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Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde / Über den Willen in der Natur
Diese elementarphilosophische Abhandlung, von Schopenhauer im Alter von 26 Jahren verfaßt, bildet eigenen Aussagen zufolge den Unterbau seines ganzen philosophischen Systems. Dieses Jugend- und Schlüsselwerk hat der sechzigjährige Schopenhauer noch einmal überarbeitet, um es mit weiterführenden, erhellenden und berichtigenden Anmerkungen zu versehen.
- GenresPhilosophy
340 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2007
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About the author
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,032 books5,989 followersArthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present day Gdańsk, Poland) and was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer attempted to make his career as an academic by correcting and expanding Immanuel Kant's philosophy concerning the way in which we experience the world.
He was the son of author Johanna Schopenhauer and the older brother of Adele Schopenhauer.
He was the son of author Johanna Schopenhauer and the older brother of Adele Schopenhauer.
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January 25, 2024
Of the two essays included in this excellently-edited volume, I read Über die vierfache Wurzel, usually translated as On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," which Schopenhauer originally wrote as his doctoral dissertation, and later leveraged as the assumed context for The World as Will and Representation, which he described as a continuation of this earlier work.
The principle of sufficient reason essentially states that all things that are must have a reason, and the goal of Schopenhauer's study is to properly explicate this core principle, which he regards as not only the basis for any possible explanation, but also the root condition for the intelligibility of the world as such, for "understanding" a thing means that we know the necessary conditions by which it came about or the reasons it must be true.
Now, note that these are two different things - the material cause of an external object of knowledge, and a logical reason for believing a thing must be so. Schopenhauer argues that despite the absolute centrality of the concept of necessity for explanation in philosophy, no one had yet provided an account of the principle that clearly differentiates its various modes. For the word "reason" [Grund] is ambiguous in German just as it is in English; it can mean material cause, but also reason for believing an assertion, where the first is an ontological concept, and the second is an epistemological concept.
Schopenhauer finds in a brief historical survey that key philosophers such as Aristotle have recognized this distinction, but none have provided an account of the principle that both a) differentiates and explains its different modalities, and b) recognizes the underlying unity of all the various expressions of this principle.
As the title suggests, Schopenhauer argues that the principle of sufficient reason has four different modes that correspond to four different kinds of objects of knowledge. With respect to external, material objects, it describes law of causality; with respect to concepts, it describes the laws of logical proof; with respect to mathematical and geometrical objects, it describes reasoning in terms of numbers and space; and with respect to living beings, it describes the motivations that bring about acts of will.
There is an underlying unity to all of these modalities that explains the similiarity between them, and which warrants our saying there is one principle with four aspects rather than four different principles. This link is key for understanding the intelligibility of the universe; we are able to provide accurate and logical accounts of the world precisely because the laws governing reason are simply a different modality of the same principle that governs the causal unfolding of material objects, only while the former is an object of what Kant called the Understanding [das Verstand], the latter is an object of sense perception mediated by the sense organs.
This is another key point: Schopenhauer argues that the same relationship of necessity may be perceived by different faculties, and may therefore be believed to be different, while they are in fact the same. For example, he argues that willing the arm to move and the actual movement of the arm are not two different events, but the same event regarded by two different faculties, one external and one internal.
This internal/external distinction follows from the subject/object distinction that Schopenhauer posits as a necessary condition for any possible account of understanding. That is, he argues that what it means to "understand" at all is for a subject to provide an account of an object. Although the status of the subject/object relationship may turn out to be complicated, it is an immediate given by the very nature of the problematic.
This approach to the history of philosophy is absolutely brilliant. A careful account of the principle of sufficient reason goes directly to the heart of most major problems of modern philosophy, and Schopenhauer's writing is powerful and admirably clear. His account is heavily indebted to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, although he refines Kant's account in several key ways, which generally have to do with simplifying his overly-architectonic approach to retain the core arguments while jettisoning some of its over-elaboration. In my opinion, this is one of the best aspects of the book, which reasonably argues, for example, there are not twelve categories of the pure intuition, as Kant argued, but one, causality. (He also reclassifies it as a category of the understanding.) The result of his refinement is to produce a version of Kant's first Critique that is much more useful and plausible.
He also (correctly, I believe) excoriates Kant and his followers for creating spurious mechanisms for attempting to preserve precisely the same kinds of metaphysical arguments the first Critique decisively proved to be untenable, especially his categorical imperative.
