2.5 What It Means to Bring the Things Themselves to Intuition
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.5 Was es heißt, die Dinge selbst zur Anschauung zu bringen
Reinach once summarized the decisive principle of this philosophical method as follows: the main thesis is that to every domain of objects there belongs its own sphere of essential laws, “and this sphere is to be distinguished prior to all empirical determination.”1
Put simply, this means: every region of reality — whether colors, numbers, promises, persons, or actions — has an essence of its own. And this essence can be known before one undertakes even a single empirical test. One need not perform an experiment to know that a color cannot exist without extension. One need not perform an experiment to know that responsibility presupposes freedom. These truths are known through intellectual looking.
The task, then, is to bring the things themselves — in their being-in-themselves — to intuition. Not the words about the things, not the theories about the things, but the things themselves. This requires the intellectual effort that Reinach describes: it is a matter of viewing the things “contemplatively” and of “penetrating into their own being”.2 Practical life tempts us merely to use the things instead of contemplating them. Philosophy demands that we pause and really look.
This is precisely why the method described here is not a philosophical school of thought, but a method of philosophizing. What matters is not belonging to a school of thought, but an attitude: the readiness to let the things themselves speak. Whoever adopts this attitude may come from the most diverse traditions — the only decisive point is that he seeks contact with the things themselves and does not stop at retelling other people’s theories.
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