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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason was originally published as a doctoral dissertation in 1813. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer revised this important work and re-published it in 1847. Throughout all Schopenhauer's later works he consistently refers his readers to this short treatise as the necessary beginning point for a full understanding of his entire system.

Background

Historical

In January 1813, after suffering their disastrous defeat in Russia, the first remnants of Napoleon's Grand Armée was arriving in Berlin. The sick and wounded quickly filled up the hospitals and the risk of an epidemic grew high. A patriotic, militaristic spirit inflamed the city and most of the populace, philosophers and students included, entertained the hope that the French yoke could be violently thrown off. All this rapidly became intolerable to Schopenhauer who ultimately fled the city, retreating to the small town of Rudolstadt near Weimar. It was here, from June to November of that year, while staying at an inn, that the work was composed.

After submitting it as his doctoral dissertation he was awarded a PhD from the University of Jena in absentia. Private publication soon followed. "There were three reviews of it, commending it condescendingly. Scarcely more than one hundred copies were sold, the rest was remaindered and, a few years later, pulped." Among the reasons for the cold reception of this original version is a) it lacked the author's later authoritative style and b) appeared decidedly unclear in its implications. A copy was sent to Goethe who responded by inviting the author to his home on a regular basis, ostensibly to discuss philosophy but in reality to recruit the young philosopher into work on his theory of colours.

In 1847 Schopenhauer rewrote and enlarged the work, publishing a new edition. This is the version of the work that is read today. "There the lines of thought are firmly pursued, linking up with his main work; there a challenge is issued to philosophical tradition, and there is no curb on attacks against the philosophical spirit of the age."

Philosophical

Schopenhauer’s epistemology, by direct admission, begins with Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge. Actually, Schopenhauer proclaimed himself a Kantian who had appropriated his predecessor's most powerful accomplishment in epistemology, and who then claimed to have merely extended and completed what Kant botched or had left undone.

In Schopenhauer’s point of view, Kant’s chief merit lies in his distinction between the thing in itself and the phenomenal world in which it appears, i.e., the world as we represent it to ourselves. What is crucial here is the realization that what makes experience possible to begin with and without exception is our perceiving mind, which synthesizes perceptions from raw sensation and consequently abstracts concepts from those perceptions. Schopenhauer appropriates Kant’s forms of sensibility (space, time, and causality) and transforms them into what he calls the understanding:

"To know causality is the sole function of the understanding, its only power, and it is a great power embracing much, manifold in its application, and yet unmistakable in its identity throughout all its manifestations. Conversely, all causality, hence all matter, and consequently the whole of reality, is only for the understanding, through the understanding, in the understanding. The first, simplest, ever-present manifestation of understanding is perception of the actual world. This is in every way knowledge of the cause from the effect, and therefore all perception is intellectual" (The World as Will and Representation volume I 11).

Thus, the understanding does not exist independent of our ability to perceive and determine relationships as it is the very ground of experience itself. Not only what we think in the abstract, but also our very perceptions are completely intellectual and subjectively determined. Already we have the philosophical grounds for Nietzsche’s perspectivism, though given in different language: representation (Vorstellung).

The World as Representation

Schopenhauer’s central proposition, then, the main idea of his entire philosophy, he states simply as “The world is my representation.” The rest of his work is an elaborate analysis and unpacking of this sentence, which begins with his Kantian epistemology, but finds thorough elaboration within his version of the principle of sufficient reason. This is responsible for providing adequate explanations for any ‘thing,’ or object that occurs in relation to a subject of knowing; of any representation possible there is always a possible question of 'why?' that one can address to it. It amounts to what Schopenhauer has done, in his view, to extend and complete what Kant began with his Critique of Pure Reason.

