Buch, Englisch, Deutsch, 304 Seiten, GB, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 220 mm, Gewicht: 581 g
Adolf Reinach – Three Texts on Ethics
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-88405-120-7
Verlag: Philosophia Verlag
Grundbegriffe der Ethik /Basic Concepts of Ethics__ Die Überlegung: ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung / Reflection: Its Ethical and Legal Significance / Grundzüge der Ethik__ Basic Features of Ethics __ German-English Parallel Edition __Translated by
Buch, Englisch, Deutsch, 304 Seiten, GB, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 220 mm, Gewicht: 581 g
Reihe: Philosophia Resources Library
ISBN: 978-3-88405-120-7
Verlag: Philosophia Verlag
Between 1906 and 1913 Adolf Reinach wrote a considerable amount on the subject of ethics. Some of his work on that subject was published during his lifetime, while other parts survive only as transcripts from his lectures.
This compilation brings together three pieces of work by Reinach dealing with ethics, published in English version for the first time. The first of these pieces shows Reinach’s early interest in developing a phenomenological ethics. The second, an article on ‘the ethical and legal significance of reflection’, published in 1911-13 has Reinach discuss the experience of reflection (Überlegung) as a problem for both ethics and for certain sections of the contemporaneous criminal law. The third piece contains a series of discussions on existing moral theories and Reinach’s own work towards a phenomenological ethics.
With these three texts added to those already in translations, the whole of Reinach’s writings regarding ethics are now available in English language form.
Each of the texts is presented in a parallel format, including the original German from the1989 edition of Reinach’s collected works alongside the English text by the translators.
The compilation also includes a short introduction outlining the content of the articles and their place within Reinach’s wider body of work.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Contents
Forword / 09 Adolf Reinach and Early Phenomenology
Alessandro Salice
General Introduction: / 17
Historical and philosophical context of Reinach’s ethics / 19
Reinach's work on ethics / 23
‘Grundbegriffe der Ethik’ / 29 The Basic Concepts of Ethics
Introduction / 31
Parallel text German – English / 34
‘Die Überlegung: ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung’ / 45 Reflection: Its Ethical and Legal Significance
Introduction / 47
Parallel text German – English / 56
‘Grundzüge der Ethik’ / 165 Basic Features of Ethics
Introduction / 167
Parallel text German – English / 180
Glossary of Terms / 283
Bibliography and suggested reading / 295
Philosophia Resources Library Advertising / 305
Foreword
Adolf Reinach and Early Phenomenology
Alessandro Salice
University College Cork
For several decades, Adolf Reinach’s contributions to phenom-enology have been largely neglected. In particular after the dissolution of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, which happened roughly around WWII, the memory of this young phenomenologist rapidly abated, to the effect that his name is barely mentioned in manuals of the history of phenomenology. In fact, it seems fair to say that, if compared with the attention devoted to other leading figures of the phenomenological movement like Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reinach’s work has been relegated to the periphery of research about phenomenology and its history – and unjustifiably so. Although his untimely death in 1917 at the age of 34 might have contributed to this situation, Reinach left behind an impressive bibliography – counting a monograph, several articles and important pieces from his Nachlass. One can certainly disagree with the claims defended in those works, but an unbiased reader will hardly deny that, being argumentatively so clear, insightful and brilliantly written, these works are second to none within phenomenology.
This said, one also has to underline that in the last thirty years the situation has changed quite dramatically. One can observe a renewed and revitalized interest in his work and it is not rare anymore to hear the name of Reinach at conferences or to read it on the titles of various publications. Several factors have caused this profound change. Arguably, one of the most important is the critical edition of Reinach’s texts, which – published 1989 by Philosophia Verlag in this very same series and under the direction of Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith – has made his work accessible to a wider audience. At the same time, this edition was accompanied by a series of seminal publications on the his-
tory and philosophical relevance of early phenomenology by Kevin Mulligan, Karl Schuhmann, Barry Smith, and others as well. Some of Reinach’s most important works have also been translated into English, which has even more enlarged the circle of the potential audience. All these initiatives have triggered a number of new and exciting lines of research. It is not possible to do full justice to this new and rapidly growing literature, but one can say that these studies move along two general directions.
