The s: Jacobi and Reinhold were given in Jena in and , and the literary journal founded and edited there – the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung – became the widest read intell
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Jacobi and Reinhold
’
One of the great and striking overall effects of Kant’s philosophical achievement was the way in which he had managed to pull off one
of the most influential and lasting redescriptions of the history of phi-losophy In one fell swoop, Kant had managed to convince his public that the great body of the history of philosophy had consisted in one
of two only partially successful (and necessarily finally unsatisfactory) approaches to human knowledge and action: on the one hand, there were the rationalists who claimed that we know nothing of things-in-themselves except what we discover through pure reason and logic; on the other hand, there were the empiricists who said that we know nothing
of things-in-themselves except that which we gather from our experience
of them Kant’s solution was to say that both camps were partially right and partially wrong, and that his “critical” philosophy was the correct synthesis between them Not only did it offer a better theory, it also explained why there had only been a see-saw and stand-off between ra-tionalismand empiricismuntil the Kantian philosophy had been itself developed
Kant’s assertion of the autonomy of reason – of its capacity to set standards not only for itself but for everything else – had some clear and immediate practical implications In Kant’s day, the theological faculty typically held sway over the other faculties and particularly over philos-ophy Professors in theology were typically also professors in philosophy and vice versa, and the theological faculty had to approve the books used
in the philosophy classes (although, of course, not vice versa) The image
of philosophy as an ineffectual underling – as presenting, in Kant’s dev-astating metaphor, “the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath” – was to be replaced by Kant’s
having finally established philosophy as a science alongside other already
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emerging and established sciences. Indeed, so Kant was to argue in a
book on the nature of the university (The Conflict of the Faculties, , his last published book), in modern times the philosophical faculty had finally developed itself to the point where it no longer needed to be re-garded simply as a preparatory study for other subjects (especially for theology); having become an autonomous faculty (mirroring reason’s
au-tonomy), it could even lay claim to being the central faculty of a modern
university Through his radical revolution in philosophy, Kant was also calling, quite specifically, for a revolution in higher education that also threatened to overturn the long-standing structure of authority in the German university system
This was, however, one instance where Kant’s own conclusions had already been anticipated by his followers before he had publicly reached them By, the faculty at the university at Jena was engaged in pre-cisely that project almost thirteen years before Kant had made explicit his own views on the matter of the place of philosophy in university education Jena, a very small town of artisans and an insignificant uni-versity, had suddenly emerged as the center of the new revolution in philosophy and in German intellectual life in general A good bit of the credit for this had to go to the newly installed minister at the court in Weimar, Johann Wolfgang Goethe himself; Goethe made Jena into a center of free intellectual inquiry, something almost unheard of in its time in Germany, and its university quickly became the model of a re-formed, even “Kantian” university The rise of Jena fit the temper of the times well: the dominant opinion in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) was that universities were outmoded, medieval institutions, staffed by tenured professors who taught students useless knowledge, and whose traditions of drunken student revelry were detrimental to the stu-dents’ moral health; and the conventional wisdom was that it just might
be better to abolish the universities and replace themwith more forward-looking academies and institutes that would train students in more useful skills (France actually did that for a while after the Revolution in.) Against that trend, Jena offered up a vision of the union of teaching and research at a single institution, an idea of bringing serious students into contact with the best minds of the time working on the latest ideas, and, even more striking, the linchpin of the whole institution was to be the
philosophical and not the theological faculty In fact, the very first
pub-lic lectures ever delivered on Kantian philosophy (besides Kant’s own)
See Critique of Pure Reason, = .
Trang 3The s: Jacobi and Reinhold were given in Jena in and , and the literary journal founded
and edited there – the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung – became the widest read
intellectual journal in Germany, serving to further disseminate the new Kantian ideas
Among the public that read journals like the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung,
Kant began being discussed with the same intensity as novels and more popular literature Part of the explanation of Kant’s popularity had to
do with the tensions within the German intellectual scene itself Besides the dry-as-dust Wolffians with their scholasticized modes of thinking, and the small group of people influenced by the materialism of the French Enlightenment, there were the proportionately large class of
Popularphilosophen, the “popular philosophers,” who argued
philosoph-ical issues in a manner accessible to a general, educated public and who typically made a living (or at least part of it) off their literary endeavors Moreover, the German “popular philosophers” tended to champion the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular the school of Scottish
“common-sense” philosophy and its corresponding versions of episte-mological and moral realism (along with its realism in theological mat-ters) (To be sure, though, many “popular philosophers” championed Rousseauian notions of “nature” and virtue; indeed, it would falsify the whole period to underestimate the influence of Rousseau on German thought during that time.)
