Korrespondenz 1773-1788. Volume 1 (review)

Abstract

596 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:4 OCTOBER i98 5 Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Korrespondenz 1773-~788. Volume x. Edited by Reinhard Lauth, Eberhard Heller, and Kurt Hiller. Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag /Gtinther Hoolzboog und Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , a983. Pp. xxix + 448. 315 DM. Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757--1825) was the first successful popular expositor and defender of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. His Briefe fiber die kantischePhilosophie,first published in the Teutscher Merkur (a786-87), of which he was an editor, attracted more favorable attention to Kant from the learned public than any other writing. As a journalist, Reinhold in the Briefe said he spoke only of the "results" of the Kantian revolution in philosophy, without troubling the reader with the details of Kant's arguments; but Reinhold was also an accurate student of the more recondite aspects of Kant's work and was, in addition, an original philosopher. Largely on the basis of his exposition of Kant's philosophy to a member of the Weimar government (included here as letter no. 35), he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in Jena. There he lectured on the first Critique to large audiences, fought one of Kant's bitterest opponents, tried to start a journal like the later Kant-Studien, and wrote one of the first theories of knowledge based on Kant, his Versuch einerneuen Theoriedes menschlichen Vorstellungsverm6gens. The Versuch was one of the starting points in the development of post-Kantian German idealism. Like Solomon Maimon, F. H. Jacobi, and J. S. Beck, Reinhold objected to the pervasive dualisms in the Critiqueand attempted to replace them with more basic principles which would give rise to only derivative, not fundamental, dualisms. Instead of beginning, as he thought Kant did, with an irreducible ontological separation of subject and object, Reinhold tried to show how "the fact of consciousness " developed and differentiated itself into subject and intentional object. Hence Reinhold's so-called "Elementarphilosophie" was an important move in the direction from Kant to Fichte, who, incidentally, was Reinhold's successor in Jena. Most of the activity for which Reinhold merits our attention, however, occurred after the closing date of the correspondence in the present volume. The value of this correspondence for the student of the history of philosophy is therefore limited. The only letters likely to interest him are those between Kant and Reinhold, and he already knows them from the Akademie edition of Kant's correspondence. When the present volume is followed by others (approximately five more are projected), the letters included in this volume may assume a greater importance in the light of the later letters, which will undoubtedly have more philosophical content. If one takes a somewhat broader view of German intellectual history, one will find much of interest in Reinhold's early life and correspondence. The first letter is a pathetic complaint from the sixteen-year old novice in a Jesuit school in Vienna, written to his father when the school was closed and the Jesuits were about to be exiled. Reinhold moved into a Barnabite cloister, where he remained for ten years, some of the time as a teacher of philosophy. In 1783, however, he joined a freemasons ' lodge, and was from then on associated with the Illuminati and freemasons in their enlightenment efforts. The editors' notes are filled with information about this BOOK REVIEWS 597 phase of Reinhold's activities, but the threat of censorship or the destruction of letters kept most of this information out of the extant correspondence. Under threat of prosecution, Reinhold went to Leipzig, where he studied under Platner, and thence to Weimar, where he became assistant to Wieland in editing the TeutscherMerkur and married Wieland's daughter. He was converted to Protestantism by Herder, whose side he took in the controversy over Kant's review of the Ideen. The letters are mostly silent on Reinhold's clandestine political activities and his spiritual development; it is only from the copious notes supplied by the assiduous editors that we are able to follow Reinhold's odyssey from "Aberglaube und Unglaube " (as he wrote Kant, letter no. 66) or "from supernaturalism through materialistic atheism, Leibniz-Wolffianism, and theism, to...