2.13 Two Kinds of Necessary Truths
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.13 Zwei Arten von notwendigen Wahrheiten
It is worth making one more important distinction at this point. Not all necessary truths are alike. There are two different kinds, and the difference is instructive.
2.13.1 a) Formal Necessities
Some truths are necessary, but they tell us nothing new about the world. For example: “A whole cannot exist without parts.” That is true, and it is necessarily true. But it already follows from the concept of the whole: anyone who says “whole” means something that consists of parts. The sentence is true, but it adds nothing to our knowledge. It merely explains what we mean by a word. One could call it a conceptual clarification.
Such truths are called analytic propositions in philosophy. They are correct, but they give us no new knowledge of reality. They are purely formal.
2.13.2 b) Substantive Necessities
Other truths are likewise necessary, but they tell us something new about reality. For example: “A color cannot exist without something extended.” This proposition does not simply follow from the concept of color. “Extension” is not already contained in the word “color.” And yet the connection is necessary. It is grounded not in our concepts, but in the nature of color itself. Whoever considers the essence of color carefully will recognize that it is impossible for a color to exist without something extended. That is not a conceptual clarification, but a genuine piece of knowledge about reality.
Such truths are called synthetic propositions a priori — that is, propositions that say something new about reality and yet do not stem from experience, but are known a priori, that is, through intellectual insight into the essence of things.
It is precisely these substantive necessities that are decisive for philosophy. They tell us something real about the world — not through measurement or experiment, but through insight into the essence of things.
When we ask in the next chapter what a person is, we are searching for exactly such truths: for statements about the essence of the person that are necessarily true, and that follow not from mere conceptual definitions, but from attentive consideration of what a person really is.