Today in Schopenhauer class, at the very end, the discussion turned to the principle of sufficient reason. I couldn’t help interjecting a question; in fact, I haven’t even started reading Schopenhauer’s book yet, so I was really rather embarrassed~
Jingang said that Schopenhauer’s argument for the principle of sufficient reason is quite dogmatic, and I agree with that. As for the teacher, he more or less said that the principle of sufficient reason is a prerequisite for questioning and reasoning, and on that point I disagree.
At the time I brought up quantum mechanics. I raised it as an example, not because I wanted to drag the cutting edge of the natural sciences into philosophical discussion; that would be overbearing.
What does quantum mechanics, as an example, prove? What I wanted to show is that even if we abandon the principle of sufficient reason, that does not necessarily prevent us from asking further questions, thinking, and reasoning; we may still develop a complete and internally coherent theoretical system, and such a theory can be highly effective in explaining phenomena,
My basic view is that, in Schopenhauer and in modern philosophers or scientists since Leibniz, the principle of sufficient reason exists as a fundamental ontological tenet. This ontological (rather than epistemological) tenet is an extremely basic part of modern philosophy and science, far more important than dispensable things like “the world is material.”
Put bluntly, this ontological tenet means that this world (whether the world here is taken as material or as representation) is deterministic.
This is also why Einstein resisted the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics so strongly. Quantum mechanics shook the law of excluded middle and repudiated the principle of sufficient reason. And compared with the law of excluded middle, Einstein seems to have cared more about the latter; or rather, the latter was something more basic than the former. Einstein’s famous line, “God does not play dice,” was aimed at precisely this.
The principle of sufficient reason does not mean merely “where there is a cause, there is an effect; where there is an effect, there is a cause,” or “everything has a reason,” but rather that not only is there a reason, there is a sufficient reason—one that makes the event necessarily occur. In the teacher’s formulation, all the states of the universe at one moment completely determine its state at the next moment. Whether people can recognize or find the sufficient reason is another matter, but this universe is a universe of the principle of sufficient reason; thus this is an ontological commitment.
Although determinism has suffered a huge blow in quantum mechanics, ontological commitments, or assumptions, are fundamentally impossible to refute, and so they count as a kind of creed. But if one wants to establish the principle of sufficient reason as an epistemological conclusion, then that is hard to make work. Granted, any act of questioning is always in search of reasons, and that already presupposes “everything has a reason.” So to say “everything has a reason” is probably valid a priori (I would not dare to assert this lightly myself). However, if one says that the reasons here must always be sufficient reasons, that is worth doubting. In fact, neither human reason nor understanding requires the guarantee of the principle of sufficient reason in order to operate normally. Saying that the principle of sufficient reason is the basis of logical inference does have some merit: in formal logical deduction, premises really do always serve as the “sufficient reason” for the conclusion. But this is only causality in a world of signs, not causality in an empirical world, or in a world as will and representation. Logical positivists believed that the real world could be reduced to a logical structure expressed in symbols; this is what led them to mistake the principle of sufficient reason that formal logic must follow for the nature of the world. But this leap is worth examining carefully.
Abandoning the principle of sufficient reason would not lead to the kind of situation the teacher described, where speech becomes incoherent and logic collapses. For example, if I ask, “Why has the sky grown dark?” and you answer, “It’s going to rain soon,” that does not provide the “sufficient reason” for the sky’s growing dark. In fact, the sky does not necessarily grow dark because rain is imminent, and when rain is imminent the sky does not always grow dark. Yet I am satisfied with your answer; whereas if you were to answer, “I didn’t eat breakfast today,” that would indeed be talking past the question. There is certainly some sort of thing related to causality (I once envisaged the form of this indeterminate causality in a philosophy of science assignment: Causality and Scientific Explanation) that guarantees the possibility and intelligibility of thought and speech, but this does not necessarily require the principle of sufficient reason, much less any ontological commitment to a deterministic world.
September 19, 2007
September 19, 2007 17:08:35 anonymous 211.166.9.17 [reply]
But it also does not necessarily require the principle of insufficient reason, and still less does it require an ontological commitment to a non-deterministic world.
PS: Legend has it that when Heisenberg was choosing a major, he first wanted to study mathematics. A professor asked him what books he had read, and he said one by Weyl (it should be that intuitionist Weyl), the title of which seemed to include the words “time” and “space” (the teacher didn’t say specifically). Then that professor said, “You won’t have any success studying mathematics; you’d be better off studying physics.” So he went to study physics instead—now in the
Gugu
September 19, 2007 22:11:45 [reply]
Indeed, one does not necessarily need to make an ontological commitment to a non-deterministic world. I never said such a thing. If one says that this world is indeterminate, or unknowable, then its ontological structure is probably also indeterminate and unknowable. At the very beginning of the article I stated clearly that I was not trying to introduce the conclusions of quantum mechanics into philosophical discussion. The world that quantum mechanics presents is indeed a non-deterministic world, but my purpose in citing it was not to prove that the world is non-deterministic, but to illustrate, by example, that one can still construct a rigorous theoretical system on the premise of non-determinism, and that abandoning determinism does not mean falling into incoherence.
