F.H. Jacobi's "On Divine Things and their Revelation." A Study and Translation. Paolo Livieri, School of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal April 2019 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies. ©PaoloLivieri2019 - 1 - Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 6 Contribution to Knowledge 7 Chapter 1. Introduction 10 F.H. Jacobi and the Divine Things 10 History of the manuscript 15 Bibliographical overview and theoretical perspectives 22 Conclusion 32 Chapter 2 Divine Things. The significance of the book within the development of Jacobi's 34 philosophy. Intro 34 Atheismusstreit 36 Jacobi's Letter to Fichte: the rise of nihilism 39 The faculty of reason 45 On death and dying 52 Chapter 3. Conceptual Analysis of the Divine Things. A View from Within. Lexical and 56 Theoretical Structure of the Text. Prophecy 56 Measure 67 Reason 72 Jacobi's realism 83 The last threat 87 Chapter 4. The Problem of Existence. 91 The distinctiveness of metaphysics: methodology 91 The certainty of existence 102 The problem of freedom 104 Concluding remarks 111 Conclusion 115 Bibliographical Appendix 121 F. H. JACOBI - On Divine Things and their Revelation 142 (the translation follows its own pagination) - 2 - Abstract English Version This dissertation presents the first English translation, together with commentary, of F.H. Jacobi´s On Divine Things and their Revelation (1811; henceforth, Divine Things). This work marked for Jacobi the emancipation of rational thinking from the bounds set to it by the Enlightenment in matters of religion. Jacobi’s goal was to develop a new definition of rationality. And this is a goal that he sought to achieve indirectly by drawing from different but consonant sources. The intention of this dissertation is twofold: to examine Jacobi’s efforts at introducing a new form of rationality; to make explicit the limits of this rationality inasmuch as Jacobi succeeded in defining it. In general, my analysis shows that, while Jacobi relies heavily on Kant’s doctrine of postulates to lay out his position, his considered concept of rationality seeks to distance itself from the Kantian transcendental mode of thinking – indeed, to distance itself from the entire tradition of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, since Jacobi still operates within the frameworks of thought typical of the Enlightenment, despite his opposition to it, his thought is ultimately continuous with it. More specifically, I demonstrate that reason for Jacobi is properly defined, not by the act of postulating, but the act of perceiving things which are truly external to the perceiving of them. This perceiving, whether reason- or sense-based, is intuitive. Jacobi recognizes, of course, that the perceiving itself, and even more so the system of conceptual representations based on it, is a subjective product. It is the undue interest in this subjective aspect of cognition that obscures the objective apprehension of reality that reason (as redefined by Jacobi) otherwise houses, and thus gives rise to at times useful, but always illusory, representations of reality. Jacobi’s Divine Things is the manifesto of a new realism. This is a realism, however, that in order to be true to itself requires according to Jacobi the assent to divine things. Where for Kant rational theology can be only the - 3 - product of subjective postulation, for Jacobi it is rather where realism is rather achieved. In this, while countering Kant, Jacobi still operates within the terms of a problematic as set by him. French Version Cette thèse présente la première traduction anglaise de F.H. Jacobi's On Divine Things and their Revelation (1811 ; dorénavant, Divine Things) avec commentaire. Cet ouvrage marque pour Jacobi l’émancipation de la pensée rationnelle à partir des limites fixées par les Lumières en matière de religion. L’objectif de Jacobi était de développer une nouvelle définition de la rationalité. Et c’est un objectif qu’il a cherché à atteindre indirectement en puisant dans des sources différentes mais en accord. L’intention de cette thèse est double : examiner les efforts de Jacobi pour introduire une nouvelle forme de rationalité ; expliciter les limites de cette rationalité dans la mesure où Jacobi a réussi à la définir. En général, mon analyse montre que, même si Jacobi s’appuie beaucoup sur la doctrine des postulats de Kant pour exposer sa position, son concept de rationalité cherche à s’éloigner du mode de pensée transcendantal Kantien - en effet, à s’éloigner de toute la tradition de philosophie moderne. Néanmoins, étant donné que Jacobi opère toujours dans les cadres de pensée typiques des Lumières ; malgré son opposition, sa pensée est finalement cohérente avec lui. Plus précisément, je démontre que la raison de Jacobi est correctement définie, non pas par l'acte de postuler, mais par l'acte de percevoir des choses qui sont réellement extérieures à leur