The Conception of Enlightenment in Reinhold’s “Letters on the Kantian Philosophy”

Abstract

According to Reinhold, by Enlightenment one should not mean just a call to freedom, equality and justice, but also a coalition of intellectual forces in the form of a scientifically grounded consensus. For this reason he holds out as the right method of enlightening the striving to clarify the moral-theological and epistemological principles of Kant’s philosophy in an effort at transforming them into productive foundations in religion, morality, right, history, aesthetics and psychology. The project of Kantian Letters that he undertook in 1786 must be understood in this sense: as the development of a conception of enlightenment praxis based on the results of the Kantian Critique. This conception in fact turns out to be the motivating as well as structural presupposition of Reinhold’s theory of representation in his System of Elementary Philosophy. The prototype of this Elementary Philosophy is a system of moral theology which Reinhold extrapolates from his conception of Enlightenment. Similarly, the foundation of the practical part of this same Elementary Philosophy which Reinhold undertakes in 1790 directly derives from the elaboration, in an Enlightenment pragmatic spirit, of Kant’s principles of morality and right.