Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Transcendental Psychology 9783110453737, 9783110443981

Citation preview

Faustino Fabbianelli Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Transcendental Psychology

Reinholdiana

Edited by Ernst-Otto Onnasch Editorial Board: Karl Ameriks (Notre Dame, USA), Daniel Breazeale (Kentucky, USA), Martin Bondeli (Bern, Switzerland), Claude Piché (Montreal, Canada), George di Giovanni (Montreal, Canada), Faustino Fabbianelli (Parma, Italy), Marion Heinz (Siegen, Germany), Alexander von Schönborn (Missouri, USA)

Volume 3

Faustino Fabbianelli

Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Transcendental Psychology

ISBN 978-3-11-044398-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045373-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045358-4 ISSN 2194-9085 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Foreword to the English Edition Four years have passed since the release of my book in Italy. The title under which it appeared then – Coscienza e realtà. Un saggio su Reinhold (Consciousness and Reality. An Essay on Reinhold) – was partly a choice of the publisher. In my original intentions, in fact, the conceptual pair “consciousness-reality” should have been followed by the obviously too long subtitle La Filosofia elementare di Karl Leonhard Reinhold come psicologia trascendentale (Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy as Transcendental Psychology). In the meantime Ernst-Otto Onnasch, director of the series Reinholdiana for the publisher De Gruyter, has proposed to present my thesis in English, which now offers me the opportunity to underline in the title of the book what I think is the core of Reinhold’s philosophical thought: with the Theory of the Faculty of Representation first and then with the Elementary Philosophy the debate around the value to be attributed to transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant takes the road of psychology. It is true that the meaning of the critical and transcendental endeavor consists in the investigation of the knowledge of objects, and hence does not take shape through research on the being but rather on the ways in which the spirit is able to say something universally valid about the being. It is also true that transcendental philosophy, by its own essence, has to address the human faculties in order to find the conditions of the possibility of knowledge of objects. Nevertheless, there are different answers which transcendentalism is able to give to the question around the value to be attributed to the nature of the finite rational being. For Reinhold finding in the representation, that is, in the representative faculty first, and then in the fact of consciousness, the unshakable foundation of the system of philosophy, means, ultimately, to weaken the Kantian quaestio juris, interpreting it in the sense of quid facti not empirically determined but comprised within the transcendental parameter. This English edition reflects the Italian one. As to new ideas presented since, I have confined myself to discussing in the notes and stating in the general bibliography the latest studies of Reinholdian research. The reason for this is that in my opinion my thesis is still of topical interest. The texts of Reinhold were cited, when possible, according to the available English translations. For reasons of linguistic uniformity, I have corrected the proposal made by Tim Mehigan and Barry Empson to render the German word “Vorstellungsvermögen” as “capacity for representation” by replacing the latter with “faculty of representation”. A first important work of translation of my text was done by Kienhow Goh; I owe firstly to Dennis Schulting and secondly to Daniel Cattolica some suggestions for linguistic refinements which I have taken account of in the final draft

VI

Foreword to the English Edition

of the book. I thank them all for their essential contribution, which has made it possible to finally publish the book. With pleasure and gratitude I thank Ernst-Otto Onnasch for giving me the opportunity to publish my work in his series devoted to the studies on Reinhold. Acknowledgements also go to Daniel Breazeale for the attention and interest that he immediately showed towards this publication. Last but not least I extend my special thanks to Gertrud Grünkorn and Christoph Schirmer of the publisher De Gruyter for their patience in waiting for the ‘long labor’. I dedicate this book to my professor and maestro Claudio Cesa, in memoriam. Prato (Italy), October 2015

Faustino Fabbianelli

Acknowledgements Before I bid farewell to this study, sending it off to the judgment of my readers, I would like to thank those who have played a part in its development. First off, I am indebted to Professor Claudio Cesa for his fundamental critiques of the central points of my investigations and for his important observations about the structure of the whole work. I am deeply grateful to him for his willingness to point his scientific rigor and speculative lucidity once again in my direction. Without his active engagement and participation, this book would have never been possible. To Professor Beatrice Centi, I owe my thanks for the many possible and still to be investigated conceptual links she provided between Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy and the Gedankengut of the “Kantian aetas”, though I doubt I have managed to follow her all the way. In any case, the most authentic Reinhold, as I imagine, is one who finds himself in intimate dialogue with his contemporaries. To that end, I wish to express my cordial gratitude to Professors Michele Ciliberto, Paolo Cristofolini and Jean-Christophe Goddard, for the kindness with which they have, from the very beginning, followed the fate of my work. My most sincere thanks go out to the director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Professor Salvatore Settis. Prato, December 2010

Faustino Fabbianelli

Contents Abbreviations Introduction

XIII 1

I The Old and the New 10  The Context 10  The Empirical-Psychological Assumption 12 . The Friends of the Kantian Philosophy 12 12 .. Ludwig Heinrich Jakob .. Friedrich Gottlob Born 13 . The Opponents of Kantian Philosophy 14 14 .. Adam Weishaupt .. Johann Georg Heinrich Feder 17 .. Johann Friedrich Flatt 18  The Transcendental-Psychological Assumption: Reinhold and the 19 Critique II

From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of 24 Representation  The Concept of Representation 24 . Reinhold and the “Bridges of Communication” 24 26 . Some Readings of Reinhold .. The Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens of Johann August Eberhard 27 .. The Critique of Pure Reason and the Review of Christian Gottfried Schütz 29 .. The Grundriβ der allgemeinen Logik und kritische Anfangsgründe zu einer allgemeinen Metaphysik of Ludwig Heinrich Jakob 32  The Principle of Consciousness 33 . Reinhold 33 . Some Readings of Reinhold 37 III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation 40  The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation 40 . Not “Woraus” but “Worin” 40 . Receptivity and Spontaneity 45

X

Contents

. . . .

“Gegebensein” and “Gegebenwerden” 48 49 Exposition and Definition of Representation Pure Sensibility 51 The Image and the Original 54 Intermezzo 58  The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of 60 Representation 60 . What Justifies the Faculty of Representation? . The Nature of the Representing Subject 63 . The Clarity and Distinctness of Consciousness 64 68 . The Reality of Representations . The Deduction of the Categories 72 .. Kant 72 74 .. Reinhold . The Transcendental Schematism 83 IV The Elementary Philosophy 87  Some Reviews of the Essay 88 . Feder 88 . Flatt 90 91 . Heydenreich  The First Volume of the Contributions 92 . The Subject as Protagonist 94 97 . Abstraction and Reflection . Intellectual Intuition 100 . Priority versus Necessity and Universality 102 . Back to the Deduction 106  A Review of the Contributions 111  The Fundamentschrift 113 Epilogue 123  Philosophy and Common Sense 124  Reinhold’s Review of Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie  The Forms of Psychology 127 Bibliography 130 A Sources 130  Reinhold 130 . Articles, books . Others 130

130

125

Contents

 . B

Other Authors 131 English Translations Studies 133

Index of Names Index of Subjects

143 145

133

XI

Abbreviations Beiträge I = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Erster Band, das Fundament der Elementarphilosophie betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg 2003 (new edition of the volume: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Erster Band das Fundament der Elementarphilosophie betreffend, Jena 1790). Beiträge II = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Zweiter Band, die Fundamente des philosophischen Wissens, der Metaphysik, Moral, moralischen Religion und Geschmackslehre betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg 2004 (new edition of the volume: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Zweyter Band die Fundamente des philosophischen Wissens, der Metaphysik, Moral, moralischen Religion und Geschmackslehre betreffend, Jena 1794). Briefe I = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, vol. 1, Jena 1790. Briefe II = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, vol. 2, Jena 1792. Fundament = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens nebst einigen Erläuterungen über die Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens, Jena 1791. KA = Karl Leonhard Reinhold: Korrespondenzausgabe der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Kurt Hiller and Ives Radrizzani, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1983–. Rezensionen = Die zeitgenössischen Rezensionen der Elementarphilosophie K.L. Reinholds, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hildesheim 2003. RGS = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Gesammelte Schriften. Kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. by Martin Bondeli, Basel 2007–. Versuch = Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, Prag-Jena 1789. Fichte-AA = Johann Gottlieb Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. by Reinhard Lauth et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962–. Hegel-AA = Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by the NordrheinWestfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften in association with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Hamburg 1968–. Kant-AA = Immanuel Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Berlin 1900–. KrV, A = Immanuel Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga 1781. KrV, B = Immanuel Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga 1787.

Introduction 1. The post-Kantian debate about the problem of cognition immediately following the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason can be divided into three different lines of thought: the transcendental, the transcendental-psychological, and the empirical-psychological. The first, proposed by Kant and, more reservedly, by Johann Schultz, holds that in order to answer the question of what one can know, it is necessary to inquire into what one can know a priori and how one can do so. In other words, the question of legitimacy (quid iuris) of the use of subjective forms for the cognition of objects must precede the factual question (quid facti). To ask how experience is possible is to underscore the prescriptive value of space and time, as well as of the categories, for the formation of an objective and object-directed cognition. The faculties of the subject which must be treated to this end – sensibility, imagination, understanding – are functions of object-directedness; thus, one speaks of them neither with reference of priority to their givenness, to explain and consider them as conditions of the possibility of experience, nor with reference to their structure and empirical constitution. The former, because the legitimacy of their use in the object must be shown in the first place; the latter, because it is not supposed to be of any interest how they are actually constituted¹. The other two options mentioned above, both alternatives to the Kantian assumption, are the transcendental-psychological and the empirical-psychological theses. According to the former, the transcendental question regarding the legitimacy or the validity of representative forms depends on, and can only be posed by beginning with, an a priori unquestionable given (consciousness). The latter holds that one can find an answer to the main question of philosophy by referring to the empirical and contingent constitution of human beings’ cognitive faculties. In these two options, the theme of normativity comes to be substituted either by a transcendental reality or by an empirical reality, respectively. In the

 Patricia Kitcher () has held the presence of a weak psychologism in Kant, on the basis of which the psychological facts explain, even if they do not ground, normative assertions. Though not holding a strong psychology, in which the validity of logical principles would depend on empirical facts, Kant propounds a transcendental psychology, which inquires into those faculties that stand at the basis of human cognition. But such an interpretation forgets that these faculties are only interesting for Kant to the extent that they pose a question of the legitimacy of their use. For example, the fact that the understanding is discursive and active for Kant, and is thus opposed to intuitive and passive sensibility, does not constitute at all ‒ as Vladimir Satura () would have it ‒ a psychological premise, but only a justifiable moment in relationship to the transcendental question of the legitimacy of its use for the object-directed cognition.

2

Introduction

first, the critical-object-directed reference of representations becomes secondary to the possibility of consciousness taken as a fact, and in the second, it ends up no longer having any significance at all. One sees that the recourse to factuality present in the transcendental-psychological assumption leads to the nullification of the sense of the quaestio iuris as Kant has posed it. 2. The thought of Karl Leonard Reinhold at Jena was born and nurtured by the idea of philosophy as a transcendental psychology. It was clear to him almost immediately from his very first reading of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kantian transcendentalism consisted in a superior psychology, that is, in an a priori investigation of the human faculty different from the ‘inferior’ psychology of Locke. This interpretation would become the theoretical framework within which Reinhold first developed the Theory of the Faculty of Representation and subsequently the Elementary Philosophy, defending it as the philosophical system which could carry forward the project of the Critique of Reason in an authentic way. In this way, Reinhold set out to explain the fundamental characteristics of transcendental idealism by applying a ‘transcendent’ assumption that ends up transforming and altering the very constitutive qualities of these characteristics. On the other hand, the assumption allowed him to single out peculiar weaknesses of the overly empiricist readings which were advanced by both Kant’s supporters and detractors. 3. In the historiographical research of recent times, much emphasis has been placed on the theoretical tensions and the changes of perspective that characterize the Elementary Philosophy. To this end, several different aspects of Reinhold’s thought have been appealed to: (1) Focusing on the narrowly theoretical characteristic that contradistinguishes it, the evolution of Reinhold’s philosophy has been explained by means of the transition from a ‘strong’ deductive model – on the basis of which it would be possible to begin with a single fundamental principle (the principle of consciousness) to derive the entire system of philosophy – to a ‘weak’ deductive model, for which it would be necessary to appeal to evident and justifiable facts of consciousness on the basis of the maxims of healthy human understanding, maxims that could, once one is in possession of all the remaining principles of consciousness, then be demonstrated as “maxims of philosophizing reason”². (2) Turning attention to the role which practical philosophy played in Reinhold’s thought from 1789 to 1792, it has been shown,

 See, among others, Henrich (); Bondeli (); Stamm (); Frank ()  – ; Henrich (), vol. .

Introduction

3

on the other hand, that it is really the practical interest of justifying the absoluteness of freedom that leads inevitably to a crisis in the Elementary Philosophy. Realizing that the will cannot be considered as a particular expression of reason at all (the position of the Essay of 1789), Reinhold necessarily thought of moving on to a justification of the will as a fundamental faculty which is distinct from reason, a faculty which would be dependent on the maxims of healthy human understanding³. Both perspectives have the merit of providing a picture of Reinholdian thought which is much more authentic than other positions that consider it static and without any breaks. If we consider the particular aspects of Reinhold’s thought⁴ and examine its totality⁵, we realize that it is no longer possible to think of the Elementary Philosophy as a speculative program that is continuous and without break. Certain readings of Reinhold which held that his system was inadequate and rendered obsolete by successive systems of classical German philosophy have now themselves been proven inadequate and obsolete⁶. 4. Taking bearing from the evolution of the Elementary Philosophy does not in itself exclude recognizing a homogeneity that follows from the beginning through to the end. The historiographical perspective which seems more promising appears to be, or rather, is, that which succeeds at taking both characteristics into account: changes in continuity, or rather, continuity in changes, we might say. The most recent investigation has responded well to this hermeneutic imperative, singling out three themes in particular which are peculiar to Reinhold’s thought in Jena: the foundationalism of the principles⁷, the defense of the concept of “freedom”⁸, more generally of the value of practical reason⁹, and the

 Cf. Lazzari (a).  This is the case of two important studies – those by Adam () and Klemmt () – that highlight the phenomenological perspective of the Elementary Philosophy.  This is the case of the accurate and still useful research of Pupi ().  The classic example of this historiographical assumption is constituted by Kroner ( – ). One should also not neglect the part of the study of Magnus Selling () which concerns the relation between Reinhold and Fichte.  One finds in the definition of the Elementary Philosophy in terms of the Grundsatzphilosophie works answering to different aspects like those already recalled by Henrich (), Bondeli (), Frank (), but also the volume edited by Lauth (a).  See Lazzari (a).  The recent study of Karianne J. Marx, dedicated to the Enlightenment background of Reinhold’s thought, focuses on the concept of practical reason: cf. Marx (), chapters  – . Marx’s essay belongs to that strand of critical literature, in which the true fulcrum of the Elementary Philosophy, Reinhold’s practical philosophy, is analyzed. To this strand also

4

Introduction

comprehension of philosophy as a history of philosophy ¹⁰. In doing so, however, it has shown little sensitivity to the explicit declarations by which Reinhold took position towards Kant’s transcendental idealism and with regard to the Elementary Philosophy itself. If carefully considered, these declarations can contribute to forming a new image of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, one which takes into account its fundamental character without forgetting the ‘breaks’. If not ignored, they provide the right point of view from which to posit the Reinholdian project of a new philosophia prima in the post-Kantian debate on the problem of cognition. The present investigation intends to fill this lacuna by following what I think is the ‘red thread’ that runs through the writings of Reinhold from 1784 to 1794. Though there are more than one identifiable points of view from which we can give a coherent sense to the multiple and sometimes opposing Reinholdian theses of the decade ‒ and the historiographical research has brought their differences to the limelight ‒ I think that only one has the merit of including all the others, respecting at once the letter and the spirit of Reinhold’s thought: that which sees a system of transcendental psychology in the Elementary Philosophy. In fact, this interpretative assumption allows us to continue to maintain that we are dealing with a Grundsatzphilosophie, a doctrinal edifice which is founded on a practical interest, and a philosophy which is transformed into history of philosophy: in the first case, it is necessary to add that it is a philosophy of grounding which is defended in a psychological manner; in the second case, that the problem of freedom comes to be resolved according to a transcendental comprehension of the facts of consciousness¹¹; and in the third case, that the historicizing and therewith the popularization of Kantianism are a direct consequence of the transcendental-psychological assumption professed by Reinhold to the extent that the recourse to facts of consciousness present in it allows us to move from the question of universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit) to the question of universal acceptance (Allgemeingeltung), thereby transforming the feature of

rightfully belongs the other study which is recently published and dedicated to the Reinholdian philosophy of history: Stolz ().  See Ameriks (). According to Ameriks, one has with Reinhold the beginning of the historical revolution with which philosophy comprehends itself as history of philosophy. Recall in this regard how Hegel already polemically made the name of Reinhold in the Differenzschrift to expound that idea of philosophy as “art” that sees in the history of philosophy help for the same philosophical science: cf. Hegel-AA/.. On the theme see also Ameriks (), Breazeale ().  See also Zöller ().

Introduction

5

the systematicity of the Kantian philosophy into a feature of its acceptability in a certain historical context. Besides, the recognition of a system of transcendental psychology in the Elementary Philosophy allows us to make sense of many of the otherwise hardly comprehensible assertions of Reinhold’s contemporary adversaries and defenders. In fact, the philosophical thought of the epoch is even formed and transformed through identifying an important contribution to the science of psychology in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation. For example, Carl Christian Erhard Schmid claims in his Empirische Psychologie that the construction of an empirical doctrine of the soul must avail itself to the Reinholdian concepts of “representation” and the “faculty of representation”¹². Ernst Platner underscores the validity of the proper conception of the soul by referring to the Reinholdian doctrine of representation: the soul refers the representations to the objects “insofar as it is something passive”, and refers them to itself “insofar as it is something active”. This is the sense of “that psychological theorem” proposed by Reinhold on the basis of which “the representation would only reach consciousness by ceasing to be material and assuming the form”¹³. Johann Heinrich Abicht theorizes the “principle of animation” (Satz der Beseelung) which must remain the basis of the new Elementary Philosophy professed by him, relying critically on Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness”. He thinks that he can refute the objections which Aenesidemus had raised against the Theory of the Faculty of Representation by appealing to a theoretical characteristic that was well present in Reinhold, the psychological givens of consciousness¹⁴. Even the principles of Fichte’s doctrine of science and Jakob Sigismund Beck’s “doctrine of the point of view” – the act (Tathandlung) or postulate of “original representing” – were really born in an attempt to overcome Reinhold’s ‘critical psychologism’¹⁵. Johann Friedrich Fries, too, concedes to Reinhold of having investigated the principle of philosophy from within psychology. His fault, however, is that of having understood the cognition of internal experience as an a priori cognition, thus misconstruing its empirical character¹⁶. Johann Friedrich Herbart speaks of Reinhold’s Kantianism in terms of a philosophical system, the starting-point of which is located “in the higher region of psychology”¹⁷.

     

Schmid ()  – . Platner () . Abicht () . Fichte-AA I/.; Beck ()  – . Fries (); Fries ()  – . Herbart () .

6

Introduction

5. It is not the first time that a scientific investigation, in our case the investigation of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, has referenced psychology. Ernst Cassirer, for example, in his inquiry into the problem of cognition in the modern age, claims that it is certainly evident that besides moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, psychology represents for Reinhold the principal and dominant systematic interest. But the same concept of psychology Reinhold aims to achieve is wider and deeper than that which is usually intended. What he seeks is a psychology that does not get mixed up with dogmatic-metaphysical claims and is built on purely critical presuppositions¹⁸.

In his view, Reinhold pursues that “pure phenomenological analysis” for which the Kantian Critique has posited the conditions of possibility by destroying the associationist psychology of Lockean origin and the rational psychology of Wolffian origin. On this point, the Reinholdian assumption is defined in accordance with the critical inquiry. Kant, in fact, seeks “to transfer the Newtonian method into the domain of ‘internal experience’, no longer aiming at the causes of the phenomena here, but only at their mode of being and the expression of this mode of being in constant laws”. According to Cassirer, Reinhold could be reproached for two things: (1) the “historical error” of thinking that his concept of “representation” and his principle of consciousness were an absolute novelty, whereas it would be sufficient to refer to the transcendental apperception of Kant to find the problem that motivates the Elementary Philosophy already formulated; (2) for having contradicted, in the complex development of his thought, the method which he himself has correctly formulated: “the question about the elements of which the representation is formed is again displaced by the problem relative to its origin”. Thus Cassirer could speak of the “dissent” present in Reinhold’s philosophy which finds its clearest expression in the doctrine of the things in themselves. Things in themselves are, on the one hand, absolutely non-representable, and on the other, conditiones sine quibus non of the reality of representations. Where in Kant the concept of a thing in itself indicates “a problem that accompanies and pervades all the work of his thought”, acquiring in every new degree of investigation “a new and more profound meaning” – for example, in the formulation of the ethical problem – in Reinhold all this becomes hopelessly lost in preference for the “pure and simple contradiction which is present in the concept of a ‘pure’ material deprived of every formal determination and in the hypostasis of this concept”. Cassirer concludes from this: “The relapse into dogmatism here cannot be denied since the fundamental

 Cassirer ()  – .

Introduction

7

thought of the Critique, according to which the conditions of being are not determinable other than through the conditions of knowing, is abandoned”¹⁹. We intend our investigation to be distinguished from that of Cassirer by an evaluation of the Elementary Philosophy which may be characterized as follows: First of all, psychology is not only one of the main interests of Reinholdian speculation; it constitutes its most basic assumption. For Reinhold, philosophy and psychology are identical in the final analysis. Moreover, by speaking of transcendental psychology with regard to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, we intend to recover a specific character which distinguishes it from Kant’s transcendentalism to the extent that it accentuates, no doubt in a one-sided way, the theme of consciousness to the detriment of the question of object-directed cognition. The Elementary Philosophy is therefore transcendental, because it poses along with Kant the question of the legitimacy of cognitive experience without limiting itself to referring to the empirical givenness of the faculty of a human being. Yet it is psychological because, unlike Kant, it resolves this problematic by invoking consciousness as a fact²⁰. Therefore, Reinhold’s dogmatism does not depend, as Cassirer would have it, on the postulation of the existence of the thing in itself, but rather on the transformation of the question of validity, that is to be justified, into the question of transcendental factuality upon which one must simply reflect. The theme of the thing in itself is certainly present in Reinhold; however, it depends on a philosophical assumption that appeals to a subjective-immanent aspect of human representations. For us, the pure phenomenological analyses of the Elementary Philosophy to which Cassirer refers is not so much, as the philosopher of Breslau would have it, the correct interpretation of Kant’s Critique, as the necessary consequence of the transcendental-psychological assumption it professes. The present investigation maintains that only in this way does it become possible to posit the thought of Reinhold correctly in the whole post-Kantian debate, not only with respect to Kant, as Cassirer does, but also in relation to the positions which are taken by friends and detractors of the critical philosophy. In other words, the transcendental psychology of Reinhold acquires a true identity not only by comparison with the Critique of Reason, but also by positioning itself against those interpretations of the latter which are too empiricistic.

 Cassirer ()  – .  Max von Zynda absolutely denies that there is space for the transcendental question in Reinhold: cf. von Zynda ()  – . Günter Zöller has spoken of the polysemy of Kant’s “transcendental” – having as much a doctrinal value, which alludes to the theory of idealism, as a methodological value, which has instead to do with the task of explaining the possibility of a synthetic a priori cognition: see Zöller ()  – .

8

Introduction

Max Wundt has spoken of a psychological orientation with regard to Reinhold, as opposed to the transcendental tendency professed in particular by Fichte and the metaphysical tendency present in Schelling. The Elementary Philosophy can be considered as such, because as an offspring of the Popularphilosophie, it interprets the doctrine of Kant as a “higher scientific psychology”. This psychologistic assumption would be shown, for example, in the dissolution of the Kantian distinction of the intelligible world and the phenomenal world, or the identification of phenomenon and representation. Wundt claims therefore: “the concept of objectivity, so fundamental for Kant, is lost and the psychological comprehension which as foundation of representation admits without hesitation the combination of object and consciousness emerges in its place”²¹. Wundt deserves the merit of highlighting the continuity between the late Aufklärung and Reinhold’s philosophical system. He did, however, take this influence one-sidedly to the point of only finding a mere psychological inquiry in the Elementary Philosophy. The reference he makes to the “higher scientific psychology” does not have the same meaning for him as it does for us. For him, this kind of psychology does not involve any critical comprehension, on the contrary, through it “the particular transcendental task of the Critique of Pure Reason is not taken at all into account”²². A revision of Wundt’s claim, according to which the identification of phenomenon and representation in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation dissolves the Kantian difference between the sensible world and the intelligible world, is thus required. In fact, Reinhold insists heavily upon the opposition between the ambit of the things in themselves and the ambit of the phenomena; the distinction between thing in itself and noumenon functions in reestablishing a distinct sense of ‘for us’ in contrast to ‘in itself’. Moreover, the phenomenon (as the thing in itself and the noumenon) is always an object of cognition, and hence of representation. The representation is thus that in consciousness which is distinguished and differentiated from the subject and the object²³. It has the phenomenon for an object, but is not itself a phenomenon. The confirmation: representations of the noumenon (mediated by forms of reason) are given in the same way as representations of the phenomenon (mediated by forms of sensibility and understanding) are given. Finally, if the concept of objectivity is lost in Reinhold, this does not so much depend on the combination of object and consciousness – also present in the Kantian doctrine of the phenomenon – as on the comprehen-

 Wundt ()  – .  Wundt () .  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).

Introduction

9

sion which is shown of it, that is, not as the correspondence which is to be verified in its validity between representations and objects, but as the relation, which is to be recognized in its a priori factuality, between these elements. The first is the transcendental assumption of Kant, the second is the transcendental-psychological assumption of Reinhold. 6. Our present inquiry is subdivided into five parts. In the first chapter, the meaning of the transcendental-psychological assumption of Reinhold is clarified through a comparison with some readings of Kant which have been proposed by both the Kantians and the anti-Kantians. The second chapter verifies this interpretation, albeit in an indirect way, by showing how two of the main elements of the Elementary Philosophy – the concept of “representation” and the “principle of consciousness” – arose and were already developed before the Theory of the Faculty of Representation from within a psychological reflection. The third chapter propounds an analysis of Reinhold’s transcendental psychology as it is defined in the Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation (1789); the fourth chapter traces it, as it changes and is transformed first in the Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of Philosophers (1790) and subsequently in On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge (1791). Finally, the epilogue considers several positions that Reinhold takes on the theme of our investigation towards his departure from Jena in 1794. It will be seen how he not only remained faithful to the idea of philosophy as transcendental psychology in these last assertions in Jena, but how he even accentuated this perspective. The crisis of Elementary Philosophy, typically identified as beginning in 1792, does not essentially call into question Reinhold’s thought up to that time; if anything, it constitutes its coherent conclusion.

I The Old and the New 1 The Context A careful analysis of the intellectual environment surrounding the reception of the Critique of Pure Reason clearly reveals the diversity of the situation. The reading of Kant in light of a conceptual schema that appeals in general to the factualempirical character of the human cognitive structures and faculties, rather than to the transcendental-logical relations that unite the representations with the objects, is present among both the Kantians and the non-Kantians. In other words, the ever-pressing question which arises among the ranks of both the enemies and the friends of the Critical Philosophy was of the type quid facti, rather than quid iuris. For both the former and the latter, transcendental idealism ended up being an anthropologico-psychological theory that would explain the what and the how of the cognition of finite rational beings on the basis of a determinate constitution of the human mind. We will call this the “empirical-psychological” assumption. On the other hand, there were those who thought that the answers proposed in Kant’s Critique of Reason to the questions of “what and how” we know objects are justifiable on the basis of the a priori interaction of certain faculties meant to be conditions of the possibility of experience. In view of this, they were not interested in investigating the organizational aspects of the cognitive structure, but their relations of validity. Nevertheless, the quaestio iuris depends here on a premise that carries factual value: the existence of consciousness. We call this the “transcendental-psychological” assumption. In both cases, the fact that Kant’s question revolves around the what and how the subject cognizes objects was emphasized: whereas the empirical-psychological assumption takes this “what and how” in an empirical-descriptive sense, the transcendental-psychological assumption interprets it in a prescriptive sense. In fact, Kant’s texts are not altogether distant from these ways of conceiving their content. Take the Prolegomena for example. On the question “How is nature itself possible?” – considered by Kant as “the highest point that transcendental philosophy can ever reach, and up to which, as its boundary and completion, it must be taken” – one can, according to Kant, give a two-fold answer: in the material sense, the question can be resolved by referring to “the constitution of our sensibility, in accordance with which our sensibility is affected in its characteristic way”, and in the formal sense, it can be resolved by referring instead to “the constitution of our understanding, in accordance with which all [the] represen-

1 The Context

11

tations of sensibility are necessarily referred to one consciousness”²⁴. Even the Critique of Pure Reason can, according to Kant, offer the same solutions in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Logic (or more precisely, the Analytic), respectively. For example, if one considers the Transcendental Aesthetic (according to the 1781 edition), one comes across assertions which are in effect similar to those of the Prolegomena. The metaphysical exposition of space rhetorically poses the question of whether the two pure forms of sensibility should be construed as real entities (the thesis of Newton and Clarke), as relations between things (the thesis of Leibniz), or rather, as elements belonging “to the subjective constitution of our mind” (the thesis of Kant)²⁵. The second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason stresses the anthropological aspect of the faculty of sensibility in an even more pronounced way. The “intuition” is here explained from the givenness of the object, “but this in turn, at least for us humans, is possible only if it [the object] affects the mind in a certain way”²⁶. And if one considers the Transcendental Analytic, one finds without difficulty passages that take one back to the characteristics of the human mind, from which it is possible to set up the problem of cognition. One of them: “It comes along with our nature [emphases F.F.] that intuition can never be other than sensible, i. e., that it contains only the way in which we are affected by objects. The faculty for thinking of objects of sensible intuition, on the contrary, is the understanding”²⁷. However, these do not compromise the transcendentalism of the Critique of Reason, because the particular characteristics of a human being’s cognitive faculty do not have any bearing on the truly critical question concerning the claim that the representative forms are to be understood as necessarily valid forms for the objects of cognition. Once again, Kant insists on the apriorism and the transcendentalism that contradistinguishes his inquiry to the extent that it is concerned not with objects, but with the way in which the subject is capable of cognizing objects a priori, that is, regarding the question of validity. Still, it is a fact that his contemporaries could find some places in his works that deal with the original constitution of a human being’s cognitive faculty, places that seem to take such an anthropological constitution to be the fundamental principle of transcendental idealism. From here we derive two different readings of Kant: on the one hand, the psychological-factual reading, according to which the faculties of a human being would be considered in their empirical character with the end of responding to the question of how a human being cognizes; on the    

Kant-AA .; en. tr.: Kant ()  – . KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () , emphasis added. KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () , emphasis added. KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () .

12

I The Old and the New

other hand, the transcendental-psychological reading, according to which they would have to constitute the basis of the possibility of how one cognizes. A brief survey of the authors who Reinhold certainly knew will serve to demonstrate how true this is.

2 The Empirical-Psychological Assumption 2.1 The Friends of the Kantian Philosophy 2.1.1 Ludwig Heinrich Jakob In his Prüfung der Mendelssohnschen Morgenstunden, published in Lipsia in 1786, and considered by both the Kantians and the non-Kantians to be one of the canonical texts of the new philosophy, Jakob underscores the contingent structure of our sensibility in no uncertain terms. Things interact with a human being in a certain way, because a human being is endowed with particular organs; if, for instance, a human being had eyes with which he could see objects as magnified, it is evident that “the major part of our beauty would disappear”²⁸. In Jakob’s view, human sensibility consists “in the capacity of our soul to receive immediate representations from objects, due solely to the fact that they make an impression on us in this or that way”²⁹. This leaves open the possibility of positing finite beings different from human beings, beings which are endowed with sensible forms different from those of space and time³⁰. The necessity which is set up for us to formalize the multiplicity of impressions according to these two pure intuitions depends therefore on the factuality of the structure of our sensible faculty. Space and time are, in other words, forms “of a species of sensibility”, and it is therefore not contradictory at all to admit “that there are also innumerable species of the faculty of consciousness” bound to forms which are different from those of a human being, i. e., to admit that there are one or more beings capable of cognizing things “immediately, without sensible intuitions”³¹. In this way, Jakob could extend the contingency which characterizes the sensible faculty of a human being to the problem of cognition, and so claim that we do not know things in themselves but only phenomena because our sensibility will filter the impressions which we receive from the objects according to the modalities that are unique to it. “It can thus be said with every right: the sensible    

Jakob Jakob Jakob Jakob

() () () ()

. . , . .

2 The Empirical-Psychological Assumption

13

world depends on the human being, and if the species of cognition of a human being were not given, there would not be the sensible world either”³².

2.1.2 Friedrich Gottlob Born When dealing with the work of Born, we should turn briefly to two texts which attest to his empirical-psychological reading of the transcendental philosophy: the Versuch über die ersten Gründe der Sinnenlehre which came out in Lipsia in 1788; and an article entitled Ueber den transcendentalen Idealismus, published in 1790 in the Neues Philosophisches Magazin, a journal with a Kantian orientation which was edited by Johann Heinrich Abicht and Born himself. We are already acquainted with the essentials of the thesis that underlies both of these writings in L.H. Jakob’s Prüfung: human sensibility could not receive certain representations from objects, if it did not have for its foundation a faculty of receiving in us external impressions, a receptivity (Empfänglichkeit) that consists “in the particular structure (Textur) and the particular condition (Lage) of different sensible organs”³³. The anthropological characteristics of the sensible faculty are highlighted by Born by stressing the theme of the contingency of the laws which govern our sensibility. The fact that we also possess certain pure representations such as space and time, and that there are particular conditions according to which we can intuit a phenomenal multiplicity – all of these depend on the cognitive structures which we possess. Hence these laws are valid only for us, “and we do not know if beings with another species of sensibility who intuit phenomena according to forms wholly different from ours exist”³⁴. Thus it is not necessary at all that all sensible beings have the same forms of intuition. “These same forms are therefore to this extent equally contingent”³⁵. In sum, one can well hold that thinking beings which are different from us have different cognitive structures; with a change in the constitution of our sensibility, the representations which we have of objects would change too³⁶. The sense of Kantian transcendental idealism, which Born finds in the thesis that phenomena are not absolute, but only relative, effects of objects, is “that they can be modified one way or another according to the constitution of the

 Jakob () .  Born () .  Born () .  Born () .  Born () . The anthropologization of Kantianism by Born is in turn criticized by Schultz () .

14

I The Old and the New

specific nature of the sensible beings”³⁷. They would be considered absolute, if they were to produce the same representations in sensible beings of a different species. If it is true that the relevant question is how we receive impressions from the things, and not that we receive them thereby, it will all depend on the nature of our sensibility, on its “constitution and configuration”. To defend the transcendental idealism of Kant, one must thus take into consideration both “the organization of the sensible organs” or “the receptivity of the sensible faculty”³⁸, and the scope which is proper to them. Therefore, the human being has certain sensations because his organs are made in a certain way; if, for instance, our organ of sight had a different constitution, then the representations we receive by it would under normal circumstances also not be the same as the ones we do have. Born can thus claim that the phenomenality of things depends on the structure of our organs; that which does not correspond to them pertains to the noumenal ambit of the in-itself ³⁹. He attempts to account for the Kantian distinction between a quaestio facti and a quaestio iuris by stressing that the question of transcendental idealism is concerned with how we sense, and not with the fact that we sense. By referring to the structure and the constitution of human sensibility, he transforms it in the final analysis into an anthropological problem. Given that our sensible organs are such and that they are contingent, even our representations of objects are not absolute at all, but merely relative.

2.2 The Opponents of Kantian Philosophy 2.2.1 Adam Weishaupt Four essays on Kantian philosophy by Adam Weishaupt came out between 1787 and 1788: Ueber Materialismus und Idealismus (Nürnberg, 1786, 17872), Zweifel über die Kantischen Begriffe von Zeit und Raum (Nürnberg, 1788), Ueber die Gründe und Gewisheit der Menschlichen Erkenntniβ. Zur Prüfung der Kantischen Critik der reinen Vernunft (Nürnberg 1788), Ueber die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen (Nürnberg, 1788). In the letters of Reinhold, the name of Weishaupt occurs many times over. From a letter addressed to Karl Wilhelm Justi around the end of 1788 or the beginning of 1789, we know that Reinhold could still not read “the most recent at-

 Born ()  – .  Born ()  – .  Born ()  – .

2 The Empirical-Psychological Assumption

15

tacks” against Kant, “though that of Weishaupt, for example, came to be presented in the Anzeigen of G o t t i n g a as a great assault”⁴⁰. In another letter addressed April 30 of the same year to the editor of the Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen Schack Hermann Ewald, Reinhold speaks of the misunderstanding of Kantian philosophy on the part of Weishaupt⁴¹. In a letter from March 13, 1790 to Jacobi, he will speak again of the Weishauptian philosophy as constituting no idealism at all, given that it contradicts itself ⁴². Furthermore, we know that Reinhold is the author of the reviews of the first and the second editions of Ueber Materialismus und Idealismus, both published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (n. 186b. 4 August 1787, coll. 313 – 319; n. 15, 15 January 1789, col. 115). In sum, Weishaupt is an author who was well-noted by Reinhold. His writings were also widely debated in contemporary discussion. There is no doubt that the position assumed by Weishaupt against Kantian philosophy constitutes one of the clearest examples of the psychologistic assumption that refers to the empirical characteristics of a human being’s cognitive faculty. According to Weishaupt, the variation of sensible organs brings with it a change in our intuitions. In fact, one could well think of a sensible organization different from ours, for which our representations are consequently not valid⁴³. Even in regard to mathematical truths, one could affirm that a human being perceives a certain extension and a three-dimensional space by the force of the sensibility and receptivity which he actually possesses. “Yet it is not certain at all that for another kind of receptivity, which is at least just as possible, a space and an extension with three dimensions are similarly given.”⁴⁴ The necessity of the geometrical propositions is thus relative and depends on the contingency of the empirical structure of the sensible faculty with which we perceive space. The same can be said of philosophy in general: in Weishaupt’s view, it makes a great deal of difference how “differently organized beings arrive at reality”⁴⁵. The plurality of philosophical systems is supported, in Weishaupt’s thought, by the plurality of the possible worlds that follows from the fact that rational beings endowed with senses different from the human ones can be hypothesized. Who says that the inhabitants of Saturn have the same concepts of the same objects

 KA . (Letter n. ). Reinhold refers himself to Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen of  November  (n. ), .  KA . (Letter n. ).  KA . (Letter n. ).  Weishaupt (b) ,  – , .  Weishaupt (b) .  Weishaupt ()  – . On this work of Weishaupt’s, see di Giovanni ()  – .

16

I The Old and the New

as we have? Furthermore, after death when we are no longer in possession of our sensibility, who says that our mode of thinking remains invariable?⁴⁶ For Weishaupt, it is not at all true that objects do not exist outside of the cognizing subject. However, it is true for him that they are not in themselves like they appear to us. This idealist thesis, which could well also be emphasized by Kant, has a significance in Weishaupt’s thought which is no longer that of the Critique. In the Critique, the phenomenon is distinguished from the thing in itself insofar as it is cognized according to a legislation which depends on pure a priori forms of the subject, but the thesis becomes for Weishaupt the empirical-psychological one for which the cognized object is different from that in itself, because I could perceive it in different ways. “It can be noticed once and for all: the idealist does not put in doubt the things outside of him, but only the properties which he perceives in them; that he takes a s s u c h for his thoughts, given that beings with different senses and receptivity cognize them differently”⁴⁷. The same object that appears to the human being as a tree could well appear in countless different ways to beings in possession of another sensible organization⁴⁸. Alongside an absolute truth, to be taken as that which indicates the objective, the absolute which is in things, cannot exist but a relative truth that indicates the effect that the objective element of things produces in beings whose sensibility is organized in a certain way⁴⁹. In his first review of the Ueber Materialismus und Idealismus, Reinhold identifies the premises that support Weishaupt’s idealism very well: daß wir alle unsre Begriffe bloß allein durch die Sinne erhalten, und daß mit jeder Veränderung und Modification der Sinne uns die Welt samt ihren Theilen ganz anders erscheine. [that we receive all our concepts only through the senses, and that with the change and modification of the senses, the world, with all its parts, appears in a wholly different way to us.]⁵⁰

In this regard, he proposes a distinction by which he will clarify the transcendentalism proposed by himself and by Kant: it is not organization, but sensible receptivity which, together with understanding and reason, must be invoked to explain the phenomenal world. Only these faculties contain the conditions of possibility without which no necessity of cognizing can be thought. This can cer-

 Weishaupt () .  Weishaupt () .  Weishaupt ()  – .  Weishaupt ()  – ,  – .  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, b,  August ,  – : . The review is also accessible in Landau ()  – .