Schopenhauer is notoriously caustic in his critique of post-Kantian idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel, whom he loathed and resented, and whom he attacks repeatedly in an off-putting and plainly ad hominem way. It's surprising to see him level accusations of being charlatans and frauds in his Habilitationsschrift, and it's sometimes amusing, but mostly tiresome. When Nietzsche puts down an opponent, it's always in the service of some telling point or insight, whereas for Schopenhauer, it obviously comes down to petty personal grudges.
Schopenhauer sees himself as an advocate for clear thinking, clear writing, and common sense in a world driven mad by Hegelians and Post-Hegelians, who, in his view, base their entire enterprise a simple misunderstanding: they confuse epistemological accounts with ontological accounts. As with Descartes' famous "proof" of God's existence, they try to make rational explanations into a material causes by sleight of hand.
In my view, Schopenhauer's account is useful and accurate in much the same way that Newtonian physics is useful and accurate. It works very well for most of the kinds of simple phenomena we deal with on a day-to-day basis at the scale of the individual. And this can be seen in the examples he uses; when he talks about material causes, he talks about lighting a fire, and when he speaks of psychological motives, he speaks of willing your arm to move. He then seems to believe that more complicated cases necessarily follow the same underlying logic.
This is all, of course, question-begging, and it must be remembered that Hegel's entire philosophy was motivated by an attempt to give accounts for much more complicated kinds of phenomena, such as movements in art and history, which cannot be explained by this kind of simple, mechanical logic. While I understand the attraction of keeping a clear head when talking about causality, that's much easier to do when you're talking about one pool ball causing another to move than when you're talking about, say, the formation of a hurricane. And when we're talking about psychological motivations, it's one thing to explain raising an arm, and another to explain the global resurgence of right-wing populism in the 21st century.
Schopenhauer's constructs sometimes mask the explanatory difficulties of this kind, such as when he defines a "cause" as the totality of conditions preceding and effect that, in aggregate, produce that effect. Whoa there, horsey - the sum totality of necessary conditions? That's an awful lot to cover with a single word, one which implies a kind of formal simplicity. And it makes our account into something of a tautology, to say that a cause is everything that has to happen, however manifold and complex, for something else to happen.
Something similar is going on with his argument that a subject/object distinction is a condition for understanding. I would only grant that something that appears to us in our ordinary transactional usage like a subject/object distinction is necessary for understanding, but this is again essentially a tautology. The nature of the actual relationship then has to be thematized. What kind of subject are we talking about? Is the subject like a watcher in a tower, looking out from our consciousness into an external world? Or is it more like a whirlpool in a stream, that is both the same as and different from the water it observes?
These are precisely the kinds of questions that Hegel starts out from, and you cannot simply reject him for providing a complex and counter-intuitive account for phenomena that cannot be otherwise explained.
Some of Schopenhauer's assertions we simply know to be wrong, such as when he argues that we cannot conceive of an effect without a cause. There are in fact phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in empty space, that his model of causality can in no way account for. This is not a problem in itself, but it does highlight the fact that Schopenhauer's account is largely constructed with heuristics, seemingly-simple constructs that invisibly perform difficult explanatory work.
Take a construct like "the Understanding." Schopenhauer does an admirable job in declaring it to essentially be a name for unknown processes in the brain, and illustrates it with examples that are extraordinarily modern-sounding, such as his appeals to developmental psychology in a way that Piaget would fully endorse. Still, I think Schopenhauer was not sufficiently self-reflective, or sufficiently humble, to recognize the provisional and pragmatic character of basically all of his core constructs.
There's a lot more in this book that I haven't even touched. In its short length, it says a great deal, and when Schopenhauer is right, he is really, really right. He is a brilliant thinker and critic, and though I think he's completely wrong about Hegel, I think he's completely right about Kant, and also has a point in arguing German philosophy would have been better off if it had stuck closely to Kant's first Critique instead of going down the road of absolute idealism and Romanticism. I also think he was right in arguing that the road philosophy did take was largely an attempt to preserve much of the traditional religious teachings, but I also don't think that's altogether a bad thing. If there is philosophical value to be found in the Kena Upanishad, which he enthusiastically quotes, it's not necessarily of a different character than that of the Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius.
