Notes on <On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason> - Chapter 4

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Chapter 4. On the First Class of Objects for the Subject, and that form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason which predominates in it

§ 17. General Account of this Class of Objects.

The first class of objects possible to our representative faculty is that of intuitive, complete, empirical representations. They are intuitive as opposed to mere thoughts, i.e. abstract conceptions; they are complete, inasmuch as, according to Kant’s distinction, they not only contain the formal, but also the material part of phenomena; and they are empirical, partly as proceeding, not from a mere connection of thoughts, but from an excitation of feeling in our sensitive organism, as their origin, to which they constantly refer for evidence as to their reality: partly also because they are linked together, according to the united laws of Space, Time and Causality, in that complex without beginning or end which forms our Empirical Reality.

§ 18. Outline of a Transcendental Analysis of Empirical Reality.

The forms of these representations are those of the inner and outer sense; namely, Time and Space. Their perceptibility is Matter. Although infinite divisibility and infinite extension are common to both Time and Space, these two forms of empirical representations differ fundamentally, inasmuch as what is essential to the one is without any meaning at all for the other.

The intimate union of both is the condition of reality which, in a sense, grows out of them, as a product grows out of its factors. It is the Understanding which, by means of its own peculiar function, brings about this union and connects these heterogeneous forms in such a manner, that empirical reality arises out of their mutual interpenetration, and arises as a collective representation, forming a complex, held together by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, but whose limits are problematical. In this complex, in short, the whole objective, real world exists for us.

We shall now proceed to give a detailed exposition of that function of the Understanding which is the basis of empirical reality; only we must first, by a few incidental explanations, remove the more immediate objections which the fundamental idealism of the view I have adopted might encounter.

§ 19. Immediate Presence of Representations.

Now as, notwithstanding this union through the Understanding of the forms of the inner and outer sense in representing Matter and with it a permanent outer world, all immediate knowledge is nevertheless acquired by the Subject through the inner sense alone. When we speak of representations as immediately present, we mean, that they are not only known in the union of Time and Space effected by the Understanding through which the collective representation of empirical reality arises, but that they are known in mere Time alone, as representations of the inner sense, and just at the neutral point at which its two currents separate, called the present.

The necessary condition mentioned in the preceding paragraph for the immediate presence of a representation of this class, is its causal action upon our senses and consequently upon our organism, which itself belongs to this class of objects, and is therefore subject to the causal law which predominates in it and which we are now about to examine.

Now as, notwithstanding the transitory, isolated nature of our representations with respect to their immediate presence in our consciousness, the Subject nevertheless retains the representation of an all-comprehensive complex of reality, as described above, by means of the function of the Understanding; representations have, on the strength of this antithesis, been viewed, as something quite different when considered as belonging to that complex than when considered with reference to their immediate presence in our consciousness. From the former point of view they were called real things; from the latter only, representations κατ’ ἐξοχήν. This view of the matter, which is the ordinary one, is known under the name of Realism. On the appearance of modern philosophy, Idealism opposed itself to this Realism and has since been steadily gaining ground.

Kant expresses himself as follows: “Transcendental Idealism teaches that all phenomena are representations only, not things by themselves. Space itself is nothing but mere representation, and whatever is in it must therefore be contained in that representation. There is nothing whatever in Space, except so far as it is really represented in it. If we take away the thinking Subject, the whole material world must vanish; because it is nothing but a phenomenon in the sensibility of our own subject and a certain class of its representations.”

§ 20. Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming.

In the Class of Objects for the Subject just described, the principle of sufficient reason figures as the Law of Causality, I call it the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming. By it, all objects presenting themselves within the entire range of our representation are linked together, as far as the appearance and disappearance of their states is concerned, i.e. in the movement of the current of Time, to form the complex of empirical reality. The law of causality is as follows. When one or several real objects pass into any new state, some other state must have preceded this one, upon which the new state regularly follows. This sort of following we call resulting; the first of the states being named a cause, the second an effect. We cannot call object cause since first, objects not only contain form and quality but Matter as well, which has neither beginning or end; secondly, because the law of causality refers exclusively to changes. The law of causality is the regulator of the changes undergone in Time by objects of our outer experience; but these objects are all material.

