How Reinhold Helped Hegel Understand the German Enlightenment and Grasp the Pantheism Controversy

Abstract

Hegel’s unpublished, undated manuscript of background material on subjective mind (1789–1794?) appears to be generally Kantian but it is, above all, heavily informed by Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie. The proposition of consciousness allows Hegel to present the subjective mind almost exclusively in terms of representation: both outer (empirical) and inner intuitions have the objective status of representations. These, in turn, are gathered into concepts of the understanding, which are generalized representations. The common grounding of both intuition and conceptual reasoning in representation allows Hegel to see Enlightenment thought as unable to surpass the endless vacillation between poles of feeling (or faith) and ratiocination. The controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn can thus be seen as symptomatic of this fruitless and inevitable to-and-fro. Of course, the only way out and beyond, as Hegel already affirms in this early manuscript, is through a type of dialectical reason that allows the truth of both “Satz und Gegensatz.”