Ștefan Maftei Nothingness or a God: Nihilism, Enlightenment, and Natural Reason [628569]

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META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS , PHENOMENOLOGY , AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
VOL. V, NO. 2 / DECEMBER 2013: 279-297, ISSN 2067-365, www.metajournal.org

“Nothingness or a God”: Nihilism, Enlightenment,
and “Natural Reason” in Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi’s Works

Ștefan-Sebastian Maftei
“Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca

Abstract

Our paper analyzes one of the most im portant philosophical problems of the
philosophies of the Enlightenment: th e problem of the emergence and the
justification of the autonomy of reason . Our study will reflect on the critique
of the autonomous reason, a critique br ought by the Enlightenment thinkers
themselves. Kant is one example of cri ticizing, and moreover securing the
status of reason in the Enlightenment . Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, however,
was not only an adversary of transcendental philosophy, but also a radical critic of the concept of ‘reason.’ In Jac obi’s works, reason faced a powerful
critique of its own mechanis ms of justification. Jacob i’s main thesis is that
reason is threatened by the prospect of nihilism lurking from inside its main
body of axioms. His critique against ni hilism from the point of view of a
believer is nothing new to the history of ideas, but here the direction of the
critique changes against the vein of th e Modern Age’s mainstream views with
respect to the relation between reason and faith: reason’s own standards of
truth are deemed as incapable of securing a safe place for reason against the
prospect of an overwhelming nihilis m. Thus, Jacobi emphasizes again and
again that reason or cognition must find its standard of truth outside itself, or
else it must face the sc ene of nothingness.

Keywords : nihilism, natural reason, Go d, rationalism, atheism,
Enlightenment

The Enlightenment of Belief
In his article Philosophe from the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , Du Marsais stated
that “reason determines the action of the philosopher” as “grace
determines the action of the Christian.” (Du Marsais 2010).

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The ground was set for a differentiation of the status of
reason from that of faith. The “philosophic spirit” is described in
its turn as “a spirit of observation and of precision , which
relates all things to their true pr inciples.” However, “it is not
the philosophic spirit alone whic h the philosopher cultivates, he
carries his attention and his concerns further.” It is reason that
“compels him to know, to study, and to work to acquire sociable
qualities,” so the philosopher’s life is a life dedicated to a social
mission: the enlightenment (moral and intellectual) of fellow
human beings. The philosopher is “an honorable man who
wishes to please and to make himse lf useful.” He is not a social
hermit or a social outcast. His correct1 and honorable use of
reason illustrates a moral quality, “humanity:” “Feelings of probity enter as much into the mechanical constitution of the
philosopher as the enlightenment of the mind.” In contrast to
“fanatics” and “superstitious” peop le, the philosopher’s attitude
towards reason will thoroughly influence his life and conduct,
as well as the life and conduct of others:

“The more reason you find in a man, the more probity you will find in
him. In contrast, where fanaticism and superstition reign, there
reign the passions and anger. The temperament of the philosopher is
to act according to the spirit of order or by reason; as he loves society
deeply, it is more important to him than to the rest of men to make
sure that all of his actions produc e only effects that conform to the
idea of the honorable man.” (Du Marsais 2010)
The article “Raison” from the same Encyclopédie has been
published in 1765, the same year as the year of the publication of the “Philosophe”. Its author is unknown. The article proposes
four basic meanings which can be granted to the notion of
“reason:” reason as faculty, a “natural faculty with which God
endowed men to know truth, whatever light it follows, and to
whatever class of subjects it applies”; reason as “the same faculty considered, not absolutely, but only inasmuch as it
functions in accordance with certain notions, which we bring
with us at birth, and that are common to all men of the world”
reason as “that very natural light by which the faculty that we
refer to by this name is guided … one ordinarily understands the term when one is speaking of a proof, or of an objection
taken from reason, and which one wants to distinguish in this
way from proofs and objections grounded in divine or human