2 The Empirical-Psychological Assumption

17

tainly be called idealism, though in a sense altogether different from Weishaupt’s, because although it denies the cognition of things in themselves, it reinstates a phenomenal truth without referring to the empirical structures with which a human being cognizes.

2.2.2 Johann Georg Heinrich Feder In his (and Garve’s) review of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Feder had already reproached the philosophy of Kant for leading one to skepticism⁵¹. He reaffirms this point in one of his most important works, Über den Raum und Caussalität zur Prüfung der Kantischen Philosophie, published in Göttingen in 1787. According to Feder, one does not wrong Kant by charging him of skepticism, whether one defines the Critique in terms of a moderate form of skepticism, which inquires about the grounds of speculative philosophy with the end of checking every form of immoderate dogmatism, or one accuses it of skepticism in the strong sense, given that Sextus Empiricus calls the existence of bodies outside of representations into question in just the same way. And is it not skepticism to affirm, as Kant did, that although we cannot cognize supersensible truths with our understanding, we must necessarily admit them in a practical point of view⁵²? Feder prefers, instead, to favor common sense, claiming explicitly that the most solid cognition of reality is that which resides in sensation, where we “sense the necessity”⁵³. In the face of Kantian apriorism, he intends to show, for example, that the two concepts of space and causality can well be received and deduced from sensible experience. We are particularly interested here in the psychological proposition which Feder forwards in opposition to Kant. It is in speaking of the pure concepts of the understanding that he enlists the Analytic of Concepts of the Critique of Pure Reason in that tradition which refers to determinate forces and predispositions of the human soul⁵⁴. This serves to weaken the assumption contained in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, from which it would follow that the forms of intellective cognition are conditions of the possibility of experience and do not, therefore, constitute mere empirical-psychological structures. As an alternative to the Kantian proposition, Feder maintains instead that it all depends on how the human being is made. In order that I might think that the judgments

 “Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen”, ,  January ,  –  (now in Landau (),  – ). On the figure of Feder, see Marino ()  – .  Feder () XXVIII–IX.  Feder () ,  – , , .  Feder () .

18

I The Old and the New

expressed by me have an objective validity, it is necessary that I presuppose “that not only in me, but in all human beings and all rational beings, that which obliges me to judge in this way is an invariable property; that it is not a quality of my understanding”⁵⁵. In order that I might account for the impossibility of my representing the relation between determinate concepts in a way which is different from the actual one, I must have recourse to an invariable “structure” of human nature⁵⁶. He says the same of the relation which unites objects and sensations, which grounds its own universality on the fact that perceptions depend on the organization of our sensible organs. In sum, if one were to call the affirmation of the dependence of sensible phenomena on human organs idealism, “then idealism would certainly be the only existing philosophy”⁵⁷.

2.2.3 Johann Friedrich Flatt One of the main tasks which Flatt claims to have accomplished in his Fragmentarische Beyträge – a work which Reinhold reviews for the Allgemeine LiteraturZeitung (no. 3, 3 January 178, coll. 18 – 22)⁵⁸ – is to establish that, no matter how different and valid the possible deductions of the concept of cause are, none of them “is wholly independent of what is empirical”⁵⁹. With this, he intends to go against the “purely transcendental” conception propounded by Kant by showing that an a posteriori presupposition is at work in the Critique of Reason. To this end, Flatt introduces in the second fragment of the work, which contains some observations on the deductions of the concepts of cause and the universal principles which refer to them, the notion of “natural subjective necessity” which would be followed by the laws of thought. In his view, even the Kantian categories can only be original a priori forms, because there are some “predispositions which are subjective and innate in our existence”⁶⁰. The transition from a subjective necessity to an objective necessity which is not only valid for all rational beings, but also for things external to the understanding, can surely be only a matter of belief and not of demonstration; however, it constitutes the

 Feder ()  (recte: ).  Feder ()  (recte: ).  Feder ()  – .  Reinhold’s review of the text of Flatt gave rise to a heated debate between Reinhold on the one hand, and Flatt and the Philosophisches Magazin of J.A. Eberhard on the other. The attacks of the journal on Reinhold will continue even after the publication of Versuch and Beiträge I. On this subject, see my Einleitung in Fabbianelli (b) XXIX–XXXVI.  Flatt () .  Flatt () .

3 The Transcendental-Psychological Assumption: Reinhold and the Critique

19

“premise” which our nature stipulates, and is valid in every judgment and action – “a premise which, for what I understand, even Kant must admit, if he does not want to fall into contradiction with himself, if he does not want to also eliminate the cognition of truth […] and if he does not want to abandon every knowledge and belief of speculative reason and practical reason to an unlimited skepticism”⁶¹. Kant subscribes to an objective necessity which is referred to all rational beings, but how can he affirm such universality? Surely not by identifying the concept of a rational being with that of a human being – something which, according to Flatt, would not tie in with the same Kantian declarations – nor by staking his claim on “a cognition of experience of the nature of other spirits which he does not have and, according to his system, cannot have”. The only path that remains open for Kant is to take universal validity as the property of that which agrees “with our subjectively necessary laws of thought”⁶². In fact, which would be the objective reasons that, independent of the necessity of an understanding which is only subjective, could be made valid against the possible attacks of a skeptic who might say to himself: I am organized like other human beings in such a way that I cannot think a quadrilateral as triangular, I can think that which arises as something which is under the condition of a phenomenon that precedes it in a regular way […] But who knows if other spirits are organized in a way that the contrary of what I and other human beings can think is thinkable for them?⁶³

Evidently none. Flatt’s conclusion is that this empirical premise, according to which the deduction of objectively valid principles cannot ground on anything but the subjectively necessary laws of thought, is also present in Kant⁶⁴.

3 The Transcendental-Psychological Assumption: Reinhold and the Critique Reinhold encounters the philosophy of Kant in 1785, when the new transcendental thought has not yet been the subject of very widespread discussion⁶⁵. The oc-

 Flatt ()  – .  Flatt ()  – .  Flatt () .  Flatt ()  – .  If four of them which are of little significance are excluded, the only important reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason till then were that of Feder for the “Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen” ( January ) and Garve for the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (ca. September ). The re-

20

I The Old and the New

casion is well-known: the objections which he forwarded in the Schreiben des Pfarrers zu *** ⁶⁶ against the review of the first part of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit ⁶⁷ which Kant had written for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, had incurred a reply in March 1785 from Kant himself ⁶⁸. This was then followed by an intensive period of study of the Critique of Pure Reason on the part of Reinhold. Ueber ein Iahr lang enthielt er sich fast aller andern Lektüre, zeichnete sich die Hauptsätze des Werkes, die er verstanden zu haben glaubte so wohl, als die er wirklich nicht verstanden hatte, besonders auf, und verfertigte mehr als einen mißlungenen Auszug des Ganzen. [For more than a year he [the author, sc. Reinhold] refrained from almost all other reading, noted down those of the work’s main theses he thought he had unterstood as well as those he really had not understood, and prepared more than one unsuccessful epitome of the whole thing]⁶⁹.

Reinhold was certainly no novice to the field of philosophy; as he himself confessed, philosophy had been the main object of his studies for ten years, to which he subordinated his studies of mathematics and the science of beauty. Drey Iahre hindurch hatte er philosophische Vorlesungen nach dem leibnitzischen Systeme gehalten, und die Schriften des grossen Stifters desselben, so wie seines würdigen Gegners Locke, waren ihm keineswegs nur aus den neuern philosophischen Produkten unsrer Landesleute bekannt. [For three years he had given lectures according to the Leibnizian system, and the writings of the great founder, as well as of his worthy opponent Locke, were by no means known to him only from the recent products of our fellow countrymen]⁷⁰.

view of C.G. Schütz will follow them two years later (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  –  July ), on which one might look at chapter . On the impact which the Kantian philosophy had on Reinhold and the birth of the Letters of the Teutscher Merkur, see Grillenzoni ().  Reinhold, “Schreiben des Pfarrers zu *** an den H. des T.M.” ().  Reinhold had presented and discussed the work of Herder in June  for the “Anzeiger des Teutschen Merkur”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, , , LXXXI–IX.  “Erinnerungen des Recensenten der Herderschen Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (No. . u. Beyl. der Allg. Lit.-Zeit.) über ein im Februar des teutschen Merkur gegen diese Recension gerichtetes Schreiben”, as Anhang zum Märzmonat der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung (also in Kant-AA . – ). On the Reinhold-Kant debate in relation to Herder, see Bondeli ().  Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . See also Reinhold’s letter to Jacobi of  in Zoeppritz () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

3 The Transcendental-Psychological Assumption: Reinhold and the Critique

21

It is not surprising that his reading of the Kantian Critique echoes this speculative background. Reinhold lived in the Germany of the 1780s in which the LeibnizWolffian philosophy opened itself to empiricist influences and transformed itself into a framework which no longer focused on “being”, but on the human being instead. The place of ontology – the true and proper philosophia prima for Wolff – was taken over in time by an anthropological-psychological investigation⁷¹. In the Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie from 1786 – 87, one clearly perceives Reinhold’s incessant attempt to distance himself as much from empty demonstrations as from mere facts, and to enter a path that would lead to the reunification of these two poles⁷². With this, Reinhold was doing nothing other than trying to revive a thesis which was expounded in the writing directed at the Kantian review of Herder’s Ideen. He had concluded his intervention by recalling that just as there would be no philosophy without metaphysics, we would not have a history without experience. “Philosophy in the narrowest sense and history in the widest sense are the two poles of the entire human knowledge”⁷³. The Kantian thought, with its reunification of the a priori and the a posteriori, thus seems to confirm for Reinhold that which he had already been thinking before encountering the Critique. Furthermore, he had already emphasized the centrality of the human being in philosophical investigations in the Gedanken über Aufklärung of 1784. The more general notions are distanced from individual sensations and concrete human activities, the more they display uselessness. One must therefore pass from the universal to the particular, descend from the transcendental regions “into the atmosphere of true life”; only then can one construct a bridge between speculation and action; only then can a work that enlightens a human being be thought⁷⁴. However, it is in Reinhold’s inaugural lecture at the University of Jena, published in the Teutscher Merkur of February 1788 under the title Ueber den Einfluβ des Geschmackes auf die Kultur der Wissenschaften und der Sitten, that something new appears for the first time alongside the conceptual schema which we have just seen. Reinhold no longer speaks only in the Enlightenment terms

 Wundt ()  – .  See for example the Second (on the question of the existence of God) and the Third Letter (on the connection between moral and religion from the point of view of the Critique of Reason). On the Letters of the Teutscher Merkur, one might look at the “Introduction” by Karl Ameriks to the English edition of the same work: Ameriks (); see also Bondeli (), Marx () and Piché ().  Reinhold, “Schreiben des Pfarrers zu *** an den H. des T.M.” () .  Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung” ()  – .

22

I The Old and the New

of the necessity of unifying theory and practice, but ventures to provide, even if only in an incidental way, an assessment of the nature of the Critique of Reason. There is evidence that the lively discussions of the time about the aims and the nature of Kantian transcendental idealism had also begun to take effect even in the personal understanding that Reinhold was nurturing. The article in question is even more interesting, given that it was written a few months before the socalled Neue Entdeckung, published in September 1788 in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, in which the conceptual schema that Reinhold would use in his Theory of the Faculty of Representation was inaugurated and according to which the philosophical disputes about (but not limited to) the existence of God had split against one another three parties to one⁷⁵. After the dark years of the Middle Ages, Renaissance Italy, according to Reinhold, saw a reawakening of interest in taste and beauty. Contemporaneously, philosophy and religion assumed a more human character, the former working scrupulously to cultivate healthy reason, the latter, a love for one’s neighbor. The new humanistic spirit reached even those countries where the effects of the Reformation had not yet been felt. However, it was only “from the middle of the last century that the flowers and fruits of taste had begun to become less rare even in our country”. The obscure and gothic character of the German world became milder; theological reason was thus able to retrieve the freedom that had been subdued by Luther in his time. In sum, the sciences in their complexity became more human. Philosophy, too, “was brought back from the empty regions of the true and real world of ideas to render the main object of the real world – the human being – the principal object of its attention”⁷⁶. In this reawakening of the sense of beauty and the new interest in the critique of taste – an evident, though implicit, hint of the reevaluation of the socalled inferior faculty of cognition propounded by Baumgarten – Reinhold saw the motive which had driven some philosophers to investigate the ultimate sources of this field of knowledge. In this context, the inquiry into the faculty of sensation and the important discoveries arose “that led little by little to a new cognition, grounded on observations and experience, of the nature of our faculty of representation in general”. In this way, Germany became the cradle “of the socalled aesthetic, of empirical psychology, and, finally, of the Critique of Reason (that is, of the scientific and superior psychology)”⁷⁷.

 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, a,  September ,  – . On the “Neue Entdeck[ung]”, Lazzari ()  – .  Reinhold, “Ueber den Einfluβ des Geschmackes” ()  – .  Reinhold, “Ueber den Einfluβ des Geschmackes” ()  – .

3 The Transcendental-Psychological Assumption: Reinhold and the Critique

23

At least two points in this piece of work from Reinhold are worth consideration: (1) the allusion to the new empirical inquiries into the faculty of representation in general – a concept which, refined and determined with more precision, will return forcefully in the Second Book of the Essay (1789) in particular; (2) the identification of the Critique of Reason with a “scientific and superior” psychology. If the former point highlights the observant and experiential character of the investigations dedicated to the representative faculty, the latter shows the understanding that Reinhold possessed regarding Kant’s transcendental philosophy, even after continuous and repeated readings of the Critique of Pure Reason. As such, a year before the publication of the text with which the new Elementary Philosophy was founded – the Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation – Reinhold thought that the sense of the Kantian enterprise was to be found in a type of psychological inquiry. Whereas its scientific character takes us back to rules that exclude every insecure and unstable basis of it, the feature of superiority indicates the apriority of the Kantian enterprise. This does not exclude an empirical dimension of observation and experience; rather, the Critique of Reason could have only been born, according to Reinhold, as a result of the new interest, founded on observations and experience, in the faculty of human representation. The new psychology is superior not because of its object (as in the Leibniz-Wolffian school, which classified the human faculties into the inferior and the superior on the basis of their constitutive characters), but because of its method. Reinhold saw in the Critique of Reason an attempt to inquire into the human faculty of representation which could combine empirical and a priori characteristics. Developed and applied to the new theory of representation, this reading of the Critique in terms of a scientific and higher psychology would ultimately give rise to the transcendentalpsychological assumption of which we have already spoken⁷⁸.

 Schultz () constitutes an important example of rigorously transcendental exegeses of Kantian texts; it is true that it affirms for example that the discursivity of our understanding finds the reason of its being in its nature (p. ). However, the end of the Critique of Pure Reason is clear to Schultz: “The Critique of Pure Reason is only concerned with whether and in which way synthetic a priori cognitions which can merely be applied a priori to objects are possible” (p. ). There is no passage of the Erläuterungen that speaks of the structure or constitution of the mind, from which the characters of transcendental cognition are deduced. The review of Schultz’s Erläuterungen (in which the Critique of Pure Reason is in effect exclusively spoken of) – written by C. G. Schütz for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (from  to  July ) – too goes in the same direction; now in: Landau ()  – . On the person of J. Schultz, see Bonelli Munegato ().

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation The transition from the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation is brought about slowly and gradually by Reinhold. He became aware of the need to go beyond Kant also thanks to his readings of authors of the Leibniz-Wolffian school and the Kantian school: After reflecting upon “the method which he would have to choose to lecture on the initial grounds of philosophy according to new principles”, “he consulted the supporters and opponents of the Kantian philosophy known to him”, and he is not able to say “to which of these two he owes more clues and more illuminating insights for the solution of his difficult problem”⁷⁹. Now, we should direct our attention to two central elements of Reinhold’s thought as they were defined even before the elaboration of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation: the concept of representation and the principle of consciousness. It will be shown that both elements were developed in Reinhold from a psychological assumption. By uncovering their roots, we will indirectly verify the thesis advanced in the preceding chapter, according to which the Elementary Philosophy pursues the project of a scientific and superior psychology initiated, according to Reinhold, by the Critique of Kant. Moreover, we will see that Reinhold is indebted, at least in part, to his confrontation with various authors of the old and new philosophies in the determination of both of these elements.

1 The Concept of Representation 1.1 Reinhold and the “Bridges of Communication” Having defined the sense of the task of enlightening (aufklären) – “enlightenment means, in general, the making of rational men out of men who are capable of rationality” – and having also rediscovered enlightenment in terms of transforming obscure concepts into clear and distinct ones, Reinhold recalls in the Gedanken über Aufklärung the importance of reason in breaking up an obscure

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

1 The Concept of Representation

25

concept into its constitutive features (Merkmale)⁸⁰. If it is true that the cobbler who cognizes clearly the procedure with which a shoe is constructed can in a similar sense be called enlightened, enlightened are usually called only those individuals who are capable of making use of such distinct concepts, which have a considerable influence on human happiness⁸¹. It is not true that conceptual clarity is the exclusive privilege of philosophers; there is both a natural and an artificial clarity and distinctness of concepts, just as there is in fact both a natural and an artificial logic. While the first belongs to the masses (Pöbel), the latter is the property of philosophers. Man bemerke den Unterschied zwischen den deutlichen Begriffen des Pöbels und jenen des Philosophen […] Die Fähigkeit des Pöbels zu deutlichen Begriffen ist mehr leidend als wirkend; die des Philosophen mehr wirkend als leidend; der Philosoph lehrt; der Pöbel lernt; der Philosoph zergliedert den Begriff; der Pöbel fasset den zergliederten auf. [Note the difference between the distinct concepts of the masses and those of the philosopher […] The capacity of the masses for distinct concepts is more passive than active; that of the philosopher is more active than passive. The philosopher teaches; the masses learn. The philosopher analyzes the concept; the masses apprehend that which has been analyzed]⁸².

If the masses are to be able to assume a pure philosophical concept, there, according to Reinhold, have to be particular concepts that serve as “bridges of communication between science and ignorance”, concepts which are neither too elevated for the masses nor too low for the philosopher, concepts which belong to the cognitive domain of both. “In these concepts lies the talisman of popular enlightenment”⁸³. For example, between the distinct concept which the philosopher possesses of divine justice on the basis of which he is capable of loving God, and the obscure concept which the masses possess and according to which they only see hardship and severity in divine justice, it is possible to find an intermediate concept, that of a “father”, which unites the two opposites. The representation of God as the wise father which the philosopher possesses coincides with that of the vulgar, who sees a good father in God. In this way, the vulgar will be able to accept the sense of divine justice, thanks to the figure of a wise father who only punishes for good. Reinhold’s thesis is clear: in order to exercise the work of Enlightenment on the common man, the philosopher must appeal to concepts common to both.

 Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung” () ; en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – . The Enlightenment aspect of Reinhold’s thought has been insisted on by Schrader ().  Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung” ()  – .  Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung” ()  – ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung” () ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .

26

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

Only by resorting to something which is commonly accepted does it become possible for him to render clear what is obscure. The value of these “bridges of communication” is evidently only psychological; in this case, the question is how an uneducated person can come to believe in something that goes beyond his own conceptual domain. The theoretical characteristic which is expressed here ‒ the necessity of a basis which is admitted by all the parties involved as the point of departure of the confrontation ‒ returns within the conception of representation which Reinhold will propound in his Elementary Philosophy. He says that: Die Vorstellung ist das einzige, über dessen Wirklichkeit a l l e Philosophen einig sind. Wenigstens wenn es überhaupt etwas giebt, worüber man in der philosophischen Welt einig ist, so ist es die Vorstellung; kein Idealist, kein Egoist, kein dogmatischer Skeptiker kann das Daseyn der Vorstellung leugnen. [Representation is the only thing about whose actuality all philosophers are in agreement. At least if there is anything at all about which there is agreement in the philosophical world it is representation; no idealist, no solipsist, no dogmatic skeptic can deny the existence of representation]⁸⁴.

While Reinhold begins in the Gedanken über Aufklärung with the presupposition that the “bridges of communication” are sufficiently clear to the interlocutors so as not to require any further clarification, he will subsequently think that it is necessary to extend the analysis and with this, also the clarification of the notions, to those concepts such as representation, upon which everyone seems to agree. The familiar will no longer be the known; the analysis will apply to the very “bridges of communication” themselves.

1.2 Some Readings of Reinhold Reinhold’s attempt to reunify the various forms of knowledge under the concept of representation does not constitute anything new in the contemporary field of speculation. One knows that the term in question constitutes the German translation for the Lockean notion of “idea”, by which one indicates what is given in consciousness. Leibniz, on the other hand, spoke of représentation, presupposing in this regard a unitary conception of consciousness itself. If he had distinguished between perceptio as the representative act and the idea as content of representation in his Latin works, Wolff would have, in turn, reunified the two

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

1 The Concept of Representation

27

aspects in his German writings under the term Vorstellung, which would come to be used practically by all those who would later follow this tradition⁸⁵. In what follows, I want to indicate some texts which Reinhold certainly knew, in which that unitary conception of the forms of human consciousness that will return in the Elementary Philosophy is proposed under the rubric of “representation”.

1.2.1 The Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens of Johann August Eberhard The work of Eberhard⁸⁶, from the beginning of the winter semester of 1787– 88, became the manual upon which Reinhold based his lessons on aesthetics at the University of Jena⁸⁷. Eberhard would ultimately define the concept of “representation” as belonging to “transcendental psychology”⁸⁸. Eberhard’s thesis was that if the forces of thought and of sensation were present separately in the soul without being reunited in a fundamental and original force, it would be impossible to recover the rules that establish the modalities in accordance with which they (as it, in fact, happens) reciprocally limit and influence each other. Psychology can be defined as a science only when it is capable of tracing all the different forces of the soul back to a single fundamental force. So long as this cannot be done, it will be constrained to invent a particular force for every activity of the soul. The different opinions which the philosophers have in this regard testify to the multiplicity of the number of forces which can be invoked to explain psychological phenomena. Why limit oneself to three and not arrive instead at seven forces, as some neo-Platonists do, or nine, as Chrisippus does? Once Descartes recognized the immateriality of the soul, it became easier to avoid the danger of an infinitization of psychical forces; in fact, it was realized that their multiplication cannot be admitted without actually presupposing their extensionality⁸⁹.

 On the history of the concept of “representation”, see Ritter/Gründer/Gabriel ()  – .  Eberhard ().  “[Reinhold] will read in the next winter semester publicly on the Kantian theory of the faculty of cognition, as introduction to the Critique for beginners and privatim on the aesthetic theory, following the manual of Eberhard and adding his own considerations” (Jenaische gelehrte Anzeigen, ,  October , ). See also Reinhold’s letter to Gerhard Anton von Halem of  August , in KA . (Letter n. ).  Eberhard () .  Eberhard ()  – .

28

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

According to Eberhard, for all their dissimilarity, the two faculties of the soul, thought and sense, can in the final analysis be explained as stemming from an original faculty that serves to provide a “sufficient general reason” for deducing the different modifications of all the derived forces. “If this original general force is enough to provide the sufficient reason of all psychological phenomena, it would no longer be philosophically permissible to take refuge in a multiplication of fundamental forces” as it happened “in the infancy of psychology”⁹⁰. To confirm the unity of the forces, one can, according to Eberhard, invoke the evidence of consciousness: we sense that our soul is always one and the same soul. It is singular, because the essence that thinks in us represents itself as that singular subject which thinks, senses, acts and feels. In the same way, if one were to admit many different forces, it would be the case that force A knows nothing of what force B has achieved, and force B can in turn cognize nothing of what force C has produced. The soul is also always the same, because it is simple. Thanks to the conservation of the truly indivisible personality, it can become conscious of its own identity; the soul is thus one singular force that modifies itself and assumes different forms⁹¹. According to Eberhard, in whichever way one breaks down the phenomena of the soul, one necessarily arrives at the observation of the existence of representations. “The fundamental force of the human soul cannot be other than the striving to have representations”⁹². Using a conceptual schema belonging to the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition itself, Eberhard establishes that a force cannot subsist without a substance that supports it. Whereas sensing constitutes a passive state, thinking is an active condition of the soul; the former is distinguished by the obscurity of present representations, the latter instead by their distinctness⁹³. There are at least two points of agreement between Reinhold and Eberhard: (1) the unity and singularity of the forms of knowledge, all traceable back to representations. This thesis of the Leibniz-Wolffian school recurs predominantly in Reinhold. The basis from which the Elementary Philosophy begins will be the idea expressed in Eberhard’s Theorie, according to which every psychical phenomenon is a representative phenomenon, without the “dogmatic” reference to the soul as substance⁹⁴. (2) The evidence of consciousness as a ground to sus-

 Eberhard () .  Eberhard ()  – .  Eberhard ()  – , ,  – .  Eberhard ()  – .  Among the non-Kantian authors known by Reinhold (he speaks of him, for example, in the Versuch,  – , but also in a letter to C. F. Nicolai of  May : KA . –  (Letter n. ))

1 The Concept of Representation

29

tain the unity of the various forms of knowledge. Reinhold will find the basis of his own thought in the idea of consciousness as a fact evident to all human beings, upon which the fundamental concepts of philosophy can be determined.

1.2.2 The Critique of Pure Reason and the Review of Christian Gottfried Schütz Both the first and the second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason contain a passage which is rightly considered to be fundamental to Reinhold’s thinking. In the Transcendental Dialectic, having introduced the concept of illusion and expounded the character of the faculty of reason in its formal-logical and transcendental use, Kant moves on to analyze the notion of idea. So as to clarify the correct use of terms, he asserts that philosophy is certainly in possession of denominations appropriate to different species of representations, which must be used in a correct way in order to avoid misunderstanding. These different species of representation are listed by Kant “in their progressive scale”. Here we will cite this important passage of the Critique in its entirety: The genus is representation in general (repraesentatio). Under it stands the representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception that refers to the subject as a modification of its state is a sensation (sensatio); an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). The latter is either an intuition or a concept (intuitus vel conceptus). The former is immediately related to the object and is singular; the latter is mediate, by means of a mark, which can be common to several things. A concept is either an empirical or a pure concept, and the pure concept, insofar as it has its origin solely in the understanding (not in a pure image of sensibility), is called notio. A concept made up of notions, which goes beyond the possibility of experience, is an idea or a concept of reason⁹⁵.

There is no doubt that Reinhold had this passage of Kant in mind when he formulated his thesis of representation as the genus under which one finds the different species consisting of sensible representation, intellective concept and ra-

who had treated representation in the unitary sense just discussed, there is also Heinrich Corrodi. He claimed: “Cognition comes from representation. Representation is the name of every change of something or of the subject […]. Representation comprehends therefore under itself, in a manifest way, as the universal subject or the subject of the highest kind, ideas and ideal images, concepts, sensible perceptions and thoughts. And sensing or perceiving and apperceiving, understanding, imagining [phantasieren], thinking are all modifications of representing” (Corrodi () ).  KrV, A /B  – ; en. tr.: Kant ()  – . On the concept of representation in Kant, see Rumore ().

30

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

tional idea⁹⁶. It can be observed in this regard that whereas it has only a classificatory value for Kant, the Stufenleiter of the concept of representation possesses a material dimension for Reinhold: the various representative forms are species of the genus “representation”, because they share the same fundamental properties of it⁹⁷. However, we might once again recall the review of Schultz’s Erläuterungen which Christian Gottfried Schütz had written for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (12– 30 July 1785), taking into consideration the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena, as possibly a more important source of the concept of representation for Reinhold than the Critique of Pure Reason. As Reinhold himself confessed in the first letter of his which is addressed to Kant, it is thanks to this review that he had the opportunity to get to know the new transcendental philosophy⁹⁸. In the review of Schütz, he could read the above cited passage on the gradual scale of the forms of representation. Schütz defined the Kantian subdivision as very useful and commented on it with various considerations. For example, in regard to the point that Kant had distinguished between sensation as subjective perception and cognition as objective perception, the reviewer observed that though they frequently tend to co-exist, there were still cases in which sensation is, so to speak, pure and not mixed with cognition. This is evidenced in the account of the man from Stockholm who fell into the water and, despite hearing something, was still not capable of saying just what it was he had heard (the sound of bells): “to him it was nothing other than the consciousness of a change in himself”⁹⁹. Schütz also made some personal additions to the Kantian scale. For example, he distinguishes between pure concepts arising “from pure image[s] of sensibility [for instance, the concept of a triangle]” – his proposal was to call it a mathematical or purely sensible concept (reinsinnlicher Begriff), rather than a pure sensible concept (reiner sinnlicher Begriff) – and pure concepts arising “from representation of the functions of the understanding itself” – a notion (Notion) in the Kantian sense of the word. Also, with regard to the concept of notion, he distinguished between primitive notions – the predications or the categories – and derived notions – the predicables (Prädicabilien) of the pure understanding: “of the category causality the predicables of action and of passion”. From another point of view, the notions could, in his view, be considered either as applica-

 See for example Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  See in this regard Bondeli () .  Reinhold’s letter to Kant of  October : KA . (Letter n. ). On Schütz, see Schröpfer ().  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  July , .

1 The Concept of Representation

31

ble to experience or as going beyond the possibility of experience: only the second can rightly be called an idea in the Kantian sense¹⁰⁰. Hence Schütz continued: We have rendered this table [of representations] a little more complete than that which was presented by Kant in the chosen place; however, as is understood, only by starting with his other concepts mentioned in other places of the Critique of Pure Reason. In addition, we want to present it here once again in the form of a true and proper table¹⁰¹.

Schütz then presented the following table:¹⁰² representation without consciousness

with consciousness perception subjective sensation

objective cognition

singular intuition empirical

pure

general concept empirical

pure

from pure images of sensibility purely sensible concept

from mere understanding notion

with respect to deduction root concepts categories

with respect to content

derived applicable to predicables of experience pure understanding

going beyond the possibility of experience ideas

This table of representations has a striking feature that distances it from Kant and brings it closer to Reinhold. When Schütz emphasizes that it is not at all true that sensation and cognition must always stay together, given that cases of pure sensation, not mixed with cognition, that is, with categorical perception, can well be devised, he highlights a characteristic which will become central to

 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  July , .  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  July , .  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  July , .

32

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

Reinhold’s speculation in opposition to Kant’s: the independence of sensible representation from intellective representation. Both, in fact, possess their specific form and material, and each thus presents a unity both constitutionally different and autonomous with respect to the other.

1.2.3 The Grundriβ der allgemeinen Logik und kritische Anfangsgründe zu einer allgemeinen Metaphysik of Ludwig Heinrich Jakob In regard to the concept of representation, we want to recall an extremely important text for Reinhold, the Grundriβ der allgemeinen Logik und kritische Anfangsgründe zu einer allgemeinen Metaphysik by Ludwig Heinrich Jakob. Published for the first time in 1788, it underwent three further editions (1791, 1794, 1800). It is certainly one of the most widely disseminated manuals of Kantian philosophy. Of even greater interest to us is the fact that Reinhold spoke of it in a review on the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung which came out on the 11th and 12th of January, 1790. The Grundriβ of Jakob contains a table of representations, too: representation obscure representation

perception

sensation

cognition

intuition pure

empirical

pure sensible concept

concept pure

empirical pure concept of the understanding notion

idea

Reinhold’s observations in this table of representations echo the general critique which he had raised against Jakob. According to Reinhold, Jakob had proposed a definition of cognition which is inadmissible from the transcendental point of view; to affirm, as does the Grundriβ, that cognizing something means representing something with consciousness or reuniting different representations in a consciousness, does not, in fact, dismiss one’s having cognition of supersensible objects. In the eyes of Reinhold, it is thus no wonder that Jakob admits not only cognition into his table of representations – for Reinhold instead, representing

2 The Principle of Consciousness

33

does not mean cognizing at all, even if the contrary is true¹⁰³ – but also intuition, concept and even idea¹⁰⁴. The idea for Reinhold is a notion which goes beyond all possible experience, which cannot be referred to any sensible intuition, and is thus empty from the cognitive point of view.

2 The Principle of Consciousness 2.1 Reinhold Like the concept of representation, the principle of consciousness in Elementary Philosophy is the fruit of a long gestation¹⁰⁵. We will see, however, that despite the terminological and conceptual variations, there is a stable core in the time that passes from its first appearance to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation: its psychological character. Both the Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie of 1786 – 87 and the essay Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens (1788 – 89) are a first undisputed testimony of it. There are two places in the Briefe in which the principle of consciousness is formulated: the first can be found in the Sixth letter, devoted to the interest which religion and morality inculcate in the face of the elimination of every cognitive ground of a metaphysical sort for the future life; the second is found in the Seventh letter, which propounds a brief history of the psychological concept of a “simple thinking substance”. Let us spell them out here before offering a critique in analytic terms. The first passage is as follows: Das Etwas, das in ihm denkt, das er aber eben darum von allen seinen Vorstellungen unterscheidet, weil er es um der Geistigkeit willen, als etwas, das als absolutes Subjekt da ist, denken muß, – und das er von allem was er ausser sich selbst wirkliches kennt unterscheidet, weil er es als einfach denken muß; mit einem Worte diese[s] denkende, einfache und substanzielle Etwas = x kann nichts auf ihn wirken, so wenig er darauf wirken kann;

 Versuch,  (RGS .).  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  January , . Reinhold will write further to Jacobi on  March  that Jakob has done more harm than good to the Kantian philosophy: KA . (Letter n. ).  Alessandro Lazzari has also spoken of it in two of his articles: Lazzari (b) and Lazzari (). When I speak of the principle of consciousness with reference to works preceding the Elementary Philosophy, I intend to assert that it is already present in a nutshell, not forgetting that Reinhold has recourse to the expression “principle” (Satz) only in , in Beiträge I (see, for example, pp. , ; ed. : pp. , ).

34

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

greift in keine seiner wirklichen Vorstellungen ein; und ist weder ein Gegenstand seines Hasses noch seiner Liebe; eben weil es für ihn = x ist. He distinguishes the something in him [in a speculative mind, F.F.] that thinks from all his representations precisely because he must, on account of its spiritual nature, think of it as something that is present as an absolute subject. And he distinguishes it from everything actual that he is acquainted with outside himself because he must think of it as simple. In a word, this thinking, simple, and substantial something = x can have as little of an effect on him as he can have on it. It intervenes in none of his actual representations and is an object neither of his hate nor of his love precisely because for him it is [a something] = x ¹⁰⁶.

The second passage, in contrast, reads: Gleich mit der ersten Morgendämerung der Vernunft mußte sich das denkende Ich, den Gesetzen des Bewußtseyns gemäß, von jeder seiner gedachten Vorstellungen, und foglich auch schon darum vom Körper, in so ferne dieser unter jenen Vorstellungen vorkam, unterscheiden. [Right at the first dawning of reason, the thinking I, in conformity with the laws of consciousness, had to distinguish itself from every one of the representations it was thinking and consequently also from the body, particularly in so far as this body appeared among those representations]¹⁰⁷.

Both places deal with the difference between the mind (or soul) and the body. The heart of the question is how the immortality of the soul can and must be considered without entering into infinitely sterile metaphysical disputes. Reinhold translates the conceptual schema of the Critique of Reason here, observing, for example, that it is possible to make use of the psychological concept of the I think on the basis of the cognitive ground of the moral (not metaphysical) type, not so much, however, as a stronghold (Grundfest) for the conviction of a future life, but as an embankment (Schutzwehre) in the face of the attacks against religion. The psychological course of Reinhold’s reflection does not evidently lie in the object that is treated – to be precise, the soul as distinct from the body – but instead in the method that is used to recognize the distinction between the thinking subject and the material body. It is possible to get hold of this distinction, according to Reinhold, to the extent that one attains the given of experience. When one tries instead to go beyond it, thus not limiting oneself to what perception attests to us, one breaks into the field of metaphysics. It is subjective  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Sixth Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Seventh Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The Principle of Consciousness

35

experience that allows us to distinguish between I and body, it is subjective experience to which one must turn in order to justify one’s own conviction of the future life. In fact, the givens contained in it are subjective, but are not only subjectively valid; that which allows us to speak in favor of their universality is the fact that the distinction which the subject makes between itself and the body is the result of the “laws of consciousness”¹⁰⁸. One must, on the basis of the “constitution of our faculty of cognition”, necessarily distinguish between the two objects, even without cognizing the ground of this distinction. Hence the issue in question here is not the reality of the difference between the cognizing subject and the cognized object – clear for Reinhold “from the most ancient eras”¹⁰⁹ – but rather the possibility of it, explained by philosophers in different ways. If the distinction between the soul and the body were the result of the cognition of each of them as they are in themselves, then it would only be possible when human reason were elevated to the level of metaphysical science; the fact that it constitutes instead an incontrovertible given, a view which has, in fact, a widespread diffusion and indubitable popularity, means that it does not at all represent the product of a refined reason, but a “subjective law of our faculty of cognition”¹¹⁰. As such, it had to have appeared among the first expressions of the true use of reason – “hence, its historical antiquity” –, must have ended up being more or less evident to all human beings – “hence, its popularity and universal dissemination” – and had to have taken refuge from more or less sophistical objections – “hence, the ancient and lasting agreement” in its regard. As such, it can be considered a “product of the human spirit” which every human being is capable of recognizing and accepting¹¹¹. The distinction between the I and its representations, or the I and its body, is for now the unique characteristic contained in this primordial formulation of the principle of consciousness; the aspect of ‘reference’ is still missing¹¹². However, there is already an appeal to consciousness, or better, the laws of consciousness, and to the constitution of the faculty of cognizing which brings us to distinguish the parts in question. Reinhold arrives at the principle of consciousness by ap-

 Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Seventh Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Seventh Letter)  – ; en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Seventh Letter)  – ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Seventh Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  See Lazzari (b) .

36

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

pealing to the givenness of consciousness. We could say that the way he spoke about consciousness in 1786 – 87 did not distinguish it at all from the inner sense. Nevertheless, the essay Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens, published in the Teutscher Merkur between October 1788 and January 1789, conceptualizes the distinction (though the reference is missing here as well) between characteristics recurring to consciousness. Here, Reinhold expresses better than in the Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie the three-fold partition which distinguishes this formulation of the principle of consciousness by often making use of a conceptuality which will later show in his more mature formulations of the same principle. Wir sind durchs Bewußtseyn genöthiget die Vorstellung, die wir von unsrem organischen Körper haben, sowohl von dem organischen Körper selbst, als auch von unserm vorstellenden Subjekte zu unterscheiden, und den erstern in die Reihe der ausser uns befindlichen Dinge zu versetzen, von denen wir nur durchs afficirt werden Vorstellungen haben können. [Consciousness compels us to distinguish the representation which we have of our organic body as much from the organic body itself as from our representing subject, and to posit the first in the series of things which are found outside of us, of which we can have representations only because of affection]¹¹³.

Here, in contrast with the Briefe, Reinhold observes what will be said in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, that is, that consciousness compels us to draw such a distinction¹¹⁴. It is also affirmed in a clearer manner than before – and in the same way as in the Essay of 1789 – that the state of being pleased (which he will later call representation) has internal and external conditions. Reinhold found these in the “representing subject” and the “represented object”. Aber auch das vorstellende Subject und das vorgestellte Objekt, ohne welche sich freylich das Vergnügen nicht denken läßt, können […] nur als solche Bedingungen in Betrachtung kommen, die ausser dem Vergnügen selbst liegen, und welche von denen genau unterschieden werden müssen die in jedem Vergnügen selbst vorkommen, die Natur desselben ausmachen, und folglich allein die eigentlichen konstitutiven Gründe des Vergnügens sind. [But the representing subject and the represented object too, without which pleasure is certainly not thinkable, can be considered […] only as conditions which are found outside of pleasure and which must be distinct in a precise way from those which appear in every pleasure itself, which constitute the nature of it and are therefore the only and true constitutive grounds of pleasure]¹¹⁵.

