## 1. Life and Works




Adolf Reinach was born into a prominent Jewish family in Mainz,
Germany in 1883. He began his university studies in Munich in 1901,
where he studied law, psychology and philosophy. In 1905 he completed
his doctorate under the direction of Theodor Lipps with a dissertation
entitled, "On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal
Code." During this time, Reinach joined a circle of philosophers
who had studied Husserl's recently published *Logical
Investigation*s (1900-01), a circle which included Johannes
Daubert, Alexander Pfander, Theodor Conrad, and Moritz Geiger. In
1909 Reinach moved to Gottingen, where he completed his
Habilitation under Husserl's sponsorship.




Shortly after the declaration of war in 1914 Reinach enlisted in the
German army. While some letters and philosophical sketches from the war
years have survived, Reinach never published another manuscript or
directed another seminar. He died in battle in Flanders in 1917,
shortly after becoming baptized into the Protestant Church.




The historian of phenomenology Herbert Spiegelberg writes:



> 
> 
> Independently of each other, the Gottingen students of
> phenomenology like Wilhelm Schapp, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alexander
> Koyre and Edith Stein, in their accounts of this period, refer
> to Reinach, not to Husserl, as their real teacher in phenomenology.
> Hedwig Conrad-Martius even goes so far as to call him the
> phenomenologist *par excellence* ... It was his death in
> action in 1917 rather than Husserl's going to Freiberg which cut
> short not only his own promise but that of the Gottingen
> phenomenological circle. (1984, pp. 191-192)




The influence of Reinach did however continue to make itself felt
above all in Poland through the work of Roman Ingarden and to some
degree also of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II).


## 2. Reinach's Realist Phenomenology




Like the other realist phenomenologists, Reinach saw himself as
developing a distinctive approach to philosophy, inspired by
Husserl's *Logical Investigations*, with the goal of being
faithful to what is given in different kinds of experience (e.g.,
linguistic, religious, moral, or aesthetic experience).




For realist phenomenologists, the distinction between *a
priori* and *a posteriori* knowledge has to do with the kind
of object studied and not (as for the later Husserl) with any special
epistemological technique such as that of *epoche* or
transcendental reduction. Reinach credited the possibility of *a
priori* knowledge to certain special features (necessity,
universality, timelessness, intelligibility) of the corresponding
objects of knowledge (which are in Reinach's eyes certain kinds
of states of affairs and associated essences or natures). Thus, Reinach
writes



> 
> 
> We can surely take it as generally granted that there are *no
> self-evident and necessary* relations of essence in the causal
> relations of external events. However it is, to speak with Hume, that
> we come to know that fire produces smoke, this is *surely not
> intelligibly grounded in the essence of fire*, as it lies in the
> essence of the number 3 to be larger than the number 2. (1913, p.
> 15, emphasis added)




Reinach saw these special features of certain essences--such as
numbers, promising, and asserting--as straightforward features of
reality, thereby insisting that calling something *a priori*
"does not mean anything dark or mystical" (1913, p. 5). His
realist understanding of material and synthetic *a priori*
knowledge of essences is further elucidated in the next two
sections.




According to Reinach, material *a priori* states of affairs
and essences exist independently of the contingent minds that may
apprehend them and of the individual objects that may instantiate them.
Such instantiation will however bring in its wake a series of concrete
associations with other entities. Thus in writing about the legal
entities (such as rights and obligations) that are grounded in the
essence of promising, Reinach notes that when such legal entities
exist, they become "intimately interwoven with the rest of the
natural world, with all the experiencing of persons who perform acts,
with their feelings and wishes, their desires and intentions, their
expectations and fears, etc." (1913, p. 130)




Reinach's insistence that the objects of *a priori*
knowledge can be considered apart from any realization in the world led
to Husserl's later accusation that Reinach embraced a Platonism
that "distorted the true picture of phenomenology"
(Spiegelberg, p. 192). Yet Reinach explicitly rejected any notion of
essences of the sort that would generate any form of third man
argument. In his article, "The Supreme Rules of Rational
Inference According to Kant" (1911a), he observes that
judgments such as "the triangle has three sides" or
"the lion has a tail" have often been said to refer to
general concepts such as "triangle" or "lion."
But this leads not only to odd ideas (e.g., that a concept has a tail)
but also, as Berkeley noted, to impossible ideas (such as a triangle
that is at once right-angled, equilateral, and obtuse). Reinach notes
that the ontological mistake lies in assuming that essences are
substances or really existing particulars; the logical mistake is
assuming that judgments about "the triangle" or "the
lion" refer to concepts at all. Rather, the judgment that
"the triangle has three sides" is more precisely expressed
as having the general form "everything that is a triangle has
three sides." It is this general state of affairs that is the
specific object of our *a priori* knowledge.


