Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Adolf Reinach

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Adolf Reinach

Adolf Reinach — a student of Husserl and co-founder of realist phenomenology — laid, with his doctrine of necessary states of affairs and essential laws, a methodological foundation that is of central importance for the ontology of the person developed in the book.

Key Contribution

Reinach shows: there are necessary states of affairs — states of affairs that are as they are and cannot be otherwise, because they are grounded in the essence of the matter itself. This essential lawfulness holds not only in the realm of mathematics, but also in the realms of law, ethics, and ontology. Philosophy can grasp such necessary states of affairs in insight — they are not constructed but seen into (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 47–55).

Central Ideas in the Book

Essential Lawfulness

An essential law is a state of affairs that holds with inner necessity because it is grounded in the essence of the matter. Reinach demonstrates this with the example of the promise: a promise essentially generates a claim and an obligation — this is not the result of social convention, but a necessary structure of states of affairs. For the ontology of the person this means: if it can be seen with insight that the person essentially has dignity, then this dignity is not a convention but a necessary state of affairs.

Insight as Method

Reinach’s method of insight into essential laws joins the phenomenological tradition (Husserl: “back to the things themselves”) with the claim to truth. The cognition of necessary states of affairs is not arbitrary, not culturally relative, not merely subjective — it is true because it validates itself against the state of affairs itself. This fundamental methodological stance determines the book’s approach to the question of the person.

Against Relativism

Reinach’s doctrine of necessary states of affairs is a bulwark against relativism: if there are necessary states of affairs, then there are also necessary truths about the person. The Personalistic Norm — the person is to be affirmed for her own sake — is then not a mere wish, but a truth open to insight.

Place in the Book

Reinach is drawn upon above all in the chapter Chapter 2: How Can This Question Be Answered? (German), where the phenomenological method is presented as the approach to the truth about the person. His doctrine of essential laws is joined with the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas) and the real ontology of Conrad-Martius.

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 47–55 (Reinach’s doctrine of necessary states of affairs and essential laws as the methodological foundation of the ontology of the person).

Further sources:

  • The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law, trans. John F. Crosby. In: Aletheia 3 (1983) — German original: Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes (1913). In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (doctrine of necessary states of affairs and essential laws)
  • “On the Theory of the Negative Judgment”, trans. Barry Smith. In: Barry Smith (ed.): Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Munich: Philosophia Verlag 1982 — German original: „Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils” (1911) (phenomenological theory of judgment and doctrine of states of affairs)

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