 Reinhold, “Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens” ()  – .  See Versuch,  (RGS .).  Reinhold, “Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens” () ; for the Versuch: .

2 The Principle of Consciousness

37

2.2 Some Readings of Reinhold Reinhold could find a formulation of the principle of consciousness in the Philosophische Aphorismen of Ernst Platner¹¹⁶: one reads in paragraphs 21– 22 of the edition of 1784 that “when I sense my I or self, I clearly sense the ideas which stand before me as something different from the I or self”; “I sense just as clearly the I or the self as something different from all the cognized parts of the body”¹¹⁷. As far as the distinction which is declared in Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens between the external and the internal conditions of representation goes, it was also presented by L. H. Jakob in the already mentioned Grundriβ der allgemeinen Logik und kritische Anfangsgründe zu einer allgemeinen Metaphysik. After having propounded the subdivision of representations, this important Kantian manual established a distinction between different forms of abstraction: “one either abstracts from something, or certain determinations of a thing are abstracted (abstrahere ab aliqua re and abstrahere aliquid)”. In the first case, Jakob continues, one eliminates everything from consciousness “and considers representation in itself and with itself” without referring it to something else. In the second case, one takes a representation of an object “and always considers it with reference to its determinate object”¹¹⁸. In the eyes of Jakob, it is possible to make sense of the Kantian Copernican revolution by means of this distinction: the case of the consideration of representation in and for itself, independently of the object, would constitute, in his view, the moment by which objects conform to consciousness; the second case would instead be that by which cognition orientates itself to the objects. To distinguish more precisely the two types of abstract consciousness, he proposes to call the first pure consciousness and the second abstract consciousness¹¹⁹. Finally, in regard to the relation that binds representation to consciousness, Reinhold was able to find a formulation of it in a text which he certainly knew, the Grundsätze der reinen Philosophie by Christian Gottlieb Selle¹²⁰. Having de-

 A. Lazzari has shown this in the article recalled above. With convincing arguments, he has also suggested that the review of Platner’s Philosophical Aphorisms published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on  September  (Supplement to n. ,  – ) may be attributed to Reinhold: see Lazzari (b). The Reinholdian readings of Platner’s psychology in particular relation to the concept of the “soul” have been discussed by Bondeli ().  Platner ()  – .  Jakob () Second Part, § , p. .  Jakob () Second Part, § , p. .  Reinhold speaks of it for example in the Versuch,  (RGS .).

38

II From the Critique of Reason to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

fined sensibility as the faculty of cognition which becomes conscious of things through sensation, Selle moves on to the explanation of what representation is: “the consciousness of an experienced sensation is called a representation. Representations are therefore consequences of the change of our sensibility”¹²¹. Having put sensibility and representation in an exclusive relation, he was then able to conclude that a priori representations do not exist¹²². The general system of Selle’s reflection is evidently of an empirical nature in a double respect. It is observed, first of all, through the reference to sensible experience of which one becomes conscious, and in the second place, through the accent placed on our sensibility. When one speaks of representation, it is necessary to refer to structural characteristics of the sensible faculty which we human beings have received. Reinhold could not but disagree with Selle for various different reasons. For Reinhold, it is not true that representation is referred only to sensibility, or that one must invoke the organized and causal aspect which contradistinguishes our sensible faculty to explain it. However, he could no doubt identify with the idea that representation has a necessary relation with consciousness, given that it expresses what he had already said some years back. Furthermore, a corollary of this thesis is constituted by the idea that unconscious representations are not admitted. In fact, if representation is definable only and exclusively with respect to consciousness, it cannot but follow that representations without consciousness are impossible. In the dispute between the Locke of the Essay on Human Understanding and the Leibniz of the New Essays of Human Understanding (also defended by Platner in his Philosophical Aphorisms), Reinhold could therefore find in Selle a companion in supporting the English philosopher. Selle’s thesis was immediately made subject of discussion by Friedrich Gottlob Born in his Versuch über die ersten Gründe der Sinnenlehre. In Born’s view, Selle had proceeded in an arbitrary manner in defining the concept of representation. Born did not see the reason for positing consciousness as “a necessary condition for the possibility of experience”. There are in fact “millions of representations in the soul” of which we are only partially conscious. And are there not also obscure representations, that is to say, those without consciousness? Born’s conclusion, then, is that Selle has “presupposed as true and indubitable that which has not only yet to be demonstrated, but that which cannot in general be demonstrated, i. e., that representation and consciousness are found to be in-

 Selle () .  Selle () .

2 The Principle of Consciousness

39

separably connected”¹²³. As confirmation of his thesis, Born denied Selle’s claim that representation constitutes the product of an experienced sensation. In the explanation he provides in support of his denial, he confines himself to rhetorically questioning where Selle’s certainty comes from that no cognition independent of experience and sensation is given in the soul, and moreover who could ever demonstrate the impossibility of a cognition which is independent of sensible impressions. For him, the idea that sensible cognition is the result not only of impressions, but also of the contribution supplied by the same faculty of cognition, was absolutely sustainable. The possibility of this species of cognition is not at all dreamt and ideal, it is objective and real. In our faculty of cognition, there are, in fact, fundamental principles which, given that they express the most rigorous universality, the most unconditioned necessity, cannot at all be the fruit of experience and the result of induction¹²⁴.

 Born () .  Born () .

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation The first chapter has shed light on the context in which Kant’s Critique of Reason was received and interpreted. We have seen how there were at least two assumptions which were at work in the exegeses of the Kantian text: the first, which appealed to the contingent structure of the human faculties of cognition (quid facti) is of the empirical-psychological type, and the second, which highlighted instead the value of the condition of the possibility of experience (quid iuris) is of the transcendental-psychological type. Reinhold’s philosophy runs along the second track. The definition which he gives of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in terms of a scientific and superior psychology demonstrates this beyond any margin of doubt. To verify this, the second chapter has considered two fundamental elements of Reinhold’s thought, the concept of representation and the principle of consciousness, indicating their possible connection with rival models of the time and their psychological nature. The Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens came out at the St. Michael’s fair of 1789. This work doubtless marks a crucial stage in Reinhold’s speculation: with it Reinhold lays the foundation of the Elementary Philosophy and works out a satisfactory philosophical position vis-à-vis the old and the new. In this chapter, we consider this work to the extent that it expresses theses which are relevant to the question that interests us. We will see that, with important clarifications, Reinhold also counts on the idea of philosophy as a superior psychology here. We will divide the analyses of the Essay into two halves, devoting the first half to those parts of the work where the line between a factual inquiry and a critical inquiry is drawn. In the second half, we will show how Reinhold’s assumption can be called psychological, despite its transcendental nature.

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation 1.1 Not “Woraus” but “Worin” Es ist hier nicht die Frage: woraus das Vorstellungsvermögen entstehe; sondern worin es bestehe, nicht um den Ursprung, sondern lediglich um die Beschaffenheit des Vorstellungsvermögens; nicht woher das Vorstellungsvermögen seine Bestandtheile erhalte, sondern, was es für Bestandtheile habe; nicht wie sich das Vorstellungsvermögen genetisch erklären lasse, sondern was man denn unter Vorstellungsvermögen zu verstehen habe.

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

41

[Here it is not a question of how the faculty of representation arises, but in what it consists; it is not a matter of the origin but merely of the nature of the faculty of representation, not where the faculty of representation gets its components from, but what components it possesses; not how the faculty of representation can be explained genetically, but what is meant by faculty of representation]¹²⁵.

The distinction between the questions “woraus?” and “worin?” is introduced by Reinhold in the Second Book of the Essay which is devoted to the Theory of the Faculty of Representation in General. He has a two-fold aim here: (1) to overcome the previous metaphysical theories which are fruitlessly engrossed with demonstrating the origin of representations; (2) to indicate the limits of what can be represented. The two tasks cannot be separated: only insofar as a discussion of the representative faculty that begins from representations is given does it become possible to circumscribe the ambit of what can be represented and respond to the four philosophical currents (idealism, materialism, dogmatic skepticism, and dualism) which subdivide the field of speculative arguments¹²⁶. To think contrarily that one can say something about the causes of the representative faculty (whether they consist in matter, spirit or something else) before cognizing it from its effects (its representations) means to apply an inadequate method of inquiry¹²⁷. The bracketing of every genetic explanation in favor of the description of the constitutive parts of representation, with the aim of identifying the elements of the faculty of representation – the true and authentic object of the Essay ¹²⁸ – constitutes the result of two other preceding distinctions: the distinction between three different senses of the “faculty of representation” and, correspondingly, the distinction between two different meanings of the concept of “representation”. Let us consider the first distinction. To the faculty of representation in the wider sense – which means “everything that belongs first to the conditions of representation” and therefore includes the representing subject and the represented object – is juxtaposed a faculty of representation in its narrower sense,

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  The four currents are not always individuated by Reinhold in the same way: in the already mentioned Neue Entdeckung, for example, these are dogmatic theism (or deism), supernaturalism, dogmatic skepticism and atheism. See also the letter to Kant of  January : KA . (Letter n. ).  Versuch,  (RGS .). L. H. Jakob has also expressed an idea similar to that of Reinhold: that one does not know where the faculties of sensibility and understanding come from, and that one knows them only from their effects: see Jakob () Second Part, § , pp.  – .  Versuch,  (RGS .).

42

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

which encompasses “only that which belongs to the inner conditions of representation alone and in consequence excludes represented objects as well as the representing subject, as external conditions”; and a faculty of representation in the narrowest possible sense, which encompasses “only that which belongs to the inner conditions of representation per se in the strictest sense”. Whereas the faculty in the narrow sense (though eliminating the representing subject and the represented object) includes all the possible representative faculties within it (thus sensibility, understanding and reason), the faculty in the most restricted sense admits the faculty of representation only as such, that is, considered regardless of the determinations of species that it assumes in the individual faculties¹²⁹. In regard to what concerns the double sense of “representation”, the wider and the narrowest, the first gathers “sensation, thought, intuition, concept, idea, in a word everything which occurs in our consciousness as an immediate effect of sensing, thinking, intuiting, comprehending”, whereas the second (the mere representation or representation per se) encompasses “only what sensation, thought, intuition, concept and idea have in common”¹³⁰. Therefore, an inquiry of the “worin” type only takes into account the internal conditions of representation, without which the latter would not be given, and leaves aside the external conditions which, though necessary for it, are presented outside of the representation itself ¹³¹. Considering its constitutive parts, one will then be able to re-ascend from representation in the narrowest sense, as effect, to the faculty of representation in the narrowest sense, as cause, maintaining oneself within the limits of an inquiry which is not genetic, but descriptive. In the essay Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens, Reinhold had already introduced the distinction between the internal and the external conditions of representation with which the investigation of “worin” is justified. In the preceding chapter, we have yet seen that a very similar conceptual schema was present in the Grundriβ of L.H. Jakob, in which it was used in another way to account for the significance of the Copernican revolution that Kant had accomplished in the Critique of Pure Reason. To consider representation in and for itself, independently of objects, amounts for Jakob to expressing the idea according to which the object conforms to cognition. This would be the case of pure cognition in the narrow sense that should be distinguished from the case of abstract cog-

 Versuch, , ,  –  (RGS ., ,  – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () , , .  Versuch, ,  (RGS ., ); en. tr.: Reinhold () , . Günther Baum has highlighted the proximity of the concept of “mere representation” to the “bare conception” of Thomas Reid (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Edinburgh ): Baum () .  Versuch,  (RGS .).

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

43

nition in which the representation is always considered with reference to its determinate object. The speculative novelty contained in the Reinholdian proposal of limiting oneself to an investigation of the constitutive elements of representation, and beginning from here, also of the representative faculty, can be gauged by comparison with Jakob’s thesis. When posing the question of “worin?”, Reinhold does not primarily have in mind the idea of the conformity of the object to the subject, because an inquiry which is conducted according to a consideration of the representing subject and the represented object, thus widened to encompass the external conditions of representation, would not exclude in principle Kant’s Copernican revolution, on the basis of which the forms of the cognizing subject would be treated to the purpose of finding out how it can cognize a priori. Through the “worin”/“woraus” distinction, Reinhold intends rather to explicate a possible premise of the Copernican revolution itself: philosophy must take its point of departure not from the subject or the object, but from those elements which everyone has in common and finds to be plausible, with the hope of overcoming the misunderstandings that have arisen until now among philosophers. Another characteristic of Reinhold’s thought is also spelled out by this. The Critique of Pure Reason had established the necessity of an inquiry which begins from the question “quid iuris?”, rather than from the question “quid facti?”. The inquiry of “worin” certainly takes place within the ambit of transcendental justification, insofar as the elements which are discovered through it constitute the conditions of the possibility of consciousness (not only of experience, as it is in Kant). Without a material of representation, that is without receptivity as a constitutive part of the representative faculty, or without a form of representation, that is spontaneity as form of the faculty of representation, neither representation nor the consciousness which is defined as the relation which binds the representation with the representing subject and the represented object would in fact be possible¹³². But its function is not exhausted in only circumscribing the perimeters of the transcendental. In introducing that question, Reinhold has in view a more precise end – that of implicitly refuting all the readings of Kant’s speculative enterprise which, as we have seen, were proposed by both the Kantians and the anti-Kantians, on the basis of which this undertaking would constitute the exposition of the contingent anthropological structures at the basis of human cognition, as compared with those of other living beings. According to Reinhold, the Critique of Reason does not expound the organic configurations in which those structures must be realized in order for cognition to be

 Versuch,  (RGS .).

44

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

possible; to be limited to a philosophical account of the internal conditions of representation means to put aside every inquiry of the organs that explains the phenomenality of our representations which have at their foundation not organic bodies but transcendental faculties. Alongside the explicit refutation of the dogmatic proposals which aimed at expounding the metaphysical origins of the phenomena (the spiritual substance according to the Leibnizians, the material according to the materialists, etc.), the implicit refutation of the interpretations of the Critique according to which Kantian idealism would be transcendental as long as it could be justified from the constitutive character of the cognitive organization of a human being, is therefore present in Reinhold’s Essay. An empirical-factual answer was thus given in these interpretations to the question “quid iuris”. In a letter signed 9 April 1789 that accompanied the dispatch of the essay Ueber die bisherigen Schicksale der Kantischen Philosophie, Reinhold expressed to Kant the hope that the Theory of the Faculty of Representation would be the decisive factor in bringing about a reversal in the successive attacks and defenses of the Kantian philosophy by beginning from the presupposition of a cognition of things in themselves¹³³. And turning to Kant again a year later, on 30 April 1790, he would remark that Kantians like Abicht and Born would have done better to assimilate in silence the spirit of the critical philosophy for a few more years¹³⁴. Born, we should recall, was one of the many who had insisted on the necessity that the human cognition was of a certain type, because the organs which are involved in cognition are as a matter of fact of a certain species. But even among the rank of the anti-Kantians, the objections which were raised against Kant’s transcendental idealism took their point of departure more or less explicitly from the presupposition that this assumption could only be justified through a factual consideration of the structures of human cognition. One thinks, for example, of J. F. Flatt, who held in his Fragmentarische Beyträge that the objective necessity Kant spoke about could only be defended by starting with the subjective necessity that the understanding contingently possesses, due to the fact that other rational beings different from the human being could judge and think in a different way. For Reinhold, to defend and attack the Kantian philosophy along this line amounts to over-stepping the limits of the transcendental inquiry, because this strategy appeals to cognitive structures which cannot be critically justified and which therefore betray the claim of cognizing the realm of the “itself”. Whereas

 KA . (Letter n. ).  KA . (Letter n. ).

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

45

the organ pertains to a factual consideration which is not verifiable from the transcendental point of view, the faculty can become an object of critical inquiry, as it constitutes a condition of the possibility of representation. In other words, if the organ must presuppose the same representative faculty, in order for it to be available to philosophical scrutiny – as object of philosophical reflection it must in fact be represented – , this faculty must not, by contrast, presuppose anything, but is capable of demonstrating itself in its effect, i. e., the representation. The organic structures of cognition are therefore an in-itself that goes beyond the representable to the extent that they constitute empty logical substrates as soon as they are separated from the predicate of the faculty of representation. They belong to a subject in itself distinct from the representative faculty, and which can thus “never be represented as the real ground of the faculty of representation”¹³⁵.

1.2 Receptivity and Spontaneity Let us take the two forms of the representative faculty, receptivity and spontaneity, and see how they are justified. This will serve to demonstrate Reinhold’s intention to proceed from within a transcendental, as opposed to a factual, reflection. Receptivity and spontaneity are introduced in the Second Book of the Essay, after it is shown that every representation possesses a material which is referred to the represented object and a form which is bound to the representing subject¹³⁶. The two internal conditions of representation can be explained in different ways, showing that the material must be given to representation and the form produced in this material of representation. In fact, [w]äre an der Vorstellung nicht nur die Form, sondern auch der Stoff durch das Gemüth hervorgebracht; so würde alles Bewußtseyn, alle Unterscheidung der blossen Vorstellung vom Subjekte und Objekte unmöglich seyn, die sich nur dadurch denken läßt, daß in der blossen Vorstellung etwas enthalten ist, das nicht durch die Handlung des Gemüthes entstanden, d. i. keine blosse Wirkung seiner Handlung ist, sondern etwas, das bey der Handlung des Subjekts vorausgesetzt wird, und dem Objekte eigen ist. [if not only the form but also the material were produced in the mind all consciousness, all distinguishing of representation per se from subject and object would be impossible. This distinguishing is only conceivable if something is contained that did not arise from the ac-

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ).

46

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

tion of the mind, i. e., is not merely the effect of its action but something that is presupposed in the action of the subject and is proper to the object]¹³⁷.

The two-fold idea which undergirds this thesis is that a finite mind would not be finite if it were capable of creating its own representations, that is, of producing their material on its own. On the other hand, if the form and not only the material were given to the mind, it would necessarily follow that “the representations would have to be present outside the mind before they were given to the mind, be representations before anything was represented by them”¹³⁸. Receptivity is therefore the “susceptibility (Empfänglichkeit) to the material of a representation”, an essentially passive faculty, while spontaneity is the “active faculty which produces the form of the representation for the given material”¹³⁹. The former faculty must not be philosophically explicated by asking oneself where its seat and origin is: this would mean for Reinhold a relapse into the metaphysical controversy over which the materialists and spiritualists are in dispute. On the contrary, one must limit oneself to affirming in what it consists, “insofar as it is indispensable to one of the inner conditions (the material) of representation per se”¹⁴⁰. The same can be shown of spontaneity: in this case, it is necessary to distinguish two points of view from which the activity of the mind can be considered. “First, as it is grounded in the representing entity, and second as representation is grounded by it”¹⁴¹. Though an activity lies in the subject which is distinct from the mere representation (the activity thus constitutes an external condition of representation and is consequently called representative force), this activity of the mind can also become object of a more limited consideration to the extent that it constitutes “a component of the faculty of representation in the strictest sense to the extent that it is cause of the representation per se, or rather of its form”. The same activity of the mind is no longer considered here as a force but as a faculty, because “this faculty is first manifest in a component of representation per se”¹⁴². It is true that spontaneity belongs to the sub Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch, ,  (RGS ., ); en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . J. C. Schwab will point out that Reinhold continues to make use of the concept of “force” by speaking of the representing subject: see, for example, Versuch,  (RGS .). In the idea of the mind as “cause” of the form of representation (Versuch, ; RGS .) is, in his view, expressed the idea of force (Philosophisches Magazin, ed. J.A. Eberhard, vol. , pt. , , pp.  – , now in Rezensionen,  – : ).

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

47

ject of representation, but only in a mediated way, “i. e. only to the extent that this subject has a faculty of representation”¹⁴³. Therefore, receptivity is as much a form of the faculty of representation as is spontaneity. That said, how does one determine the features which contradistinguish them? In this regard, Reinhold thinks that it is impossible to refer to the representing subject in itself, since the thing in itself (whether subject or object) is not representable at all¹⁴⁴. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that the limit which is drawn by the internal conditions of representation would thus be lost. It follows that the representation whose object is receptivity or spontaneity presupposes something impossible to the extent that these faculties are considered as grounded in the subject in itself. To say in what (worin) receptivity and spontaneity consist, it is then necessary to traverse the only possible path which is opened by considering, not the representing subject, but mere representation. Beginning from the effects of representation, it will be possible to re-ascend to the conditions of the possibility of this externalization of the representative faculty and establish the features which this faculty must possess as receptivity and spontaneity, if these effects are to be verified. The task consists, in other words, in finding the forms that these two faculties possess. To this end, it is not possible to avail oneself of the two characteristics of representation which are constituted by the material and the form considered in themselves; both are in fact such that they cannot be represented, because if they were objects of representation, they would be transformed into objects with contradictory predicates. Of the material, for example, one could say that it is material in itself when it is not the object of a representation and represented material when it is posited under the form of representation; the form, were it to be represented, would instead have to become the material of a representation. Mit einem Worte, dasjenige, was in jeder möglichen Vorstellung blosser Stoff, und blosse Form ist, kann kein Gegenstand einer möglichen Vorstellung seyn; weil es zugleich blosser Stoff und nicht blosser Stoff, blosse Form und nicht blosse Form seyn müßte, wenn es zugleich blosser Stoff und Gegenstand, blosse Form und Gegenstand seyn sollte. [In a word, whatever in any possible representation is material per se or form per se, cannot be the object of a possible representation, because it would have to be simultaneously material per se and not material per se, form per se and not form per se, if it were to be simultaneously material per se and object, form per se and object]¹⁴⁵.

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ).  Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

48

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

One will then be concerned with finding representable features which take into account the distinction between receptivity and spontaneity in their proper form. Reinhold thinks that to this end, one has to refer to the predicates which contradistinguish the material and the form of representation: receiving or being affected, on the one hand, and producing, on the other. But the received is a multiplicity, and the produced is a unity¹⁴⁶. Therefore, the form of receptivity will be multiplicity in general, whereas the form of spontaneity will consist in the conjoining (or synthesis) of the given manifold¹⁴⁷. This justification of the characteristics of receptivity and spontaneity is kept within the limits of a transcendental inquiry to the extent that it explains them as conditions of the possibility of representation itself, in its two elements of material and form. The feature quid iuris that belongs to it in this way is further determined, in its pars destruens, with respect to the pre-Kantian metaphysical inquiries and the factual readings of Kantian transcendentalism. Receptivity is neither the excitability of the materialists, nor the faculty which is attributed to the soul in consideration of the body with which it is united. On the other hand, spontaneity is not the character of a spiritual force, but that of a faculty of representation. The same can be said of their respective forms: multiplicity is the quality which is constitutive of the mere faculty of representation and not the property of a representing substance; conjunction is neither the active change which is verified in the conjoining nor the action of conjoining, but rather the form of the conjoining itself, the mode of the action¹⁴⁸.

1.3 “Gegebensein” and “Gegebenwerden” To highlight the limits circumscribed by the internal conditions of representation, that is, the limits of a research on the faculty of representation in the narrowest sense, Reinhold introduces a very important distinction – that between the “What-is-the-given” (Gegebensein) and the “Being-given” (Gegebenwerden) of the material. What is the difference between the two? When one speaks of the “Gegebensein” of the material, one refers to the ambit of what appears in representation. When one speaks instead of its “Gegebenwerden”, one has recourse to something different from representation. Though indispensable for the actual existence of a representation, the “Gegebenwerden” of the material  In Beiträge I (; ed. :  – ), Reinhold explicitly repudiates this demonstration of the theorem for which the material of representation must be a manifold.  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ).  Versuch, , ,  –  (RGS ., ,  – ).

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

49

constitutes an external condition of it and pertains to a consideration of the representative faculty in its widest sense. Reinhold adds that “[e]ven the given (Gegebensein) of the material in the representation must be excluded with respect to its actuality which depends on the giving (Geben) and whatever does the giving (Gegebenwerden), from the full compass of what is merely only inner condition of representation”¹⁴⁹. Thus one only deals with the possibility of this Being-given of the material of representation, and not of its actuality. It is therefore a question of the conditions of the possibility or thinkability of mere representation, not of the fact that mere representation is really given. The distinction between the “Gegebensein” and the “Gegebenwerden” of the material thus underscores the transcendental character of the inquiry of the representative faculty, as opposed to its factual implications.

1.4 Exposition and Definition of Representation In the Second Book of the Essay, immediately after having distinguished the three senses of the concept of the faculty of representation, Reinhold maintains the impossibility of offering a definition or an explanation of representation, which is an effect of the representative faculty and the point of departure from which to establish the constitutive characteristics of the latter. This is not to say that he does not ever define the concept of representation; in fact, in the very same book, he speaks shortly after of mere representation in terms of the “manifold thing given to receptivity and brought to unity through the activity of spontaneity”¹⁵⁰. Rather, the idea that he has in mind is explicated by the adjectival uses which are given in addition to the definition or explanation: “authentic” and “substantial”, respectively. This means that if we were to define representation in an authentic way or explain it in a substantial way, it should contain predicates which are deducible from a concept different from it. However, Reinhold thinks that to attempt an explanation of this kind “would be the equivalent of proposing a concept of representation which was itself not a representation”¹⁵¹. In his view, a historical consideration also confirms its theoretical impossibility. Man prüfe sorgfältig alle Erklärungen, welche von der Vorstellung, in was immer für einer Bedeutung des Wortes, von was immer für Philosophen gegeben sind; und man wird fin-

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

50

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

den, daß sie den Begriff der blossen Vorstellung nicht erklären, sondern als bekannt voraussetzen. [A careful examination of all explanations of representation in whatever sense of the term offered by any philosophers whatsoever shows that the concept is not explained but presupposed as already known]¹⁵².

In sum, Reinhold holds that representation is the most known, even if the most inexplicable, thing that appears in consciousness. It cannot, and need not, be explained, due to the fact that there is no higher concept from which it can be deduced¹⁵³. Its originality and primacy do not, however, exclude an exposition (Erörterung), but rather postulate it. Since representation constitutes the ultimate presupposition of every explanation, it is only through its exhaustive and determinate exposition that the conditions are created, in a way that features which do not belong to a concept of such an importance are not introduced into it, or other features which belong to it are not excluded from it. The method used to discover the constitutive characteristics of representation consists in bracketing the question of its essence and limiting oneself to inquiring into the conditions of its possibility. Nun gehört aber (nicht die unerklärbare Vorstellung selbst, sondern) dasjenige, ohne welches sich die blosse Vorstellung nicht denken läßt, und welches daher auch im Begriffe der blossen Vorstellung wirklich gedacht wird, zu den inneren Bedingungen der Vorstellung, und macht diese innern Bedingungen, in wieferne sie denkbar sind, aus. [But it is (not inexplicable representation per se, but) that without which representation per se cannot be conceived and which therefore is actually conceived in the concept of representation per se that pertains to the inner conditions of representation, insofar as they are conceivable]¹⁵⁴.

Thus the material of representation, with which the relation is established between the representation and the represented object, and the form of representation, with which the representation is posited in relation to the representing subject, are the internal conditions of representation. We see therefore that the difference which Reinhold introduces between the exposition and the definition of representation serves to overcome every metaphysical or factual inquiry about representation itself: of the first, to the extent that a substantial explanation is not possible; of the second, because it is not as

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .).  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

51

important to concede that which all philosophers admit, that is to say, that representations exist, as it is to clarify how they are possible. Reinhold could avail himself of the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason on this point, where Kant had first defined the exposition as “the distinct (even if not complete) representation of that which belongs to a concept”, and then distinguished between an exposition which is metaphysical “when it contains that which exhibits the concept as given a priori” and an exposition which is transcendental to the extent that it constitutes “the explanation of a concept as a principle from which insight into the possibility of other synthetic a priori cognitions can be gained”¹⁵⁵. In the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Kant had then reached the conclusion that definitions, that is, original representations of the complete concept of a thing are possible neither of empirical concepts nor of a priori concepts, but only of concepts which contain an arbitrary synthesis (mathematical concepts). Philosophy cannot therefore proceed from definitions, as it can only analyze concepts which are still confused: it must thus pass from a minor to a major completeness of exposition until it reaches, but only at the end, “a complete exposition, i.e, […] a definition”¹⁵⁶. With his distinction between definition and exposition, Reinhold shows himself to be in agreement with Kant in affirming that philosophy cannot begin from definitions. The reason which he adduces is, however, different from that given by Kant. If Kant had in fact motivated this impossibility through observing that the concept cannot be defined and can only be expounded because it is confused at the beginning and is only clarified on the way, Reinhold thought instead that the concept of representation cannot be defined because there is no higher concept from which it can be deduced. In regard to the character of Reinhold’s exposition of representation, one can say that it is metaphysical, as well as transcendental, in the Kantian sense: metaphysical to the extent that it exhibits the internal conditions of the concept of representation, and transcendental to the extent that this concept serves to provide the principle of the possibility of the synthetic a priori relation constituted by consciousness.

1.5 Pure Sensibility Even when he descends from the general “mere representation” to the specific “sensible representation” (or sensation and intuition), “intellective representa-

 KrV, B , ; en. tr.: Kant () , .  KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () .

52

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

tion” (or concept) and “rational representation” (or idea), the philosopher finds himself faced with a two-fold possibility: inquiring into the origin of these representations, or into their constitution. Let us take the case of sensibility and see where Reinhold posits the limits of the transcendental inquiry in relation to this faculty. The exchange which occurs in this regard is having admitted in the concept of sensibility features which are due not to the mere faculty of representation, but to the subject of it, that is, the substance. So verschieden die Fragen sind: Wie muß die vorstellende Substanz beschaffen seyn, wenn sie sinnlicher Vorstellungen fähig seyn soll? und: Wie muß das Vorstellungsvermögen beschaffen seyn, wenn es sinnlicher Vorstellungen fähig seyn soll? – Woraus entsteht? – und worin besteht die Sinnlichkeit des Vorstellungsvermögens? – so sehr wurden sie bisher vermengt und verwechselt. [How must the representing substance be constituted if it is to be capable of sensory representations? how must the faculty of representation itself be constituted if it is to be capable of sensory representations? from what does the sensibility of the faculty of representation arise and in what does it consist? such questions have been thoroughly confused and mixed up until now]¹⁵⁷.

In view of the indispensability of the sensitive organs for receiving the material of representations, one may be tempted to think that sensibility was identifiable with the faculty of being affected by means of the bodily organs. In this way, the organic body is listed “under the aegis of explanations arising from sensibility, that is, under attributes (Merkmale) of the concept of sensibility”¹⁵⁸. In doing so, the question that is answered is not the one about the constitutive characteristics of sensibility, but the “wholly different” one of how sensibility is present in the representing subject. Reinhold thinks that such a question cannot find a meaningful answer without being preceded by an answer to the other question. The reason that he adduces here is that it is not possible to speak of the subject of sensibility prior to having been able to account for what the predicate “sensibility” means. In his view, there must be a concept of sensibility that remains invariant with respect to the metaphysical attributes which come to be assigned to it. One would give life to a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, to an exchange of levels of discourse, if one were to overstep the limits of mere sensibility. To avoid incurring this conceptual falsification, Reinhold proposes the methodology already applied to the concept of mere representation.

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

53

So wie wir den Begriff des blossen Vorstellungsvermögens überhaupt, nachdem wir die nicht in ihn gehörigen heterogenen Merkmale entfernt haben, aus dem Begriff der Vorstellung überhaupt bestimmt haben, so muß sich auch der Begriff des blossen sinnlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, nachdem er von dem ihn verwirrenden Merkmale der Organisation gereinigt ist, aus dem Begriff der blossen sinnlichen Vorstellung bestimmen lassen. [In the same way that we have expounded the concept of the faculty of representation per se from the concept of representation in general after removing those heterogeneous attributes not pertaining to it, we are now in a position to determine the concept of the sensory faculty of representation per se from the concept of sensory representation per se after this concept has been purged of those attributes of bodily organization confusing it]¹⁵⁹.

In this way, one finds that a sensible representation would not be possible, if there were not an outer sense, or, rather, “the determinate faculty of receptivity to be affected from without” as well as an inner sense, that is, “the determinate faculty of receptivity to be affected from within”. Furthermore, a sensible representation would not be possible, if the manifold given to sensibility through outer sense did not have the characteristic of being in reciprocal externality (to which mere space or the form of outer intuition corresponds in representation) and if that which is given to inner sense were not in succession (to which mere time or the form of inner intuition corresponds in representation)¹⁶⁰. Reinhold had already introduced the concept of the faculty of sensibility delineated here, in its fundamental outlines, in the Eighth Letter on the Kantian philosophy, published in the Teutscher Merkur of 1787. Kant had discovered a new source of human cognition which had been utterly misjudged until then: pure sensibility. Sie ist weder Thätigkeit der Organisation, noch Reitzbarkeit der Organe, sondern das Vermögen der Seele überhaupt afficiert zu werden, und besteht aus den in unsrem Erkenntnißvermögen vorhandenen Bedingungen, welche jeder Anschauung (unmittelbaren Vorstellung) eines Gegenstandes zum Grunde liegen. [It is neither the activity of the sense organs nor their excitability, but rather the faculty of the soul for being affected in general, and it consists in the conditions present in our faculty

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  – ,  – ,  – ,  –  (RGS . – ,  – ,  – ,  – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () , . It should be noted that the priority of the features of reciprocal externality and succession as well as of the concepts of space and time which Reinhold defends was not a Kantian thesis. This has been maintained by, among others, Tiedemann ()  –  and Tittel () . Johann Schultz will oppose it in his Prüfung der Kantischen Critik der reinen Vernunft: cf. Schultz ()  – , .

54

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

of cognition that lie at the basis of every intuition (immediate representation) of an object]¹⁶¹.

Reinhold had continued to describe this faculty by observing that it is, for the fact that every intuition is determined by it, the form of intuition. It constitutes that receptivity of the soul which must stand at the basis of all impressions on sensible organs, and as mere subjective form, that is, mere faculty, must receive objects from the outside¹⁶². In the preceding letter, devoted to a brief history of the psychological concept of a thinking substance, Reinhold also mentioned the name of a philosopher¹⁶³ who would in his view have maintained an organic consideration of sensibility: an author who we have already considered, Adam Weishaupt, who published Ueber Materialismus und Idealismus. In regard to receptivity – a concept that is also present in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation – Weishaupt held the thesis that it would be the consequence of a human being’s bodily organization, that is to say, of the position that every being occupies in the world, that it would have an essential relation with the representative force¹⁶⁴. This is evidently the dogmatic thesis which is aimed at responding to the question of the origin of sensible representations. The opposite is Reinhold’s critical theory for which representations must only be examined to the extent of their constitutive parts. The Kantian concept of pure sensibility is meant to establish that when we proceed at the transcendental level, it is illicit to intend by “receptivity” the bodily organization of a human being.

1.6 The Image and the Original In speaking of the form of representation as the internal condition of mere representation, Reinhold claims that the form and the material constitute the representation “only through their union”, and they “cannot be separated one from the other without cancelling the representation itself”¹⁶⁵. For example, if one speaks of a statue from Salzburg which is made of white marble, one can assert

 Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Eighth Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Reinhold, “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie” () (Eighth Letter) ; en. tr.: Reinhold () .  The indication then disappeared in Briefe I: see the Tenth Letter, .  Weishaupt ()  – , .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

55

that the statue is of marble and that it is white, meaning to say that these predicates are due to the material of the statue. But one cannot say that the statue is from Salzburg “if only the marble (the material) not the statue itself (the form) is from Salzburg”¹⁶⁶. This example, according to Reinhold, well illustrates how the two constitutive elements of representation carry out essentially different functions, which must be firmly distinguished from each other. Thus the material is that by means of which the represented object belongs to the representation, and the form is instead that by means of which the representation is referred to the subject, that is, that which makes the mere material of a representation an actual representation¹⁶⁷. One perceives an asymmetry here between the functions which Reinhold attributes to the internal conditions of representation. If it is in fact only by means of the form that a material can become a true and proper representation, then to claim that it is only through their simple union that the representation can arise is really to purport that their union is made possible by the form. Though the union is of material and form, the act of synthesis between the two is formal. In other words, what is, properly speaking, the statue is not the material, but only the form. This superimposition between the form and the actual representation¹⁶⁸ is constituted in part by the identity of the subject and the mind: the logical path that leads to it consists in showing that the form is that which mediates between the representation and the subject, and also that “of the representation [which] belongs to the mind”¹⁶⁹. Therefore, the form binds the representation to the subject, that is, the mind. Even if it is true that every represented object possesses a form, and so the singular representation of a tulip has an object-directed determinateness because the form of the object of representation is that of the tulip and not, let us say, the sun-flower, it remains just as true nonetheless that this objective form is not capable of giving place to a representation without the form of representation which is imparted to the material not by the represented object, but

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .).  Superimposition is also present in another well-known text by Reinhold, that is, the Grundriβ of Ludwig Heinrich Jakob in which, in regard to cognition (not of representation), two essential moments were distinguished: “() something which is represented (§ ) and () the representing itself (§ ). The first is called content, object or material: the second, form or mode in which the material is ordered, cognized” (Jakob () First Part, § , p. ).  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

56

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

by the representing subject. To distinguish it from the other, Reinhold calls this last form of representation the subjective form¹⁷⁰. Daher kann kein Vorgestelltes, kein Gegenstand, in seiner von der Form der Vorstellung unabhängigen Form, wie er an sich ist, sondern nur durch die Form der Vorstellung modificiert im Bewußtseyn vorkommen, vorgestellt werden. [Nothing represented, no object, can be represented in its form independently of the form of representation, as it is in itself, but occurs in consciousness only as modified by the form of representation]¹⁷¹.

By this observation, Reinhold thinks that he had refuted one of the most deeply rooted prejudices of the human mind, according to which representations were images of things, so that there should be a resemblance between things and representations, in which the truth properly consists. The boundary between a transcendental inquiry that attempts to speak of the way in which the subject cognizes things a priori, and a dogmatic inquiry that claims to be able to speak of the cognition of objects in themselves, is here drawn anew. Reinhold’s following considerations in this regard betray the main interest that motivates him to repudiate the thesis that representation is the image of an original outside of the representation: to distance himself from a philosophical assumption which concedes too much to a psychology of the empirical type so as to return to a speculative thesis of the transcendental type. The prejudice in question can be explained genetically when one attends to the analogy perceived between the nature (Beschaffenheit) of the impressions produced on the bodily organs and that of the outer objects;

 Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ). On the example of the tulip, see Versuch,  (RGS .). The reviewer of the Essay for the Erlangische gelehrte Zeitung (,  February ,  – ; ,  February ,  – ) will observe of the Reinholdian thesis of the irrepresentability of the thing in itself – which Reinhold claims on the basis of the distinction between “form of the representation” and “form of the object” – that it has only a conditioned value, because it depends on an intermediate thesis “that the form of the object does not correspond to it in representation, the form peculiar to the object is not representable”. Instead, Reinhold would have already illicitly defended it on the ground of the definition of “form of representation” according to which this form would be that which permits the material to become a representation and therefore excludes the representation being the same as the object. The reviewer will further observe that despite the subjectivity of the form of representation, “the w h o l e representation” would have to represent the object in its objectivity, given that its material comes from the object (see Rezensionen,  – ). On the problematic character of the thing in itself with regard to the internal structure of Elementary Philosophy, see, among others, Selling ()  – , Klemmt ()  – ; Bondeli ()  – .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .

1 The Transcendentalism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

57

eine Analogie, die bey dem vornehmsten Organe, dem wir den Stoff unsrer meisten und kläresten sinnlichen Vorstellungen verdanken, nämlich dem Auge, in der wirklichen Aehnlichkeit des Bildes auf der Netzhaut mit dem sichtbaren Gegenstande besteht. [an analogy which with the noblest organ, to which we owe the material of our most frequent and clearest sensory representations, namely the eye, consists in the actual resemblance of the image on the retina to the visible object]¹⁷².

This had driven many philosophers to accept an indeterminate analogy between seeing and representing, die immer weiter getrieben wurde, je mehr man bey zunehmender Kultur der empirischen Psychologie für die neuentdeckten Unterschiede unter den Verrichtungen des Vorstellungsvermögens mehrere Ausdrücke von den Verrichtungen des Auges zu entlehnen genöthiget war. [and this was pushed further as it became necessary with the increasing cultivation of empirical psychology to borrow several terms from the operations of the eye for the newly discovered distinctions among the operations of the faculty of representation]¹⁷³.

