Abstract
What are the needs and interests of reason? How do those of practical reason relate to those of theoretical reason, and how do reason’s universal needs and interests relate to the general needs of humanity and the specific needs and interests of philosophy? These are the questions examined in this paper, beginning with a discussion of Kant’s account of reason’s unchanging needs and interests. Reinhold’s major contribution to this discussion and most important advance on Kant’s position is his defense of a thoroughly historical conception of the “interests” or “needs” of reason as changing over time and in different circumstances.
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- 1.
“An den Herrn Professor Kant von dem Verfasser der Resultate.” This title refers to Wizenmann’s earlier contribution to the Pantheismusstreit, written in defense of Jacobi’s position at a time when Wizenmann was living as an invalid in Jacobi’s home: Die Resultate der Jacobischen und Mendelssohnischen Philosophie Kritisch erlautert von einem Freywillgen, published in May 1786.
- 2.
Kant’s Orientation essay appeared in the October 1786 issue of the Berliner Monatsschrift; Wizenmann’s To Kant appeared in the Deutsche Museum in February, 1787; and the printing of the second Critique was completed by the end of that same year. (Though the official date of publication of the Critique of Practical Reason is 1788, Kant announced in his December 16, 1787 letter to Marcus Herz that the second Critique had just been published.)
- 3.
“Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie.” The original eight letters were subsequently revised and expanded to 12 and published in book form in 1790. Two years later, in 1792, a second volume, consisting of 12 entirely new letters, was published. In what follows, reference will be made almost exclusively to the original edition of the Kantian Letters, as these appeared in the Teutscher Merkur. Between the time of the original publication and the first collected volume of the letters Reinhold had moved from a position of mere advocacy of the Kantian philosophy to one of developing his own, systematically revised and “improved” version of the same, the so-called Elementar-Philosophie, and thus was no longer content to be, as he had described himself in his October 12, 1787 letter to Kant, “a voice in the wilderness preparing the way for the second Immanuel” (Kant 1999, 265).
- 4.
Reinhold’s innovative, historical approach to the discussion of systematic philosophical issues is also discussed in Breazeale (1998).
- 5.
Sometimes Kant distinguishes two different speculative interests of reason – an interest in the greatest possible range of genera (that is, in the most general categories) and an interest in the greatest and most manifold determinate content of these general categories (an interest in the most complete specification of differences) (A654/B682). However, he later observes that reason (by which, as the context makes clear, Kant here means speculative reason) has but a single or unified [einig] interest, namely, its interest in completeness, “and the dispute between reason’s maxims is only a diversity and reciprocal limitation of the methods used to satisfy this interest” (A666/B694).
- 6.
Moreover, that completeness of conditions, which is such a burning need of speculative reason, is, writes Kant, “of no concern whatsoever to reason’s practical interest” (A776/B804).
- 7.
“Reason is impelled by a propensity of its nature to go beyond its use in experience, to venture outward – in a pure use and by means of mere ideas – to the utmost bounds of all cognition, and to find rest for the first time in the completion of its sphere, i.e., in a self-subsistent systematic whole. Now,” asks Kant, “is this endeavor based merely on reason’s speculative interest, or is it, rather, based solely and exclusively on its practical interest?” (A797/B826). The thesis of this section (On the Ultimate Purpose of Pure Reason) is that the speculative interest of reason is ultimately grounded upon and subordinate to its practical (i.e., moral) interest.
- 8.
Kant makes the same point, though only in passing, much earlier in the text, at the beginning of the Dialectic, when he notes that, according to Plato, “ideas flowed from highest reason, from where they have been imparted to human reason” and explains this as follows: “Plato well discerned that our cognitive power feels a much higher need than merely to spell out appearances according to synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience, and that our reason naturally soars to cognitions which go far beyond the point where any object capable of being given by experience could ever be congruent with them, but which nonetheless have their reality and are by no means mere chimeras. Plato found his ideas primarily in whatever is practical, i.e., whatever rests on freedom – freedom in turn being subject to cognitions that are a product peculiar to reason” (A313/B370).
- 9.
“But the highest purposes are those of morality, and these are purposes that only pure reason can allow us to cognize” (A816/B844; see Kant [1788a] AK V, book II, ch. II, section On the Primacy of Pure Practical Reason in its Linkage with Speculative Reason).
- 10.
“The human mind takes (as, I believe, it happens necessarily with any rational being) a natural interest in morality, although this interest is not undivided and not preponderantly practical. Solidify and increase this interest, and you will find reason very teachable and even further enlightened for the task of uniting with the practical interest also the speculative interest” (A830/ B858n; see too A831/B859).
- 11.
