If something is necessarily so the case then in all instances of the circumstances this holds. Hence necessity is a generalization.
On combating determinism. From the fact that something happens regularly and predictably, it does not follow that it happens necessarily. That in every determinate case a quantum of force behaves and determines itself in a single way does not make it an ‘unfree will’. ‘Mechanical necessity’ is not a fact: it is we who have interpreted it into what happens. We have interpreted the fact that what happens can be expressed in formulae as resulting from a necessity that governs what happens. But from the fact that I do a particular thing, it by no means follows that I do it under compulsion. Compulsion in things cannot be demonstrated at all: regularity proves only that one and the same happening is not another happening as well. Only our having interpreted subjects, ‘doers’, into things makes it appear that everything which happens is the consequence of a compulsion exerted on subjects – exerted by whom? Again, by a ‘doer’. Cause and effect – a dangerous concept if one conceives of a something that causes and a something upon which there is an effect. (A) Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation. (B) Once one has understood that the ‘subject’ is not something that effects but merely a fiction, many things follow. It is only after the model of the subject that we invented thingness and interpreted it into the hubbub of sensations. If we cease to believe in the effecting subject, then the belief in things that exert effect, in reciprocal effect, cause and effect between those phenomena we call ‘things’, falls as well. This, of course, also means the fall of the world of atoms that exert effect, the assumption of which always presupposes that one needs subjects. Finally, the ‘thing-in-itself also falls, because at bottom this is the concept of a ‘subject-in-itself’, yet we have understood that the subject is fictitious. The antithesis of’thing-in-itself’ and ‘appearance’ is untenable; with this, however, the concept ‘appearance’ collapses too. (C) If we give up the effecting subject, then also the object on which effects are exerted. Duration, conformity with itself, being, in here neither in what is called subject nor in what is called object. They are complexes of what happens which appear to have duration in relation to other complexes- for example due to a difference in tempo (rest-motion, fixed-slack: all these are oppositions which don’t exist in themselves and in fact only express differences of degree that look like oppositions when viewed through a particular prism.) There are no oppositions: we have only acquired the concept of oppositions from those of logic, and from there wrongly transferred it to things. (D) If we give up the concept ‘subject’ and ‘object’, then also the concept ‘substance’ – and consequently its various modifications, e.g., ‘material’, ‘spirit’ and other hypothetical entities, ‘the eternity and immutability of matter’, etc. We have then rid ourselves of materiality. Put in moral terms: the world is false – but inasmuch as morality itself is a piece of this world, morality is false The will to truth is a making fixed, a making true and lasting, a removing from sight of that false character, its reinterpretation into something that is. Truth is thus not something that’s there and must be found out, discovered, but something that must be made and that provides the name for a process- or rather for a will to overcome, a will that left to itself has no end: inserting truth as a process to infinity, an active determining, not a becoming conscious of something that is ‘in itself’ fixed and determinate. It is a word for the ‘will to power’. Life is founded on the presupposition of a belief in things lasting and regularly recurring; the more powerful the life, the wider must be the divinable world – the world, so to speak, that is made to be. Logicising, rationalising, systematising as life’s resources. In a certain sense man projects his drive to truth, his ‘goal’, outside himself as a world that is, as a metaphysical world, as a ‘thing-in-itself’, as an already existing world. His needs as a maker already invent the world he’s working on, anticipate it: this anticipation (‘this belief’ in truth) is his mainstay. All that happens, all movement, all becoming as a determining of relations of degree and force, as a struggle . The ‘well-being of the individual’ is just as imaginary as the ‘well being of the species’: the former is not sacrificed to the latter; regarded from a distance, the species is something quite as fluid as the individual. The ‘preservation of the species’ is only a consequence of the growth of the species, i.e., of overcoming the species on the path to a stronger type. As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for us being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), attributing our existence, our happiness and misery to it as its intention, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with us. That what appears to be ‘purposiveness’ (‘the purposiveness infinitely superior to all human art’) is merely the consequence of the will to power played out in everything that happens that becoming stronger brings with it orderings which resemble outlines of purposiveness that what appear to be purposes are not intended; instead, as soon as a slighter power has been overwhelmed and made to work as a function of the greater one, there is an order of rank, of organisation, which is bound to produce the appearance of an order of means and ends. Against what appears to be ‘necessity’ – this only an expression of the fact that a force is not also something else. Against what appears to be ‘purposiveness’ – this only an expression of an ordering of spheres of power and their interplay. Logical determinacy, transparency, as criterion of truth (‘All that is true which is perceived clearly and distinctly’, Descartes): this makes the’ mechanicist hypothesis of the world desirable and credible. But that is a crude confusion, like the simplicity of truth). How does one know that the true nature of things stands in this relation to our intellect? – Could it not be different? That the hypothesis which most gives the intellect the feeling of power and security is the one it most favors, values, and consequently calls true? – The intellect posits its freest and strongest capacity and skill as the criterion of what is most valuable, consequently true… ‘true’: from the perspective of feeling: what most strongly stimulates feeling; from the perspective of thinking: what gives thinking the greatest feeling of force from the perspective of touching, seeing, hearing: what calls forth the strongest resistance. Thus the highest degrees of effort arouse for the object the belief in its own ‘truth’, i.e., reality. The feeling of force, of struggle, of resistance, prompts the conviction that there is something which is being resisted.
Notebook 9, autumn 1887 paragraph 91