In this way, not only is sensible impression confounded with sensible representation, but also on the basis of the uncontestable resemblance between impression and object, representation comes to be confounded with object¹⁷⁴. For Reinhold, it is a mistake to call a representation the image of an object, because when one speaks of “image”, one presupposes a resemblance between it and the original. But there is no resemblance between representations and the represented objects, as is shown by consideration of the fact that the comparison of the original with its image is altogether impossible, given that in the comparison, the original ceases to be an original independent of the image which is referred to it. Ich kann die Vorstellung der Rose als Bild, mit der Rose selbst als Original nie vergleichen. Denn wenn ich die Rose als einen von meiner Vorstellung derselben verschiedenen Gegenstand denke, so kann ich dieß nur dadurch, daß ich die blosse Vorstellung der Rose auf etwas ausser mir beziehe, welches ich nur durch dieses Beziehen kenne; und das unabhängig von der Vorstellung, in welcher alle seine Prädikate vorkommen, für mich ein blosses Subjekt = X ist. Ich kann also nicht von dem angeblichen Bilde zum Original übergehen, ohne daß ich eben dasselbe Bild zum Original mache, das heißt: das Bild hat kein Original für mich; es ist also kein Bild, sondern selbst Original.

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS .).

58

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

[I can never compare the representation of the rose as image with the rose itself as original. If I think of the rose as an object different from my representation of it, then I can only do this by relating the mere representation of the rose to something outside me which I only know by means of this relation and which is for me a mere subject = X independently of the representation in which all its predicates occur. I cannot therefore proceed from the alleged image to the original without making that image the original, that is, the image has no original for me; it is then not an image but is itself an original]¹⁷⁵.

Against the theory of representation as an image of the original that follows the trail of an empirical psychology which has confused that which is valid for seeing with that which is valid for representing, Reinhold stresses the essential difference between a dogmatic-empirical consideration that binds the characteristic of seeing to bodily organization, and a transcendental consideration that connects instead the characteristic of representing to the possibility of consciousness.

Intermezzo The foregoing pages have shown the distance which separates the Theory of the Faculty of Representation from every philosophical thought of the empirical-factual type. Reinhold is interested in establishing the internal conditions of the possibility of representation, not in accounting for its genetic formation. This assumption is also revealed in those considerations which have psychology for its object. We have already seen it in part when we spoke of the conceptual exchanges between sensible impression and sensible representation on the one hand, and of representation and object on the other, which would constitute the results of an intellectual culture which is dominated by empirical psychology. The Essay is full of implicit and explicit negative claims about this form of psychology which would, according to Reinhold, be an integral part of a speculation of an English origin, which is oriented toward the contingent empirical elements of the human psyche. The Preface to the work, devoted to the destinies of Kantian philosophy, contains passages in which Reinhold expresses all the scientific contempt against such a discipline, which is enriched “from all sides with highly important findings about the most obscure qualities of the human mind and heart”, which contributes in logic to the neglect of the true laws of thought,

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . The theme of the image as original will be revisited by Reinhold when he speaks of Humean skepticism in Reinhold, Beiträge II,  (ed. : ).

Intermezzo

59

which is in sum evoked and defended by those learned “compilators” who believe that philosophy consists of “knowledge of facts acquired by groping around with no plan or by mere chance”¹⁷⁶. The opposite is rational psychology – a true psychology, according to Reinhold – which constitutes one of the most mature fruits of the great Wolffian rationalism¹⁷⁷. The Theory of the Faculty of Representation subscribes explicitly to the open tradition of rational psychology, insofar as it aims to present the object of this branch of knowledge according to the new transcendental assumption. Die vollständige Erörterung der in der Natur des Gemüthes bestimmten Form, unter welcher das vorstellende Subjekt gedacht werden muß, tritt an die Stelle der bisherigen rationalen Psychologie, und macht einen Theil der höheren Metaphysik aus, welche sich mit den übersinnlichen durch blosse Vernunft denkbaren Gegenständen beschäftiget; und auf welche ich auch in Rücksicht auf die nähere Entwicklung der Idee von der Seele verweisen muß. [A complete discussion of the form determined in the nature of the mind under which the representing subject must be conceived takes the place of the rational psychology carried out till now, and constitutes a part of a higher metaphysics that concerns itself with supersensible objects conceivable through reason per se – a metaphysics to which I must point in order to develop in more detail the idea of the soul]¹⁷⁸.

Thus if it is true that psychology as a rational inquiry is destined to fail, it is equally true that one can arrive at the scientific constitution of a part of superior metaphysics, when one investigates the nature of the mind, or the faculty of representation. This is one of the main tasks which the Theory of the Faculty of Representation sets out to accomplish. Two features of Reinhold’s reflection are interesting in this regard: (1) Speaking of representation and of the faculty of representation, Reinhold distinguishes between empirical psychology, which was concerned until then with sensibility, and logic, whose objects of inquiry were intellect and reason. In his view, for the end of the reform of philosophy and of the founding of a “science of the faculty of representation”, it is necessary to leave aside “the psychological laws of sensibility” and “the logical ones of the understanding and reason”. All this is possible, because [w]irklich giebt es eine Bedeutung der Worte Vorstellung und Vorstellungsvermögen, an welche man weder in der Psychologie, noch in der Logik bisher gedacht, die man wenigstens in

 Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .  Versuch, ,  –  (RGS . – ).  Versuch,  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

60

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

Beyden ganz unbestimmt gelassen hat, und die der allgemeinen Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens überhaupt aufbehalten war. [there is […] a sense of the terms representation and faculty of representation which have not been thought of as yet either in psychology or in logic, and this sense has been left quite indeterminate in both, being reserved for the general theory of the faculty of representation in general]¹⁷⁹.

(2) To the identification of the representative faculty and the mind corresponds the distinction between the representing subject and the representative faculty on the one hand, and between the soul and the mind on the other hand. The Theory of the Faculty of Representation in the broader sense aims to treat of the mind and not the soul, the faculty and not the substance¹⁸⁰. Therefore, there is an area of investigation which is covered neither by empirical psychology nor by rational psychology, and which is reserved for the new Theory: that which concerns the human faculty of representation or the human mind taken from a critical point of view. It is the domain of what we have already called transcendental psychology. After having shown the critical character of Reinhold’s thought, we will now demonstrate first, what the psychological aspect distinguished from the transcendentalism of Kant consists in, and second, we will identify those parts of the Essay in which this is clearly shown.

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation 2.1 What Justifies the Faculty of Representation? The question which Reinhold poses is not metaphysical but logical. He does not ask what the subject of the faculty is, but what the faculty itself consists in; he is not interested in the constitutive laws of the nature of a real thing, but those of the nature of the faculty through which one cognizes the thing. Therefore, the logical question concerns die Bedingungen, durch welche das Erkennen möglich ist, welche zusammengenommen das Erkenntnißvermögen heissen, und in dem Erkenntnißvermögen selbst gegeben seyn müssen.

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .).

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

61

[the conditions under which knowledge is possible which, taken together, are called cognitive faculty and must be given in the cognitive faculty itself]¹⁸¹.

To answer such a question, it is necessary, according to Reinhold, to begin from a fact which cannot be questioned and has not yet been questioned by any philosopher, namely the fact that representations exist. Wer aber eine Vorstellung zugiebt, muß auch ein Vorstellungsvermögen zugeben, das heißt dasjenige, ohne welches sich keine Vorstellung denken läßt. [Whoever concedes representation, however, must concede a faculty of representation, i. e., that without which no representation is conceivable]¹⁸².

The object of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation should not then be representation, but the faculty that renders it possible. Wir untersuchen die Vorstellung nicht um ihrer selbst willen, sondern um über den Begriff des Vorstellungsvermögens, d. h. desjenigen, was zu den innern Bedingungen der blossen Vorstellung gehört, endlich einmal einig zu werden. [We are not investigating representation for its own sake but to reach agreement at last about the concept of faculty of representation, i. e. of what pertains to the inner conditions of representation per se]¹⁸³.

The representative faculty is therefore “the foundation (Grundlage)” of the new Theory¹⁸⁴. Reinhold starts from a given in order to inquire of its conditions of possibility and to show that such conditions are given in the faculty of representation: the transcendentalism of his thought lies here. But what type of transcendentalism is it? A transcendentalism in regard only to the form of philosophical reasoning, or also in regard to its material? It becomes clear that we need not identify these two forms of transcendentalism when we consider the different ways in which one can speak of “conditions of possibility”. If it is in fact true that not every a priori cognition is, according to the Kantian definition, transcendental, “but only that by means of which we cognize that and how certain representations (intuitions or concepts) are applied entirely a priori, or are possible”¹⁸⁵, then it is equally true that one can

    

Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () .

62

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

speak of the conditions of possibility by showing how they render objective experience possible, or by indicating what their constitutive features are. We call the first objective transcendentalism and the second subjective transcendentalism. The Theory of the Faculty of Representation constitutes an example of subjective transcendentalism, because it investigates the conditions of the possibility of representation by limiting itself to the exposition of the constitutive features of the representative faculty; it is thus distinguished from the objective transcendentalism of the Kantian Critique of Reason which extends the investigation to the validity of the same features in the objects. The difference between the two is derived from the distinction which Kant establishes between the subjective deduction and the objective deduction of the categories. When one speaks of the deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, one can in fact distinguish two aspects, one that “refers to the objects of the pure understanding” and “is supposed to demonstrate and make comprehensible the objective validity of its concepts a priori”, the other that “deals with the pure understanding itself, concerning its possibility and the powers of cognition on which it itself rests; thus it considers it in a subjective relation”. Though he holds it to be of great importance to his inquiry, Kant thinks that this second aspect does not make up an essential part of it. “[B]ecause the chief question always remains: ‘What and how much can understanding and reason cognize free of all experience?’ and not: ‘How is the faculty of thinking itself possible?’” In fact, this second problem “is something like the search for the cause of a given effect, and is therefore something like a hypothesis”¹⁸⁶. Reinhold examines how the faculty of representation is possible, and considers it as cause of the effect of representation. This is precisely what Kant defines as a subjective deduction and what he compares to a hypothesis. Thus the Theory of the Faculty of Representation constitutes a form of transcendental reflection of a subjective type. This amounts for us to saying that it is a transcendental psychology: it tells us about the conditions of the possibility of cognition (its transcendentalism lies here), limiting itself to an investigation of that aspect which is connected to the faculties and their constitutive features.

 KrV, A XVI–VII; en. tr.: Kant () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

63

2.2 The Nature of the Representing Subject The representative faculty is composed of the faculty of receptivity and the faculty of spontaneity. Reinhold defines the first as a passive faculty of the mind which “signifies nothing but the ground of the is-able-to-be-given (Gegebenseinkönnen) in representation” and is not self-active to the extent of presupposing “something given, some effect from elsewhere”¹⁸⁷. The second is instead the faculty of activity, and not the force of the acting subject. It is the mode of acting of spontaneity, and not the mode of being of its subject¹⁸⁸. Both “are given to the representing subject in and with the faculty of representation and are determinately present in it prior to all representation”¹⁸⁹. They belong to the representing subject and must precede every representation so far as they render a representation possible. This amounts for Reinhold to saying that the two faculties constitute “the nature proper to the representing subject pertaining to it prior to every representation”¹⁹⁰. The two faculties of representation must not be taken as a mere non-impossibility or an indeterminate possibility. Taken as such, a human being would possess “as many capacities for representation as there are individual […] representations”¹⁹¹. “Faculty” is for Reinhold synonymous with determinate possibility; this determination can, however, occur, either through the constitutive quality of the representing subject or something different from it; it “is either an original faculty in the subject or a derived faculty”¹⁹². But if it were an indeterminate faculty or a derived faculty, it would not be possible to have a distinct consciousness of things external to the mind. If by means of the material of representation one arrives not at the consciousness of the object, but at the consciousness of the subject, it is then necessary to think that the material is not given, but rather is created by the subject. All that belongs to the form of representation must therefore be due to the representing subject and be grounded and determined a priori in the faculty of representation. What is determined in its possibility not only by means of the nature of the representing subject, but also by means of something external to it, will instead constitute “a derived, empirical faculty, as, e. g. the faculty to attain representations through the eye, ear,

     

Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch,

 (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .).  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

64

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

etc”¹⁹³. The features of necessity and universality are due only to the original faculties of representation. Only they are a priori faculties. Here Reinhold expounds the constitutive characteristics of the human mind and indicates the determinate possibility or the representative faculty from a transcendental point of view: in sum, he accomplishes what Kant had indicated in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as the problem of a subjective deduction of the pure concepts of understanding: to formulate the solution to the question in terms of how the faculty of representation is possible.

2.3 The Clarity and Distinctness of Consciousness Speaking of the relation of the understanding to objects in general and the possibility of knowing them a priori, Kant had recognized in the transcendental deduction of the categories presented in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason the existence of “three subjective sources of cognition” upon which “[t]he possibility of an experience in general and cognition of its objects” rests: sense, imagination and apperception¹⁹⁴. He identified the ultimate ground of the connection of all the representations in the pure apperception that “yields a principle of the synthetic unity of the manifold in all possible intuition”¹⁹⁵. Only through the reference of representations to a pure and not empirical consciousness does it become possible to explain the constant identity that all of us perceive with respect to the manifold of experience. Kant calls this transcendental consciousness the “mere representation I”: “the collective unity” of all the other representations would only be possible as a result of it. He added, however: “Now it does not matter here whether this representation be clear (empirical consciousness) or obscure, even whether it be actual; but the possibility of the logical form of all cognition necessarily rests on the relationship to this apperception as a faculty”¹⁹⁶. By denying that it is important for transcendental consciousness to establish whether it is clear or distinct, or whether it is even real, Kant wants to identify this faculty with a logical condition of experience, rather than a psychological faculty. In the Third Book of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, devoted to the Theory of the Faculty of Cognition in General, Reinhold identifies three species of consciousness: the consciousness of representation, the consciousness of    

Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . KrV, A ; en. tr.: Kant () . KrV, A  – ; en. tr.: Kant () . KrV, A ; en. tr.: Kant () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

65

the representing subject and the consciousness of the represented object. All three forms of consciousness have in common the characteristic mark of consciousness in general, that is to say, “the relatedness of the mere representation to its object and subject”¹⁹⁷. The features of clarity and distinctness can be attributed to all three of them. If it is indeed true that consciousness in general is clear insofar as it is consciousness of representation, it follows that consciousness of a representation is clear when it does not have an object other than the representation, that consciousness of the subject is clear when other than being consciousness of itself, it is also consciousness of the representation through which it represents itself. Lastly, consciousness of an object is clear to the extent that it is consciousness of the object and consciousness of the representation of the object. “In the case of clear consciousness, therefore, representation of representation necessarily occurs”¹⁹⁸. Similarly, since consciousness in general is distinct when it is consciousness of the representing subject or when it is selfconscious, consciousness of the representation is distinct when, more than just being conscious of the representation, the mind is also conscious of itself as that which represents. Consciousness of the object is distinct insofar as the mind is conscious of the object and itself; and finally self-consciousness is distinct to the extent that it has only itself for an object of consciousness¹⁹⁹. The conclusions which Reinhold draws from these premises are two-fold. (1) An absolute self-consciousness, independent of representation, is impossible. If in self-consciousness, the representing subject in fact becomes an object of consciousness in consideration of the material of representation and constitutes its subject only in consideration of its form, then the representing subject is represented in itself only as representing subject. Das blosse, von dem Prädikat des vorstellenden unterschiedene, Subjekt, ist in diesem Bewußtseyn auch nur Subjekt desselben, und es wird folglich zwar ihm vorgestellt, aber dasselbe a n s i c h kann nicht vorgestellt, es kann nicht sich selbst Objekt werden. Alles, was von ihm und wodurch es sich selbst Objekt werden kann, ist blos sein Vorstellen, um dessenwillen es das Vorstellende heißt. [The subject per se, distinguished from the predicate of the representing entity, is in this act of consciousness still only its subject and in consequence it is represented to this subject, yet the subject in itself cannot be represented, it cannot become its own object. Everything that can pertain to the subject and thereby which itself can become an object is just this

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .).

66

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

representing. On account of the faculty to function in this way it is called the representing entity]²⁰⁰.

In the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, no consciousness of an absolute subject is offered thus as is the case for example in Fichte’s doctrine of science. (2) The identity of consciousness, on the basis of which self-consciousness contains not only the representation of the representing subject, but also that of the representing subject which represents in the representing subject, can be explained by considering the material of representation (in this case having for its object the representing itself) from two different points of view: as determined a priori in the faculty of representation, with respect to the forms of spontaneity and receptivity, and as determined in the actual representation by means of the affection of the receptivity which is due to every representation. The material determined a priori in the mind, in the forms of receptivity and spontaneity, and the material actually given to the mind and not produced by it (otherwise it would not be material, but form) is in fact required for self-consciousness as real and not only possible representation. In wieferne aber dieser a priori im Vermögen bestimmte Stoff durch eine Handlung der Spontaneität als wirklicher Stoff in einer besondern Vorstellung bestimmt (die Wirklichkeit dieses Stoffes in der Vorstellung durch die Handlung des Subjektes hervorgebracht) wird; in soferne stellt diese Vorstellung an dem als vorstellend vorgestellten Objekte auch das Subjekt in der Eigenschaft als Objekt vor. [However, insofar as this material, determined a priori in the faculty of representation, is determined as actual material in a particular representation through a spontaneous action (the actuality of this material in the representation is produced by the action of the subject), the representation also represents – of the representing represented object – the subject in its aspect as object]²⁰¹.

Despite the Kantian assumption that lies at the basis of it, according to which it is not possible to cognize the subject insofar as it is absolute, Reinhold’s thinking betrays a psychological approach to the question of self-consciousness for two reasons. First of all, the Theory of the Faculty of Representation explicitly sets itself the task of explaining the clarity and distinctness of self-consciousness which Kant had regarded as utterly superfluous as long as one is concerned with establishing the conditions of the logical possibility of experience. This task becomes interesting, however, in the sense that it deals, as in Reinhold, with the

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

67

psychological differences with which the mind perceives itself. Put in another way: if the Kantian observations on the limited importance attributable to the features of clarity and distinctness were to nullify the reference to pure apperception as faculty, to the extent that he dwells on it, Reinhold, making it a fundamental chapter of his thought, takes account of all the psychological value of the term “faculty”. In the second place, Kant had also excluded from his own theory the question pertaining to the reality of transcendental consciousness, relegating it to an accessory moment of his transcendentalism to the extent that he was not concerned with establishing how the faculty (in the logical sense) of pure apperception is possible, but rather how its objects are objectively cognizable. Reinhold is, on the contrary, interested in the problem of how selfconsciousness becomes real. After having explained the way in which the identity of consciousness is possible, he adds that these passages constitute “the basic principles of the actual origin of the significant representation of the I”²⁰². Now it becomes necessary to explain the birth of Kant’s “simple representation I”: Der Weg vom dunkeln Bewußtseyn eines Gegenstandes, von welchem alles Bewustseyn ausgeht, zum deutlichen Selbstbewußtseyn geht durch das klare Bewußtseyn der Vorstellung, die vorher in ihrem Unterschiede vom Gegenstande vorgestellt werden muß, bevor das Vorstellende in seinem Unterschiede von der Vorstellung vorgestellt werden kann. [The path from the indistinct consciousness of an object, from which all consciousness proceeds, to distinct self-consciousness is traversed via the clear consciousness of a representation that must first be represented in its difference from the object before the representing entity can be represented in its difference from the representation]²⁰³.

The same is true of mere representation as a genus, with respect to which one can recover, in the features of being given the material and of producing the form, “the real genetic history (Erzeugungsgeschichte) of each representation”²⁰⁴.

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Johann Christoph Schwab indicates the contradictoriness, from the Reinholdian point of view, of the concept of “obscure representation”; but then to accept it, one will have to admit representations without consciousness: cf. Schwab (), now in Rezensionen, .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

68

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

2.4 The Reality of Representations The exchange which Reinhold effects in the exposition of the table of categories presented in the Third Book of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation is not unsurprising. Whereas the first category of modality is for Kant constituted from possibility, followed by actuality (Wirklichkeit) and necessity, the first concept of the modal type is for Reinhold the actuality of objects, followed by their possibility and their necessity²⁰⁵. One better understands the reason for this different order – which evidently does not only have a formal meaning, but constitutes a true and significant departure from the Critique of Pure Reason – if one considers the main interest that motivates Reinhold’s inquiry, of demonstrating not so much the validity as the reality of representations. It responds in the first place to the intent of refuting philosophical skepticism and not, as in Kant, of establishing the normativity which regulates the cognition of the world²⁰⁶. This is in its turn the most authentic expression of a psychologistic approach to Kantian transcendentalism²⁰⁷. Let us see in what sense. A large part of the reconstruction of the internal conditions of mere representation which Reinhold proposes in the Second Book of the Essay shows that the question around which his philosophical reflection revolves is that of the conditions of the possibility of real consciousness. For example, paragraph 24 claims that

 Versuch,  (RGS .). Contrary to Kant, Reinhold starts the judgments of quantity with singular judgments, whereas the Critique of Pure Reason starts them with universal judgments (cf. Versuch,  (RGS .); KrV, A /B ).  See in this regard Ameriks () .  It can be observed in this regard that the Kantische Denkformen oder Kategorien of Gottlob August Tittel – a text of which Reinhold gave a very negative review for the Allgemeine LiteraturZeitung (,  January ,  – ) – contained a similar inversion of the categories of Kantian modality. The empirical-psychological assumption which stands at the basis of it aimed to demonstrate that the universal concepts constitute the result of comparisons “of certain features common” to all singular things given in inner and outer experience (cf. Tittel ()  – ). Tittel defined as useful the Kantian enterprise of giving an order to ideas. But if, as Kant would have it, such an ordering must contain “only the first r a d i c a l c o n c e p t s [Stammbegriffe] of real cognition”, it is necessary that “only the s i m p l e and p o s i t i v e fundamental concepts are gathered, under which the whole human cognition is referable, as, for example, unity, reality, existence, etc.” (). He showed agreement with Kant in deriving multiplicity and totality from unity and negation and limitation from reality, but added that this must also be valid for the modal categories, that therefore “n e c e s s i t y and c o n t i n g e n c y are only two species of existence” ().

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

69

[w]enn das wirkliche Bewußtseyn möglich seyn soll, so muß der Stoff, das Gegebene, in der Vorstellung ein Mannigfaltiges, und die Form, das Hervorgebrachte, Einheit seyn. [if actual consciousness is to be possible then the material, the given, must be a manifold in the representation, and the form, that which is produced, a unity]²⁰⁸.

Paragraph 28 also reaffirms that [z]ur Wirklichkeit der Vorstellung überhaupt gehört ein von den Formen der Receptivität und Spontaneität verschiedener, dem Subjekte nicht im Vorstellungsvermögen, sondern von aussen her gegebener Stoff, welcher der objektive Stoff heißt. [a material different from the forms of receptivity and spontaneity, not given to the subject in the faculty of representation but from outside, pertains to the actuality of representation in general, and this is called the objective material]²⁰⁹.

Paragraph 29 then establishes that since an object different from the representation corresponds to the material of a representation, every representation must also have an object which is found outside of the mind. Das Daseyn der Gegenstände ausser uns ist also eben so gewiß, als das Daseyn einer Vorstellung überhaupt. [To the extent that objective material is necessary for the actuality of representation in general, so the existence of things outside us is proven on the basis of the existence of representation in general]²¹⁰.

Reinhold distinguishes between actual representation, empty representation, and representation without material. True representation must possess a material, because otherwise, it “would be a representation in which nothing is represented, a circle which is not round”. In fact, representation takes its name (repraesentatio) from the material, through which is designated “something occurring in consciousness, and by its means something other outside consciousness is substituted (vertreten), made present (repräsentiert), held up to consciousness”²¹¹. Empty representation is thus not a representation without material, but instead a representation “whose material is determined by an object to which the predicate of reality is wrongly attributed” either because it does not exist anywhere or because it is contradictory. Such a representation has an object which is nevertheless unreal, it can therefore be defined as empty and dis   

Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch,

   

(RGS (RGS (RGS (RGS

.); .); .); .);

en. en. en. en.

tr.: tr.: tr.: tr.:

Reinhold Reinhold Reinhold Reinhold

() () () ()

. . . .

70

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

tinct from the mere representation that is instead a representation which is thought in itself ²¹². In conclusion: “A representation has reality (is not empty), if the predicate of reality belongs to its object”²¹³. Skepticism is therefore that philosophical position which has committed the error of mixing up the object distinct from the representation with the material of representation itself; it doubts the agreement between the representation and the object and therefore thinks that the things outside of the mind cannot be demonstrated in their existence. According to Reinhold, all representations have, as consciousness demonstrates, an object. The relation between representation and object cannot, however, be understood in terms of correspondence or resemblance, because the object is represented in consciousness by means of the material that receives a form. If there is a correspondence, then it will be only between representation and material. Without admitting the existence of objects outside of us, it would not be possible to speak of a representation in general, because the objective material, which the representation must have to count as representation, requires an object outside of the mind²¹⁴. Though conceding that not all the representations must have an objective material (the material of an object), given that there can be a priori representations having for their object the mere forms of receptivity and spontaneity, having therefore a subjective material²¹⁵, Reinhold thinks that without the objective material, there could not exist a representation in general either. Es wird nicht behauptet, daß der objektive Stoff in jeder Vorstellung als Inhalt derselben vorkommen müsse; sondern nur, daß ohne ihn die Vorstellung überhaupt und folglich auch die reinen Vorstellungen von den Formen der Receptivität und Spontaneität selbst nicht zur Wirklichkeit gelangen könnten; weil in dem blossen Vorstellungsvermögen nur die Formen desselben bestimmt sind, die, bevor sie an einem von ihnen selbst verschiedenen Stoff in einer wirklichen Vorstellung vorgekommen sind, eben so wenig sich vorstellen lassen können, als die Form der Medicäischen Venus, wenn sie nicht an irgend einem Stoffe vorher vorgekommen wäre. [It is not being argued that objective material must occur in every representation as its content, but it is only argued that without it the representation in general, and consequently also the pure representations of the forms of receptivity and spontaneity, could not become actual, because in the faculty of representation per se only those of its forms are determinate which cannot be represented with a material distinct from them in an actual represen-

   

Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch,

 –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  –  (RGS . – ). ,  (RGS . – , ).

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

71

tation before they have occurred, any more than the form of the Medici Venus if it had not occurred with some material]²¹⁶.

Kant claimed that, though every one of our cognitions begins with experience, it does not follow that knowledge is wholly derived from experience²¹⁷. Reinhold reproduces this Kantian thesis by claiming that every finite representation which arises in and with consciousness neither comes to be given, nor received, nor produced, but comes to be generated. In the concept of “generation of representation”, he expresses the idea that something (the form) comes to be produced from a given (the material); the “What-is-the-given” (Gegebensein) of the material and the producing of the form in the given material together constitute “the real genetic history of every representation”²¹⁸. This serves to maintain firmly the demonstrability of the existence of things outside of the mind and in this way, to defeat skepticism. If the primary end of Kant was that of expounding, through the transcendental deduction of the categories, the normativity of the pure concepts of the understanding for objective experience, hence to refute skepticism in the first place not through the demonstration of the reality of external objects, that of Reinhold is on the contrary to prove that real representations are not given without the actual existence of things. The normativity which in Kant must be justified from a critical point of view comes to be substituted by a double given that shifts the level of discourse from a transcendental level to a transcendental-psychological one: (1) one begins from consciousness which shows in an unequivocal way that all representations have an object; (2) one then establishes that a condition of the possibility of representation (whose givenness is demonstrated by consciousness) is constituted by the given of the material. In the Third Book of the Essay, Reinhold can thus distinguish between the actuality of the thought object which depends on thinking, and the actuality of the object not only thought but intuited, which depends instead on the impression of the material given to receptivity²¹⁹.  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .  KrV, B .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ). August Wilhelm Rehberg, reviewing the Essay, had underscored the distance from Kant concerning the thesis on the existence of things outside of us, claiming that in Reinhold it was deduced independently of the concept of time, to begin “from the actuality of representation in general” (see Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  –  November ,  – , in Rezensionen,  – : ). Johann Georg Heinrich Feder also drew attention to the difference between Kantian and Reinholdian realism, recalling how the Essay for example maintains that without a material given from the outside, a representation would not have any reality (Philosophische Bibliothek, , ,  – , in Rezensionen,  –

72

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

2.5 The Deduction of the Categories 2.5.1 Kant In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed a transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, motivating it with the argument that, contrary to the pure forms of sensibility, the validity of which is secured by their a priori necessity with respect to the faculty of the manifold of sensibility to be given, the pure forms of the understanding only make the claim to be universally valid. Therefore, one will have to verify, or better, justify the groundedness of this demand of theirs by showing by means of a transcendental deduction their character as conditions of the possibility of experience²²⁰. Without entering into the thorny problem of the structure of this deduction and the intervening variations between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason ²²¹, we will limit ourselves simply to Kant’s assertions. We have already seen how in the Preface of 1781 he distinguished between a subjective deduction and an objective deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding. Whereas the former is concerned with the question of the possibility of the intellective faculty, the latter deals with the possibility of cognizing independently of empirical experience. The addition of the inessentiality of the subjective deduction for Kant’s end gave the reader the possibility of orientating himself between the various sections in which the quid iuris was developed. The first section (which will return in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason), which is devoted to the necessity of a transcendental deduction of the categories, because they, unlike the pure forms of sensibility, do not represent the conditions by which objects are given in intuition, is therefore followed by a second section in which Kant introduces the three syntheses (of apprehension by intuition, reproduction in imagination and recognition in concept) through which objects are assembled in a unity. The third and last section deals with the relation of the understanding with objects in general and the possibility of the a priori cognition of objects, highlighting both a deduction from

:  – , ). Critical observations of the distinction between logical actuality and real actuality were expressed by Hermann Andreas Pistorius in his review of the Essay for the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (vol. , pt. , ,  – , now in Rezensionen,  – :  – ).  KrV, A  – /B  – .  Well-known in this regard are the theses of Erdmann (), Paton (), de Vleeschauwer ( – ), Chiodi (), Henrich ( – ), Ameriks () and Baum (). See also the study which Martin Bondeli has devoted to Kant’s transcendental deduction and its reception on the part of Reinhold, Maimon, Schulze, Beck and Fichte: Bondeli ().

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

73

the top, which begins from pure apperception and follows the connections between the three subjective sources of cognition (sense, imagination and apperception), as well as a deduction from the bottom, in which the necessary reference of the understanding to phenomena is clarified beginning from the bottom, that is, the empirical²²². In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presented a transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding which is completely re-elaborated. After having introduced the objective unity of pure apperception as distinct from the subjective unity of inner sense (§ 18) and after having established that it is in judgment that such an objective unity is expressed (§ 19), he had arrived at a first conclusion on the basis of which the real unity of intuition would not be possible without the objective unity of the I think. The manifold that is given in a sensible intuition necessarily belongs under the original synthetic unity of apperception, since through this alone is the unity of the intuition possible (§ 17). That action of the understanding, however, through which the manifold of given representations (whether they be intuitions or concepts) is brought under an apperception in general, is the logical function of judgment (§ 19). Therefore all manifold, insofar as it is given in one empirical intuition, is determined in regard to one of the logical functions for judgment, by means of which, namely, it is brought to a consciousness in general. But now the categories are nothing other than these very functions for judging, insofar as the manifold of a given intuition is determined with regard to them (§ 13). Thus the manifold in a given intuition also necessarily stands under categories²²³.

Paragraph 21 establishes that only a “beginning” of the deduction was given in this way, recalling that further ahead, in paragraph 26, one would be able to show that the unity of empirical intuition is really that unity prescribed by the categories to the manifold in general; “thus by the explanation of its a priori validity in regard to all objects of our senses the aim of the deduction will first be fully attained”²²⁴. In both 1781 and 1787, the transcendental deduction of the categories is preceded by a part entitled On the Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the

 KrV, A  – . On the transcendental deduction of the categories presented by Kant in , see Carl (). The Kantian usage of concepts like “apperception” or “imagination” for the quaestio iuris has led Paul Guyer to conclude that the transcendental assumption does not necessarily exclude a psychological point of view: cf. Guyer ().  KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () .  KrV, B  – ; en. tr.: Kant () .

74

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

Understanding. In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gave this part the name of a “metaphysical deduction”²²⁵. I would like to establish several points of Kant’s reflection on the basis of which to consider the deduction of the categories propounded by Reinhold in the Essay. (1) The “metaphysical deduction” of the categories does not respond to the quaestio iuris concerning their validity with respect to the possible experience, but is limited to providing a leading thread to find them. (2) The relation that binds the pure concept of the understanding and the object of cognition is only possible; if it were also factual, the transcendental deduction of the categories would no longer have any sense either. Its task, in fact, is that of justifying their presumption to be conditions of the possibility of experience; it therefore recognizes that the relation that binds the category to the object is not factual. (3) “Transcendental” is not synonymous with “a priori”; in other words, the apriority of a concept does not signify validity. To show that a pure a priori concept is valid, it is necessary to accomplish a transcendental deduction.

2.5.2 Reinhold Reinhold propounds the deduction of the categories in the Third Book of the Essay, the one devoted to the Theory of the Faculty of Cognition. Paragraph 69 establishes that objective unity is the form under which the object is thought and is thus distinguished from the unity of the object, which is represented through the pure forms of sensibility²²⁶. Paragraph 70 claims that objective unity is the form of intellective or conceptual representation. As unity in general is founded on the mode of acting of spontaneity in general, that is, on the conjoining analyzed in the Second Book of the Essay (§ 26), so the unity of the intuited manifold is founded on the a priori concept as the representation which arises from an intuition. While “in the first degree”, viz., in the “first power (Potenz)”, of the representative synthesis, sensibility, with its forms, conjoins the mere material given by the external objects, in the second degree, viz., second power, it conjoins a material that has already become a representation, thus producing “a unity of higher type, a unity of the understanding”. Thus the conceptual representation is not referred immediately to the object, but only  KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () . Chiodi has insisted strongly on the contingency of this expression, recalling that the deduction can only be transcendental for Kant; “transcendental” is not in fact opposed to “metaphysical”, but to “empirical”: cf. Chiodi () , .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ).

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

75

through the sensible representation²²⁷. Paragraph 71 defines “judging” as “[t]o gather the manifold of an intuition into an objective unity”²²⁸. Judgment is in fact the action of the intellect which conjoins two representations, the first of which is constituted by the subject, and the second by the predicate. The subject in an immediate judgment (which is not a rational inference) is a sensible representation or an intuition, the predicate is instead that feature of the subject which is referred to the object only through an intuition. There are, however, two possibilities for producing an objective unity: either it is obtained by starting from the intuition, through a generation of the predicate from the subject and in the conjoining of the intuited manifold, or by starting from the already produced objective unity, through a separation of the predicate from the subject. The first is the case of a synthetic judgment. The second is the case of an analytic judgment. Beyde, das synthetische und das analytische Urtheil, haben unter sich das Gemeinschaftliche, daß sie Urtheile, Handlungen des Verstandes sind, durch welche die Beziehung eines Begriffes auf eine Anschauung bestimmt wird; aber sie unterscheiden sich dadurch von einander, daß beym Synthetischen das Bestimmen der Beziehung im Erzeugen der beziehenden Vorstellung; beym analytischen aber im Verbinden der beziehenden Vorstellung mit der Anschauung besteht; daß das letztere eben dasselbe Prädikat mit dem Subjekte verbindet, welches von dem erstern durch Zusammenfassung des angeschauten Mannigfaltigen, aus dem Subjekte, erzeugt wurde. [Both synthetic and the analytic judgment have in common the fact that they are judgments, actions of the understanding, by which the relation of a concept to an intuition is determined, but they are distinguished from each another by the fact that the determination of the relation of the two, in the case of synthesis, occurs in the production of the relating representation, and, in the case of analysis, in the binding of the relating representation to the intuition, and by the fact that the latter binds the same predicate to the subject generated out of the subject by the former through the combination of the intuited manifold]²²⁹.

Therefore, every analysis is preceded by a synthesis and at the ground of every analytic judgment lies a preceding synthetic judgment²³⁰. In paragraph 72, Reinhold then establishes that it is possible, on the basis of the particular forms of the judgments, to determine a priori those “modifications of the objective unity” which are constituted by the categories. For our purposes, it is not necessary to follow the scholastic exposition which Reinhold devotes to

   

Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch,

 –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  –  (RGS . – ).

76

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

this problem step by step²³¹. Suffice it to say that the Reinholdian table of categories is established from analytic judgment, by inquiring into the logical material, that is, the predicate and the subject which appear, and the logical form, or the way in which the represented manifold is reunited in the objective unity. The judgments of quantity and quality are found by referring to the material. The judgments of relation and modality, on the other hand, are found by referring to the form (which emphasizes once again, in this regard, the inversion with respect to Kant of the category of actuality, viz., existence, and that of possibility). Now, Reinhold adds: Wie sich die allgemeine Form des Urtheilens zu der allgemeinen Form der Begriffe, oder der Form, Gegenstände zu denken, verhält: so verhalten sich die besondern Formen des Urtheilens zu den besonderen Formen der Begriffe, oder den Formen, Gegenstände zu denken, den Kategorien. [In the same way as the general form of judgment acts with respect to the general form of the concepts, or to the form in which objects are thought, so the particular forms of judgment also act with respect to the particular forms of the concepts, or to the forms in which objects are thought, – the categories]²³².

From here follows the correspondence between forms of judgment and categories. Therefore, the categories are the determinate forms of reunifying in objective unity the determinate modes of acting of the understanding; they are such because such is the nature of the understanding and it does not make any sense to ask how the understanding arrives at them, because these modes of acting constitute the limit of what can be represented²³³. There is no question that Reinhold expounds a deduction of the categories here; in fact, he speaks of other attempts to “deduce (ableiten) the mode of action of the understanding”²³⁴, all destined to fail to the extent that they begin from objects thought as things in themselves, instead of from the nature of the understanding itself. This deduction would now seem only metaphysical, because with it, only the table of categories is established. Paragraph 73 shows, however, that this is not the case. It claims that through the “objective unity the object is thought as object in general, and through the categories as determinate object”. Every object thought in a determinate way must be thought by means of the features of quantity, quality, relation and modality.

   

See in this regard König (), König (), Onnasch (). Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ). Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

77

Die Kategorien müssen also allen bestimmten Gegenständen beygelegt werden, weil diese nur durch jene bestimmt gedacht werden können, d. h. die Kategorien sind nothwendige und allgemeine Merkmale der bestimmten Gegenstände. [The categories must accompany all determinate objects because these are only able to be determinated through them, i. e. the categories are necessary and general attributes of determinate objects]²³⁵.

The thinkability of objects depends on the pure concepts of the understanding which are thus the conditions of their possibility. It would be the Critique of Reason to have shown this implication; such a dependence of things on thought means for Reinhold that “the certainty of human knowledge” consists “in the consciousness of the necessity of certain judgments” and a judgment is necessary to the extent that it conforms “to its form under which the understanding itself is able to make a judgment”²³⁶. Wenn man sich also nur eines einzigen wirklich als bestimmt vorgestellten Gegenstandes bewußt ist, so muß man sich auch der Nothwendigkeit und Allgemeinheit der Kategorien bewußt seyn, weil durch sie die wirkliche Vorstellung des bestimmten Gegenstandes allein möglich ist. [If a single represented object is to be made conscious really and determinately, then so must the necessity and generality of the categories be made conscious for through them alone actual representation of the determinate object is possible]²³⁷.

If the categories were determined a posteriori and were to constitute the features of things in themselves, then their necessity could be explained in consciousness only by means of habit²³⁸. The result of Reinhold’s reasoning can be summarized as follows: (1) Given that it is possible to present a single justification of the pure concepts of the understanding by alluding to the relation between subject and predicate present in the various forms of judgment, there is no difference between the metaphysical deduction and the transcendental deduction of the categories. The question of the leading thread for the statement of the table of categories can thus be considered as the genuine deduction. The transcendental justification of the applicability of the categories to objects of experience is contained in the consciousness of the necessity of the judgment. Whereas Kant had maintained that discovery of a leading thread to establish the table of the pure con   

Versuch, Versuch, Versuch, Versuch,

 (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  –  (RGS . – ).