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authority ( qu’on veut distinguer par – là des preuves & des
objections prises de l’autorité divine ou humaine );” and, finally,
reason as “the sequence of truths that the human mind can
attain naturally, without being aided by the light of faith”
(“Reason” 2010). There are two main types of truths: “ eternal
truths ( vérités éternelles ), which are absolutely necessary, to the
point that the opposite would imply contradiction … truths of
which the necessity is logical, metaphysical, or geometric …”
and “ positive truths ( positives ) … the laws that it pleased God
to give to nature, or because they depend on nature.” (“Reason”
2010)
The article states that the “eternal truths” cannot be
contested by faith,2 the “eternal” truths being “absolutely
necessary,” and independent of any faith, opinion or belief.
These are marked as “self-evident propositions.” This being the
case, the author of the article is very keen in clearly
distinguishing reason from faith: “it is now necessary to establish the precise boundarie s that lie between faith and
reason (il faut maintenant marquer les bornes précises qui se
trouvent entre la foi & la raison ).”
First, reason is impervious to “divine revelation” if “it
contradicts what is known to us, either by immediate intuition, as in the case of self-evident propositions, or by obvious
deductions of reason, as in demo nstrations.” Reason is therefore
the “true competent judge in every thing of which we have a
clear and distinct idea,” since revelation cannot nullify the
decrees of natural reason , although it can confirm these eternal
truths, by agreeing with the “s elf-evident propositions.” Thus,
reason can always defy the absurdities of faith, i.e. when propositions of faith are in contradiction with the eternal truths
of reason: “Wherever we have a clear and evident judgment of
reason, we cannot be forced to renounce it to embrace the
contrary opinion under the pretext that it is a matter of faith.
The reason for this is that we are men before we are
Christians.”
Second, revelation can be of assistance in those cases
where our natural reason is beyond its jurisdiction : “reason not
being able to rise above probab ility, faith guides the mind
where reason falls short.” If re ason is uncertain of a truth when

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it is not self-evident , and the mind only speculates in probable
conjectures, the mind “is forced to give its assent to an account
that it knows to come from he who can neither deceive nor be deceived.” Therefore, “when the principles of reason do not
make us see plainly that a proposition is true or false, manifest
revelation can resolve the mind, standing as another principle
of truth (my emphasis). In this case, a proposition supported by
revelation becomes a matter of faith, and is above reason.”
3
Thus, this explains the fact that faith may be able to guide the
reason, where reason itself falls short.
The author of the article “Reason” stresses the
importance of determining the exact place and jurisdiction of
reason over faith. Against the alleged interest of several
Enlightenment writers to limit the significance of faith to
reason as such or really exclude faith from the affairs of human reason altogether, leaving reason alone – with its obvious
limitations – to deal with metaphysical truths, this author,
through his work of defining reason, which, supposedly,
reflected the general view of the authors of the Encyclopédie ,
casts a new light on the Enlightenment’s general views on faith, and, obviously, on the limitations that reason must first set
upon its own dealings with metaphysical and non-metaphysical
truths. The mind is “uncertain of the truth of what is not self-
evident to it;” therefore, on some occasions, on the path of its
continuous and strenuous search for a certain amount of evidence, the mind seeks support from faith. The author of the
article goes even further:
“This far extends the influence of faith, without doing violence to
reason, which is neither harmed nor harried, but aided and perfected
by new lights emanating from the et ernal source of all knowledge.
Everything that is based on the jurisdiction of revelation must
prevail upon our opinions, on our pr ejudices and on our interests, and
has the right to demand of the mind its perfect assent. But such submission of our reason to fa ith may not reverse the limits of
human knowledge, and does not sh ake the foundations of reason.
Instead it leaves us the liberty to employ our faculties for the
purposes for which they were given.” (“Reason” 2010)
To take Kant, for example, he understood that determining the
precise middle ground between faith and reason (generally
understood) meant not only that m an’s reason should be finally

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freed from the absurd dictates of blind faith – a state of
obscurity seen by Kant as a self-imposed state of nonage4 – a
dogmatism spawned by religious dogmas, individual or collective superstitions etc., but also that reason should free
itself from its own shortcomings in relation to belief (Kant 2004,
150). Therefore, through his Criticism
5, Kant thought he had
found a way not only out of the dogmatism of “belief” (blind,
unquestioned faith), but also out of the dogmatisms that were incumbent to the realm of reason itself, such as the “dogmatism
of metaphysics.” This particular ‘dogmatism’ of ‘metaphysics’ is
in itself a source of “unbelief,” a sort of dogmatism that
ultimately leads, according to Kant, to skepticism. Another
dogmatism of “unbelief” was, obviously, atheism , alongside
materialism or fatalism :

