JACOBI.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was born at Düsseldorf in 1743. His father
destined him for a merchant. After he had studied in Geneva and become
interested in philosophy, he entered his father’s mercantile
establishment, but afterwards abandoned this business, having been made
chancellor of the exchequer and customs commissioner for Cleves and
Berg, and also privy councillor at Düsseldorf. In this city, or at his
neighboring estate of Pempelfort, he spent a great part of his life
devoted to philosophy and his friends. In the year 1804 he was called to
the newly-formed Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1807 he was chosen
president of this institution, a post which he filled till his death in
1819. Jacobi had a rich intellect and an amiable character. Besides
being a philosopher, he was also a poet and citizen of the world; and
hence we find in his philosophizing an absence of strict logical
arrangement and precise expression of thought. His writings are no
systematic whole, but are occasional treatises written “rhapsodically
and in grasshopper gait,” for the most part in the form of letters,
dialogues, and romances. “It was never my purpose,” he says himself, “to
set up a system for the schools. My writings have sprung from my
innermost life, and were the result of that which had taken place within
me. In a certain sense I did not make them voluntarily, but they were
drawn out of me by a higher power irresistible to myself.” This want of
an inner principle of classification and of a systematic arrangement,
renders a development of Jacobi’s philosophy not easy. It may best be
represented under the following three points of view:—1. Jacobi’s
polemic against mediate knowledge. 2. His principle of immediate
knowledge. 3. His relation to the cotemporaneous philosophy, especially
to the Kantian criticism.
1. Spinoza was the negative starting point of Jacobi’s philosophizing.
In his work “_On the Doctrine of Spinoza, in letters to Moses
Mendelssohn_” (1785), he directed public attention again to the almost
wholly forgotten philosophy of Spinoza. The correspondence originated
thus: Jacobi made the discovery that Lessing was a Spinozist, and
announces this to Mendelssohn. The latter will not believe it, and
thence grew the farther historical and philosophical examination. The
positive philosophic views which Jacobi exhibits in this treatise can be
reduced to the following three principles: (1) Spinozism is fatalism and
atheism. (2) Every path of philosophic demonstration leads to fatalism
and atheism. (3) In order that we may not fall into these, we must set a
limit to demonstrating, and recognize faith as the element of all
metaphysic knowledge.
(1.) Spinozism is atheism, because, according to it, the cause of the
world is no person—is no being working for an end, and endowed with
reason and will—and hence is no God. It is fatalism, for, according to
it, the human will regards itself only falsely as free.
(2.) This atheism and fatalism is, however, only the necessary
consequence of all strictly demonstrative philosophizing. To conceive a
thing, says Jacobi, is to refer a thing to its nearest cause; it is to
find a possible for an actual, the condition for a conditioned, the
mediation for an immediate. We conceive only that which we can explain
out of another. Hence our conceiving moves in a chain of conditioned
conditions, and this connection forms a mechanism of nature, in whose
investigation our understanding has its immeasurable field. However far
we may carry conception and demonstration, we must hold, in reference to
every object, to a still higher one which conditions it; where this
chain of the conditioned ceases, there do conception and demonstration
also cease; till we give up demonstrating we can reach no infinite. If
philosophy determines to apprehend the infinite with the finite
understanding, then must it bring down the divine to the finite; and
here is where every preceding philosophy has been entangled, while it is
obviously an absurd undertaking to attempt to discover the conditions of
the unconditioned, and make the absolutely necessary a possible, in
order that we may be able to construct it. A God who could be proved is
no God, for the ground of proof is ever above that which is to be
proved; the latter has its whole reality from the former. If the
existence of God should be proved, then God would be derived from a
ground which were before and above him. Hence the paradox of Jacobi; it
is for the interest of science that there be no God, no supernatural and
no extra or supramundane being. Only upon the condition that nature
alone is, and is therefore independent and all in all, can science hope
to gain its goal of perfection, and become, like its object itself, all
in all. Hence the result which Jacobi derives from the “Drama of the
history of philosophy” is this:—“There is no other philosophy than that
of Spinoza. He who considers all the works and acts of men to be the
effect of natural mechanism, and who believes that intelligence is but
an accompanying consciousness, which has only to act the part of a
looker-on, cannot be contended with and cannot be helped till we set him
free from his philosophy. No philosophical conclusion can reach him, for
what he denies cannot be philosophically proved, and what he proves
cannot be philosophically denied.” Whence then is help to come? “The
understanding, taken by itself, is materialistic and irrational; it
denies spirit and God. The reason taken by itself is idealistic, and has
nothing to do with the understanding; it denies nature and makes itself
God.”
