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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Open Court Library of Philosophy)

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This lucid and important book was considered by Schopenhauer as the introduction to his magnum opus "The World as Will and as Representation". It can be conceived as Schopenhauer's alternative version to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" as an attempt to map all A-PRIORI knowledge. Schopenhauer, an obvious sequel to Kant, differentiates himself from Kant in this book in two basic assumptions: 1. There is no distinction between REPRESENTATION and OBJECT. We perceive objects directly, not through a subjective "buffer". 2. PERCEPTION is not logically independent of UNDERSTANDING, on the contrary. We perceive objects (necessarily) already understood, i.e. determined and related to other objects. Schopenhauer interprets the last premiss as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which he claims to be the root of all A-PRIORI knowledge.

This amazing treatise on human knowledge has one little fault. The editors at Open Court left out eleven words in the Tranlator's Introduction. This omission should gratify present-day philosophers in that it turns Schopenhauer's words into modern-sounding nonsense. I will surround the omitted words with parentheses. On page xx, Schopenhauer is quoted: " ...so that I cannot hope ever to find a more correct and accurate expression of that core of my philosophy (than what is there recorded. Whoever wishes to know my philosophy) thoroughly and investigate it seriously must take that chapter into consideration." You see, the occurrence of the word "philosophy" twice in close proximity utterly confused them. I notified Open Court but did not receive an acknowledgement. Other than this, I have to judge this book as one of the few life-changing writings that occur a few times every century. For laughs, read Heidegger's "Principle of Reason" and compare the two.

I am happy to encourage any reader to Schpenhauer's doctoral thesis, just as much as he himself did in the introduction of the World as Will and Representation. The book is absolutely worth the time spent, and it is indeed a coherent prime step (though this is a revised edition of the 1814 original) to Schopenhauer's philosophical system. The translation by E.F.Payne is product of a life's effort. It is almost impecable and will stand to the demands of the accurate reader, though it may be advisable to compare and review the original in order to look for the literary sound of the ideas exposed. Schopenhauer is one of those rare cases where highly expressive prose correlates smoothly with mighty philosophical meaning. He may also be an excellent way to perfect our understanding of Kant.

It is one of the few injustices of Bertrand RussellÕs ÒHistory of Western Philosophy,Ó that he failed to appreciate SchopenhauerÕs thesis for his doctorate. But it is really one of the seminal documents that conclusively closed a debate which had begun with Descartes and included David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer was very much a no nonsense thinker who felt nothing but contempt for people like Hegel (his bte noir) or Fichte. He also had an open mind for the sciences, yet came a bit too early for Gregor Mendel and Darwin. So Schopenhauer proposed his famous voluntarism, a blind, but all-pervasive will behind the shifting spectre of never ending changes. In this sense Schopenhauer holds a middle position like Tycho Brahe had held between Copernicus and Kepler. It is not science yet, but already departing from the realm of pure thought. There are many ways to understand the meaning of philosophy, but I believe Bertrand Russell had put it best: ÒIs there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not.Ó SchopenhauerÕs answer to this question is fourfold, i.e. his exposition of the Òprinciple of sufficient reason,Ó and it is as good an answer, as anybody possibly could give, who puts himself under the constrains of BerkeleyÕs idealism. It is not only the epistemological core to SchopenhauerÕs own philosophy, it really takes the fundamentals through the paces and answers to David HumeÕs demolition of causality. In essence it says, that causality is a common bias in human and animal sensibility, which Ôa prioryÕ enables us to operate on our empirical sensations. It is the way how we structure the world, but not necessarily a feature of the empirical phenomena under scrutiny as Hume had already had observed. Then why does a sensibility based on the concept of causality operates so efficiently?

