This scholarly edition of Jacobi's major works is the first extensive English translation of these literary and philosophical classics. A key but somewhat eclipsed figure in the German Enlightenment, Jacobi had an enormous impact on philosophical thought in the later part of the eigh-teenth century, notably on the way in which Kant was received and the early development of post-Kantian idealism.
Jacobi was propelled to notoriety in 1785 with his polemical tract Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, included in this translation, along with David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism; Jacobi to Fichte; and the novel Allwill.
In his comprehensive introduction, George di Giovanni situates Jacobi in the historical and philosophical context of his time. Avoiding a simplistic portrayal of Jacobi as a fideist or proto-existentialist, di Giovanni shows how Jacobi's life and work reflect the tensions inherent in the late Enlightenment. To learn about Jacobi is also to learn about the period in which he lived.
This book will be invaluable to students of German Idealism and to anyone interested in the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. George di Giovanni is professor of philosophy, McGill University.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
P H I L O S O P H I C A L W R I T I N G S
AND THE N O V E L
ALLWILL
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Translated from the German, with an
Introductory Study, Notes, and
Bibliography by
George di Giovanni
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo
Legal deposit fourth quarter 1994 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 1743—1819 The main philosophical writings and the novel Allwill
(McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas; 18) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-1018-4
1. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 1743-1819. I. Di Giovanni, George,
1935-II. Title. I1935-II. Series
B3°55.E5D44 1995 !93 C94-9°°769-2 This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc.
in 10/12 Baskerville.
Preface xi
I N T R O D U C T I O N : THE UNFINISHED PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH HEINRICH JACOBI
I Jacobi and His Spiritual Landscape: An Essay in Synthesis 3 II Philosophical Arguments: An Essay in Analysis 67 III Literary Witnesses: An Essay in Interpretation 117
IV The Last Word: Jacobi on Jacobi 152 Note on the Texts 169
TEXTS
Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (1785) !73
David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, A Dialogue (1787) 253 Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn
(1789), excerpts 339
Jacobi to Fichte (1799) 497
David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, A Dialogue: Preface and also Introduction to the Author's Collected Philosophical Works (1815) 537
Notes to Jacobi's Texts 591 Notes to Jacobi's Footnotes 635
Bibliography 649 Index of Names 675 Index of Subjects 679
WHEN I APPROACHED Emil Fackenheim—it is now a quarter-century ago—to ask him whether he would be willing to direct a thesis on Hegel's Logic, I remember his first look of disconcertment and the warn-ing that followed. It was not just that the Logic is a fiendishly difficult
work and that nothing very enlightening had ever been written about it. Experience showed that serious students of Hegel have a tendency to lose themselves in their subject and not come up with anything publish-able for years after their first exposure to it. That was not a happy pros-pect for someone who would soon be looking for a job in academia.
I did manage to find a position a few years later. Yet Fackenheim's warning proved true in a way. The thesis was completed in a reasonable length of time, but at the price of limiting it to what had originally been intended as only its introductory chapter. The rest, which I had hoped to complete and publish as a book in short order, has yet to see the light of day. I soon discovered that Hegel's Logic cannot be properly
under-stood without being studied in the context of the Enlightenment scep-tical tradition, which continued unabated throughout the high period of German Idealism. Hegel has more in common with this tradition than is usually recognized. With an eye to my planned future book, I there-fore undertook to document it, in co-operation with H. S. Harris, with a translation of relevant texts from the period (Between Kant and Hegel,
1985). However, it did not take me long to realize that the discussions in those texts of the epistemological and metaphysical issues were all mo-tivated by broader and deeper interests in religious and moral matters. The ancient "faith versus reason" debate was in all cases just below the surface. One could not, however, broach this debate without comingO
first-rate philosopher. Yet his polemic against abstract reason on behalf of faith undoubtedly shaped the course of philosophical discussion in Germany in the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century. Its influence continued in the following century and was, in some respects, just as im-portant for the development of philosophy as Kant's Critique. At the time
when I was preparing Between Kant and Hegel I found it impossible to
represent Jacobi among the texts chosen for translation. Jacobi simply defied every attempt at excerption. I promised myself, however, to make up for this failure sometime in the future. The present work, which turned out to be a much greater enterprise than I had originally bargained for, is the fulfilment of that promise. The book on Hegel is of course still to be written, but I am not despairing yet.
I chose the first five texts that I have translated because, in my opinion, they best convey the philosophical promise that unfortunately Jacobi never fulfilled. The open letter to Fichte is a good expression of Jacobi's growing concern, at the time, over the new idealism that was taking shape in Germany in the wake of Kant. The introduction to the 1815 edi-tion of the David Hume was chosen because it is Jacobi's final statement
of his philosophical position. In the case of his two novels, Allwill and Woldemar, the choice was difficult. Practical considerations finally tipped
the scales. I chose Allwill because of its relative brevity in comparison to Woldemar. I have made it a point in my introductory study and in my
notes to Jacobi's texts to cite extensively from the rest of Jacobi's major works, and from most minor ones as well, in an effort to provide as com-plete a picture of Jacobi's opus as possible. I have made my translations from first editions, and I have ordered them chronologically. I have fol-lowed this policy because Jacobi's thought altered over the years, not necessarily for the better, in my opinion, and the reader ought to be given an opportunity to note the changes. Although I make no preten-sions to have provided a critical edition of the texts translated, I have made every effort to identify Jacobi's many references and to explain their context. Two of Jacobi's quotations (Otway, p. 257; and Heder, p. 324) have, however, escaped my most diligent searches. I trust that some reader will eventually find them for me. Finally, I have made no effort in the footnotes and in the Bibliography either to modernize or in any way to standardize the eighteenth-century spelling of German, French, or Italian words.
A work as complex as the present one would not have been possible without the help of many. It is now my pleasure to acknowledge this help. The staff at the libraries of the Universities of Munchen, Munster,
and Tubingen were always very kind and helpful. Most of all, however, I must thank the staff of the McGill Library. The fine collection at McGill of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts was for me a veritable treasure-trove. So was the Kierkegaard Library, now housed at McGill. It appears that Kierkegaard had in his possession copies of many of the books that Jacobi had also read and used. Any book that I could not find in either of these two funds, or that I had not already examined in Europe, was procured for me by the staff of the Interlibrary Loans Department. I thank them for their competence, their graciousness, and the humour with which they met even my most extravagant requests.
My colleagues Harry Bracken, David Norton, and Jeremy Walker were invaluable sources of scholarly information and of encouragement. I thank them for both.
Jeremy Walker came to my aid with his poetic skills by rendering in English verse Goethe's two poems that appear in the Spinoza Letters.
Hans-Jakob Wilhelm and Louise Collins (both PhD candidates at McGill) were, at different times, my research assistants. Hans-Jakob, whose first language is German, tested my translations for accuracy and occasionally found them wanting. Louise tested my English, and she too had cause to protest. Louise also subjected my introductory essays to a rigorous analytical examination that often made me feel as if I were back in the hands of a stern teacher. I thank her for her splendid work, just as I thank Hans-Jakob for his.
My thanks to Frederick C. Beiser and the anonymous reader for McGill-Queen's University Press, whose sharp and informed criticisms helped me to clarify some of my statements, at least to my satisfaction, though not necessarily to theirs.
