Intention is a nominalization and as such a distortion of our communication. Nevertheless, it is often used in NLP. NLP can be used for good or for evil. The NLP techniques are basically tools that change the way your brain or someone else his brain work. Most of the time this is done in such a way that the person improves and for the greater good. Unfortunately, there are exceptions where people use NLP for the worse. Although it is better to discourage such use of NLP, this has nothing to do with whether NLP is done with good or bad intentions as Nietzsche explains below. The reason is that it is wrong to think that an intention can cause anything at all.
Because intention is a nominalization, there ain’t such a thing as intention.
Man believes himself to be cause, doer – Everything that happens relates as a predicate to some subject Every judgment contains the whole, full, profound belief in subject and predicate or in cause and effect; and the latter belief (namely the assertion that every effect is a doing and that every doing presupposes a doer) is, in fact, a special case of the former, so that the belief which remains as the fundamental belief is: there are subjects I notice something and look for a reason for it – that originally means: I look for an intention in it, and above all for someone who has intentions, for a subject, a doer – in the past, intentions were seen in all that happened, all that happened was doing. This is our oldest habit. Do animals share it? Do they, as living creatures, not also rely on interpretations in accordance with themselves? – The question’ Why?’ is always a question about the causa finalis, about a ‘What for?’ We do not have a ‘sense of the causa efficiens’: here Hume is right, and habit (but not just that of the individual!) makes us expect that one particular, frequently observed occurrence will follow another, nothing more than that! What gives us the extraordinary strength of our belief in causality is not the great habit of the succession of occurrences but our incapacity to interpret what happens other than as happening out of intentions. It is the belief that what lives and thinks is the only thing which effects – belief in will, intention – belief that all that happens is doing, that all doing presupposes a doer; it is belief in the ‘subject’. Might not this belief in the concept of subject and predicate be a great stupidity? Question: is intention the cause of something happening? Or is that, too, illusion? Is intention not itself that which happens? ‘Attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ in the purely mechanical sense is a complete fiction: a phrase. We cannot conceive of an attraction without an intention. – The will to gain power over something or to resist its power and push it away – that ‘we understand’: that would be an interpretation we could make use of. In short: the psychological compulsion to believe in causality lies in the unimaginability of things happening without intentions: which, of course, says nothing about truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief). The belief in causae falls with the belief in final causes (against Spinoza and his causalism).
Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84