This chapter explains how Reinhold's Letters took the form of a ‘short’ Critique, which immediately after its publication was much more influential than the complex details of Kant's lengthy original. In the Letters, Reinhold simplified matters hugely by not venturing at all into the complexities of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. He jumped ahead to the moral and historical implications of the end of the Dialectic, arguing that Kant's espousal of a Critical and moral form of rational religion was the ideal solution to the battles between supernaturalism and naturalism that were raging in Germany after Jacobi had ignited the Pantheism Dispute. Admitting that he was not yet tracing Kant's notion of pure practical reason and rational religion back to its ‘grounds’ in the first Critique, Reinhold satisfied himself and his audience with the claim that the ‘results’ of the Critique met the fundamental ‘need’ of the time (fully to satisfy popular Enlightenment morality through a hope in a ‘highest good’ warranted by rational religion) — just as Jesus had satisfied the ‘common sense’ of his time by turning dogmatic religion into rational morality.
Keywords: Kant, Reihold, Critique of Pure Reason, Letters, Jacobi, religion, rational morality