as a linguistic construct.
Indeed, an underlying substantial ego is not a phenomenological fact, but a metaphysical idol, and ultimately for Nietzsche a linguistic prejudice. The substantialist egology of the Cartesian tradition harbors an implicit metaphysics of grammar. “One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—’” (BGE, 24). Metaphysical idols are but grammatical structures: “formerly, one believed in the soul as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject” (BGE, 67). The difference between a doer and the deed, that is, the position of an agent or subject beneath the event, is made possible by a “seduction of language.” Nietzsche clarifies this dependency of a metaphysics of subjectivity on language in The Will to Power. Starting with a critique of the positivists’ view that “there are only facts,” Nietzsche recalls that precisely all there is are not “facts,” but interpretations. The statement that claims that everything is subjective is also an interpretation (this is why, I should note in passing, the statement “there are only interpretations” does not mean “everything is subjective,” and Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a subjectivism or a relativism). By claiming that all there is are interpretations, and that even the subjective is an interpretation, Nietzsche is casting doubt on the belief in the subject. This is why he continues by stating that an interpretation does not require an interpreter. “Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis” (WP, 267). The subject is “not something given,” that is, not a fact. What is the subject in this case? It is, it is “something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (WP, 267). In the following paragraphs, Nietzsche approaches the notion of “subject” as both the Cartesian metaphysical cause of thought and as a word, that is, as the linguistic “I,” in each case in order to stress their fictitious nature. He states, “However habitual and indispensable this fiction [of the subject] may have become by now—that in itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin” (WP, 268). The metaphysical notion of subjectivity as substrate rests upon the linguistic motif of the subject, and not the other way around: “The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse!” This means that the metaphysician notion of substance rests upon the subject as a linguistic construct. Nietzsche had previously established that the “I” is a word that we set up “at the point at which our ignorance begins,” a horizon of our knowledge and not a truth. This is why, after recalling the metaphysical Cartesian motif of (belief in) substantiality (“‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as ‘true a priori’ our belief in the concept of substance”), he adds that such a belief “is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed” (WP, 268).
This impersonality here revealed (“there is” thinking), an impersonality that is constitutive of the event as such, leads us to consider impersonal, subjectless sentences such as “it rains.” If the event has no subject underlying it, whether as a cause or substrate, then the danger is to substantify the “it” in such expressions, as if it designated some substrate distinct from the happening. As noted prior, the position of a substrate beneath the event is apparent in Kant’s first analogy of experience, which states that “in all change of appearances substance persists” (CPR, A 182/B 224, 299). This substance can also be the ego, the “subject,” as cause of its effects, the agent as cause of its actions, or the doer as cause of its deed. All these are for Nietzsche grammatical-metaphysical fictions, prejudices, along with the “fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it” (GM, 45). Just as the “popular mind” distinguishes the lightning from its flash, just as it reifies the “it” in the “it rains,” just as it conceives of the event as an action requiring a subject (as if behind the manifestation of strength, there was an indifferent substratum that would have the freedom to be manifest strength or not), just as it “doubles the deed” (“it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect,” GM, 45), the metaphysician distinguishes a subject from its effects. “If I say: ‘Lightning flashes,’ I have posited the flashing once as activity and once as subject, and have thus added on to the event [Geschehen] a being that is not identical with the event but that remains, is, and does not ‘become’ [nicht wird]. __ To posit the event as effecting [Wirken], and effect [Wirkung] as being: that is the twofold error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.”13 In fact, Nietzsche proclaims forcefully: “there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM, 45). “The deed is everything,” this expression would require and call for another conception of the event in which such event would no longer be anchored in a cause-substrate, but happening from itself and yet happening to someone.
The subject, the substantial I, are only habits, and Nietzsche writes that “perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little ‘it’ (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego)” (BGE, 24). The “I,” the “it,” are interpretations added to the event. What this critique reveals is the radical absence of substrate and authorship in an event. After his deconstruction of the imaginary causes and subjects, Nietzsche is able to question the very notion of authorship, whether divine or human, and declares that there is no author for what happens. The event displays a radical absence of ground. This groundlessness thus exposed will lead to a deconstruction of the principle of reason, which claims to establish a rational foundation for events.
The Event without Reason
This critique of the subject, that is to say, of the subjectum or substrate underlying events, reveals the abyss beneath any event: an event is always groundless. This is what Heidegger shows in his lecture course from 1955–1956, The Principle of Reason (Der Satz vom Grund), a title that immediately reveals the proximity between reason and ground, as Grund names both reason and ground. Heidegger states in the Address, “In all founding and getting to the bottom we are already on the path to a reason,”14 as he points to the translation of ratio in German as Grund. “But Vernunft [Reason], just as much as Grund [grounds] speak as translations of the one word, ratio.” Therefore, “ratio speaks in the word Grund and indeed does so with the dual sense of Reason and grounds” (GA 10, 145/PR, 98. Also GA 10, 171–173/PR, 102–104). For Heidegger, the principle of reason is ultimately about foundation, as our existence is ruled by this demand for reasons and grounds: “We have an eye out for grounds in all that surrounds, concerns, and meets us. We require a specification of reasons for our statements. We insist upon a foundation for every attitude” (GA 10, 171/PR, 117). The principle of reason is ultimately concerned with foundation, and the principle of sufficient reason with a sufficient grounding. Derrida evokes “the proximity between many of the figures of reason and those of the bottom or the ground, the foundation, the groundwork, the principle of sufficient reason, the principium rationis, the nihil est sine ratione as Satz vom Grund, the Satz vom zureichenden Grunde of the Leibnizian theodicy and its reinterpretative repetition by Heidegger.”15
Now, what is most striking in that course is how Heidegger reveals the groundlessness of the event of being by following the very principle that is meant to provide a foundation for events: the principle of reason. More precisely, it is the very claim of the principle of reason, that is, that all events must founded in reason, that will turn out to be itself groundless. I recall that principle, as enunciated by Leibniz: “Hanovre le 14 juillet 1686: il faut tousjours qu’il y ait quelque fondement de la connexion des termes d’une proposition, qui se doit trouver dans leur notions. C’est là mon grande principe, dont je croy que tous les philosophes doivent demeurer d’accord, et dont un des corollaires est cet axiome vulgaire que rien n’arrive sans raison, qu’ont peut tousjours rendre pourquoy la chose est plustost allé ainsi qu’autrement.” In translation: “it is always necessary that there be a foundation for the connecting of the parts of a judgment, in