To H. S. Harris I owe a special debt. It was he who first suggested to me, shortly after I completed my thesis on Hegel, that I turn my atten-tion to Jacobi. I did not take the bait then, mostly because I was too ignorant to recognize Jacobi's historical importance. But I eventually came around to his early suggestion. To Harris also fell the ungrateful task of reading and improving the first version of my translations, when the text was still raw and definitely German-sounding. I thank him for this work, for his original suggestion, and for all the encouragement.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada awarded me a two-year grant for research assistants and travel to German libraries. Computer equipment was provided through a grant from the McGill Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. It is a sign of the times, and hopefully an indication that we are back to the cosmopolitanism so dear
to the Enlightenment, that this translation of German texts into English was done by one whose first language is Italian, in an institution of Scottish origin in a French-speaking part of Canada.
I am responsible for any error.
Jacobi and His Spiritual Landscape.
An Essay in Synthesis
T H E F I G U R E
I. When Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi died in 1819, four years had elapsed since the Congress of Vienna and the second Peace of Paris finally put an end to Napoleon and the Napoleonic regimes in Europe.1 The Restoration was in full swing. "Old Fritz," as Jacobi was known to friends and foes alike, died a septuagenarian. The years of his life saw many changes in German society. At his birth in 1743, almost a century had elapsed since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years' War. That war had been fought mostly on German lands and, apart from the carnage and the material devastation that it wreaked in the towns and countryside, it had also brought to a standstill whatever cultural and intellectual life German society had previously enjoyed. Nor was the
cen-1. For the general historical and literary background I have drawn from many sources, but especially from the following: Emil Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklarung (Wien:
Europa Verlag, 1965); Richard Benz, Die Zeit derDeutschen Klassik, 1750-1800 (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1953); Ernst Cassirer, DiePhilosophie der Aujkldrung (Tubingen: Mohr, 1932); Hajo
Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1648-1840 (New York: Knopf, 1968); H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, iv (Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1966); Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavelism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, tr. D. Scott (New
Haven: Yale, 1962); Angelo Pupi, Alia soglia deU'eta romantica (Milano: Universita Cattolica
del Sacro Cuore, 1962); Paul Rilla, Lessing und sein Zeitalter (Miinchen: Beck, 1973);
Hermann Timm, Gott und die Freiheit. Studien zur Religionphilosophie der Goethezeit: I, Die Spinozarenaissance (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1974); Valerio Verra, F. H. Jacobi, daU'illuminismo aU'idealismo (Torino: Filosofia, 1963; in my opinion, still the best general
treatment of Jacobi and his age); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1700-1815 (Miinchen: Beck, 1987). I have also made ample use of the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, the Neue deutsche Biographic, and the Biographie universelle.
tury that followed to be a peaceful one. Wars followed upon wars with singular regularity, and in the process the whole socio-political face of Europe was modified. England rose to the status of unchallenged world power, and in the eighteenth century it began to exercise direct influ-ence on the German lands through its possession of Hanover. On the continent, while the influence of Spain eventually collapsed and the Holy Roman Empire was reduced to an ineffectual symbol, other centres of power were beginning to assert themselves. France soon became the single strongest continental nation. Austria gradually gained in strength and eventually turned itself into an empire. There was also the steady rise of Brandenburg-Prussia, which, together with the influence that Russia had begun to exercise, added one more factor to the balance of power in Central Europe. It was the ordinary folk who bore the brunt of the destruction caused by all these changes. Yet in spite of the constant dislocations, cultural and intellectual life had slowly come alive again in Germany. The revival was clearly dependent on influences coming from France and England, which exercised cultural and political hegemony over Europe at the time. But to these foreign influences the Germans always added elements drawn from their particular intellectual and reli-gious tradition, so that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the typ-ically German phenomenon of the Aufklarung was in full swing.
Jacobi was born, therefore, to a world full of the tensions and contra-dictions that rapid change always leaves in its wake, and the rest of his life was to witness changes even more radical. At the political level, the French Revolution was to challenge long-established ideas about the role of the prince in society. At the intellectual level, under the stress of ideas that it had itself nurtured, the Aufklarung gave way to new attitudes that eventually provided the ideology required to justify the French Revolution. The attitudes themselves persisted even after the revolution had run its course, so that, under the trappings of the old political order, the "Restoration" of 1815 in fact established a totally new one. A new state absolutism emerged that had little to do with the absolutism of the eighteenth-century princes.
Jacobi did not shy away from active life, as we shall see. He was also to suffer at first hand some of the effects of the French Revolution. But un-like his younger and more famous contemporary Goethe, he never was an effective participant in the great events of the day. Like the characters of his philosophical novels, for whom action is mostly restricted to emo-tion and discussion, Jacobi lived through those events emoemo-tionally and verbally, through his writings and countless letters to just about everyone
of consequence in his day. If he did leave a mark on his world, it was pre-cisely in his role as a commentator on the contemporary scene—most of all, as an acute critic of the ideas by which the new socio-political tend-encies were seeking legitimization. In this respect Jacobi's literary work proved to be a catalyst for both the ideologies justifying the new order and the reaction against it, as we shall see in what follows. As a commen-tator on a world in transition, Jacobi came to reflect the tensions and contradictions of the latter in his own personality and work. In order to be justly measured, therefore, his figure must be viewed as part of a larger and complex spiritual landscape. Jacobi was not just a defender of faith vis-a-vis the Enlightenment or a man of feelings (a typical Herzensmensch} in opposition to the rationalism of the schools. Nor
was he just a realist in opposition to the scepticism of Hume and the idealism of Kant. Jacobi was all these and much more, at his best holding his beliefs together in a unity of tension, at his worst, especially in his later years, reconciling them under a facile account of the notions of faith and reason.
2. The main events of Jacobi's life can be related here briefly. He was born in Dusseldorf, of a merchant family. His older brother, Georg, was to make a name for himself as an anacreontic poet. His two younger half-sisters, Charlotte and Helene, eventually became part of Jacobi's family, acting as secretaries and, at the death of Jacobi's wife, as household man-agers. Of his childhood we know only what Jacobi himself gives us to un-derstand from hints in the David Hume and from what are probably
autobiographical characterizations in his Allwill.* As a child Jacobi
ap-parently was very awkward and withdrawn, stubborn and highly strung, and given to brooding on religious matters such as the existence of God and the reality of an everlasting time. His father intended him for a busi-ness career and so had him apprenticed for a brief period (1759) at a merchant house in Frankfurt-am-Main. After that he was sent to Geneva for a three-year period of general education. Jacobi himself explains that there, under the tutelage of the renowned Lesage, he became ac-quainted with both the traditional philosophy of the schools and the thought of the French philosophes, notably, among the latter, Rousseau
and Bonnet. After this Geneva stay, on his father's refusal to have him pursue medical studies in Glasgow, Jacobi returned to Dusseldorf, where
2. See below, David Hume, pp. Gyff., and Allwill, pp. a8ff. References to texts included
he joined his father in running the family business. There, after a brief liaison with an older maidservant3 that resulted in an illegitimate son and was kept secret by Jacobi for fear that it might jeopardize his be-trothal, Jacobi married Elisabeth (Betty) von Clermont in 1764.
