Schopenhauer and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Five years ago, I bought Volume I of The World as Will and Representation, magnum opus of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In the preface to the second edition, Schopenhauer refers to his work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, written as his doctoral dissertation in 1813 and later revised. He declares: “Without an acquaintance with this introduction and propaedeutic, it is quite impossible to understand the present work properly, and the subject-matter of that essay is always presupposed here as if it were included in the book.”
On the Fourfold Root is relatively short at 125 pages, minus footnotes. Not wanting to have wasted my money on the book, and hearing that the dissertation could be read in a weekend, I ordered a copy. For a while it was one of many books I own but had not yet read. I’m happy to report I’ve now finished On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which represents the core of Schopenhauer’s philosophy despite his expansion upon it in later works.
One-sided rivalry
You might be asking why I bothered reading Schopenhauer at all. Ironically, I came to Schopenhauer through his arch-nemesis: one Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I purchased The World as Will and Representation a couple years after reading Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. I had been drawn to Hegel in turn through dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism. Karl Marx famously “turned Hegel on his head” by embracing Hegel’s dialectical method while rejecting his philosophical idealism, instead putting dialectics on a firmly scientific, materialist basis.
Hegel was also Schopenhauer’s arch-nemesis. Schopenhauer despised Hegel, considering him a charlatan who used convoluted, obscure language to mask an inferior “pseudo-philosophy”. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason includes numerous attacks on Hegel. You can feel Schopenhauer’s rage at Hegel’s popularity in rants like the following, scattered throughout the text:
Only look at Hegelianism! What is it but empty, hollow, nauseous twaddle! Yet how brilliant a career was that of this philosophical time-server! A few mercenary individuals had only to strike up a laudation of this stuff, and they at once found an echo to their voices in the empty hollow of a thousand numskulls—an echo which still continues to resound, and to extend—and behold! an ordinary intellect, a common impostor soon became a sublime thinker.
In a revealing act of pettiness, Schopenhauer intentionally scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s. Unfortunately for him, the vast majority attended Hegel’s lectures instead of Schopenhauer’s. While Hegel spoke to an overcrowded auditorium, Schopenhauer was shocked to find only five people had signed up for his course.
After reading The Phenomenology of Spirit and hearing such anecdotes, I became curious about the work of Hegel’s would-be rival. There has been much praise for Schopenhauer’s writing style.
Hegel was undoubtedly a genius—Friedrich Engels described him as “the most encyclopaedic mind of his time”—who led a revolution in philosophy. His works contain many beautiful and incisive passages. Still, Hegel’s difficult writing style was not one of his strengths. Compare that to the assessment of translator E.F.J. Payne in his introduction to The World as Will and Representation: “It is universally acknowledged by all who have read Schopenhauer’s works, even by those who do not share his views, that his prose is second to none in beauty of style and in power and lucidity of expression.”
Early in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer offers an example of his expressive power when he presents a compelling argument on the importance of clarity in philosophical thought:
The true philosopher will indeed always seek after light and perspicuity, and will endeavour to resemble a Swiss lake which through its peacefulness is enabled to unite great depth with great clearness, the depth revealing itself precisely by the clearness—rather than a turbid, impetuous mountain current. “La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophies” [“Clarity is the good faith of philosophies”] says Vavenargues. Pseudo-philosophers, on the contrary, use speech, not indeed to conceal their thoughts, as M. de Talleyrand has it, but rather to conceal the absence of them, and are apt to make their readers responsible for the incomprehensibility of their systems, which really proceeds from their own confused thinking.
No prizes for guessing the most likely “pseudo-philosopher” Schopenhauer is referring to here. While this passage is well-written, there’s an underlying irony that undercuts the argument. Regardless of Schopenhauer’s strengths as a writer, Hegel is still the superior philosopher.
Kant’s influence
The starting point for Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer considered himself a Kantian who extended and completed what Kant had begun, tying up the loose ends that remained after Kant’s work. While Kant was a genius and an intellectual titan, his philosophy ultimately represented a dead end. Kant held that we obtain knowledge through our minds interpreting what we experience through our senses—but that we can only know appearances and never what he called “the thing-in-itself”.
