Karl Leonhard Reinhold and German Idealism

Abstract

For a long time, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1753–1823) has been a quite neglected thinker, but during the last 15 years interest in him has steadily increased. This new ”Reinhold revival” focuses on his ”Elementary philosophy”, a system he developed in the 1790s with the intention to systematize the results of Kant’s criticism. The Elementary philosophy started from the ”Proposition of Consciousness” (Satz des Bewusstseins) which stated the presence of a triad in the consciousness, viz. the subject, the object and the representational relation connecting them. It became, however, soon obvious that the Proposition of Consciousness led to many unresolved antinomies, mainly because it did not take the self-referential character of consciousness in account. The next step in the development of German Transcendental Philosophy was taken by Fichte, who replaced Reinhold’s Proposition of Consciousness with the idea of an I (Ego) positing itself, a move Reinhold found so convincing that he himself became a supporter of Fichte. Despite of the short-livedness of his own system, Reinhold played, however, the role of an important ferment in the subsequent development of German Idealism – so, for example, both the Fichtean and Hegelian triads owe much to the tripartite Proposition of Consciousness.