Reinhold, Religion and the Fate of Reason

Is there any reason we should read Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy today? Reinhold, if we remember him today, is known for only two things: that he was an early popularizer of the new critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and that later he would turn away from Kant toward his own “elementary philosophy.” Reinhold’s Letters occupy an ambiguous place, because if we want to understand Kant, we can just read Kant, and if we want to understand Reinhold, we can turn to his later Essay Towards a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation. The historical value in the Letters is that they shed light on the development of German Idealism, crucially the early work of J. G. Fichte. There is, however, another point of interest in this work of Reinhold that I want to discuss.

Reinhold’s Letters is in two editions, the first written in 1786, and a revised edition of 1790. So far I’ve only read the first letter, written in 1786, which does not present Kant’s work yet, but fleshes out the context in which his philosophy has caused a revolution. It’s here that Reinhold draws out what is important about the condition of religion and reason, which I think is operative today. I was surprised that Reinhold would write so much about Catholicism and Protestantism when talking about the role of reason in his day, and now I am convinced that these theological issues are at the core of the fate of reason, in Reinhold’s day and ours. My essay below is based on my notes I took, so I am taking care to separate Reinhold’s arguments with my own speculations.

Reinhold’s conceit is that his letters are actually addressed to a friend of his, whom he has been talking to for a while, with the first portions quoting large portions of his imagined friend’s last letter. Reinhold’s interlocutor holds the curious belief “the enlightenment of our German fatherland has been waning in Protestant domains ever since it began rising in Catholic domains.” ¹ And even if we compare Protestantism to itself, here the Enlightenment is not “merely moving forward more slowly but rather that it is actually at the point of retreating.” ²

Reinhold’s interlocutor despairs of the indifference toward reason, after the free use of reason in religious affairs. “Those who are not already convinced that reason has gone too far in our day do at least fear that it will go too far and are seeking either to restore its old arbitrary limits or to invent new ones.” ³ The danger that Reinhold’s interlocutor finds is that the undermining of reason undermines the rationale of Protestantism itself, which for him is based on the “exclusive right of reason to decide on the meaning of the Bible.” ⁴ And metaphysics, in the grand tradition of G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten, (who married their rationalism to a conviction in the rational proof of God) has been neglected.

Reinhold’s concern is the great war of reason, with the hostilities between the sides of unbelief (Unglaube) and superstition (Aberglaube), and of the discrediting of reason itself, leading into indifference toward reason itself and the questions that it is meant to confront (the question of the absolutely necessary being, for instance.) I don’t think it is inappropriate to talk about there being a moral panic when it comes to reason in Reinhold’s age. Obviously there seems to have been a large contingent of people who thought that reason itself had become corrosive to religion, given the rise of unbelief. It’s no wonder that arrayed against “our academies of the arts and sciences” are the “public and private societies that work under all sorts of names and pretexts for the continuation of our immaturity.” ⁵

I can’t help but think of the current “revolt of the public” against the “elites”, especially insofar as the latter is associated with the universities. This is why I think it’s wrong to consider, as many do, the problem of unbelief as starting from New Atheism. (Consider the popular narrative that the New Atheists just abruptly gave up religion and didn’t foresee the results, whatever results the purveyors of such narratives have in mind.) This was active in Reinhold's time. As late as the 1830s, effigies of David Strauss were burned, because of his infamous Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined), which was critical of the accounts of miracles in the New Testament. There is a particular tendency of philosophy which has found itself being accused of undermining the basis of religion: Spinozism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, positivism … Reinhold’s interlocutor fears that reason, no longer simply clearing away prejudices as a result of the Reformation, “might ultimately bring even the better thinking servants of religion and the state to the point of regarding as the lesser evil those well-known remedies which eliminate freedom together with licentiousness.” ⁶

Reinhold does not dispute the facts adduced by his friend, but has a paradoxical position with respect to them: that they are worrying in isolation but as a whole optimistically present a coming revolution (which would be that of Kant). The common ground between both sides is the misunderstanding of “the right and power of reason in matters of religion.” ⁷ It is not reason itself which should be elevated or degraded.

