Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, painting by Johann Friedrich Eich , 1780, Gleimhaus Halberstadt

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi after a portrait by Johann Peter Langer (1801)

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi , also Fritz Jacobi , (born January 25, 1743 in Düsseldorf , † March 10, 1819 in Munich ) was a German philosopher , economic reformer, businessman and writer .

family

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was born on January 25, 1743 in Düsseldorf as the second son of the businessman Johann Konrad Jacobi (1715–1788) and his wife Maria Fahlmer (1713–1746) .

His paternal grandparents were Johann Andreas Jacobi (1680–1756), pastor in Wollershausen in Lower Saxony, and Johanna Juliane Bauer (1684–1767), on his mother's side the merchant Georg Fahlmer (1687–1759), born in Michelstadt , and Aleida von Sonsfeld (c 1675-1739).

Jacobi married in Aachen in 1764 Helene Elisabeth (Betty) von Clermont (1743–1784), sister of the "Cloth Baron von Vaals", Johann Arnold von Clermont and daughter of the cloth merchant Esaias von Clermont (1698–1751) and Helene Magarethe von Huyssen (1705 -1776). The couple had eight children including:

• Johann Friedrich Jacobi (1765–1831), politician, President of the City of Aachen, Prefectural Council and member of the Ruhr Department in the Corps législatif. He married Johanna Katharina Luisa von Clermont (1763-1844), his cousin and daughter of Johann Arnold von Clermont
• Georg Arnold Jacobi (1768–1845), lawyer, 1793 bailiff in Wickrath near Mönchengladbach; Saxon-Weimar government councilor and later secret government councilor in Pempelfort
• Maximilian Jacobi (1775-1858), German psychiatrist

After the death of his first wife, Jacobi's father remarried. His second wife was Maria Catharina Lausberg (1728–1763), the daughter of the wine merchant Johann Heinrich Lausberg (1690–1751) and Catharina Bamberg (1703–1780).

Johann Friedrich Jacobi (1712–1791), general superintendent in Celle , was his uncle. The poet and publicist Johann Georg Jacobi (1740–1814) was his older brother. His half-sisters, Charlotte (1752–1832) and Helene (1753–1838), who emerged from his father's second marriage, ran the household after the death of his wife Helene Elisabeth.

Life

Unlike his older brother Johann Georg, Jacobi was chosen against his will as the professional successor to his father. After years of apprenticeship in Frankfurt and Geneva , where he met the mathematician LeSage , Voltaire and the circle around Rousseau (1759–1761), his wish to study medicine in Glasgow was refused . Instead, he joined his father's trading house in Düsseldorf and took over the management from 1764 to 1772. From 1765 he was a freemason and at the same time treasurer of the “La Parfaite Amitié” lodge in Düsseldorf.

In 1772 he was appointed to the court chamber council of the duchies of Jülich and Berg with the task of reforming their customs and trade systems. He was continuously engaged in this activity in the following years (he was even promoted to customs commissioner from 1775) and was able to demonstrate successes, especially in the context of the Rhine customs system .

In 1779 he was appointed to Munich to work as a ministerial advisor and privy councilor (as in Jülich-Berg) in a reform of the now entire Palatinate-Bavarian customs and trade system. However, his political and economic theoretical publications, which follow up on the liberal doctrine of Adam Smith , as well as his liberal economic reform efforts very soon met with resistance. Therefore Jacobi had to give up his position again in the same year, but not without having played a decisive role in terms of the abolition of serfdom in Bavaria.

He withdrew as a private citizen to his estate in Pempelfort , which in the meantime, thanks to the support of his wife Betty von Clermont, had become a much-visited and highly valued meeting place for people interested in literature, politics and especially philosophy; among others were Goethe , Herder , the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt , Hamann , Lavater , Diderot and Hemsterhuis guests in the so-called “Jacobihaus”.