“The Critique … previously instructed us about our inevitable
ignorance with respect to things in themselves, and … restricted
everything that we can cognize theoretically to mere appearances.
(…) Now only through critique can materialism , fatalism , atheism ,
freethinking unbelief , fanaticism , and superstition (which can become
universally harmful), and lastly idealism and skepticism (which are
more dangerous for the schools, an d can scarcely pass over into the
public) be cut off at the very root. (…) The Critique is not opposed to
the dogmatic procedure of reason in its pure cognition, as science (for
science must always be dogmatic, i.e., it must always be rigorously
proven from secure principles a priori ), but to dogmatism , i.e., to the
pretension of making progress in pure cognition from concepts
(philosophical cognition) using only principles such as reason has
long made use of, without inquirin g into the manner and the right by
which reason has arrived at those principles. Dogmatism therefore is
the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, without a preceding critique
of reason’s own ability . Consequently, this opposition should not,
under the self-assumed name of popularity, speak in favor of
babbling superficiality, nor indeed of skepticism, which makes short
work of metaphysics; on the contrary, the Critique is the necessary
preliminary preparation for the advancement of a well-founded
metaphysics as science, which ne cessarily must be worked out
dogmatically and, in accordance with the strictest requirements, systematically, and so scholastic ally (not popularly), for this
requirement on it is irremissible, si nce it obligates itself to carry out
its business wholly a priori , hence to the complete satisfaction of
speculative reason (…).” (Kant 2004, 150-153)
Regarding the realm of practical reason, Kant agrees that
freedom (a postulate of practical reason), no less than God,

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cannot be cognized theoretically, but only thought of as
transcendent “principles” that “profess to pass beyond” the
limits of experience, as opposed to immanent principles , “whose
application is confined entirely within the limits of possible
experience” (Kant 1965, A 296/B 352).6 Later, in his Critique of
Judgment , Kant will distinguish the aesthetic from the rational
ideas, the latter being referred to as according to an objective
principle which is “incapable of ever furnishing a cognition of
the object” (cf. Caygill 1995). In the Preface to the Second
Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant agrees with
limiting knowledge to the objects of possible experience and
with the establishing of the “ideas” as objects of (rational) faith
(Pomerleau 2012). He will therefore search – this is part of the
nature of his critical inquiry into metaphysics – for the transcendental conditions of our capacity to speculate
metaphysically, which he will find in the a priori ideas of pure
reason (soul, universe, God). He will contend that some ideas
serve a “regulative” function, and not a “constitutive” one (Kant
1965, A 180/B 222) (Pomerleau 2012), in the sense that they do serve “the heuristic purpose of regulating our thought and
action,” although they cannot constitute knowledge. God,
freedom , and immortality are considered regulative ideas that
function as “postulates of practical reason”, since “it is
reasonable for us to postulate them as matters of rational
faith.” (Kant 1965, A 3/B 7) (ibid.) To “postulate” these ideas
means to believe in them, since they are enormously significant to our values and to our commitm ent to these values. Although
none of these ideas are objects of any knowledge, they yield to a
justifiable, subjective, yet ratio nal belief – faith in God – which
appears as a middle ground between objective knowledge and
purely subjective, arbitrary opinion. (Kant 1965, A 822/B 850)
(ibid.) This is part of what has been usually known as the
“moral argument” of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason . The
argument contends that it is morally justified, or “morally
necessary,” to follow Kant’s words, to see ideas, such as God or
immortality , as arguments or hypotheses for a “rational faith.”
God is a “regulative idea that ca n be shown to be a matter of
rational belief.” (ibid.) Thus, the famous passage from the preface to the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ,