The Four Classes

Four classes of explanation fall under the principle’s rubric. Hence, four classes of objects occur always and already only in relation to a knowing subject, according to a correlative capacity within the subject. These classes are summarized as follows:

Time and space comprise separate grounds of being .These a priori (prior to experience) forms respectively allow for an “inner,” temporal sense and an “outer,” spatial sense for the subject; subjectively, these are the forms of pure sensibility—they make sensations possible for a subject. The first makes arithmetic possible, and is presupposed for all other forms of the principle of sufficient reason; the other makes geometry possible. Time is one dimensional and purely successive; each moment determines the following moment; in space, any position is determined only in its relations to all other positions in an infinite, hence, closed system. Thus, intuitions of time and space provide the grounds of being that make arithmetical and geometrical judgments possible, which are also valid for experience.

Only with the combination of time and space does perceptual actuality become possible for a subject, allowing for ideas of perception, and this provides the ground of becoming to judgments. This is the law of causality, which is, when considered subjectively, intellectual and a priori understanding. All possible judgments that are inferences of a cause from an effect—a physical state a subject infers as caused by another physical state or vice versa—take this as the ground of the possibility of such judgements. The natural sciences operate within this aspect of the principle.

It is possible for a subject of knowing to know herself directly as ‘will.’ A subject knows her acts of will only after the fact, in time. Action then, finds its root in the law of motivation, the ground of acting, which is causality, but seen from the inside. In other words, not only does a subject know her body as an object of outer sense, in space, but also in an inner sense, in time alone; a subject has self-consciousness in addition to knowing her body as an idea of perception. Why does a subject act the way she does? Where a sufficient motive appears in the form either of an intuition, perception, or abstract conception, the subject will act according to her character, or ‘will.’ E.g., despite all plans to the contrary, when the actual moment comes to act, we do so within the constituents of the rhetorical situation (the various representations present in a subject’s experience) and are often surprised by what we actually say and do. The human sciences find their ground in this aspect of the principle.

The last class of objects subsumes all judgments, or abstract concepts, which a subject knows through conceptual, discursive reason rooted in the ground of knowing. The previous three classes of objects are immediate representations, while this latter class is always and already composed of representations of representations. Therefore, the truth-value of concepts abstracted from any of the above three classes of objects is grounded in referring to something outside the concept. Concepts are abstract judgments grounded in intuitions of time or space, ideas of perception (causality apparent in the outer world), or acts of will (causality experienced from within). This class makes language (in the form of abstract judgments that are then communicable) possible, and as a consequence, all the above sciences become possible within the umbrella of rhetoric.

Conclusion

Different rules govern the possible explanations for representations of the four classes and “every explanation given in accordance with this guiding line is merely relative. It [the principle of sufficient reason] explains things in reference to one another, but it always leaves unexplained something that it presupposes,” and the two things that are absolutely inexplicable are the principle itself and the “thing in itself” (The World as Will and Representation volume I 81), which Schopenhauer connects with the will to live. The principle, in another point of view, provides the general form of any given perspective, presupposing both subject and object. The thing in itself, consequently, remains forever unknowable from any standpoint, for any qualities attributed to it are merely perceived, i.e., constructed in the mind from sensations given in time and space. Furthermore, because the concepts we form from our perceptions cannot in any way refer with any validity to anything beyond these limits to experience, all proofs for the existence of God or anything beyond the possibility of experience fall away under the razor of Kant’s critique. Kant termed this critical or transcendental idealism. Important to note here is that “Transcendental” does not refer to knowing the unknowable, but rather it refers to the a priori intellectual conditions for experience. This intuition of the a priori understanding is a modern elucidation of the postmodern expression "always already": time and space always and already determine the possibilities of experience. Additionally, Schopenhauer distinguishes from this something he calls a "spurious a priori": cultural perspectives (ideologies) one is born into that determine one's relationship to experience, in addition to the forms of space and time (Parerga and Paralipomena II 15). He considers these false because it is possible to investigate and uncover their grounds, leading to a reorientation that regards the phenomena of experience as source material of new knowledge, rather than one's always already prejudices about phenomena.