In addition, when Jacobi returned from Geneva in 1762, he had already started an intensive correspondence with other prominent representatives of the spiritual world of that time, which has continued since then and intensified particularly in the 1780s, so that in Jacobi's correspondence the spiritual-cultural events around 1800 as in concentrated using a burning glass. Important correspondence partners were Matthias Claudius , Johann Gottlieb Fichte , Princess Amalia von Gallitzin , Immanuel Kant , Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock , Jean Paul , the Reimarus family , Friedrich Schiller , Friedrich Schlegel and FDE Schleiermacher .

The acquaintance with the poet Christoph Martin Wieland , mediated through his brother Johann Georg, led for a time to collaboration on the literary magazine Der Teutsche Merkur, based on the model of the Mercure de France . While Wieland acted as its editor from 1773, Jacobi contributed a few essays. The friendship with Goethe (1774) and the writing and publication of his two novels in the first version also fell in the 1770s: Eduard Allwill's Papers (1775/76) and Woldemar. A rarity from natural history (1777/79), with which Jacobi presented nothing less than the first “philosophical novels” in German. Both novel projects were continued in the 1790s: Eduard Allwill's collection of letters appeared in 1792; In 1794 a supplement to the Woldemar was first published , followed by a second, improved edition of the Woldemar itself in 1796 . While Jacobi in both novel projects, as he later wrote in the preface to the Allwill of 1792, also validly for the versions of Woldemar , was about "putting humanity as it is, explainable or inexplicable, in the most conscientious way ", it is not a matter of a mere “representation of an incident”, that is, it is limited to the purely literary and poetic. The Woldemar thus not only contains the representation of the friendship between the eponymous hero and Henriette. In this representation, the actions of the characters also give a much more complex reflection, especially on the limits of the conceptions of friendship embodied in the characters. According to Jacobi's insight, the novel proves that friendship is never about an abstractable concept, but always about the existential experience of the encounter between two people “by name”, as the appropriate form that such a reflection, especially in philosophical terms, is can represent unabridged.

In contrast, Jacobis began in the 1780s in the narrower sense of philosophical activity. His visit to Lessing in Wolfenbüttel in 1780, the recording of the conversation that took place at that time, sent to Mendelssohn in 1783, and the publication On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn in 1785 (1789 in the second, especially the fundamental one, which resulted from the correspondence) Appendix VII of the significantly expanded edition) were not only the trigger for the so-called “Spinozarenaissance”, in which the ethics, which had hitherto been frowned upon as atheistic and fatalistic, became a philosophical classic in the first place. They also marked the beginning of the so-called "Spinoza" or " pantheism dispute ". In the course of this dispute, Jacobi first developed his own position, which determined his entire philosophical work, in a critical penetration of the Spinozan ethics . Starting from there, in the dispute with Mendelssohn over the question of Lessing's Spinozism, a much more fundamental debate arose about the right understanding of Spinoza's philosophy and thus about the constitution and scope of reason in general. For Jacobi reconstructed and defended Spinoza's philosophy as a paradigm of a strictly rational philosophy, insofar as it succeeded in an intellectually satisfactory, conceptually irrefutable explanation of the world. At the same time Jacobi also marked gaps in the Spinozan ethics . According to Jacobi, this could neither understand the genuinely temporal character of changes and movements as such nor freedom in the sense of an ability to willfully start new causal series in the real world based on the idea of ​​purposes of action. Rather, Spinoza applies the idea of ​​the causa finalis both with regard to divine and human action as the most serious human prejudice. Jacobi therefore shares with other critics the diagnosis that Spinoza's philosophy is fatalistic and atheistic, but at the same time gives it a completely new systematic meaning in that he understands fatalism and atheism as a necessary consequence of rationality itself.

