On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Open Court Library of Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: Fundamental Literature
Review: I am happy to encourage any reader to Schpenhauer's doctoral thesis, just as much as he himself did in the introduction of the World as Will and Representation. The book is absolutely worth the time spent, and it is indeed a coherent prime step (though this is a revised edition of the 1814 original) to Schopenhauer's philosophical system. The translation by E.F.Payne is product of a life's effort. It is almost impecable and will stand to the demands of the accurate reader, though it may be advisable to compare and review the original in order to look for the literary sound of the ideas exposed. Schopenhauer is one of those rare cases where highly expressive prose correlates smoothly with mighty philosophical meaning. He may also be an excellent way to perfect our understanding of Kant.

Rating:
Summary: Lucid and a bit quaint
Review: It is one of the few injustices of Bertrand RussellÕs ÒHistory of Western Philosophy,Ó that he failed to appreciate SchopenhauerÕs thesis for his doctorate. But it is really one of the seminal documents that conclusively closed a debate which had begun with Descartes and included David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer was very much a no nonsense thinker who felt nothing but contempt for people like Hegel (his bte noir) or Fichte. He also had an open mind for the sciences, yet came a bit too early for Gregor Mendel and Darwin. So Schopenhauer proposed his famous voluntarism, a blind, but all-pervasive will behind the shifting spectre of never ending changes. In this sense Schopenhauer holds a middle position like Tycho Brahe had held between Copernicus and Kepler. It is not science yet, but already departing from the realm of pure thought. There are many ways to understand the meaning of philosophy, but I believe Bertrand Russell had put it best: ÒIs there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not.Ó SchopenhauerÕs answer to this question is fourfold, i.e. his exposition of the Òprinciple of sufficient reason,Ó and it is as good an answer, as anybody possibly could give, who puts himself under the constrains of BerkeleyÕs idealism. It is not only the epistemological core to SchopenhauerÕs own philosophy, it really takes the fundamentals through the paces and answers to David HumeÕs demolition of causality. In essence it says, that causality is a common bias in human and animal sensibility, which Ôa prioryÕ enables us to operate on our empirical sensations. It is the way how we structure the world, but not necessarily a feature of the empirical phenomena under scrutiny as Hume had already had observed. Then why does a sensibility based on the concept of causality operates so efficiently?

Schopenhauer is still a classical rationalist of the old school. Like his master, Immanuel Kant, instead of postulating a convenient set of inborn instincts or acquired intuitions, he prefers the premise, that there is a LOGICAL reason, a preconceived NECESSITY, for the way we slot and pigeonhole perceptions and employ our operative ideas. So how does this work in the real world? In essence Schopenhauer takes ÒperceptionÓ not to be the product of sensation, but of understanding. In other words what our senses present to our cognition is transformed by the 4 linchpins of common sense: causation, plausibility, geometry, and psychological motivation. So there is a chain of mental events: sensation is converted by an act of recognition to perception. From this it is only one logical step further to SchopenhauerÕs first premise of his mature philosophy that the world is Òmy will and representation,Ó because the Òobjective worldÓ which we naively take to be given to our senses is in fact a transformation from raw data to perception. To illustrate this point just consider how the mind compensates for mild astigmatism: the afflicted still perceives a correct picture of the object. And this is a faculty animals obviously share with us. What makes man different is merely the scope and refinement of his percepts. Schopenhauer is at his best in his exposition of causation. By shifting it from a relationship between things to a relationship between different states of things, he shows the fallacy in HumeÕs scepticism. It is not the sun as such that melts the snow but the heat absorbed which causes a change from crystalline to liquid - 2 states of the same thing: water. This causal relationship between changes we judge to be necessary and not merely to be an incidental regularity. Our exposure to such regularities authorizes what Schopenhauer called a Òhypothetical judgementÓ or in modern parlance a Òcounterfactual inference.Ó But our absolute TRUST in such judgements comes from nowhere but from ourselves - it is a feature of our sensibility, because we actually apply it on every event we can imagine, and not just on actual experience. It makes us intuitively and a priory look for things to happen the way it is expected. (ThatÕs why modern science had such a hard time to get over the hump into quantum physics.) Schopenhauer then continues to explain the age old philosophical adage, that no thing ever comes into being or ceases to be. We observe changes. Matter, which always has existed, undergoes certain transformations; it loses certain properties and acquires others, until, at a given point, it presents itself as a flower. Eventually the flower will perish but its matter doesnÕt simply disappear. It turns to compost, thus feeding the seeds of new plants and so on in infinity, in ever changing configurations of matter. In other words, notions of a Òfirst causeÓ (and its theological implications) are dismissed as nonsense. ÒCausation,Ó Schopenhauer notes, Òis not like a hired cab which one dismisses once it has arrived at its desired destination.Ó Modern science since Schopenhauer seems to be on a speeding train away from such quaint exposition of the works of common sense. We have entered the realm of counter-intuitive phenomena and the facts of modern physics require new logical tools. These days the more respectable section of modern philosophy occupies itself with symbolic logic and algorithms. The rest of us like to think that the world fits into our thoughts because we fit into the world, but it is a bit more complicated, and from a perspective of classical idealism, SchopenhauerÕs thesis presents in a style of great lucidity the final summation for the way the world corresponds with our perception.

