Reason’s Folly

Jacobi, the Pantheism controversy, and Nihilism

“The main problem raised by the controversy-the dilemma of a rational nihilism or an irrational fideism-became a central issue for Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.”

-Beiser, The Fate of Reason

Whenever my thoughts turn to the Pantheismusstreit, I’m overtaken by a sense of melancholy I’m sure resounded in the breast of many a Byzantine scholar—that humiliating sense of deterioration, of distinct decline. The kind of intellectual culture which provided the stage for the Pantheism Controversy does not exist anymore, not anywhere in the world. It is a depressingly real possibility that it will never exist again. When you survey the catalogue of figures who participated in the controversy or its Idealist aftermath, who existed in the same nation over a few decades—Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Goethe, Kant, Herder, Hamann, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and so many others—you cannot help but feel impressed that so many of that kind of men, who dedicated their entire life to intellectual endeavors with great talent, even existed at the same time, let alone within the same area. Darwin’s cousin Galton, the Father of Eugenics, claimed that the ancient Athenian was a eugenic specimen who dwarfed the European of his era—some half a century after the Pantheism Controversy—for how else could one city-state of a few hundred thousand have produced so many of the greatest dramatists, philosophers, historians, and etc. of all human history. The observation becomes even more pronounced when you remember that most of those hundreds of thousands were slaves and rowers, metics and farmers, and that those great men for the most part came from a caste numbering in the thousands. We stand to Galton’s era as he felt he stood to the Greeks, for now what a country of some 20 million could produce in two generations during the Romantic age of the Germans, could hardly be found now should you comb the entire planet with all its billions. We have no Kants, no Goethes, not even a Reinhold; instead our great ‘intellectual’ controversies feature the likes of Jordan B. Peterson or Andrew Tate.

The great seriousness with which Germans of the 1780s, that explosive end of the Sturm und Drang Romantic period, concerned themselves with philosophy is evident in the relatively small occasion which ignited the Pantheism controversy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the greatest figure of the Aufklarung, the German Enlightenment. The Aufklarung, like its counterpart in France, was generally populated by Rationalist Deists—intellectuals who believed whole heartedly in the ability of Reason, our capacity to think critically, to discern the truth about Metaphysical, Theological, Moral, and Aesthetic matters. They were generally skeptical of the established Religious orders and their emphasis on faith and orthodoxy, instead arguing that monotheistic faith could be a purely rational endeavor. Lessing emblemizes this particularly. An intelligent playwright and philosopher, he believed that religious truth was not the purview of miracles and scripture, but accessible through critical inquiry, and that all religions held some part of the rational truth that the universe was the ordered product of a benevolent maximally perfect being. But unlike many of his compatriots, he took this emphasis on Reason to its logical conclusion, just as Spinoza had, until he himself became a Spinozist. After his death, his friend Friedrich Jacobi would reveal to the public that Lessing had confessed as much to him, and it would be this revelation which threw the entire German intellectual world into turmoil and conflict for years.

The Pantheism Controversy wasn’t really about Lessing and his personal convictions, that was merely the occasion; it was about Spinoza, and even more than that it was about what Spinoza represented, Rationalism, and the terrible trio which followed it; fatalism, atheism, and nihilism. To have the greatest German champion of Reason be revealed as having held views completely antithetical to Christian orthodoxy raised the question of to what extent Reason was compatible with faith and decency; the ancient fear of the philosopher as a tyrant, a dealer in acids and armaments which dissolve the foundation of conventional morality, once more erupted to the fore. Battle lines were drawn. On one side would be an irrational fideism, the rejection of our ability to objectively discern the truth, instead replaced with a nebulous ability to personally intuit it through faith, and on the other a rational nihilism, an embrace of the clockwork universe and its reducibility to impersonal machinations. Neither option was particularly appealing, and German intellectuals wrestled with both. It was only with Kant that a real third option appeared, which seemed to quell the fratricidal conflict and reconcile faith and reason with one another.

