Karl Leonhard Reinhold (October 26, 1757 -
April 10, 1823) was an Austrian
philosopher.
Life
Reinhold was born in Vienna. At the age of fourteen he entered the Jesuit college of St. Anna, on the dissolution of which (1773) he joined a similar college of the order
of St. Barnabas. Finding himself out of sympathy with monastic life, he fled in 1783 to North Germany, and settled in
Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin
Wieland's collaborator on the German Mercury (Der Teutsche Merkur), and
eventually his son-in-law.
In the German Mercury he published, in the years 1786-87, his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters
on the Kantian Philosophy), which were most important in making Kant known to a wider
circle of readers. As a result of these Letters, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794.
In 1789 he published his chief work, the Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Essay
towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation), in which he attempted to simplify the Kantian theory and make it more
of a unity. In 1794 he accepted a call to Kiel, where he taught till his death in 1823, although
his independent activity had come to an end.
In later life he was powerfully influenced by Fichte, and subsequently, on
grounds of religious feeling, by F. H. Jacobi and Bardili. His historical importance belongs entirely to his earlier activity. The development
of the Kantian standpoint contained in the New Theory of Human Understanding (1789), and in the Fundament des
philosophischen Wissens (1791), was called by its author Elementärphilosophie.
His son Ernst Reinhold (1793-1855)[1] was also a philosopher, author of a Kantian Handbuch.
Outline of his thought
Reinhold lays greater emphasis than Kant upon the unity and activity of consciousness.
The principle of consciousness tells us that every idea is related both to an object and a subject, and is partly to be
distinguished from and partly united to both. Since form cannot produce matter and a subject cannot produce an object, we are
forced to assume a thing-in-itself. This is a notion which is self-contradictory if
consciousness were to be essentially a relating activity. There is therefore something which must be thought and yet cannot be
thought (Høffding, History of Modern Philosophy, Eng. trans., vol. ii.). See
- Robert Keil, Wieland und Reinhold (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1890)
- J. E. Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin,
1866)
- histories of philosophy by Richard Falckenberg and Wilhelm Windelband.
Letters on the Kantian Philosophy
As a former Catholic priest, Reinhold retained the values of Christian morality and
individual dignity. The basic Christian doctrines of a transcendent God and an immortal human soul were presuppositions in his
thinking. However, he disagreed with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who thought
that the only way to avoid nihilism, fatalism, and
atheism was to believe in the religious morality that was revealed by God. Reinhold tried to show that Kant's philosophy provided an alternative to either religious
revelation or philosophical skepticism and
fatalistic pantheism. But Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a difficult and confusing
book. It was not widely read and had little influence. Reinhold decided to write his comments on it in the literary journal
The German Mercury. He skipped over the beginning and middle of the book and started at the end. Reinhold showed that the
book was best read backwards, that is, starting with the end section. The last part of the Critique is where Kant discussed the
issues of morality and their relation to the Rational Ideas of God, Free Will, and life after death. These issues were Reinhold's
main concern. By presenting these concerns to the public, instead of the extremely difficult epistemology that took up most of
the beginning and middle of the book, Reinhold aroused great interest. As a result, Kant's Critique immediately became a book of
great importance.
According to editor Karl Ameriks, "...Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all developed their thought in reaction to Reinhold's reading of
Kant...." There is a Faustian tendency in Reinhold's assertion that a person can
hope for a future reward only because that person is constantly striving to be good. It is not moral to be good merely in the
hope of reward. Reinhold's emphasis on history is evident in his declaration that philosophies and religions are to be judged on
the way that they respond to the needs of reason in a particular era. Philosophical development, to him, has an underlying
rationality. New philosophies are fated to struggle repeatedly in order to survive in a dialectic of history in which progress is
unconsciously occurring. With regard to a transcendent God, the human internal moral law is externalized in such a deity. This
extreme otherness or alienation is part of a rational process. It makes possible a subsequent deeper regaining of the self
through something other than the self.
Establishing Kant on Secure Ground
Kant's critical philosophy was not being accepted as the final truth. According to Professor George di Giovanni, of McGill
University, Reinhold tried to provide a foundation for Kant's philosophy in order to remedy this situation. Reinhold
distinguished two levels of philosophy. The most basic level was the concern with consciousness and the representations that
occurred in it. The second, less basic, level, was the concern with the possibility and structure of the known or desired
objects.
Kant's important realization was that the possibility of metaphysics can be established. This can be done only by describing
what occurs when the mind is conscious of objects. Kant's weakness was in being overly concerned with the objects themselves. He
remained at the second, less basic, level of philosophy. He rarely examined what occurred in consciousness, which is the basic
level of philosophy. Kant did not provide a phenomenological description of consciousness. Reinhold was convinced that Kant
should have identified the fundamental fact of consciousness that was essential in making cognition itself possible.
Reinhold's Essay towards a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation is a description of the main parts and
attributes of consciousness. In writing this book, Reinhold turned his attention from the moral issues that Kant addressed in the
end section of his Critique of Pure Reason to the epistemological concerns of
the beginning and middle sections.
- General Theory of Representation
- The thing-in-itself necessarily exists, but cannot be known.
- Human knowledge is restricted to appearances only.
- Principle of Consciousness - The thinking subject distinguishes in consciousness the representation from the subject and the
object.
- This is a certain fact of consciousness.
- The subject is the location of the representation.
- The object is anything that is represented as being present to the subject.
Reinhold examined the necessary conditions of representation, such as subject and object, that must exist in order for an
object to be consciously present.
- Representation's Material and Form
- The representation's material ('Stoff') is a given or received manifold of sensation which is unified when it is attributed
to a transcendental object. It allows the thinking subject to distinguish a thing-in-itself.
- The representation's form is a spontaneous unifying act which occurs according to the subject's conditions. It allows the
thinking subject to distinguish a self-in-itself.
- The self-in-itself and the thing-in-itself must be assumed in order for the thinking subject to be able to make a distinction
between consciousness itself and the object of consciousness.
- We can never know anything in itself, that is, as not representation. An object-in-Itself or subject-in-itself does not have
matter (sensation) or representational form, so they cannot be known. Only that which is represented can be known
- Consciousness must contain representation.
- An empirical representation takes its material from a source that is supposed to be external to it.
- A pure representation takes its material by reflecting on consciousness
- A clear and distinct consciousness of an object is an awareness that consciousness itself is a representation in a subject of
an external object.
- Special Theory of Cognition
- Cognition is clear, distinct knowledge that consciousness contains a representation of an object.
- Cognition is consciousness's awareness that its own content is a subject's representation of an object.
References
- Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, Translated, with Introductions, by George de Giovanni and H.S. Harris, Hackett
Publishing Co., Indianapolis ISBN 0-87220-504-5
- Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, Edited by Karl Ameriks, Translated by James
Hebbeler, Cambridge University Press ISBN 0-521-53723-1
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public
domain.
External links
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