Indeed, Kant claims that this is precisely how Mendelssohn’s proposal has already been interpreted by the anonymous person to whom he refers simply as “the acute author of the Results [of Jacobi’s and Mendelssohn’s Philosophy according to a Volunteer]” [Die Resultate der Jacobischen und Mendelssohnschen Philosophie, kritisch erläutert von einem Freywilligen] – actually Thomas Wizenmann, a young philosopher who was then living as an invalid in Jacobi’s home. By stressing the parallels between the positions of Mendelssohn and Jacobi, Wizenmann, according to Kant, ran the real danger of transforming common sense into “a principle of enthusiasm [Schwärmerei] in the dethroning of reason.”
- 12.
“Das Gefühl des der Vernunft eigenen Bedürfnisses.”
- 13.
“Allein hiedurch, nämlich durch den bloßen Begriff, ist doch noch nichts in Ansehung der Existenz dieses Gegenstandes und der wirklichen Verknüpfung desselben mit der Welt (dem Inbegriffe aller Gegenstände möglicher Erfahrung) ausgerichtet. Nun aber tritt das Recht des Bedürfnisses der Vernunft ein, als eines subjectiven Grundes etwas vorauszusetzen und anzunehmen, was sie durch objective Gründe zu wissen sich nicht anmaßen darf; und folglich sich im Denken, im unermeßlichen und für uns mit dicker Nacht erfüllten Raume des Übersinnlichen, lediglich durch ihr eigenes Bedürfniß zu orientiren.”
- 14.
Anxious as always not to be misunderstood in a manner that might suggest any possible bridge between this new concept of “reason’s practical need” and anything resembling religious enthusiasm, Kant appended a footnote to this passage reminding us that “reason does not feel; it has insight into its lack and through the drive for cognition it effects the feeling of a need. It is the same way with moral feeling, which does not cause any moral law, for this arises wholly from reason; rather it is caused or effected by the moral laws, hence by reason, because the active yet free will needs determinate grounds” (Kant [1786] AK VIII:140n.; Wood tr. 12n.).
- 15.
At one point, Kant even goes so far in his effort to stress the alleged similarities between Mendelssohn’s notion of “healthy common sense” and his own concept of “practical reason” as to refer to the latter as “healthy reason” (Kant [1786] AK VIII:134; Wood tr., 8).
- 16.
“Rational faith, which rests on a need of reason’s use with a practical intent, could be called a postulate of reason—not as if it were an insight which did justice to all the logical demands for certainty; but because this holding true (if only the person is morally good) is not inferior in degree to knowing, even though it is completely different from it in kind” (Kant [1786] AK VIII:141; Wood tr., 14).
- 17.
Actually, the article to which Reinhold is here referring was not Johann Schultz’s Erläuterungen über des Herm. Professor Kant critik der reinen Vernunft, which was published in 1784, and which Reinhold did eventually study with great care, but the long, serial review of the same published the next year in the ALZ, and particularly to the portion devoted to the Canon of Reason, which appeared in the July 30, 1785 issue of that journal (Anonymous 1785).
- 18.
In this footnote Reinhold expresses this point by saying that he will not, in these Letters, be presenting the “internal grounds” of the Critique, but only the “external” ones; i.e., he will be considering “the results of the Critique of Reason only in regard to the important needs of the age.” See too the following comment from the third Letter of the 1790 edition: “I shall report the results themselves, independently of the premises for them that are developed in the Critique of Reason, by tying them instead to convictions that are already present and by seeking to make visible their connection to the most essential scientific and moral needs of our age, their influence on the settling of old and new disputes of philosophers, and their agreement with what the most profound philosophical minds of all time have thought with regard to the most remarkable problems of philosophy” (Letters, 177; Briefe [Reclam], 96).
- 19.
“The ground of cognition that [the principles of the moral law] contain for the existence and properties of the deity is … not only as secure and unchanging as the essence of reason itself, but also as intuitive and illuminating as the self-consciousness that a human being has of its rational nature” (emphasis added).
- 20.
What, asks Reinhold in his fourth Kantian Letter, is the actual ground of the universally shared religious convictions of common sense concerning the existence of God and the reality of a future life, a ground that has always been operative but has only very recently been identified by philosophy? “It turns out that this ground could consist in nothing other than the feeling of the moral need, which the Critique of Reason has resolved into distinct concepts and elevated to the single and highest philosophical ground for cognition of religion” (Letters, Fourth Letter, 51; Briefe 4, 120).
- 21.
In the eighth Letter of the 1790 edition, Reinhold glosses this “common sense” interest in God and immortality as grounded in the necessity (be it merely felt, as in the case of “common sense,” or distinctly developed by philosophy) “which reason encounters in the original constitution of its own nature [ursprünglichen Einrichtung ihrer Natur]” (Letters, 190; Briefe [Reclam], 174).
- 22.
