The Principle of Sufficient Reason Aaron Harrison #30688333 PHL277 tutor-Lubica Ucnik 02/06/08

In Lecture Five of The Principle of Reason, Heidegger discusses the principle of sufficient reason, which has long been common knowledge but was first articulated by Gottfried Leibniz as the principle "nothing is without reason". He provides two main objections to this principle. One is an objection to the consequences of the principle of sufficient reason. Heidegger criticises the modern view of the world, which the principle of sufficient reason helped to shape, as limiting and historically concealed. The other objection is structural. Heidegger claims that the principle of sufficient reason can be formulated in two conflicting ways and that the principle of sufficient reason ultimately contradicts itself as it cannot provide a reason for itself. I will put forward one weakness in Heidegger's interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason. It seems that Heidegger formulates the principle of sufficient reason in such a way that it constitutes a stronger claim than the principle of sufficient reason is actually intended to make. This does weaken Heidegger's structural argument though by the end his objection still stands. Heidegger identifies strict and vulgar formulations of the principle of sufficient reason. The vulgar formulation is "nothing is without reason". The strict formulation is "nothing exists whose sufficient reason for existing cannot be rendered"1. Following the strict formulation, Heidegger says that the principle of sufficient reason tells us that for a reason to sufficiently explain an object it must "securely establish an object in its stance"2, that is, completely explain where the thing came from, why and how it came to be. In other words, reason must explain the causes and conditions of possibility of a thing for humans to be able to say what a thing is. Heidegger further reformulates the strict formulation into "nothing is without a

1. 2.

Heidegger, 1996, p.32 ibid. p.33

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why". The "why" is just a metaphor so that he can juxtapose the principle more clearly with a line of Angelus Silesius' poetry ("the rose is without a why"), nevertheless, this reformulation emphasises the "demand-character" of the principle of reason3. The demand-character is the characteristic of our cognition to search for reasons for everything that exists. When we are confronted with a thing, we always wonder "why?". Heidegger's first criticism to the principle of sufficient reason is one of consequences. The principle of sufficient reason has been taken up universally and characterised our era in a limiting and historical concealing way. Heidegger warns us that the principle of sufficient reason and the philosophy of Leibniz should not be pigeon-holed as an irrelevant relic of the pre-Enlightenment era but should be considered the driving force of modernity4. Among his criticisms of the modern era, Heidegger names the dogmatic and limiting view of nature. In part because of the principle of sufficient reason, a thing in the ''natural" world is taken to be only, in Heidegger's words, "a material concentration of mass in motion within the pure space-time order"5. It is a fact in support of Heidegger that when we hear this definition we understand it to mean "thing" or "object". There is nothing in our materialist world-view which is not a material object in space-time. Heidegger seems to be in agreement with Werner Heisenberg when he characterises the modern view of nature as that which we can study by scientific means, in contrast to the pre-modern view that nature is that which is given to us without mediation6. For modernity nature is made up of atoms and the only way

3. 4. 5. 6.

ibid. p.34 ibid. p.33 Heidegger, in Chevalley, 1992, p.347 Heisenberg, 1972, p.124

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to adequately observe nature is through complex scientific technology7. Patocka characterises modernity in a similar way. Patocka refers to the dominating worldview as Cartesianism. This is the view in which the only 'existing' things are material things which can be formalised into mathematical laws8. The world of experience is generalised into "shapes and concepts"; rough generalisations which make the world easier to understand. From these generalisations we develop precise theorems to predict the movements and relationships between things in the world. We then take this precision to be an adequate and objective characterisation of the world, while forgetting that this precision came out of the imprecision of pre-generalised experience9. Our sensual experience is, in a way, fed into a calculator. The formalised product of calculation, rather than the raw experience, is taken to be the 'true' world. The natural world becomes, for us, merely what is observable, predictable and formalisable. This scientific world-view emerges when humans decide that physical being is the only type of being. The world is reduced to merely one aspect of what it is. The notion that the material world is the primary world is too limiting. It is also "historically concealed"10. It is merely one possible way of treating the world. It ignores that "what presents itself as 'natural' is always historical, and that therefore the essential determination of the thing has not been such for all time"11. What we humans take to be the deepest aspect of a thing, what we take to be the natural world, is only how the thing is revealed in this era. The essential being of a thing is revealed in different ways in different periods of history. The

7. 8. 9.

ibid. p.125 Patocka, 1976, p.286 ibid. p.289

10. Heidegger, p.33 11. Chevalley, p.345

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principle of sufficient reason is treated as a universal truth and is not recognised as it should be, and as all human truths should be, as a historical phenomenon, changing as humans change. The principle of sufficient reason is identified as what is behind this modern world-view. "Nothing is without reason" is interpreted as "everything has a cause". Leibniz defines the principle of sufficient reason as the principle that "a reason can be given for every truth, or, as it is commonly said, that nothing happens without a cause"12. Because the principle of sufficient reason is taken to be universal, all things are subsumed under a principle of physical causation. The principle of sufficient reason is true of everything. Therefore, everything has a cause. Causation is a physical process. Therefore, everything is caught up in a physical process. This further solidifies the scientific materialistic world-view that every thing is just "a material concentration of mass in motion within the pure space-time order". The principle of sufficient reason is therefore responsible for the predominant world-view: one which is limiting our possible and multiple ways of treating the world and one which conceals the merely historically revealed nature of "nature". Heidegger goes on to criticise the principle of sufficient reason on structural grounds. It is internally incoherent. Heidegger shows that the two ways the principle of sufficient reason can be formulated - the strict formulation "nothing is without a why" and the vulgar formulation "nothing is without reason" - are conflicting. Both formulations are supposed to be universal. The vulgar formulation is true of everything: everything has grounds. However, the strict formulation has a much more restricted domain. Not everything has a "why", that is,

12. Frankel, 1994, p.60

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not everything has the demand-character of reason. To illustrate, let us consider the difference between a human and a rock. For both the human and the rock there are grounds. Everything has something that makes it what it is; its essential being13. This satisfies the vulgar formulation of the principle of sufficient reason. But what of the strict formulation? Does the rock have a why? Does the rock have the demand-character of reason? No. The rock has no why. A rock just is. It asks no questions. The rock does not search for the ground of its being. Humans on the other hand, we must ask why. One of our essential characteristics is the searching for grounds, the "demand-character" of reason. According to Heidegger, "we humans cannot come to be who we are without attending to the world that determines us - an attending in which we at the same time attend to ourselves"14. In other words, the difference between a human and a rock is that a rock has no concern for the world, its being is only caught up with itself; on the other hand, a human must have concern for the world, the human searches for grounds in other things and simultaneously is grounding itself. The ground of human being is the searching for grounds. The reason for the human being is reason15. The problem with the principle of sufficient reason is, so far, that all things fall inside the jurisdiction of one formulation of the principle of sufficient reason, but only humans (or conscious beings) fall inside the jurisdiction of the other formulation. This is a contradiction for a principle which is supposed to be universal in both formulations. But Heidegger does not stop there. He says that we must ask the further question "where does the demand-character of reason come from such that some things have it while others do