This debate continued in essence in Jacobi's second main philosophical essay, David Hume's 1787 Dialogue on Faith or Idealism and Realism . In this, Jacobi undertook a fundamental determination of reality in which, as in his discussion with Spinoza, he orientated himself in essential points on the experience of human activity. In addition, David Hume, especially in his supplement on transcendental idealism , contains Jacobi's no less influential criticism of Kant's doctrine of the “ thing in itself ” as the doubly problematic “presupposition” of which Jacobi remarked in a prominent formulation, “that I without those Precondition not to get into the system, and with that precondition could not stay in it. ”According to Jacobi, this applies because without the assumption of things in themselves as the basis of the sensual affection, Kant's concept of sensuality and thus the two-stem theory of knowledge remain incomprehensible, but at the same time this assumption would go beyond the systematic framework of transcendental idealism. This diagnosis by Jacobi has "never been rejected for reasons close to the text until recently." At the same time, Jacobi formulated a position with his own, both Kant's transcendental idealism and a "speculative egoism" later realized in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre , opposing "decided" realism of undiminished relevance. Jacobi was concerned with the immediately given equal originality of the self-experience of the knowing subject as well as the objects to be known: "I experience that I am and that something is outside of me, in the same indivisible instant," says David Hume accordingly .

In 1794, ten years after the death of his wife Betty, Jacobi was forced to leave Pempelfort; he had to flee from the advancing French revolutionary troops to Hamburg and Holstein and did not find permanent residence again in Eutin until 1798 .

A year later, in 1799, the public letter Jacobi to Fichte appeared , which is considered to be the most important contribution to the so-called " atheism dispute ". Jacobi wrote a differentiated statement on the accusation of atheism raised against Fichte's philosophy. It is true that he defended Fichte in that he intended to expose this accusation as “wrongly”, insofar as “transcendental philosophy, as such, can be as little atheistic as geometry and arithmetic can be.” Nonetheless, Jacobi provided no less here critical analysis of Fichte's idealism as Spinozism before, which at the same time served as a framework for interpretation. Because of the structural similarity between the internal constitution and systematic function of Spinoza's absolute substance and Fichte's absolute I, Jacobi characterized the science of science as a " reverse Spinozism" and combined this with the accusation of "nihilism". This aimed at a philosophical dissolution and substitution of everything real "by ever more general terms", in that Fichte's transcendental idealism takes everything as real conscious, the things of the outside world as well as the subject as theoretically knowing and acting morally-practically, from purely ideal activity explained by utterly general subjectivity. With this diagnosis, Jacobi not only brought the concept of 'nihilism' onto the stage of the philosophical public for the first time, but also established itself completely as an inevitable quantity in the context of post-Kantian philosophy.

In 1805 Jacobi moved to Munich and thus accepted a call from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , whose first presidency he took over from 1807 to 1812 after the conversion from an independent scholarly institution to a state central institution. A rift with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , who came to Munich in 1806, turned into a public matter in the so-called "dispute about the divine things" (1811/1812), also known as the "theism dispute", and forced Jacobi to withdraw from the academy. Triggered by Jacobi's rejection of Schelling spinozanisch inspired naturalism as him during his Academy speech about the relationship of the visual arts to nature presented (1807), was in the following discussion - Jacobi published in 1811 his book Of the things of God and its revelation on Schelling in turn reacted to Jacobi with his monument in 1812 - not only made the question of the possibility of a scientific knowledge of God the topic. Also and in connection with it, the concept of God was discussed in the sharpest possible way. Goethe, who brought this discussion to the point with the expression of the "statum controversiae between the nature and freedom men", ultimately and differently than z. B. Friedrich Schlegel and Jakob Friedrich Fries the party of Schelling.

The remaining seven years until his death were devoted to the publication of his works, which were published in six volumes from 1812 to 1825 and supplemented by the author's introduction to all philosophical writings (1815) and a preliminary report on the edition of the Spinozabriefe (1819) in Leipzig. In 1815 he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Jacobi died in Munich on March 10, 1819.

plant

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, portrait by Christian Gottlieb Geyser after a painting by Johann Friedrich Eich.

Second volume of Fritz Mauthner's "Library of Philosophers". 1912

Jacobi is one of the most important representatives of classical German philosophy . His philosophical conception, which he formulated for the first time in the Spinozabriefen and continued in all subsequent writings, presents itself as a complex "double philosophy". On the one hand, Jacobi developed, at the same time as Kant, an independent and original philosophical criticism of rationality by later exploring Spinoza's metaphysics also the transcendental idealism, as a systematically consistent and conceptually-rationally irrefutable paradigmatic realization of every philosophy that understands itself as science, reconstructs and intellectually admires. According to Jacobi, rational knowledge is based on the principle of "a nihilo nihil fit", i.e. i. marked the thought of complete justification: Nothing happens without sufficient reason ; but by the sufficient reason the consequence is necessarily determined and fully explainable. Knowledge therefore presents itself as a system. It is a single systematic connection made up of the relationship between ground and consequence; in knowledge everything that is specific and individual is derived and explained from the conceptual-general.