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where he states that he had to “make room for belief” in his
criticism of knowledge appears as a justification of the role that
“rational faith” had in Kant’s endeavor to ascertain a justifiable place to faith in his criticism of traditional metaphysics:
“But since, for morals, I do not need anything more than that
freedom merely does not contradict it self, and hence that it indeed at
least permits of being thought with out there being need for further
insight into it, and that it therefore does not in any way obstruct the
mechanism of nature regarding th e very same action (taken in
another respect), then, the doctrine of morality retains its place and
the doctrine of nature keeps its as well, something that would not
have taken place if the Critique had not previously instructed us
about our inevitable ignorance with respect to things in themselves,
and had not restricted everything that we can cognize theoretically to
mere appearances. This same expositi on of the positive benefit of the
critical principles of pure reason can be produced with respect to the
concept of God and the simple nature of our soul, which, however, I
pass over for brevity’s sake. I can therefore not so much as even
assume God, freedom , and immortality on behalf of the necessary,
practical use of my reason, if I do not at the same time deprive
speculative reason of its pretension to transcendent insights, since, in
order to achieve such insights, it mu st make use of principles which,
because they in fact extend only to objects of possible experience,
always change their object into appearance if they are indeed applied
to something that cannot be an object of experience, and which
therefore pronounce all practical expansion of pure reason to be
impossible. I therefore had to cast out knowledge in order to make
room for belief (my emphasis); the dogmatism of metaphysics, i.e ., the
preconception that it makes progress without a critique of pure reason, is the true source of all the unbelief (always extremely dogmatic)
which conflicts with morality .(my emphasis).” (Kant 2004, 150)
Kant’s main attempt at securing a certain role for “faith” in his
rational reconstruction of metaph ysics is not an isolated move.
He is really following the trend of the Enlightenment, which
saw faith as capable of establishing a standard of truth in those
cases that natural reason could not reach beyond its
jurisdiction. Kant succeeded in keeping a balance between faith
and knowledge by recognizing the role of faith in supporting the
standards of reason or, better yet, in providing justifiable arguments of faith with resp ect to things which were
considered uncognizable, beyond any possible experience: God,
immortality, freedom, the postulates of practical reason.

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Deism
The Enlightenment thinking in general succeeded in keeping a balance between faith and knowledge, by limiting the claims of
reason and by transforming the character of faith – by
integrating faith into a system of justifiable beliefs – of beliefs
that function as standards for the advancement of knowledge,
appealing to standards of truth which are beyond the limits of discursive thinking. Faith made an appeal to the source of all
knowledge – which was God – without, at the same time, doing
violence to reason and to th e Enlightenment’s demands for a
concept of “reason”.
However, the relation between faith and knowledge did
not developed so harmoniously thro ughout the entire Age of the
Enlightenment. Some of the authors of the Encyclopédie were
facing charges of atheism , such as Diderot, a guest of the salons
of the famous 18
th century Baron D”Holbach. Bayle and
Voltaire also had to respond to charges of atheism. However,
among French intellectuals, only d’Holbach and later Naigeon
practiced a militant atheism, based on a purely materialistic
explanation of the world.7 During his visit to France, Hume had
also been a guest of the atheists’ salons . He was actually a
Deist, reluctant to Christian dogmas, influenced by Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Pope, and Bolingbroke. Atheism is
considered to have appeared as a doctrine in the 18
th century as
an effect of the emergence of religious toleration. Nevertheless,
militant atheism professed in the salons was still rejected by
the intellectual majority.
The fate of atheism in the 18th century was complicated
by the emergence of Deism among the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. The authors of the Encyclopédie were also
Deists. Deism was a philosophical form of understanding
religious truths, which supported the idea of a Deity that
should be fully explainable by reason and not by revelation or
dogma. However, the article “Raison” of the Encyclopédie spoke
clearly about revelation and about revealed truth as a support
for the truths of reason.
Generally, the Deists were tolerant and non-atheists.
Their doctrine, though, left a deep mark upon the

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Enlightenment philosophies. They emphasized the necessity of
understanding faith as a sustaina ble argument of belief – from
here emerged the idea of a “rational faith” or rational belief in a God that did not resemble much to the God of the Christian
tradition, but rather to a God imagined by philosophers. In
Diderot’s own words: “I believe in God, although I live very
happily with atheists.” The transformation inside the concept of
“faith” itself came from the Enlightenment thinkers’ original belief in the sanctity of man and the inviolability of human
freedom:

