Polemicist, socialite, and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken critic, first of the rationalism of German late Enlightenment philosophy, then of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, especially in the form that the early Fichte gave to it, and finally of the Romantic Idealism of the late Schelling. In all cases, his opposition to the philosophers was based on his belief that their passion for explanation unwittingly led them to confuse conditions of conceptualization with conditions of existence, thereby denying all room for individual freedom or for a personal God. Jacobi made this point, in defence of individualism and personalistic values, in a number of public controversies, in the course of which he put in circulation expressions and themes that resonate to this day. He was the one who invited Lessing, who he thought was walking on his head in the manner of all philosophers, to perform a salto mortale (a jump heels over head) that would redress his position and thus allow him to move again on the ground of common sense. He was also responsible for forging the concept of ‘nihilism’ — a condition of which he accused the philosophers — and thereby initiating the discourse associated with it. His battle cry, which he first directed at the defenders of Enlightenment rationalism and then at Kant and his successors, was that ‘consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist’. The formula had the effect of bringing Spinoza to the centre of the philosophical discussion of the day. In the face Kant and his idealistic successors, Jacobi complained that they had subverted the language of the ‘I’ by reintroducing it on the basis of abstractions that in fact negated its original value. They had thus replaced real selfhood with the mere illusion of one.

But perhaps the most influential of Jacobi's formulas was the claim that there is no ‘I’ without a ‘Thou’, and that the two can recognize and respect one another only in the presence of a transcendent and personal God. Because of his defence of the individual and the ‘exception’, Jacobi is sometime taken as a proto-existentialist. This view must be balanced by the consideration that Jacobi was a defender of conservative values that he felt threatened by the culture of the day; that he never considered himself an irrationalist; on the contrary, that he thought his ‘faith’ to be essentially and truly rational; and that he tried more than once to develop a positive theory of reason. As a literary figure, he criticized the Sturm und Drang movement and dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligation. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution, the destructiveness of which he considered the practical counterpart of the speculative nihilism of the philosophers.



The first volume of Jacobi's collected works was published in 1812; the second, in 1815. This last is especially important because it contains, added to the text of the David Hume, a long new Preface intended by Jacobi, as the title indicates, also as Introduction to his life long philosophical production. (’Preface and also Introduction to the Author's Philosophical Collected Works’, Jacobi, 1812-25, vol. 2) In the piece, Jacobi tried to sum up his intellectual odyssey by articulating the interest that had motivated it from beginning to end, and thereby also to bring some systematic unity to what might otherwise have appeared a scattered philosophical production. Jacobi was obviously sensitive to the charge of irrationalism that had repeatedly been brought against him over the years, and anxious to disarm it. He appealed to the distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’ that he had adopted from around 1800 to argue, as he had already done in Of Divine Things, that the kind of knowledge he had earlier presented under the rubric of ‘faith’ should be understood rather as a product of ‘reason’ — a ‘reason’ properly understood, of course, as an intuitive faculty for the immediate apprehension of such eternal verities as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. (Jacobi, 1812-1825, vol. 2, 1815: 59-63 and passim) He accordingly edited the 1787 text of the David Hume, attributing what he thought was the inconclusiveness of the dialogue to his yet unclarified concept of ‘reason’ at the time of the first edition. He added long footnotes to it, and even modified some crucial passages of the text itself — a circumstance, incidentally, for the most part ignored by later commentators — in an obvious effort to dispel the naturalism otherwise clearly implied in the original text.[17] While thus distancing himself from any possible evidence of naturalism, Jacobi however also tried to deflect the accusation, sometime brought against him even by friends,[18] that he was against science. He tried to compensate for his past repeatedly made remark that science is but a game of abstractions (Jacobi, 1799: 22-27) by reasserting now, as he had already done in Of Divine Things, that, without the understanding's power to synthesize in the medium of abstract representations the content of sensations, reason, just like the senses, would have no form and hence no cognition of itself. (Jacobi, 1812-25: vol. 2, 58, 110)

