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"Nietzsche’s critique of causality is at the heart of his critiques of metaphysics and natural science, for causality is the mechanism by which metaphysical concepts are generated and nature is transformed into a system of universal laws." (p.327)
"The mistake is to read his metaphysically deflationary views concerning nonnatural causality and his privileging of nature and philosophical psychology, physic chemistry, and biology as acceptance of natural causality. Nietzsche uses physics and chemistry for his critique of causality, disputing the logic “that science is possible should prove to us a principle of causality” (Early 1888, 14[81], KSA 13.260–61). So, any reading of Nietzschean naturalism will have to reconstruct his model sciences without causality, a task facilitated by the fact that many sciences have embraced noncausal, probabilistic thinking similar to the kind permitted by Hume and Nietzsche’s regulative or useful fictions.
A more difficult hurdle for this nonmetaphysical, non-causal account of the sciences is that by regarding causality as intertwined with or basic to the metaphysics of subjectivity, objectivity, action, and freedom of the will, Nietzsche’s radically skeptical attitude toward natural and nonnatural causality deprives us of the language and metaphysical concepts that we have traditionally used to explain the order and connection of events in the world. The only thing remaining is the occurrence: “In the belief in cause and effect the main thing is always forgotten: the occurrence itself [das Geschehen selbst]” (Early 1888, 14[81], KSA 13.261). Yet, without causality, we lack a language to describe change. Hence, Nietzsche’s critique of causality radically delimits the possibilities for such alternative explanatory candidates as scientific naturalisms, pragmatisms, and will to power." (pp.327-328)
"Nietzsche’s frequent references to Hume most often concern his critique of causality. In Nietzsche’s library, there was a German edition of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (C279 David Hume, Gespräche über natürliche Religion[Leipzig, 1781]); early on in his notes for a work called “On Teleology,” Nietzsche wrote down the name of Hume’s text (Goethe-Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, 10: 71/63, s. 55 or 56 [pagination unmarked]); in an early manuscript of Karl Schaarschmidt’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie in the Nietzsche Archive, he wrote the names Berkeley and Hume in the margin where Schaarschmidt refers to Hume’s attack on the concept of causality (Goethe-Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, 7: 71/41, s. 25) ; in April–June 1885, Nietzsche wrote a note approving Hume’s critique of the attempt to provide a rational ground for the concept of causality (but rejecting the request to provide a rational ground for rational ground; 34[70], KSA 11.442) ; he wrote another note at the time that “Hume explained the sense of causality from custom” (34[82], KSA 11.445); and he wrote further on Hume’s critique of causality in the Fall 1885–Fall 1886 notes (2[83], KSA 12.102–3) and in The Gay Science: “Let us recall . . . Kant’s monstrous question marks, which he wrote of the concept ‘causality,’—not that he had doubted its right [Recht] in general like Hume: he began much more cautiously to delimit the realm within which this concept has sense in general”." (note 5 p.333)
"Nietzsche’s critique of causality is explicitly Humean, an empiricist critique that the meaning, proper source, and validation of a concept consist in its psychological derivation from sensation or feeling. What cannot be derived from the senses is the product of imagination with no real existence. Causality is an example of just such an imaginary product. According to Nietzsche, “We have absolutely no experience of a cause” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274): “Every ground of movement and change remains invisible to us. . . . [C]onsciousness never delivers us an example of cause and effect” (Early 1888, 14[145], KSA 13.329). Hence, sense experience cannot supply a ground for the application of causal explanations even to observed changes. The absence of any experience of causality also warrants Hume and Nietzsche in denying that the concept of causality even has a meaning. Nietzsche argues that “there is not what Kant meant, no sense of causality” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.276): “We have nothing of a ‘sense of efficient cause’ [Sinn der causa efficiens]” (1885, 2[83], KSA 12.102). We have not given sense or meaning to the concept of cause by deriving it from some experience or feeling, and thus, according to the empiricist criterion of meaning, it has no meaning." (p.328)
