Lichenz
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by Karl Hillebrand
I’ve never before been captivated by a thinker so thoroughly as I am now by Arthur Schopenhauer. What stands out especially to me is the clarity of his language, which serves to make the claims he is making entirely apparent to the reader, a stark contrast to most works of (continental) philosophy I have read in the past, which appear to be trying to obfuscate their claims to the greatest extent possible. This is not to say that I have had no difficulty in apprehending Schopenhauer’s claims, because they are often subtle and difficult to grasp. But this is a consequence merely of the subtlety and complexity of the points that he is making, and not at all due to his use of language.
This text is on the matter of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) - that is, the notion that everything has a reason for being. He begins with an overview of the history of the PSR in philosophy, and argues that many philosophers have made a grievous error in equivocating between causes and reasons. That is, between the law of causality, which pertains to the objective world which we apprehend through the conjunction of our senses and our faculty of understanding, and the law of reason, which pertains to our mental conceptions which we apprehend through our faculty of rationality. [The translation I am reading refers to this faculty as “reason” rather than “rationality”; I am choosing to use the latter term to prevent confusion between this faculty and reason in the sense of “reason for being”.]
The law of reason pertains, essentially, to statements with truth-value. A statement is given the predicate “true” if and only if it can be justified by reference to a chain of reasoning which ultimately goes back to some truth which is known à priori (on which more later). By contrast, the law of causality pertains to changes in the state of an object, which are themselves preceded by other states. He takes great pains to emphasize that changes in the state of an object are themselves caused not by some object, or some force such as gravity or electromagnetism (which are the things on which and through which changes occur) but rather that they are caused by some other, prior state.
Because every cause is itself a state, every cause has itself been caused by some other state. On the basis of this, Schopenhauer argues that the notion of a “first cause” is incoherent - this in contrast to the law of reason, under which every true statement can be traced back to some first truth on which it rests.
Schopenhauer argues that a confusion between these two concepts allows one to perform an act of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, and in particular that it allows for a rhetorical sleight-of-hand which provides the basis for the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. The notion of God is one of the first cause of the world, but Schopenhauer claims that this is incoherent, and that philosophers have made the argument that causality must be traceable back to some first cause on the basis of their confusion of cause and reason. He demonstrates in this text also a degree of contempt for philosophers who make arguments for the existence of some “Absolute”, which allows them to make an argument for what is effectively God without explicitly affirming theism, and holds that his arguments against theism apply just as well to these notions as to explicitly theistic ones.
(I am struck here, and throughout, by certain similarities to Buddhist doctrines, particularly that of dependent origination. This is certainly not coincidental, as Schopenhauer was directly influenced by both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy in his work.)
The bulk of the text is dedicated to exploring the PSR as it pertains to four different classes of objects (in the object-subject sense). The first two classes of objects are those which I have discussed already: the empirical world, in which the PSR takes the form of the law of causality, and the realm of concepts, in which the PSR takes the form of the law of reason. The third class of objects are those things known à priori which take the forms of our outer and inner sense - space and time, respectively. The fourth class of objects is the self, taken as an object; that is, the subject in volition, the will.
One thing Schopenhauer emphasizes throughout is that we have no direct apprehension of reality. He refers to each class of objects as a class of representations. Even as regards the empirical world (the first class of objects, which he calls also intuitive representations), we do not and cannot simply perceive our sense-data directly, but rather we interface with a representation of reality which has been constructed by our faculty of understanding using relatively scant sense-data.
This, too, becomes the basis for his view (in concordance with Kant, or at least Schopenhauer’s interpretation thereof) that certain truths are known à priori, a position I was quite skeptical of going into this book. Schopenhauer argues that, were it not the case that we know certain truths à priori, it would be impossible for our understanding to construct the representation of empirical reality that we actually perceive.
To attempt to summarize the case he makes: our minds receive visual sense-data from our eyes. Indeed, each eye provides for our mind its own sensory data, a small fragment of the things we actually perceive, and flawed in many ways (for instance, because of the angle that light enters our eyes the sensory data that we receive is “upside down” relative to the image we actually perceive). It is because our understanding has a notion à priori of causality, and of space and time, that our mind is able to discern that the two images received by our eyes share a common cause, and so uses this scant sense-data to construct a coherent image of the objects that we actually see.
In the section on the second class of objects Schopenhauer discusses the nature of concepts, which he considers to be representations of representations. That is, they are abstracted notions which we have derived from the empirical representations formed by the conjunction of our understanding and sense-data. Schopenhauer holds that we have the capacity for forming these concepts because of our use of language.
In the section on the second class of objects Schopenhauer discusses the nature of concepts, which he considers to be representations of representations. That is, they are abstracted notions which we have derived from the empirical representations formed by the conjunction of our understanding and sense-data. Schopenhauer holds that we have the capacity for forming these concepts because of our use of language.