Update: I mentioned there is too much to cover in this book even for a long review, but I think I was negligent in not calling attention to the extreme similarity between Schopenhauer's idealism and the Madhyamaka philosophy of India and Tibet. Schopenhauer is of course famous for his interest in Vedanata and also discusses Buddhism at some length in this work, but it is still very striking that his philosophy closely resembles Prasangika-Madhyamaka both in spirit and in many of its more obscure details. I have written before about the similarities between Tsong Khapa and Kant, but this was a whole new level.
I was struck, for example, by passages which could have been used as a gloss for the meaning of the concept of conventionally-valid imputation, which is one of the most subtle and difficult topics in all of Madhyamaka. This is a fact that should be of interest to the comparativist, because there is no possibility whatsoever that Schopenhauer would have seen advanced Madhyamaka texts - his views seem to have unfolded from the logic of the argument itself.
The principle of sufficient reason essentially states that all things that are must have a reason, and the goal of Schopenhauer's study is to properly explicate this core principle, which he regards as not only the basis for any possible explanation, but also the root condition for the intelligibility of the world as such, for "understanding" a thing means that we know the necessary conditions by which it came about or the reasons it must be true.
Now, note that these are two different things - the material cause of an external object of knowledge, and a logical reason for believing a thing must be so. Schopenhauer argues that despite the absolute centrality of the concept of necessity for explanation in philosophy, no one had yet provided an account of the principle that clearly differentiates its various modes. For the word "reason" [Grund] is ambiguous in German just as it is in English; it can mean material cause, but also reason for believing an assertion, where the first is an ontological concept, and the second is an epistemological concept.
Schopenhauer finds in a brief historical survey that key philosophers such as Aristotle have recognized this distinction, but none have provided an account of the principle that both a) differentiates and explains its different modalities, and b) recognizes the underlying unity of all the various expressions of this principle.
As the title suggests, Schopenhauer argues that the principle of sufficient reason has four different modes that correspond to four different kinds of objects of knowledge. With respect to external, material objects, it describes law of causality; with respect to concepts, it describes the laws of logical proof; with respect to mathematical and geometrical objects, it describes reasoning in terms of numbers and space; and with respect to living beings, it describes the motivations that bring about acts of will.
There is an underlying unity to all of these modalities that explains the similiarity between them, and which warrants our saying there is one principle with four aspects rather than four different principles. This link is key for understanding the intelligibility of the universe; we are able to provide accurate and logical accounts of the world precisely because the laws governing reason are simply a different modality of the same principle that governs the causal unfolding of material objects, only while the former is an object of what Kant called the Understanding [das Verstand], the latter is an object of sense perception mediated by the sense organs.
This is another key point: Schopenhauer argues that the same relationship of necessity may be perceived by different faculties, and may therefore be believed to be different, while they are in fact the same. For example, he argues that willing the arm to move and the actual movement of the arm are not two different events, but the same event regarded by two different faculties, one external and one internal.
This internal/external distinction follows from the subject/object distinction that Schopenhauer posits as a necessary condition for any possible account of understanding. That is, he argues that what it means to "understand" at all is for a subject to provide an account of an object. Although the status of the subject/object relationship may turn out to be complicated, it is an immediate given by the very nature of the problematic.
This approach to the history of philosophy is absolutely brilliant. A careful account of the principle of sufficient reason goes directly to the heart of most major problems of modern philosophy, and Schopenhauer's writing is powerful and admirably clear. His account is heavily indebted to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, although he refines Kant's account in several key ways, which generally have to do with simplifying his overly-architectonic approach to retain the core arguments while jettisoning some of its over-elaboration. In my opinion, this is one of the best aspects of the book, which reasonably argues, for example, there are not twelve categories of the pure intuition, as Kant argued, but one, causality. (He also reclassifies it as a category of the understanding.) The result of his refinement is to produce a version of Kant's first Critique that is much more useful and plausible.
He also (correctly, I believe) excoriates Kant and his followers for creating spurious mechanisms for attempting to preserve precisely the same kinds of metaphysical arguments the first Critique decisively proved to be untenable, especially his categorical imperative.