The Stage is Set

“Lessing could not accept the idea of a personal, absolutely infinite Being, unfailingly enjoying his supreme perfection. He associated an image of such infinite boredom with it, that he was troubled and pained by it”

-Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza

While the Pantheism Controversy was ostensibly about Pantheism, it is with Deism that it began. Prior to his death, Lessing had happened upon some unpublished writings of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a fellow Aufklarung thinker, in which he criticized Christian scripture from a Deist position. Lessing was in the middle of a period of profound religious reflection which would culminate in his identification with Spinozism, and seized upon Reimarus’ work, publishing it anonymously. This would lead to a conflict which ended with Lessing being censored by German authorities. Since he could no longer speak openly, Lessing turned to what he knew best, and wrote his greatest play Nathan the Wise. The play concerns the interactions between a Jewish merchant in the crusader states with Christians and Muslims, and its ultimate message is that there is a general agreement between the monotheistic faiths, accessible through Reason. The next greatest figure in the Aufklarung after Lessing was himself Jewish and Lessing’s greatest friend, Moses Mendelssohn, who had written the famous work Jerusalem which likewise emphasized monotheistic agreement. Ironically, it had been Mendelssohn who had introduced Lessing to Spinoza, as he himself had been a cautious defender of Spinoza; for though he disagreed with his philosophy, he admired Spinoza as a fellow Jew who attempted to fuse religion and philosophy. When Lessing died, it would be Mendelssohn who took up the mantle of the Aufklarung, and in a twist of fate now defended his friend’s honor against accusations of Spinozism.

It is worth mentioning the state of Spinozism in Germany at this point, considering we now find ourselves over a century later from where the last post ended with the death of Spinoza. Spinoza was a boogeyman, a punching bag for more ‘pious’ philosophers. The position that God’s revelation could be accessed not solely through scripture but also partly through philosophy was already on thin ice, so enlightenment philosophers were keen to distinguish themselves from Spinoza. It would be this point which Jacobi would jump on, and convincingly argue that all these Rational Deists were just inconsistent Spinozists. The dominant philosophical school in Germany at this point was that of Leibniz, who you should remember from last time, since he visited Spinoza and was partly influenced by him. Leibniz was quite the character, without a doubt one of the greatest geniuses of European history. An influential polymath, logician, philosopher, and political advisor, he spent his life meandering around Europe to various courts, writing his thoughts sporadically in notes and publications. Leibniz' thought itself merits a post in this series, but let this following summary suffice.

God created this world because it is the best of all possible worlds, because he is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, although still beholden to the basic rules of logic. This optimism of Leibniz would be scathingly mocked by Voltaire in his novel Candide. The Cartesian framework of a world of minds and bodies is maintained, but instead of through causal interaction the mind-body relation is explained by pre-established harmony; God established and maintains a harmony between bodies and minds, such that they are always in complete agreement despite being of separate kinds. Because the soul is indestructible, Leibniz concludes that is absolutely simple, a monad, and he argues that the perceiving conscious being is a monad with a body. He was contemporaneous with the first microscopes, which discovered that everything is covered in very small living beings, so he concluded that all bodies are themselves nade of smaller bodies each with their own monad souls, ad infinitum, such that nature is an infinite regress of life; the animal drinking from the oasis is an oasis unto itself, and so on and so forth. It was Leibniz who used the analogy for learning of chiseling a statue out of marble. You know everything, you just have to figure it out; your sensible perception of the world is just confused rational knowledge. Leibniz however did not produce a systematic corpus, that task was left to his disciple Christian Wolff who transmitted Leibnizian thought to Germany, and at the time of the Pantheism Controversy the Wolffians were the largest faction of German philosophers, including, prior to his awakening from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, Immanuel Kant.

For our purposes, the most important parts of Leibniz’ philosophy are arguably the ones he most likely borrowed from Spinoza; the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and his consequent denial of an absolutely free will. It was Leibniz who named the PSR, though it had been around for much longer than him. As a reminder, the PSR is the principle that there is nothing without an explanation, without a sufficient reason for why it is or is not. Leibniz’ system is dominated by the PSR, though he does not take it to its consistent conclusion like Spinoza. Leibniz is what is called a compatibilist, someone who believes that free will and determinism are compatible. Leibniz thought that God selected this world as the best possible world, and everything that is actual is a result of this, but that we are still free because we would have chosen the same things anyways, and God was free to create the world as he saw fit, and only chose this one due to his omnibenevolence. The problem with this is that it is an inch away from fatalism; if my decision, such as to sin, was guaranteed to occur millennia before my birth, then how do human beings have moral responsibility and live meaningful lives of autonomy? If God was guaranteed to create this world by his benevolent nature, than how is God free? Fatalism will dominate the Pantheism Controversy.

