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The Jacobian Synthesis of Spinoza and Fichte in Frühromantik

Conference Paper · October 2019

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Alexander J. B. Hampton
University of Toronto
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 ‘The Jacobian Synthesis of Spinoza and Fichte in Frühromantik’, Jacobi: A Bi-
Centenary Colloquium, McGill University, Montreal, September, 2019.

Abstract
The bicentenary of the passing of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) presents an
opportunity to re-consider the determinative influence he would play on the development of
nineteenth century religious thought and Romanticism in particular. As a public
intellectual, Jacobi had the conspicuous ability to place himself at the centre of a period of
intellectual revolution. Jacobi was deeply involved in the events of his era, not merely as a
contributor, but as a fundamental influence on the context in which the period’s thought
would develop. His influence upon early German Romanticism is overwhelmingly
considered in relation to the pantheism controversy and the reception of Spinoza. Whilst this
is in no way incorrect, it only takes account of part of his determinative influence on the
movement, and particularly its religious dimension. Jacobi also attacked Fichte’s
philosophy, arguing that his idealist position had succeeded only in restating Spinozism
from the standpoint of subjectivity. For Jacobi, the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte
represented the nihilistic danger of the persistent application of discursive philosophical
reasoning. Its finite logic required the immanentization of the Absolute, leading to the
dangers of solipsism, determinism, fatalism and atheism. At the centre of Jacobi’s thought
is a defence of the transcendence of the Absolute, and hence a traditional construction of
our relationship to it as an object of religious faith and spiritual feeling. Jacobi’s critique of
the immanent Absolute and defence of its transcendence would set the context for the
Romantic consideration of Spinoza and Fichte in a way that would affect its development in
a number of productive and surprising ways that this paper will consider in the thought of
Schlegel, Hölderlin and Novalis. This examination will first set out Jacobi’s position on the
common philosophical ground shared by the divergent philosophies of Spinoza and Fichte.
Second, it will illustrate how Schlegel, Hölderlin and Novalis took up Jacobi’s position into
their own thinking, allowing them to take both a critical and constructive stance toward
Spinoza and Fichte. Finally, it will consider how each of the three Romantics, apart from
Jacobi’s fideism, sought to recover the transcendent Absolute through their development of
Romantic aesthetics.

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Alexander J. B. Hampton | www.ajbhampton.com | hampton.alex@gmail.com

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