## 3. Investigations into the Material *A priori*




Reinach notes in his Marburg lecture (1914) that, while many
philosophers had acknowledged the existence of *a priori*
truths, most had restricted the *a priori* to a very narrow
sphere, confining it either to the formal *a priori* (Hume) or
to the *a priori* of Newtonian physics (Kant). For Reinach, in
contrast, there are material *a priori* structures in every
domain of reality. If we know that only a free agent can be
responsible, then this is because we understand the necessary and
timeless natures of freedom and responsibility. In "Concerning
Phenomenology" Reinach states that "the realm of the *a
priori* is incalculably large ... [and this] opens up for
investigation an area so large and rich that still today we cannot see
its boundaries" (1914, pp. 215-216). In defending the existence
of material *a priori* truths (also called 'essential
laws'), Reinach and his colleagues thus believed that they had
established a new kind of research agenda for philosophy. And while in
many respects this is an agenda which combats reductionism, its
proponents have at the same time provided us with several examples in
which careful analysis of essences in the spirit of this agenda
precisely refutes the existence of certain supposed entities.


### 3.1 Ordinal Numbers Do Not Exist




"Concerning Phenomenology" stands out not least in that it
is one of the earliest attempts by a German philosopher to come to
grips with Frege's work. Reinach observes that, while the division of
numbers into two sorts, the ordinal and the cardinal, is generally
accepted, it is widely debated which kind of number is more primitive
or basic. Reinach attempts to resolve this debate, and in the process
provides an account of number predications, such as "The
Kaiser's coach is drawn by four horses," of a sort treated also
by Frege. He begins by noting that cardinal numbers are properly
speaking not predicated of things. Frege, for example, argued that in
statements such as "The Kaiser's coach is drawn by four
horses" the number four is predicated of a concept, namely,
*horse that draws the Kaiser's coach*. However, Reinach finds
it to be self-evident that "a concept which subsumes four
objects is just as little four as a concept which subsumes material
objects is, therefore, itself material" (p. 206). Neither
numbers nor categorical elements such as "some" or
"all" are properties, by this argument, and accordingly
they are not really predicated of things. Numbers rather give the
range of objects that fall within the scope of a predication. Put
another way, numbers do not answer the question "how many"
but rather "how many
*A*s are *B*?"




Reinach finds that so-called ordinal numbers are nothing but a
shorthand way of referring to the (cardinal) number of terms a certain
series contains up to some given term. In any given series, we have a
first term, a last term, and any number of terms in
between. Naturally, we may wish to denote the position of a term
within an ordered series. Yet this can quickly become very
cumbersome. As Reinach notes, if we use letters to denote an ordered
series of four terms--*a*, *b*, *c*, and
*d*--then already "*c*" would be called
"the term following the term following the opening term."
It is much easier simply to adopt a numerical convention according to
which "*c*" is named in reflection of the fact that
it is the term up to which the series contains three terms. Yet in no
way does such designation constitute a new sort of number; in saying
the series 'contains three members up to this point', we
are still making use of the cardinal number three. Reinach writes that
there is



> 
> 
> no peculiarity of series terms as such, nothing
> numerical--which might be grasped by us. The elements have their
> positions in the series, and these positions can be defined by the
> successor's relation to the opening term. Nothing is said of
> number. ... there are no ordinal *numbers*. Philosophy has
> possibly been flustered here because it blindly followed the
> sign-makings of the mathematicians, and thereby took words for facts.
> (p. 208)




Reinach's view of ordinal numbers may seem radical. However,
it is not only internally consistent with his philosophy of ideal
objects and predication, but it seems consistent also with ordinary
language. As Reinach observes, the way that we designate the position
of elements in a series does not always use numerical names:



> 
> 
> the first is not the onest [*einste*]. ... Also, the
> term following the first need not be designated with the aid of a
> number. We, indeed, say "*zweite*," but the Latin
> says "secundus." So not all ordinal designations are
> ordinal number-designations.


