Karl Leonhard Reinhold
1757–1823 · Austrian philosopher and populariser of Kant
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (Vienna, 1757 – Kiel, 1823) was an Austrian-born philosopher who did more than most to bring the work of Immanuel Kant to German-speaking readers in the late eighteenth century. He stands between the late Enlightenment and the beginnings of German idealism, and his lasting importance rests mainly on his attempt to put Kant's critical philosophy on a secure foundation.
Raised in a Catholic setting, he entered a religious order in Vienna as a teenager, was ordained a priest and taught philosophy. Around 1783 he left monastic life and fled to Germany, where he converted to Protestantism. In Weimar he joined the circle of the writer Christoph Martin Wieland, whose daughter he married, and he contributed to Wieland's journal Der Teutsche Merkur. There, in 1786, he published his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. Reinhold read the Critique of Pure Reason backwards, beginning with its final section on morality, freedom and immortality, which interested readers more than the dense epistemology of the opening chapters. The result was a rapid spread of Kantian ideas.
In 1789 he published his main work, the Essay Towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation, followed by On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge. In them he sought a single starting point for critical philosophy, the 'principle of consciousness', according to which every representation relates to both a subject and an object without being wholly identical with either. His 'elementary philosophy' aimed at an indisputable basis for philosophy itself. Gottlob Ernst Schulze's critique of this project prompted Fichte to formulate his Wissenschaftslehre, usually regarded as the starting point of German idealism.
He taught at Jena and, from 1794, at Kiel, where he influenced several figures of the Romantic movement, Novalis among them. His later work moved toward a critique of language, in books such as Rüge einer merkwürdigen Sprachverwirrung (1809) and Grundlegung einer Synonymik (1812), which has led some to see him as a precursor of the linguistic turn.
His influence lies in two directions: in those who received Kant through his reading, and in those who reacted against it. He is a key figure for understanding how critical philosophy gave way to idealism.
Key ideas
- Elementary philosophy: an attempt to give Kant's critical philosophy a single, secure foundation prior to the distinction between subject and object.
- Principle of consciousness: every representation is distinguished both from the subject who represents and from the object represented.
- Thing-in-itself: it necessarily exists but cannot be known; human knowledge is limited to appearances.
- Matter and form of representation: matter is the manifold of received sensations, form is the spontaneous unifying act of the subject.
- Late linguistic turn: in his final phase he argued that thinking cannot be separated from language.
Curiosities
A backwards reading
Reinhold discussed Kant's Critique of Pure Reason starting from its final section on morality and religion, and in doing so aroused great interest in the book.
From priest to Protestant
After fleeing the Viennese monastery in 1783, he settled in Leipzig, where he converted to Protestantism.
Teachers and influences
Pupils
- Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg 1802–1872
Influenced
- Friedrich Schiller 1759–1805
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762–1814
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.