The philosophers of feeling or faith stand in the same relation to the
German Illumination as Rousseau to the French. Here also the rights of
feeling are vindicated against those of the knowing reason. Among the
distinguished representatives of this anti-rationalistic tendency Hamann
led the way, Herder was the most prolific, and Jacobi the clearest. That
the fountain of certitude is to be sought not in discriminating thought,
but in intuition, experience, revelation, and tradition; that the highest
truths can be felt only and not proved; that all existing things are
incomprehensible, because individual--these are convictions which, before
Jacobi defended them as based on scientific principles, had been vehemently
proclaimed by that singular man, J.G. Hamann (died 1788) of Königsberg.
From an unprinted review by Hamann, Herder drew the objections which his
"Metacritique" raises against Kant's Critique of Reason--that the division
of matter and form, of sensibility and understanding, is inadmissible;
that Kant misunderstood the significance of language, which is just where
sensibility and understanding unite, etc.
In Herder[1] (1744-1803: after 1776 Superintendent-General in Weimar) the
philosophy of feeling gained a finer, more perspicuous and harmonious
nature, who shared Lessing's interest in history and his tendency to
hold fast equally to pantheism and to individualism. God is the all-one,
infinite, spiritual (non-personal) primal force, which wholly reveals
itself in each thing (God: Dialogues on the System of Spinoza 1787).
To the life, power, wisdom, and goodness of God correspond the life and
perfection of the universe and of individual creatures, each of which
possesses its own irreplaceable value and bears in itself its future in
germ. Everywhere, one and the same life in an ascending series of powers
and forms with imperceptible transitions. Always, an inner and an outer
together; no power without organ, no spirit without a body. As thought is
only a higher stage of sensation, which develops from the lower by means of
language--reason, like sense, is not a productive but a receptive faculty
of knowing, perceiving ("Vernehmen")--so the free process of history is
only the continuation and completion of the nature-process (Ideas for the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind 1784 seq). Man, the last child of
nature and her first freedman, is the nodal point where the physical series
of events changes into the ethical; the last member of the organisms of
earth is at the same time the first in the spiritual development. The
mission of history is the unfolding of all the powers which nature
has concentrated in man as the compendium of the world; its law, that
everywhere on our earth everything be realized that can be realized there;
its end, humanity and the harmonious development of all our capacities. As
nature forms a single great organism, and from the stone to man describes
a connected development, so humanity is a one great individual which passes
through its several ages, from infancy (the Orient), through boyhood
(Eygpt and Phoenicia), youth (Greece), and manhood (Rome), to old age (the
Christian world). The spirit stands in the closest dependence upon nature,
and nature is concerned in history throughout. The finer organization of
his brain, the possession of hands, above all, his erect position, make
man, man and endow him with reason. Similarly it is natural conditions,
climate, the character of the soil, the surrounding animal and vegetable
life, etc., that play an essential part in determining the manners, the
characters, and the destinies of nations. The connection of nature with
history by means of the concept of development and through the idea that
the two merely represent different stages of the same fundamental process,
made Herder the forerunner of Schelling.
[Footnote 1: On Herder cf. the biography by R. Haym, 2 vols., 1877, 1885;
and the work by Witte which has been referred to above (p. 306, note).]