Rating:
Summary: An All-Time Gem
Review: The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a theory of cognition. It is a vision of the homo cognoscendi. Inexplicably, unjustifiably, it still remains largely unknown.

Schopenhauer first wrote it as his doctorate dissertation, improving it substantially more than thirty years later when his entire system of thought, the philosophy of the world as will and representation, was already established. It is this second edition that since 1974 was made available to the English-speaking world by his excellent translator, Eric F.J. Payne.

A true machine-gun of clear connections, thinking and giving to think in all directions, the book takes on the greatest thinkers of the western world up to its time, challenges long-established truths, religious dogmas, and sets the stage for one of the most - perhaps the most, apart from psychoanalysis - far-reaching metaphysical tours-de-force the human mind has been able to make unassistedly, that is, abandoned by the gods and fate. What we find in this little treatise is a most valuable source of insight into psychology, epistemology, physics and all present sciences.

There is a second merit in it, and this brings us to its quantum leap. The treatise does not only present a theory of cognition tout-court, but indeed a Kantian theory of cognition. Kantian in its ambition, Kantian in its method; Kantian in recognizing that outside its reference to that who knows, namely the subject of knowledge, the entire knowable, objective reality becomes a contradiction in terms, and cannot be even conceived of.

Still, its most impressive feat is its objective itself. In the less than 300 pages of the treatise, Schopenhauer does have the ambition of exhausting the entire reality and all possible objects of experience. If he succeeded in achieving this, the cohesiveness of his entire system of thought can and must be studied in its timelessness. On the other hand, even if problems and challenges are left in relation to what mankind has discovered and concluded ever since, there still remains the legacy of his method, an all-time gem, and the insight that by means of the principle of sufficient reason the entire objective reality can be surveyed.

Now, the reader of this review may ask him or herself: but how could it be possible that someone exhausts the totality of reality and knowable objects in one single, small book? If we allow ourselves to think that the world is a sum of its facts, events, and objects, as Wittgenstein points out in the very first line of his Tractatus, this enterprise would seem to be an utter absurdity even if we considered the knowledge mankind had in the early nineteenth century, the year of 1813 when its first version came out. But then... There is the Kantian secret, 'the world is my representation', and this insight no one can take from modernity. Content implies form, and for transcendental philosophy, this is what truly matters.

Along its eight chapters, the book is focused on the four manners in which man can, according to the philosopher, know reality, infer causes and consequences, conditioning and conditioned, associate concepts, and ask for the whys of the world. At the same time, Schopenhauer provides a detailed account of the human powers and faculties at work: the understanding (Verstand, which in the main work is nicknamed after Indian philosophy as 'the veil of Maya'), the faculty of Reason (Vernunft), pure sensibility (here we have a most interesting restatement of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, and a critique of Euclid's axioms), and inner sensibility (the magic track on which the riddle of the world could, according to the philosopher, be solved). The Fourfold Root is a crucial book also in the discussion of pure reason, in attempting to prove the apriority of causality (against David Hume, and saving KantÂ's untainable position of causality as a function of reason), in consolidating man's active place and role in the process of knowledge, and in answering Kant's question 'Is metaphysics possible, after all?' An additional remark would be that it also provides a most precious criterion for the demarcation of the sciences: according to the way we know - relate, to each other, in accordance to the various forms of the principle - objects in them.

Professors of philosophy and philosophers alike, it is high time we study Schopenhauer, in all his immodesty, in all seriousness. One may wish to dismiss the central construction of his work, his metaphysics of the will, as a theory of voluntarism, of utter irrationalism, or of unnecessary pessimism. In other works, when we see his comments on women and on theism, our first impression may well be one of rebuff. All these questions can and must be treated on their own merit; in the case of women, I judge Schopenhauer as unfair and contradictory; in the case of theism, as right and noble, inasmuch as he so brilliantly shows how a first beginning in the notion of creation, as an unconditioned cause, is a violation of the human capacities.

But what will we do with the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, the most thorough and ambitious investigation of 'the mother of all science' in the history of philosophy? Will anyone be able to challenge this basic claim?

I apologize to the reader if my review seems to be too promising, too euphoric and optimistic about this book. However, after having read it, I do trust that he or she will agree with me that it should be handled with the care a most unique specimen deserves. In addition to the 'Critique of the Kantian Philosophy', appended to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, seriousness in making oneself clear in regard to foundations and connections in one's work present themselves undeniably, though still controversially in a few main claims. An introduction to these controversies can be found in F.C.WhiteÂ's book, --On SchopenhauerÂ's Fourfold Root of the PSR--, and on Alfred SchaeferÂ's --Probleme Schopenhauers--.