However, growing legions of Pietists, old style evangelical believers
in the literal truth of the Bible, and conservative theologians were in-creasingly on the attack against the importation of Enlightenment ideas, especially as they came to be applied to matters like biblical scholar-ship; and hovering in the background of all the various expositions of Scottish common-sense philosophy was the figure of David Hume, al-ways in that context interpreted as a dangerous skeptic with the effrontery
to throw the world and its religious underpinnings into question Against Hume, the “popular philosophers” liked to invoke the common-sense realismof thinkers like Thomas Reid as offering the appropriate anti-dote to the anti-Enlightenment religious reaction to modernity in gen-eral However, anti-Enlightenment philosophers, such as J G Hamann (–), increasingly invoked Hume himself as a proof that the pre-tensions of the Enlightenment as a whole were in fact only prepre-tensions; the irony behind this – Hume was a proudly self-professed member of the Enlightenment’s own party – was only all too evident (The story of Hamann’s friendship with and eventual estrangement from the very young professor Kant over the issue of Hume is itself a fascinating piece of
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intellectual history.) Among the “popular philosophers,” Kant’s system came to be seen as an answer to Hume’s otherwise corrosive skepticism, and thus much of the early discussion of it centered on whether he had indeed satisfactorily “refuted” Hume (and about what that might even mean)
In the mid-s, however, Kant (and the Jena school) had to deal with the blistering attacks coming from F H Jacobi; those attacks, the rise of the faculty at Jena, and the Revolution in created an in-tensely combustible mixture Kant had offered what at first seemed like the right solution for the conflicted self-understandings of the German reading public The deadening conformism of day-to-day life, increas-ingly experienced by the generation born between and as in-tolerable and irrelevant, was only the sensible covering of a more radical, non-empirical freedom that reconciled itself with faith while implicitly calling for a reorganization of church life and theological teaching The fate of Kantianismthus seemed to hang together with the fate of the pos-sibility of reform in Germany that would somehow evade (what seemed fromthe outside to be) the disorder and bedlamtaking place in France
: One of the key figures to use Hume to argue against what he saw as the pretensions of the Enlightenment was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (–
), who burst onto the literary scene in as a key participant
in one of the most widely followed disputes of the day, the so-called
“pantheismdispute.” Although the dispute did not originally concern Kantian thought itself, its application to Kantianismwas clear enough eventually to draw even Kant himself into the debate, and, after the initial debate had settled down, Jacobi got around to turning his critical talents onto Kant himself
Jacobi was born into a family of merchants, and, although he be-came fairly successful at business himself, his heart was never really in it, and he withdrew frombusiness activities as soon as he had managed to put his financial holdings in good order By his own description, Jacobi had been interested in religious matters since he was a child (not en-tirely to his parents’ pleasure), and he used his fortune to establish an estate at Pempeldorff (near D ¨usseldorf ) at which he was able to attract
The standard account in English of the relation between Hamann and Kant is to be found in
Frederick C Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, ), ch .
