The spirit of the time and the need for reason in the Letters on Kantian Philosophy

Abstract

This article examines, in the work of Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823), the role that the subject assumes in the genesis of the principle of consciousness, which seems to start already in Letters on Kantian philosophy, since Reinhold studied the writings of Kant since 1785. These Letters already announced a compatible answer to the question about how to adapt the concept of God to the concept of freedom, because only through moral conviction can one resist the external forces of fear and hope, that is, when reason itself unites these external forces with the internal ones of the moral law, or when the foundation for the cognition of a future life is built directly into morality. Thus, to deal with the unity between religion and morality, Reinhold does not start solely from metaphysical foundations, but also the theoretical use of the notion of soul. However, it is difficult to state exactly what can be said theoretically about the soul, but it is important to note, and these Letters endorse the hypothesis, that for this task Reinhold also relies on Kant’s discussion contained in the paralogisms of pure reason, especially in the first, that of substantiality, for the reconstruction of the genesis of the first principle, since the path can also be that of integrating the doctrine of the soul from the chapter on paralogisms with the debate of “I think” in the Kantian transcendental deduction.