On the other hand, Jacobi's own position, which he initially called his “antispinoza”, later “unphilosophy”, insists on the philosophical primacy of the experience of living existence, which is always the experience of a concrete individual and at the same time originally a practical certainty. As a direct experience and in contrast to the discursive knowledge mediated by reasons, according to Jacobi, this experience is a “belief” in the sense of a previous “higher” knowledge. Jacobi initially called the cognitive organ of faith "feeling" and "sense", but since 1789 above all "reason" (from "hearing") and thus terminologically delimits it not only from understanding as the capacity for conceptual communication, but also from empirical sensuality and the sensation.

Both positions of Jacobi's double philosophy, the analytical reconstruction of philosophy as a science on the one hand and 'unphilosophy' on the other, form a close conceptual connection and refer directly to one another. As Jacobi says of the relationship between 'unphilosophy' and Fichte's doctrine of science, they come into contact with one another “through the highest degree of antipathy” and “to a certain extent” penetrate one another “at the moment of contact”. More precisely, this antithetical relationship consists in uncovering or finding the gaps in a systematic-rational explanation of the world, i.e. i. the not logically and conceptually accessible, but genuinely practical-existential presuppositions of rationality itself. Therefore, according to Jacobi, the unphilosophy, which addresses these presuppositions, not only exceeds the rational relation to the world, which is consistently elaborated by philosophy as a science, but also establishes it first and foremost. Only because of the immediate practical certainty that we as concrete, freely acting individuals have of ourselves are we, according to Jacobi, accessible to ourselves as rationally knowing. According to Jacobi, rationality and the philosophical explanation of the world are not an end in themselves, but originally and essentially means and moments of practical coping with existence: “Individuality is a fundamental feeling; Individuality is the root of intelligence and all knowledge; without individuality there is no substantiality, without substantiality nothing everywhere. ”This change of perspective from the systematic-rational explanation of the world to the unphilosophical primacy of living existence is, as finding our original practical-existential self- and world certainty itself, a practical act, an act of freedom, not the result conceptual -rational inference, which cannot offer any alternative to the consistent implementation of the declaration. Jacobi therefore characterizes this change of perspective in the distinction between impossible theoretical refutation and practical contradiction already in the Spinozabriefen in the controversial and influential figure of the "jump" or the "salto mortale".

In David Hume in particular , Jacobi developed the concept of faith in its epistemological dimension. According to this, all concepts formed by the mind are only abstractions and images of original perceptions, an original "representation" of reality. Jacobi's decisive thought, however, consists in the fact that he at the same time criticizes modern philosophy as a whole (with the exception of Spinoza and Leibniz ) for a false, because it is essentially idealistic concept of conception and perception, that conceptions and perceptions only as a mental inner space, as merely subjective - comprehends ideal entities. Following Spinoza and Leibniz, however, Jacobi insists on understanding sensuality as a medium between two concrete realia, a knower and a knower or something known, which in perception give themselves or, as Jacobi says, "reveal". “I experience that I am, and that something is outside of me, in the same indivisible instant”. According to Jacobi, the certainty of reality of the perceived objects and the consciousness of a real perceiver who differs from the perceived objects are, according to Jacobi, already equally original moments of the act of perception itself.

