The first edition of Reinhold’s ‘Circular Letter to J.C. Lavater and J.G. Fichte about the Belief in God’, being his contribution to the so-called Atheism Controversy (‘Atheismusstreit’) ignited by the widespread condemnation of Fichte’s ‘On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance’ (1798).
‘When J. G. Fichte’s “Appeal to the Public” appeared in January of 1799, it had the dubious virtue of offending not only the obscurantist sensitivities of the political reactionaries and religious conservatives but also the enlightened predilections of the academic liberals and literary moderates. During the next two months, J. K. Lavater and F. H. Jacobi sent highly critical letters to Fichte wherein they accused him of positing “a concept, a thing of thought, a generality, in lieu of the living God.” K. L. Reinhold’s “Letter to Fichte,” a dense and Byzantine, yet strangely elegant, brief, responds to Fichte’s Appeal and to Lavater and Jacobi’s charge. While Reinhold was penning this attempted mediation between the fideists, pietists and idealists, Fichte’s Juridical Defense was rejected and Fichte was dismissed from the University of Jena’ (Estes & Bowman, eds., J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute, 1798-1800).
‘This effort to mediate between Fichte and Jacobi was short-lived: by the end of 1799, Reinhold had become enthralled with J.G. Bardili’s logical realism and his relationship with Fichte soon came to an end’ (Stanford).
