Abstract
This essay aims to introduce F. H. Jacobi’s understanding of existence (Dasein). We briefly consider the evolution of this topic from Jacobi’s first encounter with the problem of metaphysics to those few renowned notes that he wrote about human freedom in his Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn. Among the different sources mentioned in the introductory section, we will evaluate the influence that two of Kant’s so-called pre-critical essays might have had on the young Jacobi. We will see how we may regard Jacobi’s conception of Dasein as metaphysical, and in which sense his criticism of systematic philosophy puts him in a relationship with both what precedes and what follows German Idealism.
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Notes
- 1.
The volume Friedrich Henrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, ed. by George di Giovanni (Montréal: McGill-Queen University Press, 1994) represents the major source of Jacobi’s works in the English-speaking world. Not much of Jacobi had been translated in English prior to George di Giovanni’s edition, which in the long prefatory essay provides both an overview and an analysis of Jacobi’s philosophical achievements.
- 2.
The impact of his intellectual activity is one of the reasons behind the current project “Jacobi-Wörterbuch-online” supported by the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Leipzig). In view of a thorough understanding of the complexity of the period, mapping the lexicon of his works and extensive correspondence will shed light on debates, controversies, and figures that gave shape to a stormy age of European intellectual history.
- 3.
- 4.
Cf. Bowman 2004. Bowman’s essay successfully provides an insight into the historical sources of Jacobi’s confrontation with Scottish philosophy, aiming to deflate the alleged impact the latter had on him.
- 5.
This excerpt comes from the fourth part of the so-called Fliegende Blätter, whose first part only was published in Minerva by Jacobi himself in 1817. Cf. Jacobi 2007. The remaining three parts were first published by Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Köppen in the sixth volume of the edition of Jacobi’s complete works (1812–1825) and will be included in the forthcoming Denkbücher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis edited by Sophia Victoria Krebs in the series of Jacobi’s critical edition.
- 6.
The paragraph containing the abovementioned excerpt refers to a letter that Jacobi wrote at the end of 1789 to Kant, in which he briefly mentions the root of his theism. He maintains that his theism comes from the “Daseyn” of reason and freedom, which provides the “as evident as inexplicable (unbegreiflich) connection between the sensory and a suprasensory” (Jacobi 2015, p. 324).
- 7.
For an overview see Wundt 1993 and Frängsmyr 1975. The most relevant objection to the Leibniz-Wolffian method in metaphysics focuses on the distinction between the object of logic (the possible) and the object of philosophy (the actual), as it is presented as early as 1737 by Hoffmann 2010, §21. On Leibniz, Wolff, and method in philosophy, see Arndt 1971, especially pp. 128 and ss.
- 8.
As one might expect, the bibliography on this topic is extensive, but for a first orientation see Wolff 1983b, especially §115, §139, and §167; Wolff 1983a, §§7–11; Wolff 1978 and Wolff 1981, especially §§671–716. On methodology in Wolff and the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century see Fülleborn 1968; Tonelli 1959; Engfer 1983. More recently Dunlop 2013; Jesseph 1989; Sutherland 2010.
- 9.
This method will later be thoroughly developed in both his German Logic and the Discursus praeliminaris of his Latin Logic. Cf. Engfer 1983, p. 55.
- 10.
On the difference between “analysis” and “synthesis” in Wolff’s method see Tonelli 1976.
- 11.
“On demande, si les vérités métaphysiques en général et en particulier les premiers principes de la Théologie naturelle et de la Morale sont susceptibles de la même évidence que les vérités mathématiques, et au cas qu’elles n’en soient pas susceptibles, quelle est la nature de leur certitude, à quel degré elle peut parvenir, et si ce degré suffit pour la conviction.” See Harnack 1970, pp. 306–307. The English translation is my own. The German version was published in June 1761 in Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und Gelehrten Sachen. The French word “évidence” is translated with “Deutlichkeit,” which is the term Kant uses in his essay in contrast to Mendelssohn who opts for “Evidenz.” Cf. Campo 1953, pp. 244–252.
- 12.
Cf. Sandkaulen 2015.
- 13.
Cf. Sandkaulen 1997.
- 14.
My italics. See Plato 1961, especially 341 c–d.
- 15.
My italics.
- 16.
For an analysis of the relation between Jacobi and Heidegger, see Sommer 2015.
- 17.
Cf. Heidegger 1994. For the English translation I remain faithful to the rendering offered by C.H Seibert in his edition of Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink’sHeraclitus Seminar 1966/67.
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Livieri, P. (2020). The Stumbling Block of Existence in F. H. Jacobi. In: Stewart, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_2
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