Trang 5The s: Jacobi and Reinhold such luminaries as Goethe and Diderot to visit (He also married Betty von Clermont, herself the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who shared his intellectual interests, and brought no small amount of capital her-self into the family.) By all accounts, Jacobi was a gracious and affable personality
Although Jacobi has a reputation in our times as a kind of dark figure
in German intellectual life and as having been one of the key instigators of German irrationalism, such a view is more of a caricature than it is fair to his thought.He instead belongs to that line of thinkers, of whomPascal
is another prime representative, who are skeptical of reason’s capacity to provide its own justification, who think that the drive of reason to explain everything in its own terms is a chimera, and who, like Pascal, think that reason ultimately takes its first principles from the “heart,” not from its own cognitive activities. Jacobi did not completely scorn reason; he simply thought that faith in reason to solve all of life’s problems was misplaced, and he argued passionately for that view Jacobi’s thought was in effect a protest against and rejection of any concept of “religion within the limits of reason alone” and in particular against the idea that
a rational “system” of philosophy could adequately capture what was at stake in human existence Jacobi’s own thought, however, was always too much tainted with the sentimentalism of the time Pascal tends toward a more “existential” line of thought; Jacobi always tends to sentimentalism With the publication in of his book, On Spinoza’s Doctrines in Letters
to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, Jacobi became a luminary in German
intel-lectual life The setting for the book had to do with the wide, although
The basis for Jacobi’s bad reputation comes from both Heinrich Heine and Isaiah Berlin Heine
famously said of Jacobi: “The most furious of these opponents of Spinoza was F H Jacobi who
is occasionally honored by being classed among German philosophers He was nothing but a quarrelsome sneak, who disguised himself in the cloak of philosophy and insinuated himself among the philosophers, first whimpering to them ever so much about his affection and sofheartedness, then letting loose a tirade against reason,” Heinrich Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion
and Philosophy in Germany,” in Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays (eds Jost
Hermand and Robert C Holub) (New York: Continuum Books, ), p Isaiah Berlin in his well-known piece, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism” – in Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press,), pp – – made much the same point as Heine A more balanced picture can be found in George di Giovanni, “Introduction: The Unfinished Philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,” in George di
Giovanni (ed and trans.), F H Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press,), pp –; Beiser, The Fate of Reason, chs , ; and Beiser,
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, ch..
In Pascal’s formulation: “We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our
heart It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do
with it, tries in vain to refute them,” Pascal, Pens´ees, trans A J Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, ), p (No , Lafuma edition).
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still not completely public, discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy Kant had
tantalizingly spoken in the Introduction to the first Critique of the two distinct “stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and
and repeatedly in the Critique of Judgment he spoke about the
indetermi-nate and indeterminable supersensible substrate of appearances that is
“neither nature nor freedomand yet is linked with the basis of freedom.” This naturally raised the issue for many people as to whether Kant was claiming that appearances and things-in-themselves, sensibility and un-derstanding, and even nature and freedomwere perhaps only different
aspects of some one underlying, “absolute” reality Indeed, Kant himself
had seemed to say as much. If so, then that suggested that Kant and Spinoza were not that far apart, for Spinoza had held that the one sub-stance of the world appeared to us in different aspects – for example, as mental events and as extended matter Spinoza had quite explicitly held
a “monist” position: there was only one basic reality, and there were two very different ways in which it manifested itself to us
Kant, of course, had dismissed as “transcendental illusion” Spinoza’s own claimto be able to grasp this one substance by pure thought, since Spinoza’s cognitive claims clearly went beyond the boundaries of pos-sible experience and thus in Kantian terms were without any cognitive significance However, many people found Kant’s own rigid distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves too much to swallow and were already looking for ways to reinterpret Kant so as to keep the key Kantian doctrines of knowledge, autonomy, and moral duty without hav-ing to swallow the whole Kantian metaphysics of thhav-ings-in-themselves – just as legions of Kant scholars continue to do nowadays In that context,
a Spinozistic “neutral monism” not only seemed the most promising way
of accomplishing such a task, it also seemed to be something for which Kant himself had opened the door in his own speculations about the
“supersensible substrate” in his third Critique.
However, in Germany of the last part of the eighteenth century, in-voking Spinoza was in effect raising a red flag For Spinoza, God, as identical with the one substance of the world, was everywhere and in
Critique of Pure Reason, = See Critique of Judgment, §.
The often-cited passage fromthe Critique of Pure Reason to support such a dual aspect interpretation
of Kant is the following: “But if our Critique is not in error in teaching that the object is to be
taken in a twofold sense (Bedeutung), namely as appearance as thing in itself then there is no
contradiction in supposing the one and the same will is in the appearance, that is, in its visible
acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet, as belonging to a thing
in itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free,”xxviii.