(3.) Hence we must seek another way of knowing the supersensible, which
is faith. Jacobi calls this flight from cognition through conception to
faith, the _salto mortale_ of the human reason. Every certainty through
a conception demands another certainty, but in faith we are led to an
immediate certainty which needs no ground nor proof, and which is in
fact absolutely exclusive of all proof. Such a confidence which does not
arise from arguments, is called faith. We know the sensible as well as
the supersensible only through faith. All human knowledge springs from
revelation and faith.
These principles which Jacobi brought out in his letters concerning
Spinoza, did not fail to arouse a universal opposition in the German
philosophical world. It was charged upon him that he was an enemy of
reason, a preacher of blind faith, a despiser of science and of
philosophy, a fanatic and a papist. To rebut these attacks, and to
justify his standpoint, he wrote in 1787, a year and a half after the
first appearance of the work already named, his dialogue entitled
“_David Hume_, or _Faith, Idealism, and Realism_,” in which he developes
more extensively and definitely his principle of faith or immediate
knowledge.
2. Jacobi distinguished his faith at the outset from a blind credence in
authority. A blind faith is that which supports itself on a foreign
view, instead of on the grounds of reason. But this is not the case with
his faith, which rather rests upon the innermost necessity of the
subject itself. Still farther: his faith is not an arbitrary
imagination: we can imagine to ourselves every thing possible, but in
order to regard a thing as actual, there must be an inexplicable
necessity of our feeling, which we cannot otherwise name than faith.
Jacobi was not constant in his terminology, and hence did not always
express himself alike in respect of the relation in which faith stood to
the different sides of the human faculty of knowledge. In his earlier
terminology he placed faith (or as he also called it, the power of
faith), on the side of the sense or the receptivity, and let it stand
opposed to the understanding and the reason, taking these two terms as
equivalent expressions for the finite and immediate knowledge of
previous philosophy; afterwards he followed Kant, and, distinguishing
between the reason and the understanding, he called that reason which he
had previously named sense and faith. According to him now, the faith or
intuition of the reason is the organ for perceiving the supersensible.
As such, it stands opposed to the understanding. There must be a higher
faculty which can learn, in a way inconceivable to sense and the
understanding, that which is true in and above the phenomena. Over
against the explaining understanding stands the reason, or the natural
faith of the reason, which does not explain, but positively reveals and
unconditionally decides. As there is an intuition of the sense, so is
there a rational intuition through the reason, and a demonstration has
no more validity in respect of the latter than in respect of the former.
Jacobi justifies his use of the term, intuition of the reason, from the
want of any other suitable designation. Language has no other expression
to indicate the way in which that, which is unattainable to the sense,
becomes apprehended in the transcendental feeling. If any one affirms
that he knows any thing, he may properly be required to state the origin
of his knowledge, and in doing this, he must of necessity go back either
to sensation or to feeling; the latter stands above the former as high
as the human species above the brute. So I affirm, then, without
hesitation, says Jacobi, that my philosophy starts from pure feeling,
and declares the authority of this to be supreme. The faculty of feeling
is the highest in man, and that alone which specifically distinguishes
him from the brute. This faculty is one and the same with reason; or,
reason may be said to find in it its single and only starting point.
Jacobi had the clearest consciousness of the opposition in which he
stood, with this principle of immediate knowledge, to previous
philosophy. In his introduction to his complete works, he says: “There
had arisen since the time of Aristotle an increasing effort in
philosophical schools, to subject the immediate knowledge to the
mediate, to make that faculty of perception which originally establishes
every thing, dependent on the faculty of reflection, which is
conditioned through abstraction; to subordinate the archetype to the
copy, the essence to the word, the reason to the understanding, and, in
fact, to make the former wholly disappear in the latter. Nothing is
allowed to be true which is not capable of a double demonstration, in
the intuition and in the conception, in the thing and in its image or
word; the thing itself, it is said, must truly lie and actually be known
only in the word.” But every philosophy which allows only the reflecting
reason, must lose itself at length in an utter ignorance. Its end is
nihilism.
3. From what has been already said, the position of Jacobi with his
principle of faith, in relation to the Kantian philosophy, can, partly
at least, be seen. Jacobi had separated himself from this philosophy,
partly in the above-named dialogue “David Hume,” (especially in an
appendix to this, in which he discussed the transcendental Idealism),
and partly in his essay “_On the attempt of criticism to bring the
reason to the understanding_” (1801). His relation to it may be reduced
to the following three general points:
(1.) Jacobi does not agree with Kant’s theory of sensuous knowledge. In
opposition to this theory he defends the standpoint of empiricism,
affirms the truthfulness of the sense-perception, and denies the
apriority of space and time, for which Kant contends in order to prove
that objects as well as their relations are simply determinations of our
own self, and do not at all exist externally to us. For, however much it
may be affirmed that there is something corresponding to our notions as
their cause, yet does it remain concealed what this something is.