In his History of Philosophy, Alan Woods writes that Kant’s “fundamental mistake was not to see the relation between appearance and essence. It is wrong to think that we can only know ‘appearances’. When I know the property of the thing, I know the thing itself. There is nothing else to know; no ‘beyond’, no Thing-in-Itself.” Kant regards appearance and essence as two separate things, Woods says. “Thought, instead of being seen as a bridge uniting the thinking subject with the world, is conceived of as a barrier, something standing between the subject and the object.”
The notion of the thing-in-itself and the idea that objective reality is inherently unknowable is the weakest part of Kant’s philosophy—and not coincidentally, also the one that informs today’s philosophy of postmodernism, in which there is no objective truth, but only different subjective “narratives”. Hegel destroyed this argument long ago, writing: “It marks the diseased state of the age when we see it adopt the despairing creed that our knowledge is only subjective, and that beyond this subjective we cannot go.” These words could have been written yesterday.
Woods continues:
Hegel, like Kant, was an idealist, but he was an objective idealist, who never denied that it was possible to know the real world. Such objective idealism is far superior, with all its faults, to the complete confusion which comes from subjective idealism. It is therefore not surprising that in the ‘diseased state’ of our own age, it is Kant, not Hegel, who has found most favour with philosophers and scientists, who wish to convince us that we cannot really assert that the physical world exists, or that we cannot know what happened before the ‘big bang’ (and must not ask), or that the behaviour of subatomic particles depends exclusively on whether we are present to observe them.
Instead Woods agrees with Hegel, who wrote:
[E]verything we know both of outward and inward nature, in one word, the objective world, is in its own self the same as it is in thought, and that to think is to bring out the truth of our object, be it what it may. The business of philosophy is only to bring into explicit consciousness what the world in all ages has believed about thought. Philosophy therefore advances nothing new; and our present discussion has led us to a conclusion which agrees with the natural belief of mankind.
By basing himself on Kant, Schopenhauer undercuts his own philosophy and, like Kant, falls into the trap of subjective idealism. Rather than materialism, which holds that matter is all that exists and that mind is a product of matter, philosophical idealism holds that the mind and ideas are primary and the material world, if it exists at all, is secondary.
Schopenhauer favourably quotes Kant, who wrote, “Transcendental idealism teaches that all phenomena are representations only, not things by themselves.” And again: “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.” In the last analysis, this is no different from the subjective idealism of George Berkeley, who denied the existence of the material world. Berkeley held that objects are only ideas that the mind perceives, and cannot exist without being perceived.
Only infants and idealist philosophers believe that the world vanishes if you close your eyes. Yet this is the logical conclusion of what Kant—and Schopenhauer—are saying. If we had any doubt, Schopenhauer adds, “Realism quite overlooks the fact, that the so-called existence of these real things is absolutely nothing but their being represented”. Unlike you normies, Schopenhauer understands that real things aren’t actually real! This is childish nonsense.
Everything happens for a reason
Back to the principle of sufficient reason, the main focus of Schopenhauer’s dissertation. This principle, which goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, holds that everything that happens has a reason or root cause—which, yeah, is fairly common knowledge. It’s the reason little kids like to repeatedly ask, “Why?” Even they understand the principle of sufficient reason. I think of Jonathan Kent in the 1978 Superman film: “One thing I do know, son, and that is you are here for a reason.”
Schopenhauer identifies four classes of reason. These are, and I quote from the back cover of the Pantianos Classics edition:
Becoming; over time, an object gains time and space and is thus able to be perceived, interpreted, evaluated, and judged.
Knowing; all past judgments, together with conceptions established via the use of reason, make up the basis of the known.
Being; separated into two categories; firstly time is explained as an inner sense, pertaining to the temporal and secondly, space pertains to the spatial occupancy of the subject.
Willing; the perceiving, knowing, subject may be able to perceive itself as a force of will - however this process takes action, and time, to establish itself.
