system
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human
What does Nietzsche mean when he says there are "neither causes nor effects"?

In Will to Power #551 Nietzsche says that there "are neither causes nor effects" and that "an event is neither effected nor does it effect" before deriding science for its fixation on causality. Now, I'm not unfamiliar with Nietzsche's propensity to turn well-cherished foundational values inside-out, but negating something ostensibly observable ( p -> q) is harder for me to grasp than value judgments based on the things I cannot see. Is he saying that everything is woven of the same fabric and that cause and effect are thus irrelevant, or is something else going on here?
gpt
The thing about causation is that it *isn't* directly observable. Schopenhauer lists it as one of the four roots of sufficient reason—that is to say, it's one of the tools by which we think, not a conclusion that we've drawn by thinking about what we observe.

So, take a pretty basic example: billiard balls colliding on a table. That's a relatively common illustration of physical forces. We may observe ball *a* on one trajectory, then ball *a* striking ball *b*, and then ball *a* following another trajectory, but how do we *know* that the collision is the *cause* of the change in trajectory? Because one follows on the other? We see tons of things that happen sequentially without supposing one to have caused the other. That actual relation of cause to effect is a construction that we place on phenomena.

Which isn't to say that it's false. Nietzsche (who cut his teeth on Schopenhauer) is almost certainly playing up our uncertainty on that point in order to stress how much we rely on a construction that we have trouble justifying logically.