78

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

cepts of the understanding does not yet respond to the quaestio iuris of their validity with respect to a possible experience (hence the expression “metaphysical deduction” of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason), Reinhold thinks that the determination of the modes of objective unity is already in itself the answer to the transcendental question²³⁹. Whereas Kant had observed that the definition of judgment as the representation of the relation between two concepts does not yet exclude the question of validity²⁴⁰, Reinhold holds that the answer to the transcendental question is contained in this definition. (2) The identification of the metaphysical deduction and the transcendental deduction depends on the necessary and unconditioned relation that exists, according to Reinhold, between representation and object. If a representation is such because it represents something and if the represented object would not be such if it were not referred to a representation, then the necessity of the relation between the representation (in this case: category) and the object is already explained by its very being. The impossibility, that is, the contradictoriness of a pure concept of the understanding without an object – first guaranteed on the basis of consciousness in general, comprehended as the relationship of the representation with a subject and an object, then on the basis of the consciousness of an object, comprehended as the reference of the representation to a determinate object – renders senseless the quaestio iuris of the object-directed relation of the categories, which in Kant’s thought was grounded on the distance between this necessity and the pretense of unconditioned validity. “The categories of the understanding […] do not represent to us the conditions under which objects

 Here is outlined for the first time after Kant that sense of “transcendental deduction” of the pure concepts of the understanding that will become more and more preponderant in the grand systems of classical German philosophy, and for which – as Hegel will recall in the Encyclopedia of  (§ ) when speaking of Fichte’s doctrine of science – the determinations of thought are not readily found in the manner of Kant, but deduced in their necessity from the unity of the I. Kant will never recognize the validity of such a procedure. Rather, speaking of Fichte with Tieftrunk, he will say that the idea of a self-consciousness without material, held in the doctrine of science, seems like a specter which does not have in front of itself any object other than itself (see the letter of  April : Kant-AA . – ). It can be added, with respect to Reinhold’s enterprise, that the Kantian use of the technical term “Deduktion” in favor of the interchangeable “Ableitung” and “Deduktion” disappears together with the superimposition of transcendental deduction and metaphysical deduction. Cassirer had already observed at his time how in Reinhold the metaphysical deduction works as a basis for the transcendental deduction: Cassirer () .  KrV, B  – ; en. tr.: Kant () : “I have never been able to satisfy myself with the explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is, they say, the representation of a relation between two concepts. […] I remark only that it is not determined wherein this relation consists”.

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

79

are given in intuition at all, hence objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions”²⁴¹. The possibility of the appearance of objects without the forms of the understanding means for Kant that the relation between categories and objects is not automatically guaranteed as that which exists between forms of sensibility and objects; it must therefore be deduced in a transcendental way²⁴². (3) Instead of this essential difference of relations, which motivates the necessity of the transcendental deduction in Kant, Reinhold posits a difference of potency which once again signifies the loss of the sense of the quaestio iuris regarding the use of the representations in the object. The unity which is achieved due to the forms of sensibility is to the objective unity of the understanding as the inferior element is to the superior element in a scale of possible grades of synthesis of the manifold. This explains, on the one hand, the not at all Kantian duplication of the concept of “object” on the basis of which there would be an object of sensible representation which has not yet been represented as distinct from the representation, an object that is intuited but not yet thought²⁴³ – whereas the transcendental deduction of the categories secures that one cannot speak of an “object” intuited independently of its categorization. On the other hand, it accounts for the (this time Kantian²⁴⁴) idea that the categories are both forms of what can be thought, and so have no need for an intuited manifold, and forms of what can be cognized, and so must have an intuited manifold. Die Kategorien sind also nicht blos unabhängig von der Sinnlichkeit, ohne Beziehung auf die allgemeine Form der Anschauungen, d. h. ohne die blosse Zeit, denkbar, sondern müssen auch, wenn sie ohne Beymischung alles fremdartigen in ihrer ursprünglichen Reinheit und ihrem eigentlichen Wesen nach gedacht werden sollen, unabhängig von der Sinnlichkeit und abgesondert von der Zeit gedacht werden. Daher die Ewigkeit der logischen Wesen. [The categories are thus not merely conceivable independent of sensibility, without relation to the general form of the intuitions, i. e. without time per se, but must, if they are to be thought without contaminating their original purity with foreign elements and according to their actual essence, also be thought independent of sensibility and separate from time. Thus is established the eternity of logical beings]²⁴⁵.

    

KrV, B ; en. tr.: Kant () . See, on this point, Chiodi ()  – ,  – . Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ). KrV, A ,  – ,  – /B ,  – , . Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

80

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

The pure concepts are therefore concepts of the understanding in the narrow sense when they are referred to the a priori represented manifold in general (and hence only to the faculty of representation in general), and are instead concepts of the understanding in a narrower sense when they are referred to the intuited manifold (and hence to the faculty of sensible representation). It is the same spontaneity, which connects the intuited manifold with the same categories, that also connects the manifold in general. Wird also den Kategorien die Vorstellung a priori des Mannigfaltigen überhaupt als Stoff untergelegt, so gehören sie dem Verstand in engerer – wird ihnen die vorgestellte allgemeine Form der Anschauung überhaupt untergelegt, so gehören sie dem Verstande in engster Bedeutung an, dessen Natur in der Beziehung der Handlungsweise der Spontaneität auf die Form der Anschauung bestehen muß. [If the representation a priori of the manifold as material underlies the categories, they belong to the understanding in the narrower sense. If the represented general form of intuition in general underlies them, they belong to the understanding in the narrowest sense, an understanding whose nature must consist in the relation of the mode of action of spontaneity to the form of intuition]²⁴⁶.

The field of what can be thought and that of what can be cognized are respectively defined on the basis of this double applicability of the pure concepts of the understanding. A thought object is that which has an only subjective reality, and depends only on “the effect of spontaneity”. A cognized and not only thought object is that which has an objective reality, and depends on “an effect of the thing outside us that has affected our receptivity”, and is thus also intuited. The first object has only a logical actuality, while the second has real actuality²⁴⁷. For Reinhold, “the greater the subjective reality of our representations, the more restricted their objective reality, and vice versa”. Intuition, concept and idea stand in an ascending/descending order, according to the type of reality they possess: intuition is thus the richest with objective reality, while idea is the richest with subjective reality²⁴⁸. (4) “Transcendental” is for Reinhold synonymous with “a priori”. If Kant had maintained the indispensability of the transcendental deduction of the categories by distinguishing the theme of apriority from that of validity – a pure a priori concept is not in itself unconditionally valid, even if it presumes to be so –, Reinhold thinks that the apriority of the pure concepts of the understanding con-

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

81

tains in itself the justification of its own unconditioned validity. Recognizing with Kant that the transcendental deduction is opposed to the empirical²⁴⁹, Reinhold maintains contra Kant that it cannot have but the meaning of an a priori deduction. Taking his departure from the necessary and universal relation that defines cognition as consciousness of object, he deduces at the same time its unconditioned validity. (5) The problem of the transcendental deduction has already come to be resolved in Reinhold by the answer given to the question of the ground (Fundament). The relation between pure concept of the understanding and object of experience is in fact established by the consciousness which constitutes the “basis” of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation. As consciousness has a certain nature, the unconditioned validity of the representation-object relation is also secured. Kant’s reply to the doubts raised by skepticism is therefore not the only one possible. Reinhold intends in fact to show that one could not be conscious of an object if one were not conscious of the necessity and universality of the categories. This two-fold consciousness underscores above all the primacy of the consciousness on the basis of which one can respond to the skeptical doubt about the relation between representation and object: one can only speak of the object of cognition as object of consciousness. It establishes, in the second place, that the categories, like the forms of sensibility (for which mere space and mere time can be considered as objects²⁵⁰), can also become the material of a priori representations. The pure representations of the categories (objective genitive: of the categories as object) are “representations of necessary and general attributes of the objects determined by the understanding”²⁵¹. When Reinhold holds then that consciousness of the object would not be possible without consciousness of the category with its features of necessity and universality, he does not so much affirm, as Kant had done, that all objects of the senses are subject to the categories, and that therefore the deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding is meant to express their objectivity, as instead that consciousness of the one (the object) would not be possible without con-

 “I therefore call the explanation of the way in which concepts can relate to objects a priori their transcendental deduction, and distinguish this from the empirical deduction, which shows how a concept is acquired through experience and reflection on it, and therefore concerns not the lawfulness but the fact from which the possession has arisen” (KrV, A /B ; en. tr.: Kant () ).  Versuch, ,  (RGS ., ). Johann Georg Heinrich Feder will immediately stress the distance which separates Reinhold from Kant about this question (Philosophische Bibliothek, , ,  – ; now in Rezensionen,  – : ).  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

82

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

sciousness of the other (the categories). Here one finds again that distinction between a subjective deduction and an objective deduction of the categories which Kant had established in the Critique of Pure Reason and with respect to which, as we have seen, Reinhold opted for the former in order to justify the faculty of representation. Even in our case, the transcendental deduction of the categories is the deduction of how the intellective consciousness of the object is possible. If Kant had identified the question of the constitution of the faculties as only a subjective explanation²⁵², Reinhold set it forth again as decisive for the explanation of the possibility of cognition. (6) The Copernican revolution of the Critique of Pure Reason is taken by Reinhold (and by many exponents of classical German philosophy in his wake) in the sense of the shift of foundation from object to subject, rather than, as in Kant, in that of foundational justification of the relation between subject and object. While in the first case one begins from a reality, namely that of consciousness, as ground of determination of the objective relation, in the second case, one begins from a necessary relation to explain its possibility. It is clear that in the first case, that of Reinhold, the problem of the objectivity of cognition is resolved on the basis of the exposition of the conditions of the possibility of a reality which is both necessary and unconditioned, that is, valid in itself, and in the second case, that of Kant, in terms of a transcendental justification of a claimed necessity which is thus not yet valid²⁵³. Taking the Copernican revolution to be the problem of grounding, substantializing the question of the relation between subject and object as a relation which is explicable from a reality means ultimately making a quaestio facti of the quaestio iuris, even if not of the empirical type: the psychologism of Reinhold’s reflection lies in this, too²⁵⁴.

 “If someone still wanted to propose a middle way between the only two, already named ways, namely, that the categories were neither self-thought a priori first principles of our cognition nor drawn from experience, but were rather subjective predispositions for thinking, implanted in us along with our existence by our author in such a way that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along which experience runs […] this would be decisive against the supposed middle way: that in such a case the categories would lack the necessity that is essential to their concept” (KrV, B  – ; en. tr.: Kant () ).  For Kant, see Chiodi ()  – .  Johann Christian August Grohmann claimed that the deduction of the forms of objective unity presented in the Essay is not transcendental, because it expounds facts, but not the reasons of the facts: see Neue transcendentale Deduktion der logischen Formen, in Grohmann () . Rehberg, in his review of the Essay, had noted the absolute novelty of the deduction of the Reinholdian categories (cf. Rezensionen, ). See also the review of the Essay which came out in the Erlangische gelehrte Zeitung (,  February ,  – ; ,  February ,  – ), now in: Rezensionen,  – : .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

83

2.6 The Transcendental Schematism In Kant, the chapter on transcendental schematism represents an indispensable moment of the quaestio iuris concerning the possible application of the categories of the understanding on sensible intuitions. Though it is not relevant to the transcendental deduction of the categories in the narrow sense, it guarantees, in fact, that the claim of validity which is posited by the pure concepts is received as grounded. In this sense, it is an integral part of that reasoning which is meant to establish that we can cognize objects independently of empirical experience, and belongs to that level of discourse identified by what Kant calls an objective deduction²⁵⁵. The Critique of Pure Reason introduces the question of the schematism in the following way: the pure concepts of the understanding are all heterogeneous to the sensible intuitions. “Now how is the subsumption of the latter under the former, thus the application of the category to appearances possible”?²⁵⁶ The “how” (wie) in this passage cannot be intended to mean the same sense as the “how” to which Kant assigned the subjective aspect of the transcendental deduction of the categories in the Preface to the first edition of the work. Rather, it is a “how” which essentially belongs to the objective aspect of the quaestio iuris. The confirmation is contained in paragraph 26 of the Transcendental Deduction of the second edition which, despite referring to “the possibility of as it were prescribing the law to nature”²⁵⁷, does not respond to the subjective question of how the faculties of cognizing are possible, but rather to the objective question of what and how much reason can cognize independently of experience²⁵⁸. Even the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason therefore contains the question

 More than any other, in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik Heidegger has insisted on the centrality of the transcendental schematism and hence denied the possibility to distinguish between a first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason of a psychological character, that supposedly developed the subjective aspect of the transcendental deduction, and a second edition of a logical character, which highlighted the objective aspect of it. On the other hand, neo-Kantianism has emphasized this last aspect, arriving at holding with Cassirer that the true problem of the doctrine of the schematism was constituted by the “psychological possibility of universal concept”: cf. Cassirer () .  KrV, A /B ; en. tr.: Kant ()  – .  KrV, B  – ; en. tr.: Kant () .  This is the correct position of Dieter Henrich against Paton and Adickes, who have instead interpreted §  in terms of the subjective deduction: cf. Henrich ( – ) , .

84

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

of “how”, however, no longer in the psychological sense put in light by Kant in the Preface to the first edition²⁵⁹. The schema is for Kant the intermediate representation between the category and the sensible intuition, as homogeneous with one as with the other. It is therefore not a pure concept of the understanding, but only a transcendental determination of time which conjoins the categorial unity with the phenomenal manifold. It restricts the use of the concept to the empirical ambit, guaranteeing in this way its validity. It is in sum the true and only condition of the category in that it confers a relation with the object to it, and by this a meaning²⁶⁰. The Kantian thesis, according to which the relation between concept and sensible intuition requires a transcendental deduction, is grounded on the difference between the schema and the pure concept and simultaneously, on their strict interconnection. In absence of a reality which guarantees the validity of the application of the pure concept on the sensible intuition, thus only the problematic nature of their relation being present, the matter at hand is one of justifying the claim of the concepts being absolutely valid for a possible experience: schematism is meant to respond to this question²⁶¹. Kant insists on many occasions, and in different ways, on the dynamic character so to speak of the transcendental schema: once, emphasizing the procedural aspect through which the productive imagination, on the basis of the schema, procures for the concept of the understanding an image; later, asserting that the schema is a rule of the synthesis of the imagination; or, further, saying that it is the pure synthesis “in accord with a rule of unity according to concepts in general, which the category expresses”²⁶². What is the function of the schematism in the whole of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation? We begin from the place in which it is expounded – the Third Book, in particular the part devoted to the Theory of the Understanding. After having dealt with the categories, Reinhold declares that the schemata are the categories “represented in their determinate relation to the general form of the intuitions [time per se]”²⁶³. They are “the connected forms of thinking and intuition” and “are therefore the real forms of cognition”²⁶⁴. In them the cat-

 Chiodi had stressed the presence in the Critique of Pure Reason of a descriptive “how” (quaestio facti) and a justificatory “how” (quaestio iuris): Chiodi ()  – , .  KrV, A  – ,  – /B  – ,  – .  Important observations in this regard can be found in Chiodi ()  – ,  – .  KrV, A  – /B  – ; en. tr.: Kant () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The Psychologism of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation

85

egories are rendered sensible²⁶⁵, the forms of intuition are determined by means of the understanding, and thinkability and intuitability are raised to cognizability. Kein Gegenstand also, dem die Schemate widersprechen, ist erkennbar, und jeder ist nur in soferne erkennbar, als ihm die Schemate als Prädikate beygelegt werden können. [Thus, no object that the schemata contradict is cognizable, and every object is only cognizable to the extent that the schemata can be attributed to it as predicates]²⁶⁶.

Like all the other forms of representation, the schemata can also become the objects of a priori representations: to this extent necessity and universality are due to them. Being in fact the forms which every material given by objects must assume in the mind, they constitute the universal attributes of cognizable objects²⁶⁷. Three points must be highlighted in order to gauge the distance between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Theory of the Faculty of Representation in regard to the doctrine of schematism. (1) Whereas Kant had placed the emphasis on the difference of nature and of the role of the pure concepts of the understanding on the one hand, and of the imaginative schemata on the other, Reinhold tends rather to bring the two representations together by taking one to be the sensibilized form of the other. By doing so, he shows himself to be so to speak more royal than the king. If Kant had in fact also given ample space to the role of the productive imagination and the faculty of judgment, distinguishing their functions from those of the understanding, Reinhold does not ever speak thematically of Einbildungskraft and Urteilskraft at all over the course of the Essay, nullifying the distance that separates them from the understanding and makes the latter carry out every synthetic activity of second degree, after what is carried out by the sensible faculty. (2) While Kant had treated the schemata from within the question of the possible application of pure concepts to sensible representations, attributing therefore a decidedly transcendental function to them, Reinhold highlights rather their character of givenness based on the nature of the faculty of human cognition. The apriorism which denotes them once again, as already in the case of the categories, guarantees their universal and unconditioned validity. (3) This aspect of factuality and reality which char-

 Kant had not, but Carl Christian Erhard Schmid had in his Wörterbuch zum leichtern Gebrauch der Kantischen Schriften, nebst einer Abhandlung, Jena , sub voce, spoken of the transcendental schema in terms of “Versinnlichung” of the pure concept of the understanding.  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  –  (RGS .).

86

III The Theory of the Faculty of Representation

acterizes the doctrine of schematism depends on the “basis” on which it stands: consciousness. In just the same way as this is a fact, as the relation between representation and object is ‘a priori-factual’, the relation between schema and object can also be characterized in terms of a necessity which does not require any justification²⁶⁸.

 This difference between an apriorism in need of a justification (Kant) and an apriorism that justifies itself (Reinhold) clearly returns in the doctrine of the principles. For Kant, the a priori principles carry this name because they ground the other judgments and are not grounded in any higher cognition. This peculiar character “does not elevate them beyond all proof”. “For although this could not be carried further objectively, but rather grounds all cognition of its object, yet this does not prevent a proof from the subjective sources of the possibility of a cognition of an object in general from being possible, indeed even necessary”. A proof of this kind is necessary in order that one does not exchange the principle with a “surreptitious assertion” (KrV, A  – /B ; en. tr.: Kant () ). Instead, according to Reinhold, the principles of the understanding are original judgments which “require a proof as little as they are capable of one”. They cannot be proved, given that higher judgments from which they would have to be deduced do not exist. Moreover, they have no need for a proof, “because they carry with them the ground of their necessity and generality in their priority, or, which amounts to the same thing, because through them nothing is represented other than what is determined in the cognitive faculty and consequently cannot be cognized in any other manner than the way it is cognized” (Versuch,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () ). His last point will be taken by J. G. H. Feder to be an inference from the possible to the real (Philosophische Bibliothek, , ,  – ; now in Rezensionen,  – : ).

IV The Elementary Philosophy One year after the publication of the Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, the first volume of the Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of the Philosophers which is devoted to the foundation of the Elementary Philosophy came out for the St. Michael’s fair of 1790²⁶⁹. Reinhold originally intended it to serve as a periodical where one could find space for discussing objections raised against the Critique of Reason and a more precise exposition of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation²⁷⁰. But it is soon transformed into a true book, though conceived merely as the first of a series of volumes. Only by expounding the characteristics of the first principle on which a philosophical system is founded in a coherent way, Reinhold explains in the Preface, might one in fact hope to bring about that agreement which allows one to avoid new misunderstandings, overcome disagreements and respond to criticisms in a fundamental way²⁷¹. Thus a new essay on the Elementary Philosophy is born, the realization of which will, according to Reinhold’s schedule, occupy the different volumes of the Contributions, and deal with “the fundamentals, the elements and true principles of the critical philosophy”; furthermore, the Letters on the Kantian Philosophy will be devoted to the consequences, applicability and influence of the Kantian philosophy²⁷². As it turned out, however, the first remains the only volume of the Contributions which is wholly devoted to the Elementary Philosophy; the second and last volume which came out in 1794 deals with it only in the first essay, very briefly in the final part of the second, and in the review of the Critique of Pure Reason reproduced at the end²⁷³. In May 1791, Reinhold published another essay on the Elementary Philosophy, Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens nebst einigen Erläuterungen über die Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens (On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge Together with Some

 Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, ,  October , .  Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, ,  November ,  – ; Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen, ,  December ,  – .  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  “Über den Unterschied zwischen dem gesunden Verstande und der philosophierenden Vernunft in Rücksicht auf die Fundamente des durch beide möglichen Wissens; Systematische Darstellung der Fundamente der künftigen und der bisherigen Metaphysik”; “Über das Fundament der Kritik der reinen Vernunft”: Beiträge II,  – ,  – ,  –  (ed. :  – ,  – ,  – ).

88

IV The Elementary Philosophy

Comments Concerning the Theory of the Faculty of Representation), known also as the Fundamentschrift. The task of this chapter is to analyze the Elementary Philosophy of the years 1790 – 91 from the perspective of the relation between transcendentalism and psychologism. We will see that despite the significant and multiple theoretical variations with respect to the Essay of 1789, it will be possible to recover a common thread which we have already begun to point out in the preceding chapters.

1 Some Reviews of the Essay The new Theory of the Faculty of Representation immediately found a wide audience. Among the many reviews of the Essay, we consider in particular those of J.G.H. Feder, J.F. Flatt and K.H. Heydenreich here. The reason for these choices is two-fold: on the one hand, the critical observations of these thinkers come to be explicitly discussed by Reinhold in the first volume of the Contributions ²⁷⁴, and on the other, some of them form the implicit basis of some of the theoretical innovations which emerge between the text of 1789 and that of 1790.

1.1 Feder We begin with the first of the three authors who review the Essay on a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation: Johann Georg Heinrich Feder. There are two places in which this professor of Göttingen expresses his objections to Reinhold’s theory: the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (this review is discussed in the first volume of the Contributions) and the Philosophische Bibliothek ²⁷⁵. The short account that will follow it will once again reveal the difference between the psychological assumptions of the two philosophers. In fact, in the view of Feder, the Theory of Representation deals with the question of whether objects can be represented and cognized only from a general point of view. According to Reinhold, Feder explains, one should draw a limit between a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of the soul and its relation to the body, and an inquiry devoted to the mere faculty. This is surely a worthy enterprise. Yet, all things considered, it has the defect of remaining vague to the point of

 In the case of Feder, Reinhold only discusses the review of the Göttingische Anzeigen.  Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, ,  January ,  – ; Philosophische Bibliothek, , ,  – ; both in Rezensionen,  – ,  – .

1 Some Reviews of the Essay

89

not being able to demonstrate an applicable result. How can one in fact analyze the cognitive faculty without referring to some internal and external organization, and objects which the tradition has called “soul” and “body” (Leib)? How is it possible to discuss sensation without speaking of imagination, memory and remembrance? The doctrine of sensible cognition cannot but describe the relations of the outer senses to the representation of space to see the extent to which this is the form of outer sense: our perception of space always avails itself, for example, of sight or hearing. It is a beautiful and just thing, grounded and enlightening, when philosophy admits the least possible principles and only those necessary ones. However, this must always take place taking into precise and interested consideration the whole content of that which is given and is objective of cognition. Otherwise, one has some idealist systems instead of the true system of nature²⁷⁶.

According to Feder, one goes too far in considering every change of the faculty of representation as consciousness, in the way Reinhold does. “Consciousness, conscientia, refers to a knowing, thus not to every grade and every species of affection and active expression of the faculty of representation”. If psychological observation still has to have value, one must not omit important characteristics like the force and duration of an impression and the disposition of the affected subject to receive and consider the represented material. For Feder, this theoretical impoverishment also reemerges with respect to the definition of cognition. Before Kant, cognizing meant possessing the grounded representation of a thing: cognition can therefore be certain, probable, dubious, direct, analogous, as in a cognition of experience or of an inference. The new philosophy teaches us instead that an intuition is required for cognizing in an authentic way. But if this is so, how will one be able to affirm that we can cognize God, given that we do not intuit Him? If we cannot therefore apply any predicate of our understanding to the subject which we call God, if we can therefore predicate of God neither goodness, wisdom, omnipotence, governance and providence, nor can we think of them in God in a well-grounded way, what then is the name good for to us, or what have we to do with faith in God, which exactly for this philosophy is necessary due to practical reason, if we may not admit and think of properties and relations in a well-grounded and rational way? ²⁷⁷

 Rezensionen, .  Rezensionen,  – ,  – ,  – ,  – .

90

IV The Elementary Philosophy

1.2 Flatt Johann Friedrich Flatt raised many criticisms in his tremendously rich review of Reinhold’s Essay. We limit ourselves here to reporting those which we can sum up under the general title of ‘skeptical’. It will, in fact, be in response to them that Reinhold makes some claims which are important for our investigation. It is Flatt who assumed again and again a different role in order to express his observations; under the guise of a skeptical philosopher, he thus poses, above all, the question of the universal plausibility of certain principles of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation. “Is it generally possible, and how is it possible, to know with certainty that a certain principle, whichever it is, is admitted by all to be valid?” Referring then to paragraph VII of the Essay, where Reinhold had expounded the relation between representation, object and subject which consciousness compels us to recognize, Flatt concedes that the consciousness of a skeptic could only admit the reality of a representation, but never that of an object distinct from the same representation. It would demand in any case a justification of the premise present in an implicit manner in Reinhold’s reasoning, on the basis of which it would be admissible to pass “from subjective necessitation to objective necessity and truth”. When one speaks of the affection of sensibility on the part of an object or the production of the form of representation on the part of an active faculty, it seems that one takes for granted the validity of the principle of ground or causality, which should instead be wholly justified from within the Reinholdian theory. An exponent of the Wolffian philosophy would gladly concede the actuality of the things in themselves which is explicitly affirmed by Reinhold, but would also ask how a thesis of this kind can go together with the other claims which maintain, for example, that to a thing in itself cannot be attributed any predicate; “and if the things in themselves must be something on which something else is grounded or through which this is determined […], then it must also be conceded that the principle of causality has a transcendental validity”²⁷⁸.  Rezensionen,  – . Flatt’s review came out in the Tübingische gelehrte Anzeigen, ,  May ,  – . Reinhold reprints and comments on it in Beiträge I ( – ; ed. :  – ). The presence of the concept of the thing in itself within the Essay was also criticized by Schwab: such a notion, which Reinhold proposes to eliminate, constitutes an indispensable presupposition of the Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, because without it, one would not understand a fundamental feature of the faculty of representation itself, namely, receptivity. Besides, Schwab had given much attention to the Reinholdian theory of the three grades of spontaneity with which on his view a Leibnizian monism at the center of which would be the representative force would be claimed again: cf. Schwab () , ; now in Rezensionen, , .

1 Some Reviews of the Essay

91

1.3 Heydenreich There are two criticisms which were raised by Heydenreich against the Essay. (1) Though he conceded to Reinhold the necessity of recovering a ground (Grund) accepted by all as valid which could be expressed according to a principle (Grundsatz) that is equally universally understood as valid, Heydenreich denied that a theory of the mere representative faculty could contribute to this end and therefore contain the premise of the theory of the cognitive faculty and, by means of this, of the whole critical Elementary Philosophy²⁷⁹. “Representation was for him [sc. for the reviewer, F.F.] a universal concept for what is common to intuiting, thinking and understanding, just as the faculty of representation was for the common conditions of the existence and essentiality of these species”. Neither is representation the basis of intuition, thought and rational inference, nor is the faculty of representation the fundamental faculty on which sensibility, understanding and reason rely. It is not therefore true, Heydenreich continued, that the concept of representation should be considered as the foundation which is universally admitted as valid, or that one can acquire a new path which arrives at results of the Kantian philosophy through its analyses. All of this can at most constitute “a piece of philosophical bravura” which is, however, not indispensable for the doctrine of cognition. The Reinholdian theory comprehends under a unique point of view the common characteristics of intuition, thought and rational inference, but does not add anything at all to their respective theories. “Representation and the faculty of representation are not the prius, but the posterius, and cannot in any way offer the premises of the science of the cognitive faculty”. (2) To confirm this, Heydenreich highlighted the contradictoriness of various parts of the Second Book of the Essay in which Reinhold would develop from the concept of mere representation more than what, by his explicit admission, it could contain. If it is in fact true that in its narrowest sense (with which the Second Book is concerned), representation abstracts as much from the subject as from the object, then to talk, in an inquiry that is devoted only to representation, of the objective material which is given from the outside, of the existence of external things, can only make sense if the narrowest concept of rep-

 Reinhold had already spoken of “Elementarphilosophie” in a letter to F.H. Jacobi of  March : see KA . (Letter n. ). As is well-known, Kant speaks in the Critique of Pure Reason only of “Elementarlehre”, “Elementarlogik” and “Elementarbegriffe” (the categories).

92

IV The Elementary Philosophy

resentation is surreptitiously substituted by the widest to which the concepts of subject and object pertain²⁸⁰.

2 The First Volume of the Contributions There are many innovations in the volume of the Contributions by which Reinhold seeks to remedy the shortcomings and inadequacies of the Essay. We begin with those which he himself lists in the sixth part which is devoted to the discussions that have arisen around the Theory of the Faculty of Representation. (1) The principle of consciousness was not presented in 1789 with the degree of attention the fundamental first principle (Grundsatz) of the system of the Elementary Philosophy would have merited. Now the matter at hand is one of recognizing its range and of showing how the concepts of representation, subject and object can be immediately and originally established from it; and relegating the exposition of the features of representation and the faculty of representation which can follow only from the development of these original concepts to second place. (2) The demonstration of the theorem, as it is given in the Essay, according to which the material of a representation is manifold, could well be overturned, making it clear that the form is a multiplicity and the material a unity. One is therefore concerned with offering a different demonstration that shows how the material alone can be manifold and the form alone can be one²⁸¹. (3) In

 Rezensionen,  – . On the review of Heydenreich, see Rumore ()  – . The accusation of conflating two senses of “representation” will also be repeated by H. A. Pistorius in his review of the Essay which came out in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, vol. , pt. , ,  – , now in Rezensionen,  – : . The review of Heydenreich came out in the Neue Leipziger gelehrte Anzeigen, ,  June ,  – . It was reprinted in Beiträge I together with Reinhold’s reply which was already published on the Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung (,  June ,  – ) and that of Heydenreich which followed Reinhold’s statement (,  July ,  – ). Follows an unedited “Abgenötigte Gegenantwort” of Reinhold: see Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ). An echo of the polemic with Heydenreich can be found in Reinhold’s letter to G. J. Göschen of  July : KA . –  (Letter n. ). On the critiques of Reinhold’s Versuch, see Sassen ().  Reinhold recalls having arrived at a different demonstration of this theorem after Forberg had shown its insufficiency to him (Beiträge I, ; ed. : ). However, the new proof which Reinhold offers in the Contributions will neither find a favorable reception in Forberg nor in the reviewers of Beiträge I: see Forberg () ; Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen, ,  December ,  – ; Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  January , ; Oberdeutsche allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, ,  February , ; Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, ,  May ,  – ; Annalen der neuesten Theologischen Litteratur und

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

93

the Theory of the Faculty of Representation, it is said that the material is given and the form is produced. One must now turn to specifying the extent to which the form is really product, if one does not want to wrongly conclude that space and time, insofar as they are forms of sensible representations, also constitute the product of spontaneity. They are such a product only in regard to the unity through which they are represented. With respect to the external and successive multiplicity, they are the given forms instead. The form of receptivity is one thing, and the form determined by spontaneity for a material of representation another. “One consists in the multiplicity, the other in the unity”. (4) The principle of cognition, by virtue of which we are conscious of a represented object which is distinguished in consciousness from a represented representation and a represented subject, is not indicated in its peculiarity by showing the original and immediate bond that subsists between the concept of cognition and consciousness. (5) The genus must be accurately distinguished from the species, and so too the Theory of Cognition in general from the particular theories of sensibility, understanding and reason, which are not comprehended in, but under, that theory. (6) The Essay speaks of intuition exclusively in the sense of sensible intuition, forgetting that there is also an intellectual one²⁸². Besides these novelties, which are overtly recognized by Reinhold, there are others which he does not mention, but which make the first volume of the Contributions without doubt a very different text from the Essay. We will give a list of them here: (1) the Theory of the Faculty of Representation is transformed into Elementary Philosophy; alongside the concept of ground (Grund) is now introduced the “fundamental principle” (Grundsatz) to which philosophy must avail itself, if it is to assume the systematic form which necessarily belongs to it²⁸³; (2) if Reinhold had overtly affirmed, with Kant, the impossibility of an original definition of the concept of representation before – for the fact that it cannot rely on any higher concept from which it can be derived –, he now holds for the same reason contra Kant (and contra himself) that philosophy can provide definitions as long as they are grounded on the original fact of consciousness. The two assertions are not at all contradictory, since the relations between the terms at play change: in the first case, one says in fact that philosophy does not in the strict sense possess the definition of representation but only an exposition, because its concept is the original one. In the second case, one says that philosoKirchengeschichte, , , th week,  (now all the reviews in Rezensionen). There is also an echo of this discussion in Diez () , , .  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Reinhold also cautions against the exchange of “Grund” and “Grundsatz” in Briefe I,  (RGS /.).

94

IV The Elementary Philosophy

phy possesses original definitions (and those of “philosophy”, “subject”, “object”, “representation” amply demonstrate it) because the same definitions express the fact of consciousness. Both in 1789 and 1790, consciousness constitutes the basis of the system; now, however, it is bound to the definition and the fundamental principle; (3) the subject of the principle of consciousness becomes the ‘protagonist’ of the Elementary Philosophy; (4) hand-in-hand with the new exposition of the principle of consciousness goes a new definition of “object”, through which it now becomes possible to reply, for example, to Flatt’s objection, which contends that the reality of object different from representation would not be justifiable from within the Theory of the Faculty of Representation; (5) the noumenon and the thing in itself are clearly distinct and become two different objects of philosophical knowledge; (6) the concept of priority (that is, apriority) comes to the fore as the fulcrum of Reinhold’s argumentation against Kant and the Kantians; (7) the conceptual pair Erörterung/Erklärung is substituted in part by that of Abstraktion/Reflexion, with the end of identifying and determining the features of the constitutive parts of consciousness²⁸⁴. Which of these novelties (recognized or unrecognized by Reinhold) are interesting for our research? On the basis of which theses of the Contributions can we say that the Elementary Philosophy expresses, as the Essay, a psychology, even if of a transcendental type?

2.1 The Subject as Protagonist Paragraph 7 of the Essay had established that consciousness constrains us to agree on the fact “that there belongs to representation a representing subject and a represented object which both must be distinguished from the representation to which they belong”²⁸⁵. Paragraph 38 established that consciousness in general consists “of the relatedness of the representation per se to the object and subject” and is “inseparable from every representation in general”²⁸⁶. Both theorems spell out the constitutive parts of consciousness (representation, subject and object) by highlighting the distinction and the relation between them. The explanation which Reinhold gives of what is laid out in paragraph

 I have occupied myself with the transformations of the subject and the object which are bound to the principle of consciousness and of cognition, as also of the distinction between the noumenon and the thing in itself, in some studies to which I allow myself to refer: Fabbianelli (a); Fabbianelli (b) XVI–XXXV; Fabbianelli ().  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

95

38 indicates that, therefore, for every consciousness there is the need of “a double action of the subject through which representation is assigned in respect of its material to the object and in respect of its form to the subject”; an action of spontaneity that permits the conjoining of the representation with the object and the subject. Dieses Verbinden (die eigenthümliche Handlungsweise der Spontaneität) äussert sich beym Bewußtseyn auch als ein Trennen (ein Unterscheiden); in wieferne die Vorstellung dadurch, daß sie mit dem Objekte verbunden, vom Subjekte getrennt, und dadurch, daß sie mit diesem verbunden, von jenem getrennt wird. [This binding, the proper mode of action of spontaneity, is also manifest in consciousness as a separating, a distinguishing, in that the representation is separated from the consciousness. In being bound with the object it is separated from the subject, and in being bound with the subject it is separated from the object]²⁸⁷.

The New Exposition of the Main Points of the Elementary Philosophy, the third part of the Contributions, begins by stating the principle of consciousness: Im Bewußtsein wird die Vorstellung durch das Subjekt vom Subjekt und Objekt unterschieden und auf beide bezogen. [In consciousness the representation is distinguished by the subject from the subject and the object, and referred to both]²⁸⁸.

It would therefore seem that what had already been said a year before, namely, that consciousness is constituted through the reference and the distinction (a double action of the subject) of representation to/from the subject and the object, was also reaffirmed in the essay of 1790. The difference would only be the position attributed to the principle of consciousness, which made its appearance in the Second and Third Book in the Essay, and in the first volume of the Contributions, at the commencement of the Fundamental doctrine of the Elementary Philosophy. This would agree with the already observed withdrawal by Reinhold of the exposition given in the Essay: the principle of consciousness must be stated in its range as the absolutely first principle. However, it remains to be clarified just what Reinhold means when he claims in his palinode, that only in this way does it become possible to deduce the features of the concept of representation, subject and object in an original and immediate way without having

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ). Briefe I (Letter ) indicates the origin of the principle of consciousness in the notion of “I” present in the Paralogism of the Critique of Pure Reason. See in this regard Ameriks () .

96

IV The Elementary Philosophy

to proceed from the exposition of the features of representation and the faculty of representation, as in the Essay. Perhaps the definitions given in this work are not original? And what would it mean for them to be original? Let us take for example the ‘old’ definitions of “subject” and “object” and compare them with the ‘new’ ones. In the Essay, it is said: Das, was sich bewußt ist, heißt das Subjekt des Bewußtseyns; wessen es sich bewußt ist, der Gegenstand des Bewußtseyns. [That which is conscious is called the subject of consciousness; that of which one is conscious the object of consciousness]²⁸⁹.

In the Contributions, we have instead: Das Objekt ist dasjenige, was im Bewußtsein durch das Subjekt vom Subjekt und der Vorstellung unterschieden, und worauf die vom Subjekte unterschiedene Vorstellung bezogen wird; Das Subjekt ist dasjenige, was im Bewußtsein durch sich selbst von der Vorstellung und dem Objekte unterschieden, und worauf die vom Objekte unterschiedene Vorstellung bezogen wird. [The object is that which is distinguished in consciousness, by the work of the subject, from the subject and the representation, and that to which the representation that is distinguished from the subject is referred; The subject is that which is distinguished in consciousness by its own work from the representation and the object, and that to which the representation that is distinguished from the object is referred]²⁹⁰.

What is new here is that the respective definitions take into account the distinction and reference of that which is defined by the other two constitutive elements of consciousness; moreover, it is overtly said in both cases that the definiendum is identified by the work of the subject. However, if one recalls that the actions of referring and distinguishing also belong to the subject in 1789, one would then also be tempted to assert that the subject was the principal actor there, too. If this were the case, however, it would be hard to make sense of Reinhold’s withdrawal. The only way to reconcile the theses of the Essay with those of the Contributions, giving credit to the assertion that “subject” and “object” were not grasped in their original essence in the first text and avoiding the reduction of their difference to a mere difference of formulation, is then to recognize that the princi-

 Versuch,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

97

ple of consciousness was not yet formulated in an adequate way (as Reinhold concedes), because the role which the subject plays in it was not yet recognized. In other words, because the subject’s activity was then recognized by first expounding the features of representation and the faculty of representation, it became impossible to likewise recognize with clarity the value of the principle of consciousness as the first principle of the Elementary Philosophy. If the subject was still an external condition of representation in the Essay, it becomes the protagonist in the Contributions ²⁹¹.

2.2 Abstraction and Reflection To understand how one might evaluate this primacy of the subject, it is necessary to draw one’s attention first of all to the context of reference, on the basis of which one establishes that one can speak of it only in the transcendental sense. In this regard, Reinhold reaffirms in the first chapter of the Contributions that distinction which is already proposed in the Essay between the questions woraus? and worin?, between the genetic question of origin and the descriptive question of the nature of representations. The subject of consciousness comes therefore to be called the representing subject not because it is a substance, “but because of the simple representations cognized by us through consciousness”, hence to the extent of being a faculty. While the substance cannot be presented in any simple representation, the faculty can only be expressed in a simple representation, “because by this faculty, nothing other than the way of acting and being affected through which the representation becomes a representation, is thinkable”. On the other hand, the subject is not, as the Leibnizians think, a representing force either. If this would be the case, the subject alone would suffice to determine the representation completely, and the represented object would have “no real part” to play in its arising²⁹². Speaking of the connection which binds the faculty and the subject and for which the former would be the one that belongs to the latter in real representation, Reinhold repeats once again, as he did already in the Essay, the line of demarcation between an investigation of an empirical type and one of a transcendental type: Es ist nicht die Rede von dem, woraus das Vorstellungsvermögen entsteht, sondern worin es besteht. Es mag aus was immer für Quellen entspringen; in was immer für Substanzen

 On the role of actor and moment of the subject-object relation, played by the subject itself, see Bondeli () .  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).

