Karl Leonhard Reinhold - Life

Life

Reinhold was born in Vienna. At the age of fourteen he entered the Jesuit college of St. Anna, on the dissolution of which (1773) he joined a similar college of the order of St. Barnabas. Finding himself out of sympathy with monastic life, he fled in 1783 to North Germany, and settled in Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin Wieland's collaborator on the German Mercury (Der Teutsche Merkur), and eventually his son-in-law.

In the German Mercury he published, in the years 1786-87, his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian Philosophy), which were most important in making Kant known to a wider circle of readers. As a result of these Letters, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794.

In 1788, Reinhold published Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse Freymaurerey (The Hebrew Mysteries or The Oldest Form of Freemasonry) under the pseudonym Decius. The fundamental idea of this work is that Moses derived his system from the Egyptian priesthood. He presented them in the form of two lectures in Leipzig that year.

In 1789 he published his chief work, the Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Essay towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation), 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. In 1794 he accepted a call to Kiel, where he taught till his death in 1823, although his independent activity had come to an end.

In later life he was powerfully influenced by Fichte, and subsequently, on grounds of religious feeling, by F. H. Jacobi and Bardili. His historical importance belongs entirely to his earlier activity. The development of the Kantian standpoint contained in the New Theory of Human Understanding (1789), and in the Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791), was called by its author Elementärphilosophie.

"Reinhold lays greater emphasis than Kant upon the unity and activity of consciousness. The principle of consciousness tells us that every idea is related both to an object and a subject, and is partly to be distinguished from and partly united to both. Since form cannot produce matter and a subject cannot produce an object, we are forced to assume a thing-in-itself. This is a notion which is self-contradictory if consciousness were to be essentially a relating activity. There is therefore something which must be thought and yet cannot be thought."