Philosophical foundations of Lorenz Kähler’s theory of the ontological ideality of law

This article investigates the philosophical foundations of Lorenz Kahler’s theory of the ontological ideality of law. The central focus lies on Kahler’s attempt to conceptualize legal norms as a distinct type of entity - immaterial yet ontologically stable. In contrast to classical forms of legal idealism, which rely on moral justification or transcendental sources of justice, Kahler proposes a minimalist and analytically precise model that treats legal norms as ontologically ideal objects. These entities do not belong to the physical or psychological realm but retain their identity regardless of moral validity, institutional enforcement, or social effectiveness. Kahler introduces a tripartite structure of legal ideality -moral, legal, and ontological - and insists on the logical irreducibility of these dimensions to one another. Ontological ideality refers to a non-material mode of being, comparable to the existence of numbers, algorithms, or linguistic structures. This perspective offers a novel way of accounting for the persistence and coherence of legal meaning even in cases where a norm is no longer valid, has been forgotten, or has never been enacted. The article outlines the strengths of this approach: its capacity to separate the question of legal being from that of moral value; its independence from both legal positivism and transcendental moralism; and its potential for enriching the metatheoretical reflection on law. At the same time, the article addresses several philosophical tensions. These include the lack of a clearly articulated methodological basis for distinguishing the forms of ideality, the risk of reifying norms -i.e., treating interpretative structures as if they were independent ontological entities - and the potential relativization of normative critique, once legal and moral ideality are treated as autonomous and mutually independent. Kahler’s theory is presented as an original and thought-provoking contribution to the ontology of law, one that avoids dogmatic metaphysics while raising productive challenges for contemporary legal philosophy. However, it also requires further clarification of its conceptual foundations to fulfill its philosophical promise. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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