98

IV The Elementary Philosophy

gegründet sein; so ist dasjenige in der Vorstellung überhaupt (der Gattung) in der sinnlichen Vorstellung, im Begriffe und in der Idee – (den Arten) […] immer eben dasselbe; und das Vermögen, das sich daran äußert ist Vorstellungsvermögen, Sinnlichkeit, Verstand und Vernunft. [One does not speak of that from which the representative faculty is born, but of that in which it consists. This faculty can originate from whatever source one likes, can be grounded in whatever substance one likes, that which is present in representation in general (in the genus), in sensible representation, concept and idea (in the species) […] is always the same thing, and the faculty which is expressed in them is representative faculty, sensibility, understanding and reason]²⁹³.

This transcendental character which is due to the representing subject can ultimately be determined by referring to two activities by which Reinhold justifies, positively and negatively, his new concepts of subject and object (but this is also valid for that of representation): reflection and abstraction. The thesis being put forward is that these new concepts constitute the result of a mere reflection on consciousness and are not at all the fruit of an abstraction that takes its lead from the species of the thing which is defined by taking into account outer or inner experience. They “gush” (quellen) from the same consciousness and are defined by means of the principle of consciousness. It suffices in sum to reflect on the fact of consciousness in order to identify the constitutive features of it, without any reasoning and in a way which is understood by everyone as valid²⁹⁴. The reflection is obviously philosophical, but is potentially the domain of every human being. One can therefore speak of the subject as of an identifiable object by means of a reflective act; it is the same subject, we could say, which discovers itself by analyzing its own consciousness. The reflection would thus not have universal value, if the object to which it is referred was not universally valid, i. e., the fact of consciousness which establishes the relations between subject, object and representation, and which, in our case, determines the value of the subject. Not only is it the case that reflection would not be able to establish features and characteristics understood by everyone as valid, if the fact of consciousness could not be understood as valid by all. Furthermore, the fact of consciousness is also universally valid and universally understood as valid, because it belongs neither to outer experience, which is always referred to the individual circumstances, nor to inner ex-

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  – ,  (ed. :  – , ). Peter Reuter has spoken of the theory of Kantian cognition as of a theory of the reflection which comprehends a “straight intention” (“intentio recta”), true cognition, and an “oblique intention” (“intentio obliqua”), the reflection in the strict sense as Kant treats it, for example, in the Amphiboly: cf. Reuter ().

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

99

perience, if by this is meant the sensible perception or interior sensation. The latter are always individuals and cannot be communicated in a universal way²⁹⁵. Therefore, the originality of the concept of subject is fueled for Reinhold by the philosophical reflection on the fact of consciousness. As this is not an empirical-psychological fact, in that it does not pertain to internal experience, in a similar way the representing subject is not an empirical subject. The proof of this is demonstrated by the other determination which Reinhold propounds of the fact of consciousness: if it must appear to all in a universal way, it cannot but occur inside us, it must not be bound to any determinate experience and particular reasoning, and “must […] be able to accompany every possible experience and every thought of which we can become conscious”²⁹⁶. The fact of consciousness is not, as Kant had already said in the Critique of Pure Reason in regard to the I, something multifarious and diverse, but is as original as the Kantian I think, if it is true that it must be able to accompany all possible experience. The original concept of the subject contains therefore some features which are not abstracted from experience, but arise immediately from the consciousness which accompanies every experience, once consciousness becomes the object of philosophical reflection²⁹⁷. Here we come face to face with a transcendental subject the concept of which possesses a wholly particular nature: its constitutive characters can only be discovered through a reflection, its essence can only be defined by reference to the other two components of the fact of consciousness, representation and object. The subject’s reflection on its own consciousness is not empirical, in the manner of Locke²⁹⁸, but, we could say, rational; it does not depend on experience, but precedes every experience and is thus a priori. Whereas Kant had claimed in the Critique of Pure Reason that a reflection can give rise only to an empirical explanation or deduction which shows “how a concept is acquired through experience” and “therefore concerns not the lawfulness but the fact from which the possession has arisen”²⁹⁹, Reinhold attributes to his reflection a wholly particular transcendental character. Though not an abstraction from a fact, it actually concerns a fact, that of consciousness. The apriority of this fact has repercussions on the philosophical reflection which has it for its object.

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Daniel Breazeale correctly emphasizes the difference between the Lockean and the Reinholdian reflection: cf. Breazeale () . For the opposite interpretation, see Baumanns () .  KrV, A /B ; en. tr.: Kant () .

100

IV The Elementary Philosophy

A problem of legitimacy (quaestio iuris) ‒ how can the concept of the subject qua the condition of the possibility of consciousness, and hence of experience, be justified? ‒ is resolved from a factuality, though not an empirical one. In this way, the transcendentalism of the Elementary Philosophy is fueled by an ‘introspection’ ‒ how should we call it otherwise? ‒ which the subject accomplishes on its own consciousness, and with which it cognizes the original concept of itself, departing from a reality which already guarantees the possession itself of the same concept. The concept of an object, together with its primacy, though discovered through a transcendental reflection, receives a psychological connotation to the extent that it derives from a reflection which is constructed on a given. Ultimately, it is not concerned with explaining the legitimacy which is secured through the factuality of consciousness, but only with making it explicit.

2.3 Intellectual Intuition Through the intellectual intuition which Reinhold introduced for the first time in the Contributions of 1790, the subject cognizes itself according to a representative modality and not in an absolute way, as it does in Fichte’s doctrine of science. Every intuition is in fact a representation which is referred to its object in an immediate way. If the empirical one has for its object a material coming from the outside, characteristic of the object that strikes the receptive faculty, and is thus called a posteriori intuition, the intellectual one is referred to a subjective material, characteristic of the faculty of representation, given with this and through this. It is in this sense an a priori intuition and produces an a priori cognition, even if it requires for its actuality an action of spontaneity that makes that material the object of a particular representation³⁰⁰. The definition of intellectual intuition which Reinhold provides in the Fundamentallehre of the first Contributions reiterates the point of factuality which we have already seen in regard to reflection: Die Anschauung, deren Stoff seiner objektiven Beschaffenheit nach im Vorstellenden durchs bloße Vorstellungsvermögen bestimmt ist, heißt Intellektuell. [The intuition whose material is determined, regarding its objective constitution, in the representing subject by means of the mere faculty of representation, is called intellectual]³⁰¹.

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ). On Reinhold’s intellectual intuition, see Gueroult () , Stolzenberg ()  – , Bondeli ()  – , Tilliette ()  – , Goubet ()  – ; Breazeale (), Imhof ()  – .  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

101

It is intellectual, because its material is not the empirical one of an outer object but comes from the faculty of representation before every experience; it has, however, a factual character, because it regards a given which is the nature of the representing subject with its forms of representation, grounded on the faculty of representation. It is true that the determination of what pertains to such a faculty is only potential, because it needs an actual action of the representing subject that renders it an object of intuition. The fact remains, nonetheless, that it is that which is both intuited and not intuited. In other words, the forms of the faculty of representation which constitute the material of intellectual intuition do not become real objects unless the subject does not affect its own receptivity in conformity with these forms. This means, however, that the forms have such a nature independently from the question of their possibility or reality in an a priori representation³⁰². Reinhold distinguishes between inner intuition and intellectual intuition in terms of the genus with respect to the species. An intuition which arises through an affection (Affiziertwerden) from the inside is a so-called inner intuition. When it has a material constituted by this affection, it is called sensible inner intuition. When it has a material which is not determined, insofar as its objective constitution is concerned, through being affected (Affiziertsein), but by means of the faculty of representation, then it is called intellectual inner intuition. This intuition “is referred to an object which can be represented neither as a mere representation nor as the representing subject, but only as the form of representation, determined a priori, and to this extent belonging to the subject”³⁰³. The inner character that characterizes this intuition thus derives from the fact that its object is internal to consciousness, that it is “that which is determined in the representing subject as such”; the intellective character on the other hand is due to the fact that the nature of the intuited material is not determined by means of an affect, as is the case in sensible inner intuition, but “before every affect, in the mere faculty of representation”³⁰⁴. The feature of factuality that surrounds intellectual intuition is thus also reaffirmed by this distinction. The universal validity of the intuition, as well as the guarantee that its object can be understood by everyone as valid, have no need at all of a deduction, as they are contained in the fact of consciousness, upon

 Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ). “Affect” and “affection” substitute the conceptual couple of the Essay “Gegebensein” – “Gegebenwerden” to which Reinhold had attributed, as is seen (see above, chap. ), different meanings. Unlike in , Reinhold now uses those two notions in an interchangeable way.  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. : ).

102

IV The Elementary Philosophy

which intellectual intuition relies. Here we have that transcendental psychologism which we have already encountered in relation to the reflection on the fact of consciousness through which the original concepts of the Elementary Philosophy are posited.

2.4 Priority versus Necessity and Universality There is another conceptual interchange in the first volume of the Contributions that goes in the same direction: priority must take the place of necessity and universality. There is no trace of this in the Essay. Speaking of synthetic a priori judgments, Reinhold had confined himself there to observing that they must be considered as original, weil sie unmittelbar aus Vorstellungen bestehen, die keinen andern Gegenstand, als die Form des Denkens und der Anschauung, wie sie im Gemüth bestimmt ist, haben; und weil sie daher auch nicht aus anderen höheren Urtheilen abgeleitet sind. [because they immediately consist of representations having no other object than the form of thought and intuition, for how it is determined in the mind, and because they are thus also not derived from other higher judgments]³⁰⁵.

In their originality, he added, they neither have the need to be proved, nor can they be proved. [Sie sind k]eines Beweises fähig, weil dieser aus höheren Grundsätzen, als sie selbst, und folglich aus Urtheilen, von denen sie abgeleitet würden, geführt werden müßte. Aber auch keines Beweises bedürftig, weil sie den Grund ihrer Nothwendigkeit und Allgemeinheit in ihrer Priorität mit sich führen, oder welches eben so viel ist, weil durch sie nichts anderes vorgestellt wird, als was im Erkenntnißvermögen bestimmt ist, und folglich nicht anders als so erkannt werden kann, wie es erkannt wird. [They are not capable of proof because proof would have to come from higher principles than the judgments themselves and consequently from judgments from which they were derived. They do not require proof because they carry with them the ground of their necessity and generality in their priority, or, which amounts to the same thing, because through them nothing is represented other than what is determined in the cognitive faculty and consequently cannot be cognized in any other manner than the way it is cognized]³⁰⁶.

 Versuch,  –  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Versuch,  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

103

The recognition of the priority as the ground of necessity and universality is extended in the Contributions from the ambit of synthetic a priori judgments to the ambit of the fundamental principles of the Elementary Philosophy. Both cases have to do with the Grundsätze; however, if in the Essay they pertain to the cognitive problem in the narrow sense – they were treated in the Third Book, which is devoted to the faculty of cognition – in the Contributions, they concern the most general problem of the foundation of the Elementary Philosophy, and hence of theoretical and practical knowledge. The sense of this substitution is clearly anti-Kantian: it is no coincidence that Reinhold speaks of priority as the ground of the necessity and universality only and exclusively in the part of the Contributions which bears the title On the Relation of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation with the Critique of Pure Reason. He responds in this way to Heydenreich, who had claimed in his review of the Essay that the Theory of the Faculty of Representation can in no way constitute the premise of the Critique of Reason³⁰⁷. The main objection which Reinhold advances against Kant here is that he had provided all the material of knowledge without, however, having led it back to a single fundamental principle; this could not have been otherwise because the consequences would then have to be discovered before the grounds. Kant had therefore indicated the species, but not the genus, of representation in an exhaustive way. Lacking this, he would thus not have provided a theory of the species³⁰⁸. Reinhold insists in observing, contrary to Heydenreich, that the species of representation (sensations/sensible intuitions, concepts and ideas) – those of which Kant would have spoken in the Critique of Pure Reason – cannot be thought without the common feature which belongs to them and which renders them all representations. Prior to a theory of the sensible, the intellective or the rational faculty of representation, and before possessing the fundamental principles that stand at their basis, a theory of the faculty of representation as such with its own principle is required³⁰⁹.

 The review of Heydenreich is decisive for the drafting of this part of the Contributions: Reinhold speaks of it implicitly in several places: see Beiträge I, ,  (ed. : , ). See also the first part of the Contributions devoted to the concept of philosophy, where Reinhold discusses the concepts of “necessary” and “universal”, denying that they express by themselves something absolutely determinate; necessity, for example, consists in the possibility determined in the representing subject (Beiträge I,  – ,  – ; ed. :  – ,  – ) and the feature of being absolutely necessary is the concept of representability (Beiträge I, ; ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).

104

IV The Elementary Philosophy

According to Reinhold, it necessarily follows from here that the Critique of Reason is only capable of spelling out a principle of the use of the understanding for which every object of experience must be subject to the conditions of the synthetic unity of the manifold in a sensible intuition. However, this is neither a first principle of the theory of the faculty of cognition in general – and hence of sensibility, the understanding and reason – nor a first principle of the whole of philosophy. Kant only wanted to demonstrate that we can cognize phenomena and not things in themselves; his investigation was therefore intentionally limited to the possibility of experience and by way of contrast also of metaphysics³¹⁰. The Critique of Reason is nothing other than the propaedeutic to metaphysics, whereas the Theory of the Faculty of Representation is meant to be Elementary Philosophy, Wissenschaft der Prinzipien aller Philosophie, der theoretischen und der praktischen, der formalen und der materialen Philosophie; nicht der Metaphysik allein. [science of the principles of all philosophy, of theoretical and of practical philosophy, of formal and of material philosophy; not only of metaphysics]³¹¹.

There are three moments in relation to which Reinhold speaks of the priority in contraposition to necessity and universality. (1) Dealing with the representative forms (sensible, intellective and rational representations), he holds that their priority is demonstrated in the Critique of Pure Reason from their necessity and their necessity again from the possibility of experience. Experience is therefore the true ground of Kant’s thought, and the representation of the regular and necessary connection of perceptions constitutes the fact from which Kant takes his point of departure or the basis on which he constructs his system³¹². The Theory of the Faculty of Representation would, on the other hand, demonstrate not the priority of those forms from the point of departure of their necessity, but rather the necessity from their priority, and the priority from the possibility of consciousness.

 Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ). On Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy as science, see Goh ().  According to Manfred Baum, a source of the Reinholdian understanding of the Kantian concept of “experience” as a fact is Maimon’s Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie; Baum has shown, moreover, how Reinhold reads the Critique of Pure Reason in the light of the Prolegomena, for example, with respect to the discussion about mathematical cognition: cf. Baum ().

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

105

Es wird nämlich gezeigt, daß das Bewußtsein überhaupt unmöglich wäre, wenn die hervorgebrachte Einheit des gegebenen Mannigfaltigen, worin die Form der Vorstellung überhaupt besteht, nicht im bloßen Vorstellungsvermögen bestimmt wäre. [It is thus shown that consciousness in general would be impossible, if the produced unity of the given manifold, in which consists the form of representation in general were not determined in the mere faculty of representation]³¹³.

For Reinhold, the ultimate ground of the system of Elementary Philosophy is therefore consciousness, and the distinction and relation of the representation with the object and the subject build the fact which all understand as valid and the basis on which the Theory of the Faculty of Representation is constructed³¹⁴. (2) Speaking of the synthetic a priori judgments, Reinhold holds that their priority would be shown in the Critique by invoking the features of necessity and universality which belong to them. These features would, however, have their ground in the experience understood as the necessary connection of sensibly represented objects. Therefore, he who denies (Reinhold alludes to Eberhard) that experience is definable in this way must also deny that synthetic a priori judgments are given. There is thus the need to go beyond experience as a fact, and to substitute it by another ground, namely, consciousness. Only in this way would it be possible to show to Leibnizians like Eberhard that the syntheticity of judgments does not derive from experience, but from something that precedes and explains it; namely that consciousness which, expressed in the fundamental principle of the Elementary Philosophy, establishes that a representation is referred to and is distinguished, by the work of the subject, from the subject and the object³¹⁵. (3) In relation to the Transcendental Aesthetic, Reinhold asserts that Kant would demonstrate that space and time are forms of intuition on the basis of their priority (which, in turn, derives from their necessity and universality). The Theory of the Faculty of Representation begins from mere space and mere time as forms of sensible representation in order to demonstrate that they are something determined a priori. Der Beweis der Priorität von Raum und Zeit wird in der Kr. d. V. aus ihrer Notwendigkeit und Allgemeinheit hergenommen; welche beide in der Theorie des V. V. bloß als Folgen jener Priorität vorkommen.

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).

106

IV The Elementary Philosophy

[The demonstration of the priority of space and time is obtained in the Critique of Pure Reason from their necessity and universality, whereas these two only emerge in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation as consequences of that priority]³¹⁶.

The idea that guides Reinhold’s thinking about this opposition of priority to necessity and universality is the following: what is considered in the Critique of Pure Reason to be a principle (Grund) is transformed into a consequence (Folge) in the Elementary Philosophy³¹⁷. Experience as a fact becomes a consequence of the real ground which is constituted by the fact of consciousness. In a similar way, necessity and universality are such only to the extent that they have in themselves a priority which comes from consciousness as fact. The question of the legitimacy of the use of the subjective forms for the objects (quid iuris) converges with the problem of their prior givenness; thus, the main theme is no longer that of how objective experience is determined in a prescriptive way, but how subjective experience can be described. The necessity and universality of the subjective forms, which Kant claimed to be recognized as such but which nevertheless require a transcendental justification, come to be substituted in Reinhold by the priority of representative forms and synthetic a priori principles which find their justification in the fact of consciousness³¹⁸.

2.5 Back to the Deduction In the preceding chapter, speaking of the deduction of the categories, we observed how Reinhold renounced the restricted use of the Kantian term Deduktion in favor of a much wider usage that also includes the notion of Ableitung. This follows from the identification of the transcendental and the metaphysical deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding. The problem of their formal derivation (Ableitung) fuses with the juridical question of the legitimacy of their application to the objects of experience (Deduktion). The superimposition of the

 Beiträge I,  (ed. :  – ).  Reinhold expresses himself very explicitly in this regard in a letter to Jacobi of  March : “You would know that I have re-founded the critical system on another path, and deduce [deduciere] space and time, and the categories, and the ideas of reason not only according to another method, but beginning from a source wholly different – so that all that is ground and prove in Kant, appears with me only as consequence [Folge] and conclusion [Folgerung]”: KA . (Letter n. ).  Therefore, it is clear how the psychologistic assumption which sustains the Reinholdian reflection represents also the basis of the thesis for which experience is the initial fact of the Critique of Pure Reason.

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

107

two terms implies, however, a second theoretical moment, which constitutes the premise of the preceding and which persists through both the Essay and the Contributions of 1790, the idea, that is, that the different species of representation derive their constitutive character from the genus “representation in general”. In proceeding from the top toward the bottom, from the widest concept to the most restricted, a logical derivation and a transcendental deduction are constituted at once. The Elementary Philosophy is defined by this very procedure³¹⁹. The part of the Contributions which is devoted to the comparison of the Theory of the Faculty of Representation with the Critique of Reason confirms the extent of what has just been said³²⁰. Reinhold observes that experience, which for Kant’s purposes was sufficient as the foundation of the deduction (Deduktion) of the forms of representation, is, in reality, not sufficient for the deduction (Deduktion) “through which these forms must be stated in the science of the faculty of representation in general, as well as of the faculty of sensible, intellective and rational representation”. For this end, there is a need for a first principle that expresses the fact of consciousness from which the features of those concepts and those forms which are at the basis of the Elementary Philosophy, and which also belong to the concerns of the Critique of Pure Reason, can be deduced (ableiten)³²¹. Reinhold clearly thinks that the program of derivation (Ableitung) proposed by the Elementary Philosophy is the continuation of that program of deduction (Deduktion) peculiar to the Critique of Reason. Yet this is to say that: (1) Not only the categories of the understanding, but also the pure intuitions of sensibility and the ideas of reason, have in themselves a deductive moment. It is no coincidence that one speaks generally of the forms of representation. Whereas Kant had distinguished between the case of the legitimate use of pure intuitions and that of pure concepts of the understanding, insisting on the fact that only the first is secured by the givenness of the phenomena according to a spatio-temporal modality, Reinhold held that the forms of sensibility can and must be deduced (Deduktion) also, since they too can be derived from the foundation of  See in this regard a passage of the part of the Contributions which is devoted to the concept of philosophy: “In this deduction [Deduktion] [of the forms of representation, F.F.] consists then the true theory of the representative faculty, of sensibility, of understanding and of reason – which is science of the first principles of everything representable, therefore elementary philosophy, to the extent that it deduces the forms of representations from consciousness, as the first ground universally taken to be valid” (Beiträge I,  – ; ed. : ).  Many of the theses of this part of the Contributions will return in the Reinholdian review of the Critique which appeared in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  February ,  –  and then reproduced by Reinhold in Beiträge II,  –  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ).

108

IV The Elementary Philosophy

consciousness. From this presupposition, he puts in the mouth of Kant a deductionistic program which would deal with all the forms of representation and which, in the Critique, could be accomplished starting from an insufficient ground like that of experience. (2) If the Kantian quaestio iuris binds only and exclusively pure concepts of the understanding and cognizable objects, leaving the problem of the foundation of the system aside, the Reinholdian version of the question regards, above all, the relation between the foundation and the principle of the system on the one hand, and concepts, forms and derived principles on the other. The Kantian question of the correspondence between the subjective forms and the objects occupies only a secondary position. The problem of the legitimacy of the forms of representation is posed above all in relation to consciousness and only secondarily in relation to the objects of experience; the clue of philosophical reflection is constituted, according to Reinhold, not so much by that necessary connection of sensible perceptions which would define the Kantian concept of experience as by the relation and distinction of representation with its subject and object which identifies the fact of consciousness. The necessity in the object ends up becoming a corollary, furthermore not a very important one, of the priority of consciousness³²². On the basis of this ‘internalist’ theory, for which I propose the name of transcendental psychology, Reinhold can claim that unlike the Critique of Reason, the Elementary Philosophy does not take off from the problem of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, but rather from the problem of what constitutes their premise. Der erste Punkt, von dem sie ausgeht, ist ein Satz, der allgemein gilt und nicht mißverstanden werden kann, in wieferne durch ihn nichts als das bloße Bewußtsein gedacht wird. Das Lehrstück vom synthetischen Urteile kömmt in ihr nur als eine Folge, nicht als Grund; als Erläuterung, nicht als Begründung der Wissenschaft des Vorstellungsund Erkenntnisvermögens vor. [The first point of departure is a principle that is valid in a universal way and cannot be misunderstood to the extent that nothing other than mere consciousness is thought through it. The doctrinal part of synthetic judgment appears in the Elementary Philosophy only as a

 To Flatt who requested in the review of the Essay a proof of how one can pass from a “subjective necessitation” (i.e., one that is expressed by the fact of consciousness) to an “objective necessity and truth” (see Rezensionen, ), Reinhold responds in the Contributions that only the moment of reference and distinction of representation from the object and the subject is affirmed by the principle of consciousness, and no objective necessity is either spoken of or presupposed (cf. Beiträge I, ; ed. : ).

2 The First Volume of the Contributions

109

consequence, not as a ground; as clarification, not as foundation of the science of the faculty of representation and of cognition]³²³.

This is the theoretical basis on which the evaluations that Reinhold proposes of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason rest. We begin with the first. Reinhold is interested to show not that space and time are forms of intuition because they have in themselves the feature of priority – this would have taken place in Kant – but, on the contrary, that they are a priori because they are forms of sensible representation. While in the first case, their priority is, as already said, drawn from their necessity and universality, in the second case, their priority derives from consciousness. Only in this way, according to Reinhold, can one reply to objections which are forwarded by Kant’s enemies, for which the very possibility of representation of space would depend on outer objects. In der Theorie des V. V. überhaupt wird aus der Möglichkeit des Bewußtseins erwiesen, daß die Form jeder Vorstellung Einheit des Mannigfaltigen überhaupt sein, und daß diese Einheit ein Produkt der Spontaneität und die Mannigfaltigkeit überhaupt in der Form der Rezeptivität gegründet sein müsse. Dadurch ist denn auch erwiesen, daß die Formen der Vorstellung sowohl des äußern als des innern Sinnes, als Einheiten des Mannigfaltigen überhaupt in der Natur des Vorstellungsvermögens bestimmt sein müssen. [In the theory of the faculty of representation in general, it is demonstrated by the possibility of consciousness that the form of every representation must be unity of a manifold in general, this unity must be a product of spontaneity and multiplicity in general must be grounded on the form of receptivity. In this way, it is also demonstrated that the forms of representation of outer sense and inner sense must be determined as unity of a manifold in general in the nature of the faculty of representation]³²⁴.

The Theory of Sensibility adds to this proof the consideration that consciousness of an outer object would not be possible if the material of representation of outer sense were not given under the form of a manifold in reciprocal externality and that of representation of inner sense were not given under the form of a manifold in succession. But these two forms of the unity of the manifold are constituted by mere space and mere time; they are therefore necessary because they are a priori and justify their priority from consciousness as a fact³²⁵.

 Beiträge I,  (ed. :  – ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Reinhold, as in the Essay, confirms once again that mere space and mere time are not at all representations, but a priori objects, that Kant errs, therefore, in attributing only an ideal reality to them (Beiträge I,  – ; ed. :  – ).

110

IV The Elementary Philosophy

According to Reinhold, there are, as far as the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned, two principles to which Kant avails himself: on the one hand, the possibility of experience, and on the other, the synthetic unity of original apperception. Both are revealed to be insufficient, if admitted in the sense attributed to them by Kant and made to take into account the objections of the “cognizers of things in themselves”. Dogmatic philosophers in fact continue to distinguish an objective foundation and a subjective foundation of the connection between intuitions, and affirm that the first must be sought in things in themselves. Against them it is not enough to say with Kant that from the necessity and apriority of the categories follows their applicability to objects as such. Even the logical synthesis is in fact necessary and a priori, though not object-directed. To refute their objections conclusively, one must, according to Reinhold, deduce the pure concepts of the understanding in a different way, availing oneself of a principle which is different from that of the possibility of experience and transforming the significance of the principle of the unity of transcendental apperception. As far as the first point goes, the new deduction of the categories proposed by the Theory of the Faculty of Representation takes off from the fact of the consciousness of an object as such, that is to say, as distinguished from the represented subject and the represented representation, and shows that such a represented object constitutes the result of an intellective representation related to a sensible representation. Das Bewußtsein, wodurch wir das Objekt als ein solches kennen, ist nur dadurch möglich, daß das bloße Objekt erstens zum bloßen Vorgestellten durch Anschauung, zweitens zum gedachten Vorgestellten durch Begriff werde. [The consciousness through which we cognize an object as such is possible only through the fact that the mere object becomes in the first place a mere represented object thanks to intuition, in the second place a represented object thought by means of the concept]³²⁶.

Therefore, we only cognize an object by means of consciousness, because the object constitutes a particular species of consciousness. The synthetic unity of apperception can in contrast continue to be defended only if it is understood in the sense of the identity of self-consciousness which would stand at the basis not only of the unity of the manifold of intuition, but of the manifold of every representation in general. Both sensations and concepts must thus be able to be re-

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).

3 A Review of the Contributions

111

assembled in a consciousness, though according to different forms of synthetic activities³²⁷.

3 A Review of the Contributions A few months after the publication of the first volume of the Contributions, at the end of January 1791, a review appeared in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung ³²⁸. It was not the first time that Reinhold had August Wilhelm Rehberg for his reviewer; Rehberg had also written summaries for Ueber die bisherigen Schicksale der Kantischen Philosophie ³²⁹ and the Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens appearing in the same journal³³⁰. This “extremely wrong” review of Rehberg is important, because it constitutes the main motive of Reinhold’s decision to write the essay On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge ³³¹; so important, even, that Johann Benjamin Erhard responded to it with a paper that was published as an appendix to Reinhold’s text, together with an essay of Forberg who replied to the already mentioned article of Schwab’s against the Theory of the Faculty of

 Beiträge I,  –  (ed. :  – ). On the relation, in Kant, of the identity of selfconsciousness and deduction of the categories, see Henrich ().  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  January ,  – , now in Rezensionen,  – .  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  June ,  – . See in this regard the letter of Reinhold to Gottlieb Hufeland datable to the end of May/beginning of June : KA . –  (Letter n. ).  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  –  November ,  – , now in Rezensionen,  – . Reinhold is also not at all content with this review: see his letter to Hufeland of the end of November/beginning of December  (KA . – , Letter n. ) and his letter to Nicolai of  November  (KA . – , Letter n. ). Against the review of his Essay, Reinhold published in the Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung (,  December ,  – ) a “Declaration” to which Rehberg countered with a “Reply” which came out on the same journal on  January , ,  – . In the letter to Hufeland, Reinhold expressed his belief that the reviewer of the Versuch was J. Schultz, the author of the Erläuterungen; but in his review of the Contributions, Rehberg will refer to it as to his own. In a letter to Baggesen of / March , Reinhold will also correct the target, speaking of Rehberg as the author of the review of the Essay (KA ., Letter n. ). The fact that Rehberg was the reviewer of Beiträge I was testified by Forberg () .  Reinhold himself confesses this to Baggesen in a letter of  March : KA . (Letter n. ). See also the advertisement of the Fundamentschrift in the Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, ,  April ,  – . On Reinhold’s reaction to Rehberg’s review, see Forberg ()  – .

112

IV The Elementary Philosophy

Representation³³². Rehberg’s review is also important for us for an ‘internal’ reason, because it puts in sharp relief that aprioristic and, at one point in time, factual character of the Elementary Philosophy that we have been pointing to through the use of the designation ‘transcendental psychology’. Reinhold based his theory on an a priori definition which would determine the relations (material, and not only formal) between the representation, the subject and the object. To do this, he made use, however, of the nature of human consciousness in which he found the ultimate grounds of knowledge. Let us consider in further detail some of the primary highlights of Rehberg’s review: (1) The Theory of the Faculty of Representation contains a system of the philosophical principles, a system distinguished as much by its content as in its method from the Kantian system³³³. Beginning, as Reinhold does, from a single fundamental principle (Grundsatz) – which in the Essay was merely presupposed – and deducing an entire system from it, goes in fact as much against the letter and the spirit of Kantian thought as against the nature of human being which postulates a multiplicity of principles (Prinzipien). On the other hand, the thought of being able to start off with a preliminary definition of philosophy contradicts the methodology of Kant, by which definitions are found only at the end of the work, not at the beginning. In this way, Reinhold constructs a demonstrative philosophy by finding in consciousness those ultimate grounds of knowledge that, according to Kant, would reside in the nature of the faculty of representation which is inaccessible to human understanding³³⁴. (2) The fundamental principle on which Elementary Philosophy rests, which, by Reinhold’s explicit admission, only determines the form and not the material of other principles, is instead a definition of the content of human representations, as it establishes synthetic relations between representation, subject and object from the inside of consciousness and does not limit itself, as does the principle of contradiction, to their formal relations³³⁵. (3) Furthermore, the fundamental principle of the Elementary Philosophy is a definition that as such exposes the entire system to the risk of being arbitrary in the determination of its main concepts. This

 Erhard (); now in RGS . – ; Forberg (); now in RGS . – . Reinhold added some brief introductions and considerations. A contextualization of Erhard’s thought in the whole of post-Kantian thought can be found in Henrich ()  – .  Rehberg distances himself here from the reading proposed by him (see his review of the Versuch) and several reviewers of the Essay, among others K. H. Heydenreich and C. G. Fürstenau (Annalen der neuesten Theologischen Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte, , , th and th week,  – ,  – ), to resume that of Flatt: see Rezensionen,  – ,  – ,  – .  Rezensionen,  – .  Rezensionen, .

4 The Fundamentschrift

113

means that from these concepts is deduced more than what is actually contained in them³³⁶. (4) Elementary Philosophy is not capable of proving the results of the Critique of Pure Reason: the Theory of Sensibility and the Understanding contained in it demonstrate this. Elementary Philosophy holds that space and time would be derivable as forms of outer and inner intuition, from the features of reciprocal externality and succession of the manifold. This explanation (which, according to Rehberg, is not very far off from the Wolffian one) is insufficient, because those features can only be demonstrated from space and time; space is then much more than the mere reciprocal externality of the manifold. Finally, only some qualities of space, for example, continuity, but not others, for example, three-dimensionality can be obtained from the concept of the form of intuition. In the Theory of the Understanding, Reinhold calls “judging” the activity of reuniting the manifold of an intuition in an objective unity, thus interchanging it with “conceiving”. This is the reason for the double attribution of the categories, on the one hand, to the understanding in the narrow sense, when they are referred only to the faculty of representation in general, and on the other hand, to the understanding in the narrowest sense, when they are referred to sensibility³³⁷. According to Rehberg, a difference between Kant and Reinhold can also be noted in the application of the pure concepts to experience. While in the Critique of Reason the principles of the understanding are demonstrated from the nature of the form of experience which can be cognized a priori, in the Theory of the Faculty of Representation they are already shown to be solely applicable to experience from the fundamental concept of the understanding alone, and hence defined as neither requiring to be, nor capable of being, proved. Hence, the different role which is attributed to the transcendental schema that in the Reinholdian theory would also have to contain the grounds of those principles of the understanding.

4 The Fundamentschrift The essay on the foundation of philosophical knowledge, besides the fact that Reinhold felt great personal affection towards it³³⁸ and that it was well regarded

 Rezensionen,  – . The objection is also made, for example, by Heydenreich.  Rezensionen,  – .  As Reinhold confesses to his friend Baggesen in a letter of  April : KA . (Letter n. ).

114

IV The Elementary Philosophy

even among his contemporaries³³⁹, should also be considered as one of Reinhold’s most successful. He expounded with fresh clarity the theses already present in the Essay and the Contributions, by attending to objections raised by reviewers of those works, and laid a decisive claim to having been able to successfully articulate a real difference between his own philosophical project and that of the Kantian Critique of Reason. The frame of this self-presentation consists in the interpretation of the Kantian question as the problem of the worin? – the Critique of Reason would have shown “in what the possibility of experience consists” – and simultaneously as the problem of the origin of representations³⁴⁰. Kant, in responding to the first point, would have believed that he had already responded to the second, which is not surprising, in Reinhold’s view, because the two questions are so tightly interweaved: In wieferne alles Wissen vom Vorstellen abhängt, und Wissenschaft nur durch Vorstellungen möglich ist; insoferne muß der Entstehungsgrund der Vorstellungen auch der Bestimmungsgrund des Wissens seyn. [To the extent that all knowing depends on representing, and science is possible only through representations, the genetic reason of representations must also be the determining reason of knowledge]³⁴¹.

In this way, Reinhold seeks to express the fact that Kant’s transcendentalism would, by subscribing to that modern discussion founded on the breaking down of concepts in which Locke, Leibniz and Hume participated, be still prescientific. Only when one has reached the very end of the path of analytic inquiry will one be capable of achieving a kind of philosophy that takes off from a fact that cannot furtherly be broken down into its elements, insofar as it can be thought “only in utterly simple concepts” and can be expressed “in an entirely self-determined proposition”³⁴². Only then will one be able to offer a plausible answer to the question of the foundation of philosophical knowledge, without getting it mixed up with the question of the genesis of representations. Another fact, namely, the fact of experience, rests at the basis of Kantian thought³⁴³; however, experience cannot constitute the ultimate foundation of philosophy as science,

 Fichte, writing to Reinhold on  March , will define it as “the masterpiece” among all the masterpieces of our author: Fichte-AA III/..  Fundament, ,  (RGS ., ).  Fundament,  (RGS .) en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Fundament,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Fundament,  (RGS .).

4 The Fundamentschrift

115

because it acknowledges an analysis of its components, thus leaving too much space for misunderstandings which arise from admitting and excluding in a given concept features which are extraneous to the concept and do necessarily characterize it. In Reinhold, the pre-scientific transcendentalism of Kant receives a further determination that once again puts in relief the psychologistic character of his thought. The fundamental principle of the Critique of Pure Reason is in fact, according to Reinhold, characterized by the statement “every object stands under the necessary conditions of synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience”. This principle is justified by developing the concept of possibility of experience, thus showing that the formal conditions of experience are founded a priori on the faculty of cognition and consist in the forms of sensible representations (space and time) and intellective representations (categories). According to Reinhold, this transcendental justification depends on, and takes off from, the peculiar determinations of the human mind, that is, the original constitution of the cognitive faculty³⁴⁴. Während sie aus der Natur der Sinnlichkeit und des Verstandes zeigte, daß die realen und als solche vorstellbaren, d. h. erkennbaren Objekte unsers Wissens nur Erscheinungen seyn könnten, zeigte sie aus der Natur der Vernunft, daß die Realität der durch reine Vernunft vorstellbaren Objekte unbegreiflich, und durch theoretische Vernunft schlechterdings unerweislich sey. [From the nature of sensibility and understanding it [the Critique of Pure Reason, F.F.] showed that those objects of our knowledge that are real and can be represented as such (are knowable, in other words) can only be appearances, from the nature of reason it showed that the reality of the objects that are representable through pure reason is incomprehensible, and utterly indemonstrable by means of theoretical reason]³⁴⁵.

In this reconstruction of the Kantian thought, Reinhold reconnects with the thesis that he had advocated in 1788 when he defined the Critique of Reason in terms of a “scientific and superior psychology”. Now, as before, he argues from the presupposition that Kant’s thought contains in itself a moment of apriority and is thus distinguished from every empirical investigation³⁴⁶; however, this apriorism, on the basis of which experience is transcendentally justified,

 Fundament,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Fundament,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  The Fundamentschrift associates with empirical psychology, which would be a historical knowledge about the given of inner experience, the name of Locke: cf. Fundament,  (RGS .).

116

IV The Elementary Philosophy

should be founded on the natural structures of the faculty of cognition, and therefore be comparable to a psychological inquiry of the human mind. The transcendental-psychological assumption which animates the thought of Reinhold transpires not only in the proffered reconstruction of Kantian philosophy, but also in the self-interpretation of Elementary Philosophy. Kant had only dealt with the part of philosophical knowledge constituted by metaphysics or the science of objects in the strict sense. But metaphysics is not identical with philosophy: whereas the former is the science of the a priori features of objects which are distinct from representations, the latter is the science of the a priori features of simple representations; whereas one regards the objects of experience, “i. e., what can be cognized a posteriori by being represented through the a priori forms of sensible representation and of the concepts”, the other concerns these same forms “but precisely as what is originally knowable a priori”³⁴⁷. Elementary Philosophy (philosophy of the faculty of representation in general, hence the theoretical and the practical faculty) is therefore the foundation of Kant’s Critique of Reason, because it is capable of justifying the grounding principle according to which cognizable objects would be subject to the material and the formal conditions of experience: if in the Critique of Reason, this can only be explained through its use, that is, in a circular fashion, in Elementary Philosophy, it is demonstrated by showing that space and time, the twelve categories and the three ideas are qualities of simple representations. All that is principle in the Critique becomes a corollary in Elementary Philosophy. The result that is reached by Kant according to which things in themselves are non-cognizable depends on the demonstration of two principles: (1) that one can cognize the form of representation, and what is possible through it, only a priori; (2) that the form of representation is not the form of the thing in itself. Whereas Kant had demonstrated the validity of these two principles in an inductive way, beginning, that is, from the analyses of sensible intuitions, the categories and the ideas, Reinhold thought that he could deduce them from the concept of representation as such. Elementary Philosophy is therefore essentially different from the Critique of Reason: Die eine entwickelt, was die andere unentwickelt voraussetzt; beweiset, was diese als keines Beweises bedürftig aufstellt; gründet auf vollständige Expositionen, was diese aus

 Fundament, ,  (RGS ., ); en. tr.: Reinhold () . Concerning the relation between metaphysics and philosophy, Reinhold criticizes a step of the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Pure Reason in which it is claimed that the system of the pure science of reason is called metaphysics, a name which can be given to all of pure philosophy: KrV, B ; for the Fundament see pp.  – .