From all accounts (including Goethe's) Betty was a most charming and talented woman.4 Her premature demise in 1784, coming soon after the death of an eleven-year-old son, proved a heavy emotional blow for Jacobi, and he never remarried. Jacobi enjoyed excellent relations with Betty's family, especially her brother. To the latter's capable hands he soon entrusted his financial affairs, thus freeing himself more and more from the burdens of business. Together with Betty he established in Pempelfort near Diisseldorf, at his father's country estate, what amounted to a centre of social, literary, and philosophical activities.5 Few people of literary consequence at the time did not manage to make their way there, or were not reached from there through Jacobi's lively correspondence. Among his acquaintances were Sophie La Roche, Heinse, Wieland, Goethe (whose friendship with Jacobi took, as we shall see, a rather uneven course), Lavater, Diderot, Hemsterhuis, Furstenberg, Princess Gallitzin, Dohm, Stolberg, Hamann, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Georg Forster—and the list could continue. We also know that at Pempelfort Jacobi was in close contact with a congre-gation of pietists, for whose particular brand of religiosity he always felt a special affinity.
The Pempelfort period lasted until 1794, at which time the French Revolution touched Jacobi directly.6 Because of the occupation of 3. Anna Katharina Miiller. The liaison has come to light only recently through the dis-covery of the correspondence between Jacobi and Marc Michel Rey, bookseller and editor in Amsterdam, whom Jacobi used as an intermediary for passing money to the mother of the illegitimate child and apparently buying her silence. See: LesAnnees deformation deF. H. Jacobi, d'apres ses lettres inedites a M. M. Rey (1763—1771), avec "Le Noble," de Madame de Charriere, ed. J. T. de Booy and Roland Mortier (Geneve: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1966).
The affair (which does not do honour to Jacobi) is related on pp. 27-34.
4. Goethe describes her as "having the right feelings without a trace of sentimentality."
Aus meinem Leben, Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Karl Richter, Part m,Johan Wolfgang Goethe, Sdmtliche Werke, 19 Vols. (Miinchen: Hanser, 1985 ff), Vol. 16, p. 661.
5. Goethe describes it in Campagne in Frankreich 1792, Sdmtliche Werke, Vol. 14, p. 470.
6. Jacobi had already had occasion to feel the threat of the invading French armies. See his letter to Herder of 23 October 1793, in which Jacobi describes the fears in his house-hold, during a return trip from Karlsruhe to Pempelfort, upon hearing that a French army had crossed the borders and had set Speier in flames, and that another army was three hours from Karlsruhe. Fortunately, the rumours about the French advance on Karlsruhe
Diisseldorf by French troops, he moved north, first to Wandsbeck as the guest of Claudius,7 then to Eutin, where he settled. Earlier Jacobi had demonstrated his interest in political economy practically, by serving, from 1773 to 1779, as a member of the treasury of the duchies ofjulich and Berg along the Rhine,8 and in 1779 he had also been appointed minister and privy councillor for the Bavarian department of customs and commerce. In both posts he gave evidence of his strong preference for open trade policies. However, his plans for a liberalization and ratio-nalization of local customs and taxes were never implemented. Upon being appointed to the Bavarian position he soon ran into stiff opposi-tion from his superiors and from enemies at court; unwilling to engage in a power struggle, he resigned within months of his appointment. And that was the end of Jacobi's active intervention in practical politics. The only remnants of it, apart from the correspondence that it generated, are two essays ("A Political Rhapsody" and 'Yet Another Political Rhapsody," both written in 1779)9 that attack the mercantilistic policies of the Bavarian government and defend free trade along orthodox phys-iocratic lines.
Jacobi's early literary ventures also belong to this time. They took the form, at first, of translations and occasional pieces on topical themes.10 By temperament, and because of his close connections with his brother Georg and his poetic circle, Jacobi was naturally drawn to the baroque sentimentalism much in vogue at the high point of the Enlightenment. But he could not for long remain immune to the cult of genius and
proved to be false. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's auserlesener Briefwechsel, 2 Vols., ed. Friedrich
Roth (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1825-27), Vol. n, Letter 217, pp. 11 iff. (henceforth, Auserlesener Briefwechsel).
7. For Claudius, see below, David Hume, footnote to p. 206.
8. See letter to Sophie La Roche, 29 November 1772. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Briefwechsel, 1.1, ed. Michael Briiggen and Siegfried Sudhof (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Fromann-Holzboog, 1981), Letter #268, p. 178 (henceforth, Briefwechsel).
9. Eine politishce Rhapsodie and Noch eine politische Rhapsodie. They are reproduced in
Vol. vi of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Werke, 6 Vols. (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1812-25). This is the
edition that Jacobi personally supervised until his death in 1819, and was brought to com-pletion by Friedrich Koppen and Friedrich Roth (henceforth, Werke). It can of course
be argued that Jacobi exercised considerable political influence indirectly, through the intellectual influence he had on other figures such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Georg Forster. For Jacobi's liberal ideas and their influence, see Frederich C. Beiser,
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), especially ch. 6.
the interest in the deeper and often darker side of the emotional life that the Sturm und Drang movement was promoting in reaction to what they took to be the superficiality of Enlightenment reason and Enlightenment sentiment. In 1774 Jacobi made the personal acquaint-ance of the young Goethe, the great exponent of this new group of lit-erati. He thereupon embarked on two novels, Allwill and Woldemar, in
which he explored but also sharply criticized some common themes of the Sturm und Drang.
The two novels were initially published in fragments and were not given final form until the 17908. Their literary value was questioned from the beginning. But then, the constant, long drawn-out philosophi-cal discussions engaged in by the novel's characters should have made it clear that Jacobi was basically a philosopher, not a poet. Metaphysics— specifically the problem of establishing the possibility of theoretical and moral truth—had been Jacobi's concern since the Geneva years, and it was still the interest motivating his novels. One significant development of these years—one directly related to the encounter with Goethe—was precisely Jacobi's discovery of Spinoza. This previously much-reviled phi-losopher was enjoying a revival because of the Sturm und Drang's attrac-tion to those very views about God's immanent relaattrac-tion to nature that had been the cause of his earlier rejection. Jacobi made an intensive study of Spinoza's philosophy, with a twofold result. On the one hand, he found in it what he took to be the root cause of philosophy's inability to deal with questions of existence effectively. In this respect Spinoza helped Jacobi to formalize his opposition to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Even more than before, therefore, Jacobi found himself squarely on the side of those who, like Hamann, Claudius, Herder, or Goethe, were all reacting, though for a variety of reasons, against the ra-tionalism of the Berlin Aufklarer. On the other hand, Jacobi also found in Spinoza the justification for his suspicions about the cult of nature and history that the reaction against the Enlightenment was promoting. When his famous correspondence with Mendelssohn regarding the al-leged Spinozism of Lessing was published in 1785—thus giving rise to what was to be known as the Spinozism Dispute—the book could justly be taken as a critique of Goethe no less than an attack on the Enlightenment of which Mendelssohn was at the time the most brilliant light. The second edition of 1789 was to include a critique of Herder as well.
Two polemical political pieces had appeared in 1781 and 1782, about which more in the following section. In these essays Jacobi had attacked
the absolutism of the princes vehemently (just as he would eventually at-tack, after 1789, the absolutism of the new order engendered by the French). However, it was the Spinoza Letters that established Jacobi firmly
at the centre of the literary discussion of the day as a commentator and critic of all things philosophical. In this work Jacobi appealed to com-mon sense and faith as means of overcoming the inability of philosophi-cal reflection to reach out to existence. He did not, however, spell out the exact nature of the evidence that he hoped to achieve through these instruments, nor for that matter the exact place, within the economy of human knowledge, of the evidence thus achieved.