### 3.2 The Category Mistake Behind the Concept of *Negative Properties*




Throughout his writings, Reinach makes extensive use of the category
of states of affairs (*Sachverhalte*). For example, he maintains
that *a priori* knowledge is first and foremost knowledge of
specific states of affairs (e.g., the *being equal of 2+2 and
4*) rather than of propositions or things. States of affairs may be
most accurately described as states of *being*. This is because
it is the being (the copula) in a state of affairs that typically bears
the special (for example modal) properties attributed to that state of
affairs. For example, in the *being equal of 2+2 and 4* it is
the *being equal* that is necessary, just as in the *being
red of the house* it is the *being red* that is contingent.
Similarly, when we assert "that house is not red" we are
asserting a state of affairs we have apprehended, namely, the *not
being red of the house*. In this case, the negativity pertains to
the copula of the state of affairs, that is, the *not being red*
of the house, rather than the being not-red of the house. There are no
negative properties, for Reinach. That is to say, negative properties
have no existence, and those philosophers who have posited their
existence have been misled by language, which frequently says things
are, e.g., not red.




Reinach claims that numerous properties that are standardly viewed
by philosophers as properties of objects are most properly conceived as
properties of states of affairs.




Many of Reinach's fellow realist phenomenologist came to embrace the
idea that either all states of affairs (Lipps 1928; Pfander 1921)
or at least negative states of affairs (Ingarden 1964-65) exist
only as intentional objects. Reinach, however, embraced a realist
position towards both positive and negative states of affairs. The
kind of being Reinach attributed to states of affairs was that of
"obtaining" (*Bestehen*); they do not really
"exist" as do things, but neither are they simply mental
or intentional objects. Reinach believed that negative states of
affairs obtain precisely as do positive states of affairs; otherwise,
he did not see how we could defend objective knowledge of the most
basic laws of ontology and logic (specifically, the principle of
contradiction and the law of the excluded middle). On the other hand
he did not believe that every positive or negative sentence
corresponds to some state of affairs which obtains; this applies only
to those sentences which are true, and thus only to one member of any
given positive and negative pair of putative states of affairs.


### 3.3 How the Law Misinterprets the Moral Significance of Deliberation




In his essay, "Deliberation: Its Ethical and Legal
Significance" (1912/1913), Reinach observes that there are
contradictions in how we evaluate the moral significance of
deliberation. For example, we consider a crime more reprehensible if it
is performed after deliberation, yet we also judge harshly one who
performs a crime without a second thought. Reinach noted that in the
German law in his day killing without deliberation could mean as little
as six months in prison where killing after deliberation would mean
certain capital punishment.




Reinach distinguishes between intellectual and volitional
deliberation. The former aims at apprehending what is the case, the
latter at apprehending what should be done. For example, upon arriving
in a concentration camp, an inmate might intellectually deliberate
about the odds of successfully escaping. He might decide the odds are
low (say 1 in 20) yet still volitionally deliberate about whether he
ought to attempt to escape. Of the two, volitional deliberation is
psychologically the more complex. Intellectual deliberation tends to
culminate in conviction once we apprehend what is the case. In
contrast, volitional deliberation has no "automatic"
conclusion because the value of an act is subject to modification when
it is connected to the real world of consequences. An act that appears
highly noble in itself may have such negative consequences that the
value of actually undertaking it is modified to a disvalue. For
example, while escaping from a concentration camp may be good in
itself, it may be a disvalue if escapes are punished through increased
torture and killing of remaining inmates. Moreover, even after one
rightly discerns the value of an action *per se* and the value
of undertaking a proposed action, experience shows that value
perception does not compel either the will or the heart to provide a
fitting response. That is, one might decide that escaping is
wrong--all things considered--yet still attempt an escape to
save one's own life or sanity.




