Concept
Causa sui
Overview
psychological and philosophical concept
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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21. The CAUSA SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
States what Causa sui is; names Causa sui twice.
This again is only their manner of expressing their veneration: the highest thing must not have grown out of the lowest, it must not have grown at all.... Moral: everything of the first rank must be _causa sui._ To have been derived from something else, is as good as an objection, it sets the value of a thing in question. All superior values are of the first rank, all the highest concepts—that of Being, of the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
Close in meaning to Causa sui; the term itself is not named.
Thus what, with Descartes, was only reason of knowledge, becomes, with Spinoza, reason of fact. If the former, in his Ontological Proof, taught that the _existentia_ of God is a consequence of the _essentia_ of God, the latter turns this into _causa sui_, and boldly opens his Ethics with: _per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia_ (conception) _involvit existentiam_, remaining deaf to Aristotle's warning cry, τὸ…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
Close in meaning to Causa sui; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Causa sui
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Determinism.