Concepts necessarily have less detail than empirical representations, because they are formed by dropping away detail from our immediate perceptions to break them down into their constituent parts, or to form a conception of a category of objects. (For an example of this, consider all the detail contained when you look at a chair which is physically present before you, compared to considering the concept of a chair abstractly.)
While concepts contain less than empirical representations do, for that same reason they are also easier to work with, and the manipulation of concepts serves as the basis for things like the entire field of science, in which we derive general principles from specific examples, and then use those general principles in order to make predictions about specific objects and their behaviors.
Schopenhauer argues that thought which occurs through our faculty of rationality is either logical reasoning - which pertains to the relationships between concepts - or else is connected to perceptible experience, seeking the conception to which a given perception belongs, or seeking a perception which tests a conception or rule. The process of connecting or separating concepts in accordance with logic Schopenhauer calls a judgment, and he holds that the faculty of judgment is that which links understanding and rationality.
Another point Schopenhauer emphasizes strongly throughout the section on the second class of objects is that, while all conceptions contain less than empirical representations, as our concepts become more general, they become still more empty. So he argues that philosophical systems which are based on the analysis of extremely broad concepts (essence, thing, etc.) are essentially vacuous.
The sections on the third and fourth class of objects I found somewhat more difficult to apprehend than the first two, but I will attempt to discuss them regardless.
The third class of objects consists of space and time, which Schopenhauer believes we understand à priori (as previously discussed). He argues that each element of space stands in mutual relation to each other element of space. For instance, if we imagine a plane, the position of one line determines the position of all other lines on that plane, and is also determined by the position of all other lines. This applies also to time, replacing the position of lines with the succession of states.
The third class of objects consists of space and time, which Schopenhauer believes we understand à priori (as previously discussed). He argues that each element of space stands in mutual relation to each other element of space. For instance, if we imagine a plane, the position of one line determines the position of all other lines on that plane, and is also determined by the position of all other lines. This applies also to time, replacing the position of lines with the succession of states.
Finally, the fourth class of objects is the self in volition, the will. This is the will as object, separate from the subject which is the perceiver (witness-consciousness). Here he discusses the nature of subject-object relations, how subject and object necessarily exist in mutual dependence, making the point that it is immaterial whether we say objects are divided into such and such classes, or that such and such cognitive faculties are peculiar to the subject.
Schopenhauer holds that the identity of will with the subject is inexplicable, and cannot be justified on the basis of any argument, but simply assumes it to be true. I am generally averse to this sort of claim, but here I do not object because this does, indeed, feel intuitively true to me.
Here also he discusses memory, arguing that memories are not in fact recalled as if stored in the mind, but rather that in accordance with the will the mind reconstructs a representation which has previously been constructed. As far as I can tell modern cognitive science affirms this, that memories are reconstructed and not simply recalled.
Overall I find it striking how much modern science seems to have borne out many of the claims Schopenhauer makes in this text, about perception and memory. In the last section there is even a certain parallel to the modern online rationality movement, when Schopenhauer says that “motivation is causality seen from within”.
There is still much in this text that I do not fully understand, and I get the sense that Schopenhauer is one whose entire body of work forms a unified whole, and I will not fully apprehend any of it until I have studied all of it. (Not to mention that Schopenhauer gives very high praise to Kant, whom I have not read...) Still, I felt that much of what he said in On the Fourfold Root was clear and makes sense.
Next I plan to take on The World as Will and Representation.
Some quotes from the text I liked or thought seemed important:
“For, by pointing out the existence of those transcendental principles, as such, which enable us to determine à priori, ie before all experience, certain points concerning objects and their possibility, he [Kant] proved that these things could not exist, as they present themselves to us, independently of our knowledge. The resemblance between a world such as this and a dream is obvious.”
“Our knowing consciousness, which manifests itself as outer and inner sensibility (or receptivity) and as Understanding and Reason, subdivides itself into Subject and Object and contains nothing else. To be Object for the Subject and to be our representation, are the same thing. All our representations stand towards one another in a regulated connexion, which may be determined à priori, and on account of which nothing existing separately and independently, nothing single or detached, can become an Object for us. It is this connexion which is expressed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason in its generality.”
“We form conceptions by dropping a good deal of what is given to us in perception, in order to be able to think the rest by itself. To conceive, therefore, is to think less than we perceive.”
“The true kernel of all knowledge is that reflection which works with the help of intuitive representations; for it goes back to the fountain-head, to the basis of all conceptions. Therefore it generates all really original thoughts, all primary and fundamental views and all inventions, so far as chance had not the largest share in them. Certain thoughts which wander about for a long time in our heads, belong to this sort of reflection: thoughts which come and go, now clothed in one kind of intuition, now in another, until they at last become clear, fix themselves in conceptions and find words to express them. Some, indeed, never find words to express them, and these are, unfortunately, the best of all.”