Mais il faut être bien peu philosophe soi-même, pour ne pas sentir
que le plus beau privilége de notre raison consiste à ne rien croire par
l'impulsion d'un instinct aveu gle & méchanique, & que c'est
deshonorer la raison, que de la mett re dans des entraves ainsi que le
faisoient les Chaldéens. L'homme est né pour penser de lui-même.8
The article Athéisme from the Encyclopédie , authored by
Formey (Formey 2012), described atheism as “the opinion of
those who deny the existence of a God in the world.” Thus, the
simple ignorance of God is not really atheism . But “to be
charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the
notion of God and reject it:”
[Athéisme ] c’est l’opinion de ceux qu i nient l’existence d’un Dieu
auteur du monde. Ainsi la simple ignorance de Dieu ne ferait pas
l’athéisme . Pour être chargé du titre odieux d’ athéisme , il faut avoir
la notion de Dieu, & la rejeter. L’état de doute n’est pas non plus
l’athéisme formel: mais il s’en approche ou s’en éloigne, à proportion
du nombre des doutes, ou de la ma nière de les envisager. On n’est
donc fondé à traiter d’ athées que ceux qui déclarent ouvertement
qu’ils ont pris parti sur le dogme de l’existence de Dieu, & qu’ils
soutiennent la négative. Cette remarque est très importante, parce
que quantité de grands hommes, ta nt anciens que modernes, ont fort
légèrement été taxés d’ athéisme , soit pour avoir attaqué les faux
dieux, soit pour avoir rejeté certains arguments faibles, qui ne
concluent point pour l’exis tence du vrai Dieu. (…) L’ athéisme ne se
borne pas à défigurer l’idée de Dieu , mais il la détruit entièrement.
(Formey 2012)

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Aut Deus, aut nihil9

Facing the dire consequences of dealing with a religious faith
that was strongly directed towa rds the imperatives of reason,
some Enlightenment thinkers began to have second thoughts
about reason’s ability to master the issues which itself was
trying to address: for example, the issues of God, immortality of
the soul , human freedom , etc. Their concerns materialized into
expressing doubts about the real ca pacity of reason to ascertain
not only the truths of religion, but also its own (immutable)
truths. Soon, these doubts cohered into a full-blown critique of
human reason, yet not in a Kantian manner. These critiques
appeared on the occasion of the “pantheism controversy” in
Germany, sparked by a dialogue between the philosopher
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Lessing, an upholder of Spinozism, was criticized by
Jacobi as supporter of a dogmatic atheist philosophy – the
philosophy of Spinoza. The controversy emerged roughly
around 1785, on the occasion of the publication of Jacobi’s
Letters on the Teachings of Spinoza.
10 The second edition
appeared in 1789, and readdressed Jacobi’s critique on
Spinoza’s substance, which was deemed as materialistic
substance. Jacobi also saw Spinoza’s materialism as a
consequence of Enlightenment’s treatment of reason; therefore,
pantheism was strictly equated with materialism and, finally,
as a form of atheism . Actually, Jacobi’s critique went even
further. He complained about reason’s inability to master its
own powers and about the rationalistic project altogether:
reason is not only incapable of mastering its own powers, but everything touched by it turns into atheism and, consequently,
nihilism . A treatment of reason as ‘dogmatic’ as the
Enlightenment’s reason was bound to fail, precisely because
this reason rejected faith altoge ther. Moses Mendelssohn was
Jacobi’s most important critic: he ridiculed him for confusing
Spinozism with atheism and for lack of philosophical savoir-
faire .
11 The first (1785) edition summed up Jacobi’s critique
quite clearly, in a few theses:
“Spinozism is atheism. (…) The Leib nizian-Wolffian philosophy is no
less fatalistic than the Spinozist philosophy and leads the persistent

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researcher back to the principles of the latter. (…) Every avenue of
demonstration ends up in fatalism. We can only demonstrate
similarities. Every proof presuppo ses something already proven, the
principle of which is Revelation. Faith is the element of all human
cognition and activity.” (Jacobi 1994, 233-234)
This is, roughly, the sum of Jacobi’s entire work in a few
sentences. A later work, entitled David Hume Über den
Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (Jacobi 1994, 252-339)
was another reply of Jacobi to Mendelssohn’s critique of the
Jacobian Glaube (belief). In the 1815 edition of David Hume on
Faith or Idealism and Realism. A Dialogue. Preface and also
Introduction to the Author’s Collected Philosophical Works ,
Jacobi will state the same thing: “ all human cognition derives
from revelation and faith (my emphasis).” (Jacobi 1994, 538)
Basically, Jacobi’s argument against rationalistic
philosophy in general consisted on four main accusations
against rationalism: any consiste nt version of the rationalist
view of reason as a ground for explanation will lead to a dogmatic system, which can be ch aracterized as: 1) monistic, 2)
atheistic, 3) fatalistic, and 4) nihilistic.
12 I will refer here mainly
to nihilism.
Jacobi will criticize the main argument of rationalistic
philosophy with reference to a First Cause, the knowledge of which is based on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, guided by
the idea of “infinite intelligibility” of a finite series ending in a
causa sui (Franks 2000, 97). The First Cause, Jacobi states,
cannot be proven of as transcending the “totality of series of
conditions,”
13 since reason itself is only a formula of conditioned
conditioning , working within a series of conditioned conditions:
“to want to discover the conditio ns of the unconditional; to want
to invent a possibility for what is absolutely necessary, and to
construct it in order to comprehend it, seems on the face of it an
absurd undertaking.” (Jacobi 1994, 376)
If rationalism tries to prove its hypothesis, the Principle
of Sufficient Reason will require that finite realities should be part of an infinite substance (a monistic worldview). On the
other hand, rationalism is atheistic, because reason in itself is
atheistic: only belief in a tr anscendent reality is genuinely
theistic (Franks 2000, 98). If finite conditions are dependent of
an infinite monistic reality, then there really is no freedom for

