"Theismus des Gefühls": Heydenreich, Fichte, and the Transcendental Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

Belief in God is a living and animating principle within human beings, and it springs from life itself, not from dead concepts.(Concluding Remark by the Editor, 1/6, 411; IW, 179).1The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, which erupted publicly in 1785, impacted the development of German philosophy in the subsequent decades in almost incalculable respects. To name just two of these, the rise of German Idealism and of early German Romanticism are both inconceivable apart from the flowering of Spinozism occasioned by the earlier controversy. As Frederick C. Beiser has convincingly shown, nothing less than the authority of reason itself was at stake in the so-called Pantheismusstreit.2 Still, it is important to keep in mind that the heart of the issue was the authority of reawn vie-I-vie religioue belief. The debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, on which virtually every major figure of the penod had something to say, was fundamentally a debate about religion. It brought to a head a long-standing tension in eighteenth-century thought, particularly in Germany, between the partisans of rationalist metaphysics and those (most famously in Germany, J.G. Hamann) who took religion to be fundamentally a matter of pre- or sub-rational sentiment [Emp findung]. This tension is articulated most clearly in K. L. Reinhold's intervention into the dispute, the Briefe uber die Kantische Philosophie.~ Reinhold's work presents the issue in terms of the relationship between rational reflection, on the one hand, and common sense natural faith, on the other. In this epochal work, Reinhold attempted to bring Kant's new critical perspective to bear on the larger issue of the relationship between philosophical reflection and religious belief.Reinhold's work in turn stimulated others to take up the torch of Kantianism and to address the religious questions of the era from that point of view. In particular, the little known Leipzig philosopher K. H. Heydenreich (1764-1801) and the better known pioneer of idealism, J. G. Fichte (17641814), each attempted to develop a new philosophical synthesis that responded to the Pantheismusstreit in the spirit of Kant's phiosophy.~ Heydenreich, though virtually ignored by contemporary scholars, played a key role in shaping the larger intellectual context in which post-Kantian philosophers, including Fichte, worked out their views. The present essay has three interlocking goals: (1) to rehabilitate Heydenreich as an important figure in his own right and as an important player in the development of the philosophy of religion in Germany in the 1790s; (2) to explore the hitherto overlooked role that Heydenreich played as a stimulus to Fichte's intellectual development during the crucial Jena phase (1794-1800) of his career; and (3) to utilize Heydenreich's views to bring out some of the distinctive aspects of Fichte's position during this period.Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801) was an important figure in the tumultuous German philosophical scene in the 1790s, and yet he has been all but forgotten.5 His System der Asthetik (1790) was the first serious philosophical response to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In two works from the 1780s, Uber Mendelssohns Darstellung des Spinozismus (1787) and Natur und Gott nach Spinoza (1789), he addressed directly the intellectual watershed of his age, the so-called Pantheismusstreit described above. His attempt at a fair-minded presentation of Spinoza's philosophy was widely noted, and it earned him an appointment in philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Heydenreich's work exercised a profound influence on the reception of Spinoza by the young Romantic generation, with Schleiermacher (ca. 1793-94) and Holderlin (ca. 1795) being particular beneficiaries.6As it did for Fichte, the publication of Reinhold's Briefe and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason led to a profound shift in Heydenreich's position.7 His ardent partisanship for Spinoza cooled somewhat, and he took up the project of developing a thoroughly Kantian philosophy of religion. …