The notion of ‘The first cause’ is as inconceivable as the ends of Space or the beginning of time since every cause is a change, which necessarily obliges us to ask for the preceding change that brought it about, and so on in infinitum. The Cosmological Proof consists thus in the assertion, that the principle of the sufficient reason of becoming, or the law of causality, necessarily leads to a thought which destroys it and declares it to be null and void.

Now, as the law of causality is known to us à priori, and is therefore a transcendental law, applicable to every possible experience and consequently without exception, as will be shown in §21. The relation between cause and effect is a necessary one, so that the causal law authorizes us to form hypothetical judgments, and thereby shows itself to be a form of the principle of sufficient reason, upon which principle all judgments must be founded and, as will be shown further on, all necessity is based.

This form of our principle I call the principle of the sufficient reason of becoming, because its application invariably pre-supposes a change, the entering upon a new state: consequently a becoming.

From the law of causality spring two corollaries which, in virtue of this origin, are accredited as cognitions a priori, therefore as unquestionable and without exception. They are, the law of inertia and that of permanence of substance.

By the endless chain of causes and effects which directs all changes but never extends beyond them, two existing things remain untouched, precisely because of the limited range of its action: on the one hand, Matter, as we have just shown; on the other hand, the primary forces of Nature. The first (matter) remains uninfluenced by the causal nexus, because it is that which undergoes all changes, or on which they take place; the second (the primary forces), because it is they alone by which changes or effects become possible; for they alone give causality to causes. i.e. the faculty of operating, which the causes therefore hold as mere vassals a fief.

The rule, by which a force of Nature manifests itself in the chain of causes and effects—consequently the link which connects it with them—is the law of Nature. It is frequently confused with cause previously. Every true primary force of Nature is essentially a qualitas occulta, it does not admit physical but only of metaphysical explanation, an explanation which transcends the world of phenomena.

Now Causality, as the director of each and every change, presents itself in Nature under three distinct forms: as causes in the strictest acceptation of the word, as stimuli, and as motives. It is just upon this difference that the real, essential distinction between inorganic bodies, plants, and animals is based, and not upon external, anatomical, let alone chemical, distinctions.

A cause, in its narrowest sense, is that upon which changes in the inorganic kingdom alone ensue. he second form of causality is the stimulus; it reigns over organic life, as such, i.e. over plant life and the vegetative, that is, the unconscious, part of animal life. The third form of causality is the motive. Under this form causality rules animal life.

§ 21. À priori character of the conception of Causality.

One must indeed be forsaken by all the gods, to imagine that the outer, perceptible world, filling Space in its three dimensions and moving on in the inexorable flow of Time, governed at every step by the laws of Causality, which is without exception, and in all this merely obeying laws we can indicate before all experience of them—that such a world as this, we say, can have a real, objective existence outside us, without any agency of our own, and that it can then have found its way into our heads through bare sensation and thus have a second existence within us like the one outside.

In the organs of the senses, sensation is heightened by the confluence of the nerve-extremities, it is besides specially susceptible to particular influences, consequently something essentially subjective, of whose changes we only become immediately conscious in the form of the inner sense, Time: that is, successively. It is only when the Understanding begins to act—a function, not of single, delicate nerve-extremities, but of that mysterious, called the brain—only when it begins to apply its sole form, the causal law, that a powerful transformation takes place, by which subjective sensation becomes objective perception. It is the Understanding itself which has to create the objective world; for this world cannot walk into our brain from outside all ready cut and dried through the senses and the openings of their organs.

The perception of the bodily world by tough and sight is an essentially intellectual process, a work of the Understanding, to which sensation merely gives the opportunity and the data for application in individual cases. Understanding is able to produce the visible world by means of the simple function of referring effects to causes assisted by the intuition of Space.