The actual content of this brief section is not “historical” at all, but is devoted to a stark juxtaposition of the views of competing schools of metaphysicians regarding the proper object of rational cognition, the actual origin of pure cognitions, and the proper method of metaphysics, concluding with the observation that, as a result of the standoff between the dogmatic and skeptical methods of philosophizing, as represented by the schools of Wolff and Hume, “the critical path alone is still open” (A856/ B884). This too is a suggestion that may well have inspired Reinhold’s account, not only of the historical development of reason’s changing needs, but also of the necessity for these changes.
- 23.
See Kant’s very brief remark in the Canon regarding the “the history of human reason”: namely, that before moral concepts had been developed to a certain stage, religious concepts of the deity were based only on nature and were consequently crude and erratic (KrV, A817/B845). But a more penetrating treatment of moral ideas “sharpened reasoning for dealing with this [divine] object, through the interest that this treatment compelled people to take in this object [viz. God as a practical postulate].”
- 24.
“Pure religion is the need of the present age in precisely the same sense that pure morality was the need of the age eighteen centuries ago” (Letters, Third Letter, 33; Briefe 3, 11–12).
- 25.
“The question of God’s existence was always the occupation of reason’s highest concern and the most general subject of faith. Yet never before has reason’s occupation with such an important question been so rigorously examined, never before have the roles that both reason and faith must have in the answer been sorted out so precisely, and never before have the legitimate claims of both to universal conviction been so clearly exhibited and so completely confirmed, as with this new [Kantian] answer” (Letters, Second Letter, 22; Briefe 2, 124).
- 26.
Kant thus “completes by means of reason the unification of religion and morality that was introduced through Christianity by means of the heart” (Letters, Third Letter, 29; Briefe 3, 5). At last we have arrived, according to Reinhold, at “the point of time when philosophy can and must repay [the] great service [it originally received from religion: viz. disseminating the most sublime and important results of practical reason in the actual world, in the form of the moral teachings of Jesus] has presently arrived. Reason is being urgently pressed to secure cognition and worship of the deity against unphilosophical errors, to justify it against philosophical doubts, and to bolster it against enthusiasm and indifference, to do to religion what Christianity in its way did to morality, then as Christians led from religion to morality by means of the heart, so philosophy must lead from morality back to religion by means of reason” (Letters, Third Letter, 34; Briefe 3, 12–13).
- 27.
“Speculation has never before justified itself better to common sense, … the deliverances of the latter have never before agreed more closely with the results of the former, and … philosophy and history have never before been so united on a more important matter than in the present case. An investigation, whose depth is as unprecedented as the astuteness with which it was carried out, has derived the highest principle of all philosophy of religion from the nature of pure reason. And this principle contains nothing more and nothing less than a formula expressing the need that has all along obliged reason to prescribe to itself two articles of faith” (Letters, Fourth Letter, 51; Briefe 4, 119–20).
- 28.
Or see the fifth Letter, where Reinhold claims that Kant, by reconciling religion and philosophy, has achieved both the satisfaction of the fundamental need of reason itself and “the rescue of the basic truths of religion from present-day attacks and their establishment for all future ages” (Letters, Fifth Letter, 71; Briefe 5, 178; emphasis added).
- 29.
In the sixth, seventh, and eighth Letters, Reinhold offers a similar account of the necessary historical development of belief in a future life, beginning with a vaguely felt need of reason and culminating in a clear understanding of the practical grounds of this belief. Underneath all the folk tales, myths, and positive religions of the past one can discern the same, universally shared wisdom of “common sense,” i.e., the commonly shared belief in the reward or punishment of morally good and bad deeds after death, a presupposition that, “had no other basis than the felt need of reason to assume future rewards and punishments” (Letters, Fifth Letter, 69; Briefe 5, 174). As in the case of belief in God, it took a very long time for reason to reach the point in its self-development where it could clearly recognize the true ground of its conviction concerning the immortality of the soul, and in the meantime philosophers and theologians offered a plethora of metaphysical (or “speculative”) and “hyperphysical” (or “supernatural” or “historical”) proofs of immortality. But Reinhold insists that “these two pseudo-grounds of cognition were just as unavoidable as they were indispensable on the way to [the] discovery and recognition” of the true cognitive ground of this belief and that such errors were “absolutely indispensable for the preparation” of Kant’s discovery of the moral basis of the belief in immortality (Letters, Fifth Letter, 70; Briefe 5, 176). Moreover, even the most misbegotten efforts on the part of dogmatic metaphysicians to prove the immortality of the soul were all part and parcel of the “legitimate endeavor in which the human spirit struggled for its own inner conviction,” inasmuch as they were, according to Reinhold, “the only means for asserting the independence of reason during that period when reason had not yet developed enough to recognize the moral ground of cognition […, and] the only means of keeping reason itself in actual possession of those rights without whose use its true nature and the entire extent of its domain would have necessarily remained unknown to us” (Letters, Sixth Letter, 78; Briefe 6, 70–71). See too the eighth Letter, in which, after a scathing criticism of efforts by all the Greek schools of philosophy to understand the distinction between the body and the soul, a failure based upon their faulty grasp of the faculty of cognition itself, Reinhold then adds: “This misunderstanding was unavoidable until the human spirit had continued exercising its powers long enough to become capable of an analysis of its faculty of cognition as precise and complete as that which the Critique of Reason has supplied” (Letters, 114; Briefe 8, 263–64).