"Nietzsche uses the empiricist criteria of knowledge and meaning without accepting many empiricist tenets. His contemporaneous published work of the mid- to late 1880s criticizes standard empiricist understandings of experience for their individualistic, ahistorical assumptions and their reduction of experience to sensation. His genealogies provide an alternative to an empiricist account of sensation as the origin of ideas. Thus, he says that “the jurisdiction [Bann] of determinate grammatical functions is in the final ground the jurisdiction of physiological judgments of value and conditions of race [Rasse-Bedingungen].—So much for the refutation [Zurückweisung] of Locke’s superficiality in regard to the origin of ideas” (JGB 20, KSA 5.35). Ideas originate not in the individual’s abstraction from the sensation of singular individuals but from the common metaphysics of grammar shared within language families, which metaphysics is itself determined by physiological and “racial conditions.” Nietzsche also argues against the reduction of science to sense evidence, praising physics for its resistance to sense evidence and the “eternally popular sensualism” (JGB 14, KSA 5.28), though the antiteleologists and Darwinists oppose this resistance to the senses (dumbly) and the imperative that the investigation of knowledge can only proceed through the senses is attractive to a future race of rough machinists and bridge builders (JGB 14, KSA 5.28–29): “In order to pursue physiology with a good conscience, one must hold that the sense organs are not appearances in the sense of the idealist philosophy: as such they could be no causes ! Sensualism at least therein as a regulative hypothesis, in order not to say as a heuristic principle . . . would the outside world be the work of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of this outside world, would be the work of our organs ! This is, as it seems to me, a fundamental reductio ad absurdum: assuming that the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently is the outside world not the work of our organs—?” (JGB 15, KSA 5.29). Hence, Nietzsche is no thoroughgoing empiricist in the Humean or Lockean sense, for he criticizes empiricists for equating sense experience with knowledge, assigning to individuals the capacity of autonomously constructing ideas independently of society, and identifying all reality by discrete individuals." (note 6 pp.333-334)
"Hume also argues in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that we can rule out cause because it is contradictory, which is a distinct criticism from the one dependent on the empirical criterion of meaning: thus, he speaks of “the contradictions which adhere to the very ideas of matter, cause and effect, extension, space, time, motion; and in a word, quantity of all kinds” [...] Berkeley’s critique of matter similarly depends sometimes on the assertion of contradiction in the very idea and sometimes on the absence of an intuitive source of the idea." (note 7 p.334)
"What explains this connection to a larger metaphysics is Nietzsche’s Aristotelian understanding of causality as material, formal, final, and efficient, rather than the narrow modern sense of efficient causality. His identification and critique of final and efficient causes undermine intentionalism and teleology. Thus, his identification of intentionalism as the key problem in causal attribution should not be taken merely as another modern scientific criticism of Aristotelian final causes, for he argues that “efficient cause and final cause are one in their basic conception” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.275); both are invalid in their common reliance on metaphysical intentions. Hence, he parts from modern or early modern science in applying its critique of final causality to efficient causality as well. Viewing the world on the model of intentional consciousness leads us to see occurrences as a “doing,” which entails a doer, an independent subject acting through intentional willing: “Psychologically accounted, the whole concept [of cause] comes to us from the subjective conviction that we are causes, namely, that the arm moves itself. . . . But that is an error” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274). It is an error because “we differentiate ourselves, the doers, from the deed and we make use of this schema everywhere, — we search for a doer for every occurrence” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274). This explains why Nietzsche argues that the concept of causality contains within it the notion of subjectivity: “Our ‘understanding of an occurrence’ consists in that we invented a subject which would be responsible for the fact that something occurred and how it occurred” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274). Similarly, we “understand the will to do this and that as cause because the action follows on it” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274). But in examining our experience, we never unearth the cause: “‘Cause’ is not found at all: from some cases, where it seemed given to us and from where we have projected it into the understanding of the occurrence, the self-deception is demonstrated [nachgewiesen]” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.274). Thus, we lack any justification for asserting that our experiences are caused by free will. And thus, for Nietzsche, efficient and final causal claims conceived in terms of intentionality underwrite our belief in metaphysical subjects and objects, which he elsewhere ascribes to our historically conditioned belief in grammar, grammatical subjects and predicates. Nietzsche’s critique of the material and formal causes similarly undermines metaphysics in rejecting their explanation of factical changes by reference to static objective correlates of the metaphysical subject and universal essences removed from change. The ahistorical universality of the formal cause cannot stand in a world defined by flux, as in Nietzsche’s account, and the material cause falls with his concomitant rejection of matter or atoms as a final hiding place for static universals, as something that “stands fixed,” “the belief in ‘substance’ [Stoff ], in ‘matter’” (JGB 12, KSA 5.26). In this sense, Nietzsche’s critique of causality undermines an entire metaphysics." (pp.329-330)
