Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of Idols

How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth, The Four Great Errors

4 The error of imaginary causes . – To start from the dream: on to a certain sensation, the result for example of a distant cannon – shot, a cause is subsequently foisted (often a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the chief character). The sensation, meanwhile, continues to persist, as a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the cause – creating drive permits it to step into the foreground – now no longer as a chance occurrence but as ‘meaning’. The cannon – shot enters in a causal way, in an apparent inversion of time. That which comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which pass like lightning, the shot follows .… What has happened? The ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition. – We do just the same thing, in fact, when we are awake. Most of our general feelings – every sort of restraint, pressure, tension, explosion in the play and counter – play of our organs, likewise and especially the condition of the nervus sympathicus – excite our cause – creating drive: we want to have a reason for feeling as we do – for feeling well or for feeling ill. It never suffices us simply to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact – become conscious of it – only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind. – The memory, which in such a case becomes active without our being aware of it, calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations which have grown out of them – not their causality. To be sure, the belief that these ideas, the accompanying occurrences in the consciousness, were causes is also brought up by the memory. Thus there arises an habituation to a certain causal interpretation which in truth obstructs and even prohibits an investigation of the cause.