Schopenhauer is notoriously caustic in his critique of post-Kantian idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel, whom he loathed and resented, and whom he attacks repeatedly in an off-putting and plainly ad hominem way. It's surprising to see him level accusations of being charlatans and frauds in his Habilitationsschrift, and it's sometimes amusing, but mostly tiresome. When Nietzsche puts down an opponent, it's always in the service of some telling point or insight, whereas for Schopenhauer, it obviously comes down to petty personal grudges.
Schopenhauer sees himself as an advocate for clear thinking, clear writing, and common sense in a world driven mad by Hegelians and Post-Hegelians, who, in his view, base their entire enterprise a simple misunderstanding: they confuse epistemological accounts with ontological accounts. As with Descartes' famous "proof" of God's existence, they try to make rational explanations into a material causes by sleight of hand.
In my view, Schopenhauer's account is useful and accurate in much the same way that Newtonian physics is useful and accurate. It works very well for most of the kinds of simple phenomena we deal with on a day-to-day basis at the scale of the individual. And this can be seen in the examples he uses; when he talks about material causes, he talks about lighting a fire, and when he speaks of psychological motives, he speaks of willing your arm to move. He then seems to believe that more complicated cases necessarily follow the same underlying logic.
This is all, of course, question-begging, and it must be remembered that Hegel's entire philosophy was motivated by an attempt to give accounts for much more complicated kinds of phenomena, such as movements in art and history, which cannot be explained by this kind of simple, mechanical logic. While I understand the attraction of keeping a clear head when talking about causality, that's much easier to do when you're talking about one pool ball causing another to move than when you're talking about, say, the formation of a hurricane. And when we're talking about psychological motivations, it's one thing to explain raising an arm, and another to explain the global resurgence of right-wing populism in the 21st century.
Schopenhauer's constructs sometimes mask the explanatory difficulties of this kind, such as when he defines a "cause" as the totality of conditions preceding and effect that, in aggregate, produce that effect. Whoa there, horsey - the sum totality of necessary conditions? That's an awful lot to cover with a single word, one which implies a kind of formal simplicity. And it makes our account into something of a tautology, to say that a cause is everything that has to happen, however manifold and complex, for something else to happen.
Something similar is going on with his argument that a subject/object distinction is a condition for understanding. I would only grant that something that appears to us in our ordinary transactional usage like a subject/object distinction is necessary for understanding, but this is again essentially a tautology. The nature of the actual relationship then has to be thematized. What kind of subject are we talking about? Is the subject like a watcher in a tower, looking out from our consciousness into an external world? Or is it more like a whirlpool in a stream, that is both the same as and different from the water it observes?
These are precisely the kinds of questions that Hegel starts out from, and you cannot simply reject him for providing a complex and counter-intuitive account for phenomena that cannot be otherwise explained.
Some of Schopenhauer's assertions we simply know to be wrong, such as when he argues that we cannot conceive of an effect without a cause. There are in fact phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in empty space, that his model of causality can in no way account for. This is not a problem in itself, but it does highlight the fact that Schopenhauer's account is largely constructed with heuristics, seemingly-simple constructs that invisibly perform difficult explanatory work.
Take a construct like "the Understanding." Schopenhauer does an admirable job in declaring it to essentially be a name for unknown processes in the brain, and illustrates it with examples that are extraordinarily modern-sounding, such as his appeals to developmental psychology in a way that Piaget would fully endorse. Still, I think Schopenhauer was not sufficiently self-reflective, or sufficiently humble, to recognize the provisional and pragmatic character of basically all of his core constructs.
There's a lot more in this book that I haven't even touched. In its short length, it says a great deal, and when Schopenhauer is right, he is really, really right. He is a brilliant thinker and critic, and though I think he's completely wrong about Hegel, I think he's completely right about Kant, and also has a point in arguing German philosophy would have been better off if it had stuck closely to Kant's first Critique instead of going down the road of absolute idealism and Romanticism. I also think he was right in arguing that the road philosophy did take was largely an attempt to preserve much of the traditional religious teachings, but I also don't think that's altogether a bad thing. If there is philosophical value to be found in the Kena Upanishad, which he enthusiastically quotes, it's not necessarily of a different character than that of the Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius.
Update: I mentioned there is too much to cover in this book even for a long review, but I think I was negligent in not calling attention to the extreme similarity between Schopenhauer's idealism and the Madhyamaka philosophy of India and Tibet. Schopenhauer is of course famous for his interest in Vedanata and also discusses Buddhism at some length in this work, but it is still very striking that his philosophy closely resembles Prasangika-Madhyamaka both in spirit and in many of its more obscure details. I have written before about the similarities between Tsong Khapa and Kant, but this was a whole new level.
