Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment: Editor’s Presentation

Abstract

Karl (or “Carl,” as Reinhold himself spelled his name) Leonhard Reinhold is a philosophers’ philosopher, so to speak—not widely known outside the circle of cognoscenti except, perhaps, as a popularizer of Kant who repeatedly changed philosophical positions during his lifetime and, at one point, was the object of one of Hegel’s most scathing attacks. Such allegations are not altogether false. But neither do they reflect the true character of Reinhold as a philosopher, or his position in the German intellectual scene at the crucial time of transition from late Enlightenment to early Romantic age. As a matter of fact, the popularization of Kant had begun at the hand of the Jena theologians long before Reinhold’s publication of his first series of Kantian Letters in 1785/86 (see Hinske 1995, 231–43). Reinhold’s specific contribution to this popularization process was the arguably very constructive move of injecting the Critique of Reason into the Spinoza-dispute that Jacobi had instigated in 1785, thereby altering both the tenor of the dispute and the course that the reception of Kant’s critical work was to take. As for Hegel’s criticism of Reinhold, it must be viewed in context (see Differenzschrift, GW 4,1–92). The fact is that Hegel had held Reinhold in high esteem when a student of theology at Tübingen, and that his first exposure to Kant’s Critique had been through Reinhold’s interpretation of it (see J. Reid, in this volume).