From these four forms of the principle of sufficient reason, Schopenhauer says, there exist four different kinds of necessity:
Logical necessity, according to the principle of sufficient reason of knowing, in virtue of which, when once we have admitted the premises, we must absolutely admit the conclusion.
Physical necessity, according to the law of causality, in virtue of which, as soon as the cause presents itself, the effect must infallibly follow.
Mathematical necessity, according to the principle of sufficient reason of being, in virtue of which, every relation which is stated in a true geometrical theorem, is as that theorem affirms it to be, and every correct calculation remains irrefutable.
Moral necessity, in virtue of which, every human being, every animal even, is compelled, as soon as a motive presents itself, to do that which alone is in accordance with the inborn and immutable character of the individual.
Schopenhauer’s concept of “moral necessity” is on very shaky ground. Yet he goes on to claim, “The law of motives (motivation) is the chief guide in History, Politics, Pragmatic Psychology, &c. &c.” One has to ask: how do we know “the inborn and immutable character of the individual”?
Here Schopenhauer essentially falls into the great man theory of history—since according to him, the best way to understand history is as individuals who act according to their “inborn and immutable character” as “soon as a motive presents itself.” Compare this simplistic and superficial view of Schopenhauer to the method of historical materialism, which views material conditions and changes in the mode of production as the ultimate driving force of human history.
Hegel the superior philosopher
I’ll wrap up these scattered thoughts with Schopenhauer’s sum-up of his dissertation near the end:
The general meaning of the Principle of Sufficient Reason may, in the main, be brought back to this: that every thing existing no matter when or where, exists by reason of something else. Now, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is nevertheless a priori in all its forms: that is, it has its roots in our intellect, therefore it must not be applied to the totality of existent things, the Universe, including that intellect in which it presents itself. For a world like this, which presents itself in virtue of a priori forms, is just on that account mere phenomenon; consequently that which holds good with reference to it as the result of these forms, cannot be applied to the world itself, i.e. to the thing in itself, representing itself in that world. Therefore we cannot say, “the world and all things in it exist by reason of something else;” and this proposition if precisely the Cosmological Proof.
To me this passage is a damning indictment of philosophical idealism. Schopenhauer literally says, “The principle of sufficient reason is a priori [knowledge independent from experience] and you can’t apply it to ‘the totality of existing things, the Universe’.” What is this nonsense? The entire point of philosophy is to study the nature of knowledge, reality and existence. If you can’t apply the principle of sufficient reason to the “totality of existing things”, i.e. to objective reality, then what’s the point?
Hegel shows his superiority to Schopenhauer in his analysis of cause and effect. Woods again:
Hegel explains that there is no such thing as true causality, in the sense of an isolated cause and effect. Every effect has a counter-effect, and every action has a counter-action. The idea of an isolated cause and effect is an abstraction taken from classical Newtonian physics, which Hegel was highly critical of, although it enjoyed tremendous prestige at that time. Here again, Hegel was in advance of his time. Instead of the action-reaction of mechanics, he advanced the notion of Reciprocity, of universal interaction. Everything influences everything else and is, in turn, influenced and determined by everything. Hegel thus re-introduced the concept of accident which had been rigorously banned from science by the mechanist philosophy of Newton and Laplace.
At first sight, we seem to be lost in a vast number of accidents. But this confusion is only apparent. Order emerges out of chaos. The accidental phenomena which constantly flash in and out of existence, like the waves on the surface of an ocean, express a deeper process, which is not accidental but necessary. At a decisive point, this necessity reveals itself through accident.
Sorry, Schopenhauer, but I have to go with Hegel on this one. The latter’s view of cause and effect is far more thorough and accurate than Schopenhauer’s mechanistic, one-sided interpretation of reality.
There’s a lot more I could say about Schopenhauer. He’s known both as a philosophical pessimist and misogynist, with his 1865 essay “On Women” a foundational incel text. Yet Schopenhauer was more open-minded about Eastern philosophy and religion than any other European philosopher of his time. At some point I’ll read The World as Will and Representation, if only because I own a copy of Volume I. But in terms of their philosophy, Hegel > Schopenhauer.