I was struck, for example, by passages which could have been used as a gloss for the meaning of the concept of conventionally-valid imputation, which is one of the most subtle and difficult topics in all of Madhyamaka. This is a fact that should be of interest to the comparativist, because there is no possibility whatsoever that Schopenhauer would have seen advanced Madhyamaka texts - his views seem to have unfolded from the logic of the argument itself.
December 19, 2016
Zunächst sollte man mal erwähnen, dass, wenn der große Schopenhauer darauf verzichtet hätte, seine Rivalen vom sogenannten "philosophischen Gewerbe" in der hier vorliegenden Ausführlichkeit zu beschimpfen, dieses Buch wohl nur zwei Drittel seiner Seitenzahl ausgefüllt hätte.
Während die Tiraden anfangs noch ziemlich unterhaltsam zu lesen sind, drängt sich im weiteren Verlauf immer mehr das Bild eines verbitterten Alten auf, der trotz seines sich ankündigenden Nachruhms nicht verkraften kann, dass seine Zeitgenossen ihn nicht nur nicht verstanden, sondern schlicht ignoriert haben.
Das alles soll keinesfalls eine Geringschätzung Schopenhauers ausdrücken, es zeigt für mich lediglich, was ja auch ein schöner Punkt ist, auch einige Genies menschlicher waren, als sie sich vielleicht selbst zugestanden hätten.
Eine zweite Feststellung, die ich bei der Lektüre gemacht habe war die Bestätigung, wie sehr das Spektrum eigener Erfahrung oder philosophischer Betrachtungen abhängig ist vom Rahmen der zur Verfügung stehenden Erfahrungen bzw. Erkenntnisse.
Während die Abhandlung über die "vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" zumindest in meinem mangelhaften Verständnis heutiger wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse keine unmittelbaren Widersprüche findet, muten Schopenhauers Betrachtungen zum "Willen in der Natur" (war in meiner Ausgabe beigefügt) in Anbetracht heutiger Erkenntnisse aus Biochemie, Neurologie und Physiologie doch stark spekulativ an. Es hätte mich sehr interessiert, wie Schopenhauer sein System vor dem Hintergrund des heutigen verfügbaren Wissens entwickelt hätte.
Abzüglich der, zuweilen unterhaltsamen, Schimpftiraden und Spekulationen zur Realtität von Magie und animalischem Magnetismus bleibt das unvergleichliche Vergnügen, einem großen Geist beim Denken zuzuhören.
Während die Tiraden anfangs noch ziemlich unterhaltsam zu lesen sind, drängt sich im weiteren Verlauf immer mehr das Bild eines verbitterten Alten auf, der trotz seines sich ankündigenden Nachruhms nicht verkraften kann, dass seine Zeitgenossen ihn nicht nur nicht verstanden, sondern schlicht ignoriert haben.
Das alles soll keinesfalls eine Geringschätzung Schopenhauers ausdrücken, es zeigt für mich lediglich, was ja auch ein schöner Punkt ist, auch einige Genies menschlicher waren, als sie sich vielleicht selbst zugestanden hätten.
Eine zweite Feststellung, die ich bei der Lektüre gemacht habe war die Bestätigung, wie sehr das Spektrum eigener Erfahrung oder philosophischer Betrachtungen abhängig ist vom Rahmen der zur Verfügung stehenden Erfahrungen bzw. Erkenntnisse.
Während die Abhandlung über die "vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" zumindest in meinem mangelhaften Verständnis heutiger wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse keine unmittelbaren Widersprüche findet, muten Schopenhauers Betrachtungen zum "Willen in der Natur" (war in meiner Ausgabe beigefügt) in Anbetracht heutiger Erkenntnisse aus Biochemie, Neurologie und Physiologie doch stark spekulativ an. Es hätte mich sehr interessiert, wie Schopenhauer sein System vor dem Hintergrund des heutigen verfügbaren Wissens entwickelt hätte.
Abzüglich der, zuweilen unterhaltsamen, Schimpftiraden und Spekulationen zur Realtität von Magie und animalischem Magnetismus bleibt das unvergleichliche Vergnügen, einem großen Geist beim Denken zuzuhören.
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