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human beings: freedom is seen here as a capacity to generate , to
initiate finite series of conditions, which, according to
rationalism itself, seems impossible. The infinite substance hypothesized by rationalism denies the existence of finite
entities: furthermore, it denies its own existence as an entity.
The clear consequence of this is that rationalism asserts that
All is Nothing. The result is absurd (Franks 2000, 98).
Thus, atheism, along with its nihilism, is, according to
Jacobi, “the indirect consequence of man’s attempt to
understand nature for theoretical and practical purposes.”
(Jacobi 1994, 361) This is a full-scale critique of the
philosophical notion of reason seen both as theoretical-
instrumental, and as practical-instrumental.
14
Jacobi starts to develop anoth er perspective with respect
to cognition: “the principle of cognition is living being,” because
cognition understood through and as “the faculty of abstraction
and language,” really suggests the fact that “our philosophical
understanding does not reach beyond its own creation,” so that
“we understand perfectly what we thus create, to the extent
that it is our creation. And whatever does not allow being
created in this way, we do not understand.” (Jacobi 1994, 370)
Ironically, the only thing which does not fall under the laws of
the all-encompassing reason is the real world itself, that is, “the actual existence of a temporal world made up of individual
finite things producing and destroying one another in
succession,” that “can in no way be conceptualized, which is to
say, it is not naturally explicable.” (Jacobi 1994, 373) However,
the fate of reason is not utterly doomed. Jacobi suggests that
there could be a way of redressing the role of reason, by
returning to what he names as a “natural reason.” “Natural reason,” in Jacobi’s view, is re ason’s capacity of seeing the
world as it is , as a temporal world, beyond abstraction, without
transforming “the natural into something supernatural.”

“But reason need not despair because of this incomprehensibility, for
knowledge forces itself upon it, so to speak; namely, the knowledge
that the condition of the possibility of the existence of a temporal
world lies outside the region of its concepts, that is to say, outside
that complex of conditioned beings which is nature. So when reason
searches for that condition, it is searching for something extra-
natural or supernatural within what is natural; or again, it is trying

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to transform the natural into some thing supernatural.” (Jacobi 1994,
373)
The basic argument against rationalism as nihilism – actually
it was the first text where Jacobi used the exact term “nihilism”
– appears in Jacobi’s famous open letter to Fichte ( Jacobi an
Fichte , 1799)15 where Jacobi criticizes Fichte’s rationalism and
explicitly accuses him of “nihilism.” Jacobi’s reply attacked the
essence of Fichte’s philosophical thinking, his rationalism, precisely at a time when Fichte was under intense criticism
from the part of the religious circles in Germany. Jacobi’s
accusation of atheism couldn’t have come at a worse time for
Fichte. He was in the middle of the so-called “Atheist dispute,”
which was generated by Fichte’s 1798 essay Über den Grund
unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung . Because of
these accusations, Fichte was forced to resign from his
academic position in Jena and to leave for Berlin.
Jacobi’s main points of accusation relied on his earlier
critique against Leibnizian ra tionalism and transcendental
philosophy. He criticized especially the philosophical tendency
to theorize upon the notion of God in the most rigorous manner:
“It would not be any reproach to Transcendental Philosophy that it
does not know anything about God, for it is universally acknowledged
that God cannot be known, but only believed in. A God who could be known would not be a God at all. But a merely artificial faith in Him
is also impossible as faith; for in so far as it only wants to be artificial
– i.e. simply scientific or purely rational – it abolishes natural faith
and, with that, itself as faith as well: hence theism is abolished as a
whole.” (Jacobi 1994, 500)
Here, Jacobi clearly recognizes t hat faith is incompatible with
reason and that between these two there cannot be any sort of
compromise. Either reason abolished faith, or vice versa.
Actually, here Jacobi is confronting us with a dilemma that has been troubling philosophical thinking for centuries. Is faith
really incompatible with reason? Is there just one way of
acknowledging God?
Jacobi defined his philosophy as a “non-philosophy,” that
had its essence in “non-knowledge.” (Jacobi 1994, 500) He accused both materialism and idealism of supporting the same
method of “attempting to expl ain everything from a self-
determining matter alone or from a self-determining

