Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond

Four: Reinhold and Kant: The Quest for a New Religion of Reason

f o u r Reinhold and Kant: The Quest for a New Religion of Reason Overview: Reinhold, Kant, and Hegel Before 1800 This chapter will focus on Reinhold and Kant, and the next will focus on Hegel. These chapters together examine how Reinhold, Kant, and Hegel search for a new version of the religion of reason that had been so central to the Enlightenment and which, they all agreed, had shown itself in need of an entirely new approach when Mendelssohn published his Morning Hours and Jacobi had, in response, published his Spinoza-Letters. Reinhold was the first to recognize that what the Mendelssohn-Jacobi quarrel had demonstrated, above all, was that a new footing for the religion of reason had to be found, one that would not be vulnerable to Jacobi’s critique that hiding behind the God of Mendelssohn (and Lessing) was the Jewish God of Spinoza, a God of unfreedom. Besides answering Jacobi, the new religion of reason would also need to respond to Mendelssohn’s defense of the Jewish people as the living 162 Reinhold and Kant 163 embodiment of the revealed legislation of the Hebrew Bible. Mendelssohn’s religion of reason in Morning Hours was offered as the best attempt that finite minds can make at rationally comprehending the infinite mind of God. Jacobi’s attack against Morning Hours was answered by Mendelssohn himself in To the Friends of Lessing. Mendelssohn argued that faith in revelation was not, in fact, incompatible with his religion of reason. He reminded Jacobi that in Jerusalem he, Mendelssohn, had shown that Judaism rests upon trust (Mendelssohn explained that the Hebrew term for faith— emunah—was better translated as trust) and not reason. The Jewish people trust in the historical evidence that God revealed Himself to them as a legislator at Mt. Sinai. It may seem impossible to reconcile the conception of God as infinite Mind with trust in God as the legislator of a particular law code. But Mendelssohn had claimed in Jerusalem, and he restated this in To the Friends of Lessing, that Judaism’s law code not only leaves reason free to seek to understand God in the best way that any finite mind can, but it even orients reason in the right direction.1 The revealed legislation of the Hebrew Bible is designed to keep the Jewish people ever aware of the insuperable gap between human finitude and divine infinitude. The people were to make no attempt at capturing the infinite within the finite, neither in word nor in image. They were enjoined to make the entirety of their finite lives a sign pointing beyond itself toward an infinite God. Kant, Reinhold, and Hegel each stake a claim to be the philosophical voice of the religion of reason. Their religion of reason is offered as the universalization of the historical particularity of Christian revelation and as the completion of Christianity’s supersession of Judaism. The project of constructing a new religion of reason was, as I have said, a central one for the German Enlightenment, and it was perhaps epitomized in the late text of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, to which I will return in a moment. Kant, Reinhold, and Hegel all accepted Jacobi’s argument against Lessing that speculative reason, if it dispensed with the theological category of revelation, would necessarily lead to a system that had a place only for God as (freedom-denying) Creator. The problem with retaining God as Creator and dispensing with God as Revealer was that creation was complete all at once, at the moment of creation. Whether creation was thought to be a single act preceding the existence of the world or an eternal, unchanging ground underlying the world, the relation between God and world never altered. Once creation was accounted for, there 164 Reinhold and Kant was no further need for God. Jacobi understood that this independence from a God who was believed to have revealed himself to humanity in history might at first seem to be a liberation of humanity from superstition and priestly authority, but, in truth, it reduced humanity to just one more effect of God’s creative power. Revelation as Jacobi understood it introduced something new in the world, and it opened up the possibility of humanity breaking free of the causal chain (or the underlying unchanging ground) that bound all other...