perception. Cette perception, qu'elle soit fondée sur la raison ou sur le sens, est intuitive. Jacobi reconnaît, bien sûr, que la perception elle-même, et plus encore le système de représentations conceptuelles qui en découle, est un produit subjectif. C'est l'intérêt indu de cet aspect subjectif de la connaissance qui masque l'appréhension objective de la réalité que la raison (redéfinie par Jacobi) accueille par - 4 - ailleurs et donne ainsi lieu à des représentations de la réalité parfois utiles, mais toujours illusoires. Les choses divines de Jacobi est le manifeste d’un nouveau réalisme. C’est un réalisme, cependant, que pour être fidèle à lui-même nécessite, selon Jacobi, l’assentiment aux choses divines. Là où, pour Kant, la théologie rationnelle ne peut être que le produit d’une postulation subjective, pour Jacobi, c’est là que le réalisme est plutôt atteint. En cela, tout en combattant Kant, Jacobi fonctionne toujours selon les termes de la problématique qu'il a définie. - 5 - Acknowledgments This dissertation has been a challenge in many respects: it includes a translation from a language that is not my own into a language that I did not master as I arrived in Montreal 5 years ago; it is about concepts such as faith, immediacy and feeling that are in many ways foreign to the theoretical precision that I have always attributed to philosophy; it has been chosen as a project about an author and a text that are somehow at odds with what I believed pure rational thinking meant. I want to thank Prof. George di Giovanni. He believed that there was some good in doing research on Jacobi´s On Divine Things and their Revelation. Thanks to him, I have been introduced to Jacobi's philosophy; I discovered the intrinsic potential of the analysis of the notion of immediacy which appears to have no citizenship in the land of speculation that philosophy occupies. Moreover, my intellectual background may be deemed a purely theoretical approach to the problems of philosophy, and thanks to Prof. di Giovanni's writing and teaching I slowly discovered that within the confrontation immediacy-VS-mediation lies the ultimate horizon of philosophy of religion, where both ethical and theoretical inquiries gather around shared notions such as: truth, ultimate reality, Being, existence, and subject. I want to thank Prof. Garth W. Green. His teaching is the reason why I will continue to walk the thin line that philosophy of religion constitutes. As Jacobi would state, philosophy of religion has to do with the limits of rational explanations; it deals with the limits of our language. Garth Green made me realize how the field of philosophy of religion is quintessentially rational for it constitutes the analysis of the confrontation between what is conceptually assumed but, at the same time, cannot be known. In the end, philosophy of religion appears as the logos about how we relate to a principle. I am also grateful to the PRIS (Philosophy of Religious Informal Seminar) colleagues: Hadi Fakhoury, Matthew Nini, Jason Blakeburn, Jingjing Li, Naznin Patel, and Marco Dozzi. The - 6 - community we created was established to contextualize, discuss, and communicate our research in a shared field. Thanks to this, I was able to appreciate the limits of this present research. Contribution to knowledge The author of this dissertation is the first to have translated Jacobi's On Divine Things and their Revelation into English, and the first in the English-speaking world to have dedicated a book- length study to it. He will defend a thesis that, though foreshadowed by some scholars (namely: George di Giovanni, Birgit Sandkaulen and Marco Ivaldo) is the result of a new understanding of what finitude means in the context of Jacobi's philosophy of religion. The equation of reason and virtue (Marco Ivaldo) and the conception of existence according to the blueprint provided by the notion of cause (Birgit Sandkaulen), have contributed to the theoretical background of the author's investigations about potential and limits of Jacobi's understanding of rational thinking in the context of German Idealism. As they have been presented by George di Giovanni since 1994, the potential and limits of Jacobi's understanding of rational thinking can be appreciated only when confronted with the limits that Jacobi's polemical target (systematic thinking) shows. Otherwise, Jacobi's works would look like unsound ideology written in the most baroque manner. Instead, Jacobi's efforts shed light on internal frictions and flaws of systematic thinking while highlighting the whole panorama of rational issues that falls outside that systematic approach. First among these issues is the question about finite existence. On the basis of a critical analysis of the methodological weaknesses of Jacobi's philosophy (as highlighted by George di Giovanni), we may appreciate the intentions and the general project that moved Jacobi's ungifted pen.