F.H. Jacobi's "On divine things and their revelation." A study and translation

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 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

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