Schopenhauer is still a classical rationalist of the old school. Like his master, Immanuel Kant, instead of postulating a convenient set of inborn instincts or acquired intuitions, he prefers the premise, that there is a LOGICAL reason, a preconceived NECESSITY, for the way we slot and pigeonhole perceptions and employ our operative ideas. So how does this work in the real world? In essence Schopenhauer takes ÒperceptionÓ not to be the product of sensation, but of understanding. In other words what our senses present to our cognition is transformed by the 4 linchpins of common sense: causation, plausibility, geometry, and psychological motivation. So there is a chain of mental events: sensation is converted by an act of recognition to perception. From this it is only one logical step further to SchopenhauerÕs first premise of his mature philosophy that the world is Òmy will and representation,Ó because the Òobjective worldÓ which we naively take to be given to our senses is in fact a transformation from raw data to perception. To illustrate this point just consider how the mind compensates for mild astigmatism: the afflicted still perceives a correct picture of the object. And this is a faculty animals obviously share with us. What makes man different is merely the scope and refinement of his percepts. Schopenhauer is at his best in his exposition of causation. By shifting it from a relationship between things to a relationship between different states of things, he shows the fallacy in HumeÕs scepticism. It is not the sun as such that melts the snow but the heat absorbed which causes a change from crystalline to liquid - 2 states of the same thing: water. This causal relationship between changes we judge to be necessary and not merely to be an incidental regularity. Our exposure to such regularities authorizes what Schopenhauer called a Òhypothetical judgementÓ or in modern parlance a Òcounterfactual inference.Ó But our absolute TRUST in such judgements comes from nowhere but from ourselves - it is a feature of our sensibility, because we actually apply it on every event we can imagine, and not just on actual experience. It makes us intuitively and a priory look for things to happen the way it is expected. (ThatÕs why modern science had such a hard time to get over the hump into quantum physics.) Schopenhauer then continues to explain the age old philosophical adage, that no thing ever comes into being or ceases to be. We observe changes. Matter, which always has existed, undergoes certain transformations; it loses certain properties and acquires others, until, at a given point, it presents itself as a flower. Eventually the flower will perish but its matter doesnÕt simply disappear. It turns to compost, thus feeding the seeds of new plants and so on in infinity, in ever changing configurations of matter. In other words, notions of a Òfirst causeÓ (and its theological implications) are dismissed as nonsense. ÒCausation,Ó Schopenhauer notes, Òis not like a hired cab which one dismisses once it has arrived at its desired destination.Ó Modern science since Schopenhauer seems to be on a speeding train away from such quaint exposition of the works of common sense. We have entered the realm of counter-intuitive phenomena and the facts of modern physics require new logical tools. These days the more respectable section of modern philosophy occupies itself with symbolic logic and algorithms. The rest of us like to think that the world fits into our thoughts because we fit into the world, but it is a bit more complicated, and from a perspective of classical idealism, SchopenhauerÕs thesis presents in a style of great lucidity the final summation for the way the world corresponds with our perception.

I bought the Cosimo Classics edition of "on the fourfold root" (its the pink one) and basically there is on major problem with this copy, there are entire passages that Schopenhauer uses from other philosophers that are left completely untranslated, rendering null any ability to make sense of an already not too easy volume (that is of course unless you know latin, french, german, etc...)

This work is amazingly still ahead of its time despite being roughly 150 years old. It is essential for any student of science and/or philosophy. It requires focus and energy to read, and rather bogs down toward the end, but upon finishing it you'll most likely be enlightened on aspects of your cognitive and reasoning powers you weren't previously aware you even possessed. Here's why this book is important. The history of humanity's awakening from animal consciousness into the self-aware, abstract reasoning existence marks a movement from the the evolutionary advent of vertebrates to interstellar space probes. It's quite a little drama. The chroniclers of this story weren't really able to swing into action, due to technical difficulties, until a crotchety old cuss from Konigsberg ran off the barbarians of the mind. Kant is not refered to as the father of the modern scientific method for nothing. What Kant attributes to Hume in terms of motivation is also given to Kant on the road to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer takes up the torch mightily and ushers us finally onto the platform of the empirical epistemology of idealism, which seems like a contradiction but isn't. It is astounding how many supposedly scientific types still do not grasp the necessary idealism ingrained in the neural cognitive machinery and see the human animal as machines of sensation. Whatever graduation requirements in American universities stand responsible for this travesty are dispelled by the concise and unwavering interpretation of Schopenhauer. Read it. Learn from it. The principle of sufficient reason is of course the necessity that all events derive from their concomitant causes, or, that things happen for a reason. Schopenhauer asigns his (arbitrary) classifictions in a workman like manner and demonstrates a means by which a priori knowledge of causation occurs. Other than elucidating the elemental role idealism plays in the human mind's functioning, the main thrust of this book is to put the final nail in Kant's refutation of Hume's denial of causation in an eloquent compliment to what Hume was asking future generations to do; and Schopenhauer rises to the task. Scopenhauer takes from Kant the halter of reality, that marriage of empiricism, cognition, and ratiocination, and leads the old mare firmly into the present. Too bad the present has not worked its way beyond a man dead for over a century. This need not be your fate however. If you have read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' then this book is its logical extension and awaits your company. If not, then head to a cabin high in the Himalayas come winter, read the Critique, then read this book. It'll rock your world.

