NIETZSCHE

CAUSE AND EFFECT
from Beyond Good and Evil

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived [...]. The longing for "freedom of will" in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half-educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden—all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Münchahausens's, pulling yourself by the hair from from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naiveté of this famous concept of "free will" and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of "free will": I mean the "unfree will," which is basically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not mistakenly objectify "cause" and "effect" like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days—) [...] [for] the effect does not follow "from the cause," there is no rule of "law." We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbolic world into things as an "in-itself," then this is how we have always done things, namely mythologically.

PHILOSOPHERS' CONVICTIONS
from Beyond Good and Evil

[Philosophers] act as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions thorugh the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely insouciant dialectic [...] while what essentially happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an "inspiration" or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have swifted through and made properly abstract—and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact.

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