Notes on <On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason> - Chapter 1-3
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2. General Survey of the most important views hitherto held concerning the Principle of Sufficient Reason
- Chapter 3. Insufficiency of the Old and outlines of a New Demonstration
Chapter 1 Introduction
§ 1. The Method.
Plato and Kant tell us two laws to serve as the method of all philosophy and science: the law of homogeneity and the law of specification.
The law of homogeneity directs us to collect things together into kinds by observing their resemblances and correspondences, kinds into species, species into genera, till the highest all-comprehensive concept. This law takes for granted that Nature conforms with it.
The law of specification is that we should clearly distinguish one from another the different genera collected under one comprehensive conception.
§ 2. Application of the Method in the present case.
I find the second of these two laws has been far too rarely applied to a fundamental principle of all knowledge: the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Sufficient distinction has not been made between its extremely different applications. As Kant says in “Architectonic of Pure Reason” that “It is of the highest importance to isolate various sorts of knowledge, which in kind and origin are different from others, and to take great care lest they be mixed up with those others with with which, for practical purposes, they are generally united…”
§ 3. Utility of this Inquiry.
I hope the principle of the subject of inquiry may be a step towards promoting greater lucidity and precision in philosophizing.
§ 4. Importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Its importance is indeed very great, since it may truly be called the basis of all science. By science we mean a system of notions. But what is it that binds together the members of a system, if not the Principle of Sufficient Reason?
§ 5. The Principle itself.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason is an expression common to several a priori notions. Meanwhile, it must be stated under some formula or other. I choose Wolf’s as being the most comprehensive: Nothing is without a reason for its being.
Chapter 2. General Survey of the most important views hitherto held concerning the Principle of Sufficient Reason
§ 6. First Statement of the Principle and Distinction between Two of its Meanings.
Both Plato and Aristotle has stated the principle of sufficient reason. Aristotle’s division of cause into material cause, formal cause, efficient cause and final cause is adopted by the Scholastic philosophers. However, Aristotle betrays the distinction of reason and cause in some of his writings, although he shows at considerable length that knowing and proving that a thing exists is a very different thing from knowing and proving why it exists: what he represents as the latter, being knowledge of the cause; as the former, knowledge of the reason.
Sextus Empricus presents another example in which the Ancients were wont universally to confound the logical law of the reason of knowledge with the transcendental law of cause and effect in Nature, persistently mistaking one for the other.
By this we see that the Ancients had not yet arrived at a clear distinction between requiring a reason as the ground of a conclusion and asking for a cause for the occurrence of a real event.
§ 7. Descartes.
We find even the excellent Descartes, who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account. Descartes did not distinguish between reason and cause.
Here Schopenhauer gives an argument against the ontological proof of God. He said “All depends upon the source whence you have derived your conception: if it be taken from experience, all well and good, for in this case its object exists and needs no further proof; if, on the contrary, it has been hatched in your own sinciput, all its predicates are of no avail, for it is a mere phantasm.”
Aristotle, although never heard of the ontological argument, has carefully shows that defining a thing and proving its existence are two different matters, separate to all eternity, since by the one we learn what it is that is meant, and by the other that such a thing exists. Like an oracle of the future: “Existence never can belong to the essence of a thing.”
§ 8. Spinoza.
Although Spinoza’s philosophy mainly consists in the negation of the double dualism between God and the world and between soul and body, which his teacher, Descartes, had set up, he nevertheless remained true to his master in confounding and interchanging the relation between reason and consequence with that between cause and effect; he even endeavored to draw from it a still greater advantage for his own metaphysics than Descartes for his, for he made this confusion the foundation of his whole Pantheism.
A conception contains implicitly all its essential predicates, so that they may be developed out of it explicitly by means of mere analytical judgments: the sum total of them being its definition. This definition therefore differs from the conception itself merely in form and not in content. We may accordingly look upon these judgments as the consequences of that conception, considered as their reason. And this relation is precisely the relation between Spinoza’s so-called God and the world. It is therefore the relation in knowledge of the reason to its consequent, whereas the True Theism assumes the relation of the cause to its effect, in which the cause remains different and separate from the consequence. The word God means a cause such as this of the world, with the addition of personality. Spinoza intended to retain the word God to express substance, and explicitly called this the cause of the world, he could find no other way to do it than by completely intermingling the two relations, and confounding the principle of the reason of knowledge with the principle of causality. He substitutes a cause acting from without, for a reason of knowledge lying within, a given conception.
