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Title: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Open Court Library of Philosophy) by Arthur Schopenhauer ISBN: 0-87548-201-5 Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 August, 1974 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.86 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Minor Problem
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: An All-Time Gem
Comment: The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a theory of cognition. It is a vision of the homo cognoscendi. Inexplicably, unjustifiably, it still remains largely unknown.
Schopenhauer first wrote it as his doctorate dissertation, improving it substantially more than thirty years later when his entire system of thought, the philosophy of the world as will and representation, was already established. It is this second edition that since 1974 was made available to the English-speaking world by his excellent translator, Eric F.J. Payne.
A true machine-gun of clear connections, thinking and giving to think in all directions, the book takes on the greatest thinkers of the western world up to its time, challenges long-established truths, religious dogmas, and sets the stage for one of the most - perhaps the most, apart from psychoanalysis - far-reaching metaphysical tours-de-force the human mind has been able to make unassistedly, that is, abandoned by the gods and fate. What we find in this little treatise is a most valuable source of insight into psychology, epistemology, physics and all present sciences.
There is a second merit in it, and this brings us to its quantum leap. The treatise does not only present a theory of cognition tout-court, but indeed a Kantian theory of cognition. Kantian in its ambition, Kantian in its method; Kantian in recognizing that outside its reference to that who knows, namely the subject of knowledge, the entire knowable, objective reality becomes a contradiction in terms, and cannot be even conceived of.
Still, its most impressive feat is its objective itself. In the less than 300 pages of the treatise, Schopenhauer does have the ambition of exhausting the entire reality and all possible objects of experience. If he succeeded in achieving this, the cohesiveness of his entire system of thought can and must be studied in its timelessness. On the other hand, even if problems and challenges are left in relation to what mankind has discovered and concluded ever since, there still remains the legacy of his method, an all-time gem, and the insight that by means of the principle of sufficient reason the entire objective reality can be surveyed.
Now, the reader of this review may ask him or herself: but how could it be possible that someone exhausts the totality of reality and knowable objects in one single, small book? If we allow ourselves to think that the world is a sum of its facts, events, and objects, as Wittgenstein points out in the very first line of his Tractatus, this enterprise would seem to be an utter absurdity even if we considered the knowledge mankind had in the early nineteenth century, the year of 1813 when its first version came out. But then... There is the Kantian secret, 'the world is my representation', and this insight no one can take from modernity. Content implies form, and for transcendental philosophy, this is what truly matters.
Along its eight chapters, the book is focused on the four manners in which man can, according to the philosopher, know reality, infer causes and consequences, conditioning and conditioned, associate concepts, and ask for the whys of the world. At the same time, Schopenhauer provides a detailed account of the human powers and faculties at work: the understanding (Verstand, which in the main work is nicknamed after Indian philosophy as 'the veil of Maya'), the faculty of Reason (Vernunft), pure sensibility (here we have a most interesting restatement of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, and a critique of Euclid's axioms), and inner sensibility (the magic track on which the riddle of the world could, according to the philosopher, be solved). The Fourfold Root is a crucial book also in the discussion of pure reason, in attempting to prove the apriority of causality (against David Hume, and saving KantÂ's untainable position of causality as a function of reason), in consolidating man's active place and role in the process of knowledge, and in answering Kant's question 'Is metaphysics possible, after all?' An additional remark would be that it also provides a most precious criterion for the demarcation of the sciences: according to the way we know - relate, to each other, in accordance to the various forms of the principle - objects in them.
Professors of philosophy and philosophers alike, it is high time we study Schopenhauer, in all his immodesty, in all seriousness. One may wish to dismiss the central construction of his work, his metaphysics of the will, as a theory of voluntarism, of utter irrationalism, or of unnecessary pessimism. In other works, when we see his comments on women and on theism, our first impression may well be one of rebuff. All these questions can and must be treated on their own merit; in the case of women, I judge Schopenhauer as unfair and contradictory; in the case of theism, as right and noble, inasmuch as he so brilliantly shows how a first beginning in the notion of creation, as an unconditioned cause, is a violation of the human capacities.
But what will we do with the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, the most thorough and ambitious investigation of 'the mother of all science' in the history of philosophy? Will anyone be able to challenge this basic claim?
I apologize to the reader if my review seems to be too promising, too euphoric and optimistic about this book. However, after having read it, I do trust that he or she will agree with me that it should be handled with the care a most unique specimen deserves. In addition to the 'Critique of the Kantian Philosophy', appended to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, seriousness in making oneself clear in regard to foundations and connections in one's work present themselves undeniably, though still controversially in a few main claims. An introduction to these controversies can be found in F.C.WhiteÂ's book, --On SchopenhauerÂ's Fourfold Root of the PSR--, and on Alfred SchaeferÂ's --Probleme Schopenhauers--.
In the end, one wonders whether it is our time (with all the sound and fury of its technology, barions and genes) that challenges Schopenhauer's teachings or the reverse. And even if his claims seem to be unsustainable, we still get to know in a direct way, and without a shadow of a doubt, what human excellence in philosophy really is.
Rating: 5
Summary: easy reading
Comment: 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.
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Title: The World As Will and Representation (Volume 1) by Arthur Schopenhauer ISBN: 0486217612 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1966 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Volume II by Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne ISBN: 0199242216 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee ISBN: 0198237227 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Essays and Aphorisms (The Penguin Classics) by Arthur Schopenhauer, R. J. Hollingdale ISBN: 0140442278 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1973 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) by Arthur Schopenhauer, Gunter Zoller ISBN: 0521577667 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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