Friedrich Jacobi: Kierkegaard before Kierkegaard

“The whole thing comes down to this: from fatalism I immediately conclude against fatalism and everything connected with it.”

-Jacobi to Lessing, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza

“For what is Spinoza's God, Jacobi asks, other than the concept of existence itself, that being of which everything else is only a limitation?”

-Beiser, The Fate of Reason

Jacobi is both a delightful and tedious figure in German philosophy. His intellect is evident in how ahead of his time he was; he was among the first great interpreters of all the philosophers of his time, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and others, and was always quick to recognize the problems within them that came to dominate his era; he was among the first Europeans to identify the onset of nihilism. He is one of those philosophers, like Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and unlike Fichte and Hegel, whose writing is genuinely pleasant to read, although he is somewhat of a messy figure who never developed a clear system. But, alas, all of this talent is laid before a quite paltry goal; a return to common sense faith and morality. Jacobi, like all the great figures of this era, is trying to reconcile religion and philosophy, but one cannot help feel that his solution is merely to deliver philosophy bound to her old foe. Jacobi will succeed in his goal of discrediting Reason and ending the reign of the Aufklarung, but the great thinkers of the age hardly felt his surrender of and retreat from objective knowledge was an acceptable option.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was born in 1743 and part of that young generation of German intellectuals who revolted against the austere enlightenment reign of reason in favor of Sturm und Drang, the passionate embrace of feeling and individuality. He discovered Spinoza at the age of 20 when he was investigating the ontological argument and found a comment from Leibniz that Spinoza was merely “exaggerated Cartesianism”, and consequently decided he would read Spinoza to better understand Descartes’ ontological argument. Spinoza was still a boogey man at this point, though he had found sympathy among the more radical members of the Aufklarung, and the only available German translation of the Ethics was part of a polemic by Christian Wolff shitting on Spinoza. Jacobi realized that Spinoza’s argument for God was just a superior version of Descartes’, and when he later read Kant’s own Leibnizian proof of God’s existence, he realized all these proofs were not proofs for the Christian God, but for Spinoza’s; the God of the enlightenment philosophers was Spinoza’s God, a raw impersonal necessary existence of which everything else is a lesser limitation.

Following this realization Jacobi was passionately driven to understand Spinoza under the belief that it was the key to understanding the entire enlightenment project. It was during this period that he met and befriended Goethe, and further motivated the great poet in his own studies of Spinoza. The two would be close, but with frequent battles; Jacobi always trying to make a Christian of Goethe, Goethe always recoiling at that tedious pious spirit which Schopenhauer reviled. Eventually this erupted into a period of total separation between the two, after Goethe had been so put off by Jacobi’s novel Woldemar that he nailed it to a tree at a dinner party, to scare off “both readers and crows” from the book. The news of this ‘crucifixion of Jacobi’ by Goethe quickly spread, and created a rift between the two friends. It would not be until 1784 that they reconciled, with incredibly important results. Lessing, who had likewise befriended Jacobi, chose the opportunity of the two discussing Goethe’s poem Prometheus to confess his Spinozism, and when Jacobi revealed this to the public, he included a copy the poem, dragging Goethe into the controversy.

The Powder Keg

“I know nought poorer
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty;
Ye would e'en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.”

- Goethe, Prometheus

“Perhaps we will live to see the day when a dispute will arise over the corpse of Spinoza like that over the corpse of Moses between the archangel and satan.”

-Jacobi to Mendelssohn

The Pantheism Controversy began in earnest with a simple event; Jacobi and Lessing visited one another, and spent their time discussing philosophy and religion. On the second day, Lessing visited Jacobi while the latter was busied writing some letters, and asked if he had anything interesting to read. Jacobi gave him a copy of Goethe’s Prometheus, and asked his thoughts. During their discussion of the poem, Lessing suddenly declared: “The point of view from which the poem is treated is my own point of view (…) The orthodox concepts of Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan! I know of nothing else.” Jacobi was somewhat shocked, and when he asked if he was a Spinozist, Lessing said he was. Jacobi joked that meant a wretched salvation, and Lessing merely asked if he knew of a better answer. Their conversation was cut short, and the following day they fell into more serious discussion.