The first relates to the intent of determining the precise role that Reinach has played within phenomenology. Several phenomenologists, especially those who worked side by side with him, already acknowledged that his role was crucial in many respects. Importantly, many of them clearly refer to Reinach as their primary teacher in phenomenology. This nicely squares with the fact that current research has started to uncover the many (explicit or implicit) references to Reinach with which early phenomenological publications are imbued. Accordingly, new historical facts are coming to light and are in the process of being assessed. This development can have momentous consequences for the understanding of the phenomenological tradition. Indeed, these facts seem to controvert a view that tends to all too closely identify (especially: early) phenomenology with the development of Husserl’s thought.
On the one hand, Husserl (and especially his Logical Investigations) certainly exerted a powerful influence on early phenomenologists. Husserl’s groundbreaking work was inspiring in many ways and stimulated an entire range of philosophical investigations on such disparate topics as philosophy of mind, social philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of science, epistemology, theory of meaning, formal ontology, etc.
On the other hand, the originality of Reinach’s philosophy and his pivotal position within early phenomenology makes it dubious whether the understanding of phenomenology propounded in Munich and Göttingen has to be considered simply as a variant – if not even an excrescence – of Husserl’s thought. Obviously, this issue cannot be settled here. However, I would like to briefly suggest that perhaps the crux of the matter might not (or at least not predominantly) lie on how early phenomenology received Husserl’s Ideen in 1913. Certainly this was a critical reception, which caused severe frictions: for it is by now a well known fact that early phenomenologists were not ready to endorse the form of transcendentalism Husserl clearly formulated in that book. But what is the reason to believe that they should have? Why, in other words, should their reaction be surprising at all?
This brings to the fore an interpretation that the literature has generally taken for granted and that, I believe, is too simplistic, if not simply mistaken. Very roughly, this interpretation tells us that, with his Logical Investigations, Husserl has initiated a unitary movement that splits in 1913, at the very latest. It is merely on the basis of this interpretation that salience is assigned to the events around 1913. However, this interpretation relies on two assumptions, which are not free of tension and can be questioned. The first assumption is that early phenomenologists passively accepted the research agenda that Husserl developed in the Logical Investigations. The second is that the Ideen represent a genuine turn in Husserl’s thought.
But how sound are these assumptions? Apart from the fact that in his later works Husserl himself rejects the second assumption, there is mounting evidence within the literature that Husserl’s six investigations can be naturally inscribed in a coherent and consistent line of thought. But, if this is correct, it has consequences for the first assumption: how to explain the allegedly full endorsement of the Logical Investigations by early phenomenologists? If Husserl’s transcendentalism is present, although perhaps only in nuce, already in the Investigations, how comes that early phenomenologists so enthusiastically embraced that work? The answer one is generally used to hear at this point is: they have misunderstood Husserl’s project! But this is neither really credible, nor charitable. It is not credible given that we are talking of an entire generation of excellent scholars, who were in direct contact with Husserl. If taken at face value, the idea of a misunderstanding would basically imply some form of collective deception, which admittedly is quite hard to defend. Neither is it charitable, though, because it leaves unexplored other interpretations that can cohere with the facts without including the charge of an epistemic mistake on somebody’s side.
This is not the place for developing exegetic claims, but it is my conviction that further research will put more and more pressure on the idea that early phenomenologists’ reading of the Logical Investigations was as completely positive and merely receptive as the received view suggests. In particular, the two pillars of Husserl’s phenomenology – his theory of intentionality and, consequently, his idea of an a priori of correlation – seem to have been put under close and critical scrutiny within the Munich and Göttingen circles. Future research should ascertain the viability of an alternative interpretation of the relationships between early phenomenology and Husserl. If such interpretation would prove itself, it would generate evidence in favor of an interpretation of early phenomenology that emphasizes its uniqueness, fertility and – its autonomy.