Bust of Emil Jungblut on the Malkasten House , 1943

At its core, however, Jacobi's realism is practically founded. According to him, there is no more original and "livelier conviction than that I do what I think," that is, that after the conception of purposes I begin to act and thereby bring about changes in the world. According to Jacobi, all concepts formed by the mind, including our concepts of space and time, ultimately refer back to actions. A decisive philosophical achievement of Jacobi consists in the distinction between the concepts of 'reason' and 'cause', insofar as the concept of cause means the genuinely temporal connection between cause and effect, which is experienced only in action. The concept of reason, on the other hand, denotes the purely logical-conceptual relationship between reason and consequence and, according to Jacobi, is ultimately formed by abstraction from the character of the action of the cause-effect relationship, while it is the (according to Jacobi wrong) endeavor of purely rational philosophy, conversely, to derive the real temporal connection of cause and effect from the purely conceptual relationship of cause and consequence. According to Jacobi, rational explanation is only necessary and justified as a tool of a living being, but it is impossible to derive its genuinely practical existence from general concepts.

In this sense, Jacobi finally criticizes the moral philosophies of Kant and Fichte for their departure from an impersonal and general practical reason. As a result, they remained a pure formalism devoid of content, insofar as they cannot justify the reality of any concrete moral action and cannot give the real "person [not] their peculiar individual value". Jacobi therefore opposes them with an ethics orientated towards Aristotle of concrete virtuous action, which seeks to grasp morality as actual practice and in which you as such are committed. Moral action, as concrete and empirically real, according to Jacobi, is based on the "word of a named man", not on submission to the general duty of an impersonal reason. It is the person as a concrete individual who gives himself practical principles. Because according to Jacobi, man is moral and real through his ability to project himself as a temporally finite being with a certain past and empirical determination for a certain future, to give himself a unity of life and his future will through his own decision to bind, analogous to the peculiar obligation that arises in the act of promising concretely to another person and also underlies the moral relationship of friendship.

Since all human activity, including unconditional moral activity, is the activity of an individual, of a finite living being, which is not absolute self-determination and activity, but presupposes something other, external and objective, Jacobi's direct experience of self and action shows at the same time threefold way beyond oneself, "because without you, the self is impossible". This concerns on the one hand nature and on the other hand the history and the spirit of a certain epoch, which co-determines how every person thinks and acts, and finally, thirdly, the reference to a personal God. Jacobi's theism, contrary to Spinoza's divine substance, does not mean the God of the Christian religion. The God “ who is a spirit ”, “who knows and wants, and speaks to himself, I am who I am” is the ultimate symbolic expression on the one hand for the rejection of any philosophy that makes rationality and explanation absolute, and on the other for the unconditionality experienced nonetheless in our concrete and thus conditioned actions, for the rationally not justifiable binding force of my personal self-binding as a moral-spiritual being. Because of the unconditional freedom of action, Jacobi's unphilosophy must and will necessarily appear as metaphysics.

The complex system as a double philosophy, the two halves of which are connected in the act of a 'leap', corresponds to the fact that Jacobi's thinking is represented in very different types of text. That this also includes literary forms such as the novel, but also the letter and the philosophical conversation, is a direct expression of the unphilosophical primacy of living, moral-practical existence. This also applies to the fact that Jacobi's critical systematic analyzes of philosophical system designs such as those of Spinoza, Fichte and Schelling, but also Kant, have the character of occasional writings that arise from concrete systematic debates.

Jacobi's double philosophy, with all its motives, exerted a substantial influence on the development of post-Kantian philosophy, insofar as this is essentially determined by the question of the relationship between knowledge, theory and system on the one hand and freedom, practice and individuality on the other. Basically, three modes of reaction can be distinguished: 1. The project of a reconciliation of philosophy and knowledge on the one hand and freedom and individual existence on the other hand, which is to be achieved through a further development of the philosophical system into a "system of freedom" (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel ) . 2. The attempt to mediate system and freedom, which, understood as “lack of system, brought into a system”, aims neither at a merely improved alternative system design nor at a fundamental contradiction to the primacy of knowledge or “logical enthusiasm” ( Friedrich von Hardenberg , Friedrich Schlegel). This should succeed in the concept of romantic irony through the idea of ​​an opening up of the system, which results from the permanent self-criticism of the system idea. 3. The continuation and further development of the position represented by Jacobi himself of a practical contradiction to rational system philosophy in favor of the change of perspective to the philosophical primacy of the concrete individual experience of existence and action. Of Jacobis' prominent contemporaries to this day, this attitude was followed only by the writer Johannes Paul Richter , known under the pseudonym Jean Paul , and in a certain way later by Kierkegaard as well . Jacobi's philosophical followers, who are little known today, included Thomas Wizenmann , Jakob Salat , Friedrich Ancillon , Friedrich Ludewig Bouterweck and Friedrich van Calker .

