Schopenhauers Criticism of Kants Theory of Experience

the conditioned and reason as the faculty which demands the unconditioned. Although, as already observed in Chapter I,1 Schopenhauer does not at first explicitly recognize this, Kant's real distinction between understanding and reason, nevertheless, in his examination of the 'Transcendental Dialectic,' he attempts to account for the origin of the notion of the unconditioned and to point out its role in Kant's philosophy. "It is the peculiar principle of reason (in its logical use)," Kant says, "to find for every conditioned knowledge of the understanding the unconditioned, whereby the unity of that knowledge may be completed."2 Now Schopenhauer insists that the whole plausibility of Kant's conception is due to its abstractness. Kant's argument is summarized by Schopenhauer as follows: "If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, and therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality becomes complete."3 But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality of the conditions of everything conditioned' is contained in its nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, and which is only thus a sufficient reason or ground.4 In the alternating series of conditioned and conditioning states, "as each link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principle of sufficient reason entirely satisfied, it arises anew because the condition becomes the conditioned."6 This is the actual modus lCf. above, pp. 14 ...