These principles which Jacobi brought out in his letters concerning Spinoza, did not fail to arouse a universal opposition in the German philosophical world. It was charged upon him that he was an enemy of reason, a preacher of blind faith, a despiser of science and of philosophy, a fanatic and a papist. To rebut these attacks, and to justify his standpoint, he wrote in 1787, a year and a half after the first appearance of the work already named, his dialogue entitled “David Hume, or Faith, Idealism, and Realism,” in which he developes more extensively and definitely his principle of faith or immediate knowledge.
2. Jacobi distinguished his faith at the outset from a blind credence in authority. A blind faith is that which supports itself on a foreign view, instead of on the grounds of reason. But this is not the case with his faith, which rather rests upon the innermost necessity of the subject itself. Still farther: his faith is not an arbitrary imagination: we can imagine to ourselves every thing possible, but in order to regard a thing as actual, there must be an inexplicable necessity of our feeling, which we cannot otherwise name than faith. Jacobi was not constant in his terminology, and hence did not always express himself alike in respect of the relation in which faith stood to the different sides of the human faculty of knowledge. In his earlier terminology he placed faith (or as he also called it, the power of faith), on the side of the sense or the receptivity, and let it stand opposed to the understanding and the reason, taking these two terms as equivalent expressions for the finite and immediate knowledge of previous philosophy; afterwards he followed Kant, and, distinguishing between the reason and the understanding, he called that reason which he had previously named sense and faith. According to him now, the faith or intuition of the reason is the organ for perceiving the supersensible. As such, it stands opposed to the understanding. There must be a higher faculty which can learn, in a way inconceivable to sense and the understanding, that which is true in and above the phenomena. Over against the explaining understanding stands the reason, or the natural faith of the reason, which does not explain, but positively reveals and unconditionally decides. As there is an intuition of the sense, so is there a rational intuition through the reason, and a demonstration has no more validity in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Jacobi justifies his use of the term, intuition of the reason, from the want of any other suitable designation. Language has no other expression to indicate the way in which that, which is unattainable to the sense, becomes apprehended in the transcendental feeling. If any one affirms that he knows any thing, he may properly be required to state the origin of his knowledge, and in doing this, he must of necessity go back either to sensation or to feeling; the latter stands above the former as high as the human species above the brute. So I affirm, then, without hesitation, says Jacobi, that my philosophy starts from pure feeling, and declares the authority of this to be supreme. The faculty of feeling is the highest in man, and that alone which specifically distinguishes him from the brute. This faculty is one and the same with reason; or, reason may be said to find in it its single and only starting point.
Jacobi had the clearest consciousness of the opposition in which he stood, with this principle of immediate knowledge, to previous philosophy. In his introduction to his complete works, he says: “There had arisen since the time of Aristotle an increasing effort in philosophical schools, to subject the immediate knowledge to the mediate, to make that faculty of perception which originally establishes every thing, dependent on the faculty of reflection, which is conditioned through abstraction; to subordinate the archetype to the copy, the essence to the word, the reason to the understanding, and, in fact, to make the former wholly disappear in the latter. Nothing is allowed to be true which is not capable of a double demonstration, in the intuition and in the conception, in the thing and in its image or word; the thing itself, it is said, must truly lie and actually be known only in the word.” But every philosophy which allows only the reflecting reason, must lose itself at length in an utter ignorance. Its end is nihilism.
3. From what has been already said, the position of Jacobi with his principle of faith, in relation to the Kantian philosophy, can, partly at least, be seen. Jacobi had separated himself from this philosophy, partly in the above-named dialogue “David Hume,” (especially in an appendix to this, in which he discussed the transcendental Idealism), and partly in his essay “On the attempt of criticism to bring the reason to the understanding” (1801). His relation to it may be reduced to the following three general points:
(1.) Jacobi does not agree with Kant’s theory of sensuous knowledge. In opposition to this theory he defends the standpoint of empiricism, affirms the truthfulness of the sense-perception, and denies the apriority of space and time, for which Kant contends in order to prove that objects as well as their relations are simply determinations of our own self, and do not at all exist externally to us. For, however much it may be affirmed that there is something corresponding to our notions as their cause, yet does it remain concealed what this something is. According to Kant, the laws of our beholding and thinking are without objective validity, our knowledge has no objective significance. But it is wrong to claim that in the phenomena there is nothing revealed of the hidden truth which lies behind them. With such a claim, it were far better to give up completely the unknown thing-in-itself, and carry out to its results the consequent idealism. “Logically, Kant is at fault, when he presupposes objects which make impressions on our soul. He is bound to teach the strictest idealism.”