Trang 7The s: Jacobi and Reinhold everything, and the logical conclusion that this was therefore incompati-ble with any doctrine of a personal God – and therefore with the whole of Christianity – was only too obvious In fact, the incompatibility of Spinozismwith orthodox Christianity led many quite explicitly to equate Spinozistic “pantheism” with atheism per se
Independently of the discussion surrounding Kant, Jacobi entered the German debate in the context of the emerging discussion of Spinozism
in Germany, but his own contribution to the debate was ultimately to change the way Kant was debated The background to Jacobi’s book had to do with some letters exchanged between Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn, a widely (and justifiably) revered philosopher of the time After Gotthold EphraimLessing’s death, his old friend, Mendelssohn, had been planning to write a laudatory piece on him Hearing of this, Jacobi wrote to Mendelssohn to tell himof a conversation he had had with Lessing in which Lessing confessed to being a Spinozist Mendelssohn, astounded by this news, exchanged a series of impassioned letters with Jacobi on the matter Jacobi then put his recollections of conversations with Lessing, some other thoughts of his on free will and knowledge, and his letters to Mendelssohn into book formand published themin; the ensuing “pantheismdebate,” as it was called, electrified the German intellectual public The forbidden – Spinozism– had come out into the open, and none other than a cultural giant such as Lessing had been allegedly shown to be a Spinozist
However, rather than sinking Lessing’s reputation, the controversy only elevated Spinoza’s This did not particularly bother Jacobi, who took himself at least to have brought the key issues to light; he summed
up his position as the theses that “Spinozismis atheism,” “Every av-enue of demonstration ends up in fatalism,” and “Every proof
presup-poses something already proven, the principle of which is Revelation,”
and thus “faith is the element of all human cognition and activity.”To show this, Jacobi appealed to the old argument that any demonstration requires some principles from which it can be demonstrated, and that, in turn, requires a stopping point, a set of first principles (or a first principle) that cannot itself be proved Such first principles, Jacobi argued, could only be vouchsafed in some kind of “immediate certainty.”Playing on
the slack in the word “belief ” (Glauben) as indicating both secular belief
See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza,” in F H Jacobi, The Main
Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” (ed and trans George di Giovanni), pp –; Briefe,
pp –.
The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” p. ; Briefe, p .
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and religious faith, Jacobi concluded that all our knowledge must rest
therefore on some kind of faith: “Through faith we know that we have a body, and that there are other bodies and other thinking beings outside
of us A veritable and wondrous revelation!” And if our belief in our own bodies and in a mechanical, natural world is ultimately grounded
in “faith” (or “immediate certainty”), then why not go the whole route and accept on faith the existence of a personal God? Indeed, all the problems encountered providing grounds for such knowledge – whether
it be belief in physical objects or, more particularly, belief in God – can
only be solved by making a “leap,” as Jacobi put it, a salto mortale (quite
literally, a “mortal somersault”), and only in such a “leap” can we be confident of our own radical freedomand of there being anything of enduring value that could claimour allegiance.
Jacobi’s argument rested on an “inferentialist” presupposition, itself based on a “regress” argument, that was also to be equally assumed
by many of the authors writing in the period up until, and which was itself to come under attack in that same period in the debate sur-rounding Kantianismand the alleged “post-Kantian” development of Kant’s views The regress argument (which says that we must have some stopping point somewhere to our justifications) rests on the principle that all “epistemic” dependence (all relations of dependence that have
to do with “grounding” or justifying some claim to knowledge) is always
“inferential” dependence The basic idea is that if one believes some-thing, then one must be able to justify that belief, and one can justify it only if one can show that it follows logically fromsome other true belief
or proposition; the logic of that position drives one inexorably to the
con-clusion that there must therefore be something that one knows without
having to know anything else, some proposition or set of propositions
that one just knows without having to deduce it fromanything else That
is given to us by the “heart,” by “feeling,” since it cannot obviously be given to us by “reason” (which sets the regress into motion in the first place) The early Romantics, writing only a few years after Jacobi first dropped his bombshell with his book on Spinoza and themselves greatly under Jacobi’s influence, in effect threw that presupposition into ques-tion Although they did not formulate the matter in quite this way, they effectively challenged the basic presupposition by holding that there is a difference between the evidence for a claimand all the other factors that also must hold for that evidence to count as evidence; indeed, so they
The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” p. ; Briefe, p .
The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” p. ; Briefe, p .