Thus, properly speaking, Spinoza’s Pantheism is merely the realization of Descartes’ Ontological Proof. The very same argument which Descartes had used to prove the existence of God, is used by Spinoza to prove the existence of the world - which consequently needs no God.
Descartes had stated in an exclusively ideal and subjective sense, i.e. only for us, for the sake of proving the existence of God - Spinoza took in a real and objective sense, as the actual relation of God the the world. According to Descartes, the existence of God is contained in the conception of God, therefore it becomes an argument for his actual being: according to Spinoza, God is himself contained in the world. Thus what, with Descartes, was only reason of knowledge, becomes, with Spinoza, reason of fact.
§ 9. Leibniz.
It was Leibniz who first formally stated the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a main principle of all knowledge and of all science. “Everything must have a sufficient reason for being as it is, and not otherwise”.
§ 10. Wolf.
The first writer who explicitly separated the two chief significations of our principle and stated the difference between them in detail was Wolf. He urges the necessity of not confounding the principle of sufficient reason of knowing with that of cause and effect.
§ 11. Philosophers between Wolf and Kant.
Reimarus, distinguishes inward reason (reason) and outward reason (cause). Lambert recognizes a difference between reason of knowledge and cause. Plattner says: “What is called reason and conclusion within our knowledge, is in reality cause and effect. Every cause is a reason, every effect a conclusion.”
§ 12. Hume.
No one before Hume had doubted what follows. First is the Principle of Sufficient Reason in the form of the Law of Causality. It is in and by itself above God and Fate; whereas everything else is what it is only in accordance with, and by virtue of, that principle. Hume was the first to inquire whence this law of causality derives its authority and to demand its credentials. The result he arrives is that: causality is nothing beyond the empirically perceived succession of things and states in Time, that cause and effect, with which habit made us familiar. The fallacy of this result is felt at once, nor is it difficult to refute. The merit lies in the question itself since it is starting point of Kant’s profound researches, and lead to an incomparably deeper and more thorough view of Idealism than the one which existed. It led to transcendental idealism from which arises the conviction, that the world is as dependent upon us as we are dependent upon it. There are a priori transcendental principles which points to objects and their possibility before all experience. He proves that things could not exist independently of knowledge.
§ 13. Kant and his School.
Kant’s chief passage on the Principle of Sufficient Reason is in a little work entitled “On a discovery, which is to permit us to dispense with all Criticism of Pure Reason.” Here he strongly urges the distinction between “the logical (formal) principle of cognition ‘every proposition must have its reason,’ and the transcendental principle ‘every thing must have its cause,’”
§ 14. On the Proofs of the Principle.
I hope, in the course of this treatise, to point out the different laws of our cognitive faculties, of which the principle of sufficient reason is the common expression, it will result as a matter of course, that this principle cannot be proved. For every proof is a reference to something already recognized; and if we continue requiring a proof again for this something, whatever it be, we at last arrive at certain propositions which express the forms and laws, therefore the conditions, of all thought and of all knowledge: so that certainty is nothing but correspondence with those conditions, forms and laws, therefore their own certainty cannot again be ascertained by mean of other propositions.
To seek a proof for the Principle of Sufficient Reason is an especially flagrant absurdity. Every proof is a demonstration of the reason for a judgment which has been pronounced, and which receives the predicate true in virtue precisely of that demonstration. This necessity for a reason is exactly what the Principle of Sufficient Reason expresses. Now if we require a proof of it, or, in other words, a demonstration of its reason, we thereby already assume it to be true.
Chapter 3. Insufficiency of the Old and outlines of a New Demonstration
§ 15. Cases which are not comprised among the old established meanings of the Principle.
From preceding chapters we find two distinct applications of the principle of sufficient reason can be found: the one being its application to judgments, which, to be true, must have a reason; the other its application to changes in material objects; which must always have a cause. In both causes we find the principle of sufficient reason authorizing us to ask why? But are all the cases in which it authorizes us to ask why comprised in these two relations? We may find that is not true. But before attempting this classification, it will be necessary to determine what is peculiar to the principle of sufficient reason in all cases, as its special characteristic; because the conception of the genus must always be determined before the conception of the species.
§ 16. The Roots of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
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 connection, which may be determined a priori, and on account of which, nothing existing separately and independently, nothing single or detached, can become an Object for us. It is this connection which is expressed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason in its generality. The relations upon which it is founded, and which will be more closely indicated in this treatise, are what I call the Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Their number may be reduced to four, according to the four classes into which everything that can become an object for us, that is to say, all our representations, may be divided. These classes will be stated and considered in the following four chapters.