Do Your Promises Create Real Duties in the World?
What Does It Mean to Break a Promise?
It’s Saturday afternoon. You promised your friend you would meet at the playground at 3 p.m. But you got caught up in a video game and forgot. Your friend stood waiting, watching the gate. Later they say, “You broke your promise.” What exactly did you break? Did you just make your friend sad, or did you break something real — something that existed in the world the moment you said those words?
That question might sound like it belongs in a courtroom, but it grabbed the attention of a young German philosopher named Adolf Reinach (1883–1917). He wasn’t a lawyer or a politician. He was a student of law, psychology, and philosophy who died in battle during World War I. In his short life, he wrote a small masterpiece about promises, laws, and the invisible structures that hold our social world together. His ideas were almost forgotten, but today many of them are being rediscovered — often without people realizing he got there first.
Adolf Reinach: The Soldier-Philosopher Who Took Promises Seriously
Reinach was born into a Jewish family in Mainz, Germany, in 1883. At university in Munich he studied law, psychology, and philosophy. He joined a circle of young philosophers who were fascinated by what the mind could know directly from experience — not just from books or arguments, but by looking carefully at how things appear to us. This approach later became known as phenomenology. In 1909 he moved to Göttingen and became a close collaborator of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the phenomenological movement. Many students later said that Reinach, even more than Husserl, was their real teacher in philosophy.
Reinach’s big idea was that philosophy should describe the a priori structures of reality — the necessary truths that don’t depend on how the world happens to be, but on what things really are. For example, it’s not just a fact about our planet that three is larger than two; it’s true because of the very essence of the numbers. Essences are the fundamental natures of things, what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. And essences, Reinach argued, are not hidden or mystical. We can grasp them in a single clear experience, or even just by imagining. “I can now, in this moment, convince myself with complete certainty of the fact that orange lies qualitatively between red and yellow,” he wrote, “if only I succeed in bringing to clear intuition for myself the corresponding natures.” You don’t need to find an actual orange, red, and yellow slice of the world. Pure imagination is enough.
This method — look, imagine, and describe the essences you find — was Reinach’s way of doing philosophy. He used it to study mental acts, movement, ethical feelings, and especially the strange realm of social things like promises, obligations, and claims.
The Essence of a Promise: What Makes It a Promise?
If essences are the blueprints of things, what is the blueprint of a promise? Reinach said that a promise is not just a report about what you plan to do. Telling someone “I intend to meet you at 3 p.m.” describes a state of your mind. But a promise does something more. It is what he called a social act.
A social act is an act of the mind that is aimed at another person and needs to be heard to succeed. If you whisper a promise to an empty room, no obligation comes into existence, because the act was never received by its addressee. But if you say “I promise to be there” and your friend hears and understands you, then something new appears in the world: an obligation for you and a claim for your friend. The promise doesn’t just reflect a bond; it creates one. Reinach insisted that this is not a metaphor. The obligation is as real as the spoken words, even though you can’t see or touch it.
This bond has a built-in logic. A promise must be directed to someone — there is no such thing as a promise to nobody. And the person promising must genuinely intend to do what they say, or else it’s a sham promise, a false imitation that does not generate real obligation, just as a false friend is not a friend. But here’s something surprising: even a promise to do something immoral still creates a real obligation. If you promise to help someone vandalize a wall, you genuinely owe them your help in a social sense — even though morality may tell you that you ought not to do it.
How Spoken Words Create Obligations?
To see why Reinach’s view is radical, compare promising with simply deciding. When you form an intention, you bring something about inside your own mind. That act doesn’t need anyone else to hear it; it’s just yours. Promising, on the other hand, is a spontaneous act — you actively do it — but it also reaches out and changes the landscape between two people.
Reinach listed many other social acts: commanding, requesting, questioning, answering, informing, even transferring a right or waiving a claim. All of them need an addressee, and all of them bring social facts into being just by being performed. This is why, he argued, promising can’t be reduced to a useful habit (as David Hume thought) or to a set of legal rules. Promises are sui generis — a fundamental kind of thing we discover, not invent. “Strictly speaking,” he wrote, “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.” It’s like the fact that 1 × 1 = 1. You don’t explain it; you just see that it’s true.
But don’t we sometimes have a duty to break a promise? Yes, said Reinach, and that brings us to an important distinction. Promises generate social normativity — social obligations and claims. But there is also moral normativity, which comes from values. Helping a friend in trouble is morally valuable, so you have a moral duty to help. If your promise conflicts with a stronger moral duty, morality overrides the social bond. You still have the promissory obligation; it just shouldn’t be acted on. This shows that the social bond is real even when you shouldn’t keep it.
The Mystery: Are Obligations Physical, Mental, or Something Else?
If an obligation isn’t a material object, what kind of thing is it? Reinach walked through the possibilities with the care of a detective.
First, could an obligation be a physical thing? No. You can’t trip over an obligation, measure it with a ruler, or set it on fire. It has no size, shape, or location in space.
Second, could it be a mental thing — a belief or a feeling? No again. You can have a belief about an obligation without actually being obligated (the belief might be about someone else’s duty, or it might be mistaken). And feelings of being committed are real, but they aren’t the same as the obligation itself. After all, you can forget an obligation for years; it still exists. You can even die, and your debt can still exist for your heirs. The obligation outlasts any single mind.
Third, could an obligation be an ideal object — like the number 2 or the quality of redness, which are timeless? That doesn’t work either. Obligations are born at a specific moment (when you promise) and can be discharged or waived. They exist in time, even though they don’t unfold over time the way a storm does.
So what’s left? Reinach showed that obligations behave a lot like states of affairs. A state of affairs is a fact-like entity — not an object, but a way the world is. “The rose is red” is a state of affairs; it obtains if the red rose exists. Similarly, an obligation obtains if the promise was made. Obligations can ground each other (the promise grounds the obligation, not causes it, just as “all humans are mortal” grounds “Socrates is mortal”). And obligations, like states of affairs, can be in time. Reinach never declared for certain that obligations are states of affairs, but he demonstrated that they belong to a category of real, non-physical, non-mental, social things — a discovery that opened a whole new area of philosophy.
Why It Still Matters: Every Promise You Make
Reinach’s ideas about social acts appeared decades before the famous speech act theories of J.L. Austin and John Searle in the 1960s, though they rarely credit him. His distinction between social and moral normativity gave philosophers new tools for thinking about law, contracts, and rights. And his claim that there are genuinely social entities — things that are neither physical nor psychological — helps us make sense of everything from marriage and money to citizenship and football clubs. These are not just “constructs” in our heads; they are real parts of the shared world we build together.
So the next time you say “I promise,” don’t think of it as just a string of sounds. You are performing an act that, by its very nature, creates an invisible chain between you and another person. That chain can’t be weighed or photographed, but it can be broken — and when it breaks, everyone feels it. Reinach spent his short life trying to see such chains clearly. The better we see them, the better we understand the most human thing we do: bind ourselves to each other with words.
Think about it
- If you whisper a promise and the other person doesn’t hear, have you really made a promise? Why or why not?
- Suppose you promise to do something that you later realize is deeply wrong. Should you keep the promise, or does the wrongness cancel it? What if the other person is counting on you?
- Could a society exist without promises and contracts? What would friendships and agreements look like if no one could create an obligation just by speaking?