Actually, the first two features should be uncontroversial already now – early phenomenology is unique because it combines an emphasis on the first-personal nature of our access to objects and states of affairs with a robust form of metaphysical realism, which is a thesis that has not been explored by any other strand of phenomenology (at least not to any comparable extent). And it was fertile because it produced a number of first-order philosophical insights that are of fundamental importance for many philosophical issues.
Such philosophical insights are what the second line of research within Reinachian studies is mainly about. In recent years, especially three subjects of his philosophy have been made object of in-depth investigations: metaphysics, philosophy of mind and social philosophy. In metaphysics, Reinach’s insights about states of affairs and about material necessity have attracted lively attention – in particular, his ideas that necessity is grounded in essentiality and that logic is of or about states of affairs seem to have been rediscovered (partly independently of Reinach) and are at the center of an intense debate. In the philosophy of mind, his accounts of judgment, of knowledge, of presentation, of meaning acts (Meinen), of position-takings, etc. have substantially informed phenomenology and are in the process of being mined and assessed in the light of more contemporary debates. And in social philosophy, his name is closely associated with the notion of social acts (which is an equivalent of what nowadays also goes under the label of ‘speech acts’) and with the idea of an ontological foundation of the law, and of social sciences more in general – his contributions on these topics have already begun being appreciated by current research on social ontology.
Against this background, it can only be warmly welcomed that Mette Lebech and James Smith have undertaken the task of translating Reinach’s works on ethics in English. If compared with the other fields of research, ethics still is largely terra incognita in current studies about Reinach’s phenomenology. It is to be expected that this translation will contribute to bolster research in this field and that this research, once more, will expose the originality of Reinach’s phenomenological approach.
But, concluding, how about early phenomenology as an autono mous tradition of phenomenology? Again, much will depend on how th e role played by Husserl for early phenomenology (as well as those played by early phenomenologists for Husserl) is eventually to be assessed. However, if one is willing to grant uniqueness and fertility to early phenomenological production, it is just a small step to g rant autonomy to it, too, and torecogni-ze that early phenomenologists just did not follow heteronomous research agendas – but developed their own.
General Introduction
Historical and Philosophical Context
In the summer of 1906, Adolf Reinach was coming to the end of his time in Munich, having earned his doctorate in philosophy two years earlier with his thesis Über den Ursachenbegriff im geltenden Strafrecht. While Reinach prepared to leave Munich to continue his studies of law, his friend Theodor Conrad, who had recently joined him in a visit to Edmund Husserl at the university of Göttingen, invited Reinach to present a paper to the Akademischer Verein für Psychologie, a student society set up by their teacher Theodor Lipps. The subject that Reinach chose for his paper was that of ethics; specifically, the distinction between two fundamental concepts in ethics according to Reinach, the concept of moral value (Wert) and the concept of moral rightness (Rechtheit). The short paper that Reinach delivered to the Verein is one of Reinach’s earliest surviving works, preceded only by his doctoral thesis. Although Reinach never went on to publish a treatise solely on ethics, the themes raised in this early paper would remain part of his thinking for the rest of his philosophical career. ‘[The question of] whether there is objective knowledge of values,’ Reinach said in a 1913 lecture, ‘is perhaps the most important in the world.’
This compilation brings together three pieces of Reinach’s work that deal with ethics. They represent the bulk of Reinach’s surviving work on ethics, though not the sum total of it; one other work, Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes, contains several passages concerning ethical obligation and the distinction between ethics and the philosophy of law. The three
texts translated here do, however, represent an important part of Reinach’s thought that for many years was difficult if not impossible to access, particularly in the English-speaking world. Only one of these three texts saw print in Reinach’s lifetime, or was ever clearly intended for publication; the others have survived as transcripts from Reinach’s presentations of them. However, all three bear the hallmarks of Reinach’s descriptive phenomenological style, and together they display a progression of thought as Reinach developed his ideas concerning ethics over time.
