Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
1743–1819 · German philosopher, critic of Enlightenment rationalism and forerunner of debates on nihilism
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Düsseldorf, 1743 – Munich, 1819) was a German thinker who stood between the Enlightenment and German idealism. He is remembered above all for challenging the idea that demonstrative reason is the only path to truth, and for defending faith and feeling as ways of reaching what is real. His work mattered because it anticipated later debates about nihilism and about the foundations of morality and religion.
He came from a family of merchants. After working in the family business and in the administration of the duchies of Jülich and Berg, he turned to philosophy. At his house in Pempelfort, near Düsseldorf, he gathered much of the German intellectual elite and kept up contacts with Herder, Hamann and Goethe. His philosophical novels, such as Allwill's Papers and Woldemar, mixed epistolary form with reflection.
His best-known work grew out of a quarrel. According to his own account, Lessing confessed to him shortly before his death that he was a Spinozist. Jacobi then published his letters to Moses Mendelssohn on Spinoza's doctrine (1785), arguing that Enlightenment rationalism led, in the end, to pantheism. In David Hume on Faith (1787) he claimed that certain immediate certainties, such as the existence of our own self and of other beings, are not proved but accepted. He criticised Kant for leaving the thing-in-itself unknowable, and he accused Fichte and Schelling of falling into an aporia that now bears his name.
After French troops occupied Düsseldorf in 1794, he spent almost a decade in Holstein. In 1804 he settled in Munich, and in 1807 he became president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. His last philosophical work, On Divine Things and Their Revelation (1811), was aimed chiefly at Schelling.
His influence was uneven. His views on faith had few followers, but the pantheism controversy drew German Romantics to Spinoza, and his critique of rationalism remains part of the history of thought on nihilism. His collected works appeared in six volumes, completed posthumously in 1825.
Key ideas
- Faith as immediate certainty: some truths cannot be proved, such as the existence of our own self and of other beings, and all later reasoning rests on them.
- Immediate knowledge of the absolute: conceptual knowledge does not exhaust what is real, and we reach the absolute by a direct route that he associated with feeling.
- Critique of rationalism: in his view, systems that try to explain everything by reason end in pantheism, fatalism or nihilism.
- The thing-in-itself: it cannot be known directly, but it must be accepted on faith that a real object corresponds to our representations.
- Jacobi's aporia: an idealism that starts from consciousness cannot justify the existence of what lies outside it without presupposing it.
Curiosities
An unexpected confession
According to his own account, Lessing confessed to him shortly before his death that he was a Spinozist, an episode that sparked the pantheism controversy.
A psychiatrist son
He was the father of the psychiatrist Maximilian Jacobi.
A notable doctoral thesis
The German-American philosopher Leo Strauss dedicated his doctoral thesis, supervised by Ernst Cassirer, to him in 1921.
Teachers and influences
Influenced by
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749–1832
- Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
- Adam Smith 1723–1790
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646–1716
- Benedictus de Spinoza 1632–1677
- David Hume 1711–1776
Influenced
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling 1775–1854
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.