Modern philosophy has a subversion of ontology: on the Continent, existentialism replaces ontology with ontology, and in the Anglo-American world, positivism abolishes all metaphysics. So the teacher’s remark that Schopenhauer is the last classical philosopher is reasonable; there is still ontology in his philosophy.
mist
September 19, 2007 22:48:03 anonymous 211.166.9.17 [reply]
I’m looking forward to seeing such a system~~
There are also modern philosophers who talk about metaphysics, such as Peter van Inwagen, Plantinga, and so on.
Gugu
September 19, 2007 22:57:41 [reply]
Modern philosophy of course talks about metaphysics; otherwise how did I get that 68 points…………
Early analytic philosophy hardly talked about metaphysics; later analytic philosophy did. Lewis’s construction of a philosophical system around possible worlds also amounts to a grand system that includes metaphysics. As for philosophers from other schools and factions, of course they talk even more. In early Anglo-American philosophy there were also many mavericks, such as Whitehead, Russell’s teacher, who also built a system of process philosophy.
Passerby
September 19, 2007 23:04:18 anonymous 124.17.16.232 [reply]
Quoting Schopenhauer in *On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason*:
“The basic meaning of the principle of sufficient reason can be reduced to this: every thing existing in time or in space exists by reason of other things. However, in all its forms the principle of sufficient reason is something a priori: that is to say, its source lies in our understanding; therefore it absolutely cannot be applied to the totality of existing things, cannot be applied to the universe……”
I’m afraid Brother Gu should reconsider the argument.
Gugu
September 19, 2007 23:43:42 [reply]
At the very beginning I honestly said that I had not yet started reading Schopenhauer and was simply discussing what the teacher mentioned today. The teacher once said something like the universe’s present instant determines the universe’s next instant, and so I said the same. What I am mainly discussing here is the principle of sufficient reason as a fundamental tenet of modern philosophy; as for Schopenhauer’s distinctive interpretation, I am not in a position to comment on it now.
However, whether it can be applied to the “universe” as a whole does not seem to be the main issue. Schopenhauer’s point here seems to be to avoid asking for the cause of the existence of the universe as a whole (or, in other words, a first mover and the like), but what I mean by treating the principle of sufficient reason as an ontological tenet about the world is aimed at each and every thing, not at the universe as a whole. This is a different question from whether one asks after a first mover. One must note that “sufficient reason” is said of each and every thing, whereas “determinism” is said of the world as a whole. If every thing follows the principle of sufficient reason, then this whole universe is deterministic; but we do not say that every thing is deterministic, nor do we say that this whole universe is something that must follow the principle of sufficient reason. The objects modified by these two terms are different from the outset. So Schopenhauer’s not applying the principle of sufficient reason to the universe as a whole does not mean that he did not make a deterministic presupposition about the universe as a whole.
Let me repeat: the relation here needs to be distinguished clearly. The application of the “principle of sufficient reason” to each and every thing will result in a deterministic universe. And to say that the principle of sufficient reason does or does not apply to the universe as a whole is not the same thing as saying whether it is deterministic.
Gugu
September 19, 2007 23:57:41 [reply]
Simply put, on the one hand we can think that the universe as a whole does not itself follow the principle of sufficient reason, that is to say, it does not exist by reason of “other things.” But on the other hand we can simultaneously think that each and every thing in this universe does follow the principle of sufficient reason, that is to say, each thing always exists by reason of other things within this universe. If what is meant by reason here is the “sufficient reason” that guarantees the necessary occurrence of the result, then we say that such a universe is deterministic. These two assertions are consistent. I do not know what contradiction there was in my earlier discussion.
Gugu
September 20, 2007 00:29:49 [reply]
I can’t help adding one thing: since you call me Brother Gu, you must be someone I know, yet you actually used the name “passerby,” and then just dropped a quotation without saying where exactly I went wrong, much less stating your own view, and then asked me to “reconsider the argument”—that’s quite provocative~~! Though Brother Gu is not particularly strong in Western philosophy, and textual reading is even weaker, I do have some confidence in my ability to make a case that hangs together; it is not easy to make me admit fault and concede defeat~
mist
September 20, 2007 09:43:13 anonymous 124.17.16.46 [reply]
Could it be some junior female student? I get nervous the moment I see junior brothers and junior sisters now~ To borrow the respectful way of addressing Confucius: “like a homeless dog”
Passerby
September 20, 2007 09:54:48 anonymous 124.17.16.232 [reply]
Hehe, please forgive me, Brother Gu. Because it was almost eleven and the lights were about to go out, I just left after saying only a few words. My intention was not to reach any conclusion contrary to yours; it was only that after reading your article I flipped through Schopenhauer’s book and found that if one speaks of the principle of sufficient reason from the standpoint of transcendental philosophy, then deriving your conclusion would probably take a lot more work.