The aim of this introduction is to provide some historical and philosophical context to the translated texts. As such, it will begin with a discussion of Reinach’s education in philosophy and the influences on his philosophical development. Following that, the introduction will outline Reinach’s thinking on ethics generally, in order to help clarify how the ideas in his various works on this subject come together. Finally, each of the individual translated texts is accompanied by a separate introduction of its own, discussing how each came to be written and the structure of Reinach’s arguments therein.
Adolf Reinach’s initial education in philosophy took place at the University of Munich, principally under the noted philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps. Here, Reinach was inducted in Lipps’ philosophical approach: a ‘psychological technique for painstaking yet flexible descriptions of subjective phenomena’. At the same time Reinach also came into contact with Lipps’ other students, including Alexander Pfänder and Johannes Daubert, who would become the leading figures of the Munich phenomenological circle. Meanwhile, and for several years after he left Munich, Reinach was also engaged in his studies of law, and his interest in that discipline can be seen to inform some of his philosophical writing in later years.
It was through Pfänder and Daubert that Reinach came to read Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and in 1905 Reinach visited Göttingen to attend Husserl’s lectures on phenomenology. Husserl and Reinach quickly became friends, and they remained in correspondence with each other after Reinach returned to Munich and subsequently left for Tübingen to complete his studies of law. In 1909, with those studies complete, Reinach returned to Göttingen where he secured a teaching position alongside Husserl. He would remain in this post until he left for the war in 1914. Reinach’s students during his time at Göttingen included Edith Stein, Alexandre Koyré and Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Also at Göttingen during this time was Max Scheler, best known for his work on phenomenological ethics. Reinach had attended some of Scheler’s lectures in 1908, and the two would later collaborate in editing and contributing to the first issue of Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1913. During this time, Reinach showed an interest in opening greater discussion between phenomenology and neo-Kantian philosophy, exemplified by Reinach’s review of a book by the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp and his subsequent invitation to speak at Natorp’s university, in Marburg.
Reinach’s initial education in philosophy under Theodor Lipps had a lasting effect on his writing style and his approach to philosophical problems, even if he ultimately came to be critical of Lipps’ work and especially of his psychologism. Methodologically, Reinach’s phenomenology is characterised by a descriptive, realist approach which was based on Reinach’s understanding of the Logical Investigations, and which he broadly shared with the Munich phenomenologists. Husserl once commented that Reinach ‘fully understood the distinct character of the new phenomenological method’, even if the two ultimately grew apart in their understanding of what phenomenology was.
Throughout Reinach’s writings, the theme of Kant’s philosophy often comes up, and although Reinach generally places himself in opposition to Kant in these pieces, the extent to which Kant was a presence in the German philosophical climate at the start of the twentieth century should not be overlooked. The very fact that Reinach dedicates so much space to engaging with Kant, even critically, shows the importance of the place Kant held within Reinach’s philosophical environment. The ‘clarion cry’ of phenomenology, ‘we must go back to the “things themselves”’ , recalled Kantian language and – at least for some early phenomenologists – represented a realist challenge to Kant’s transcendental idealism.
The complexities of the different influences in Reinach’s philosophical background are reflected in the development of his ethics. Though using Lippsian language and structure, and a phenomenological (so Reinach interpreted it) understanding of values and their mode of being, Reinach also saw Kant’s insights on ethics as important and, as is discussed below, attempted to incorporate some such elements into his own theory. Reinach’s other discipline, that of law, also has a recognisable bearing in how he approaches some problems, particularly in the areas of ethics and political philosophy. It should not be overlooked, either, that while Dietrich von Hildebrand regarded Reinach as his ‘only teacher’ from 1910 onward, Reinach in turn credited von Hildebrand with having developed ideas that Reinach himself used in his work on ethics.