At the same time, Jacobi's reception was marked from the start by numerous misinterpretations, which misunderstood his defense of the concept of faith as an expression of a naive empirical-sensualistic realism, an intuitionistic ethics of the 'beautiful soul', a religious fideism or an irrationalism.

Works

• Eduard Allwill's papers , in Der Teutsche Merkur in the booklets of April, July and December 1776.
• Eduard Allwill's collection of letters , Königsberg 1792. ( digitized version and full text in the German text archive )
• Woldemar. A rarity from natural history , Flensburg and Leipzig 1779. Digitized
• Woldemar. Supplemented by a supplement , Königsberg 1794.
• Woldemar. New improved edition , Königsberg 1796. Digitized
• Two Political Rhapsodies , Munich 1779.
• About the teaching of Spinoza in letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn . Breslau 1785. Digitized (2nd, expanded edition 1789, digitized 3rd, again expanded edition 1819)
• David Hume on Faith or Idealism and Realism. A conversation , Breslau 1787. Digitized
• Jacobi on spruce . Hamburg 1799. Digitized
• About the undertaking of Criticism to understand reason and to give philosophy in general a new purpose , Hamburg 1802. Digitized
• About learned societies, their spirit and purpose , Munich 1807. Digitized
• Of divine things and their revelation . Leipzig 1811. Digitized version (2nd edition 1816)

Jacobi's works appeared collected in Leipzig 1812-25, 6 volumes, reprint 1968, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft.

The 6 volumes have been published under the title "Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Works", Leipzig, by Gerhard Fleischer. 1812-1825

Revisions

• Correspondence - estate - documents . Ed. V. Walter Jaeschke and Birgit Sandkaulen. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981 ff. (= JBW) ( https://www.saw-leipzig.de/de/projekte/friedrich-heinrich-jacobi_briefwechsel_text_kommentar_woerterbuch_online )
• Works. Complete edition. Ed. V. Klaus Hammacher and Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Meiner, Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog 1998 ff., ISBN 3-7728-1366-6 (= JWA).
• About the teaching of Spinoza in letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn. Meiner (= Philosophical Library 517), Hamburg 2000, ISBN 978-3-7873-1434-8 .
• "I'd rather dream Fritz the moment". The correspondence between Goethe and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. First published in 1846 by Maximilian Jacobi; newly edited by Andreas Remmel and Paul Remmel, with an afterword by Dr. Gabriel Busch OSB; Bernstein-Verlag, Gebr. Remmel, Bonn 2005, ISBN 978-3-9808198-1-7 .
• Jacobi an Fichte , text 1799/1816 in comparison, La Scuola di Pitagora, Naples 2017 (German text, introduction by Marco Ivaldo, notes, commentary and Italian translation by Ariberto Acerbi, with index and bibliography), ISBN 978-88-6542- 553-4 .
• David Hume on Faith or Idealism and Realism. A Conversation (1787). Jacobi to Fichte (1799). On the basis of the edition by Walter Jaeschke and Irmgard-Maria Piske, edited and introduced by Oliver Koch. Meiner (= Philosophical Library 719), Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7873-3590-9 .