“The following morning, when I had returned to my room to dress after breakfast, Lessing joined me after a while. I was in a chair, having my hair done, and in the meantime Lessing quietly settled himself near a desk at the end of the room. As soon as we were alone, and I sat down on the other side of the desk against which Lessing was leaning, he began: "I have come to talk to you about my hen kai pan. Yesterday you were frightened.

I: You surprised me, and I may indeed have blushed and gone pale, for I felt bewilderment in me. Fright it was not. To be sure, there is nothing that I would have suspected less, than to find a Spinozist or a pantheist in you. And you blurted it out to me so suddenly. In the main I had come to get help from you against Spinoza.

Lessing: Oh, so you do know him?

I: I think I know him as only very few can ever have known him.

Lessing: Then there is no help for you. Become his friend all the way instead. There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.

I: That might be true. For the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a fatalist: the rest then follows by itself.

Lessing: I see that we understand one another. I am all the more anxious to hear what you hold to be the spirit of Spinozism; I mean the spirit that inspired Spinoza himself.

I: It is certainly nothing other than the ancient a nihilo nihil fit that Spinoza made an issue of, but with more abstract concepts than the philosophers of the cabbala or others before him.”

Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza

The two continued their discussion of the meaning of Spinoza, before Jacobi in turn surprised Lessing by declaring himself, despite his great insight into Spinoza, an anti-Spinozist. If Spinoza is correct, then to be conscious is not to be a thinking acting being, but a mere passive observer of pre-determined events under the illusion that they are subject to change.

I: The whole thing comes down to this: from fatalism I immediately conclude against fatalism and everything connected with it.—If there are only efficient, but no final, causes, then the only function that the faculty of thought has in the whole of nature is that of observer; its proper business is to accompany the mechanism of the efficient causes. The conversation that we are now having together is only an affair of our bodies; and the whole content of the conversation, analyzed into its elements, is extension, movement, degree of velocity, together with their concepts, and the concepts of these concepts. The inventor of the clock did not ultimately invent it; he only witnessed its coming to be out of blindly self-developing forces. So too Raphael, when he sketched the School of Athens, and Lessing, when he composed his Nathan. The same goes for all philosophizing, arts, forms of governance, sea and land wars—in brief, for everything possible. For affects and passions would have no effect either, so far as they are sensations and thoughts; or more precisely, so far as they carry sensations and thoughts with them. We only believe that we have acted out of anger, love, magnanimity, or out of rational decision. Mere illusion! What fundamentally moves us in all these cases is something that knows nothing of all that, and which is to this extent absolutely devoid of sensations and thoughts. These, the sensations and thoughts, are however only concepts of extension, movement, degrees of velocity, etc.—Now, if someone can accept this, then I cannot refute his opinion. But if one cannot, then one must be at the antipodes from Spinoza

Sound familiar? What Jacobi feared in Spinoza is precisely the kind of nihilist despair which the modern mechanical understanding of the universe can inspire in people. The Pantheism Controversy is nothing less than the specter of nihilism rearing its head fully for the first time. Their conversation ends with Jacobi explaining his answer to Spinoza, his salto mortale (“mortal jump”). Jacobi essentially prefigures Kierkegaard, and asserts that all philosophy, in other words the unrestricted adherence to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, necessarily leads to nihilism, and we can only be saved by a leap of faith.

Lessing: Yet people always speak of Spinoza as if he were a dead dog still…

Jacobi: I: And so they will go on speaking of him. It takes too big an effort of mind, and too much determination to understand Spinoza. And no-one to whom a single line in the Ethics remains obscure has grasped his meaning; nor has anyone who does not comprehend how this great man could have as firm an inner conviction in his philosophy as he so often and so emphatically manifested. At the end of his days he wrote still: ". . . . non prcesumo, me optimam invenisse philosophiam; sed veram me intelligere sa'o."—Few can have enjoyed such a peace of the spirit, such a heaven in the understanding, as this clear and pure mind did.

Lessing: And you, Jacobi, are no Spinozist?

I: No, on my honour!

Lessing: But then, on your honour, by your philosophy you must turn your back on all philosophy.