Reinach’s Work on Ethics
For the most part, Reinach’s work on the problems of ethics belongs firmly to the school of value-realism common among his contemporaries in the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenologists. According to this school of thought, the key to living a good life and being a good person lies in proper appreciation and respect for values (Werte). There are subtle distinctions in how the early phenomenologists understand the concept of value, but in general, a value is understood to be something experienced in connection with or alongside an object in the world that the subject grasps as having an intrinsic normative significance. Value represents, broadly speaking, the innate or essential goodness of an object; disvalue (Unwert) represents a corresponding badness or evil. These categories are usually considered to include the concepts of moral good and evil, but also more broadly to encompass aesthetic value and disvalue, and certain other qualities of goodness and badness.
Reinach shares this common understanding of values for the most part, and assigns to moral values a significant role as ethical principles. The greatest distinction between his thinking and that of many of his contemporary phenomenologists is that in Reinach’s view, ethics cannot be entirely about values; a concept of value is necessary, but not sufficient for the foundation of ethics. Rather, Reinach proposes a total of three ‘basic concepts’ (Grundbegriffe) within ethics: (1) the aforementioned concept of moral value or moral goodness, (2) the concept of moral rightness (Rechtheit) and (3) the concept of goods (Güter). Reinach feels that these three concepts together are necessary to fully account for all questions in ethics, though value still holds perhaps the most important role.
The distinction between the concept of moral value and the concept of moral rightness mirrors the distinction in early phenomenological language between objects (Gegenstände) and states of affairs (Sachverhalte). Objects are the correlates of the subject’s intentional experience, things that are grasped in some kind of act of apprehending (Wahrnehmen); one can speak of objects as existing or as not existing in a real or ideal sense. States of affairs correlate to the subject’s judgements about objects, the facts or relationships that subsist in relation to objects. Values attach to the former and are experienced in tandem with their objects. Reinach argues that although value cannot be ascribed to states of affairs, we will nonetheless find that certain states of affairs have a moral status. In the simplest case, if I grasp that something is morally good, then the fact of the existence of that something must have some kind of moral significance – even if it cannot be called ‘morally good’ in the same way as an object. Thus he proposes that the second basic concept of ethics, the concept of moral rightness, is a predicate of certain states of affairs, which expresses the idea that those states of affairs ought to be or to obtain. It is not ‘morally valuable’ that a morally valuable object exists, but it is ‘morally right’, and ought to be the case.
Reinach describes the concept of moral rightness as representing the idea that a state of affairs is ‘in order’ (in Ordnung) with formal moral principles of rightness, thus making some room for a partially Kantian model of formal ethics. He presents as self-evident four such principles:
1. that the existence of a moral value is always morally right;
2. that the existence of a moral disvalue is always morally wrong;
3. that the non-existence or absence of a moral value is always morally wrong; and
4. that the non-existence or absence of a moral disvalue is always morally right.
This establishes a direct relationship between the first two basic concepts of ethics while clearly distinguishing them at the same time. Whether there are other formal principles of ethics that can dictate the moral rightness or wrongness of a state of affairs, or whether all depends on these four basic laws, is not fully explored by Reinach.
These two spheres each place different but interconnected demands on the moral subject. Appreciation of value and respect for moral values are themselves both moral values, according to Reinach; a person who possesses these qualities is therefore by extension a morally good person. Appreciation for what is morally right, too, is a moral value – and likewise, it is morally right that the character of a person is morally valuable. The demand of ethics to be good has not just a material (non-formal), intuitive aspect, but also that of a formal duty under a moral law.
The third of Reinach’s three basic concepts of ethics, the concept of goods, is less well developed than the other two. It creates a space for certain things that are not morally good in themselves (that is, their existence and even maximisation is not morally called for) but that are, in an objective sense, good for someone or for a set of people. Life, health and happiness are three key examples. Goods form a hierarchy (Rangordnung) of sorts; certain goods are correctly to be preferred over others, though Reinach does not clearly indicate how that hierarchy might be grasped or deduced. As this is a concept that Reinach does not discuss in much detail, it is hard to say what precise role he intended it to have in his ethics, except as a recognition that certain things not defined as morally valuable in themselves are nonetheless to be recognised for a quality of goodness that they do possess. It is reasonable to suggest that for a person to live a good life requires a correct appreciation of goods in their proper order of preference.