In the dialogue David Hume, which followed in 1787, Jacobi tried to
remedy this deficiency by defining his own position in more positive terms and by somehow connecting it with both Hume and Leibniz. He also went on to develop the thesis, which he had already stated in the
Spinoza Letters,11 that there is no "I" without reference to a "Thou," and
on this basis sought a way out of idealism. Yet this work too remained in-conclusive, as Jacobi himself later admitted (though not necessarily for the right reasons).12 It showed signs, moreover, thatjacobi's attention was now being drawn to Kant's transcendental idealism, which at die time was dislodging the philosophy of the schools from centre stage, and that, as he braced himself for a new polemic, Jacobi was instinctively re-verting to the polemical stance of the Spinoza Letters. However much
Jacobi admired Kant, he came to interpret his idealism as one more form of crypto-Spinozism and as therefore ultimately liable to the same fatal-ism and consequent amoralfatal-ism that the latter implied. This line of crit-icism culminated with the publication in 1801 of the essay "On the Attempt of Critique to Reduce Reason to the Understanding, and in General to Give a New Purpose to Philosophy."13
By that time Jacobi was also busy attacking the new kind of idealism born of Kant's critique. Jacobi's first target had been Fichte—a thinker
11. See below, Spinoza Letters, p. 163.
12. See below, Preface to the David Hume (1815), pp. 3—9; andjacobi's footnote to p. 221
of the 1815 ed. of the David Hume (in the present text, pp. 2ggff.).
13. Uber das Unternehmen des Kriticismus, die Vemunft zu Verstande zu bringen, and der Philosophie uberhaupt eine neue Absicht zu geben, in Beytrdge zur leichtern Ubersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie beym Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts (Contributions to an Easier Overview of the Situation of Philosophy at the Beginning of the igth Century), ed. C. L. Reinhold, 6 Vols.
(Hamburg: Perthes, 1801-03), Vol. in (1802), pp. 1-110. The essay is reproduced in Vol. in of the Werke (1816).
who, ironically, had drawn his inspiration fromjacobi's personalismjust as much as from Kant's subjectivism. At first Jacobi had admired him. ^ But he soon began to be suspicious of the highly reflective constructions on which Fichte's science of the "I" was being built, not least because Jacobi also perceived a connection between this new idealism and the political ideologies behind the French Revolution. He came to interpret Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or "Doctrine of Science" (the new name that
Fichte gave to philosophy),15 as a type of inverted Spinozism, an ideal-ized mathesis that merely replaced Spinoza's abstract concept of sub-stance with an equally abstract idea of subjectivity and was, in fact, just as incompatible with personalism and individual freedom as Spinozism. Jacobi made public his criticism of Fichte in an open letter of 1799, at the height of the so-called Atheism Dispute—a sad episode that saw Fichte charged with atheism and eventually forced to resign from his university chair at Jena. At that time Jacobi was collaborating with Reinhold (a sometime popularizer of Kant and erstwhile Fichte sympa-thizer), even though the two men had little in common intellectually and temperamentally except their dislike for idealism and a bent for re-ligious piety.16 In his campaign against idealism, however, Jacobi was also to attract to his side members of a younger generation, such as Koppen and Salat (both his disciples), Bouterwek, and Fries. The last fa-mous battle took place after Jacobi—in financial straits because of the bankruptcy of the Clermont family—moved to Munich in 1805 to
an-14. See letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt of 2 September 1794, Auserlesener Briefwechsel,
Vol. ii, #234, 180-81.
15. The first statement was published in 1794. J. G. Fichte, Uber den Begriff der Wissenschftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophic (Concerning the Concept of the Doctrine of Science or So-called Philosophy; Weimar: Comptoire, 1794). Wissenschaftslehre has commonly been
translated into English as "Science of Knowledge."
16. Jacobi registered his first impression of Reinhold to Elise Reimarus in a letter of 11 January 1775 [sicl It should read 1795 instead]; Auserlesener Briefwechsel, Vol. 11, #240.
The impression was not too favourable. Jacobi thought of Reinhold as too narrow a philos-opher, only interested in the mistakes and prejudices that prevented others from under-standing him. He did not really care for what others had to say, since he already carried everything with him—the metaphysics of nature in one pocket and the metaphysics of morals in the other. "One should just make him turn these pockets out!" (p. iga^Jacobi's opinion did not change with the years. See his letter to Bouterwek of 5 July 1804, in which Jacobi says to Bouterwek that he has let Reinhold know that he has had enough of him and now hopes to be delivered from Reinhold's "logical enthusiasm" for a long time to come.
Friedr. Heinr. Jacobi's Briefe an Friedr. Bouterwek aus demjahren 1800 bis 1819, ed. W. Meyer
swer a call to join the newly founded Academy of the Sciences there, and was thereupon elected its first president.17 The attack was directed this
time at Schelling, with whom Jacobi had already skirmished in connec-tion with the publicaconnec-tion of Hegel's essay Faith and Knowledge18 (to which Jacobi had replied in three letters to Koppen).19 It culminated in 1811
with the publication of Of Divine Things and Their Revelation, in which Jacobi took issue with Schelling because of his pantheistic doctrine of na-ture.20 Jacobi's attack was a bitter one. Schelling replied in kind,21 and
thus was launched the so-called Pantheism Dispute, the third (and last) of the three famous disputes either initiated by Jacobi or in which he played a leading role.22 This last cost him the final break in relations
with Goethe, who sided with Schelling.23
In 1812 Jacobi retired. He spent the remaining years of his life super-vising the publication of his Werke, which, however, he did not see to completion. Throughout his life Jacobi had developed his own philo-sophical position indirectly, mostly through polemics against others. In 1815, in a new introduction to the dialogue David Hume that was also to serve as preface to the rest of the collected works, Jacobi finally gave his most direct and positive statement of what he stood for, though even
17. Jacobi's inaugural address is included in Vol. vi of Werke. Ubergelehrte Gesellschaften, ihren Geist und Zweck, gelesen . . . zu Miinchen i8oj (Of Learned Societies, Their Spirit and Goal, read . . . at Munich in 1807).
18. "Glauben und Wissen, oder die Reflexionphilosophie der Subjectivitat, in der Vollstandigkeit ihrer Formen, als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtesche Philosophic" ("Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Complete Range of Its Forms as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philosophy"), Kritische Journal, 11.1 (1802):
3-4H-19. Published in F. Koppen, Schellings Lehre oder das Game der Philosophic des absoluten Nichts, nebst drei Briefen verwandten Inhalts von F. H. Jacobi (Schelling's Doctrine or the Whole of Philosophy of the Absolute Nothing, Together with Three Letters of Related Content by F. H. Jacobi;
Hamburg: Perthes, 1803).
20. See below, Preface to David Hume, footnote to p. 77.
21. Jacobi complained to Bouterwek: "In the meantime Schelling has had fifteen folios of the most wrathful vituperations published against me and my little book." Letter of i February 1812, Bouterwek-Briefwechsel, #23, pp. 139—40.
22. See Lewis S. Ford, "The Controversy between Schelling and Jacobi," Journal of the History of Philosophy, ill (1965): 75-89.