I: Why turn my back on all philosophy?

Lessing: Come, so you are a perfect sceptic.

I: On the contrary, I draw back from a philosophy that makes perfect scepticism a necessity.

Lessing: And where do you turn to then?

I: Towards the light, of which Spinoza says that it illumines itself and the darkness as well.—I love Spinoza, because he, more than any other philosopher, has led me to the perfect conviction that certain things admit of no explication: one must not therefore keep one's eyes shut to them, but must take them as one finds them. I have no concept more intimate than that of the final cause; no conviction more vital than that I do what I think, and not, that I should think what I do. Truly therefore, I must assume a source of thought and action that remains completely inexplicable to me.

The conversation as Jacobi relays it then ends with the two praising each other’s answers, but declaring that they cannot be reconciled. Lessing would die just two years later.

Following Lessing’s death, Jacobi learned in 1783 through a mutual friend that Mendelssohn was preparing a work on the recently deceased, a final farewell to his compatriot. Jacobi was ready for this moment; his investigation of Spinoza and discussion with Lessing had lead him to identify the critical weaknesses of the enlightenment. Thinkers like Mendelssohn wanted to have their cake and eat it too, they wanted to be the defenders of both reason and faith; Jacobi would use Spinoza to expose them as inconsistent. To do so, he began by writing to Mendelssohn and informing about Lessing’s confession; if he was going to write something on Lessing, surely his Spinozism would warrant mentioning. Jacobi of course knew that Lessing had never revealed it to Mendelssohn, and that the revelation would alarm the man. Jacobi wanted to humiliate the Aufklarung and reveal that it was just inconsistent Spinozism, while Mendelssohn wanted to defend the reputation of his friend and their project, which now fell upon his shoulders as the undisputed greatest philosopher of the Aufklarung following Lessing’s death. The two began a long game of cat and mouse, each seeking to out maneuver the other in their replies and reach the presses first; I will save you the details, and simply say that Jacobi won by a month, publishing his Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn in September of 1785.

The Explosion

“[Prometheus] served as tinder for an explosion that opened to discussion the most private relation of worthy men, relations they themselves were not conscious of, although they slumbered in an otherwise highly enlightened society. The disruption was so powerful that, because of accidental occurrences, we lost Mendelssohn, one of the worthiest of our men.” - Goethe on the Pantheism Controversy

Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza created a firestorm. It included parts of Jacobi and Mendelssohn’s communications, the conversation between Jacobi and Lessing from which I have been quoting, and a long exposition of Spinoza’s philosophy which Jacobi attached. It had several immediate effects. First, it raised the topic of Jacobi and Lessing’s conversation to the forefront of the German world; was a philosophy that didn’t end in Spinozism possible? Second, it instantly changed the perception of Spinoza. Jacobi’s interpretation was the first serious, sincere, and complete exposition of Spinoza to become widely read, and by revealing that a much admired man like Lessing had been a Spinozist, it suddenly became acceptable to be one. Mendelssohn wrote his own responses, and attempted to refute Spinozism and argue that Lessing had merely been a noble pantheist rather than a Spinozist, but his era was coming to a close; he would die from pneumonia as a result of walking through the cold winter to deliver his manuscript.

Jacobi’s interpretation of Spinoza is excellent, and worth reading still today. He both accurately summarized Spinoza’s views, while also identifying the acosmist problem which later figures like Hegel would further elaborate; if all that exists is the infinite, which cannot be in-itself limited, then how does anything limited and definite (a this or a that) come to be? He concluded the tract with a final summary of his position:

I. Spinozism is atheism.

II. The philosophy of the cabbala [Jewish esoteric text] (…) is, as philosophy, nothing but undeveloped or newly confused Spinozism.

III. The Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy is no less fatalistic than the Spinozist philosophy and leads the persistent researcher back to the principles of the latter.

IV. Every avenue of demonstration ends up in fatalism.

V. We can only demonstrate similarities. Every proof presupposes something already proven, the principle of which is Revelation.

VI. Faith is the element of all human cognition and activity.

Each of these points is important, and merits further elaboration. As for the controversy, it raged on for years, with various factions intervening. Its immediate consequence was the end of the Aufklarung’s reign; although it had been under great assault by the Romantic upstarts of Sturm und Drang for years, Jacobi had succeeded in discrediting their union of reason with faith. The door lay open to a new era, a new kind of philosophy.