Let us now examine its procedure in doing so more closely. The first thing it does is to set right the impression of the object, which is produced on the retina upside down. The second thing which the Understanding does in converting sensation into perception, is to make a single perception out of a double sensation; for each eye in fact receives its own separate impression from the object we are looking at; each even in a slightly different direction: nevertheless that object presents itself as a single one. The third process by which the Understanding converts sensation into perception, consists in constructing bodies out of the simple surfaces hitherto obtained—that is, in adding the third dimension. This fourth operation of the Understanding consists in acquiring knowledge of the distance of objects from us: it is this precisely which constitutes that third dimension of which we have been speaking.

I have entered thus fully into detail concerning all the different processes by which seeing is accomplished, in order to show clearly and irrefragably that the predominant factor in them is the Understanding, which, by conceiving each change as an effect and referring that effect to its cause, produces the cerebral phenomenon of the objective world on the basis of the à priori fundamental intuitions of Space and Time, for which it receives merely a few data from the senses.

Now, that it should be so, follows necessarily from the intellectual character of perception. All animals, even down to the very lowest, must have Understanding—that is, knowledge of the causal law, although they have it in very different degrees of delicacy and of clearness; at any rate they must have as much of it as is required for perception by their senses; for sensation without Understanding would be not only a useless, but a cruel gift of Nature.

Of the three types of causes mentioned in §20: cause, stimulus and motive. If cause is used as the object of investigation for the Understanding, it would produce Astronomy, Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry. If stimulus are the guide for Understanding, it will produce Physiology of Plants and Animals, Therapeutics, and Toxicology. Finally, if it devotes itself to the study of motives, the Understanding will produce, first theoretically, works on Morality, Jurisprudence, History, Politics, and even Dramatic and Epic Poetry; and second practically, either merely to train animals, or for the higher purpose of making human beings dance to its music, when once it has succeeded in discovering which particular wire has to be pulled in order to move each puppet at its pleasure.

This is different from Kant’s conception of perception, which is not dependent on causality, and which identifies with sensation.

Substance is action viewed in abstracto and Accidents, particular modes of action, are action in concreto. Now these are the results to which true, i.e. transcendental, Idealism leads.

§ 22. Of the Immediate Object.

Thus it is from the sensations of our body that we receive the data for the very first application of the causal law, and it is precisely by that application that the perception of this class of objects arises. They therefore have their essence and existence solely in virtue of the intellectual function thus coming into play, and of its exercise.

I have called the bodily organism the Immediate Object, however, this must not be taken in a strictly literal sense. For although our bodily sensations are all apprehended directly, still this immediate apprehension does not yet make our body itself perceptible to us as an object; on the contrary, up to this point all remains subjective, that is to say, sensation. It is only indirectly that we know even this body objectively, i.e. as an object, by its presenting itself, like all other objects, as the recognized cause of a subjectively given effect—and precisely on this account objectively—in our Understanding, or brain

§ 23. Arguments against Kant’s Proof of the à priority of the conception of Causality.

One of the chief objects of the “Critique of Pure Reason” is to show the universal validity of the causal law for all experiences, its à priority and as a necessary consequence of this, its restriction to possible experience. However, I cannot assent to the proof of the a priority of the principle, which is:

The synthesis of the manifold by the imagination, which is necessary for all empirical knowledge, gives succession, but not yet determinate succession: that is, it leaves undetermined which of two states perceived was the first, not only in my imagination, but in the object itself. But definite order in this succession—through which alone what we perceive becomes experience, or, in other words, authorizes us to form objectively valid judgments—is first brought into it by the purely intellectual conception of cause and effect. Thus the principle of causal relation is the condition which renders experience possible, and, as such, it is given us à priori.