While Reinach identifies actions as the bearers of moral value – with certain actions, such as murder, having a character of moral value or disvalue according to their essence – the main emphasis of his ethics is on the character of the moral agent. More important than doing good things is being a good person. In fact, Reinach argues that the latter necessarily comes before the former; as ‘[Martin] Luther said: [The] person must [already] be good, before [the] good action’. This need to be of good character certainly includes an appreciation of which actions are essentially good or bad, but it also goes beyond that to a broader sense of what is good and bad, right and wrong. Aspects of an agent’s character can find expression in actions that do not seem essentially good or bad in themselves. Even an action as innocuous as driving a car from A to B can indicate something about the character of the driver based on the particular way in which it is done, for example recklessly or without due care and attention.
The largest area of incompleteness in Reinach’s work on ethics is that he never clearly indicates how personal moral goodness – the moral values of the personal character – may be acquired or cultivated. If one is not a good person now, how can one become a good person in the future? While certain speculative answers are possible (by emulating certain role models, for example), Reinach does not develop this part of his theory in any surviving text. This creates an especially large problem given that becoming a good person is the first demand of Reinach’s ethics and all other moral guidance depends on that first step.
Given this considerable gap, it is clear why Reinach’s combined work cannot be said to add up to a complete theory of ethics, though further development of his ideas is certainly possible. However, taken in the context of early phenomenological ethics, Reinach’s work certainly represents a significant contribution. A few particularly noteworthy insights include his work on the ethical significance of reflection and on symbolic value-characters in Die Überlegung, his analysis of acts of willing and his discussions of phenomenal freedom and self-authorship in Grundzüge. Some of these points will be further explored in the introductions to the texts themselves.
Although Reinach is perhaps best known for his work on social acts, on states of affairs and on positive and negative judgements, the theme of ethics is a consistent presence in his body of work from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career. It accompanies the development of his philosophy between his first departures from his Lippsian roots, up to his ultimate position as a prime example of a realist phenomenologist of the Munich-Göttingen circles.
The purpose of this introduction is not to do justice to all of Reinach’s work on ethics, or his contributions to the field of early phenomenological ethics. Others may want to take up that challenge. Our aim with this compilation is simply to aid anyone studying this important area of Reinach’s work in reading and understanding his contributions for themselves. The introductions to the individual texts that follow are written with this aim in mind, and seek to do no more than clarify while the texts are allowed to speak for themselves.
The three pieces of writing by Adolf Reinach that which are here presented in translation have been taken from Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden, ed. by Karl Schumann and Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1989), vol. 1. The title of that edition is abbreviated in footnotes as S.W. The page numbers of the text in the Sämtliche Werke are reproduced in line with the text in the translation; these appear in bold type and in braces (see below).
The German text of the translated works contains editorial notes that have been preserved here. To distinguish these from notes added by the translators the former are marked with brackets, i.e. [ ], and the latter have been marked with braces, i.e. { }. In addition, the German sources from which two of the included texts are translated were reconstructed from more than one transcript source by the editors of the Sämtliche Werke. Italic text in these sections is not used for emphasis but instead denotes differences between the transcript sources. The significance of the italic text in each case is explained in the introduction to that text.
The translated texts are accompanied by footnotes, some of which are present in the original text while others have been added by the translators. To highlight this distinction, footnotes from the original text have been marked with an asterisk, i.e. *, in addition to the sequential numbering of the footnotes.
Where possible, we have followed existing conventions in translating the language of early phenomenology. The glossary following the translations contains explanations of some key terms and the way they have been represented in translation.
