Commission for the Publication of the Correspondence of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
The Commission is working on a historical critical edition of and commentary on the correspondence of the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who was president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1807 to 1812.
Genuine and fictional letters are characteristic of Jacobi's work; a novel in letter form ("Allwill"), a novel including numerous letters ("Woldemar"), circular letters, and about 2,600 surviving letters are evidence of the importance he attached to this literary form of intellectual communication. His criticism of a systematically based philosophy (attacking Spinoza, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) was based on the realisation that mastering reality completely by means of logical thinking leads to nihilism (according to Jacobi in 1799) and to atheism. His letters and works show Jacobi to be a representative of the late Age of Reason, who however drew attention to its disadvantages, in other words the "dialectic of the Enlightenment". In this way he became, to quote Hegel, "the turning point in the intellectual education of the time" and the inspirer and critical companion of classical German philosophy after Kant.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Painting by Laurentius Schäfer from about 1842.
Based on a portrait by Johann Friedrich Eich (1748–1807) from 1780.