„Die künftige Schule Europens“: Reflections on L. Reinhold’s Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (1789)

Abstract

On the 16^th of November 1789 Friedrich Jacobi wrote to Immanuel Kant. The contact between the two great men of German letters had survived significant differences in philosophical outlook apparent since the appearance of the first edition of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1781. Jacobi’purpose in his letter to Kant was to touch on these differences once more, yet also to underscore areas of common purpose. Despite differences in outlook, he averred, the results of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and his own were almost the same. Jacobi restated his view that the connection of the human being to the supersensible, while directly “evident” to human intuition, was nevertheless ultimately to be considered beyond rational understanding. Kant, by contrast, had contended that the idea of the deity emerged as a conclusion of the rational activity of the mind. Admittedly not directly knowable, the deity in Kant’s view could still be sought as a moral notion within human beings. The capacity for moral judgement in the here and now, which was a function of rational activity, thus also contained a presentiment of what went beyond the here and now. While such a presentiment stopped short of constituting an actual proof of the existence of the deity, Kant had nevertheless brought the deity back within the compass of human rationality as an idea and simultaneously empowered the intellect somehow to grasp it. It was to this rational empowerment of the human being that the avowedly theistic Jacobi had declared himself from the beginning to be opposed. Vigorous debate in philosophy in the 1780s was unable to settle opinion on this matter either way.¹ Those who were swayed by Jacobi’s scepticism about the claims of reason also accepted his conclusions about religious understanding — that God had finally to be approached as a matter of non-rational belief.

For an excellent discussion of the range of views expressed on the topic of God and rationality, see Beiser.