literature

Modern

• Stefan Schick: The legitimacy of the Enlightenment. Self-determination of reason in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi . Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2019, ISBN 978-3-465-04392-8 .
• Birgit Sandkaulen: Jacobi's philosophy. About the contradiction between system and freedom. Hamburg: Meiner, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7873-3628-9 .
• Konstanze Sommer: Between Metaphysics and Metaphysics Criticism. Heidegger, Schelling and Jacobi. Hamburg: Meiner, 2015, ISBN 3-7873-2800-9 .
• Karl Schön: Goethe and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: A friendship alliance. BookRix, 2014, ISBN 3-7309-7772-5 .
• Oliver Koch: Individuality as a fundamental feeling. On the metaphysics of the person in Jacobi and Jean Paul . Hamburg: Meiner, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7873-2253-4 .
• Jan Wartenberg: The family circle Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Helene Elisabeth von Clermont - portraits and contemporary testimonies . Bonn: Bernstein, 2011, ISBN 978-3-939431-05-3 .
• Arnold, HJ (Ed.): Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. pp. 201 f.
• Dirk Fetzer: Jacobi's philosophy of the unconditional . Paderborn, Munich: Schöningh, 2007 ( online , Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).
• Walter Jaeschke u. Birgit Sandkaulen (ed.): Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. A turning point in the intellectual education of the time . Hamburg: Meiner, 2004, ISBN 978-3-7873-1679-3 .
• Birgit Sandkaulen: Reason and cause. The Critique of Reason Jacobi . Munich: Fink, 2000, ISBN 978-3-7705-3500-2 ( online , Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).
• Kurt Christ: FH Jacobi: Rousseau's German adept. Rousseauism in the early work of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi . Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1519-3 .
• Michael Tilly :  JACOBI, Friedrich Heinrich. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 1400-1402.
• Klaus Hammacher:  Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 222-224 ( digitized version ).

Historical

• Carl von Prantl :  Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich Ritter von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1881, pp. 577-584.
• Friedrich Schlichtegroll , Kajetan von Weiller , Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch : Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi former President of the k. Academy of Sciences in Munich after his life, teaching and work: at the academic Feyer of his memory on May 1st, 1819 . Fleischmann: Munich, 1819 ( online , Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).
• Friedrich Alfred Schmid (later Schmid Noerr): Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. A representation of his personality and his philosophy as a contribution to a history of the modern problem of value . Habil. Writing at the University of Heidelberg, Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, Heidelberg, 1908.

Foreign language

• Pierre Jean Brunel: Les Lumières Platoniciennes de Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi . Paris: PUPS, 2014, ISBN 978-2-84050-685-0 .
• Marco Ivaldo: Introduzione a Jacobi . Rome: Laterza. 2003, ISBN 978-8-8420-6823-5 .
• Marco Ivaldo: Filosofia delle cose divine. Saggio su Jacobi . Brescia: Morcelliana, 1996, ISBN 978-8-8372-1613-9 .