(2.) Yet Jacobi essentially agrees with Kant’s critick of the understanding. Jacobi affirmed, as Kant had done, that the understanding is insufficient to know the supersensible, and that the highest ideas of the reason could be apprehended only in faith. Jacobi places Kant’s great merit in having cleared away the ideas, which were simply the products of reflection and logical phantasms. “It is very easy for the understanding, when producing one notion from another, and thus gradually mounting up to ideas, to imagine that, by virtue of these, which, though they carry it beyond the intuitions of the sense, are nothing but logical phantasms, it has not only the faculty but the most decided determination to fly truly above the world of sense, and to gain by its flight a higher science independent of the intuition, a science of the supersensible. Kant discovers and destroys this error and self-deception. Thus there is gained, at least, a clear place for a genuine rationalism. This is Kant’s truly great deed, his immortal merit. But the sound sense of our sage did not allow him to hide from himself that this clear place must disappear in a gulf, which would swallow up in itself all knowledge of the true, unless a God should interpose to hinder it. Here Kant’s doctrine and mine meet.”
(3.) But Jacobi does not fully agree with Kant, in wholly denying to the theoretical reason the faculty of objective knowledge. He blames Kant for complaining that the human reason cannot theoretically prove the reality of its ideas. He affirms that Kant is thus still entangled in the delusion, that the only reason why these ideas cannot be proved, is found in the nature of the ideas themselves, and not in the deficient nature of our knowledge. Kant therefore attempts to seek, in a practical way, a kind of scientific proof; a roundabout way, which, to every profound seeker, must seem folly, since every proof is as impossible as it is unnecessary.
Jacobi agreed better with Kant, than with the post-Kantian philosophy. The atheistic tendency of the latter was especially repulsive to him. “To Kant, that profound thinker and upright philosopher, the words God, freedom, immortality, and religion, signified the same as they have ever done to the sound human understanding; he in no way treats them as nothing but deception. He created offence by irresistibly showing the insufficiency of all proofs of speculative philosophy for these ideas. That which was wanting in the theoretical proof, he made up by the necessary postulates of a pure practical reason. With these, according to Kant’s assurance, philosophy was fully helped out of her difficulty, and the goal, which had been always missed, actually reached. But the first daughter of the critical philosophy (Fichte’s system) makes the living and working moral order itself to be God, a God expressly declared to be without consciousness and self-existence. These frank words, spoken publicly and without restraint, roused some attention, but the fear soon subsided. Presently astonishment ceased wholly, for the second daughter of the critical philosophy (Schelling’s system) gave up entirely the distinction which the first had allowed to remain between natural and moral philosophy, necessity and freedom, and without any further ado affirmed that the only existence is nature, and that there is nothing above; this second daughter is Spinozism transfigured and reversed, an ideal materialism.” This latter allusion to Schelling, connected as it was with other and harder thrusts in the same essay, called out from this philosopher the well-known answer: “Schelling’s Monument to the Treatise on Divine Things, 1812.”
If we now take a critical survey of the philosophical standpoint of Jacobi, we shall find its peculiarity to consist in the abstract separation of understanding and feeling. These two Jacobi could not bring into harmony. “There is light in my heart,” he says, “but it goes out whenever I attempt to bring it into the understanding. Which is the true luminary of these two? That of the understanding, which, though it reveals fixed forms, shows behind them only a baseless gulf? Or that of the heart, which points its light promisingly upwards, though determinate knowledge escapes it? Can the human spirit grasp the truth unless it possesses these two luminaries united in one light? And is this union conceivable except through a miracle?” If now, in order to escape in a certain degree this contradiction between understanding and feeling, Jacobi gave to immediate knowledge the place of mediate as finite knowledge, this was a self-deception. Even that knowledge, which is supposed to be immediate, and which Jacobi regards as the peculiar organ for knowing the supersensible, is also mediate, obliged to go through a course of subjective mediations, and can only give itself out as immediate when it wholly forgets its own origin.