George di Giovanni, ed.: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment.
Redding, Paul
George di Giovanni, ed.
Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment.
Dordrecht: Springer 2010.
350 pages
S$139.00 (cloth ISBN 978-90-481-3226-3)
Those with philosophical interests that extend to the development
of German idealist philosophy in the decades following the appearance of
Kant's critical philosophy in the 1780s have many reasons to be
grateful to George di Giovanni. Besides his many translations and
interpretative writings, di Giovanni has introduced many Anglophone
readers to less well-known but crucial figures of the period. Thus in
the mid-1990s he presented important works of F. H. Jacobi (The Main
Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press 1994), while a decade earlier together with H. S.
Harris, he translated and edited works of a number of other key figures
of this period in the volume Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the
Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Albany: State University of New
York Press 1985). Among these was Karl Leonhard Reinhold.
Reinhold is generally known as an early popularizer and would-be
systematizer of Kant's critical philosophy, effectively becoming
the first 'Kantian' philosopher when he took up the newly
formed chair of 'critical philosophy' at the University of
Jena in 1787. In 1794 Reinhold was replaced by J. G. Fichte, who came to
loom much larger than his predecessor, relegating Reinhold to
'transitional' status. But Reinhold had effectively initiated
the post-Kantian project of 'unifying' Kant's system, his
own attempt being to try to ground it in the so-called 'principle
of consciousness'. For most of the period since the appearance of
Between Kant and Hegel, English-readers have been restricted to the
50-odd pages from Reinhold's 1791 text, The Foundation of
Philosophical Knowledge, translated there, but recently the situation
has started to change. In 2005, Reinhold's Letters on the Kantian
Philosophy appeared (ed. Karl Ameriks, trans. James Hebbeler [Cambridge
University Press]), and a full translation of his seminal Essay on a New
Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation is slated to appear in
2011 (trans. T. Mehigan and B. Empson [Walter De Gruyter]). The volume
under review is a very welcome addition to the hitherto sketchy critical
literature on Reinhold.
After a helpful introductory presentation by di Giovanni, the
following seventeen essays (eight in English, five in German and four in
French) are grouped under four headings: 'Reinhold, Freemason and
Educator of Mankind' (essays by Ives Radrizzani, Jean-Francois
Goubet, Martin Bondeli, Peirluigi Valenza and Michael Gerten);
'Reinhold and the Historical Turn' (Daniel Breazeale and Karl
Ameriks); 'Reinhold in Struggle with Religious and Moral
Issues' (Alessandro Lazzari, Karianne Marx, Claude Piche, Marco
Ivaldo); and 'Reinhold and Systematicity: Theory of Science and
Theory of Mind' (Faustino Fabbianelli Brigitte Sassen, Sven
Bernecker, Pertra Lohmann, Jeffrey Reid). The volume then closes with a
further 'Sources and Materials' appendix consisting of a
presentation (by Karianne Marx and Ernst-Otto Onnasch) of two short
talks from Reinhold's pre-Kantian days in Vienna, and a
presentation and outline (by Erich Fuchs) of three sets of student notes
from Reinhold's Jena lectures on Kant's theoretical
philosophy.
De Giovanni characterizes Reinhold's outlook as caught
somewhere between the late enlightenment and the early romantic age, a
positioning that marks its strengths and weaknesses. When Reinhold first
encountered Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the mid-1780s he was
already a philosopher with a mission. As Karianne Marx points out in her
essay, when he first took up and championed Kant's critical
philosophy in his series of 'Letters' in Der Teutsche Merkur
in 1786, Reinhold already had well-formed 'enlightened' ideas
about the role of reason in life that gave him a particular perspective
on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But as she points out, the
interpretation he offered of Kant's postulated moral basis for
religion on the basis of his reading of the first Critique came to be
somewhat out of step with Kant's own version that appeared in the
Critique of Practical Reason in 1788. In subsequent 'letters'
Reinhold had to adjust his interpretations in response to this moving
target, initiating a game of catch-up with Kant himself, and then with
those 'post-Kantian' idealists who took Kant's views
further.
This type of constant re-interpretation of his existing
philosophical commitments in fact seemed to characterize Reinhold's
entire life. Originally ordained a Catholic priest, while practicing in
Vienna he had come to find a home within another tightly knit, closed
society to which one pledged allegiance--the freemasons. (Ives
Radrizzani in his essay in Part 1, shows the depth of Reinhold's
engagement with the life of the masons, and even within that of their
even more shadowy offshoot, the Bavarian Illuminati, and connects it
centrally with his deep commitments to the goals of Enlightenment
reform.) For Reinhold, the idea of existence within a secret society
with its projects of social engineering was clearly at one with his
general Enlightenment activism devoted to the education of humankind and
the creation of the conditions under which humans could express what he
took to be their essentially rational characters. It was his distinctly
practical conception of rationality informing his involvement with the
masons as well as his later dealings with students (the subject of
Jean-Francois Goubet's essay) that provided the particular twist he
gave to Kant's idea of the 'primacy of practical reason',
a twist that was in many senses at odds with Kant's own intentions.
