The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We believe—and even our philosophers believe it still—that pleasure and pain are the causes of reactions, that the very purpose of pleasure and pain is to occasion reactions. For hundreds of years, pleasure and pain have been represented as the motives for every action. Upon reflection, however, we are bound to concede that everything would have proceeded in exactly the same way, according to precisely the same sequence of cause and effect, if the states "pleasure" and "pain" had been entirely absent; and that we are simply deceived when we believe that they actually cause anything:—they are the attendant phenomena, and they have quite a different purpose from that of provoking reactions; they are in themselves effects involved in the process of reaction which takes place.

In short: Everything that becomes conscious is a final phenomenon, a conclusion—and is the cause of nothing; all succession of phenomena in consciousness is absolutely atomistic.—And we tried to understand the universe from the opposite point of view—as if nothing were effective or real, save thinking, feeling, willing! ...

479.

The phenomenalism of the "inner world!" A chronological inversion takes place, so that the cause reaches consciousness as the effect.—We know that pain is projected into a certain part of the body although it is not really situated there; we have learnt that all sensations which were ingenuously supposed to be conditioned by the outer world are, as a matter of fact, conditioned by the inner world: that the real action of the outer world never takes place in a way of which we can become conscious.... That fragment of the outer world of which we become conscious, is born after the effect produced by the outer world has been recorded, and is subsequently interpreted as the "cause" of that effect....

In the phenomenalism of the "inner world," the chronological order of cause and effect is inverted. The fundamental fact of "inner experience" is, that the cause is imagined after the effect has been recorded.... The same holds good of the sequence of thoughts: we seek for the reason of a thought, before it has reached our consciousness; and then the reason reaches consciousness first, whereupon follows its effect. All our dreams are the interpretation of our collective feelings with the view of discovering the possible causes of the latter; and the process is such that a condition only becomes conscious, when the supposed causal link has reached consciousness.[1]

The whole of "inner experience" is founded on this: that a cause is sought and imagined which accounts for a certain irritation in our nerve-centres, and that it is only the cause which is found in this way which reaches consciousness; this cause may have absolutely nothing to do with the real cause—it is a sort of groping assisted by former "inner experiences," that is to say, by memory. The memory, however, retains the habit of old interpretations,—that is to say, of erroneous causality,—so that "inner experience" comprises in itself all the results of former erroneous fabrications of causes. Our "outside world," as we conceive it every instant, is indissolubly bound up with the old error of cause: we interpret by means of the schematism of "the thing," etc.

"Inner experience" only enters consciousness when it has found a language which the individual can understand—that is to say, a translation of a certain condition into conditions with which he is familiar; "understand" means simply this: to be able to express something new in the terms of something old or familiar. For instance, "I feel unwell"—a judgment of this sort presupposes a very great and recent neutrality on the part of the observer: the simple man always says, "This and that make me feel unwell,"—he begins to be clear concerning his indisposition only after he has discovered a reason for it.... This is what I call a lack of philological knowledge; to be able to read a text, as such, without reading an interpretation into it, is the latest form of "inner experience,"—it is perhaps a barely possible form....

[1] When in our dream we hear a bell ringing, or a tapping at our door, we scarcely ever wake before having already accounted for the sound, in the terms of the dream-world we were in.—TR.

480.