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intelligence … their opposing cour ses do not take them apart at
all, but rather bring them gradually nearer to each other until
they finally touch.” (Jacobi 1994, 502) He accused both materialism, and idealism of philosophical monism which
would eventually lead to fatalism. Against Fichte, he issues a
warning: a philosophy understood only as a construct of pure
reason is only an illusion, since “pure reason only takes hold of
itself,” without saying anything about the external world. Moreover, a philosophy of pure reason would only turn real
things into empty abstractions and futile illusions. A
rationalistic philosophy would on ly transform the thing into
pure nothingness : “For man knows only in that he
comprehends, and he comprehend s only in that, by changing
the real thing into mere shape, he turns the shape into the
thing and the thing into nothing.” At the core of rationalism lies
a very treacherous and concealed nihilism . The reference to
Fichte’s “I” is unmistakable:
“Since outside the mechanism of nature I encounter nothing but
wonders, mysteries and signs; and I feel a terrible horror before the
nothing, the absolutely indeterminate, the utte rly void (these three
are one: the Platonic infinite!), espe cially as the object of philosophy
or aim of wisdom; yet, as I explor e the mechanism of nature of the I
as well as if the not-I, I attain only to the nothing-in-itself ; and I am
so assailed, so seized and carried away by it in my transcendental being (personally, so to speak), that , just in order to empty out the
infinite, I cannot help wanting to fill it, as an infinite nothing, a pure-
and-total-in-and-for-itself (were it not simply impossible!): since, I
say, this is the way it is with me and the science of the true, or more
precisely, the true scienc e, I therefore do not see why I, as a matter of
taste, should not be allowed to prefer my philosophy of non-
knowledge to the philosoph ical knowledge of the nothing, at least in
fugam vacui . I have nothing confronting me, after all, except
nothingness; and even chimeras are a good match for that.” (Jacobi
1994, 519)
Only a “natural reason,” which man already possesses, Jacobi
argues, would accept “to call a God who is non-personal a God
who is not , a non-entity.” (Jacobi 1994, 520) Is God a figment of
my imagination, then? Yes, but only to the non-believer of
rationalistic philosophy:
“Hence do I claim: Man finds God because he can find himself only in
God; and he is to himself unfathomable to him. ‘Necessarily,’ for

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otherwise there would reside in man a supra-divine power, and God
would have to be capable of being invented by man. God would then
only be the thought of someone fi nite, something imaginary, and by
no means the Highest Being who subs ists in Himself alone, the free
creator of all the other beings, the beginning and the end. This is not
how it is, and for this reason man loses himself as soon as he resists
finding himself in God as his creator, in a way inconceivable to his reason; as soon as he wants to gro und himself in himself alone. Then
everything gradually dissolves fo r him into his own nothingness.
Man has this choice, however, and this alone: Nothingness or a God
(emphasis mine). If he chooses nothingness, he makes himself unto a
God, that is, he makes a phantom in to God, for it is impossible, if
there is no God, that man and a ll that surrounds him should be
anything but a phantom. I repeat: God is, and is outside me, a living,
self-subsisting being, or I am God. There is no third.” (Jacobi 1994,
524)

Conclusion

Thus, Jacobi reiterates the dilemma: either God or nothingness.
Facing a powerful critique of its own mechanisms of justification, Enlightenment’s re ason, at least with respect to
the rationalistic worldview, is threatened by the prospect of
nihilism lurking from inside its main body of axioms. Jacobi’s
critique against nihilism from the point of view of a believer is
not something entirely new to ph ilosophical thinking. However,
the relentless criticism against reason ’s own standards of truth
leaves no choice in front of the alleged overwhelming nihilism:
reason or cognition must find its standard of truth outside
itself, or else it must face the prospect of nothingness.
16 Reason
cannot be autonomous without being itself condemned to its own illusion of power. The Enlightenment’s vision of an all-
powerful, autonomous reason is thus shattered. If there is not a
human cognition in the shape of a “non-philosophy” that could
find its roots in revelation of faith or in “non-knowledge,” then
philosophical reason is doomed to dream its own dream of godlessness and self-deception.