Jacobi’s Answer

“The external world by no means give itself, as Jacobi explains, merely on credit; nor is it accepted by us on faith and trust. It gives itself as what it is, and performs directly what it promises. It must be remembered that Jacobi set up such a credit system of the world, and was lucky enough to impose it on a few professors of philosophy, who for thirty years went on philosophizing about it extensively and at their ease; and that it was this same Jacobi who once denounced Lessing as a Spinozist, and later Schelling as an atheist, and received from the latter the well-known and well-merited reprimand. In accordance with such zeal, by reducing the external world to a matter of faith, he wanted merely to open a little door for faith in general, and to prepare the credit for that which was afterwards actually to be offered on credit.”

-Schopenhauer, World as Will Vol II

Alas, here is where Jacobi’s weaker side shows. His salto mortale is, in my opinion, a cowardly answer. He picks up on an important insight in its support, however, which has profound influence on all the German Idealists who followed from him.

V. We can only demonstrate similarities. Every proof presupposes something already proven, the principle of which is Revelation.

Jacobi recognized an important limitation of Reason; it is mediate. Reason operates through inferences from one thing to another. Whenever we try to prove something, we must begin from some premise which we do not prove; otherwise our argument would be an infinite regress. This is not a new insight, but one Aristotle himself makes:

“Moreover, the basic premises of demonstrations are definitions, and it has already been shown that these will be found indemonstrable; either the basic premises will be demonstrable and will depend on prior premises, and the regress will be endless; or the primary truths will be indemonstrable definitions.”

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics

The insight that follows from this is that it can’t be reasoning all the way down; at some point there must be a first principle which is not proven mediately, but accepted immediately. And if two individuals disagree on first principles, then reason can do nothing to reconcile them; as Jacobi says to Lessing “Now, if someone can accept [the PSR], then I cannot refute his opinion.” From this point Jacobi realizes that it is faith that is primary in a certain sense; all reasoning must begin from the immediate acceptance of a principle. What the proper source of immediate knowledge is will be a source of major disagreement between Schopenhauer and the Idealists. Jacobi himself argues that Reason is not actually a faculty of mediate inferences, but rather a faculty of faith; the capacity to immediately recognize the truth of free will, God, and the reality of the external world. Schopenhauer will identify it with intuitive perception, the mark of the Genius, while the Idealists will adopt Jacobi’s answer of a nebulous Reason which can intuit supersensible truths. Jacobi’s answer to Spinoza, Kant, and everyone else is simply this: my reason immediately tells me you are wrong, therefore you are wrong.

The problem with this answer should quickly become evident; what about those whose Reason doesn’t tell them with certainty that Spinoza is wrong? Jacobi argues that we can immediately know that a personal benevolent God exists through this intuition, but then why did millions live and die under the intuition that a plurality of Gods exist? If we renounce an ability to objectively dispute and determine things, then we renounce the ability to refute or be refuted. The consequence of this view can be seen in how Jacobi acts towards the philosophers of his era who lacked his piety: he denounces Lessing after his death, gets Fichte fired from professorship, and then tries to do the same to Schelling; all because they could not accept what according to him is evident on faith alone. It shouldn’t be surprising that although the Aufklarung was toppled, rather than buying into Jacobi’s “cloying pious drivel”, in Schopenhauer’s words, the next generation of German thinkers turned to Spinoza and the new titan who arrived on the scene; Kant.

Although Jacobi’s system was, in my humble opinion, a poorly thought out attempt to salvage the bourgeois wholesome Christianity of modern Europe from the threat of nihilism, his sense for his era was incredible; he recognized that the awakening of Reason with the enlightenment would eventually mean the end of Christianity’s efficacy as a social structure from which a civilization could derive norms and meaning, and that only nihilism lay ahead for Europe. While he had no serious alternative to halt the rise of the Spinozist and Kantian philosophies which followed the Pantheism controversy, he early on recognized in the Idealists a tendency to completely undermine the conventional view of the world; the finite apparent world receded from view, and the Romantic German of the 19th century stood alone before the gaping maw of the Absolute.

A New Era

“A second striking effect of the controversy was the breakthrough of Kantianism, its final triumphal entry onto the public stage in Germany.”

