The First Casualty…

Let me make it clear, before we begin, that the Principle of Sufficient Reason entitles us to ask “why something is as it is and not otherwise.”

In “On the Principle of Sufficient Reason”, the first Principle Schopenhauer describes is the Principle of the Sufficient Reason of Becoming.

The objects for this Principle are:

“intuitive, complete, empirical representations. They are intuitive as opposed to mere thoughts, i.e. abstract conceptions ; they are complete, inasmuch as, … 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. As, nevertheless, according to the result of Kant s teaching, this Empirical Reality does not annul their Transcendental Ideality, we shall consider them here, where we have only to do with the formal elements of knowledge, merely as representations.”

The Law under which form they take is the Law of Causality. Schopenhauer was the first to give a precise definition of Causality.

“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, i.e. as often as that preceding one occurs. This sort of following we call resulting ; the first of the states being named a cause, the second an effect. When a substance takes fire, for instance, this state of ignition must have been preceded by a state, 1, of affinity to oxygen; 2, of contact with oxygen; 3, of a given temperature. Now, as ignition must necessarily follow immediately upon this state, and as it has only just taken place, that state cannot always have been there, but must, on the contrary, have only just supervened. This supervening is called a change. It is on this account that the law of causality stands in exclusive relation to changes and has to do with them alone. Every effect, at the time it takes place, is a change and, precisely by not having occurred sooner, infallibly indicates some other change by which it has been preceded. That other change takes the name of cause, when referred to the following one of effect, when referred to a third necessarily preceding change. This is the chain of causality. It is necessarily without a beginning. By it, each supervening state must have resulted from a preceding change : in the case just mentioned, for instance, from the substance being brought into contact with free heat, from which necessarily resulted the heightened temperature ; this contact again depended upon a preceding change, for instance the sun’s rays falling upon a burning-glass; this again upon the removal of a cloud from before the sun; this upon the wind; the wind upon the unequal density of the atmosphere; this upon other conditions, and so forth in infinitum. When a state contains all the requisite conditions for bringing about a new state excepting one, this one, when at last it arrives, is, in a sense, rightly called the cause par excellence, inasmuch as we here have the final in this case the decisive change especially in view ; but if we leave out this consideration, no single condition of the causal state has any advantage over the rest with reference to the determination of the causal connection in general, merely because it happens to be the last. Thus the removal of the cloud in the above example, is in so far the cause of the igniting, as it took place later than the direction of the burning-glass towards the object; but this might have taken place after the removal of the cloud and the addition of oxygen might have occurred later still: in this respect therefore it is the accidental order of things that determines which is the cause. On closer inspection, however, we find that it is the entire state which is the cause of the ensuing one, so that the chronological order in which its single conditions were brought about, is in all essential respects indifferent. With reference to a given case therefore, the last occurring condition of a state may be called the cause par excellence because it completes the measure of the necessary conditions, and its appearance thus becomes the decisive change. For purposes of general consideration, however, it is only the entire state which, by bringing about its successor, can be regarded as the cause. The single requisites which, added together, complete and constitute the cause may be called causal elements or even conditions, and into these accordingly the cause may be subdivided. On the other hand, it is quite wrong to call the objects themselves causes, instead of the states: some would, for instance, call the burning-glass in the above example the cause of the ignition ; while others, again, would call the cloud the cause; others the sun or the oxygen, and so on arbitrarily and without order. But it is absurd to call an object the cause of another object; first of all, because objects not only contain form and quality, but Matter also, which has neither beginning or end ; secondly, because the law of causality refers exclusively to changes in states.”

It should be noted that Primary Forces of Nature (those forces that can not be reduced to others, e.g. Gravity) are Metaphysical in nature, being free from Space, Time and Causality. They are always ready, everywhere, to show themselves when appropriate conditions arise.

Matter (substance) also remains unaffected by Causality, as that upon which Causality acts; the Forces of Nature being that through which it acts.

Now, the Faculty of the mind which has the sole form of the Law of Causality is the Understanding.

“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. For what a miserably poor thing is mere sensation, after all! Even in the noblest of our organs it is nothing but a local, specific feeling, susceptible of some slight variation, still in itself always subjective and, as such therefore, incapable of containing anything objective, anything like perception. For sensation is and remains a process within the organism and is limited, as such, to the region within the skin; it cannot therefore contain any thing which lies beyond that region, or, in other words, anything that is outside us. A sensation may be pleasant Or unpleasant which betokens a relation to the Will but – nothing objective can ever lie in any sensation. In the organs of the senses, sensation is heightened by the confluence of the nerve-extremities, and can easily be excited from without on account of their extensive distribution and the delicacy of the envelope which encloses them; it is besides specially susceptible to particular influences, such as light, sound, smell; notwithstanding which it is and remains mere sensation, like all others within our body, 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, complicated structure weighing from five to ten pounds, 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. For, in virtue of its own peculiar form, therefore a priori, i.e. before all experience (since there could have been none till then), the Understanding conceives the given corporeal sensation as an effect (a word which the Understanding alone comprehends), which effect, as such, necessarily implies a cause. Simultaneously it summons to its assistance Space, the form of the outer sense, lying likewise ready in the intellect (i.e. the brain), in order to remove that cause beyond the organism; for it is by this that the external world first arises, Space alone rendering it possible, so that pure intuition a priori has to supply the foundation for empirical perception. In this process, …, the Understanding avails itself of all the several data, even the minutest, which are presented to it by the given sensation, in order to construct the cause of it in Space in conformity with them. This intellectual operation, does not however take place discursively or reflectively, in abstracto, by means of conceptions and words; it is, on the contrary, an intuitive and quite direct process. For by it alone, therefore exclusively in the Understanding and for the Understanding, does the real, objective, corporeal world, filling Space in its three dimensions, present itself and further proceed, according to the same law of causality, to change in Time, and to move in Space. It is therefore 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. In fact, the senses supply nothing but the raw materials which the Understanding at once proceeds to work up into the objective view of a corporeal world, subject to regular laws, by means of the simple forms we have indicated : Space, Time, and Causality. Accordingly our every-day empirical perception is an intellectual one and has a right to claim this predicate,…”

Whew! There are collieries following this, but I think it is enough for anybody to chew over this today.