The 1780s - the immediate post-Kantian reaction Jacobi and Reinhold

 
The s: the immediate post-Kantian reaction:
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

 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
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,  = .
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
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 pretensions;
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
 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
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. .
The 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 philosophyand 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).

 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
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 understand-
ing, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown root,”

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 things-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.
The 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..