The Law Of Sufficient Reason And Its Scope Of Application

With the continuous development of modern society, human civilization is constantly improved. But on the other hand, the true life of human being has been falling apart. Science and technology are playing a leading role in human life today, while the end and means of human life are depart from each other. Human being has been tied up by these sophisticate means, trapping into these details of technology, but the real end of life has been forgotten. After all, the search for the end of life still exits, no matter how deeply it has been buried. With his forward looking vision, Schopenhauer says that his philosophy belongs to all human being, surpasses his age and it does not belong to his time or his nation. His philosophy cares about the value of life, the circumstance that individual lives in and the possibility of self-salvation. This is a road that leads to a thing-in-itself, a pursuit of absolute Being.The core of Schopenhauer's philosophy is that one side of the world is representation, just as the other side of the world is always the will. The essence of the world as well as the essence of life is will. In other words, we are the representation at the same time, we are the will; we are the phenomena at the same time, we are the essence. The duality of "ego" (I know/I am the will) is the fundamental belief of all above. Schopenhauer clearly points out that the identity of willing subject and the knowing subject is the cornerstone of his metaphysics. The principle of reason (Satz vom zureichenden Grunde) is the fundamental of Schopenhauer's philosophy. The cognition of phenomena world is subordinated to the cognition of the principle of reason, and the cognition of will is a vision of the noumenon that escapes from the principle of reason.To Schopenhauer, the principle of sufficient reason (Satz vom zureichenden Grunde) is the common expression of conscious, a priori, of all forms that the object possesses. It is the fundamental principle of all knowledge, rule of all science and the fundamental of philosophy study. It comes from our cognitive faculties. It is the comment expression of different kinds of cognitive faculties that we have. By this we are able to take a grasp of the phenomenal world, or in other words, we create the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer subdivides object into four classes:the first class is intuitive, complete and empirical representation. The second class is the abstract representation, the conception. The third class is the formal part of representation, the pure intuition of space and time. The forth class is the immediate object of the inner sense, the subject of volition. The counterparts of these classes in terms of subject are the cognitive faculties of human being, and they are understanding, reason (Vernunft), sensibility and self-consciousness respectively. This is what the principle of reason tries to express:the forms of these cognitive faculties (from the point of view of subject) or the connections among representations (from the point of view of representation). These principles in orders are:the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Becoming (Causality), the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing (The Law of Reason); the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Being and the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Acting (the Law of Motives). They all come from the same original quality of our cognitive faculties, thus they have the common expressions of the principle of reason. But after all they are the very different fourfold forms under the same name of the principle of reason. That is why these principles have their own scope of applications, and they become effective only within their corresponding classes of representation. A speculative philosopher must distinguish what kind of reason (Grund) he is talking about. In philosophy, there are a lot of fallacies come from the use of the principle of reason that goes beyond its scope of applications and the indiscriminate use of different forms of the principle of reason. If that is the case, we will not be able to gain the substantial, solid and true knowledge.From Schopenhauer's point of view, the principle of sufficient reason is the common boundary of subject and object as well as the common boundary of science and philosophy. The contents of science are about nothing but the correlations among phenomena and the relations along the clue of the principle of reason. Pure philosophy is reviewed from where science stops, not even a step further for the principle of reason by using methods that are radical different from science. In other words, the examination of science is consistent with the principle of reason; Pure philosophy is reviewed by surpass the principle of reason. With the help of Heidegger, we can profoundly describe the original relation between the reason (Grund) and the principle of reason. The reason (Grund) originates from freedom. Freedom is the "Grund des Grundes". Freedom is the "Ab-grund" of Dasein.