In the end, one wonders whether it is our time (with all the sound and fury of its technology, barions and genes) that challenges Schopenhauer's teachings or the reverse. And even if his claims seem to be unsustainable, we still get to know in a direct way, and without a shadow of a doubt, what human excellence in philosophy really is.

Rating:
Summary: Minor Problem
Review: This amazing treatise on human knowledge has one little fault. The editors at Open Court left out eleven words in the Tranlator's Introduction. This omission should gratify present-day philosophers in that it turns Schopenhauer's words into modern-sounding nonsense. I will surround the omitted words with parentheses. On page xx, Schopenhauer is quoted: " ...so that I cannot hope ever to find a more correct and accurate expression of that core of my philosophy (than what is there recorded. Whoever wishes to know my philosophy) thoroughly and investigate it seriously must take that chapter into consideration." You see, the occurrence of the word "philosophy" twice in close proximity utterly confused them. I notified Open Court but did not receive an acknowledgement. Other than this, I have to judge this book as one of the few life-changing writings that occur a few times every century. For laughs, read Heidegger's "Principle of Reason" and compare the two.

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended for philosophers !
Review: This lucid and important book was considered by Schopenhauer as the introduction to his magnum opus "The World as Will and as Representation". It can be conceived as Schopenhauer's alternative version to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" as an attempt to map all A-PRIORI knowledge. Schopenhauer, an obvious sequel to Kant, differentiates himself from Kant in this book in two basic assumptions: 1. There is no distinction between REPRESENTATION and OBJECT. We perceive objects directly, not through a subjective "buffer". 2. PERCEPTION is not logically independent of UNDERSTANDING, on the contrary. We perceive objects (necessarily) already understood, i.e. determined and related to other objects. Schopenhauer interprets the last premiss as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which he claims to be the root of all A-PRIORI knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading.
Review: This work is amazingly still ahead of its time despite being roughly 150 years old. It is essential for any student of science and/or philosophy. It requires focus and energy to read, and rather bogs down toward the end, but upon finishing it you'll most likely be enlightened on aspects of your cognitive and reasoning powers you weren't previously aware you even possessed. Here's why this book is important. The history of humanity's awakening from animal consciousness into the self-aware, abstract reasoning existence marks a movement from the the evolutionary advent of vertebrates to interstellar space probes. It's quite a little drama. The chroniclers of this story weren't really able to swing into action, due to technical difficulties, until a crotchety old cuss from Konigsberg ran off the barbarians of the mind. Kant is not refered to as the father of the modern scientific method for nothing. What Kant attributes to Hume in terms of motivation is also given to Kant on the road to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer takes up the torch mightily and ushers us finally onto the platform of the empirical epistemology of idealism, which seems like a contradiction but isn't. It is astounding how many supposedly scientific types still do not grasp the necessary idealism ingrained in the neural cognitive machinery and see the human animal as machines of sensation. Whatever graduation requirements in American universities stand responsible for this travesty are dispelled by the concise and unwavering interpretation of Schopenhauer. Read it. Learn from it. The principle of sufficient reason is of course the necessity that all events derive from their concomitant causes, or, that things happen for a reason. Schopenhauer asigns his (arbitrary) classifictions in a workman like manner and demonstrates a means by which a priori knowledge of causation occurs. Other than elucidating the elemental role idealism plays in the human mind's functioning, the main thrust of this book is to put the final nail in Kant's refutation of Hume's denial of causation in an eloquent compliment to what Hume was asking future generations to do; and Schopenhauer rises to the task. Scopenhauer takes from Kant the halter of reality, that marriage of empiricism, cognition, and ratiocination, and leads the old mare firmly into the present. Too bad the present has not worked its way beyond a man dead for over a century. This need not be your fate however. If you have read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' then this book is its logical extension and awaits your company. If not, then head to a cabin high in the Himalayas come winter, read the Critique, then read this book. It'll rock your world.

Rating:
Summary: easy reading
Review: This work is well written, like the rest of Schopenhauer's books, and many of its arguments stand strong today. That the understanding is active in perception, that percpetion is intellectual, is a huge step beyond Kant. Furthermore, Schopenhauer's claim that causality is necessary for sense experience, though not proving the a priori nature of causality as he thought, is strong and holds true whether one is a realist or an idealist. In the case of realism, sense experience is gotten by the affectation of objects upon the body, and in the case of idealism, sense experience is the production of the individual, and thus causality is necessary either way. One may object to Schopenhauer's attempt to rationalize everything down to human action - that he makes the entire phenomenal world deterministic. But he has strong arguments for this as well which are further explained in On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will. Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers I still enjoy reading, and rather than finding gaps in his system... people would do well to learn from him. While this work prepares the way for his whole system, and is essential to understanding particulary Book One and the Appendix on Kant of his magnum opus, this work should make any openminded empirical realist uneasy, though it does not prove the radical kind of Berkeleian idealism to which Schopenhauer subscribed.