Trang 9The s: Jacobi and Reinhold were to argue, for us to know anything, we must be in possession of a large amount of pre-reflective knowledge that we cannot even in princi-ple articulate This pre-reflective knowledge is certainly not “evidence” for ordinary epistemic claims, but it must be in play if we are to be able effectively to redeemany such claims in the first place That supposition and the way it was found to be unsatisfactory, so it turned out, gave rise
to a good bit of the subsequent debate
In,however, Jacobifolloweduphisdiscussionwiththeremarkably
titled book, David Hume on Faith; or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue, a book
that, despite its title, had virtually nothing to do with Hume or Hume’s doctrines In some ways, the real focus of attack in that book – made explicit in the “supplement” at the end of the book, “On Transcendental Idealism” – was Kant himself; and the main charge against Kant was devastatingly simple: Kant claimed that things-in-themselves caused our sensations (which then get synthesized into intuitions); but causality was
a transcendental condition of experience, not a property of things-in-themselves; therefore, even the great Kant had contradicted himself
We must therefore conclude, Jacobi argued, that Kant had not in fact refuted Hume (interpreted as a skeptic) and that the only proper response
to Hume’s thoroughgoing skepticism was the salto mortale To that end,
near the beginning of the book, Jacobi cited a long passage fromHume’s
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, citing with particular relish the
passage where Hume says: “And in philosophy we can go no farther
than assert that belief is something felt by the mind which distinguishes
the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.” Curiously,
by invoking Hume (whom Kant claimed to have refuted) in a manner calculated to have little to do with Hume himself, Jacobi was trying to justify Pascal’s skepticismabout reason against the claims of the Kantian
“rationalist” critical philosophy
In David Hume (as in all his writings), Jacobi argued that the only really
sensible position is that of ordinary realism(as the belief that objects exist independently of our experiences of them) coupled with the neces-sity of having a “faith” in the way the world “reveals” itself to us and the eschewal of any need for “system” in philosophy (In that context,
Jacobi used the religiously loaded term, “Offenbarung,” “revelation.”) Life
is more about experience than pure reason, and any attempt to rely “on reason alone” can only have disastrous consequences for “life.” Indeed, once the European way of life had taken the Cartesian turn and decided that it needed to prove the existence of objects independent of our expe-riences of them, as Jacobi put it, “they were left with mere subjectivity,
with sensation And thus they discovered idealism” – and even worse,
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once Europeans subjected religion to the demand for scientific, rational proof, “they were left with merely logical phantoms And in this way they discovered nihilism.”( Jacobi in fact coined the term, “nihilism.”) The stakes in this debate, so Jacobi had argued, were really quite high
In the second, edition of On Spinoza’s Doctrines in Letters to Herr
Moses Mendelssohn, Jacobi extended his criticismand made his position
even more clear Kant had proposed that reason must by its own nature seek “the unconditioned,” although it can never satisfy itself in this regard; Jacobi by contrast claimed that we can only become conscious of
the unconditioned when we elect to make a salto mortale The scientific
un-derstanding of nature itself consists in a set of premises and conclusions, and each premise in turn is itself the conclusion of other premises Thus,
as Jacobi put it, “as long as we can conceptually comprehend, we re-main within a chain of conditioned conditions Where this chain ceases, there we also cease to conceptually comprehend, and the complex that
we call nature also ceases the unconditional must [thus] lie outside of
nature and outside every natural connection with it therefore this
un-conditioned must be called the supernatural.”The lines of battle had been drawn: either one opted for Enlightenment rationalism, with its concomitant skepticism and ensuing nihilism; or for faith, which could
only be attained in a salto mortale Kantianismhad already been under
attack from the old guard for its dramatic claim to have demonstrated the failure of the previous rationalist and empiricist metaphysics; now Jacobi had upped the ante considerably
, “ ,”
In that context, hot on the heels of Jacobi’s writings, another series
of articles appeared in (and in in book formas Letters on
the Kantian Philosophy) defending Kantian thought; not surprisingly, this
occurred at Jena, the birthplace of the “new university.” The author, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, briefly occupied the highest points of German philosophy and helped set the stage for the rapid development of post-Kantian thought in thes and early s Reinhold himself was born
in in Vienna in the reign of Joseph II of Austria, the paradigmatic enlightened despot of his time In , he became a Jesuit novitiate,
The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” p. ; David Hume ( edition), p .
The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” p. ; Briefe, p .