-Beiser, The Fate of Reason

“I feel a terrible horror before the nothing, the absolutely indeterminate, the
utterly void (these three are one: the Platonic infinite!), especially as the
object of philosophy or aim of wisdom; yet, as I explore the mechanism of the
nature of [Fichte’s Neo-Spinozist philosophy], I attain only to the nothing-in-itself; (…)
therefore do not see why I, as a matter of taste, should not be allowed to prefer
my philosophy of non-knowledge to the philosophical knowledge of the nothing, at
least in fugam vacui [“flight from the void”]. I have nothing confronting me, after all, except
nothingness; and even chimeras are a good match for that. Truly, my dear Fichte,
I would not be vexed if you, or anyone else, were to call Chimerism the view I
oppose to the Idealism that I chide for Nihilism.”

-Jacobi in his public letter to Fichte including the first major use of “Nihilism”

I fear that I have dragged you through a dense web of autistic minutiae, dear reader, and yet I have in truth left much unsaid. The Pantheism Controversy is, in my humble opinion, the most important and informative event in modern philosophy; it is here that the essential problem, which still tortures us, first was clearly named. The kind of religious certainty available to pre-moderns is unavailable to us; we have been permanently alienated from it. It may be that our only options are some kind of Kierkegaardian leap of faith, or a rational nihilism which does not flinch before the abyss. Neither is easy.

Lessing’s Spinozism mattered because Spinozism means fatalism, atheism, and ultimately, Jacobi began to realize, nihilism. If all that exists is the infinite One of which all finite individual things are ephemeral modifications, than what remains is an infinite nothingness. The pantheism controversy was about the fact that the PSR, the principle that everything has a rational explanation, which was the underpinning of Enlightenment Rationalism, and is the underpinning of modern scientism, necessarily leads to the denial of the entire worldview which underpinned European culture in the 19th century. It reduced absolutely free immortal souls to determined fleeting parts, and made an impersonal necessity the fundamental principle of all existence. All of German philosophy after 1785 is in part an attempt to address this problem; how do we avoid Spinoza’s conclusions or how do we live with them? How do we escape nihilism or how do we overcome it?

The first significant answer to this question will be the subject of the next post; the Critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the greatest European philosopher since Plato. Kant had published his first edition of the Kritik in 1781, four years prior to the outbreak of the Pantheismusstreit, and had gained a small dedicated readership of those, including Jacobi, who recognized the importance of his doctrine. But it was with the Pantheism Controversy that Kant became the undisputed greatest philosopher of Germany, and Kantian philosophy supplanted the Aufklarung as the dominant school. This was not an accident; Kant went mainstream when Reinhold published a series of letters on Kantian philosophy which made it accessible to the broader public and explicitly presented it as an answer to the Pantheism controversy. Kant avoided Spinoza’s conclusions without abandoning Reason by dividing the world of appearance from the true world of being, and placing limits on the possibility of philosophy.

There is much more I would say, but I have already taken so much of your attention, dear reader, for which I am honoured. Should you wish to read more about the Pantheism Controversy, I cannot recommend Beiser’s The Fate of Reason enough, and would recommend reading Jacobi’s publication itself as well. I will now leave you with the concluding paragraph of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in which he discusses his Kantian answer to the Pantheism controversy, how he created the first philosophy without the fatalism of Spinoza or the inconsistencies of his opponents:

“Those who in most recent times were unwilling to acknowledge the Neo-Spinozism that had arisen, were scared of doing so, like Jacobi for example, principally by the bugbear of fatalism. By this is to be understood every doctrine that refers the existence of the world, together with the human race’s critical position in it, to some absolute necessity, in other words, to a necessity incapable of further explanation. On the other hand, those afraid of fatalism believed it to be all-important to deduce the world from the free act of will of a being existing outside it; as though it were certain beforehand which of the two would be more correct, or even better merely in reference to us. But in particular, that there is no third possibility is here assumed, and accordingly, every philosophy hitherto has represented the one or the other. I am the first to depart from this, since I actually set up the third option, namely that the act of will, from which the world springs, is our own. It is free; for the principle of sufficient reason or ground, from which alone all necessity has its meaning, is merely the form of the Will’s phenomenal appearance.”