Context
Karl Reinhold led a varied religious life. He studied at the Viennese Catholic college of the Barnabites, then in 1778 became a teacher at the College. In 1780 he was ordained as a Catholic priest, and on 30 April 1783, he became a member of the Viennese Freemasons' lodge (Zur wahren Eintracht). Disliking monastic life, he fled to Leipzig in 1783, where he converted to Protestantism. In 1784, after studying philosophy for a semester at Leipzig, he settled in Weimar, where he became a journalist on the German Mercury (Der Teutsche Merkur).
In the German Mercury Reinhold published his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian Philosophy) (1786-87), which were important in making Immanuel Kant known to a wider audience. As a result of these Letters, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794.
It was at Jena that the author published his chief work, the Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Essay Towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation) (1789), in which he attempted to simplify the Kantian theory and make it more of a unity by basing it on one principle: Reinhold's principle of consciousness. His kantian studies were followed up at Jena University by Fichte, Schelling, then Hegel.
In his analysis of Kant Reinhold retained his Christian beliefs in a transcendent God and an immortal human soul. He aimed to demonstrate that Kant's philosophy provided an alternative to either mediaeval religious revelation or philosophical empirical scepticism or Leipzig's fatalistic pantheism.
When Reinhold wrote his comments on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in The German Mercury, he decided to start at the end section of the book and understand it backwards. The final part of the Critique is where Kant discusses the issues of morality and their relation to the rational ideas of God, free will, and life after death. By presenting these themes to the public, instead of the difficult epistemology in the former parts of the book, Reinhold aroused public interest in the Critique.
Reinhold held that there were two levels of philosophy. The ground level was concerned with consciousness and the representations that happened in it. The next level was the consideration of the possibility and structure of the known or desired objects. Kant had realised that the possibility of metaphysics can be established, indeed he worked to found a metaphysics of metaphysics. This can be done only by describing what occurs when the mind is conscious of objects. However, according to Reinhold, Kant's weakness was in being too focused on the objects themselves. He remained at the second level of philosophy, examining the possibility and structure of the known objects, and rarely examined what occurred at the basic level, in consciousness. For example, Kant did not provide a phenomenological description of consciousness. Reinhold was convinced that Kant had missed identifying the fundamental fact of consciousness that was essential in making cognition itself possible.
In his Essay Towards a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, where he describes the main parts and attributes of consciousness, 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.
Commentary
Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie (Elementary Philosophy or Philosophy of the Elements) consisted of three books:
- Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Attempt at a New Theory of Human Imagination) (1789),
- Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen, Erster Band (Contributions to the Correction of Philosophers' Misunderstandings, Volume One) (1790),
- Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge) (1791).
Reinhold's aim was to find a scientific grounding for philosophy. In the Elementarphilosophie he asks: How is philosophy possible as a strict science, and what is the distinguishing feature of such a science? Following Kant, as well as rationalist tradition, Reinhold maintained that the essence of science lies in universality and necessity. But these are properties of thought, not of sensation or intuition. Only through thinking and judging can we recognise universality and necessity, a recognition that is, in turn, formulated and expressed in concepts and propositions. The business of philosophy is therefore to establish universally valid [allgemeingültig] propositions in a manner that allows their necessity and universality to be universally recognised as binding upon everyone [allgemeingeltend]. This last requirement reveals the intimate link between Reinhold’s earlier efforts at popularising the Kantian philosophy and his subsequent efforts to expand and to ground this same system. One of the constant hallmarks of Reinhold’s philosophical efforts was his conviction that a genuinely scientific philosophy must be capable of being understood and recognised as true by everyone.
The most influential part of the Elementarphilosophie is the first section, the Theory of Representation, which is devoted entirely to an analysis of the fundamental faculty of the mind, that of representation itself [Vorstellungsvermögen]. This is done to determine “everything that can be known a priori concerning the representations of sensibility, understanding, and reason.” This foundational portion of the Elementarphilosophie strives to provide a thorough and complete analysis of the necessary features of representation in itself, an analysis that claims to show
“that space, time, the twelve categories, and the three forms of the ideas are originally nothing but properties of mere representations."
This same analysis of our faculty of representation also claims to establish the distinction between the form and content of representations, the necessity of both receptivity and spontaneity on the part of the faculty of representation, the necessary multiplicity of sensations, and the unknowability of things in themselves.
What makes philosophy scientific, according to Reinhold, is not that it consists of propositions arrived at by thinking, but rather, the logical connection between the propositions in question, their systematic form. Reinhold often repeats the same declaration: scientific philosophy is systematic philosophy. Accordingly, he embarked upon an analysis of systematic form, in order to gain insight into how kantianism could be made rigorously systematic and therefore genuinely scientific.
The hallmarks of systematic form, according to Reinhold, are consistency and completeness, but it was the former of these that attracted most of his attention. The only way to determine whether a number of philosophical propositions actually constitute a system is to show that they can all be traced back to the same first principle or foundation [Grundsatz]. And the only way to show that they can indeed be traced back to such a first principle is by actually deriving them from there. (Despite his efforts to clarify this point, Reinhold’s conception of philosophical “derivation”, which is apparently not to be understood as simple logical deduction, nevertheless remains extraordinarily unclear.)