"But he sets up different models of how the critique of causality can be used to undermine the belief in other metaphysical concepts, structural parallelism, causal foundationalism, and metaphysical foundationalism. The argument to structural parallelism asserts that “we seek such metaphysical concepts, like causation, to explain change; the atom itself is still such an imagined [hinzugedachtes] ‘thing’ and ‘originary subject’ [Ursubjekt]” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.275). Causation involves the same metaphysical leap as the atom, thing, and transcendental subject, as an imagined explanation for change that transcends all experience. On this view, Nietzsche’s critique of causality would undermine these other metaphysical concepts not because causality was fundamental to them but because they all relied on the same kinds of metaphysical arguments. The structural parallelism between the argument to causality and the argument to thinghood, atomism, and so forth would mean that to bring down the first would be to bring down the rest.
In the metaphysical foundationalist model, Nietzsche attacks the concepts underwriting causality: “Finally, we conceive that things, consequently even atoms effect [wirken] nothing: because they are just not there . . . that the concept causality is completely unusable—from a necessary sequence of conditions its causal-relationship does not follow (—that means its effecting power to make 1 leap to 2, to 3, to 4, to 5)” (Early 1888, 14[98], KSA 13.275).
Causality cannot exist, because it presupposes the existence of certain non-existent metaphysical entities such as atoms. This account subordinates the critique of causality to a greater metaphysical critique of atoms and things, reversing the order of precedence we have often seen in Nietzsche’s critique of causality. Here causality does not underlie an entire metaphysics; an entire metaphysics underlies causality, and with the absence of the metaphysics, causality disappears as well. This approach is also at work above in Nietzsche’s view that intentionalist belief in subjects underlies any causal metaphysics. On this account, the critique of causality would work through the critique of a general metaphysics of subjects and objects, and hence, the general undermining of metaphysics would precede and make possible any critique of causality.
In a third model, the critique of causality is basic to the critique of metaphysics because causality grasps in itself the properties of metaphysical entities: “But the ‘thing’ in which we believe is invented in addition [hinzuerfunden] only as ferment [Ferment] for various predicates. If the thing ‘effects,’ that thus means that: we grasp all remaining properties, which otherwise are still present at hand here and momentarily latent, as cause, that now a single property steps forward: i.e. we take the sum of its properties — x as cause of property x: which is after all entirely dumb and crazy ! ‘The subject’ or the ‘thing’” (Fall 1885–Fall 1886, 2[87], KSA 12.105).
The entailments of a critique of causality differ according to which of these three models of the relationship between causality and metaphysics inheres. If metaphysics underlies causality, then its critique would undermine causality, but a critique of causality might very well leave metaphysics standing unchallenged, cutting off one of its branches but not its roots. However, if metaphysics simply derives analytically from causality or depends logically on it, or there is a structural parallelism between causality and metaphysics, a relation of equality, then the critique of causality simultaneously constitutes a critique of metaphysics. In the latter cases, causality’s end eliminates an entire metaphysical system, along with the language and concepts of change. Even in the former case, where the elimination of causality brings with it no necessary further entailments, causality’s demise obviates any explanation of the sequence of events. Whether causality is at the basis of, parallel to, or inextricable from metaphysics, its elimination creates the need to replace an entire metaphysical system. For this reason, the significance of rejecting causality goes far beyond replacing one mechanistic explanation of relations among things and events to the central metaphysical conceptions of the self, world, and being." (pp.330-332)
-Joshua Rayman, "Nietzsche on Causation", The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 3, special issue with the society for phenomenology and existential philosophy (2014), pp. 327-334.
