§21-23: ‘Substance = matter = causality’, reason vs cause, laws of nature, inner outer world

Dina began the seminar by re-stating some important questions from last week: 


(1a) what is the difference between reason and cause?
(1b) why is it important for Schopenhauer to maintain this distinction?
(2) what does Schopenhauer mean when he identifies causality with substance, and matter with substance, thus leaving the three terms synonymous?


Thoughts on (1a): While, in the past, reason and cause have been conceived as epistemological and ontological notions (respectively), this is not straightforwardly done within the framework of transcendental idealism. For one thing, ontology is not possible according to this system, so the familiar notion of causality is not taken to apply at the level of ontology. Rather, it is understood as one of the transcendental conditions of experience. That is to say, the notion of causality has its origin in our cognitive faculties; it is one of the formal structures that our Intellect (specifically, in Schopenhauer, our Understanding) imposes upon the world. Hence, it is a ubiquitous feature of the world of appearances: in all cases of change in this world, we may ask ‘what is the cause?’

Thoughts on (1b): Schopenhauer needs to retain a distinction between the knower and the known, between mind and world, or between judgement-maker and subject of judgements. Our knowledge claims aren’t true or false merely because we have reasons for them, they must have a truth condition which is (potentially) independent of their warrant.

Thoughts on (2): At the end of §21 (p.97), Schopenhauer writes that ‘causality itself, objectively thought’ is ‘nothing but mere activity in general’. Further, the essence of Matter is ‘action in general’.

So, lets take Matter to be the raw essence of the mind-independent world (the in-itself): a formless, undifferentiated, unity which undergoes changes. Matter is a metaphysical notion, it refers to the universe as a whole; the word is used here almost as a proper noun. In contrast, for Schopenhauer both substance and causality are concepts which pertain only to the world of appearances. What does it mean to identify a thing with two concepts? Well, maybe he’s just being a deflationist here: emphasising there’s no such thing as substance, it’s just a concept. The thing philosophers are groping towards when they talk about substance (as, say, the subject of all predicates) is, simply, Matter. Similarly, there is no such thing [or attribute?] as causality, except in so far as we understand what we experience as causality (e.g. successive events unfolding) to (somehow) arise out of the changes undergone by Matter, at the metaphysical level.

[ Would Kant accept this view of Matter? ] [ Might there be a problem with talking of formless change? Is change a concept? If so, how can we apply it transcendentally? Lastly, isn’t to call Matter formless, undifferentiated, unified, to make positive - apparently unwarranted - metaphysical claims? ]

At the end of the seminar we briefly talked about Schopenhauer on laws of nature. For him [I’m slightly hesitant on this], what we call laws of nature are basically an expression of our experience of the unfolding of the changes undergone by Matter in the past. Presumably they are underwritten by a degree of regularity in the way Matter has manifested itself in the past - it is this which allows us to generalise. I hope we will explore this in more detail when we look at Ch. V tomorrow.

Finally, we briefly looked at §22, ‘Of the Immediate Object’. Schopenhauer says that given some sensations, we apply the causal law to infer the existence of an outside world, distinct from us, as ‘cause’ of these sensations. My first impression is that this is a little weak: can we really apply a law of the understanding before we’ve made the distinction between ourselves and the outer world? Who / what makes the judgement, to what is it applied?