According to this, the order in which changes succeed each other in real objects becomes known to us as objective only by their causality. Kant affirms that the objectivity of the succession of representations is only known through the rule by which they follow upon one another, the law of causality; and my mere apprehension consequently leaves the objective relation between phenomena following one another quite undetermined: since I merely apprehend the succession of my own representations, but the succession in my apprehension does not authorize me to form any judgment whatever as to the succession in the object, unless that judgment be based upon causality; and since, besides, I might invert the order in which these perceptions follow each other in my apprehension, there being nothing which determines them as objective. Kant gives examples of the house, whose part we may consider from top to bottom or bottom to top, the order of perception is subjective and the ship sailing down a river, he derives the subjective following in his own apprehension from the objective following in the phenomenon, and he calls it an event. I maintain that there is no difference between these two cases, both are events and our knowledge of both is objective: it is knowledge of changes in real objects recognized as such by the Subject. Both are changes of relative position in two bodies. The first is a change in observer’s body, which is also an object among all objects.

Kant says, Time cannot be perceived; therefore no succession of representations can be empirically perceived as objective: i.e. can be distinguished as changes in phenomena from the changes of mere subjective representations. The causal law, being a rule according to which states follow one another, is the only means by which the objectivity of a change can be known. He claims that no succession in Time could be perceived by us as objective, excepting that of cause and effect, and that every other succession of phenomena we perceive, would only be determined so, and not otherwise, by our own will.

In contradiction to all this, it is quite possible for phenomena to follow upon one another without following from one another. Nor is the law of causality by any means prejudiced by this; for it remains certain that each change is the effect of another change, this being firmly established a priori; only each change not only follows upon the single one which is its cause, but upon all other changes which occur simultaneously with that cause, and with which that cause stands in no causal connection whatever. It is not perceived by me exactly in the regular order of causal succession, but in quite a different order, which is, however, no less objective on that account.

Elsewhere Kant asserts, that a representation only shows reality by our recognizing its necessary connection with other representations subject to rule (the causal law) and its place in a determined order of the time-relations of our representations. But of how few representations are we able to know the place assigned to them by the law of causality in the chain of causes and effects! Yet we are never embarrassed to distinguish objective from subjective representations: real, from imaginary objects. Kant fell into a very singular error, and one which is indeed so palpable, that the only way we can account for it is, by supposing him to have become so absorbed in the à priori part of our knowledge, that he lost sight of what would have been evident to anyone else.

Kant and Hume have fallen into opposite errors in their proofs. Hume asserts that all consequence is mere sequence; whereas Kant affirms that all sequence must necessarily be consequence. Pure Understanding, it is true, can only conceive consequence (causal result). Empirical knowledge of the following of events in Time is, indeed, just as possible as empirical knowledge of juxtaposition of things in Space, but the way in which things follow upon one another in general in Time can no more be explained, than the way in which one thing follows from another: the former knowledge is given and conditioned by pure Sensibility; the latter, by pure Understanding.

My view of succession is the following one. We derive our knowledge of the bare possibility of succession from the form of Time, which belongs to pure Sensibility. The succession of real objects, whose form is precisely Time, we know empirically, consequently as actual. But it is through the Understanding alone, by means of Causality, that we gain knowledge of the necessity of a succession of two states: that is, of a change; and even the fact that we are able to conceive the necessity of a succession at all, proves already that the causal law is not known to us empirically, but given us à priori. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is the general expression for the fundamental form of the necessary connection between all our objects, i.e. representations, which lies in the innermost depths of our cognitive faculty: it is the form common to all representations, and the only source of the conception of necessity, which contains absolutely nothing else in it and no other import, than that of the following of the consequence, when its reason has been established. Now, the reason why this principle determines the order of succession in Time in the class of representations we are now investigating, in which it figures as the law of causality, is, that Time is the form of these representations, therefore the necessary connection appears here as the rule of succession. In other forms of the principle of sufficient reason, the necessary connection it always demands will appear under quite different forms from that of Time, therefore not as succession; still it always retains the character of a necessary connection, by which the identity of the principle under all its forms, or rather the unity of the root of all the laws of which that principle is the common expression, reveals itself.

§ 24. Of the Misapplication of the Law of Causality.

From the foregoing exposition it follows, that the application of the causal law to anything but changes in the material, empirically given world, is an abuse of it.

§ 25. The Time in which a Change takes place.

What is the time in which change is taking place? Aristotle says that as there always remains a line between two points, so there always remains a time between two nows; this is the time in which a change takes place.

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