Jacobi on Kant, or Moral Naturalism vs. Idealism

Abstract

F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819) is a central member of what one might call, borrowing a phrase from Dieter Henrich, the “constellation” of figures, ideas, and debates that makes up German Idealism.¹ Already well-known through his chapters and literary works, Jacobi burst upon the philosophical scene in 1785 with his Letters concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza.² Jacobi’s epochal intervention came just as Kant’s critical philosophy was emerging into public view — as if Jacobi had the interests of future historians of philosophy already in mind. The reception of Kant’s thought in the 1790s and beyond was profoundly shaped by Jacobi’s debate with the key Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Jacobi’s philosophical writings, including David Hume on Faith (1787), his open letter Jacobi to Fichte (1799), and On Divine Things and Their Revelation (1811), alongside his novels Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar (which received their more or less final forms in 1792 and 1796, respectively), secured for Jacobi a leading role in the intellectual and cultural life of the era. Add to these his voluminous correspondence with figures such as Hamann, Herder, Fichte, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as his on-again-off-again relationship with Goethe, and it is no exaggeration to say that Jacobi is literally present everywhere in this pivotal philosophical period.³ His career spans the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang era, and the rise of Romanticism, and yet Jacobi himself cannot be easily assimilated into any of these intellectual trends.