Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819)
Polemicist and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken and effective defender of individualism. He accused philosophers of conceptualizing existence according to the requirements of explanation, thus allowing no room for individual freedom or for a personal God. In a series of polemics that influenced the reception of Kant, Jacobi applied his formula, ‘Consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist’, first to Enlightenment philosophy and then to idealism. Jacobi was not however opposed to reason; in ‘faith’ and ‘feeling’ he sought to recover the intuitive power of reason philosophers ignored.
Jacobi also criticized the literary movement spearheaded by the young Goethe, because of its latent fatalism. He dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligations. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution which he considered the product of rationalism.
1 Life and work
Born in Düsseldorf, of well-to-do merchant family, Jacobi studied in Geneva where he became acquainted with Rousseau and Bonnet. Destined to a business career, after marrying Elisabeth (Betty) von Clermont he entrusted his affairs to his brother-in-law and dedicated himself to literary and social activities. Together with Betty he made his villa at Pempelfort a meeting place for the personalities of the day and a centre of liberal ideas. He was instrumental to the founding of the journal der Teutsche Merkur. In the 1770s he held political positions in the duchies of Julich-Berg and, briefly in 1779, in Bavaria. In 1805 he moved to Munich to take up the post of president of the Academy. He spent his last years there, supervising the edition of his works.
Widely regarded as an anti-Enlightenment figure in his own lifetime and afterwards, Jacobi in fact sought to defend individualistic values which were just as much part of the Enlightenment as the rationalism he fought all his life. He claimed that philosophy artificially abstracts from the individuality of existence yet takes its empty conceptual artifacts to define reality itself. For the sake of explanation philosophy subordinates conditions of existence to conditions of thought, thereby subverting the possibility of choice and action. Hence Jacobi accused philosophy of ‘nihilism’ (a term he popularized).
2 Critique of philosophy
In a masterstroke of philosophical propaganda, Jacobi propelled his position (and himself) to the centre of attention in 1785, by publishing with commentary letters he had recently exchanged with Moses Mendelssohn (Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn; second, much enlarged edition, 1789) (see Mendelssohn, M.). The purpose of the correspondence had been to clarify Lessing’s declaration, allegedly made to Jacobi in a conversation shortly before Lessing’s death, that he was a Spinozist (see Lessing, G.E.; Spinoza, B. de). In that conversation Jacobi had claimed that philosophy inexorably leads to Spinoza’s ‘substance’, and this abstract concept, when set up as first principle, undermines individual distinctions, most of all the distinction between God and creatures. Lessing had responded by declaring his sympathy for Spinoza, and Jacobi had thereupon urged him to perform a salto mortale – a spiritual somersault in virtue of which, through an act of faith, Lessing would simply declare himself for a personal God, and for freedom, and thereby rejoin common sense.
The book caused an uproar. Jacobi had succeeded in dramatizing his cause against philosophy by identifying the latter with Spinozism (widely regarded at the time as synonymous with atheism), and, by associating Spinoza with Lessing, he had cast doubt on Lessing’s typical Enlightenment belief that reason can save the essential truths of religion and morality. Jacobi had at the same time challenged the authority of Mendelssohn, universally acknowledged as Lessing’s intimate friend and a witness to reason’s ability to establish truths transcending ethnic and religious differences. The equation Jacobi then drew, ‘Consistent philosophy=Spinozism=pantheism=fatalism=atheism’, is one he defended to the end, although he soon had to adapt it to the idealism of Kant and his followers.
3 Critique of idealism
Jacobi’s objections to Kant’s critique of reason became commonplace in the sceptical reaction to Kant (see the Appendix to David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue, 1787). Jacobi argued that it is inconsistent to accept the ‘thing in itself’ yet disclaim knowledge of it; that in a priori ‘space-time’ the individuality of determination is a mere illusion; that the categories are empty forms artificially imposed upon experience, and the transcendental ‘I’ a counterfeit subject. His later negative reactions to Fichte and Schelling were even stronger. Jacobi accused Fichte of inverted Spinozism – of parading as ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ an indeterminate source of activity (the self-positing ‘I’) in fact just as anonymous and impervious to individuation as Spinoza’s substance. He made this accusation in Jacobi to Fichte (1799), at a time when Fichte was under suspicion of atheism. The attack on Schelling – fellow member of the Munich Academy whose views on art and nature Jacobi feared would corrupt the young – came in 1811 (Of Divine Things and Their Revelation). The ensuing bitter public debate is known as the ‘pantheism dispute’.
4 Positive doctrine
Despite his polemics, Jacobi insisted that he was not against reason but that, on the contrary, his aim was to unmask the irrationalism latent in rationalistic philosophy. In David Hume – philosophically his most interesting work – he claimed that he used ‘faith’ in the sense of Hume’s ‘belief’ (both Glaube in German). He however rejected Hume’s phenomenalism and in the same work defended a realism of the senses not unlike that of Thomas Reid (by whom he was influenced, as also by Adam Ferguson). He concluded with the suggestion that reason is a higher and more reflective form of sensibility – a position which Jacobi associated with Leibniz and which had obvious vitalistic implications. Yet Jacobi later rejected the vitalism of Herder because of its pantheism (Appendices IV–V to Doctrine of Spinoza, 1789).
Jacobi’s ambiguity towards philosophy – to which he was attracted but which he feared because of its possible nihilistic effects – was reflected in his attitude to the philosophers he criticized. He admired Spinoza for his consistency and his recognition that truth is selfrevelatory (hence transcends ratiocination). He felt kinship with Kant, with whom he shared belief in the priority of existence over thought and in the finitude of reason. Retrospectively he used Kant’s distinction between reason and understanding to define what he had always meant by ‘faith’ or the ‘feeling for truth’. He identified the ‘reason’ he had criticized as Kant’s ‘understanding’– a faculty by nature bent on cataloguing and exploiting finite, sensible things. But above understanding there is true reason with its intuitive power to apprehend higher moral truths. By ‘faith’, Jacobi claimed, he had always meant this true reason. Kant had rightly distinguished it from understanding but had failed to recognize its intuitive power, thereby subordinating it to understanding (‘On the Undertaking of Critique to Reduce Reason to the Understanding’, 1802). Jacobi also hinted that in his David Hume he had offered an alternative to Kant’s deduction of the categories, and that Kant had based his refutation of idealism on his own early claim that no ‘I’ is possible without a ‘Thou’. Despite ambiguities and fluctuations, Jacobi always defended his two fundamental theses: (1) Existence is radically individualized and precedes thought possibilities; (2) Truth is selfrevelatory and is best intuited in the relations between individuals and between individuals and their God.
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