4 The Fundamentschrift

117

unvollständigen folgert; leitet aus den letzten angeblichen und durch vollendete Zergliederung erschöpften Principien her, was diese aus subalternen und in Rücksicht auf ihre höheren Merkmale unbestimmten Begriffen geschlossen hat, führt systematisch auf eines zurück, was diese rhapsodisch aus vielen abstrahirt; stellt dogmatisch auf, was diese kritisch vorbereitet. [It will develop what the other takes for granted in its undeveloped state; it will prove, what the other lays down as being in no need of proof; will found on complete expositions, what the other infers from incomplete ones. It will derive from principles as final as ever can be given, and from their exhaustive analysis, what the other has inferred from subaltern and (as regards their higher characteristics) still indeterminate principles. It will reduce systematically to one [base] what the other abstracts rhapsodically from many; and will exhibit dogmatically what the other prepares for critically]³⁴⁸.

Hence Elementary Philosophy cannot be denoted by means of any adjectivation: it is neither critical nor empirical nor rational nor skeptical; “it is philosophy WITHOUT SURNAMES”³⁴⁹. Precisely because it must precede metaphysics and be the propaedeutic to all philosophy, theoretical and practical, the new science of the representative faculty cannot draw the features of the concept of representation from any part of philosophy, but must draw them from a primordial fact constituted by consciousness, which can be explicated through reflection and stated in a first fundamental principle, on the basis of which we know “that in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is referred to both”³⁵⁰. As is already the case in the first volume of the Contributions, Reinhold highlights the primacy of the subject in the principle of consciousness, the indispensable character of the reflection, and the difference between the principle of consciousness as a first principle of philosophy and the fact of consciousness as a foundation of philosophical knowledge. The distinction between a material and a formal foundation of Elementary Philosophy is new: while the first is constituted by consciousness as a fact, the second is the principle of consciousness and the definitions extracted from it; while one supplies the content, the other supplies the scientific form of philosophical knowledge³⁵¹. Another unique and original aspect of Reinhold can be found in an episode from the Fundamentschrift in which Reinhold replies to Rehberg’s objection that the principle of consciousness is merely a definition. His reply in this regard is categorical:

   

Fundament, Fundament, Fundament, Fundament,

 (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  –  (RGS . – ).

118

IV The Elementary Philosophy

Um den Satz des Bewußtseyns eine Definition zu nennen, muß man ihn nicht verstanden haben […] Im Satze des Bewußtseyns liegt freylich die Definition der Vorstellung, in wieferne sie sich aus ihm und aus ihm allein ableiten läßt; aber er ist so wenig diese Definition selbst, als je ein Grund in eben der Rücksicht Folge seyn kann, in welcher er Grund ist. [To call the principle of consciousness a definition, one must have misunderstood it […] Of course the definition of representation is included in the principle – inasmuch, that is, as it can be derived from it, and from it alone. But it is no more possible for the principle to be itself this definition than for a ground ever to be both ground and consequence in the same respect]³⁵².

The first fundamental principle of Elementary Philosophy only expresses the fact of consciousness through which the definition of the concept of representation (but also of the subject and object) is determined, by which the science of the representative faculty can take off. That is to say, it grounds this definition, and is grounded by consciousness. No definition can be given of the concept of representation to the extent that it is immediately extracted from the fact of consciousness through mere reflection. Insofar as a simple concept can be expressed in words, it nevertheless admits a definition of representation which renders it a scientific concept. The two points do not contradict each other, since they stand in different relations to the foundation of the philosophical knowledge which is constituted by consciousness. There is thus an original concept of representation that precedes consciousness, and another equally original concept that follows from it and is determined through the acts of distinguishing and referring a representation to the object and the subject which are expressed by the principle of consciousness. Whereas the first concept is simple and inexplicable, the second is composite and explicable. Der eine läßt sich nur durch das Wort Vorstellung, von dem keine Erklärung möglich ist; der andere hingegen durch Erklärung des Wortes Vorstellung ausdrücken; der eine hängt von der unbegreiflichen Möglichkeit, der andere von der erkannten Wirklichkeit des Bewußtseyns ab; der eine wird vom Satze des Bewußtseyns vorausgesetzt, der andere setzt den Satz des Bewußtseyns voraus. [The former concept can only be expressed by a word, “representation”, for which no definition is possible; the original complex concept, on the contrary, can be expressed by the definition of precisely this word. One is dependent on the incomprehensible possibility of consciousness; the other, on the cognized actuality. One is presupposed by the principle of consciousness; the other presupposes it]³⁵³.

 Fundament,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () .  Fundament,  –  (RGS . – ); en. tr.: Reinhold () .

4 The Fundamentschrift

119

Elementary Philosophy is based on consciousness – a point which Reinhold had already affirmed in the Essay – and has a fundamental first principle which expresses a fact of consciousness – Reinhold made this assertion only in the Contributions. Now we can go on to say that both the incomprehensible possibility and the comprehensible and recognized reality of consciousness can be considered. This additional point does not mean, of course, that the conditions of possibility cannot be spelled out for consciousness; this is, in fact, the very task of Elementary Philosophy, as distinguished from the Kantian Critique of Reason, which instead goes no further than indicating the conditions of the possibility of experience. The sense of the addition provided in the Fundamentschrift lies in the idea that philosophy is not capable of explaining how consciousness is possible from the genetic and temporal point of view, being able to only begin from the presupposition of its real existence. Philosophical knowledge is not exhausted in the empirical-psychological inquiry of how (descriptively speaking) consciousness can actually arise. Nonetheless, once the fact of consciousness is admitted, it must explain how (prescriptively speaking) consciousness can be admitted a priori. Philosophical investigation is therefore transcendental in essence. It still remains psychological, however, because it proceeds according to a method that in principle requires the givenness of consciousness. In this regard, let us consider once again the question of the deduction of the categories. According to Reinhold, the Critique of Pure Reason had shown that one cannot cognize anything through mere concepts of real objects; to this end, a sensible intuition and a sensation as tertium which renders their application to objects possible is required. Taking a different notion of “object” than that of Kant, that is, that which can be represented, including the forms of representation, it is, however, possible to demonstrate that from the concepts of these objects one can no doubt cognize something. The limit of Kant was thus restricting the concept of the object too much and arguing from incomplete concepts which could never have been supplied any definition. Once it is established, as it is in Elementary Philosophy, that the object can be not only the object distinguished in consciousness from the representation and the subject, but every represented object as well, even representative forms, once the concepts are completely determined, and thus defined, it becomes possible to demonstrate the cognition of something from concepts (even if it remains impossible to do so from mere concepts). The third thing that intervenes to justify the synthetic consciousness of the object (broadly speaking) is not sensible intuition, then, but consciousness itself ³⁵⁴.

 Fundament,  –  (RGS . – ).

120

IV The Elementary Philosophy

Whereas Kant took it to be necessary to offer a transcendental justification for the demand advanced by pure concepts to be valid with respect to objects of experience, for unlike the case of pure intuitions objects are not already given as categorized, Reinhold thought that concepts absolutely determined through consciousness should be applied, thanks to consciousness, to objects of experience. The categories, being intellective representations defined completely by means of consciousness, have thus a reference to an object from within consciousness. Their deduction therefore postulates that consciousness is only shown to be possible through them. Quaestio iuris is no longer identified with the possibility of a priori cognition of objects, but with the possibility of consciousness. The predominance of the subjective aspect of the deduction, something we have already seen in the Essay, makes a return again here as well. To confirm the distance that separates the Elementary Philosophy from the Critique of Reason on this point, we should add what Reinhold has to say in regard to the act of defining, which Kant had understood as an original exhibition of “the exhaustive concept of a thing within its boundaries”, observing that “exhaustiveness” signifies “the clarity and sufficiency of marks”³⁵⁵. An empirical concept, according to Kant, can only be rendered explicit, not defined, because a concept presents only some marks of a determinate species of objects. On the other hand, neither can an a priori concept be susceptible to definition, insofar as “I can never be certain that the distinct representation of a (still confused) given concept has been exhaustively developed unless I know that it is adequate to the object”. One can, in this case, reach at best a probability in virtue of “many appropriate examples”, but never apodictic certainty. For this reason, it is opportune to substitute “definition” with “exposition” (Exposition), and recognize that “philosophical definitions come about only as expositions of given concepts” which “come about only analytically through analysis”³⁵⁶. Reinhold holds that Elementary Philosophy satisfies the requirements that Kant posed with the goal of introducing definitions in philosophy. The explanation (Erklärung) of representation, for example, as “that what is distinguished in consciousness from object and subject and is referred to both”, not only completely expounds the concept of representation, since it shows the clarity and sufficiency of its features, but it expounds it, as Kant wanted, from within its limits and in an original way.

 KrV, A /B ; en. tr.: Reinhold () . On the question of philosophically defining in Reinhold, see Bondeli ()  – .  KrV, A  – /B  – ; en. tr.: Reinhold ()  – .

4 The Fundamentschrift

121

Die in der Grunderklärung angegebenen Merkmale sind klar; denn sie sind unmittelbar durch evidente Fakta bestimmt. Sie sind zulänglich; weil durch sie die Vorstellung von allem, was keine Vorstellung ist, unterschieden werden kann. Die Grunderklärung stellt ferner den Begriff der Vorstellung innerhalb seiner Grenzen dar; weil […] in ihr nicht mehrere Merkmale der Vorstellung enthalten sind, als zum ausführlichen Begriff der Vorstellung gehören. Endlich stellt sie denselben ursprünglich dar; indem die in ihr vorkommende Grenzbestimmung […] nicht von einer andern Erklärung abgeleitet ist; und also “keines Beweises oder einer Erklärung bedürfte; welches die Grunderklärung unfähig machen würde, an der Spitze aller Urtheile über die Vorstellung zu stehen.” [The characteristics in the explanation are clear, for they are determined immediately through evident facts. They are sufficient, because through them representation can be distinguished from all that is not representation. The explanation, moreover, presents the concept of representation within its limits, for […] it contains no more characteristics than are required for the exhaustive conception of representation. Finally, it presents the concept originally, for the determination of the limits of the concept that occurs in it […] is not derived from another explanation; hence it “does not require proof or explanation; for if it did, that would disqualify it from standing at the head of all judgments concerning representations”³⁵⁷.

If, on the one hand, in Kant the impossibility of having definitions in philosophy went hand in hand with the demand for a transcendental justification of the categories because these pure concepts did not have in themselves the reason for their application to objects, in Reinhold, on the other hand, the possibility of offering philosophical definitions transforms the whole quaestio iuris into the subjective problem (not objective, that is, of correspondence with objects) of the peculiar clarity of the concept in the whole of consciousness. Kantian transcendentalism, developed around the question of what and how it is possible to have an a priori cognition of objects, is transformed into the question of what and how it is possible to have consciousness of objects a priori. Since consciousness consists in the necessary relation between representation and object, through the subject, the subjective moment present in Reinholdian transcendentalism then manages to contain in itself a factual aspect that at least deprives of all significance the problem of the legitimacy of the claim advanced by the cat-

 Fundament,  (RGS .); en. tr.: Reinhold () ; for the Kantian citation, see KrV, B . The possibility of philosophical definitions within the Elementary Philosophy also opens the path to an approach of philosophy to mathematics which Kant had by principle excluded (KrV, B  – ; Fundament,  – ; RGS . – ). This aspect goes hand-in-hand in Reinhold with the thesis that philosophy is a rigorous science (this is seen in the whole fifth chapter of the Beiträge I). It will then be Fichte’s doctrine of science to develop this idea, arriving at the conclusion that philosophy is “mathematics of reason”: J. G. Fichte, [Ankündigung:] Seit sechs Jahren, in Fichte-AA I/.. On this aspect of Fichte’s philosophy see Wood ().

122

IV The Elementary Philosophy

egories of being applicable to objects. The subjective aspect and the factual aspect converge to make the Elementary Philosophy a system of transcendental psychology.

Epilogue The years spanning 1791 to 1794 saw in Reinhold a number of important proposals for reforming the Elementary Philosophy. Whereas Reinhold had initially affirmed in the old Theory of the Faculty of Representation the ability to start from a single fundamental principle, from which he could ground and derive further secondary principles³⁵⁸, he claims with the new theory that different principles of consciousness, which were first used to deduce certain theorems (for instance, that the material of representation is given, whereas the form is a product), can be admitted in a lemmatical fashion on the basis of the maxims of a healthy human understanding. They can be demonstrated as “maxims of philosophizing reason” when all the remaining principles of consciousness had also been developed³⁵⁹. Of course, hand-in-hand with this renunciation of philosophical monism goes the consolidation of the transcendental-psychological assumption which was already present in Reinhold’s thought from the very outset in the Fundamentschrift. In this last part of my investigation, I will confine myself to analyzing three short writings of Reinhold from which we can well verify what has just been said: (1) an anonymous article, that, however, is well attributable to Reinhold, and which came out in December 1791 in the Neuer Teutscher Merkur of Wieland; (2) a review of 1792 which Reinhold wrote for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on the Empirische Psychologie of C. C. E. Schmid; and lastly, (3) the second chapter of Beiträge II entitled Systematische Darstellung der Fundamente der künftigen und der bisherigen Metaphysik (1794).

 In his important review of the Fundamentschrift, C.C.E. Schmid doubts however that the fundamental principle of the Elementary philosophy could constitute a material fundamental principle (materialer Grundsatz) which would contain in itself the foundation of objective truth of every other principle; it would be instead a normal fundamental principle (normaler Grundsatz), in the sense that it would only determine the relation of the principle to another principle, would not, that is, sum up all the content in itself, but under itself: Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  –  April ,  – ; now in Rezensionen,  – .  See Reinhold’s letter to J. B. Erhard of  June : KA . – , Letter n. . The new position of Reinhold thus gave an answer to the objection which Schmid had advanced in the already recalled review, on the basis of which the old Elementary Philosophy, alongside the principle of consciousness, would admit other principles in an unobserved and tacit way. See in this regard my Einleitung, in Fabbianelli (a) XV, and Frank () .

124

Epilogue

1 Philosophy and Common Sense On 17 November 1791, Christoph Martin Wieland wrote a letter to his son-in-law, Reinhold, to inform him of the loss of several pages of a manuscript “on popularity, etc.” which he thought about publishing in the Neuer Teutscher Merkur. Only the author, who might still possess a copy of the missing pages, was in his view capable of salvaging what was still salvageable. Wieland begged Reinhold to resend him the complete manuscript with the missing papers³⁶⁰. The writing in question came out a month later under the title Ueber Popularität und gesunden Menschenverstand. Fragment eines Briefwechsels ³⁶¹. This brief article was redacted in the form of a correspondence between two friends: A certain Andrees shares with Asmus his disappointment upon having heard a university lesson taught by a great philosopher on the negative aspects of popularity and healthy human understanding³⁶², seeking comfort and confirmation in his friend regarding his sympathy for their priest as a result of his popularity and comprehensibility. Asmus replies that the attack of the philosopher was not raised directly against the priest, but against those “who are not priests and yet want to teach others […] and penetrate the profundity of the truth”. The philosopher was bothered by those who exhibit an “extravagant [verschroben] human understanding” that no longer knows how to be healthy and is lost in useless and pedantic distinctions. Healthy human understanding (gesunder Menschenverstand) is something good in itself; once a philosophy distances itself from it, it falls off course. In fact, Asmus adds, the intellect can become healthy and authentically philosophical only when it cultivates good practices and reaches beyond the common sense (gemeiner Menschenverstand). The first philosopher was the person who, reflecting upon himself and his own abilities, abandoned the path marked by common human understanding. Philosophy itself, Asmus continues, is considered today the science of the products of thought, or rather, the “science of what is present in the faculty of representation before every experience”. Consciousness of one’s own common human understanding and healthy human understanding are not opposed at all; rather, they are in harmony with each other. Reinhold calls for a substantive unity between his own Elementary Philosophy and a healthy human understanding. He lays claim, in no ambiguous terms,

 See Schelle () , now in KA . (Letter n. ).  Der Neue Teutsche Merkur,  December ,  – , now also in Beiträge II,  – . For a discussion of it, see Fabbianelli (a) XVII–IX, and Lazzari (a)  – .  The philosopher of whom Andrees speaks is none other than Reinhold, who was not ever tired from the Versuch to the Fundamentschrift of attacking the popular philosophy.

2 Reinhold’s Review of Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie

125

to what was affirmed indirectly in his preceding works, that is, the view that a system of philosophy constitutes the result of a formalization of the givens of consciousness and of the facts which a healthy human understanding always carries with itself. Like the healthy human understanding, the Elementary Philosophy works by means of a reflection on consciousness. In this way, both distance themselves from the common sense.

2 Reinhold’s Review of Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie Daß auch der empirischen Psychologie eine eben so unvermeidliche als unentbehrliche Reformation durch die kritische Philosophie bevorstehe, ist unter den Kennern und Freunden der letztern so wenig einem Zweifel unterworfen, als es den Nichtkennern und Gegnern derselben, und vorzüglich denjenigen, glaublich seyn kann, welche sich auf den Feldern der Erfahrungswissenschaften der Mühe überhoben wähnen, von dem, was gegenwärtig in den Gegenden der höhern Speculation vorgeht, einige Kenntniß zu nehmen. [That empirical psychology finds itself in need of inevitable and necessary reform through the critical philosophy, is for the experts and proponents of the latter as indisputable as it is credible for the laymen and its opponents, and especially those who imagine preserving in the fields of the empirical sciences the fatigue of coming to know what takes place at the moment in the regions of higher speculation]³⁶³.

The review of the Empirische Psychologie of Carl Christian Erhard Schmid that Reinhold wrote for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung opens with the above quotation. With this declaration, he reiterates a thesis he had already expounded in the Fundamentschrift, in which he made the claim that one can only think of an empirical psychology as a true philosophical science to the extent that the pure Elementary Philosophy is capable of grounding the empirical Elementary Philosophy in all its aspects³⁶⁴. Once the problem of the sources of cognition has been resolved – as was done in the Critique of Pure Reason – philosophizing reason becomes capable of knowing which questions can be resolved by means of experience and which cannot. Sie kann von nun an nicht etwa meynen, sondern wissen, nicht nur wo und wie sie die psychologischen Facta aufzusuchen, sondern auch wodurch sie denselben denjenigen Zusammenhang zu ertheilen habe, durch den allein bloße Wahrnehmungen den Rang, die Festigkeit und Fruchtbarkeit wissenschaftlicher Principien erhalten können.

 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,  – ,  –  April ,  – : .  Fundament,  (RGS .).

126

Epilogue

[From now on, reason does not have to opinionate, but rather, it can know, not only where and how it should investigate psychological facts, but also in what way it should assign to them that nexus through which mere perceptions alone acquire the status, the firmness and the fecundity of scientific principles]³⁶⁵.

Important observations on the theme of our investigation are expressed in Reinhold’s assessment of the subdivision of Schmid’s psychology. For Schmid, psychology is empirical insofar as it departs solely and immediately from experience; is rational insofar as it proceeds a priori only relatively, but derives its material lastly from the experience; and is transcendental insofar as it proceeds absolutely a priori (the latter is the rational psychology exemplified by the Kantian critique)³⁶⁶. First and foremost, according to Reinhold, rational psychology can only truly be a science of the absolute subject as noumenon and not as a thing in itself. To this extent, it is capable of indicating, as Schmid would have it, the regulative principles which empirical psychology can make use of. Transcendental psychology is in fact a priori, but not in the sense that Schmid would have it, that is, as the rational psychology of Kant. Rec. würde lieber unter der transcendentalen Psychologie die r e i n e Wissenschaft des Vorstellungs-, Erkenntniß- und Begehrungsvermögens verstehen […] und eben darum dafür seyn, durch die rationale noch fernerhin nichts als die Wissenschaft des vorstellenden Subjects als eines solchen zu bezeichnen. [By transcendental psychology, the reviewer [Reinhold, F.F.] prefers to mean the pure science of the representative, cognitive and appetitive faculty […], and thus would like to continue pointing out that rational means nothing other than the science of the representing subject as such]³⁶⁷.

On the basis of several theses in the first volume of the Contributions, it is completely fair to maintain that this transcendental psychology properly consists in the Elementary Philosophy itself. In his work, Reinhold in fact defines the Theory of the Faculty of Representation as

 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  April , .  Schmid ()  – . In the fourth edition of his Wörterbuch zum leichtern Gebrauch der Kantischen Schriften, nebst einer Abhandlung (Jena ) under the heading Psychologie, Schmid will retrieve the canonical distinction between empirical psychology and rational psychology, identifying transcendental psychology with the rational.  Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, ,  April , .

3 The Forms of Psychology

127

[d]ie Wissenschaft desjenigen, was nur allein, ursprünglich und unmittelbar im bloßen Vorstellungsvermögen bestimmt ist, das heißt die Wissenschaft der ursprünglichen Formen der bloßen Vorstellungen […] der Sinnlichkeit, des Verstandes, und der Vernunft. [the science of what is determined only and uniquely, originally and immediately in the simple representative faculty, that is, the science of the original forms of the simple representations […] of sensibility, understanding and reason]³⁶⁸.

Yet the faculty of representation includes within itself the cognitive as well as the appetitive faculty, both of which are, so to speak, applications of the representative faculty when the representations are referred respectively either to the represented object or to the representing subject³⁶⁹. Elementary Philosophy is therefore the a priori science of the representative, cognitive and appetitive faculty. As a result, Elementary Philosophy is, in fact, transcendental psychology.

3 The Forms of Psychology The second chapter of Beiträge II bears the title “Systematic Exposition of the Grounds of Metaphysics of the Future and the Past” and is particularly relevant to our investigation in that it proposes important distinctions for the concept of psychology³⁷⁰. The section that concerns our investigation deals with the metaphysics of the future. To the two main questions – “Where does the ground of the representation of substances, of causes and of community in general reposit?” and “Where does the ground of the representation of the absolute reposit?” – the Kantian Critique of Reason has, according to Reinhold, responded in different ways. As far as the first question is concerned, it has shown that the representations of substance, cause and community do not derive from experience, but rather from the faculty of the understanding that belongs to the possibility of experience and precedes every experience in the mind. It is the constitution of this faculty (with the emphasis once again on its a priori structure) that explains which are the representative forms at the basis of this concepts³⁷¹. As far as the second question is concerned, the Critique of Reason has shown (and the Theory of the Faculty of Representation confirmed) that the ground of the abso-

 Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  Beiträge I,  (ed. : ).  A large part of it, with variations and a slightly different title, had already appeared in the journal of Wieland: “Systematische Darstellung aller bisher möglichen Systeme der Metaphysik”, Neuer Teutscher Merkur,  January ,  – ;  March ,  – .  Beiträge II,  –  (ed. : ).

128

Epilogue

lute is not in things in themselves, but in the original constitution of the rational faculty. The features of the absolute and the relative do not belong to things in themselves, but only to things represented by means of reason or to the noumena³⁷². Of the soul, for example, one can therefore speak not in terms of a thing in itself, but rather of a thing represented by means of reason. It is in relation to this object of representing that Reinhold proposes an important subdivision of psychology. The science of the representing subject considered as a thing in itself is rational or transcendent psychology. It cannot be anything but “a useless attempt founded on a misunderstanding”³⁷³. The science of the representing subject considered as a represented thing (as a noumenon) in contrast includes in the first place the science of the faculties of this subject, which are, on the one hand, object of transcendental psychology, and, on the other, empirical psychology. It includes in the second place the science not of the faculties of the subject, but rather of the subject of the faculties considered according to transcendental laws or empirical laws. The first form of psychology is metaphysical psychology and the second is philosophical anthropology³⁷⁴. Although he reserves the name of rational psychology in his review of Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie to the science of the subject considered as a noumenon, Reinhold uses it in this chapter of the second volume of the Contributions to mean the science of the subject considered as a thing in itself. This terminological variation is due to the different levels of discourse which Reinhold employs in his two writings. Rational psychology is the science of the subject considered as a noumenon (review of the Empirische Psychologie) when one considers it positively, in its authenticity; it is the science of the subject considered as a thing in itself (Beiträge II) when one considers it in its actual historical realizations. Even the use of the concept “transcendental psychology” varies correspondingly. If this notion was valid for the pure science of the representative faculty, both cognitive and appetitive, it is valid now for the science of the a priori faculties of the noumenal subject. The fact that we have arrived at a different definition does not change the substantive identity of Elementary Philosophy

 The first explicit appearance of the distinction between thing in itself and noumenon is found in the review which Reinhold writes for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung ( – ,  –  January ,  – : ) of the already mentioned Grundriβ by L.H. Jakob. Reinhold will insist much on it in Beiträge I.  It is notable that he had defined rational psychology in Beiträge I (; ed. : ) not as science of the representing subject considered as a thing in itself, but as “science of the substance of the rational representing subject, which is representable only through reason”: it is precisely this that he now subdivides into transcendental psychology and empirical psychology.  Beiträge II,  –  (ed. :  – ).

3 The Forms of Psychology

129

and transcendental psychology at all: though it can neither remain an empirical psychology or a philosophical anthropology (both grounded a posteriori), nor a rational psychology concerned with the representing subject as a thing in itself, nor, lastly, a metaphysical psychology that deals with the subject of the faculties (rather than the faculties of the subject). Elementary Philosophy can in fact, as pure philosophy, remain on the part of transcendental psychology. As the latter, the Elementary Philosophy deals with the faculties of the representing subject considered as a representable object.

Bibliography A Sources 1 Reinhold 1.1 Articles, books Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Erster Band, das Fundament der Elementarphilosophie betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg 2003 (new edition of the volume published in Jena in 1790). Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Zweiter Band, die Fundamente des philosophischen Wissens, der Metaphysik, Moral, moralischen Religion und Geschmackslehre betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg 2004 (new edition of the volume published in Jena in 1794). “Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, August 1786, 99 – 141; January 1787, 3 – 39; February 1787, 117 – 142; May 1787, 167 – 185; July 1787, 67 – 88; August 1787, 142 – 165; September 1787, 247 – 278. Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, 2 vols., Jena 1790 – 92. “Gedanken über Aufklärung”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, July 1784, 3 – 22; August 1784, 122 – 133; September 1784, 232 – 245 (also in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Schriften zur Religionskritik und Aufklärung 1782 – 1784, ed. by Zwi Batscha, Bremen-Wolfenbüttel 1977, 351 – 396). “Schreiben des Pfarrers zu *** an den H. des T.M. Ueber eine Recension von Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, February 1785, 148 – 174. “Systematische Darstellung aller bisher möglichen Systeme der Metaphysik”, in: Neuer Teutscher Merkur, 1, January 1794, 3 – 18; 3, March 1794, 235 – 256. Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens nebst einigen Erläuterungen über die Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens, Jena 1791 (partially repr. in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Über das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens. Über die Möglichkeit der Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ed. by W.H. Schrader, Hamburg 1978). “Ueber den Einfluß des Geschmackes auf die Kultur der Wissenschaften und der Sitten”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, February 1788, 167 – 183. “Ueber die Natur des Vergnügens”, in: Der Teutsche Merkur, October 1788, 61 – 79; November 1788, 144 – 167; January 1789, 37 – 52. Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, Prag-Jena 1789.

1.2 Others Reinhold, Karl Leonhard: Gesammelte Schriften. Kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. by Martin Bondeli, Basel. The following volumes are published till now: Vol. 1: Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Silvan Imhof, Basel 2013.

A Sources

131

Vol. 2/1: Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie. Erster Band, ed. by Martin Bondeli, Basel 2007. Vol. 2/2: Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie. Zweyter Band, ed. by Martin Bondeli, Basel 2008. Vol. 4: Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens nebst einigen Erläuterungen über die Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens, ed. by Martin Bondeli assisted by Silvan Imhof, Basel 2011. Vol. 12: Vorlesungsnachschriften: Logik und Metaphysik. Darstellung der ‹Kritik der reinen Vernunft›, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli and Erich H. Fuchs, Basel 2015. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard: Korrespondenzausgabe der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Kurt Hiller and Ives Radrizzani, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. The following volumes are published till now: Vol. 1: Korrespondenz 1773 – 1788, ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Eberhard Heller and Kurt Hiller, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1983. Vol. 2: Korrespondenz 1788 – 1790, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Eberhard Heller, Kurt Hiller, Reinhard Lauth, Ives Radrizzani and Wolfgang H. Schrader, assisted by Christian Kauferstein and Petra Lohmann, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2007. Vol. 3: Korrespondenz 1791, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Eberhard Heller, Kurt Hiller, Reinhard Lauth, Ives Radrizzani and Wolfgang H. Schrader, assisted by Christian Kauferstein, Petra Lohmann and Claudius Strube, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2011. Vol. 4: Korrespondenz 1792, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Kurt Hiller and Ives Radrizzani, assisted by Lorenza Castella, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2016. Die zeitgenössischen Rezensionen der Elementarphilosophie K.L. Reinholds, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hildesheim 2003.

2 Other Authors Abicht, Johann Heinrich (1794): Hermias oder Auflösung der die gültige Elementarphilosophie betreffenden Aenesidemischen Zweifel, Erlangen. Baggesen, C. and A. (eds.) (1831): Aus Jens Baggesen’s Briefwechsel mit Karl Leonhard Reinhold und Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 2 vols., Leipzig. Beck, Jakob Sigismund (1796): Einzig-möglicher Standpunct, aus welchem die critische Philosophie beurtheilt werden muß, Riga. Born, Friedrich Gottlob (1788): Versuch über die ersten Gründe der Sinnenlehre, Leipzig. Born, Friedrich Gottlob (1790): “Ueber den transcendentalen Idealismus”, in: Neues philosophisches Magazin, Erläuterungen und Anwendungen des Kantischen Systems bestimmt, ed. by Johann Heinrich Abicht and Friedrich Gottlob Born, vol. 1, pt. 3, 360 – 371; vol. 1, pt. 4, 459 – 463. Corrodi, Heinrich (1788): Versuch über Gott, die Welt, und die menschliche Seele. Durch die gegenwärtigen philosophischen Streitigkeiten veranlaßt, Berlin-Stettin. Diez, Immanuel Carl (1997): Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften. Wissensbegründung in der Glaubenskrise. Tübingen-Jena (1790 – 1792), ed. by Dieter Henrich, Stuttgart. Eberhard, Johann August (1776): Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens, Berlin. Erhard, Johann Benjamin (1791): “Die im 26sten Stück der A.L.Z. von 1791 enthaltene Beurtheilung der Reinholdschen Elementarphilosophie. Geprüft von J.B. Ehrhard [sic!]

132

Bibliography

aus Nürnberg”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens, cit., 139 – 182. Feder, Johann Georg Heinrich (1787): Ueber Raum und Caussalität zur Prüfung der Kantischen Philosophie, Göttingen. Flatt, Johann Friedrich (1788): Fragmentarische Beyträge zur Bestimmung und Deduktion des Begriffs und Grundsatzes der Caussalität, und zur Grundlegung der natürlichen Theologie, in Beziehung auf die Kantische Philosophie, Leipzig. Forberg, Friedrich Carl (1791): “Des Herrn Hofrath und Professor Schwab Gedanken über die Reinholdsche Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens. Im 2ten St. des 3ten Bandes des Eberhardschen Magazins. Geprüft von M.F.C. Forberg”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens, cit., 183 – 221. Forberg, Friedrich Carl (1840): Lebenslauf eines Verschollenen, Hildburghausen-Meiningen. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1798): “Ueber das Verhältniß der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik”, in: Psychologisches Magazin, 3, 156 – 202. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1803): Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, Leipzig. Grohmann, Johann Christian August (1796): Neue transcendentale Deduktion der logischen Formen, in: Id., Neue Beyträge zur kritischen Philosophie und insbesondere zur Logik, Leipzig, 1 – 187. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968): Gesammelte Werke, ed. by the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften in association with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Vol. 4: Jenaer kritische Schriften, ed. by Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler, Hamburg. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1964): Allgemeine Metaphysik nebst den Anfängen der philosophischen Naturlehre. Erster historisch-kritischer Theil, in: Id., Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel, vol. 7, Aalen. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich (1786): Prüfung der Mendelssohnschen Morgenstunden oder aller spekulativen Beweise für das Daseyn Gottes, Leipzig. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich (1788): Grundriß der allgemeinen Logik und kritische Anfangsgründe zu einer allgemeinen Metaphysik, Halle. Kant, Immanuel (1781): Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga. Kant, Immanuel (1783): Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, Riga. Kant, Immanuel (1785): “Erinnerungen des Recensenten der Herderschen Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Nro. 4. u. Beyl. der Allg. Lit.-Zeit.) über ein im Februar des teutschen Merkur gegen diese Recension gerichtetes Schreiben”, in: Anhang zum Märzmonat der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, 1, last page. Kant, Immanuel (1787): Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga. Landau, Albert (ed.) (1991): Rezensionen zur Kantischen Philosophie, Bebra. Platner, Ernst (1784): Philosophische Aphorismen nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte, vol. 1, 2nd ed., Leipzig. Platner, Ernst (1793): Philosophische Aphorismen nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte, vol. 1, 3rd ed., Leipzig. Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard (1788): Wörterbuch zum leichtern Gebrauch der Kantischen Schriften, nebst einer Abhandlung, 2nd ed., Jena. Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard (1791): Empirische Psychologie, Jena. Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard (1798): Wörterbuch zum leichtern Gebrauch der Kantischen Schriften, nebst einer Abhandlung, 4th ed., Jena.

B Studies

133

Schultz, Johann (1784): Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft, Königsberg. Schultz, Johann (1789): Prüfung der Kantischen Critik der reinen Vernunft, vol. 1, Königsberg. Schwab, Johann Christoph (1790): “Ueber den Reinholdischen Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens”, in: Philosophisches Magazin, ed. by Johann August Eberhard, vol. 3, pt. 2, 125 – 147. Selle, Christian Gottlieb (1788): Grundsätze der reinen Philosophie, Berlin. Tiedemann, Dieter (1785): “Ueber die Natur der Metaphysik; zur Prüfung von Hrn. Professor Kants Grundsätzen”, in: Hessische Beiträge zur Gelehrsamkeit und Kunst, vol. 1, pt. 1, 113 – 130; vol. 1, pt. 2, 233 – 248; vol. 1, pt. 3, 464 – 474. Tittel, Gottlob August (1787): Kantische Denkformen oder Kategorien, Frankfurt a. M. Weishaupt, Adam (1787): Ueber Materialismus und Idealismus, Nürnberg. Weishaupt, Adam (1788a): Ueber die Gründe und Gewisheit der Menschlichen Erkenntniß. Zur Prüfung der Kantischen Critik der reinen Vernunft, Nürnberg. Weishaupt, Adam (1788b): Ueber die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen, Nürnberg. Weishaupt, Adam (1788c): Zweifel über die Kantischen Begriffe von Zeit und Raum, Nürnberg. Zoeppritz, Rudolf (ed.) (1869): Aus F.H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß. Ungedruckte Briefe von und an Jacobi und Andere, Leipzig.

2.1 English Translations Kant, Immanuel (1998): Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge. Kant, Immanuel (2004): Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, ed. by Gary Hatfield, Cambridge. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1996): “Thoughts on Enlightenment”, trans. by Kevin Paul Geiman, in: What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century answers and twentieth-century questions, ed. by James Schmidt, Berkeley, CA, 65 – 77 (partial translation of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, “Gedanken über Aufklärung”). Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (2000): “The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge”, in: Between Kant and Hegel. Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, ed. by George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, Albany, 51 – 103 (translation of the First Treatise of Beiträge I and of Fundament without the essays of Erhard and Forberg). Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (2005): Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Karl Ameriks, trans. by James Hebbeler, Cambridge-New York. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (2011): Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation, ed. by Tim Mehigan and Barry Empson, Berlin-New York.

B Studies Adam, Herbert (1930): Carl Leonhard Reinholds philosophischer Systemwechsel, Heidelberg.

134

Bibliography

Ameriks, Karl (1978): “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument”, in: Kant-Studien, 69, 273 – 285. Ameriks, Karl (1989): “Reinhold and the Short Argument to Idealism”, in: Proceedings of the Sixth International Kant Congress, 2/2, ed. by Gerhard Funke and Thomas M. Seebohm, Washington D. C., 441 – 453. Ameriks, Karl (2000): Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy, Cambridge. Ameriks, Karl (2003): “Reinhold’s Challenge: Systematic Philosophy for the Public”, in: Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Wolfgang H. Schrader, Amsterdam-New York, 77 – 103. Ameriks, Karl (2004): “Reinhold über Systematik, Popularität und die ‘historische Wende’”, in: Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari, Basel, 303 – 333. Ameriks, Karl (2005): “Introduction”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. by Karl Ameriks, trans. by James Hebbeler, Cambridge, IX–XXXV. Ameriks, Karl (2010): “Reinhold, History and the Foundation of Philosophy”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 113 – 130. Amrhein, Hans (1909): Kants Lehre vom “Bewusstsein überhaupt” und ihre Weiterbildung bis auf die Gegenwart, Berlin. Bach, Thomas (2003): “Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757 – 1823): Philosophie und Kulturmorphologie im ‘Teutschen Merkur’”, in: “Der Teutsche Merkur” – die erste deutsche Kulturzeitschrift?, ed. by Andrea Heinz, Heidelberg, 254 – 275. Baum, Günther (1974): “K.L. Reinholds Elementarphilosophie und die Idee des transzendentalen Idealismus”, in: Philosophie aus einem Prinzip. Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Sieben Beiträge nebst einem Briefekatalog aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages, ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Bonn, 86 – 107. Baum, Manfred (1986): Deduktion und Beweis in Kants Transzendentalphilosophie. Untersuchungen zur “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, Königstein i. Ts. Baum, Manfred (2004): “Die Möglichkeit der Erfahrung und die analytische Methode bei Reinhold”, in: Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari, Basel, 104 – 118. Baumanns, Peter (1974): Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre. Probleme ihres Anfangs. Mit einem Kommentar zu § 1 der “Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre”, Bonn. Beiser, Frederick C. (1987): The Fate of Reason. German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge (MA)-London. Berger, Andreas (1998): “Systemwandel zu einer ‘neuen Elementarphilosophie’? Zur möglichen Rolle von Carl Christian Erhard Schmid in der Entwicklung von Reinholds Elementarphilosophie nach 1791”, in: Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik, 8, 137 – 210. Bojanowski, Jochen (2006): Kants Theorie der Freiheit. Rekonstruktion und Rehabilitierung, Berlin-New York. Bondeli, Martin (1994): “Geschmack und Vergnügen in Reinholds Aufklärungskonzept und philosophischem Programm während der Phase der Elementarphilosophie”, in: Evolution des Geistes: Jena um 1800. Natur und Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld der Geschichte, ed. by Friedrich Strack, Stuttgart, 351 – 372.

B Studies

135

Bondeli, Martin (1995): Das Anfangsproblem bei Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Eine systematische und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Philosophie Reinholds in der Zeit von 1789 bis 1803, Frankfurt a. M. Bondeli, Martin (1997): “Von Herder zu Kant, zwischen Kant und Herder, mit Herder gegen Kant – Karl Leonhard Reinhold”, in: Herder und die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, ed. by Marion Heinz, Amsterdam-New York, 203 – 234. Bondeli, Martin (2003): Reinholds Kant-Kritik in der Phase der Elementarphilosophie, in Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Wolfgang H. Schrader, Amsterdam-New York, 1 – 24. Bondeli, Martin (2006): Apperzeption und Erfahrung. Kants transzendentale Deduktion im Spannungsfeld der frühen Rezeption und Kritik, Basel. Bondeli, Martin (2007): “Über eine ‘Entdeckung’ in der Psychologie. Reinholds Auseinandersetzung mit Platners Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Seelenbegriffs”, in: Aufklärung, 19, 327 – 342. Bondeli, Martin (2008): “Reinholds Kant-Phase. Ihre Entwicklungslinie, ihre Wirkung und Bedeutung”, in: Am Rande des Idealismus. Studien zur Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Wolfgang Kersting and Dirk Westerkamp, Paderborn, 41 – 69. Bondeli, Martin (2010): “The Conception of Enlightenment in Reinhold’s ‘Letters on Kantian Philosophy’”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 43 – 51. Bondeli, Martin/Lazzari, Alessandro (2004): Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, Basel. Bondeli, Martin/Schrader, Wolfgang H. (eds.) (2003): Die Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, Amsterdam. Bonelli Munegato, Cristiana (1992): Johann Schultz e la prima ricezione del criticismo kantiano, Trento. Breazeale, Daniel (1981 – 82): Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s “Elementary Philosophy”, in: The Review of Metaphysics, 35, 785 – 821. Breazeale, Daniel (1998): “Putting Doubt in Its Place: Karl Leonhard Reinhold on the Relationship between Philosophical Skepticism and Transcendental Idealism”, in: The Skeptical Tradition around 1800, ed. by Johan van der Zande and Richard H. Popkin, Dordrecht, 119 – 132. Breazeale, Daniel (2005): “Reflection, Intellectual Intuition, and the Fact of Consciousness: Remarks on the Method of Reinholds ‘Elementarphilosophie’ (1789 – 1791)”, in: Archivio di Filosofia, 73/1 – 3, 35 – 57. Breazeale, Daniel (2010): “Reason’s Changing Needs: from Kant to Reinhold”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 89 – 111. Carabellese, Pantaleo (1929): Il problema della filosofia da Kant a Fichte (1781 – 1801), Palermo. Carl, Wolfgang (1992): Die Transzendentale Deduktion der Kategorien in der ersten Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ein Kommentar, Frankfurt a. M. Cassirer, Ernst (1999): Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 2: Die kritische Philosophie, Hamburg 1999 (Hamburger Ausgabe, 3), 489 – 638.