23. Goethe wrote to Jacobi: "As poet and artist I am polytheist, pantheist instead as stu-dent of nature, and am the one just as decidedly as the other." Letter to Jacobi of 6 January 1813, Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe andF. H. Jacobi, ed. Max Jacobi (Leipzig: Weimann, 1846),
#121, p. 261 (henceforth, Goethe-Briefwechsel). See also Letter #119, 10 May 1782,
here he did not eschew polemic. How true to Jacobi's own past this state-ment was, and how cogent the philosophy it delivered, are points at issue. He died in Munich.
THE LANDSCAPE: POLITICS
5. So much for a sketch of Jacobi's figure. Now, to the landscape. The rise of the absolute state was perhaps the one most important political and social development in the Europe of the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries. The Thirty Years' War had made this development practically possible by sweeping away in the aftermath of its general de-struction the institutional remnants of post-feudal political pluralism. But the phenomenon was also in keeping with the general mentality of the age, and there were many attempts to legitimize it theoretically. People looked at the world as an aggregate of individual units of energy, each striving blindly for its own preservation yet achieving a wonderful harmony with the rest through a universal self-equilibrating system. It was not difficult to extend this picture to apply to the power-plays of political entities. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679) provided the ideological justification for this move by claiming that the laws of political behaviour are only special cases of physical necessity. And since the force thereby identified as the basis of political life was the amoral nature of the new contemporary science—selfishly blind in its striving for self-preservation—the same could be expected of the politi-cal entities supposedly born of it. As the new theoreticians of the raison d'etat were to argue, the state ultimately had no other rule of conduct
ex-cept the interest to assert its power. All other considerations, moral and religious ones included, had to be subordinated to this fundamental rule.
Yet it was part of the complexity of the age that the same picture of na-ture that made for political absolutism could also support the individu-alism and the respect for conscience so much prized by Enlightenment culture. In fact it did. One had only to apply the image of autonomous units of energy seeking discharge to the individuals who make up any so-ciety to come up with a thoroughly liberal theory of the state. Starting from premises about the relationship of moral to physical laws essentially the same as Hobbes's, a philosopher like Spinoza (1632-77) could nevertheless draw the most liberal conclusions concerning freedom of conscience and expression. And the situation was further complicated
because of the continued widespread appeal of classical (essentially Stoic) ideas of cosmic reason and cosmic harmony, and the general tendency to apply them to the contemporary scientific picture of the universe—though in fact there was little in common between the mor-ally qualified world of the Stoic and the Newtonian universe.
All this meant that state absolutism and liberal ideals as well as liberal practices could often go hand in hand. In some of the smaller German lands absolutism meant little more than the despotism of some petty ty-rant intent on extracting as much taxation as possible from the impov-erished subjects for the sake of personal advantage.24 But in a state like Prussia, by contrast, the situation could be quite complex. Frederick William i had ruled the country between 1713 and 1740 and organized it strictly around the needs of the army. However, Frederick the Great (1740—86), his son and successor, turned out to be of much more re-fined temperament. A keen student of philosophy, one of his first acts upon ascending the throne was to recall Christian Wolff (1679-1754), whom his father had exiled from Prussia at the instigation of pietist the-ologians, to the University of Halle. During his reign he revitalized the existing Berlin Academy originally founded by Leibniz. It now assumed the name of Academic des Sciences et Belles Lettres. Frederick drew to it renowned scholars from all over Europe, Voltaire included. There is no doubt that his commitment to the ideas of the Enlightenment were genuine—even in matters concerning the duties of a ruler towards his subject—and that in times of personal tribulation he often drew conso-lation from a spirit of resignation nurtured by a deeply held scepticism. He was, in brief, a truly enlightened ruler. Yet for all his philosophy, Frederick the Great did not alter the policies of his father but on the contrary reinforced them. The state needed power in order to assert it-self as an autonomous entity. But since power required a strong army, the whole society had to be organized around the needs of maintaining one. Frederick the Great never questioned this imperative.
At least in continental Europe, then, state absolutism was part of the ethos of the eighteenth century, even though there were in that same ethos strong elements militating against it. It is in the context of this ten-sion that Jacobi's two political pieces referred to above must be read. In 1777 his friend and literary collaborator C. M. Wieland (1733-1813)
had argued that power is the only source of legitimacy for political au-thority.25 Right follows upon the ability to enforce obedience. Jacobi re-plied in the first piece with a scathing point-by-point rebuttal that was only published four years later.26 Wieland was wrong on all counts. Historically, he had misconstrued anthropological data regarding the origin of societies. Conceptually, he had failed to notice that moral law and natural necessity are parts of the one concept of natural right only in a very broad sense. Because of this failure he was forced to absurd con-clusions, such as that every human action is morally correct, given that it occurs, for, like any natural event, if it occurs it must presumably be governed by necessary laws. An attempt on the monarch's life is thus morally justified provided that it is successful—so regicide is always mor-ally justified. Wieland would also have to hold that the right of an indi-vidual to defend his life or property follows with the same necessity as that by which a heavy body falls to the ground, or certain seeds grow into big trees and others into smaller ones. But this is absurd. Contra Wieland,
Jacobi asserted that moral rights derive their force from the freedom of an individual, not from any consideration of natural laws. There is an ir-reducible difference between the domain of nature and that of freedom. This is Jacobi's crucial point. But even assuming per impossibile that
human conduct is purely a natural product, Wieland was still wrong in his defence of despotism as the most effective form of government. On the contrary, a philosopher like Spinoza, starting from purely naturalis-tic premises, had argued quite consistently to the very opposite conclusion—for it is unreasonable to expect that any individual, driven
25. See Wieland's essay, "Ueber das gottliche Recht der Obrigkeit" ("On the Divine Right of Authority"), which appeared in Der Teutsche Merkur, xx (1777): 119-45. Jacobi
told Hamann some years later that the essay "had revolted him." Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, Vols. v-vn, ed. Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1965-79), Vol. vi, Letter
#896, 17-18 November 1785, p. 147 (henceforth Hamann-Briefwechsel). See Levy-Bruhl, La Philosophic deJacobi (Paris: Allcan, 1894), pp. 126. Levy-Bruhl is wrong in saying that there
is an inconsistency in Jacobi, in that he wants to be a liberal but rejects the moral ophy of Kant. This objection makes sense only on the assumption that Kant's moral philos-ophy (as contrasted to Kant's personal attitudes and intentions) leads to liberalism. But this is an assumption open to challenge. Levy-Bruhl speaks from the point of view of the neo-Kantianism of the nineteenth century.
26. "Ueber Recht und Gewalt, oder philosophische Erwagung eines Aufsatzes von dem Herrn Hofrath Wieland, iiber das gottliche Recht der Obrigkeit" (anonymous, "Concerning Right and Power, or a Philosophical Consideration of an Essay by Councillor Wieland on the Divine Right of Authority"), Deutsches Museum, i (1781): 522-54; reprinted
as he is by private interest, can fairly recognize the welfare of a whole society.
