2.6 What "Careful Looking" Means -- Three Examples

2.6 What “Careful Looking” Means — Three Examples

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.6 Was „genaues Hinschauen“ bedeutet — drei Beispiele

What this means in practice can be shown by three examples.

2.6.1 First Example: Colors

Look at an orange. Its color lies, in its quality, between red and yellow. That is no accident. It could not be otherwise. Orange, by its quality, cannot lie between blue and green. That lies in the essence of the color orange. Whoever has once understood this state of affairs knows: this is necessarily so. It holds in every possible world, at every time, for every knower.

Note: you did not gain this knowledge through an experiment. You ran no laboratory tests on colors. You simply looked — with the mind — and saw something that is necessarily so. You have recognized a necessary state of affairs: a state of affairs that is grounded in the nature of the colors themselves and that holds in every conceivable world.

2.6.2 Second Example: Promises

When someone promises you something, this gives rise to an obligation. This is not a social custom that could just as well be otherwise. It lies in the essence of a promise that it obligates. A promise that did not obligate would be no promise. This too you can see if you look carefully at the essence of a promise. The connection between promise and obligation is no accident and no convention — it is an essential law that is grounded in the essence of the promise itself.

Adolf Reinach (1883—1917), one of the most important representatives of this philosophical method, was the first to investigate such connections systematically. He showed: there are necessary states of affairs in the realm of law and of interpersonal relations that can be known just as surely as the states of affairs of mathematics.¹

2.6.3 Third Example: Responsibility

Responsibility presupposes freedom. Whoever is not free cannot be responsible. This too is not an agreement that we have made. It lies in the essence of responsibility itself that it presupposes a free and rational being. This state of affairs can be grasped with the mind — it is necessarily true and not merely contingent. It holds regardless of whether a particular human being acknowledges it or not.

In all three cases we recognize something that cannot be otherwise. What we discover are not contingent facts, but necessary connections. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that is decisive for the question of the essence of the human being.

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Fußnoten

1. Reinach, Sämtliche Werke (1989), Munich: Philosophia, 1989, pp. 141 ff. ↩