According to Kant, the laws of our beholding and thinking are without
objective validity, our knowledge has no objective significance. But it
is wrong to claim that in the phenomena there is nothing revealed of the
hidden truth which lies behind them. With such a claim, it were far
better to give up completely the unknown thing-in-itself, and carry out
to its results the consequent idealism. “Logically, Kant is at fault,
when he presupposes objects which make impressions on our soul. He is
bound to teach the strictest idealism.”
(2.) Yet Jacobi essentially agrees with Kant’s critick of the
understanding. Jacobi affirmed, as Kant had done, that the understanding
is insufficient to know the supersensible, and that the highest ideas of
the reason could be apprehended only in faith. Jacobi places Kant’s
great merit in having cleared away the ideas, which were simply the
products of reflection and logical phantasms. “It is very easy for the
understanding, when producing one notion from another, and thus
gradually mounting up to ideas, to imagine that, by virtue of these,
which, though they carry it beyond the intuitions of the sense, are
nothing but logical phantasms, it has not only the faculty but the most
decided determination to fly truly above the world of sense, and to gain
by its flight a higher science independent of the intuition, a science
of the supersensible. Kant discovers and destroys this error and
self-deception. Thus there is gained, at least, a clear place for a
_genuine_ rationalism. This is Kant’s truly great deed, his immortal
merit. But the sound sense of our sage did not allow him to hide from
himself that this clear place must disappear in a gulf, which would
swallow up in itself all knowledge of the true, unless a God should
interpose to hinder it. Here Kant’s doctrine and mine meet.”
(3.) But Jacobi does not fully agree with Kant, in wholly denying to the
theoretical reason the faculty of objective knowledge. He blames Kant
for complaining that the human reason cannot theoretically prove the
reality of its ideas. He affirms that Kant is thus still entangled in
the delusion, that the only reason why these ideas cannot be proved, is
found in the nature of the ideas themselves, and not in the deficient
nature of our knowledge. Kant therefore attempts to seek, in a practical
way, a kind of scientific proof; a roundabout way, which, to every
profound seeker, must seem folly, since every proof is as impossible as
it is unnecessary.
Jacobi agreed better with Kant, than with the post-Kantian philosophy.
The atheistic tendency of the latter was especially repulsive to him.
“To Kant, that profound thinker and upright philosopher, the words God,
freedom, immortality, and religion, signified the same as they have ever
done to the sound human understanding; he in no way treats them as
nothing but deception. He created offence by irresistibly showing the
insufficiency of all proofs of speculative philosophy for these ideas.
That which was wanting in the theoretical proof, he made up by the
necessary postulates of a pure practical reason. With these, according
to Kant’s assurance, philosophy was fully helped out of her difficulty,
and the goal, which had been always missed, actually reached. But the
first daughter of the critical philosophy (Fichte’s system) makes the
living and working moral order itself to be God, a God expressly
declared to be without consciousness and self-existence. These frank
words, spoken publicly and without restraint, roused some attention, but
the fear soon subsided. Presently astonishment ceased wholly, for the
second daughter of the critical philosophy (Schelling’s system) gave up
entirely the distinction which the first had allowed to remain between
natural and moral philosophy, necessity and freedom, and without any
further ado affirmed that the only existence is nature, and that there
is nothing above; this second daughter is Spinozism transfigured and
reversed, an ideal materialism.” This latter allusion to Schelling,
connected as it was with other and harder thrusts in the same essay,
called out from this philosopher the well-known answer: “_Schelling’s
Monument to the Treatise on Divine Things_, 1812.”
If we now take a critical survey of the philosophical standpoint of
Jacobi, we shall find its peculiarity to consist in the abstract
separation of understanding and feeling. These two Jacobi could not
bring into harmony. “There is light in my heart,” he says, “but it goes
out whenever I attempt to bring it into the understanding. Which is the
true luminary of these two? That of the understanding, which, though it
reveals fixed forms, shows behind them only a baseless gulf? Or that of
the heart, which points its light promisingly upwards, though
determinate knowledge escapes it? Can the human spirit grasp the truth
unless it possesses these two luminaries united in one light? And is
this union conceivable except through a miracle?” If now, in order to
escape in a certain degree this contradiction between understanding and
feeling, Jacobi gave to immediate knowledge the place of mediate as
finite knowledge, this was a self-deception. Even that knowledge, which
is supposed to be immediate, and which Jacobi regards as the peculiar
organ for knowing the supersensible, is also mediate, obliged to go
through a course of subjective mediations, and can only give itself out
as immediate when it wholly forgets its own origin.