These facts about deliberation help us to recognize shortcomings in
the significance that the law attaches to deliberation. Reinach claims
that our belief that a crime is made worse by deliberation rests on the
assumption that when an individual undertakes a project that is
disvaluable (say killing), the moral situation is worsened by knowledge
of the relevant disvalue. That is to say, individuals are less culpable
when they act in ignorance of the disvalue of their crime. Reinach
finds that deliberation is actually playing a symbolic role when its
significance is interpreted in this fashion: it is taken to signify
that the individual had in fact apprehended the disvalue of an act
prior to choosing to perform it. However, the connection between
deliberation and the perception of a disvalue is not a necessary
connection: one may apprehend a disvalue without deliberation, and one
may deliberate and still fail to apprehend a disvalue. Thus, the law is
in no position to determine the precise significance of deliberation in
an *a priori* fashion.




In fact, Reinach argues that the common-sense assumption that a
reprehensible deed is actually worse when done without a second
thought--an assumption that contradicts the prevailing wisdom of
criminal law--more properly reflects the direct moral significance
of deliberation. It is good for people to consider what they do.
Failure to deliberate about a crime implies either a fundamental
disregard for or an insensitivity to values--and neither seems to
reduce the culpability of a criminal act. Thus, Reinach concludes that
the law is mistaken in attaching more severe punishment to deliberate
than to non-deliberate crimes.


### 3.4 Claims and Obligations




Reinach's major work, "The *A priori* Foundations
of the Civil Law" (1913) begins with the following claim:



> 
> 
> Insofar as philosophy is ontology or the *a priori* theory of
> objects, it has to do with the analysis of all possible kinds of
> objects as such. We shall see that philosophy here comes across objects
> of quite a new kind, objects which do not belong to nature in the
> proper sense, which are neither physical nor psychical and which are at
> the same time different from all ideal objects in virtue of their
> temporality. (p. 6)




Reinach here refers specifically to claims and obligations. He
asserts that they exist just as much as do trees and houses. Clearly,
they are not physical entities, but neither are they mental. They do
indeed presuppose a person as their "bearer"--that is,
real claims and obligations always belong to someone. In addition,
psychological properties may correspond to claims and obligations; for
example, one may *feel* entitled or feel obligated. However, if
I accept a car loan and contractually agree to pay back the loan over a
36-month period, my obligation does not cease to exist even if such
feelings fade away and even if I forget about the obligation
completely. The very fact that a claim or obligation may last for years
without change speaks against any alleged reduction to something
psychological, for there is nothing in the psychological (or indeed in
the physical) domain that remains static over time.


## 4. Reinach's Theory of Social Acts




In the *Logical Investigations*, Husserl developed a thesis
advanced by his teacher Brentano to the effect that all mental acts are
intentional, that is, that they are directed towards an object. Husserl
maintained that all intentional experiences are in this sense
'objectifying acts'.




Husserl's account of meaning builds upon this theory. All uses
of language are, he says, referential. Accordingly, Husserl viewed acts
such as questions or commands as masked assertions. The command
"sit down on the chair" he interpreted as a statement to
the effect that "your sitting down on the chair is my current
request."




It was in critical reaction to such theses that Reinach developed
his theory of *social acts* (Smith 1990), a theory which bears
striking similarities to the theory of speech acts later developed by
Austin and Searle.




Both promising and communicating one's intention to do
something, according to Reinach, belong to the category of what he
calls "spontaneous" acts, i.e. acts which involve a
subject's bringing something about within his own psychic sphere,
as contrasted with passive experiences of, say, feeling a pain or
hearing an explosion (1913, p. 706, Eng. p. 18). Certain types of
spontaneous act are such as to require as a matter of necessity a
linguistic utterance or some other overt performance of a non-natural
and rule-governed sort. This does not hold of judging or deciding, nor
even of forgiving, but it does hold of apologizing, commanding, or
accusing. We may accordingly divide spontaneous acts into two classes,
which we might call internal and external, according to whether the
act's being brought to overt expression is a separable or an
inseparable moment of the relevant complex whole.




