JACOBI, FRIEDRICH HEINRICH. - Philosopher, b. in Düsseldorf on 25 January 1743, d. in Munich on 10 March 1819. He cultivated literary and philosophical studies, but he was not a philosopher by profession, nor a systematic thinker. He nevertheless possessed a strong intellectual coherence that allowed him to bind ideally all his rich and ingenious output around a firm core of philosophical and moral convictions.
He made his debut with two novels, Allwill and Woldemar (1722), 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 takes his stand against the atheism of the philosopher of Amsterdam; in David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus (1787) he lays the fideistic premises of his realism; he subsequently takes a position against Fichte (Sendschreiben an Fichte, 1799), against the Critique of Pure Reason (Über das Unternehmen des Kritizismus, 1802), against Schelling, against Hegel. He reproaches Kant for having founded the moral conception on the formalism of law and duty rather than on feeling; he reproaches Fichte for setting forth a materialism without matter, where mere and empty consciousness represents mathematical space; he reproaches Schelling for the reincarnation of Spinozism, that is, a pantheism in which human personality and freedom are shipwrecked; he reproaches Hegel for wanting to overcome the standpoint of the understanding by a dialectical effort of thought.
Like that of Hamann and Herder, to whom he was bound by ties of friendship and with whom he had joined in the struggle against the Enlightenment and rationalist tendencies of the century, J.'s speculative conception has been defined a philosophy of faith. At first J. wants to preserve for reason only a logical and regulative function: it is feeling that must oppose reason and claim its own supremacy; later he clarifies his thought and calls reason the feeling of faith; he therefore makes it the feeling of the divine, the aspiration toward that absolute which one believes in even without seeing. The intuition of the absolute, this «feeling of the true» (cf. Werke [v. bibl.], III, p. 317) possible for every man, is not only superior to the intelligence, but is entirely distinct from it. Reason is therefore considered as a higher faculty, «intuition wrapped in tendency» (ibid., II, p. 101; III, p. 32). Here rests the edifice of J.'s speculation, which, affirming the incontestable value of immediate conviction, formulates a mystical doctrine of faith. The problems of the spirituality and immortality of the soul, as well as the ethical and psychological problems (not to take into account the one concerning freedom of conscience, of which he spoke at length) are treated by J. sporadically and in passing. Their solution is implicitly contained in his religious metaphysics and in his conception of God. The philosophical doctrine is always, for him, closely connected with his religious faith, and all his metaphysics is based on the «continuous miracle, of which each one can have experience: the regeneration of man through a higher force» (Auserlesener Briefwechsel [v. bibl.], II, p. 146, letter of 29 January 1794). Such a force must be recognized.
Despite the lack of systematicity, J. was a philosopher in the strict sense of the word. His thought responded not only to the demands of the times, but to the aspirations of souls weary of Enlightenment rationalism, and it was transformed, according to the saying of Schelling, who had defined J. as «perhaps the most instructive personality in all of modern history and philosophy» (K. Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, VI, Stuttgart 1894, pp. 294-96), into something extremely significant and highly fruitful for the culture of the time.
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