Web links

Wikiquote: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi  - Quotes

Wikisource: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi  in the German Digital Library
• Works by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi at Zeno.org .
• Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Carl Jacobi (ed.): Die Voreltern Jacobi: a memorial book for the descendants . Jänecke, Hanover, 1856; accessed on January 9, 2019.
2. ↑ "In general and memorable in historical terms". Georg Arnold Jacobi's life stories, continued and supplemented by his own memories by Victor Friedrich Leopold Jacobi / edited by Cornelia Ilbrig. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2010 (publications by the Heinrich Heine Institute). Essay from April 1, 2010 in the Literatur-Archiv-NRW ( online ) on the edition of his autobiography.
3. ↑ Elmar Wildt: The Lodge in Münster, its environment and its members around 1780 . In: Westphalian magazine . No. 143 , 1993, pp. 91 ( lwl.org [PDF]).
4. ↑ See Klaus Hammacher / Hans Hirsch, Die Wirtschaftsppolitik des Philosophen Jacobi , Amsterdam / Atlanta 1993, 23.
5. ↑ See ibid., 24ff.
6. ↑ See ibid., 42f.
7. ^ Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Correspondence. Text Comment Dictionary Online. Retrieved February 18, 2019 . 
8. ↑ See JBW I, 2, VIff.
9. ↑ Cf. JWA 7,1,206f.
10. ↑ JWA 6,1,89.
11. ↑ JWA 7,1,207.
12. ↑ JWA 3.51.
13. ↑ JWA 2,1,109.
14. ↑ Peter Baumanns, Kant's Philosophy of Knowledge. Continuous commentary on the main chapters of the "Critique of Pure Reason" , Würzburg 1997, 10.
15. ↑ JWA 2,1,112.
16. ↑ Ibid., 32.
17. ↑ Ibid., 37.
18. ↑ Cf. Birgit Sandkaulen, “'I am and there are things outside of me'. Jacobi's Realism and the Overcoming of the Paradigm of Consciousness “, in: International Yearbook of German Idealism / International Yearbook of German Idealism 11 (2013), Berlin / New York 2016, 169–196; 184. Cf. also Birgit Sandkaulen, “The 'unfortunate thing in itself'. Kant - Jacobi - Fichte ”, in: Jürgen Stolzenberg (ed.), System der Vernunft. Kant and early idealism , Hamburg 2007, 175–201.
19. ↑ JWA 2,1,192.
20. ↑ Ibid.
21. ↑ JWA 2,1,195.
22. ↑ JWA 1,1,203.
23. ^ Chronicle of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Retrieved January 17, 2019 . 
24. ^ Goethe to Knebel, April 8, 1812, cited above. n. Walter Jaeschke (Ed.), Philosophy of Religion and Speculative Theology. The dispute about the Divine Things (1799-1812). Quellenband , Hamburg 1994 (= philosophical-literary disputes, vol. 3.1), 319.
25. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 122.
26. ↑ This characterization comes from Dieter Henrich: "The origin of the double philosophy. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's significance for post-Kantian thinking". In: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. President of the Academy, philosopher, theorist of language, ed. v. Dieter Henrich. Munich 1993, pp. 13-27.
27. ↑ JWA 1,1,18.
28. ↑ JWA 1,1,274.
29. ↑ JWA 1,1,194.
30. ↑ z. B. JWA 2,1,28 / 67.
31. ↑ JWA 1,1,201.
32. ↑ JWA 1,1,198.
33. ^ Jacobi to Jean Paul on March 16, 1800, JBW 12.207.
34. ↑ JWA 1,1.30 / 20. For the jump figure, see above all Birgit Sandkaulen. Reason and cause. The Critique of Reason Jacobi. Munich 2000.
35. ↑ JWA 2,1,37.
36. ↑ Cf. Birgit Sandkaulen: "I am and there are things outside of me". Jacobi's realism and the overcoming of the consciousness paradigm, in: International Yearbook of German Idealism / International Yearbook of German Idealism 11 (2013), Berlin / New York 2016, 169–196.
37. ↑ JWA 2,1,31.
38. ↑ JWA 2,1,37.
39. ↑ JWA 1,1,28.
40. ↑ JWA 2,1,50. For the distinction and the relationship between reason and cause and their mixing cf. Birgit Sandkaulen. Reason and cause. The Critique of Reason Jacobi. Munich 2000.
41. ↑ JWA 1,1,260.
42. ↑ JWA 1,1,253.
43. ↑ Ibid.
44. ↑ JWA 1,1,116.
45. ↑ Cf. JWA 1,1,133ff. and 2.1.93.
46. ↑ JWA 1,1,167.
47. ↑ JWA 3.75.
48. ↑ See Birgit Sandkaulen: System and System Criticism. Reflections on the current importance of a fundamental problem context, in: Birgit Sandkaulen (ed.), System und Systemkritik. Contributions to a basic problem of classical German philosophy. Critical Yearbook of Philosophy, Volume 11, Würzburg 2006, 11–34.
49. ↑ Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Draft of a letter to JI Baggesen from April / May 1795. GA III, 2.298. [Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: Complete edition of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Edited by Reinhard Lauth et al. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt 1962ff.]
50. ↑ Novalis: Fichte-Studien, No. 648. In: Werke, Bd. 2, ed. v. Hans-Joachim Mähl. Munich 1978, p. 200.
51. ^ Friedrich Schlegel: Woldemar review. KFSA II, 273. [Schlegel, Friedrich: Critical Friedrich Schlegel Edition. By Ernst Behler et al. 22 vol. Paderborn et al. 1958 ff.]

predecessor	Office	successor
Anton Clemens von Toerring-Seefeld	President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences 1807 to 1812	unoccupied