Acts are divided further into self-directable and
non-self-directable. Self-directable acts are such that the subject
toward whom they are directed may be identical with the subject of the
act (as in cases of self-pity, self-hatred, etc.). Non-self-directable
acts, on the other hand, such as forgiving or praying, demand an alien
subject. A peculiarity of certain external and non-self-directable acts
is that the relevant utterance must of necessity be
not only directed toward a certain subject but also registered or
grasped by this subject in a further act: a command must be received
and understood by those to whom it is addressed (something which does
not apply, for example, to an act of blessing or cursing). It is part
of the essential structure of a command that it be an action of a
subject which is spontaneous, intentional, non-self-directable and in
need of being grasped by the subject towards whom it is addressed. The
same holds also of requests, admonishments, questionings, informings,
answerings, and many other types of act. (Reinach 1913, p. 707, Eng.
pp. 19f.) Each social act constitutes an inner unity of deliberate
execution and deliberate utterance. The experience is here impossible
in the absence of the utterance. And the utterance for its part is not
something that is added to the experience as an incidental extra; it
stands in the service of the social act and is necessary in order that
the latter should fulfill its announcing function.




Reinach mentions many social acts in his treatise on "The
*A Priori* Foundations of the Civil Law"
(1913)--commanding, requesting, warning, questioning and
answering, informing, enacting, revoking, transferring, granting, and
waiving of claims--but he devotes the most attention to the act
of promising. Drawing on the theory of essences or intrinsically
intelligible structures referred to above, Reinach offers the
following examples of *a priori* truths about what he sees as
the intrinsically intelligible structure instantiated through the
performance of a promising act:


* through promising one incurs an obligation;
* by receiving a promise one has a claim to what was promised;
* such claims are extinguished when the promise is fulfilled;
* such claims may also be extinguished if the claimholder waives the
claim;
* promising is subject to a range of variations or modifications,
including conditional promising, promising on behalf of or as a
representative of someone else, promising to a group, promising by a
group, and so forth.




Reinach maintains that such truths are not merely necessary and
universal, but also informative, thus that they are examples of truths
that are both *a priori* and synthetic.




Reinach's views are in this respect opposed to those of Searle
(1969), who argued that promising is a social institution that can be
explained in terms of so-called constitutive rules analogous to the
rules of chess (Zaibert and Smith 2007). Once one stipulates the
rules, on this account, then certain necessary truths can be derived.
Reinach, in contrast, held that promising is a *sui generis*
phenomenon that is not invented but rather discovered, as is seen in
the contrast between promising and those elements of a code of law
which truly are constructed, for example specific rules concerning
primogeniture or the discharging of liens. Reinach speculates that an
individual who orally contracts to rent a piece of property for three
years may be surprised to learn that, in German law, this contract is
made for an "indefinite length of time." In contrast,
someone who waives a claim will hardly be surprised by the fact that
the claim is now extinguished. The latter, in Reinach's terms,
flows from the very essence of a claim and of the act of waiving a
claim, and in this it contrasts sharply with the non-intuitive
arbitrariness of the rules of chess.




Reinach next surveys Hume, who familiarly provides an account of why
a promise is binding which rests on the idea that there is a certain
sort of *sui generis* experience which becomes expressed in a
promise and which is somehow binding on the subject but which is at the
same time analogous to experiences of resolving, wishing, willing in
that it can be present also *without* any accompanying
expression. Reinach rejects this account - denying that such an
experience could exist - and rejects also a variety of other
psychologistic and consequentialistic theories because they are, he
claims, seeking an explanation of a phenomenon so basic that it cannot
be further elucidated in terms of anything more simple. As he himself
expresses it:



> 
> 
> Strictly speaking, we are not proposing any *theory* of
> promising. For we are only putting forward the simple thesis that
> promising as such produces claim and obligation. One can try, and we
> have in fact tried, to bring out the intelligibility of this thesis by
> analysis and clarification. To try to explain it would be just like
> trying to explain the proposition, 1 x 1 = 1. It is a fear of what is
> directly given, a strange reluctance or incapacity to look the ultimate
> data in the face and to recognize them as such, that has driven
> unphenomenological philosophies, in this as in so many other more
> fundamental problems, to untenable and ultimately to extravagant
> constructions. (1913, p. 46)




In this passage, Reinach summarizes his view not only of promising,
but also of phenomenological philosophy itself. The central task of
phenomenology is to describe faithfully what is given in experience,
preferring knowledge that is immediate and intuitive to that which is
known indirectly through deduction or other means.