F. H. Jacobi and the Development of German Idealism

F. H. Jacobi and the Development of German Idealism DALE EVARTS SNOW COMMENTATORS ON German Idealism from Hegel to the present have been fond of claiming that the philosophical movement between Kant and Hegel displayed a logic and demonstrated a necessary unfolding of thought to a degree seldom found in the history of philosophy. Most commonly, the roots of this supposedly inevitable development are said to be found in the incompleteness and inconsistencies of Kant's critical philosophy; Kant's successors' attempts to remedy these defects, it is claimed, resulted in the development of their increasingly extreme positions, culminating in the collapse of idealism itself. The chief difficulty with these interpretations is that even the most assiduous study of Kant fails to explain a significant number of the imporThe following abbreviations are used in this article: Scholz Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischenJacobi und Mendelssohn, ed. Heinrich Scholz. Nendrucke seltener philosophischer Werke. Hrsg. yon der Kantgesellschaft , vol. 6 (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 19t6). Jacobi F.H. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Werke. (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer d. Jfinger, a8t2-1815). Schelling F. W. J. Schelling, Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schr6ter (Munich Jubilee Edition [6 main volumes r 1-6] Munich: C. S. Beck, t927, 1979). The original pagination is reproduced in F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, tr. and commentary by Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 198o), from which the translations in this article are taken. Fichte J.G. Fichte, Fichtes Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., a971). The original pagination is reproduced in Fichte:Scienceof Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre ). With the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197o, a982), from which the translations in this article are taken. [397] 398 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~5:3 .JULY 1987 tant concerns of his immediate successors. It is my contention that the rethinking of the scope and role of philosophy which occupied much of the energies of later idealists is related only to a limited extent to the criticism of Kant, and cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the catalytic role played by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the so-called pantheism controversy in Germany. If Jacobi is remembered at all in standard histories of philosophy, it is usually for his criticism of Kant's concept of the thing-in-itself; however, I find his attacks on both Kant's and Spinoza's theories of intuition to have been his most influential contribution to the history of philosophy. F. H. Jacobi's Spinoza-Biichlein, ~ the first published result of his quarrel with Moses Mendelssohn, was unquestionably the beginning of the renewal of interest in Spinoza in the 178os. In that work and in "David Hume fiber den Glauben oder Realismus und Idealismus" (1787) as well as other shorter works, Jacobi developed his interpretation of and attack on Spinoza. His polemic against Spinoza became a general attack on rationalism, which in its turn produced the extremely influential notion that all philosophical systems could be classified as one of two diametrically opposed types (speculative or realistic). Finally, the notion that all philosophical systems had to belong to one of the two basically opposed types led to a heightened focus on the role of intuition in philosophy, for it was this, in Jacobi's view, which constituted the most basic difference between philosophies. Jacobi employed his views on rationalism, speculative philosophy, and intuition to criticize Kant; all three elements ofJacobi's Kantkritik were widely discussed and influential on Kant's contemporaries as they struggled to come to terms with the Critical philosophy . Today the understanding of all three has substantially changed from that of the late eighteenth century, and if it cannot be claimed that Jacobi was himself a philosopher of the first rank, still he influenced and formed the way in which the generation after Kant would understand their own philosophical task to a much greater extent than is presently recognized. It cannot be denied that the effort to find something approaching a characteristic philosophical standpoint in Jacobi leads to a certain sympathy with writers such as Ernst Cassirer, who see him as a polemicist or intellectual troublemaker...