It is especially characteristic of our age that the disputing factions are latching directly onto reason itself, which they elevate or degrade depending on whether or not they believe that they have cause to be satisfied with its decisions. Those who are dissatisfied press against reason and storm it for better answers, or they give up all hope and either take up sides with the faction against reason or become indifferent spectators of the conflict. This is roughly the contour shaping the history of the current state of our higher enlightenment regarding speculative religion, which has a much larger influence on the rest of the affairs in our moral world than the indifferent spectators usually care to admit. ⁸

What is most important for Reinhold is that all the age-old disputes on important questions like God hinge on the fact that reason has been unable to give answers that are universally convincing. I do not think that this is a merely “sociological” fact that is unconnected to the fact and perhaps even the essence of God and religion. What would it mean for there to be universal conviction? I would think that it would be that there is such a unified faculty of reason and that there are public standards that we can hold for this, and that we can guarantee that those who think from a place of reason will come to agree on the same proposition, the existence of God. The problem of course is that those with genuine philosophical spirit either hang their heads in agnosticism over whether reason can decide on the existence of God, or decide that there is no God.

What has happened to the Wolff-Baumgarten school of metaphysics? Wolff and Baumgarten obviously cared a lot about making metaphysics a science, and a rational one at that, and aimed to guarantee God and freedom. Reinhold to me seems to be referring to them in the past tense, as if they had gone into decline. What has happened to them? What is up with the “pantheists,” who, together with the skeptics, have thrown reason into dispute? I think that it is important that Wolff had formed a proper school in Germany, and had a systematic presentation (compare to Leibniz’s fragmentary work), so the decline of Wolff and Baumgarten must mean something like a fracturing of the academy, and so the integrity of something called philosophy. Kant calls back to this in the opening pages of the Critique of Pure Reason, and it is one of history’s ironies that Kantianism would soon play the role that Wolffianism did, as a German school-philosophy.

Reinhold believes that just because “we have no such metaphysics” that would provide universal assent, “it in no way follows that we cannot have one.” ⁹ Those who claim that metaphysics cannot do this, because of the superiority of faith, must concede that faith has not succeeded here either. Reading this confused me. Was Germany overrun with atheists who were bothering the faithful with their unbelief? Who are these people who have not submitted to universal belief, other than a few malcontent philosophers, say? There is perhaps the “heathens” outside Christendom (and here a discussion of colonialism is useful), but in the absence of direct mention of them, I think that this has to do with the Reformation and the shattering of the “universal” Church, as I think that Reinhold inadvertently shows us later.

Universal agreement matters so much, because the status of belief in God is distinct from the belief in any given proposition. For one, there is a practical interest in the existence of God, as Kant would put it. But there is also a link between God (or say, the Absolute) and the social. I wonder if part of the importance here comes from the Christian significance of the Incarnation, which brings God down to Earth literally, and the Holy Spirit, which is tied to the Christian community. It is not just a matter of the abstract acceptance of the existence of God, and even of freedom, but that of a religion that can hold God together. And it is from thinking this absolute that authority makes sense, not just that of the State, but also good-feeling, custom, morals, and so on.

We face an inability to maintain doctrinal agreement; instead a succession of incompatible doctrines ends in a purely negative, zero-sum war. Or as Reinhold put it: The signs of our time “are the evident effects and distinguishing marks of a universal shaking of all our previous doctrinal structures – a shaking that is assaulting everything with a zeal and strength the likes of which we have never before seen.” ¹⁰ This description can just as well be applied to the Reformation, and the traumatic birth of Protestantism, and the conflicts that came afterward. Perhaps we should tell Herr Reinhold that we have seen this assault before.