136

Bibliography

Cassirer, Ernst (2000): Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 3: Die nachkantischen Systeme, Hamburg 2000 (Hamburger Ausgabe, 4), 32 – 55. Chiodi, Pietro (1961): La deduzione nell’opera di Kant, Turin. Coreth, Emerich (1985): “Zur Elementarphilosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds”, in: Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, 107, 259 – 270. Delbos, Victor (1992): De Kant aux postkantiens, Paris. de Muralt, André (1958): La conscience transcendantale dans le criticisme kantien. Essai sur l’unité d’aperception, Paris. de Vleeschauwer, Herman Jean (1934 – 37): La déduction transcendantale dans l’œuvre de Kant, 3 vols., Antwerpen-Paris. di Giovanni, George (1985): “The Facts of Consciousness”, in: Between Kant and Hegel. Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, ed. by George di Giovanni and Henry S. Harris, Albany, 2 – 50. di Giovanni, George (2005): Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors. The Vocation of Humankind, 1774 – 1800, Cambridge. di Giovanni, George (ed.) (2010): Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, Dordrecht. Durante, Gaetano (1943): Gli epigoni di Kant, Florence. Erdmann, Benno (1878): Kants Kritizismus in der ersten und zweiten Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Eine historische Untersuchung, Leipzig. Fabbianelli, Faustino (1998 – 99): La concezione della libertà del volere nel “Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens” di Karl Leonhard Reinhold (Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia dell’Università di Firenze), 39 – 53. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2001): “Elementarphilosophie und Wissenschaftslehre: zwei Modelle der Transzendentalphilosophie”, in: Der transzendentalphilosophische Zugang zur Wirklichkeit. Beiträge aus der aktuellen Fichte-Forschung, ed. by E. Fuchs, M. Ivaldo and G. Moretto, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 129 – 146. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2003a): “Einleitung”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Erster Band, das Fundament der Elementarphilosophie betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg, XI–XXXVIII. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2003b): “Einleitung”, in: Die zeitgenössischen Rezensionen der Elementarphilosophie K.L. Reinholds, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hildesheim, XIII– LXXVIII. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2004a): “Einleitung”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Zweiter Band, die Fundamente des philosophischen Wissens, der Metaphysik, Moral, moralischen Religion und Geschmackslehre betreffend, ed. by Faustino Fabbianelli, Hamburg, IX–CIII. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2004b): “Von der Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens zur Elementarphilosophie. Reinholds Satz des Bewußtseins und die Auseinandersetzung über das Ding an sich”, in: Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari, Basel, 39 – 56. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2005): “K. L. Reinhold e la psicologia”, in: Archivio di filosofia, 73, 139 – 148. Fabbianelli, Faustino (2010): “Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung in Reinholds ‘Elementarphilosophie’”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 197 – 207.

B Studies

137

Förster, Eckart (2012): Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie, Frankfurt a. M. Frank, Manfred (1997): “Unendliche Annäherung”. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, Frankfurt a. M., 152 – 661. Franks, Paul (2000): “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon”, in: The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. by Karl Ameriks, Cambridge, 95 – 116. Frischeisen-Köhler, Max (1907): “Über den Begriff und den Satz des Bewusstseins. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchung”, in: Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie, 31, 145 – 201. Fuchs, Gerhard W. (1994): Karl Leonhard Reinhold – Illuminat und Philosoph. Eine Studie über den Zusammenhang seines Engagements als Freimaurer und Illuminat mit seinem Leben und philosophischen Wirken, Frankfurt a. M. Fuchs, Gerhard W. (1996): “Reinhold im Lichte Kants und Hegels”, in: Hegel-Studien, 31, 159 – 165. Gent, Werner (1930): Die Raum-Zeit-Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Historische, kritische und analytische Untersuchungen. Die Geschichte der Begriffe des Raumes und der Zeit vom kritischen Kant bis zur Gegenwart, Bonn. Gliwitzky, Hans (1974): “Carl Leonhard Reinholds erster Standpunktwechsel”, in: Philosophie aus einem Prinzip. Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Sieben Beiträge nebst einem Briefekatalog aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages, ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Bonn, 10 – 85. Goh, Kienhow (2014): “Reinhold and the Transformation of Philosophy into Science”, in: The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. by Matthew C. Altman, Basingstoke, 243 – 264. Goubet, Jean-François (1999): “Présentation”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Le principe de conscience (Nouvelle présentation des Moments principaux de la Philosophie élémentaire), trans. by Jean-François Goubet, Paris-Montréal, 1 – 47. Grillenzoni, Paolo (2006): “L’incontro di Karl Leonhard Reinhold con la filosofia kantiana”, in: Rivista di storia della filosofia, Supplement, 33 – 43. Gueroult, Martial (1930): L’évolution et la structure de la Doctrine de la science chez Fichte, vol. 1, Paris. Guyer, Paul (1989): “Psychology and the Transcendental Deduction”, in: Kant’s Transcendental Deductions. The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum’, ed. by Eckart Förster, Stanford, 47 – 68. Heidegger, Martin (1991): Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt a. M. Heinz, Marion (2004): “Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Geschichte und System der Philosophie in Reinholds Fundamentschrift”, in: Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari, Basel, 334 – 346. Heinz, Marion/Stolz, Violetta (2008): “Vernunft und Geschichte: Von Kant zu Reinhold”, in: Am Rande des Idealismus. Studien zur Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Wolfgang Kersting and Dirk Westerkamp, Paderborn, 159 – 185. Henrich, Dieter (1968 – 69): “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction”, in: The Review of Metaphysics, 22, 640 – 659. Henrich, Dieter (1976): Identität und Objektivität. Eine Untersuchung über Kants transzendentale Deduktion, Heidelberg.

138

Bibliography

Henrich, Dieter (1989): “Die Anfänge der Theorie des Subjekts (1789)”, in: Zwischenbetrachtungen. Im Prozeß der Aufklärung. Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Axel Honneth et al., Frankfurt a. M., 106 – 170. Henrich, Dieter (1991): Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatte am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1785 – 1795), Stuttgart. Henrich, Dieter (2004): Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus. Tübingen-Jena (1790 – 1794), 2 vols., Frankfurt a. M. Horstmann, Rolf-Peter (1972): “Maimon’s Criticism of Reinhold’s ‘Satz des Bewusstseins’”, in: Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, ed. by Lewis White Beck, Dordrecht, 330 – 338. Horstmann, Rolf-Peter (1995): Die Grenzen der Vernunft. Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus, Weinheim. Imhof, Silvan (2014): Der Grund der Subjektivität. Motive und Potenzial von Fichtes Ansatz, Basel. Ivaldo, Marco (2007): “Percorsi della ragion pratica: Kant, Reinhold, Fichte”, in: Etica, Religione e Storia. Studi in memoria di Giovanni Moretto, ed. by Domenico Venturelli, Roberto Celada Ballanti and Gerardo Cunico, Genoa, 63 – 87. Ivaldo, Marco (2010): “Zwei Wege der Kantischen Praktischen Vernunft: Reinhold und Fichte”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 181 – 193. Ivaldo, Marco (2012): Ragione pratica. Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Pisa. Kersting, Wolfgang/Westerkamp, Dirk (eds.) (2008): Am Rande des Idealismus. Studien zur Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, Paderborn. Kim, Y. K. (1996): Religion, Moral und Aufklärung. Reinholds philosophischer Werdegang, Frankfurt a. M. Kitcher, Patricia (1990): Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, New York-Oxford. Klemmt, Alfred (1958): Karl Leonhard Reinholds Elementarphilosophie. Eine Studie über den Ursprung des spekulativen deutschen Idealismus, Hamburg. König, Alfred Philipp (1980): Denkformen in der Erkenntnis. Die Urteilstafel Immanuel Kants in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft und in Karl Leonhard Reinholds Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, Bonn. König, Alfred Philipp (1982): “Reinholds Modifikation des Kantischen analytischen Urteils”, in: Kant-Studien, 73, 63 – 69. Kroner, Richard (1921 – 24): Von Kant bis Hegel, Tübingen. Lauth, Reinhard (ed.) (1974a): Philosophie aus einem Prinzip. Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Sieben Beiträge nebst einem Briefekatalog aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages, Bonn. Lauth, Reinhard (1974b): “Fichtes und Reinholds Verhältnis vom Anfange ihrer Bekanntschaft bis zu Reinholds Beitritt zum Standpunkt der Wissenschaftslehre Anfang 1797”, in: Philosophie aus einem Prinzip. Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Sieben Beiträge nebst einem Briefekatalog aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages, ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Bonn, 129 – 159. Lauth, Reinhard (1985): “La conception de la philosophie cartésienne par Reinhold au début du XIXe siècle, ses conséquences pour le développement de la philosophie allemande”, in: Les études philosophiques, 2, 191 – 204. Lazzari, Alessandro (2004a): “Das Eine, was der Menschheit Noth ist”. Einheit und Freiheit in der Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds (1789 – 1792), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt.

B Studies

139

Lazzari, Alessandro (2004b): “Zur Genese von Reinholds ‘Satz des Bewußtseins’”, in: Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari, Basel, 21 – 38. Lazzari, Alessandro (2005): “K. L. Reinhold: Die Natur des Vergnügens und die Grundlegung des Systems”, in: Archivio di filosofia, 73/1 – 3, 213 – 221. Lazzari, Alessandro (2007): “Platner und Reinhold über das Vergnügen”, in: Aufklärung, 19, 309 – 327. Lazzari, Alessandro (2010): “K.L. Reinhold und der Glaube der Vernunft”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 133 – 143. Leopoldsberger, Jürgen (1968 – 69): “Anfang und Methode als die Grundprobleme der systematischen Philosophie. Reinhold, Fichte, Hegel”, in: Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie, 7 – 48. Maier, Heinrich (1930): “Die Anfänge der Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus”, in: Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1930. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Öffentliche Sitzung vom 23. Januar 1930, Berlin, XXXIV–XLVII. Maréchal, Joseph (1947): Le point de départ de la métaphysique. Leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, vol. 4: Le système idéaliste chez Kant et les postkantiens, Brussels-Paris. Marino, Luigi (1975): I maestri della Germania. Göttingen 1770 – 1820, Turin. Marx, Karianne (2010): “Reinhold a Kantian? ‘Practical Reason’ in Reinholds ‘Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie’ and ‘Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens’”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 145 – 159. Marx, Karianne (2011): The Usefulness of the Kantian Philosophy. How Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Commitment to Enlightenment Influenced His Reception of Kant, Berlin. Mensen, Bernhard (1974): “Reinhold zur Frage des ersten Grundsatzes der Philosophie”, in: Philosophie aus einem Prinzip. Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Sieben Beiträge nebst einem Briefekatalog aus Anlaß seines 150. Todestages, ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Bonn, 108 – 128. Michelet, Carl Ludwig (1837): Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel, vol. 1, Berlin. Mittmann, Jörg-Peter (1993): Das Prinzip der Selbstgewißheit. Fichte und die Entwicklung der nachkantischen Grundsatzphilosophie, Bodenheim. Onnasch, Ernst-Otto (2005): “Vorüberlegungen zur Herleitung der Urteilsformen und Kategorien in Reinholds Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens”, in: Archivio di filosofia, 73, 93 – 113. Paton, Herbert James (1936): Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience. A Commentary on the First Half of the “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, 2 vols., London-New York. Pfeifer, Albert (1935): Die Philosophie der Kantperiode Karl Leonhard Reinholds, Phil. Diss. Bonn. Piché, Claude (1995): Kant et ses épigones. Le jugement critique en appel, Paris. Piché, Claude (2010): “Le ‘besoin de la raison’ dans les ‘Lettres sur la philosophie kantienne’ (1786 – 1787)”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 161 – 180. Pierini, Aldo (1941): “Carlo Leonardo Reinhold. Il metodo della filosofia elementare, il ‘principio della coscienza’ e il problema della ‘cosa in sé’”, in: Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 22, 162 – 176.

140

Bibliography

Pinkard, Terry (2002): German Philosophy 1760 – 1860. The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, 96 – 104. Pupi, Angelo (1966): La formazione della filosofia di K.L. Reinhold (1784 – 1794), Milan. Reinhold, Ernst (1825): Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Leben und litterarisches Wirken, nebst einer Auswahl von Briefen Kant’s, Fichte’s, Jacobi’s und andrer philosophierender Zeitgenossen an ihn, Jena. Reinhold, Ernst (1830): Handbuch der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie für alle wissenschaftlich Gebildete, vol. 2/2, Gotha. Reinhold, Ernst (1845): Geschichte der Philosophie nach den Hauptmomenten ihrer Entwicklung, 2 vols., Jena. Reuter, Peter (1989): Kants Theorie der Reflexionsbegriffe. Eine Untersuchung zum Amphiboliekapitel der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Würzburg. Ritter, Joachim/Gründer, Karlfried/Gabriel, Gottfried (eds.) (1971–): Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel-Stuttgart. Roehr, Sabine (1995): A Primer on German Enlightenment. With a Translation of Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s “The Fundamental Concepts and Principles of Ethics”, Columbia-London. Rosenkranz, Karl (1840): “Geschichte der Kant’schen Philosophie”, in: Immanuel Kant’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by K. Rosenkranz and F.W. Schubert, vol. 12, Leipzig. Röttgers, Kurt (1974): “Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft und K.L. Reinhold. Fallstudie zur Theoriepragmatik in Schulbildungsprozessen”, in: Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses Mainz (6.–10. April 1974), vol. 2/2: Sektionen, ed. by Gerhard Funke, Berlin, 789 – 804. Rumore, Paola (2002): “Una via all’idealismo: la concezione reinholdiana dell’oggetto trascendentale”, in: Studi kantiani, 15, 199 – 210. Rumore, Paola (2003): “Reinhold e la ricerca del fondamento assoluto”, in: Rivista di filosofia, 94, 41 – 63. Rumore, Paola (2007): L’ordine delle idee. La genesi del concetto di ‘rappresentazione’ in Kant attraverso le sue fonti wolffiane (1747 – 1787), Florence. Rumore, Paola (2008): “Reinholds ursprüngliche Einsicht. Die Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens und ihre zeitgenössischen Kritiker”, in: Am Rande des Idealismus. Studien zur Philosophie Karl Leonhard Reinholds, ed. by Wolfgang Kersting and Dirk Westerkamp, Paderborn, 111 – 128. Rumore, Paola (2009): “Wolff und die neue Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens. Das Wolffianische Erbe in der Elementarphilosophie Reinholds”, in: Christian Wolff und die europäische Aufklärung, vol. 5, ed. by Jürgen Stolzenberg and Oliver-Pierre Rudolph, Hildesheim, 163 – 176. Salvucci, Pasquale (1981): Filosofia e vita nel primo idealismo tedesco, Urbino. Sassen, Brigitte (2010): “Reinhold’s Critics: Kantian and Antikantian”, in: Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. by George di Giovanni, Dordrecht, 209 – 220. Satura, Vladimir (1971): Kants Erkenntnispsychologie in den Nachschriften seiner Vorlesungen über empirische Psychologie, Bonn. Sauer, Werner (1992): “Reinholds Versuch zur Überwindung der Kantischen Dualität von Anschauung und Begriff”, in: Verdrängter Humanismus – verzögerte Aufklärung. Österreichische Philosophie zur Zeit der Revolution und Restauration (1750 – 1820), ed. by Michael Benedikt, Vienna, 828 – 851.

B Studies

141

Schelle, Hansjörg (1971): “Unbekannte Briefe C.M. Wielands an Carl Leonhard Reinhold aus den Jahren 1787 bis 1792”, in: Lessing Yearbook, 3, 7 – 24. Schönborn, Alexander von (1997): “Fichte und Reinhold über die Begrenzung der Philosophie”, in: Fichte-Studien, 9, 241 – 255. Schönborn, Alexander von (1999): “Karl Leonhard Reinhold: ‘… Endeavoring to keep up the pace mit unserem zeitalter’”, in: The Emergence of German Idealism, ed. by Michael Baur and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Washington, D.C., 33 – 62. Schrader, Wolfgang H. (1979): “Philosophie als System – Reinhold und Fichte”, in: Erneuerung der Transzendentalphilosophie im Anschluß an Kant und Fichte, ed. by Klaus Hammacher and Albert Mues, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 331 – 344. Schrader, Wolfgang H. (1983): “Systemphilosophie als Aufklärung. Zum Philosophiebegriff K.L. Reinholds”, in: Studia Leibnitiana, 15/1, 72 – 81. Schrader, Wolfgang H. (1987): “‘Wir denken über keinen einzigen Begriff gleich’ – Die Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Reinhold und Maimon”, in: Fortschritt der Aufklärung. Klassische europäische Philosophie und materialistische Dialektik, ed. by Hans Jörg Sandkühler and Hans Heinz Holz, Cologne, 41 – 64. Schröpfer, Horst (1995): “Karl Leonhard Reinhold – sein Wirken für das allgemeine Verständnis der ‘Hauptresultate’ und der ‘Organisation des Kantischen Systems’”, in: Der Aufbruch in den Kantianismus. Der Frühkantianismus an der Universität Jena von 1785 – 1800 und seine Vorgeschichte, ed. by Norbert Hinske, Erhard Lange and Horst Schröpfer, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 101 – 120. Schröpfer, Horst (2003): Kants Weg in die Öffentlichkeit. Christian Gottfried Schütz als Wegbereiter der kritischen Philosophie, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2003. Schuhmann, Karl (1968), “Reinholds Vorstellungstheorie und die Metaphysik”, in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 30, 264 – 324. Schulz, Eberhard Günter (1975): Rehbergs Opposition gegen Kants Ethik. Eine Untersuchung ihrer Grundlagen, ihrer Berücksichtigung durch Kant und ihrer Wirkungen auf Reinhold, Schiller und Fichte, Cologne-Vienna. Selling, Magnus (1938): Studien zur Geschichte der Transzendentalphilosophie. I. Karl Leonhard Reinholds Elementarphilosophie in ihrem philosophiegeschichtlichen Zusammenhang. Mit Beilagen Fichtes Entwicklung betreffend, Lund. Spickhoff, Karl (1961): Die Vorstellung in der Polemik zwischen Reinhold, Schulze und Fichte: 1792 – 94, Diss. Munich. Stamm, Marcelo (1995): “Das Programm des methodologischen Monismus. Subjekttheoretische und methodologische Aspekte der Elementarphilosophie K. L. Reinholds”, in: Neue Hefte für Philosophie, 35, 18 – 31. Stolz, Violetta (2010): Geschichtsphilosophie bei Kant und Reinhold, Würzburg. Stolzenberg, Jürgen (1986): Fichtes Begriff der intellektuellen Anschauung. Die Entwicklung in den Wissenschaftslehren von 1793/94 bis 1801/02, Stuttgart. Stolzenberg, Jürgen (1996): “Selbstbewußtsein. Ein Problem der Philosophie nach Kant. Zum Verhältnis Reinhold-Hölderlin-Fichte”, in: Revue internationale de philosophie, 3, 461 – 482. Stolzenberg, Jürgen (2003): “‘Geschichte des Selbstbewußtseins’. Reinhold – Fichte – Schelling”, in: Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism, 1, 93 – 113. Teichner, Wilhelm (1976): Rekonstruktion oder Reproduktion des Grundes. Die Begründung der Philosophie als Wissenschaft durch Kant und Reinhold, Bonn.

142

Bibliography

Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle (2000): Critique de la représentation. Étude sur Fichte, Paris. Tilliette, Xavier (1995): Recherches sur l’intuition intellectuelle de Kant à Hegel, Paris. Valenza, Pierluigi (1992): “Karl Leonhard Reinhold: fenomenologo ante litteram o anticipatore della filosofia analitica? In occasione di una bibliografia recente”, in: Archivio di filosofia, 60, 587 – 598. Valenza, Pierluigi (1994): Reinhold e Hegel. Ragione storica e inizio assoluto della filosofia, Padua. Verra, Valerio (1951): “Reinhold e le lettere su la filosofia kantiana”, in: Filosofia, 2, 329 – 359. Verra, Valerio (1989): “Critica e rivoluzione: K.L. Reinhold”, in: Intersezioni, 9, 141 – 150. Wahl, Hans (1914): Geschichte des Teutschen Merkur. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Journalismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin. Weinhandl, Ferdinand (1930): K. L. Reinhold, ein Kapitel aus der Problemgeschichte des Kritizismus (Veröffentlichungen der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Universitätsgesellschaft: Jahrbuch, 26), 65 – 94. Wellek, René (1984): “Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold”, in: Journal of the History of Ideas, 45, 323 – 327. Wood, David W. (2012): “Mathesis of the Mind”. A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry, Amsterdam-New York. Wundt, Max (1932): Die Philosophie an der Universität Jena in ihrem geschichtlichen Verlaufe dargestellt, Jena. Wundt, Max (1945): Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, Tübingen. Zöller, Günter (2000): “The Unpopularity of Transcendental Philosophy: Fichte’s Controversy with Reinhold (1799 – 1801)”, in: PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 10, 50 – 76. Zöller, Günter (2005): “Von Reinhold zu Kant. Zur Grundlegung der Moralphilosophie zwischen Vernunft und Willkür”, in: Archivio di filosofia, 73/1 – 3, 73 – 91. Zöller, Günter (2007): “From Transcendental Philosophy to ‘Wissenschaftslehre’: Fichte’s Modification of Kant’s Idealism”, in: European Journal of Philosophy, 15, 249 – 269. Zynda, Max von (1910): Kant – Reinhold – Fichte. Studien zur Geschichte des Transzendental-Begriffs, Berlin.

Index of Names Abicht, Johann Heinrich 5, 13, 44 Adam, Herbert 3 Adickes, Erich 83 Ameriks, Karl 4, 21, 68, 72, 95 Baggesen, Jens 111, 113 Baum, Günther 42 Baum, Manfred 72, 104 Baumanns, Peter 99 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 22 Beck, Jakob Sigismund 5, 72 Bondeli, Martin 2 f., 20 f., 30, 37, 56, 72, 97, 100, 120 Bonelli Munegato, Cristiana 23 Born, Friedrich Gottlob 13 f., 38 f., 44 Breazeale, Daniel 4, 99 f. Carl, Wolfgang 73 Cassirer, Ernst 6 f., 78, 83 Chiodi, Pietro 72, 74, 79, 82, 84 Chrisippus 27 Clarke, Samuel 11 Corrodi, Heinrich 29 de Vleeschauwer, Herman Jean Descartes, René 27 di Giovanni, George 15 Diez, Immanuel Carl 93

Fries, Jakob Friedrich 5 Fürstenau, Carl Gottfried

112

Gabriel, Gottfried 27 Garve, Christian 17, 19 Goh, Kienhow 104 Göschen, Georg Joachim 92 Goubet, Jean-François 100 Grillenzoni, Paolo 20 Grohmann, Johann Christian August Gründer, Karlfried 27 Gueroult, Martial 100 Guyer, Paul 73

82

Halem, Gerhard Anton von 27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 78 Heidegger, Martin 83 Henrich, Dieter 2 f., 72, 83, 111 f. Herbart, Johann Friedrich 5 Herder, Johann Gottfried 20 f. Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich 88, 91 f., 103, 112 f. Hufeland, Gottlieb 111 Hume, David 114

72

Eberhard, Johann August 18, 27 f., 46, 105 Erdmann, Benno 72 Erhard, Johann Benjamin 111 f., 123 Ewald, Schack Hermann 15 Fabbianelli, Faustino 18, 94, 123 f. Feder, Johann Georg Heinrich 17 – 19, 71, 81, 86, 88 f. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 3, 5, 8, 66, 72, 78, 100, 114, 121 Flatt, Johann Friedrich 18 f., 44, 88, 90, 94, 108, 112 Forberg, Friedrich Carl 92, 111 f. Frank, Manfred 2 f., 123

Imhof, Silvan

100

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 15, 20, 33, 91, 106 Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich 12 f., 32 f., 37, 41 – 43, 55, 128 Justi, Karl Wilhelm 14 Kant, Immanuel 1 f., 4, 6 – 11, 14 – 20, 23 f., 29 – 32, 40 – 44, 51, 53, 60 – 62, 64, 66 – 68, 71 – 74, 76 – 86, 89, 91, 93 f., 98 f., 103 – 116, 119 – 121, 126 Kitcher, Patricia 1 Klemmt, Alfred 3, 56 König, Alfred Philipp 76 Kroner, Richard 3 Landau, Albert 16 f., 23 Lauth, Reinhard 3

144

Index of Names

Lazzari, Alessandro 3, 22, 33, 35, 37, 124 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 11, 26, 38, 114 Locke, John 2, 20, 38, 99, 114 f. Luther, Martin 22 Maimon, Salomon 72, 104 Marino, Luigi 17 Marx, Karianne J. 3, 21 Newton, Isaac 11 Nicolai, Carl Friedrich Onnasch, Ernst-Otto

28, 111 76

Paton, Herbert James 72, 83 Piché, Claude 21 Pistorius, Hermann Andreas 72, 92 Platner, Ernst 5, 37 f. Pupi, Angelo 3 Rehberg, August Wilhelm 117 Reid, Thomas 42 Reuter, Peter 98 Ritter, Joachim 27 Rumore, Paola 29, 92 Sassen, Brigitte 92 Satura, Vladimir 1 Schelle, Hansjörg 124

71, 82, 111 – 113,

Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard 5, 85, 123, 125 f., 128 Schrader, Wolfgang H. 25 Schröpfer, Horst 30 Schultz, Johann 1, 13, 23, 30, 53, 111 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst 72 Schütz, Christian Gottfried 20, 23, 29 – 31 Schwab, Johann Christoph 46, 67, 90, 111 Selle, Christian Gottlieb 37 – 39 Selling, Magnus 3, 56 Sextus Empiricus 17 Stamm, Marcelo 2 Stolz, Violetta 4 Stolzenberg, Jürgen 100 Tiedemann, Dieter 53 Tieftrunk, Johann Heinrich 78 Tilliette, Xavier 100 Tittel, Gottlob August 53, 68 Weishaupt, Adam 14 – 17, 54 Wieland, Christoph Martin 123 f., 127 Wolff, Christian 21, 26 Wood, David W. 121 Wundt, Max 8, 21 Zoeppritz, Rudolf 20 Zöller, Günter 4, 7 Zynda, Max von 7

Index of Subjects Act (Tathandlung) 5 Ableitung/Deduktion 78n, 106 – 107 Abstraction/reflection 97 – 100 Affect/affection 36, 66, 89 – 90, 101, 101n Apperception 6, 64, 67, 73, 73n, 110 Apprehension 72 Apriorism 11, 17, 85, 86n, 115 Apriority/priority 1, 23, 53n, 74, 80, 86n, 94, 99, 102 – 106, 108 – 110, 115 Atheism 41n Body

35 – 37, 48, 52, 88 – 89

Category 1, 18, 30 – 31, 68, 68n, 73 – 82, 82n, 83 – 85, 91n, 106n, 107, 110, 113, 115 – 116, 120 – 121 Causality 17, 30, 90 Clarity and distinctness 25, 64 – 67 Cognition 1, 4 – 8, 10 – 13, 17, 19, 29 – 32, 39, 42 – 45, 53 – 54, 62 – 63, 68n, 71, 73 – 74, 81 – 82, 86n, 89, 91, 93 – 94, 98, 100, 104n, 120, 125 Common sense / healthy human understanding 17, 124 – 125 Concept 16, 18, 24 – 25, 29 – 33, 42, 51 – 52, 61, 68n, 72 – 73, 76 – 78, 80 – 81, 83 – 85, 98 – 99, 103, 106 – 108, 110, 113 – 116, 118 – 120 Consciousness 1, 5, 7 – 8, 10 – 12, 26, 28 – 32, 34 – 38, 42 – 43, 45, 50 – 51, 56, 63 – 67, 69, 70 – 71, 77 – 78, 81 – 82, 86, 89 – 90, 93 – 101, 105, 107n, 108 – 110, 112, 117 – 121, 124 – 125 Copernican revolution 37, 42 – 43, 82 Critique of Reason 2, 7, 10 – 11, 18, 21n, 22 – 24, 34, 40, 43, 62, 77, 87, 103 – 104, 107 – 108, 113 – 116, 119 – 120, 127 Deduction 18 – 19, 31, 99, 107, 107n – of the categories 17, 62, 64, 71, 72 – 82, 83, 106, 110, 111n, 119 Definition 49 – 51, 93 – 94, 112, 117 – 121, 121n Deism/theism 41n

Doctrine of science 5, 66, 78n, 100, 121n Dogmatism 6 – 7, 17 Dualism 41 Elementary Philosophy 2 – 3, 3n, 4 – 9, 23 – 24, 26 – 28, 33, 33n, 40, 56n, 87 – 88, 91 – 95, 97, 100, 102 – 104, 104n, 105 – 107, 107n, 108, 112 – 113, 116 – 120, 121n, 122 – 123, 123n, 124 – 129 Excitability 48, 53 Experience 1, 5 – 7, 17, 19, 21 – 23, 31, 33 – 35, 38 – 39, 43, 62, 64, 68n, 71 – 72, 74, 77 – 78, 81, 81n, 82n, 83 – 84, 89, 98 – 101, 104, 104n, 105 – 106, 106n, 107 – 108, 113 – 115, 115n, 116, 120, 124 – 127 Explanation 41, 49 – 51, 52, 73, 78n, 81n, 82, 99, 120 – 121 Exposition 11, 49 – 51, 93, 117, 120 Fact of consciousness 93 – 94, 98 – 102, 106 – 108, 108n, 109 – 110, 117 – 119 Fact of experience 114 Factuality 2, 12, 85, 100 – 101 – a priori 9 – transcendental 7 Faculty of cognition 22, 27n, 35, 38 – 39, 103 – 104, 109, 115 – 116 Faculty of receptivity/spontaneity 53, 63, 69, 70 Faculty of representation 5, 22 – 23, 41 – 43, 45 – 47, 49, 52 – 53, 57, 59 – 63, 66, 69 – 70, 80, 82, 89, 90n, 91 – 92, 97 – 98, 100 – 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112 – 113, 116 – 118, 124, 126 – 128 Force 15, 17, 27 – 28, 46n, 48, 63 – representative 46, 54, 90n, 97 Form 1, 5, 8, 11, 16, 18, 28, 32, 43, 45 – 48, 50, 53 – 55, 55n, 66 – 67, 69 – 72, 74, 76, 79 – 81, 84 – 85, 92 – 93, 102, 104 – 105, 107, 109, 112 – 113, 116, 123, 127 – of representation 43, 46n, 47 – 48, 50, 54 – 56, 56n, 63, 85, 90, 101, 105, 107, 107n, 108, 116, 119

146

Index of Subjects

Freedom 3, 4 Fundamental principle (Grundsatz) 2, 11, 39, 93 – 94, 103, 105, 112, 115, 117, 119, 123, 123n Gegebensein/Gegebenwerden 48 – 49, 71, 101n Genus/species 12 – 14, 29 – 30, 39, 42, 44, 64, 67, 68n, 89, 91, 93, 98, 101, 103, 107, 110, 120 Givenness 1, 7, 11, 36, 71, 85, 106 – 107, 119 God 21n, 22, 25, 89 Ground 17, 24, 28, 34 – 36, 45, 64, 81 – 82, 86n, 90 – 91, 93, 102 – 106, 106n, 107n, 108, 112 – 113, 118, 127 Grundsatz/Prinzip 112 Grundsatzphilosophie 3n, 4 Idea

26, 29 – 33, 37, 42, 52, 80, 98, 103, 106n, 107, 116 Idealism 7n, 15 – 18, 41, 44 – transcendental 2, 4, 10 – 11, 13 – 14, 22, 44 Imagination 1, 64, 72 – 73, 73n, 84 – 85, 89 Impression 12 – 14, 39, 54, 56 – 58, 71, 89 Inner/outer sense 36, 53, 73, 89, 109 Intuition 11 – 13, 15, 29, 31 – 33, 42, 51, 53 – 54, 61, 72 – 73, 75, 79 – 80, 83 – 85, 89, 91, 93, 100 – 101, 103 – 105, 107, 109 – 110, 113, 116, 119 – intellectual 100 – 102 I think 34, 73, 99 Judgment 17, 19, 68n, 73, 75 – 78, 78n, 85, 86n, 121 – synthetic a priori 102 – 103, 105, 108 Logic

25, 58, 59, 60

Manifold 48, 48n, 49, 53, 64, 69, 72 – 76, 79 – 80, 104 – 105, 109 – 110, 113, 115 Material 5 – 6, 32, 43 – 50, 52, 54 – 55, 55n, 56n, 57, 63, 65 – 67, 69 – 71, 76, 78n, 81, 85, 89, 91 – 93, 100 – 101, 103, 109, 112, 123, 126 – objective 69 – 70, 91 – subjective 70, 100

Materialism 41 Maxims of healthy human understanding 2, 123 Maxims of philosophizing reason 2, 123 Metaphysics 21, 34, 59, 104, 116, 116n, 117, 127 Mind 10 – 11, 23n, 45 – 46, 55 – 56, 58 – 60, 63 – 67, 69 – 71, 85, 102, 115 – 116, 127 Necessity and universality 64, 81, 85, 102 – 106, 109 Necessity, objective 18 – 19, 44, 90, 108n Necessity, subjective 18, 44, 90, 108n Notion 29 – 32 Noumenon 8, 94, 94n, 126, 128, 128n Object 1, 5, 8 – 16, 18, 29, 32, 35, 37, 42 – 43, 45 – 47, 54, 56, 56n, 57 – 58, 62 – 65, 67, 70 – 72, 74 – 75, 77 – 79, 81 – 82, 84 – 86, 86n, 88, 90 – 92, 94, 96, 98 – 99, 101, 104 – 105, 108n, 109 – 110, 112, 115 – 122 – represented 36, 41 – 43, 45, 50, 55, 57, 65, 78, 93 – 94, 119, 127 Ontology 21 Organ 12 – 15, 18, 43 – 45, 52 – 54, 56 – 57 Organization 14 – 16, 18, 44, 53 – 54, 58, 89 Perception 18, 29, 29n, 30 – 32, 34, 89, 99, 104, 108, 126 Phenomenon/appearance 6, 8, 12 – 13, 16, 18 – 19, 27 – 28, 44, 73, 79, 83, 104, 107, 115 Philosophical anthropology 128 – 129 Popular philosophy 124n Possibility of consciousness 2, 43, 58, 100, 104, 109, 118, 120 Possibility of experience 1, 10, 17, 29, 31, 38, 40, 43, 66, 72, 74, 104, 110, 114 – 115, 119, 127 Possibility of representation 45, 48, 58, 62, 71 Propaedeutic 104, 117 Principle of consciousness 2, 5 – 6, 9, 24, 33, 35 – 37, 40, 92, 94 – 98, 108n, 117 – 118, 123 Principle of contradiction 112

Index of Subjects

Psychologism 1, 5, 82, 88, 102 Psychology 6 – 8, 27 – 28, 58, 60 – empirical 22, 57 – 60, 115n, 125 – 126, 126n, 128, 128n, 129 – metaphysical 128 – 129 – rational 6, 59 – 60, 126, 126n, 128 – 129 – superior 2, 23 – 24, 40, 115 – transcendental 1n, 2, 4 – 5, 7, 9, 27, 60, 62, 94, 108, 112, 122, 126, 126n, 127 – 128, 128n, 129 quaestio/quid facti 1, 10, 14, 40, 82, 84n quaestio/quid iuris 1, 7, 10, 14, 40, 48, 72, 73n, 74, 78 – 79, 82 – 83, 84n, 100, 106, 108, 120, 121 Reality, objective/subjective 80 Reason 3, 16, 24, 28–29, 35, 42, 59, 91, 93, 98, 104, 106n, 107, 115, 127–128, 128n – theoretical/speculative 19, 115 – practical 3, 19, 89 Receptivity 13 – 16, 43, 45 – 48, 49, 53 – 54, 63, 66, 69 – 71, 80, 90n, 93, 101, 109 Reciprocal externality 53, 53n, 109, 113 Recognition 72 Representation 2, 5 –15, 17, 23–32, 34, 36 – 58, 60–61, 63–67, 70, 73 –75, 78–79, 81, 84–86, 89–100, 102–105, 107, 108n, 109–110, 112, 114–121, 123, 127–128 – actual 34, 55, 66, 69 – 70, 77 – empty 69 – mere/per se 42, 42n, 45 – 47, 49 – 54, 58, 61, 64 – 65, 67 – 68, 70, 91, 94, 101 – in general 29, 53, 69 – 70, 71n, 94, 98, 105, 107, 110 – without material 69 Reproduction 72 Schema 84 – 85, 85n, 86, 113 Self-consciousness 65 – 67, 78n, 110, 111n Sensation 14, 17 – 18, 21, 27, 29, 30 – 32, 38 – 39, 42, 51, 89, 99, 119 Sensibility 1, 8, 10, 12 – 16, 29 – 30, 37 – 38, 42, 52 – 54, 59, 72, 74, 79, 81, 91, 93, 98, 104, 107, 107n, 113, 115, 127 – pure 51 – 54 Skepticism 17, 19, 41, 41n, 58n, 68, 70–71, 81

147

Soul

5, 12, 17, 27 – 28, 34 – 35, 37n, 38 – 39, 48, 53 – 54, 59 – 60, 88 – 89, 128 Space 1, 11 – 13, 15, 17, 53, 53n, 81, 89, 93, 105 – 106, 106n, 109, 109n, 113, 115 – 116 Spontaneity 43, 45 – 48, 49, 63, 66, 69 – 70, 74, 80, 90n, 93, 95, 100, 109 Subject 1, 8, 10 – 11, 16, 28 – 29, 34 – 35, 43, 45 – 47, 52, 55, 60, 63, 65, 76, 78, 82, 90 – 92, 94 – 100, 105, 108n, 112, 117 – 118, 120, 126, 128 – 129 – representing 36, 41 – 43, 45, 46n, 47, 52, 56, 59 – 60, 63 – 64, 66, 94, 97 – 99, 101, 103n, 126 – 128, 128n, 129 Substance 28, 33, 44, 48, 52, 54, 60, 97 – 98, 127, 128n Succession 53, 53n, 109, 113 Supernaturalism 41n Susceptibility 46 Synthesis 48, 51, 55, 72, 74–75, 79, 84, 110 Theory of the Faculty of Representation 2, 4 – 6, 8 – 9, 22, 24, 33, 36, 44, 54, 58 – 62, 64, 66, 68, 81, 84 – 85, 87 – 88, 90, 90n, 92 – 93, 103 – 105, 107, 110, 112 – 113, 123, 126 – 127 Thing in itself 6 – 8, 12, 16 – 17, 44, 47, 56n, 76 – 77, 90, 90n, 94, 94n, 104, 110, 116, 126, 128, 128n, 129 Time 1, 12 – 13, 53, 53n, 71n, 79, 81, 84, 93, 105 – 106, 106n, 109, 109n, 113, 115 – 116 Transcendental philosophy 10, 13, 23, 30 Transcendentalism 2, 7, 11, 16, 48, 60 – 62, 67 – 68, 88, 100, 114 – 115, 121 – objective 62 – subjective 62 Understanding 1, 8, 10 – 11, 16 – 19, 29 – 31, 41n, 42, 44, 59, 62, 64, 71 – 74, 76 – 79, 81, 83 – 85, 91, 93, 98, 104, 106 – 107, 107n, 108, 110, 112 – 113, 115, 124, 127 Universal acceptance (Allgemeingeltung) 4 Universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit) 4, 19 Validity 1, 1n, 7, 9 – 11, 18, 62, 68, 72 – 74, 78, 80 – 81, 83 – 85, 90, 101, 116 Worin/woraus

40 – 45, 47, 52, 97, 105, 114