Abstract

Jacobi's idea of the status of philosophy has puzzled many interpreters of his work, ever since it was published. Doesn't his plea for an ‘unphilosophy’ or a ‘philosophy of not-knowing’ inevitably lead to sheer inationalism? My approach to answer this question is Jacobi's conception of real life. In contrast to the mechanistic idea of life of the Enlightenment, Jacobi thinks life as a multiplicity of passionate, contingent, historical living beings. Is philosophy capable to think real life and, if so, what kind of philosophy does Jacobi have in mind? He considers his ‘stubbornness’ as the core of his philosophical method. He actually takes the propositions of other philosophers as his point of departure. He does not want to refute them rationally, but contradicts them by opposing concrete experiences of life to their rational arguments. By doing so, he leaps with a ‘salto mortale’ from a kind of rationality, founded on the principle of sufficient reason, into a sphere beyond argumentative reason. Jacobi calls these two totally heterogeneous spheres instrumental (or adjective) reason versus substantive reason. A double movement of tearing apart and appropriating, of destruction and construction characterizes instrumental reason. It destroys the multiplicity of real life and construes a world of its own making, consisting of images, ideas, and words. Substantive reason, on the other hand, is not synonymous with irrationalism, but is a spiritual, metaphysical reality, to which man belongs. Substantive reason does not think life conceptually, but testifies to life as an immediate, independent reality. Man's awareness of this reality is given by revelation, learning etc. Jacobi uses these terms to stress the fact that this spiritual reality is both internal and external with regard to substantive reason. Thus, the only way of man approaching real life is a practical one, viz. substantive reason testifying to its objective reality