How successful these defensive tactics were is open to discussion. The additions and modification made to the David Hume only succeeded in disrupting Jacobi's earlier theory without offering a credible new resolution to it. Moreover, as already remarked, it made little difference replacing ‘faith’ with ‘reason’ when the meaning of the latter remained just as unclarified as that of the earlier term. And Jacobi's positive remarks about science did not come unqualified. Jacobi also stressed that, however necessary the functions of the understanding, the latter is none the less still naturally prone to naturalism and to the atheism consequent upon it. The question could naturally be asked how, on Jacobi's premises, reason was both dependent on the understanding for its form yet naturally exposed to falsification at its hand. One could legitimately doubt, as Friedrich Schlegel had done earlier in a review of Of Divine Things, whether Jacobi had truly made peace with reason.[19] None the less, despite all ambivalence, there was no doubt about Jacobi's motivation throughout. Jacobi had always perceived himself as the champion of personalism, of human individuality and of human transcendence over nature — values these, that he had always thought threatened by the rationalism of the Enlightenment. At the end of his life, reviewing his long struggle against Kant's Critique and its idealistic aftermath, he judged the struggle justified. For, as he thought events had demonstrated amply, that idealism was but a more sophisticated form of traditional metaphysics, and had indeed led to the same naturalism.

A measure of the great influence that Jacobi had in his own lifetime, and continued to have in the rest of the nineteenth century, is that he was the first to put in circulation the term ‘nihilism’, and to inaugurate the discourse associated with it. Ironically, however, more often than not that influence did not work itself out in ways Jacobi himself would have wanted. He had been the one to bring Spinoza to the centre of philosophical discussion, and many were to be the young philosophers (Schleiermacher among them) who were first exposed to his pantheism through Jacobi's intermediary. Rather than rejecting it, however, as Jacobi would have expected, they often embraced it enthusiastically. Jacobi's influence on Fichte can also not be overestimated. And his crisp formulation of how Kantian idealism stood with respect to Spinoza's philosophy of substance — namely, that it repeated the latter in subjective terms, the result being that, while it reintroduced the language of personalism, it also subverted it by changing its meaning — caught indeed the imagination of many nineteenth century philosophers. But these took it to mean that the values of the old morality had run its historical course, and that it was high time to reestablish humanism on a new foundation. And this was a conclusion that Jacobi would have found just as abhorrent as he had found the French revolution.

Because of Jacobi's insistence on the primacy of immediate existence over reflective conceptualization, and of the rights of the ‘exception’, the possibility is there to interpret his position as case of proto-existentialism, and to treat him, just as Kierkegaard, as an essentially religious thinker. (Beiser, 1987) Indeed, some of the language Jacobi uses, and the themes he explores, are to be found in Kierkegaard again. (Whether the latter was himself an existentialist is, of course, itself an open question.) One must however keep in mind that the language of the ‘leap of faith’ does not belong to Jacobi. The salto mortale he had proposed to Lessing was no leap into the unknown but, according to his explicit testimony, a jump that would have brought Lessing, who had been walking on his head in the manner of philosophers, back to his feet. (Jacobi, 1787: 62; 1789: 353) And as for the religious outpourings that pervade his writings, and often mar them, they must be measured against what Jacobi himself had to say about his religiosity when confiding to Reinhold late in life. As he said, his problem, the source of his many ambiguities, was that, though temperamentally endowed with a Christian heart, his mind was just as temperamentally pagan. (Jacobi, 1825-27: vol. 2, 478) And there are testimonies to the effect that he always kept himself at a psychological distance from Christian believers. (di Giovanni, 1994: 42) At the end, he identified with ‘reason’ what he had earlier referred to as ‘faith’. Also to be kept in mind is that the personalist values that Jacobi championed were Enlightenment values as well. Jacobi belongs very much to his times. To label him ‘an anti-Enlightenment figure’, as is routinely done, is perhaps misleading.

In sum, Jacobi's figure, including its place within the Enlightenment, is much more complex than usually assumed, and still in need of discussion. In our own times, Leo Strauss did his PhD on Jacobi. Perhaps this is still another way in which Jacobi is working his influence on us and still bringing Spinoza centre stage, exactly where he did not want him to be. It might well be that the secret of this complexity is that Jacobi, just like Kierkegaard after him, was motivated by deeply conservative beliefs which he saw threatened by the culture of the day; but, again like Kierkegaard, in trying to reassert them, developed a language that was later to be used, contrary to anything he would have ever imagined, to undermine them instead.