This class pertains to knowledge, and its ‘objects’ are concepts. The associated form of the PSR is the PSR of Knowing, which states that no one can make a knowledge claim without a [sufficient?] ground. That is, a judgement can count as known iff it has sufficient ground. [ perhaps a ‘sufficient’ ground is one which ‘tracks’ the truth condition of the judgement ] Ground comes in four varieties, corresponding to the four classes of objects.
While the other three classes of objects are given to us as immediate representations, Schopenhauer defines concepts as representations of representations. While our perceptual representations are intuitive, which is to say, singular, complete and determinate, our conceptual representations are abstract, which is to say general and, to at least some degree, indeterminate. Our Faculty for Abstraction removes differentiating details from numerous representations to bring out their commonalities. The more we abstract, the less content the resulting concept contains, until, we reach the limits of abstraction, that is, the completely empty concepts of being, thing, essence and becoming. The guy [name?] who presented today reminded us of Kant’s famous phrase: ‘concepts without sensations are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’.
The Faculty of Judgement mediates between our rationality, which is conceptual, and our understanding, which is intuitive. It is both ‘reflective’ and ‘subsuming’, in its former capacity, bringing out the content of concepts for inspection, and in the latter, applying them to intuitions. Schopenhauer claims that in ‘abstraction’, intuitions forfeit their perceptibility. Nevertheless, we can (obviously) represent concepts to ourselves: through either signs (words) or through mental images. We often think (or imagine) using images to represent a concept (e.g. ‘dog’). But Schopenhauer is keen to stress that concepts are not pictures: pictorial representations of conceptions are always inadequate to them, bearing, as they do, countless arbitrary determinations (e.g. the dog I think of is brown).
My favourite part of this chapter wasn’t discussed in much detail today. It is the part just before Schopenhauer characterises Reason - given its passive, formal character - as feminine, and the Understanding - given its substantive, material content - as masculine. For him, Reason, which permits conceptual thought, bears no material content, only a formal one - namely, the metalogical rules which constitute the conditions of thought. Therefore, he writes (§28, p.125) ‘mere rational talk thus renders the result of given conceptions clearer, but does not, strictly speaking, bring anything new to light’. I find this thought quite palatable, though (or, perhaps, because) it seems to bear within it the end of first philosophy. Indeed, the student presentation concluded with a criticism that this view of the material emptiness of Reason (i.e. purely conceptual thought) seems to undermine the possibility of transcendent metaphysics of exactly the flavour Schopenhauer will later espouse in his doctrine of the World as Will.
The student presentation also mentioned another criticism of Schopenhauer’s discussion, namely that he doesn’t adequately account for the origins of concepts. This becomes clear when we ask: how do we explain the first abstractions without presupposing concepts such as similar, different, colour, size, shape, etc? If certain concepts are presupposed in our first abstractions, the origin of these still need to be explained. If concepts are not presupposed, then there must be some non-cognitive process taking place to get abstraction going... perhaps some kind of cognitive mechanism? Schopenhauer doesn’t discuss the issue of the first abstractions in this chapter, but I think he’d be quite happy to say that they originate from some mechanical process. This view seems quite compatible with his system in general, with his emphasis on of the embodiment of perception and the intellect, and with his previous claim regarding the continuity of some explanatory chains of knowledge with those of the empirical world. Indeed, I’d be quite happy, prima facie, to accept this basic non-cognitivism, as it seems to sit comfortably with (the little I know of) current views in contemporary science. This discussion reminds me of reading McDowell and Sellars... maybe this is the topic I will write on for the long essay.
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