The Fourfold Root, Still 'on the First Class of Objects'

The class started with a presentation by Patrick where he talked about Schopenhauers criticism of the Kantian proof of the a priori nature of causality. Unfortunately I was late, so I didn't get most of lecture. Patrick claimed that Schopenhauer criticised Kants claim, that all sequence is consequence. So for Schopenhauer there was a difference between follow upon - something that pure sensibility could recognize - and follow from, which we would need the law of causality to make sense of.

As much as I agree that follow upon and follow from are definitely not the same thing, I made a suggestion that for Schopenhauer all sequence might be in some sense consequence. Since for him the whole state of the empirical world is caused by the state that preceded it. You can not distinguish between objects in that sense, it is not the hammer that causes the object to go in, it is the state of the empirical world at the time of the hammering that causes the state of the world at the time of the nail going into the wood.

We turned again to the questions of last seminar: (1) Why does Schopenhauer insist on the distinction between cause and reason if he has annihilated ontology, and (2) Why, for Schopenhauer, does causality equal matter and matter equal substance?

If I understood it right, the answer to the first question would be that, reason, or more clearly the principle of sufficient reason, is a cognitive ability of the subject. Cause is just one manifestation of that cognative ability, the one that is manifested in empirical, intuitive representatuions.

Concerning the second question Schopenhauer says that matter “is the residue which remains over after bodies have been divested of their shape and of all their specific qualities,” (96) and this must be identical in all bodies. The only thing that remains is the “mere activity in general” and that is causality. So if you remove both time and space you don't get many different matters, since they are all the same, only a one big blob of action.

A bit further down, Schopenhauer claims that Substance is this same action viewed in abstracto. So if substance is only another way of viewing that action, it as well, is equal with causality.

Then we talked about the two things that causality does not apply to. They are matter and the laws of nature.

Matter, since it is equal with causality, can not be subject to itself, like the eye can not see itself.

I did not quite get the talk about the laws of nature! Could anyone please clear that up, or point out in which part he formulates the thought? Or else I will need read through that stuff again (which would actually be a good, but time-consuming idea)

We also touched on the threefold distinction Schopenhauer makes between different kind of causes in the empirical world. The first one concerns inorganic objects and is simply called cause, the second one is stimuli in organic objects, and the third one is motives in a knowing consciousness, human beings. Someone asked if the motives are not a jump from one class of representation to another and therefore breaking Schopenhauers own rules. I assume we'll get an answer to that soon.