Wieland's essay led to a cooling off of Jacobi's relations with him.27
Jacobi renewed his attack in 1782 with his second piece, on the occasion this time of the publication by the historian Johann von Miiller of a pamphlet entitled The Travels of the Popes,*8 in which, contrary to current
"enlightened" views, a positive revaluation of the role of the papacy in the Middle Ages was offered. Miiller himself was reacting against the Austrian emperor Joseph n's attempt to assert complete control over the Catholic church in his domains.2Q With Etwas das Lessing gesagt haft0
Jacobi came out in defence of Miiller's position. This was not because Jacobi felt any particular affinity toward the papacy,31 nor was it a
rever-sal of his secularism,32 but because he thought that its spiritual
despo-tism was much to be preferred over the secular, supposedly enlightened, despotism of the princes.33 At least the popes' authority over their
sub-jects presupposed a spiritual life on their part, whereas that of the mod-ern princes worked only to its destruction. The basic issue for Jacobi was how one conceives of humanity. On one conception the motive force be-hind man's actions are his passions, and these are purely natural sources
27. See Briefwechsel, 1.2, Letter #475, to Wieland, Middle of December, p. 69.
28. The pamphlet was originally published in French in 1782. Jacobi asked for a copy from Princess Gallitzin. See Briefwechsel, 1.3, Letter #774, to Princess Gallitzin, 10 May 1782,
p. 27; Letter #775, toj. Miiller, 14 May 1782, pp. 28-29. An anonymous German transla-tion, complete with a point-by-point refutatransla-tion, appeared shortly after. DieReisen derPdbste, aus dem Franzosischen. Neue rechtmdssige Auflage mil notigen Anmerkungen und einer Vorrede ver-mehrt (The Travels of the Popes, from the French; A New Legitimate Edition, Augmented with Required Comments and a Preface; n. p. p., 1783).
29. See Pupi, Alia soglia dett'eta romantica, pp. 1—3.
30. Subtitled Ein Commentar zu den Reisen der Pdpste (Something That Lessing Said, A Commentary on the Travels of the Popes). It was published in Berlin anonymously. See Werke,
11, p. 327.
31. See letter to J. A. J. Reimarus, 30 October 1782, Briefwechsel, 1.3, #825, pp. 72-73.
32. See Jacobi's letter (in French) to F. F. Fiirstenberg, in connection with the educa-tional reform that the latter was introducing in the Bishoprics of Minister and Cologne: "The principle you are establishing is indeed a wonderful triumph for sane reason: that in the colleges natural morality, or philosophy, and Christian morality ought to be taught sep-arately. Whenever we found the system of our obligation solely upon revealed religion, we almost always destroy the precious germ of morality in the hearts of children." Briefwechsel,
1.1, #203, i7july 1771, p. 118.
33. Kant takes the opposite position, perhaps deliberately, in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloflen Vernunft. Kant's Werke, Academy Edition, Vol. vi (Berlin: Reimer, 1907),
of energy seeking their discharge blindly. Reason's function in this con-text is simply to channel the energy thus released in the most efficient way consistent with the greatest discharge possible. On the opposing conception, action's motive force is reason itself and the spiritual desire for happiness that accompanies it. The passions are merely channels through which reason, which is an autonomous source of energy, makes its way, drawing indeed from their natural resources but for purposes that transcend them altogether. On the first conception, the laws of a state are merely formal devices that regulate the blind passions of the subjects from the outside. The state itself is a machine (as Hobbes had said) and its ruler necessarily a despot. On the second conception, ruler and state are subject instead to the rule of the same reason that also an-imates the citizens as individuals. External coercion has no place in this context, except to the extent that it is necessary to remove obstacles to the free exercise of individual rights. Jacobi sees these two models as exhausting the conceptual possibilities. On his interpretation, Wieland endorses the first, and he himself the second.
What strikes one in these early essays is how much Jacobi still assumes an essentially classical notion of reason, even though he is obviously thinking within the conceptual framework of a theory of individual lib-erties that only made sense in the context of eighteenth-century scien-tific ideology and eighteenth-century socio-economic debates. This explains why the Platonizing of a Hemsterhuis could have such a fasci-nation for him. For this early Jacobi, reason has nothing to do with the abstract concept of humanity in general, or with universal laws of con-duct, nor, for that matter, with the concept of an "individual" as such. It is the measure, rather, of right action and right feeling with respect to the individuals of one's immediate society, just as it was at the time of Aristides, Epaminondas, or Timeleon.34 Political upbringing means the
internalization of this measure through proper guidance and practice. It means moral education in the classical sense, in other words, and if Jacobi objects to the princes of his day ("Our popes," as he calls them),35
it is precisely because with their despotic policies they ignore the moral nature of their subjects and, in ignoring it, they corrupt it.
But despotism suffers from practical weaknesses as well, as Jacobi
34. See letter to Furstenberg, 17 July 1771, Briefwechsel, 1.1, #203, pp. 119-20.
35. See letter toj. Miiller, 14 May 1782, Briefwechsel, 1.3, #775, p. 28. Jacobi calls the
princes "popes" because they exhibited all the despotics traits of which the Aujklarer
points out. History shows that no single ruler can ever be clever enough to take into consideration all the contingencies that affect the workings of a state-machine. Sooner or later the passions of its members will over-flow the margins set by formal reason, and the state will be flooded from within. But above all the problem lies in the functional definition of what constitutes its external boundaries. On the assumption of the state as a machine, the most that one can do is to define its boundaries in terms of a number of square miles of territory. But who is to say that this square mileage is inviolate and that some neighbouring state will not at some point want to annex it? If we deny that the state is merely a machine and claim that it is rather an entity with some defining good or function, then a non-arbitrary limit can be found to its boundaries. But Jacobi had difficulty understanding what the good of a state could consist in, except the good of the individual members freely associated in it.
When Jacobi wrote Etwas das Lessing gesagt hat, he was already in
private correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn on the subject of Lessing's Spinozism, and it probably was with the ulterior motive of showing his affinities to Lessing that he quoted Lessing's words to the effect that whatever Febronius and his followers had said against the supremacy of the popes over the churches applied to the princes in twofold, nay threefold, measure as well. "Justinus Febronius" was the pen-name of the Austrian bishop Johann Nicolaus von Hontheim, who defended the autonomy of local churches against the supremacy of Rome. For both Lessing and Jacobi, to withdraw the churches from the authority of the popes meant in fact to subject them to the more repres-sive power of the princes. From Mendelssohn there came a reply in defence of the princes, and also the suggestion that Jacobi had not understood the spirit of Lessing's words.s6 Jacobi countered with an-other article.37
All in all the picture was that of a surprisingly free exchange of polit-ical ideas. Most remarkable of all was the fact that (as Jacobi himself was to note retrospectively in 1815) Jacobi's essay, though rejected byj. A.
36. "Gedanken Verschiedener iiber eine merkwiirdige Schrift" (anonymous; "Reflections of Various People concerning a Remarkable Writing"), Deutsches Museum, i
(1783): 3-9; see Werke, 11, pp. 389-411.
37. "Erinnerungen gegen die in den Januar des Museums eingeriickten Gedanken iiber eine merkwiirdige Schrift" (anonymous; "A Memorandum Regarding the Reflections Reported in the January Issue of the Museum Concerning a Remarkable Writing"), Deutsches Museum, i (1783): 3-9, 389-400. Cf. Werke, 11, pp 400-11.
H. Reimarus for publication in Hamburg because it might offend the Austrian royalty, was published in Berlin unaltered with the approval of the censors.38
We have again an example of the complexity of the Enlightenment, where despotism could harbour liberal dissent and Enlightenment phi-losophy provide the conceptual basis for a defence of despotic political practices. The situation was soon to change, however, and not in favour of liberalism. The events leading up to the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror naturally promoted a conservative reaction. But it would be a mistake to interpret this reaction simply as a defence reflex on the part of established despotism against the new freedoms being de-clared by the revolution. Both in practice and in ideology the new order turned out to be even more tyrannical than the old one, for the state was now identified with the will of a quasi-mystical entity called the "people," and individual citizens were therefore expected not only to obey it exter-nally but to feel loyalty towards it as well. The bond uniting them to the
"people" was supposed to be an internal one. The tyranny of the state was now extended over the domain of the mind as well, whereas accord-ing to the old order external obedience did not in any way imply per-sonal loyalty. In Germany the average burgher, not to speak of the peasants, had been notoriously indifferent to the fortunes of his prince. It is this new absolutism that the nineteenth century inherited and that, as we suggested above, made of Europe after the Restoration a totally new political entity.