Reinhold himself holds the position of being a Protestant who was once a Catholic priest. I want to follow some more of his discussion of the Protestant churches and theologians, because I think here we see an internalization of a kind of Catholic critique of Protestantism that Reinhold catalyzes through Kantianism. “The supernaturalists among the Protestants have no infallible church and consequently no territory of their own impervious to reason, no territory upon whose ground their doctrinal structures would be safe from attack.” ¹¹ Reinhold presents the Protestants as nomads passing through the wreckage of philosophical systems. They aim to show the inadequacy of reason because of the contradictions of all these systems, but they still cannot remain indifferent to these disputes.

In order to keep the pantheists at bay they must side with the deists; yet in doing so they have to give up the very claims they had made earlier. Hence, the frequent contradictions among the supporters of the supernaturalist faction: while some claim the impossibility for proving God’s existence from reason, others claim its indispensability; while some presuppose God’s existence in their proof of revelation, others prove it from revelation; while some think that they know in advance what they subsequently believe on the basis of the word, others believe even before they know whom they are supposed to believe. ¹²

I presume (being neither a Catholic nor a Protestant) that this is not a problem that a Catholic faces. This is because a Catholic can refer to the work of the Angelic Doctor, who has already outlined the rational arguments for the existence of God, and the relationship between Scripture and Reason has been set out already. ¹³ There is already a standard that the Catholic intellectual can appeal to. Notably, this is what a Protestant cannot appeal to, as even Reinhold admit the exclusive right of reason to decide on the meaning of the Bible as constitutive of Protestantism. Perhaps the impossible paradoxical position that we must come to is that each Protestant should have the right to decide on the meaning of the Bible, but that they should all spontaneously agree anyway? ¹⁴

What is the purpose of fighting for the right of reason if the philosophers who have come up with rational philosophical systems can no longer hope for rational universal acceptance? It is one thing that a science is not immediately accepted, because one can hope that the light of reason will dawn, and quite another to find the whole endeavour hopeless. It is no wonder that indifferentism has become the order of the day. I am tempted to think that indifferentism is a greater problem, from Reinhold’s point of view, than even atheism, because indifferentism really can be nihilistic, in that it gives up even the question of God, which has such practical and moral import to us. But we cannot simply be so indifferent.

We live in an age of indifferentism more than atheism, to the extent that few care so much about theological disputes or the universal acceptance of the proposition of God (or even its negation). Reading Kant, you get an impression that he genuinely cares about the questions of classical metaphysics, that of God and freedom and the soul, and the immense social import of those questions, to some extent even for the common man. We no longer live in such times. We still have Reinhold’s zero-sum battles, though, even if we have shifted from the theological plane. Humanity, as Reinhold would put it, still continues to have an “interest” in the existence of God.

I think that what Kant provides for Reinhold is an internalization of something like the Catholic Church that can bring the war of superstition and unbelief, and more than that, that of nihilistic indifference, to a close. This is only possible by moving to the question of how an answer to the existence of God is even possible in the first place. The paths of metaphysics (Spinoza) and “hyperphysics” ¹⁵ have failed. The failure of dogmatists is necessary for him, both of the orthodox (Leibniz and Wolff, probably) and unorthodox (Spinoza). He makes the curious remark that “it would have been neither advisable nor possible to hold them up in their advances” ¹⁶ until now, that the task of the critical philosophy has been well-prepared by them. The main task of the current age is to work out whether cognition of God is possible through reason.

It is the resolution of this problem that can end the despair that has become very visible in recent times concerning the possibility of establishing opinions through proofs of reason or resolving doubts through grounds of reason.” ¹⁷ Perhaps this is for Reinhold broader than the question of God. This despair has a socially corrosive effect, he claims, on the base who retreat into mysticism, the Kabbalah and all sorts of secret societies, and even on the noble religionist who declares that reason cannot supply indubitable proofs of God. ¹⁸

The hatred of reason is the characteristic of the age. There are base and there are noble forms of metaphysics, but reason, I think for Reinhold, cannot carry out the social role that we expect of it. Reinhold splits the difference between the two camps by saying that both agree in attributing to reason the limits and faults of metaphysics. It is reason that has been mischaracterized, and this mischaracterization is the cause of the “idolatry that is being practiced with reason on the one hand and the disgust that is shown to it on the other are approaching the absurd.” ¹⁹ I do not think that it ruins Reinhold’s argument to term the opposite of “idolatry”, scapegoating.