This work is well written, like the rest of Schopenhauer's books, and many of its arguments stand strong today. That the understanding is active in perception, that percpetion is intellectual, is a huge step beyond Kant. Furthermore, Schopenhauer's claim that causality is necessary for sense experience, though not proving the a priori nature of causality as he thought, is strong and holds true whether one is a realist or an idealist. In the case of realism, sense experience is gotten by the affectation of objects upon the body, and in the case of idealism, sense experience is the production of the individual, and thus causality is necessary either way. One may object to Schopenhauer's attempt to rationalize everything down to human action - that he makes the entire phenomenal world deterministic. But he has strong arguments for this as well which are further explained in On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will. Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers I still enjoy reading, and rather than finding gaps in his system... people would do well to learn from him. While this work prepares the way for his whole system, and is essential to understanding particulary Book One and the Appendix on Kant of his magnum opus, this work should make any openminded empirical realist uneasy, though it does not prove the radical kind of Berkeleian idealism to which Schopenhauer subscribed.

I came to this book through a winding road. I was out of new books to take at work with me and the idea of having to spend the day actually working without the chance to transfer at least my mind somewhere else was unbearable, so I opened a case of old books and took out something at random, which revealed itself to be a collection of writings about the primacy of the will over reason by Schopenhauer - a book which I had received as a gift seven years before. Apparently at the time I didn't have the right bag of experiences to appreciate Schopenhauer, but this time it really hit, and after that I decided I had to read his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. After reading the introduction and several reviews, I got the feeling that of the various prerequisites the author himself prescribes to be able to fully understand his work there was at least one that could not be skipped without depreciating the whole experience, and it was to read Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis: "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason".

I had never ever heard of this book before, so I guess that it's not well known outside the circle of full-time philosophy students, and that's a shame. Compared to better known works it's exceptionally clear and enjoyable, and still it builds an essential, solid framework that will probably become one of the most useful tools in your mental arsenal. After reading it I caught myself using it in many different circumstances; it made me reconsider a lot of problems leading to a view where everything simply fell into its place. This came naturally, almost without even realizing that I was applying it... I think I can't say more to vouch for the simple beauty of this system.

The "sufficient reason" is a relation that presents itself in the various realms in which our mind operates and that ties the objects of such realms between themselves. It appears in a different form for each of those realms (for example as cause-and-effect in the material world, and as logical consequence in the world of concepts) but with a consistency that makes it a perfect candidate to be the swiss army knife of idealism. Indeed this book can be seen as a no-nonsense presentation of idealism using the idea of sufficient reason as its principle.

"On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" can be read in one day, doesn't need any prior knowledge, and I couldn't even make a complete list of how many benefits it brings, although I'd like at least to mention two:

-The ability to see the bases of the scientific method (logic and experience) united as different aspects of the same principle, or even to take it further and have a single idea that in a practical way unifies "objective" and "subjective" reasoning

-The verbal/logical advantage to be able to distinguish between the different meanings the word "why" can have. I would like to believe that it is so obvious that this remark will get people laughing, but as sad as it is, I've noticed that most people never think about it and that allows them to fall prey of rhetoric persuasion, or to spend emotional and mental efforts with paradoxes whose flaw becomes immediately clear once one can question that meaning

The reviews so far have covered all that needs to be said of substance for practical purposes.

I will just add, with emphasis, that this is a terrible translation.

The "Open Court Classics" translation is much, much better.

1. In this "Dodo Press" edition, there are no translations of the latin. The Open Court ed. has them, with the added benefit of their being in the main body of text; no need to flip back-and-forth constantly to the back of the book.

2. This edition (Dodo press) has so many errors, its frustrating to say the least!
Its as if no one bothered editing the book at all! I mean this literally: this is the only explanation as to how lines of gibberish could be printed, such as, "% No# .? ^& % Il #?", etc.)

Great book, bad edition. Don't buy this one.

I am not a philosophy scholar, nor do I speak German, but even I am qualified to dismiss this edition. I thoroughly enjoyed the content of the work, where it was legible. But several basic practices were not followed. First, there are long sections of garbled text, as though they printed a corrupted word processor file. That's rubbish. Secondly, there is no consistent practice regarding Greek and Latin quotations in the original: sometimes they are translated into English, sometimes not, and if it's French, forget about it. As anyone who has read Schopenhauer will know, this is no minor flaw. If your work is written for specialists, then pick a design and stick with it. Perhaps I will have better luck with the Payne translation.