Simply put, if the principle of sufficient reason is merely an a priori form of subject cognition—that is, merely a necessary form by which the subject’s cognitive capacities determine objects—then even if the principle of sufficient reason can be valid for any object, it is still an epistemological proposition. If I have not misunderstood it, the principle of sufficient reason that Schopenhauer talks about is an extension of Kant’s pure forms of intuition and a priori categories; in his words, it is the four basic forms by which all representations are mutually connected. As long as it is a form, in transcendental philosophy it originates in the structure and capacities of the subject. In that case, the principle of sufficient reason cannot be understood as a description of the essential state of the world; the question of the preceding moment determining the following moment is no longer a legitimate question from the standpoint of transcendental philosophy. In other words, if our various cognitive activities (including perceiving objects, generating concepts, and so on, broadly construed as cognitive activities) necessarily organize all representations according to the form of the principle of sufficient reason, then first we can take the first step of escaping the accusation that it is an ontological proposition.
But even if the principle of sufficient reason is classified as an epistemological proposition, it may still fail to stand, and may be reduced to something that is in essence a hidden ontological commitment. I think the key point in what Brother Gu discusses, or rather the place where the problem of the principle of sufficient reason is most likely to arise, is still the matter of “sufficiency.” Brother Gu thinks that sufficient reason is in fact not a necessary condition for ordinary cognitive activity; whereas Teacher Xian’s argument treats the principle of sufficient reason as a necessary condition for the possibility of thinking. In Teacher Xian’s view, the principle of sufficient reason means that we necessarily understand the existence of all objects of thought as having a reason; the clearest proof of this is that we can always, and always tend to, inquire endlessly into why something exists. If one speaks only in broad terms of “reason,” then the “principle of sufficient reason” is vaguely pointing to a basic form of our cognitive activity (whether logical or in some other sense), something foundational to language, thought, and general cognition, and thus something that can serve as a transcendental principle. But if it is “sufficient” reason, then the problem Brother Gu mentioned arises: in everyday language and in the process of cognition, we do not constantly require sufficient reasons. So my view is that if one insists that the “principle of sufficient reason” does not require “sufficiency” (though I have not thought this through very clearly; from my reading of Schopenhauer, he seems only to stress that we necessarily construct and organize our representations according to the principle that every thing’s existence has its reason), then the principle of sufficient reason can remain under the protective umbrella of transcendental philosophy and evade your criticism. Otherwise, your point should be tenable, because a “sufficient” reason law is very hard to understand as a genuinely a priori form of cognition.
If I were to state my own view, I’m afraid the above is all there is, because even with regard to transcendental philosophy alone there is still too much I do not understand, let alone anything else. I have also read too superficially, so please correct any bias, Brother.
Gugu
September 20, 2007 17:39:59 [reply]
Hehe, what you said is quite good~ You’ve put your finger on the problem. Actually, my interjection in class was precisely aimed at this confusion: is Schopenhauer’s principle of sufficient reason really Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason? That was why I raised the point that “everything has a reason” is not the same as the principle of sufficient reason, and Teacher Xian clearly replied that what Schopenhauer meant by reason was sufficient reason, so I said it that way as well.
As for the “principle of sufficient reason” that is not “sufficient,” then it probably can no longer count as the “principle of sufficient reason.” This may go back to a much older tenet, a presupposition already beginning in ancient Greece: the “intelligibility” of this world, or, in other words, that this world is governed by regularities. Or, one might replace the principle of sufficient reason with the law of causality—in many places, the law of causality is taken as synonymous with the principle of sufficient reason, though I do not think that is necessarily appropriate.
Gugu
September 20, 2007 18:00:59 [reply]
By the way, the “Copernican revolution” of transcendental philosophy really did, to some extent, dissolve the problem of “ontology.” Though I have not read Schopenhauer, I do know something about Kant, and this dissolution is quite ingenious. Still, I continue to feel that ontology cannot be dissolved away; only the place of the ontic has changed. It is no longer located outside the knower, but within the knower’s own cognitive capacities. Here I am understanding “ontology” as “foundationalist” philosophy: to “seek essence behind phenomena.” Transcendental philosophy says that the forms presented in phenomena are not inherent in things-in-themselves, but are bestowed by the subject’s cognition. Yet in any case one is still always seeking the essence of phenomena. In this sense, I can agree with some of Old Yang and Teacher Wu’s views: modern philosophy and German classical philosophy, which brought about the epistemological turn and even the Copernican revolution, are still “ontological philosophy.” Whether one says that the “ontic” is external to human beings or dependent on human beings, the ontic is after all still the ontic.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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