In his introduction di Giovanni portrays Reinhold's adherence
to the abstract ideals of the classical enlightenment as in tension with
just those features of post-Kantian idealism that came to be skeptical
of this feature of the eighteenth-century outlook. But if his attempts
at systematization were part of this Enlightenment outlook, as Michael
Gerten urges, it was this commitment to systematicity that led Reinhold
to continually reshape his own philosophical ideas in his attempt to
adjust to the rapidly changing terrain of European thought through the
1790s and into the 19th century. Thus from his own pre-Kantian phase,
Reinhold progressed from expositor and popularizer to critical
re-interpreter and systematizer of Kant, issuing in different versions
of his own 'elementary philosophy' in the first half of the
1790s (see especially Bernecker's essay). The same search for
consistency, however, subsequently led him to abandon this project in
the mid-1790s to become a follower of Fichte, only to then move from
Fichte to Jacobi, and then convert to the 'rational realism'
of Christoff Bardili, and after that to go on to espouse his own
linguistic-based philosophy.
It is this theme of this constantly self-transforming character of
Reinhold's philosophy that enframes many of the interlinking
particular studies making up the third and fourth parts of this volume.
These essays are invaluable for anyone wanting to understand both the
architecture and dynamics of Reinhold's views and the complex
situation within which post-Kantian idealism was born. But they also
provide a particularly relevant background from which to appreciate the
more schematic essays by Daniel Breazeale and Karl Ameriks making up
Part 2 of the volume, with their focus on Reinhold's role in the
historical turn in German philosophy. I think one can confidently say
that from now on Reinhold will no longer be able to be omitted from
discussions of the background to Hegel's elaborate historicization
of reason. (Reinhold's influence on Hegel is also the specific
topic of Jeffrey Read's essay in Part 4.)
In 'Reason's Changing Needs: From Kant to Reinhold',
Breazeale argues that in Letters Reinhold had taken Kant's idea of
the 'needs of reason' in a explicitly historical way, seeing
such needs as changing over time. (Piche's essay in Part 3 also
pursues the complex issues of Reinhold's appropriation of
Kant's concept of the needs of reason and is usefully read in
conjunction with these two essays.) As the Letters develop, this idea
itself develops into a more explicit claim about the development of
reason over time via a process involving the resolution of conflicts
within reason. 'What really changes over time', Breazeale
notes, 'are the efforts of reason to explain the grounds of its
(common sense) judgments concerning god and immortality, not the
judgments themselves' (102). That is, reason itself came to be seen
as having an internal logic governing its own development.
'According to Reinhold, it is not simply that the needs of reason
actually have developed in the way just described, but rather that they
necessarily had to develop in precisely this manner, in accordance with
an internal logic of their own' (104). Breazeale concludes his
essay with a set of questions for further exploration including those of
Reinhold's influence on Hegel, questions that are in turn taken up
and examined by Ameriks in his contribution.
The constitutive tension in Reinhold's thought stressed by di
Giovanni--his commitment to a type of Cartesian foundationalism while at
the same time relating developments in philosophy to concrete historical
realities--also appears in Ameriks's 'Reinhold, History, and
the Foundation of Philosophy'. Ameriks attends to Reinhold's
attitude towards the role of feeling played in Kant's account of
one's awareness of the 'fact of reason'--an attentiveness
that chimes with the role of aesthetics in Reinhold's moral
pedagogy, brought out in other essays. (In relation to this it should
not be forgotten that Reinhold was the principal philosophical teacher
of many of the Jena 'Fruhromantiker'.) By stressing the role
of feeling in awareness of the 'fact of reason' Reinhold thus
seemed perched on the cusp of a radical divide separating Cartesian
approaches to philosophy, stressing the role of consciousness as
epistemic foundation, and non-Cartesian approaches, emphasizing the
dependence of thought on something less overtly cognitive. In
Ameriks' words, 'Reinhold was thus both the catalyst of the
"Cartesian", non-historical strands of post-Kantianism, which
repeatedly led to a dead end, and the initiator of the non-Cartesian,
historical strands of post-Kantianism, which provided a fruitful new
paradigm for philosophical writing' (116). It seems then that we
may be doing Reinhold a disservice to take his most well-known work,
Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge, at face value. Rather than
regarding it as yet another foundationalist tract, we should not ignore
its apparently intended status as an historically particular and
specifically targeted intervention within the pedagogy of humankind,
informed by an historical conception of reason and its changing needs.
Paul Redding
The University of Sydney