Jacobi, who quickly became engrossed in the affairs of the revolu-tion,39 harboured suspicions about it from the beginning.40 It has been said that one motive behind Jacobi's rejection of it was fear of the threat that the revolution seemed to pose to private property.41 And the claim is very likelyjustified. But there certainly also were conceptual and moral
38. See Werke, n, p. 327. See letter toj. Miiller, 4 October 1782 (Briefwechsel, 1.3, #808,
pp. 54—55), which shows Jacobi in search of a publisher, and Letter #851, to C. K. W. Dohm, 3 December 1782 (p. 100), in which Jacobi praises "die Berliner PreBfreiheit."
39. Letter to Georg Forster, 12 November 1789, Auserlesener Briefwechsel, H, #181, p. 11:
"The French doings have totally immersed me in the political realm."
40. See letter to Reinhold of 7 November 1789, in Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Leben und litterarisches Wirken, nebst einer Auswahl von Briefen Kant's, Fichte's, Jacobi's, und andrer philosophirenden Zeitgenossen an ihn (K. L. Reinhold's Life and Literary Work, Together with a Selection of Letters of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Other Philosophers to Him), ed. Ernst Reinhold
(Jena: Fromann, 1825), p. 226 (henceforth, Reinhold's Leben).
reasons behind it, all consistent with Jacobi's past attitudes. At least since the Spinoza LifersJacobi was no longer using "reason" in a classical sense
but had rather given the term a pejorative meaning that he was to re-serve for it until the last phase of his development. "Reason" now meant for him the misuse of the power of abstraction. It stood for the tendency to assume as the principle of explanation or moral action a conceptual representation of reality that in fact has no meaning except by reference to the very matter it is expected to clarify or direct, and owes its appear-ance of intelligibility only to its lack of content. This poverty on its part makes it a particularly apt instrument for simplifying our perception of the world and thus satisfying our innate desire for order. But its prag-matic value apart, reason's ideal order is not to be mistaken for the re-quirements of actual existence. It is at best only a distant reflection of it, and to assume it instead as the source of intelligibility and value is in fact to invert the real order of things. It is like transforming reality into a nothingness by means of abstraction and then trying to retrieve the reality from the nothingness by means of purely conceptual means of inference.
This is in effect the objection that Jacobi raised in the fragment of a letter intended for Jean Francois Laharpe, member of the Academic franchise, in lygo,42 but repeated in other contexts as well. It is not sur-prising that people do not everywhere flock to the cry of liberty for all coming from Paris. For the freedom being proclaimed there is only an empty concept, and common people do not see how it connects with their individual needs and individual desires. Brave words indeed those of Mirabeau, according to which one has finally discovered "a fixed way of being governed by reason alone,"43 a feat accomplished by finally de-stroying the rule of the passions. But in fact this creation of a new society
ex nihilo is achieved at the price of ignoring "individual and person."
"Until now," Jacobi says, "reason never was alone for us; considered as a
separate entity or as pure reason, it appeared to us neither as legislative
nor as executive but simply as judging, simply as applying given
deter-minations to given objects. Reason is a superb bearer of light; by itself,
however, it would neither give light nor move."44
42. Bruchstuck eines Briefes an Johann Franz Laharpe, Mitglied der franzosischen Akademie (Fragment of a Letter to Johann Franz Laharpe, Member of the French Academy), published in Werke, n, pp. 513-44.
43. Jacobi cites in French. An Laharpe, Werke, n, p. 515.
It is interesting that Jacobi's objection to Laharpe is essentially the same as the one he had moved in 1787, only three years earlier, against the Berlin Aufklarer, who at the time were waging a campaign against the new religious piety promoted by such people as Lavater. Behind that piety the Aufklarer detected a hidden papist plot to subvert the principles of the universal religion of pure reason that they advocated.45 Jacobi made his counter-objection to the Aufklarer in an occasional piece pub-lished in the Deutsches Museum, where he has a fictional believer reply to
the charges of superstition levelled against him by an enlightened phi-losopher.46 The believer's basic point is that the philosopher might in-deed have the right to criticize faith. But the believer has just as much right not to accept the philosopher's portrayal of his faith. For at the ab-stract level of conceptualization on which philosophy operates he is in no position even to recognize the true nature of the object of his attack. He cannot see that there is nothing that he expresses about God and the world with his abstract concepts that the believer does not already know and has not already held on the strength of his historical faith from time immemorial. The philosopher also forgets that his reason too has a history—that it was born of the very faith he is now trying to discredit but on which he still relies even to be understood, let alone command as-sent. By attempting to destroy historical faith, philosophical reason thus runs the risk of undermining its own source of evidence. And this objec-tion to the Aufklarer was in effect also Jacobi's objecobjec-tion to Laharpe con-cerning the social experiment undertaken by the French Revolution. The enterprise was a self-defeating one, for in trying to establish a society
de novo exclusively based on the supposed needs of individuals in
gen-eral, the architects of the new social order had lost sight of the fact that
real individuals have the needs that they really have only because they are
all born in historically given societies. They can therefore respond to the call of enlightened needs only to the extent that they have been pre-pared for them by their particular society. By cutting itself loose from the past, the new society was actually destroying its own social material.
45. See below, footnote to p. 15 of David Hume.
46. "Einige Betrachtungen iiber den frommen Betrug and uber eine Vernunft, welche nicht die Vernunft 1st" ("A Few Comments Concerning Pious Fraud and a Reason Which Is No Reason"), Deutsches Museum, 1.2 (1788): 153-84; reproduced with some alterations
in Werke, n, pp. 457-59)-1 suspect that this dialogue between believer and philosopher is
behind Hegel's dramatic confrontation of reason with faith in chapter vi of the
So far as Jacob! was concerned, both the tyranny of the French Revolution and the despotism of the enlightened ruler were phenomena of one and the same abstractive reason. Constitutional monarchy ap-pears to have been his favourite form of government,47 and during the French Revolution he was clearly drawn to the conservative ideas of Burke.48 But then, we cannot expect a fully worked-out theory on the part ofJacobi here. It is not just that he eschewed systematization in prin-ciple. Jacobi's attitudes harboured an inconsistency that of necessity stood in the way of any clearly defined position. Signs of it could be seen even in his letter to Laharpe. For there, to Mirabeau's exalted picture of a society founded on the formal rule of reason Jacobi opposed the more pedestrian one of individuals held together, organically, as it were, by bonds forged dirough history on the basis of particular needs. This pic-ture of Jacobi's presupposed, however, a rational order in human affairs that would unfold out of the historical and biological basis of experience without any break with it. It presupposed, in other words, some sort of pre-knowledge rooted in muscle reflexes, so to speak, or in sexual drives, which Jacobi could then oppose to the rule-driven reason of the philos-ophers. Jacobi had in fact presupposed this (classical) notion of reason in his early political writings, when he had clearly and deliberately de-fended the idea of the liberal state without, however, espousing the ide-ology of abstractive rationality upon which the liberalism of his day was based. Now that the French Revolution was dramatically demonstrating the possibly catastrophic effects of this same rationality, one would have expected him to develop his own implicit theory of reason in open con-tradistinction to it. But Jacobi did nothing of the sort. Nor could he, for, as we shall see, Jacobi indulged in a purism of sentiment that was the exact counterpart of the purism of reason for which he was attacking the revolutionary ideologues. And this purism denied him the historical and organic basis for the kind of social rationality he was groping for—the net result being that, as the letter to Laharpe illustrates (and so too, as we shall see, his Woldemar},^ while he could clearly argue against what
47. See letter to C. K. W. Dohm, 3 December 1782, in the aftermath of the publication of his Etwas, das Lessinggesagt hat: "I won't allow that you should pass my essay for an
apol-ogy of democracy. I have made crystal clear, on the contrary, my indifference to any nom-inal property of the states, and condemned every arbitrary use of power. I have only praised
the rule of law." Briejwechsel, 1.3, #851, p. 100.
