Notes on <On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason> - Chapter 5

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Chapter 5. On the Second Class of Objects for the Subject, and that form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason which predominates in it

§ 26. Explanation of this Class of Objects.

The only essential distinction between the human race and animals, which from time immemorial has been attributed to a special cognitive faculty peculiar to mankind, called Reason, is based upon the fact that man owns a class of representations which is not shared by any animal. These are conceptions, therefore abstract, as opposed to intuitive, representations, from which they are nevertheless derived. We may also define them as representations drawn from representations. For, in forming them, the faculty of abstraction decomposes the complete, intuitive representations described in our last chapter into their component parts, , in order to think each of these parts separately as the different qualities of, or relations between, things. By this process, however, the representations necessarily forfeit their perceptibility.

In learning the use of language, the whole mechanism of Reason—that is, all that is essential in Logic—is brought to our consciousness. Now this can evidently not take place without considerable mental effort and fixed attention, for which the desire to learn gives children the requisite strength.

§ 27. The Utility of Conceptions.

The fundamental essence of our Reason or thinking faculty is, as we have seen, the power of abstraction, or the faculty of forming conceptions. Because they contain less than the representations from which they are drawn, that conceptions are easier to deal with than representations. What is properly called thinking, in its narrowest sense, is the occupation of the intellect with conceptions: that is, the presence in our consciousness of the class of representations we now have before us. This is also what we call reflection which expresses at once the derivative and the secondary character of this kind of knowledge.

§ 28. Representatives of Conceptions. The Faculty of Judgment.

Conceptions must not be confounded with pictures of the imagination, these being intuitive and complete, therefore individual representations, although they are not called forth by sensuous impressions and do not therefore belong to the complex of experience. All thinking, in a wider sense: that is, all inner activity of the mind in general, necessitates either words or pictures of the imagination: without one or other of these it has nothing to hold by. In thinking therefore, we seek either for the conception or rule to which a given perception belongs, or for the particular case which proves a given conception or rule. In this quality, thinking is an activity of the faculty of judgment, and indeed in the first case a reflective, in the second, a subsuming activity. The faculty of judgment is accordingly the mediator between intuitive and abstract knowledge, or between the Understanding and the Reason.

§ 29. Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing.

Even in a narrower sense, thinking does not consist in the bare presence of abstract conceptions in our consciousness, but rather in connecting or separating two or more of these conceptions under sundry restrictions and modifications which Logic indicates in the Theory of Judgments. A relation of this sort between conceptions distinctly thought and expressed we call a judgment. Now, with reference to these judgments, the Principle of Sufficient Reason here once more holds good, yet in a widely different form from that which has been explained in the preceding chapter; for here it appears as the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing.

As such, it asserts that if a judgment is to express knowledge of any kind, it must have a sufficient reason: in virtue of which quality it then receives the predicate true. Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself, called its reason or ground, which reason itself admits of a considerable variety of kinds. These grounds upon which a judgment may rest, may be divided into four different kinds, which we will see next.

§ 30. Logical Truth.

A judgment may have for its reason another judgment; in this case it has logical or formal truth. This founding of a judgment upon another judgment always originates in a comparison between them which takes place either directly, by mere conversion or contraposition, or by adding a third judgment, and then the truth of the judgment we are founding becomes evident through their mutual relation. This operation is the complete syllogism.

The truth of Judgments becomes evident through the four well-known laws of thinking. (1). Principle of Identity (2). Principle of Contradiction (3). Principle of the Excluded Middle (4). Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing

§ 31. Empirical Truth.

A judgment may be founded upon a representation of the first class, i.e. a perception by means of the senses, consequently on experience. In this case it has material truth, and moreover, if the judgment is founded immediately on experience, this truth is empirical truth.

§ 32. Transcendental Truth.

The forms of intuitive, empirical knowledge which lie within the Understanding and pure Sensibility may, as conditions of all possible experience, be the grounds of a judgment, which is in that case synthetical à priori. As nevertheless this kind of judgment has material truth, its truth is transcendental; because the judgment is based not only on experience, but on the conditions of all possible experience lying within us.

§ 33. Metalogical Truth.

Lastly, a judgment may be founded on the formal conditions of all thinking, which are contained in the Reason; and in this case its truth is of a kind which seems to me best defined as metalogical truth. There are only four metalogically true judgments of this sort:

  1. A subject is equal to the sum total of its predicates, or a = a.
  2. No predicate can be attributed and denied to a subject at the same time, or a = -a = o.
  3. One of two opposite, contradictory predicates must belong to every subject.
  4. Truth is the reference of a judgment to something outside of it, as its sufficient reason.

It is by means of a kind of reflection which I am inclined to call Reason’s self-examination, that we know that these judgments express the conditions of all thinking, and therefore have these conditions for their reason.

§ 34. Reason.

Our professors decided that the faculty of thinking should be called Understanding instead of Reason, and that all that is derived from it should be named intelligent instead of rational, which, of course, had a strange, awkward ring about it, like a discordant tone in music. For in all ages and countries the words understanding had been used to denote the more intuitive faculty described in our last chapter.

When therefore we are told, that we possess a faculty for direct, material, supersensuous knowledge, faculty specially designed for metaphysical insight, and inherent in us for this purpose—I must take the liberty to call this a downright lie. The result at which all honest, competent, authoritative thinkers have arrived in the course of ages, moreover, tallies exactly with my assertion. It is as follows: All that is innate in the whole of our cognitive faculty, all that is therefore à priori and independent of experience, is strictly limited to the formal part of knowledge: that is, to the consciousness of the peculiar functions of the intellect and of the only way in which they can possibly act; but in order to give material knowledge, these functions one and all require material from outside. Within us therefore lie the forms of external, objective perception: Time and Space, and then the law of Causality—as a mere form of the Understanding which enables it to construct the objective, corporeal world—finally, the formal part of abstract knowledge: this last is deposited and treated of in Logic, which our forefathers [136]therefore rightly called the Theory of Reason. But this very Logic teaches us also, that the conceptions which constitute those judgments and conclusions to which all logical laws refer, must look to intuitive knowledge for their material and their content; just as the Understanding, which creates this intuitive knowledge, looks to sensation for the material which gives content to its à priori forms. Thus all that is material in our knowledge: that is to say, all that cannot be reduced to subjective form, to individual mode of activity, to functions of our intellect,—its whole material therefore,—comes from outside; that is, in the last resort, from the objective perception of the corporeal world, which has its origin in sensation. Reason therefore has absolutely no material, but merely a formal, content, and this is the object-matter of Logic, which consequently contains only forms and rules for thinking operations.

If Reason were a faculty specially designed for Metaphysics, a faculty which supplied the material of knowledge and could reveal that which transcends all possible experience, the same harmony would necessarily reign between men on metaphysical and religious subjects—for they are identical—as on mathematical ones, and those who differed in opinion from the rest would simply be looked upon as not quite right in their mind. Now exactly the contrary takes place, for on no subject are men so completely at variance with one another as upon these. Ever since men first began to think, philosophical systems have opposed and combated each other everywhere.

The existence of God belongs to revelation, by which it is firmly established, it has no need whatever of human authentication. Philosophy, however, is properly speaking only an idle, superfluous attempt to let Reason, once in a while, try its own powers unassisted, as a child is now and then allowed to run alone on a lawn and try its strength without leading-strings, just to see what will come of it.

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