Indulging in some anachronism, we can think of the war between superstition and unbelief as a mimetic rivalry in the sense that René Girard put it. Even the moderates in both camps are drawn into this great battle, each side goes in search of new principles that would make it legitimate. Neither side can ultimately be content. We can think of Kantianism’s purpose as acting as a kind of “anti-mimesis” that would halt this war, much like Jesus’ crucifixion was meant to suspend the logic of idolatry-scapegoating. ²⁰

If I were to speculate on the implication of Reinhold’s position: This requires something like an “inner”, invisible church, rather than an external one like what the Catholic church provides. Reason is to be subjected to a fair and universal tribunal, but without relying on external authority, so that everyone can apprehend it. This requires reason to be able to assess itself on its own grounds, being able to rule on itself. Not for nothing is there a similarity with Kant’s practical philosophy, with the doctrine of the self-legislating will. This explains the curious structure of the Letters, which proceeds in reverse. It begins from Kant’s results concerning freedom and religion, not Kant’s initial analysis of the forms of space and time, and sets the practical aspect of Kant’s thought as the main problem of German Idealism.

So we can think of Reinhold’s solution to the wars like this: instead of being compelled by an external authority like a Catholic church, each person can rationally grasp the limits and capacities of reason and stand down. The Critique of Reason, as Reinhold puts it, plays the role of a kind of intellectual conscience, which would solve the “bloody and unbloody wars between orthodoxy and heterodoxy,” ²¹ among other issues. The solution seems to me reminiscent of the later Kant’s solution to war, as presented in Perpetual Peace, where in game-theory terms we can say that everyone has decided to cooperate, not defect.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is interesting as a model. The practical solution is that some external third party insists that you two cooperate, but the solution that the “anti-mimetic” position is groping toward is that if one could “internally” decide to cooperate, freely and rationally. Is this possible?

The problem is that Kant’s own philosophy has not brooked universal agreement. Reinhold himself admits this and reminds his interlocutor of “Newton’s works, which experienced the very same fate for a long period of time despite their mathematical evidence.” ²² He also blames the obstinacy of philosophers. Reinhold himself would move away from Kant, turning toward his own “elementary philosophy”. Maybe it is only sociological reasons that Kant’s philosophy could not gain universal assent, much as Leibniz’s and Wolff’s could not, but I think that what Kant shows us is that there is a third term after “mimesis” and “anti-mimesis” (whatever we wish to call it).

On the status of war, for example, we can compare Kant and Hegel, the latter who finds the necessity, both in the System of Ethical Life and the Philosophy of Right of the non-eliminability of war. Perhaps more relevant is Hegel’s critique of the function of conscience, even in Kant.

Leaving aside Hegel, though, what strikes me reading Reinhold is how the complexes we have around reason, the social status of religion, the place taken by atheism, have to come down to the time of the Reformation. I end my analysis here, and perhaps someone can trace this further back behind Martin Luther. But it seems to me that the anxiety of no longer having a philosophy or a theology that can assume universal assent (as is the aspiration of reason) comes from the disintegration of a Church taken as infallible, with the line of apostolic succession and a given regulated doctrine. I don’t think that the story is so much rosier in Catholicism, of course, and I suspect that there are analogous problems in Catholicism, before and after the Reformation.

Today religion does not play the role that it did even in Reinhold’s time, and even the war between religion and unbelief, when fought, is fought on the plane of culture and politics more so than theology (of course, not that politics was not uninvolved in Reinhold’s time). I think it’s right to think of us as being in an indifferentist time (even reasoned atheism assumes the importance of the question of God), and it would not be so wrong to associate this with a kind of nihilism. And this is linked to the decline of symbolic authority that has been going back for the past two centuries, in my opinion. The solution I hope is something that can take the current indifferentism itself as a positive condition, as it was for Kant. I think that we still have much to confront when it comes to religion and the fate of reason today.