His polemic against Kant in the Metacritique 1799 (against the Critique
of Pure Reason, and the dialogue Calligone 1800 (against the Critique
of Judgment, is less pleasing. These are neither dignified in tone nor
essentially of much importance. In the former the distinction between
sensibility and reason is censured, and in the latter the separation of the
beautiful from the true and the good, but Kant's theory of aesthetics is
for the most part grossly misunderstood. The "disinterested" satisfaction
Herder makes a cold satisfaction; the harmonious activity of the cognitive
powers, a tedious, apish sport; the satisfaction "without a concept,"
judgment without ground or cause. The positive elements in his own views
are more valuable. Pleasure in mere form, without a concept, and without
the idea of an end, is impossible. All beauty must mean or express
something, must be a symbol of inner life; its ground is perfection or
adaptation. Beauty is that symmetrical union of the parts of a being, in
virtue of which it feels well itself and gives pleasure to the observer,
who sympathetically shares in this well-being. The charm and value of the
Calligone lie more in the warmth and clearness with which the expressive
beauty of single natural phenomena is described than in the abstract
discussion.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) gave the most detailed statement of
the position of the philosophy of feeling, and the most careful proof of
it. He was born in Düsseldorf, the son of a manufacturer; until 1794 he
lived in his native place and at his country residence in Pempelfort; later
he resided in Holstein, and, from 1805, in Munich, where, in 1807-13, he
was president of the Academy of Sciences. Of his works, collected in five
volumes, 1812-25, we are here chiefly concerned with the letters On the
Doctrine of Spinoza 1785; David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism
1787; and the treatise On Divine Things 1811, which called out
Schelling's merciless response, Memorial of Jacobi Besides Hume and
Spinoza, the sensationalism of Bonnet and the criticism of Kant had made
the most lasting impression on Jacobi. His relation to Kant is neither that
of an opponent nor of a supporter and popularizer. He declares himself in
accord with Kant's critique of the understanding (the understanding is
merely a formal function, one which forms and combines concepts only, but
does not guarantee reality, one to which the material of thought must be
given from elsewhere and for which the suprasensible remains unattainable);
in regard to the critique of reason he raises the objection that it; makes
the Ideas mere postulates, which possess no guarantee for their reality.
The critique of sensibility appears to him still more unsatisfactory, as
it does not explain the origin of sensations. Without the concept of the
"thing-in-itself" one cannot enter the Kantian philosophy, and with it
one cannot remain there. Fichte has drawn the correct conclusion from the
Kantian premises; idealism is the unavoidable result of the Critique of
Reason and foretold by; it as the Messiah was foretold by John the Baptist.
And by the evil fruit we know the evil root: the idealistic theory is
philosophical nihilism, for it denies the reality of the external world, as
the materialism of Spinoza denies a transcendent God and the freedom of
the will. Reality slips away from both these systems--they are the only
consistent ones there are--material reality escaping from the former
and suprasensible reality from the latter; and this must be so, because
reality, of whatever kind it be, cannot be known, but only believed and
felt. The actual, the existence of the noumenal as well as of the external
world, even the existence of our own body, makes itself known to us through
revelation alone; the understanding comprehends relations only; the
certainty that a thing exists is attained only through experience and
faith. Sense and reason are the organs of faith, and hence the true
sources of knowledge; the former apprehends the natural, the latter, the
supernatural, while for the understanding is left only the analysis and
combination of given intuitions.
Philosophy as a science from concepts must necessarily prove atheistic and
fatalistic. Conception and proof mean deduction from conditions. How shall
that which has no cause from which to explain it, the unconditioned, God,
and freedom, be comprehended and proved? Demonstration rises along the
chain of causes to the universe alone, not to a transcendent Creator;
mediate knowledge is confined to the sphere of conditioned being and
mechanical becoming. The intuitive knowledge of feeling alone leads us
beyond this, and along with the wonderful, the inconceivable power of
freedom in ourselves, which is above all nature, shows us the primal source
of all wonders, the transcendent God above us. The inference from our
own spiritual, self-conscious, free personality to that of God is no
unauthorized anthropomorphism--in the knowledge of God we may fearlessly
deify our human existence, because God, when he created man, gave his
divine nature human form. Reason and freedom are the same: the former
is theoretical, the latter practical elevation to the suprasensible.
Nevertheless virtue is not based upon an inflexible, despotic, abstractly,
formal law, but upon an instinct, which, however, does not aim at
happiness. Thus Jacobi attempts to mediate between the ethics of the
Illumination and the ethics of Kant, by agreeing with the former in regard
to the origin of virtue (it arises from a natural impulse), and with the
latter in regard to its nature (it consists in disinterestedness). Hence
with the Illumination he rejects the imperative form, and with Kant the
eudemonistic end. At the same time he endeavors to introduce Herder's idea
of individuality into ethics, by demanding that morality assume a special
form in each man. Schiller and the romantic school take from Jacobi their
ideal of the "beautiful soul," which from natural impulse realizes in its
action, and still more in its being, the good in an individual way.