Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Formation and influences

Jacobi exerted during several years of the marketing activities before being devoted to the literature and philosophy. It occupied several places in the administration, was to advise in Düsseldorf and became in 1804, adviser of Bavaria and chair Academy of Science of Munich. It was Franc-maçon as from 1765 and was treasurer of the Cabin “the Perfect Friendship”. It was critical with regard to the French revolution, in which it saw the political counterpart of the Nihilisme that it associated with the Rationalisme.

Jacobi took note of works of Charles Bonnet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His/her older brother Johann Georg Jacobi presented to him Christoph Martin Wieland with which it published as from 1773 the review Der Teutsche Merkur . He also maintained the friendly relations with Frans Hemsterhuis, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Work

Jacobi published a great number of works of Philosophie and Littérature. Like philosopher, it was an adversary of Kant, and proposed mystical doctrines which based any philosophical knowledge a priori on perceptions of the understanding, suprasensible body by which the heart can reach the most important truths immediately, God, Providence, the immortality of the heart. It was made the defender of a philosophy of the feeling and was presented in the form of a severe critic with regard to any form of Rationalisme. Its writings do not present a systematic form, but consist rather of collections of letters or conversation. Its arguments with Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte or Friedrich Schelling remained famous.

The remarks where Lessing acknowledges being a disciple of Spinoza led Jacobi to study in-depth this author. The result of this reflection was that philosophy, when she undertakes to know or prove the infinite one by means of a finished understanding, necessarily leads to reduce the divine one to something of finished. This is why it is necessary to give up the rationalist project to prove the existence of God; the philosophical will to remain attached to rationalism could on the contrary lead only to the Mécanisme, the Fatalisme and the Athéisme (as it is the case at Spinoza). These are these reflections that Jacobi developed in particular in its correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn, which caused to cause an renewed interest for the philosophy of Spinoza in the years which followed.

There however exists according to Jacobi a type of certainty which does not need rational proof: it is of the belief or the faith. This one is thus the highest authority of which any knowledge proceeds - that it is sensitive or suprasensible. This authority is indicated by the term of Vernunft (“reason”) included/understood like intuitive faculty, and this in opposition to the Verstand (“understanding”) included/understood like discursive faculty to know. Jacobi was regarded thus by no means as an irrationalist, but it held on the contrary its concept of certainty of the belief for something of strictly rational.

Jacobi contributed finally important shares in the field of the economic thinking, where it is inspired in particular by the work of Adam Smith. He is regarded as the first thinker German Libéral.

Its principal philosophical works are:

Letters on the doctrines of Spinoza (1785)
Of Hume and the faith, or the idealism and realism (1787)
Letter with Fichte (1799)

Jacobi is also the author of the famous novel Woldemar , in which it fought the morals of the personal interest.

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