Karl Leonhard Reinhold was a major proponent, but often over looked promoter of the German Idealism movement. He is not familiar to our time but was relevant and criticized by figures like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, etc. He was commonly called one of the greatest acute thinkers of our time as he takes Kant further by suggesting a single principle of consciousness. Sometimes he was called a pop philosopher of Kant but this will later be disagreed with as it assumes circularity.
Reinhold was claimed to have been, if neo-Kant, a fall into transcendental metaphysical mysticism. He goes through the phases of the systems in an attempt to discover the underlying premise of metaphysics. He's received a lot of criticism in being far too little autonomous for a philosopher in that he viewed truth, originally, as given and not through reason. Yet, he was a remarkable emergence away from the thing and began the focus on the self for consciousness of representations.
Reinhold was regarded as eclectic and inconstant. This critique was developed as Reinhold transitioned from Christianity through masonry from Catholicism and into bouts of Aetheism but back to Lutheranism. He had a deep desire to get to the bottom of truth and this made him skeptical as he first sought to achieve it through reason and philosophy.
Reinhold views morality, moving toward the holy will, as the underpin of all philosophy. This was greatly influenced by Protestantism which allowed a synthesis between knowledge and faith through the use of free reason with an incomplete historical realization. Reinhold expounds Kant in his letters, the first of immorality of the soul and the second of God's existence. He loved Kant because he thought that he was able to bridge the head and the heart. They must involve a system of reason because the practical action, through practical reason is based on rational belief. So, because man must be moral, he must be rational; this requires reasoning. Reflective reason adjoins morality and religion. It is sense and freedom that pivots philosophy. He seeks to resolve the action of consciousness which was missing from Kant, where grounds are experience.
Kant builds a theory but Reinhold must take it down to a single principle If he tried to do this with Kant's theory as the primary, it would be circular. The singular proposition must be propaedeutic to metaphysics. His principle is that: In consciousness, representation is distinguished by the subject from the subject and the object, and then related to both. All philosophy must be derived from a single principle, from which, all theory will derive and does derive. He takes this to the consciousness. This principle assumes bidimensionalism because we have both the empirical facts understood through abstraction and reflection. Inner experience must be the foundation of philosophy. This is a major proponent of German Idealism. The primary cohesion between the subject and object must be one of atomicity.
Any pursuit of truth is based in a moral seeking. Then, the practical rules of reason, which morality is dependent on the theoretical. this is because one meets demands by desire. Will is connected to this but is distinct from sense and reason because it is the power of one to determine self to meet demands.
Reinhold likes Fichte on two accounts. he likes the focus on morality but doesn't resolve the thing in itself. He views absolute freedom as the beginning of philosophy. Reinhold steps away from trying to fully relieve the disparity between religion and life by making philosophy a separate endeavor. Religion requires absolute objectivity and philosophy requires absolute subjectivity because it is based on the experience of presentations.
Reinhold later turns from this kind of thinking as well as he seeks to embrace logical realism. However, despite his changes, he was a prominent source in the development and emergence of German Idealism.