- 30.
“Before the moral interest could be even vaguely discerned, moral feeling (the indistinct expressions of practical reason) first had to be awakened into a certain measure of activity. Before it could be traced back to determinate and distinct concepts, the scientific cultivation of morality had to advance fairly far. And before the moral interest could be derived apodictically – as far back as the limits of the comprehensible reach – from its first source, the nature of practical reason, there first had to be that unexpected self-cognition of reason which we owe to the Critical investigation of our entire cognitive faculty” (Letters, Fifth Letter, 66–67; Briefe 5, 169–70).
- 31.
Another way to express Reinhold’s achievement is to see it as a synthesis of “relativistic historicism” and “systematic ahistoricity,” as suggested by Karl Ameriks: “Although Reinhold had special respect for Herder and Leibniz, the Letters exhibited a new and immediately influential style of writing that aimed at leading modern philosophy beyond the forced choice of either relativistic historicism or systematic ahistoricity” (2005b, xxii). “Ironically, it was precisely the difficulties in the reception of Kant’s own writings that forced Reinhold eventually to insist all the more on the ‘historical turn’ in philosophy, and to stress that a special hermeneutical perspective was needed in order for us properly to appreciate the underlying rationality of our philosophical development and its ultimate compatibility with common sense” (Ameriks 2005b, xxiii; cf. Ameriks 2006, 175).
- 32.
This point is forcefully reiterated in the third Letter of the 1790 edition, where Reinhold maintains that that the checkered history of philosophical efforts to understand the basis for our cognition of God represents “the course that the human spirit had to take in order to arrive at these problems…. All the more essential fates that our speculative philosophy has experienced until now had to be undergone before one could think of even posing these problems – let alone solving them” (Letters, 170; Briefe [Reclam], 84–85). This path was “unavoidable” and “indispensable,” because “without the zeal of the dogmatists, which was sustained and enlivened by a sweet imagining of found truths, those numerous and in part marvelous preliminary exercises of the philosophical spirit would not have been achieved to which reason owes that degree of development which more profound undertaking presupposes. During this protracted period the merit of skepticism consisted in little else than forcing the dogmatists partly to sharpen their old proofs and partly to think up new ones, setting bounds to their self-complacency, and keeping their zeal alive.” As a result, we have now reached the point where we can see the possibility of a third path (other than that of dogmatism or skepticism), and “nothing is more understandable than why this moment did not come sooner” (Letters, 71; Briefe [Reclam], 86). A comparison with the earlier version of this same passage (Letters, First Letter, 11–12; Briefe 1, 116–17) shows that by 1790 Reinhold had gained a new appreciation of the role of skepticism it keeping the historical process of philosophy in motion. This is consistent with the his interesting 1793 essay “Über den philosophischen Skepticismus.”
- 33.
See too the references in the seventh Letter to “the period of philosophy’s immaturity” and to “the childhood and early youth of the human spirit” (Letters, 93; Briefe 7, 148).
- 34.
This suggestion is reinforced by two other, similar remarks in the 1790 edition of the Letters, the first in the eighth Letter, where Reinhold concedes that the moral powers of the “child of nature” can be cultivated only in society and by virtue of “civic relations” (Letters, 192; Briefe [Reclam], 176–77), and the second in the more protracted discussion, in the twelfth Letter, of the relationship between, on the one had, the development of morality, religion, and philosophy and, on the other, the development of religious and civic institutions (Letters, 206–24; Briefe [Reclam], 264–89).
References
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––––– 1784a. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” In AK VIII:15–31. Reprinted in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, 41–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Translated into English by Lewis White Beck in Kant: On History, by Immanuel Kant, edited by Lewis White Beck, 11–26. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
––––– October 1786. “Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren?” In Berlinische Monatsschrift: 304–330. Reprinted in AK VIII:131–48. Translated into English by Allen W. Wood as “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in Religion and Rational Theology, by Immanuel Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, 7–18.
––––– 1788a. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In AK V:1–164. Translated into English by Lewis White Beck as Critique of Practical Reason. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Mary J. Gregor as Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Breazeale, D. (2010). Reason’s Changing Needs: From Kant to Reinhold. In: Giovanni, G. (eds) Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment. Studies in German Idealism, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3227-0_7
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