48. See letter to Rehberg, 28 November 1791, Auserlesener Briefwechsel, vol. n, #205,
pp. 68-69.
politically he stood opposed to, he could only fall back upon a statement of traditional values when it was a matter of defending what he stood for. But then, in this respect Jacobi was only reflecting inconsistencies that had been deeply rooted in the Enlightenment from the beginning.
THE LANDSCAPE: PHILOSOPHY
4. Many ingredients had gone into the making of the characteristically
German form that the Enlightenment assumed in the German lands, where it was blooming by the middle of the eighteenth century. The remote inspiration of the Enlightenment everywhere had been Descartes—more specifically, Cartesian rationalism, which had rid the world of final causes and thereby made the world itself into a machine. "Under mechanism I include every concatenation of purely efficient
causes," Jacobi was to define. "Such concatenation is eo ipso a necessary
one, just as a necessary concatenation, qua necessary, is by that very fact
a mechanistic one."50 This kind of rationalism was part and parcel of Enlightenment thought, yet, though always present, it by no means con-stituted its essence in Germany or anywhere else. For one thing, philos-ophers and theologians had been quick after Descartes to reintroduce finality by picturing the world as indeed organized according to mech-anistic lines of causality, but for purposes that God had formulated and that lay in his mind. Of course, this kind of external finality had very little if anything in common with Aristotelian ends, which made up the very nature of things. It determined the whole of reality formally without in-trinsically affecting the determination of any of its parts (which had to be left to efficient causality). In Germany, however, Cartesian rational-ism had meant most of all Leibniz's (1646—1714) version of it. And in this version, though the Cartesian picture of a universe in which every part reflected and balanced every other part was preserved, the harmony of the whole thus established was conceived as induced, so to speak, from within each of the parts, because of a part's specific intensive de-gree of life. The result was a peculiar synthesis of Cartesian mechanism and Aristotelian vitalism, and this synthesis, in the systematic and highly scholasticized form given to it by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), became the basis in Germany of Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza (1632-77) also entered into the picture, albeit belatedly. Although perhaps the most consequential of all Cartesians, he was indirectly to provide the
petus for the emergence of early Romanticism because of his quasi-mystical insistence on the immanent presence of God in the universe. Leibniz must be mentioned a second time because, with the posthumous publication in 1765 of his Nouveaux Essais sur Ventendement humain, he made a second entrance on the scene, so to speak. And this time he came equipped with a vitalistic theory of the mind in which the uncon-scious figured prominently as a dimension of conuncon-sciousness itself. When Herder or Goethe (andjacobi himself in the David Hume) reacted to the contemporary vogue for mechanistic explanations of mental processes, and when they strove for a more organic view of nature, they were draw-ing from a vitalistic tradition deeply rooted in German thought.
More to the point for our immediate purposes, however, the Enlightenment was also born of a reaction against the formalism of Cartesian rationalism. The rationalists came under attack because of their utter disregard for experimentation and sense experiences and their naive pretence that they could derive knowledge of the real world from the mind a priori. The inspiration for this new recognition of the importance of empirical knowledge had come from England—from John Locke's (1632—1704) theory of mind based on the primacy of sen-sations, and from Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) experimental method in physics.
By the middle of the century, therefore, Wolffs metaphysics was al-ready falling into disrepute in Germany.51 This is not to say that his style
of philosophy died out in Germany. But, although always faithful to its metaphysical ancestry, Wolffian-style philosophy remained alive pre-cisely because it began to respond to the issues raised by English empir-icism and eventually incorporated many of its elements. Kantian critique was a case in point. According to Kant's explicit testimony, his critical work was inspired by the desire to establish metaphysics on a sure con-ceptual foundation. To the extent that Kant still shared in the belief that science is foundational and systematic that is the hallmark of Wolffs metaphysics, his critique fell on the side of the Wolffian tradition.52 But
according to Kant's equally explicit testimony, he had been awakened from his "dogmatic slumber" by Hume's scepticism;53 much of his
cri-51. Though in all fairness to Wolff it must be said that he had already made plenty of room in his rationalism for a role to be played by the senses.
52. Kritik derreinen Vernunft, and ed. (Riga: Hartnoch, 1787), p. xxxvi.
53. Prolegomena zu einerjeden kunftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics;
tique, moreover, was intended to restrict science to empirical knowl-edge. Here was a case in which Wolffian metaphysical assumptions and classical metaphysical problems were being reasserted indeed, but in the light of English empiricism.
The English influence had come to Germany through various chan-nels, including France. Since the seventeenth century French culture had established a massive presence in the German territories, where it had found a natural ground of expansion because of the cultural vac-uum caused there by the Thirty Years' War. The French language had become the accepted medium of communication in the chancelleries, and in the Prussia of Frederick the Great it was the language of the court. Since Frederick had imported French experts to introduce French methods of tax collection in the kingdom, the language had also filtered through to the lower echelons of the bureaucracy. (Hamann was bitterly to resent the petty tyranny of these French tax experts, to whom he was subjected first as translator and then as a minor official in the customs house in Konigsberg). The French language was also adopted by the German nobility for daily use. Until 1778 state minister Furstenberg and the Princess Gallitzin (both friends of Jacobi) carried on their thick cor-respondence, which was entirely dedicated to personal and even inti-mate matters, in French; and when in 1780 they shifted to the use of their mother tongue, they did so deliberately, knowing quite well that they were conforming to new trends in Germany.54
Along with the French language there had come into Germany French tastes and French ideas. As it happened, by the middle of the eighteenth century the passion for things English had become almost a craze in France, and this passion too was exported into Germany. The first to fuel it had been Voltaire (1694-1778). Originally an orthodox rationalist, Voltaire made his acquaintance with the philosophy and the political institutions of England during an early exile there (1726-29), from which he returned to France totally converted to the historico-empirical study of nature and the human mind and (a refugee as he had been from the intolerance of the French establishment) enthusiastically convinced of the merits of political, juridical, and economic liberalism. During the following fifty-odd years he translated these newly acquired beliefs into a relentless, often satirical, always brilliant attack on the
ste-54. See Gisel Oehlert, "Fiirstenbergs Briefe an die Fiirstin Gallitzin," in Furstenberg, Furstin Gallitzin, und ihr Kreis, Erich Trunk (Miinster: Aschendorff, 1955), pp. 7-14:
