Артур Шопенгауэр - The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)

That the return to an unconditioned cause, to a first beginning, by no means lies in the nature of reason, is, moreover, practically proved by the fact that the primitive religions of our race, which even yet have the greatest number of followers upon earth, Brahmanism and Buddhaism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry the series of phenomena conditioning each other into infinity. Upon this point, I refer to the note appended to the criticism of the first antinomy, which occurs further on; and the reader may also see Upham's “Doctrine of Buddhaism” (p. 9), and in general all genuine accounts of the religions of Asia. Judaism and reason ought not to be identified.

Kant, who by no means desires to maintain his pretended principle of reason as objectively valid, but merely as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by means of a shallow sophism, p. 307; V. 364. He says that because we seek to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as far as this process can be carried, this is nothing else than the pursuit of the unconditioned, which we already presuppose. But, in truth, in this endeavour we do nothing more than apply reason, and intentionally make use of it to simplify our knowledge by enabling us to survey it – reason, which is that faculty of abstract, general knowledge that distinguishes the reflective, thinking man, endowed with speech, from the brute, which is the slave of the present. For the use of reason just consists in this, that we know the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule; thus that we seek the most general points of view. Through such survey or general view our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between the life of the brutes and that of men, and again between the life of educated and that of uneducated men. Now, certainly the series of grounds of knowledge , which exist only in the sphere of the abstract, thus of reason, always finds an end in what is indemonstrable, i. e. , in an idea which is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, thus in the a priori or a posteriori directly perceptible ground of the first proposition of the train of reasoning. I have already shown in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 50, that here the series of grounds of knowledge really passes over into grounds of becoming or of being. But one can only desire to make this circumstance hold good as a proof of an unconditioned according to the law of causality, or even of the mere demand for such an unconditioned, if one has not yet distinguished the forms of the principle of sufficient reason at all, but, holding to the abstract expression, has confounded them all. Kant, however, seeks to establish that confusion, through a mere play upon words, with Universalitas and Universitas , p. 322; V. 379. Thus it is fundamentally false that our search for higher grounds of knowledge, more general truths, springs from the presupposition of an object unconditioned in its being, or has anything whatever in common with this. Moreover, how should it be essential to the reason to presuppose something which it must know to be an absurdity as soon as it reflects? The source of that conception of the unconditioned is rather to be found only in the indolence of the individual who wishes by means of it to get rid of all further questions, whether his own or of others, though entirely without justification.

Now Kant himself denies objective validity to this pretended principle of reason; he gives it, however, as a necessary subjective assumption, and thus introduces an irremediable split into our knowledge, which he soon allows to appear more clearly. With this purpose he unfolds that principle of reason further, p. 322; V. 379, in accordance with the method of architectonic symmetry of which he is so fond. From the three categories of relation spring three kinds of syllogisms, each of which gives the clue for the discovery of a special unconditioned, of which again there are three: the soul, the world (as an object in itself and absolute totality), and God. Now here we must at once note a great contradiction, of which Kant, however, takes no notice, because it would be very dangerous to the symmetry. Two of these unconditioneds are themselves conditioned by the third, the soul and the world by God, who is the cause of their existence. Thus the two former have by no means the predicate of unconditionedness in common with the latter, though this is really the point here, but only that of inferred being according to the principles of experience, beyond the sphere of the possibility of experience.

Setting this aside, we recognise in the three unconditioneds, to which, according to Kant, reason, following its essential laws, must come, the three principal subjects round which the whole of philosophy under the influence of Christianity, from the Scholastics down to Christian Wolf, has turned. Accessible and familiar as these conceptions have become through all these philosophers, and now also through the philosophers of pure reason, this by no means shows that, without revelation, they would necessarily have proceeded from the development of all reason as a production peculiar to its very nature. In order to prove this it would be necessary to call in the aid of historical criticism, and to examine whether the ancient and non-European nations, especially the peoples of Hindostan and many of the oldest Greek philosophers, really attained to those conceptions, or whether it is only we who, by quite falsely translating the Brahma of the Hindus and the Tien of the Chinese as “God,” good-naturedly attribute such conceptions to them, just as the Greeks recognised their gods everywhere; whether it is not rather the case that theism proper is only to be found in the religion of the Jews, and in the two religions which have proceeded from it, whose followers just on this account comprise the adherents of all other religions on earth under the name of heathen, which, by the way, is a most absurd and crude expression, and ought to be banished at least from the writings of the learned, because it identifies and jumbles together Brahmanists, Buddhists, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Gauls, Iroquois, Patagonians, Caribbeans, Otaheiteans, Australians, and many others. Such an expression is all very well for priests, but in the learned world it must at once be shown the door: it can go to England and take up its abode at Oxford. It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism, the religion which numbers more followers than any other on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it. As regards Plato, it is my opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism with which he is periodically seized. On this account Numenius (according to Clem. Alex., Strom. , i. c. 22, Euseb. præp. evang. , xiii. 12, and Suidas under Numenius) called him the Moses græcisans : Τι γαρ εστι Πλατων, η Μωσης αττικιζων; and he accuses him of having stolen (αποσυλησας) his doctrine of God and the creation from the Mosaical writings. Clemens often repeats that Plato knew and made use of Moses, e. g. , Strom. , i. 25. – v. c. 14, § 90, &c., &c.; Pædagog. , ii. 10, and iii. 11; also in the Cohortatio ad gentes , c. 6, where, after he has bitterly censured and derided the whole of the Greek philosophers in the preceding chapter because they were not Jews, he bestows on Plato nothing but praise, and breaks out into pure exultation that as Plato had learnt his geometry from the Egyptians, his astronomy from the Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and much also from the Assyrians, so he had learnt his theism from the Jews: Οιδα σου τους διδασκαλους, καν αποκρυπτειν εθελῇς, … δοξαν την του θεου παρ᾽ αυτων ωφελησει των Εβραιων ( Tuos magistros novi, licet eos celare velis, … illa de Deo sententia suppeditata tibi est ab Hebræis ). A pathetic scene of recognition. But I see a remarkable confirmation of the matter in what follows. According to Plutarch ( in Mario ), and, better, according to Lactantius (i. 3, 19), Plato thanked Nature that he had been born a human being and not a brute, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel's “Prayers of the Jews,” from the Hebrew, second edition, 1799, p. 7, there is a morning prayer in which God is thanked and praised that the worshipper was born a Jew and not a heathen, a free man and not a slave, a man and not a woman. Such an historical investigation would have spared Kant an unfortunate necessity in which he now becomes involved, in that he makes these three conceptions spring necessarily from the nature of reason, and yet explains that they are untenable and unverifiable by the reason, and thus makes the reason itself a sophisticator; for he says, p. 339; V. 397: “There are sophistications, not of man, but of pure reason itself, from which even the wisest cannot free himself, and although after much trouble he may be able to avoid error, yet he never can escape from the illusion which unceasingly torments and mocks him.” Therefore these Kantian “Ideas of the Reason” might be compared to the focus in which the converging reflected rays from a concave mirror meet several inches before its surface, in consequence of which, by an inevitable process of the understanding, an object presents itself to us there which is a thing without reality.