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NOTES

1 “The world is full of intelligent people and very intelligent people,
who always judge; they always guess, because to judge without a
sense of when one has a proper reason to judge is to guess. They do
not know the extent of the human mind; they believe that everything can be known: thus they are ashamed not be able to pronounce
judgement and imagine that intelligence consists in judging. The
philosopher believes that it consists in judging well: he is more satisfied with himself when he has suspended the faculty of making a
decision than he would be to have come to a decision before having a
sense of the proper reason for a decision.” (Du Marsais 2010)
2 “Now it is those last truths that faith would never oppose.” („Reason”
2010)
3 All of the above quotes appear in „Reason” 2010.
4 Cf. (Kant 2012): “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-
imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-
imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision
and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude. ) ‘Have the courage to use your own
understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”
5 The newest Romanian analysis of Kant’s critique of metaphysics can
be found in (Bondor 2013, 119 ff.)
6 See article “Transcendent” in Caygill (1995).
7 Materialism was a constant preoccupation for many of the 18th and
19th century French intellectuals: He lvetius, La Mettrie, Condorcet,
Cabanis, de Sade, Volney, Laplace, De Tracy, Benjamin Constant, Lamarck, Saint-Simon, T hurot, Stendhal, etc.
8 Diderot. 1976. “Chaldeans”. In L’Encyclopédie II (Lettres B-C),
Oeuvres complètes, edités par John Lough et Jacques Proust . Volume
6: 331. Paris: Hermann.
9 The expression is a title of an English book against atheism
published in 1659 by Vincent Hattecliffe: Aut Deus aut nihil. God or
nothing, or, a logicall method comprised in twelve propositions,
deducing from the actual being of what we evidently experience, the unavoidable necessity of a God, agai nst the atheists of our age and
nation. It suggest the dilemma faced by the honest defender of
religion against atheism who, confronted with atheist theses, is forced
to reject atheism altogether, due to the common opinion that atheism
draws attention to the perspective of nihilism concerning reality as
such.

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10 For references to this work an d other major works of Jacobi, see
(Jacobi 1994).
11 See Mendelssohn’s reply in Jacobi (1994, 350-358).
12 See the sketching of Jacobi’s critique in (Franks 2000).
13 (Franks 2000, 98): “(…) if the First Cause transcended the totality
of series of conditions, temporally (by existing prior to creation) or modally (by being capable of existi ng without creation), either there
would be some prior reason for creation (whether regarded as a
temporal act or as an eternal actuality) and the First Cause would not
be first, or the First Cause would be conditioned by nothingness,
contravening the Principle. (…) Fi rst Cause can (therefore must) be
the totality of the series of conditions, regarded as an infinite whole
prior to its finite parts, or the ens realissimum of which all realities
are limitations. Therefore, infinite intelligibility requires all finite
realities to be modifications of one infinite substance: in short, the
Principle of Sufficient Reason entails that reality be a monistic system, which philosophy should mirror.”
14 See, for comparison, Heidegger’s ow n critique of nihilistic reason in
(Heidegger 1982).
15 The text appears as Jacobi to Fichte in (Jacobi 1994, 497-536).
16 “If this is not to happen – if the divine in man is not to be delusion,
if truth and purified reason are to be godlessness instead, then the non-knowledge of an entirely different kind. It must be that place of
truth which is inaccessible to science.” (Jacobi 1994, 533)

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Ștefan-Sebastian Maftei (PhD) is currently Lecturer in Philosophy at the
“Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Nap oca (Romania), Department of
Philosophy. His research areas are philo sophy of art, rhetoric, hermeneutics,
and philosophy of culture. His main research interests include German
aesthetics, avant-garde aesthetics, and contemporary rhetorical theory. He is the author of “The Artistic Genius”. Nietzsche and the Problem of Artistic
Creation. Between Romanticism and the Avant-Garde , Cluj, Casa C ărții de
Știință Publishing House, 2010.

Address:
Ștefan-Sebastian Maftei
Department of Philosophy
“Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca
M. Kogălniceanu str. 1
400084, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Email: stmaftei@yahoo.com