La formazione della filosofia di K. L. Reinhold 1784-1794 (review)

350 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY aesthetic civilization. This is a question that neither Kant nor Schiller would be able to answer. MAX RmSEl~ New York City La formazione della fdosofia di K. L. Reinhold 1784-1794. By Angelo Pupi. (Milan: Societh Editrice Vita e Pensiero, 1966. Pp. 625) As the title of the book indicates, Professor Pupi confines himself to the early, formative period of Reinhold's thought from 1784, the date of his first connection with Wieland and the Teutscher Merkur to 1794 when he left lena for Kiel. Professor Pupi describes and analyzes Reinhold's writings during these ten busy and productive years in great detail and with a wealth of scholarly apparatus. He also relates them to the various contemporary philosophical controversies of which they formed part, especially to the discussions about the Enlightenment and the propagation of Kant's philosophy. Just a few months before the publication of Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment ?" Reinhold's first contributions to the Teutscher Merkur included (in July 1784) a series of articles tracing the emergence of Enlightenment thought, Gedanken ~ber Aufkl~rung. In these he called for a fuller realization of Enlightenment aims, such as greater tolerance towards religious minorities, more widespread secularization of knowledge and its greater accessibility to all sections of the population, but, above all, for the right of the individual to seek and assert truth free from fear, according to his critical reason and moral convictions. As Pupi makes clear, Reinhold underlined the educational function of the Enlightenment. "To enlighten," Reinhold wrote, "means fundamentally to make reasoning men out of men capable of reason." But, significantly, Reinhold also stressed the socio-political implications of this educational transformation . For he maintained that authentic and progressive enlightenment was inconceivable in the absence of a growing sense of collective identity shared by an entire people. To invest the nation as a whole, and not merely particular individuals or privileged groups, with education was, therefore, both the condition for, and the aim of, true enlightenment. Seen in this manner, the Enlightenment assumed a distinctly national and 'populist' flavour at variance with its predominantly cosmopolitan and "elitist' tenor. By stipulating a degree of national unity and educational equality as a prerequisite , it itself became a unifying and 'democratic' movement. Reinhold's relationship with Kant and Kantianism, which occupies the greater part of this book, began inauspiciously with an article in the Teutscher Merkur refuting Kant's unfavourable review of Herder's ldeen. In contrast to his subsequent espousal of Kant's critical philosophy, he now (1785) categorized him as a metaphysician isolated by his abstractions from the concrete reality of experience. Along with other metaphysicians , Kant was carried away by what Reinhold called the "metaphysical illusion." Describing this illusion, he wrote: So one has a certain number of given concepts, which for thousands of years passed from book to book, peacefully enjoying dominion over our knowledge; the speculative advances of our ancestors remain the non plus ultra of our intelligence; a collation of words with which one does not really think at all perpetuates itself as the codex of all fundamental verifies. One refers to it for advice in particular cases and claims to have found the cause of everything when one has managed to find the apt word for everything. The ancients made their abstractions from experience with sincerity, so that the concepts achieved by them were not without truth; it was the very truth of such accepted notions BOOK REVIEWS 351 which induced the dangerous mentality of the later metaphysicians, who were occupied solely in clarifying these notions from possible misunderstandings laid over them by their thousandyear tradition, without ever thinking of resorting to the empirical concreteness from which they had developed; on the contrary they discovered that it was easier to render these notions still more transparent by increasing their abstractness and reducing still more the number of their constituent characters. So they reached the point of moving in a world of simple and universal ideas; where the universality is in inverse proportion to the comprehension of the terms. This analysis of the contemporary crisis of metaphysics, Professor Pupi claims, constitutes the "modest, constructive element" of Reinhold...