Friedrich Jacobi: Only Madman Can Be Follower of Kant!

Friedrich Jacobi (1743-1819) is known mainly as a representative of the “philosophy of feeling and faith” and as one of the first critics of Kant, who drew attention to the fundamental contradiction in his system: without the concept of “thing in itself” (or “thing in oneself”) it is impossible to enter into his “Critique of Pure Reason”, but it is equally impossible to remain in it with this concept. The consistent development of the transcendental philosophy system leads to the elimination of its own initial, fundamental premise. The discovery of this contradiction and the indication of its significance for the evaluation of critical philosophy was often seen as almost the only contribution of Jacobi to world philosophy. In the historical and philosophical literature, the opinion prevails is that Jacobi, by and large, simply did not understand Kant and was in comparison with him, just a “grumpy scoundrel” (Heinrich Heine) and a “lower monad” (Kuno Fischer). This pejorative assessment significantly simplifies and distorts both Jacobi’s philosophy and Jacobi’s actual attitude towards Kant, which was not so unambiguous. It should be considered in a much broader historical and problematic context. The study briefly examines the history of the long and difficult relationship between the “privileged heretic” and the “gray eminence” of the German philosophical classics with the creator of the transcendental philosophy system. The main directions of a deeply thought-out and well-founded serious criticism of Kant’s philosophy (i.e. its inconsistency, idealism, rational intellectualism, subjectivism, “speculative egoism”, etc.) are outlined and analyzed from the positions of radical realism, common sense, Christian faith, metaphysical “sense of the supersensible”, direct knowledge of the most important truths for a person, the absolute values of life, moral intuition, freedom, and dignity of the individual.