On the Supposed Neither-Physical-Nor-Psychical Nature of Rights and Obligations: A Legal-Sociological Approach

In his Apriori Foundations of Civil Law Reinach claimed that promises call into being objects of a neither-physical-nor-psychical nature: rights and obligations. Unfortunately, Reinach did not clarify what such a neither-physical- nor-psychical nature is, nor what he meant by “physical” and “psychical.” To address Reinach’s claim, I first clarify what I mean by “physical” and “psychical.” Next, I attempt to show that the existence of Reinach’s rights and obligations can be explained without invoking neither-physical-nor-psychical realities. Notably, I maintain that the extraconscious existence of rights and obligations can be explained away by having recourse (α) to Czesław Znamierowski’s idea that legal entities are psycho-physical systems and (β) to historical realism, that is, the hypothesis of the objective and unalterable past existence of physical and psychical realities. To be sure, Reinach himself unwittingly arrived at this conclusion, but his unshakable assumption that rights and obligations exist despite their unamenability to direct or indirect sensory experience prevented him from realizing it.