FRIEDRICH HEINRICH JACOBI. — Philosopher, born in Düsseldorf on 25 January 1743, died in Munich on 10 March 1819. He cultivated literary and philosophical studies, but was not a professional philosopher nor a systematic thinker. Yet he possessed a strong intellectual coherence that enabled him to bind together, in an ideal unity, his rich and brilliant output around a solid core of philosophical and moral convictions.
He made his debut with two novels, *Allwill* and *Woldemar* (1772), which were intended as a war cry against the axioms of the Enlightenment (v.). In the *Briefe an M. Mendelssohn über die Lehre des Spinoza* he took a stand against the atheism of the Amsterdam philosopher; in *David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus* (1787) he laid the fideistic premises of his realism; subsequently he took a position against Fichte (*Sendschreiben an Fichte*, 1799), against the *Critique of Pure Reason* (*Über das Unternehmen des Kritizismus*, 1802), against Schelling, and against Hegel. To Kant he reproached for having founded the moral conception on the formalism of law and duty rather than on sentiment; to Fichte he reproached for expounding a materialism without matter, where mere and empty consciousness represents mathematical space; to Schelling he reproached for being the reincarnation of Spinozism, that is, a pantheism in which human personality and freedom are lost; to Hegel he reproached for seeking to surpass the standpoint of the intellect through a dialectical effort of thought.
Like that of Hamann and Herder, with whom he was bound by ties of friendship and with whom he united in the struggle against the Enlightenment and rationalistic tendencies of the century, Jacobi’s speculative conception has been defined as a philosophy of faith. At first Jacobi wished to grant reason only a logical and regulative function: it is sentiment that must oppose reason and claim its own supremacy; later he clarified his thought and called reason the sentiment of faith; he thus made it the sentiment of the divine, the expiation of that absolute in which one believes even without seeing. The intuition of the absolute, this “sentiment of the true” (cf. *Werke* [V. BIBLICA.], III, p. 317) possible for every man, is not only superior to the intelligence but entirely distinct from II. Reason is therefore considered a higher faculty, “intuition wrapped in tendency” (ibid., II, p. 101; III, p. 32). Here rests the edifice of Jacobi’s speculation, which, by affirming the incontestable value of immediate conviction, formulates a mystical doctrine of faith. The problems of spirituality and the immortality of the soul, as well as
JACOBI FRIEDRICH HEINRICH — JACOBS LUCA
6 vols., Leipzig 1812–25; cf. also: *Auserlesener Briefwechsel*, ed. J. Roth, 2 vols., ibid. 1825–27; R. Läppritz, *Briefwechsel aus Jacobi’s Nachlass*, 2 vols., ibid. 1869. In Italian: *Sulla dottrina dello Spirito: lettera a Mosè Mendelssohn*, trans. T. Capra, Bari 1914; *Idealismo e realismo*, ed. N. Bobbio, Turin 1948. Studies: L. Lévy-Bruhl, *La philosophie de Jacobi*, Paris 1894; F. A. Schmid, *F. H. Jacobi*, Hildesheim 1908; Th. C. V. Stockum, *Spinoza, Jacobi, Lessing*, Groningen 1921; B. Magnino, *La filosofia mistica di F. H. Jacobi*, in *Giornale critico della filosofia italiana*, 12 (1931), pp. 381–98, 457–79; 13 (1932), pp. 57–70, 103–16; G. Durante, *Gli epigoni di Kant*, Florence 1943, pp. 2–18; B. Croce, *Discorsi di varia filosofia*, I, Bari 1945.