It follows that to be consistent a philosophical system must begin with a single first principle that determines all the other propositions of the system. A system with two or more first principles is not a system at all, but several different systems. As for the completeness problem, Reinhold’s implicit solution seems to have been to seek an a priori first principle that could be known in advance to include the entire domain of experience, and hence of philosophy. What, however, can you say about the “validity” [Gültigkeit]) of the proposed first principle itself? If the validity of a philosophical proposition is determined by its systematic, logical connection to other propositions, then what determines the truth of the first principle, from which the system as a whole is generated or derived? The answer, Reinhold thought, is obvious: the first principle and systematic starting point of philosophy must be self-evident. It must be immediately certain. (This is similar thinking to the self-evidence of Descartes's concept: "Pienso, luego existo.")
Despite reservations concerning the capacity of the first principle to determine the content, as opposed to the form of the propositions derived from it, Reinhold maintained that the first principle of all philosophy had to be a material as well as a formal principle. Otherwise, scientific philosophy would be identical to formal logic and would have no content of its own, which Reinhold denied. This is a matter of the utmost practical urgency, because in the absence of such a foundational first principle:
“...philosophy itself is impossible as a science, in which case the basis for our ethical duties and rights — as well as those duties and rights themselves—must remain forever undecided."
In order to find this first principle, Reinhold determined to turn to the consideration of consciousness itself. This, he maintained, is precisely what Kant had done, although he did not succeed in presenting the results of his enquiries in an adequately scientific and systematic form.
The first principle of the Elementarphilosophie is the “Principle of Consciousness,” namely, the proposition that,
“...in consciousness, the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and the object and relates the representation to both."
In this proposition, the term representation [Vorstellung] designates the basic synthetic unity between subject and object, which is constitutive of consciousness. The term “subject” designates the one who “is conscious” and the term “object” designates that “of which” the representation is a representation.
Reinhold distinguishes between three senses of “object”: object as thing [Ding], that to which the representation refers; object as represented [Vorgestelltes], the intentional object of the representation; object as thing in itself [Ding an sich], that is, considered in abstraction from the representation. Anyone who reflects upon what is asserted by this Principle of Consciousness will immediately recognise its truth and universal validity, since it expresses what Reinhold called a “universally recognised fact of consciousnes".
With the Principle of Consciousness Reinhold believed he had uncovered that “common root” of thought and sensibility, which Kant had declared to be unknowable. By commencing his analysis at the level of “representations as such,” Reinhold was convinced that he had, so to speak, hit philosophical rock bottom, because all consciousness is self-evidently “representational” in character. One of the merits of the Principle of Consciousness, according to Reinhold, is that from it one can then derive the starting point of Kant’s own philosophy, which began with an ungrounded assumption of the difference between theoretical and practical reason. From this point, Reinhold maintains, one can then proceed to the derivation of a complete system of philosophy as a whole, as envisioned but never actually accomplished by Kant himself. (The Elementarphilosophie was written before Kant's third Critique.)
Themes
Representation
In the general theory of representation the thing-in-itself (noumenon) necessarily exists, but cannot be known. This is because human knowledge is restricted to appearances only.
In Reinhold's principle of consciousness the thinking subjects distinguish in their consciousness the representation or mental image from both the observing subject and the observed object. The location of the representation or mental image is the observing subject. The observed object is anything that is represented as being present to the mind of the observing subject.
Consciousness
Reinhold examined the necessary conditions of representation of subject and object that must exist in order for an object to be consciously present.
The representation's material (Stoff) is a given or received assortment of sensations which is unified when it is attributed to a represented object. It allows the thinking subject to distinguish a thing-in-itself. The representation's form is a spontaneous unifying act that 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, except as representation. An object-in-Itself or subject-in-itself does not have matter (sensation) or representational form, so it cannot be known. Only that which is represented can be known.
Fichte
Unfortunately, Reinhold did not give details of his strategy for demonstrating the unity of theoretical and practical reason. This provoked his most brilliant and critical reader, J. G. Fichte, to attempt his own version of an Elementary Philosophy, that would begin with the unity of the theoretical and the practical and that would, with the act of “positing”, claim to have discovered a starting point even more “basic” than that of mere “representation.”
Influence
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of Reinhold’s enquiries into systematicity and first principles on an entire generation of philosophers. Though some recent research on Reinhold and the “Jena circle” of the late 1780s has stressed the degree to which Reinhold himself soon came to have doubts about the project of “philosophy from a single principle”, this project was nevertheless enthusiastically embraced by Fichte and the young Schelling, and inspired others, notably Hegel, to re-examine and to question the alleged connection between systematic form and self-evident first principles. Despite Reinhold’s subsequent reservations about his own Elementarphilosophie, it remains one of the clearest examples of a thoroughgoing foundationalist project in the history of European philosophy.
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