13. Backman, 2005, p.175 14. Heidegger, p.37 15. Allers, 1960, p.367

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not?" We must ask this of the principle of sufficient reason itself. According to Leibniz, "the reason for a truth consists in the connexion of a predicate with the subject, that is, that the predicate is in the subject"16. In the proposition "the rock came from space", the truth of the rock-coming-from-space is contained in the subject, the rock. It is the same with the principle of sufficient reason itself. The ground of the principle of sufficient reason must be contained in the principle of sufficient reason. We come to realise though, that "the principle of reason states nothing about reason. The principle of reason states nothing directly about the essence of reason"17. According to the principle of sufficient reason, everything must have a reason. Since the principle of sufficient reason is a "thing" it too must have a reason. However, it does not. Therefore, the principle of sufficient reason does not hold for all things. This is the main point of Heidegger's structural criticism of the principle of sufficient reason. Heidegger's critique is persuasive. One possible weakness is his interpretation of, what he calls, the strict formulation18 of the principle of sufficient reason: "nothing exists whose sufficient reason for existing cannot be rendered". Heidegger reformulates this principle "nothing is without a why". As explained above, the "why" for Heidegger, means the demand-character of reason, the searching for reasons. Humans have this "why", but not other things like rocks or flowers. The step from Leibniz's formulation to Heidegger's is suspicious. Leibniz's formulation emphasises the fact that reasons are not just for something but also for someone. Reasons are always rendered by someone. This formulation seems to emphasise not only the ontological idea that things always have reasons for existing but also

16. Leibniz, 1973, p.172 17. Heidegger, p.39 18. According to Allers, Heidegger refers to reddendae rations sufcientis as the strict formulation and claims that Leibniz also treated it as the strict formulation, although he provides no evidence for this. 1960, p.366

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the methodological idea that reasons, if they exist, can always be found out and given. The principle, reformulated once again with more complexity, is this: if something exists, there will be a sufficient reason for it, and this reason will be able to be known and stated. On my reading, this formulation of the principle of sufficient reason does not state that everything searches for reasons, or that everything has the demand-character of reasoning, which is clearly false considering that only conscious things can search for reasons. The emphasis of this formulation of the principle of sufficient reason is on a methodological point that all reasons are able to be learned. Heidegger says that the strict formulation indicates that everything searches for reasons but it seems this formulation actually contains a much less significant claim. This weakness in Heidegger's argument disturbs his idea of the conflict between the two formulations of the principle of sufficient reason. The second formulation does not pretend to have jurisdiction over unconscious things like rocks and flowers except insofar as the reasons for their existence can be known and stated by conscious beings. This weakness, however, leaves his main point, that the principle of sufficient reason does not have a ground, relatively untouched. It is still the case that the principle of sufficient reason does not provide reasons for itself and so Heidegger's criticism still stands. This objection also does not create problems with Heidegger's objection that the principle of sufficient reason has characterised modernity in a limiting and historically concealed way. It may even lend this support to this objection because the tone of the strict formulation becomes one of scientific optimism. It states that all reasons can be learned, and in the case of Leibniz, presumably by scientific investigation. Heidegger offers two kinds of objections to the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason has helped shape a modernity which ignores the actual historically revealed
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character of what we take to be natural. Modernity is also limited to a materialistic worldview partly because the principle of sufficient reason has universally subsumed everything under the principle of physical causation. Heidegger also finds that the principle of sufficient reason contradicts itself. It claims that everything has a reason, and yet reason itself has no reason. Although Heidegger weakens his argument by interpreting the principle of sufficient reason to be saying that everything searches for answers, his objections ultimately stand. Modernity relies on a principle which has not been good to us and which is internally inconsistent.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allers, R. (1960). Heidegger on the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20(3), 365 -373. Backman, J. (2005). The Absent Foundation: Heidegger on the Rationality of Being. Philosphy Today, 49, 175 - 184. Frankel, L. (1994). From a Metaphysical Point of View: Leibniz and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In R. Woolhouse (Ed.), Gottfried WIlhelm Leibniz: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1996). Lecture Five (R. Lilly, Trans.). The Principle of Reason. (pp. 32 - 40). Indianapolis: Indiana State University. Heisenberg, W. (1972). The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics (O. T. Benfrey, Trans.). The Discontinuous Universe. New York: Basic Books. Kisiel, T. (1992). Heidegger and the New images of Science. In C. Macann (Ed.), Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments. London: Routledge. Leibniz, G. W. (1973). Metaphysical Consequences of the Principle of Reason c.1712. In G. H. R. Parkinson (Ed.), Leibniz: Philosphical Writings. London: J M Dent & Sons. Patocka, J. (1976). Cartesianism and Phenomenology (E. Kohak, Trans.). Jan Patocka: Philosphy and Collected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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