Faith, Knowledge, and the Ausgang of Classical German Philosophy: Jacobi, Hegel, Feuerbach

Abstract

This article revisits Feuerbach’s “break with speculation” in the early 1840s in light of issues raised by the original Pantheism Controversy, initiated in 1785 by the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza. The article first describes the concerns underlying Jacobi’s repudiation of Spinozism, and rationalism more generally, in favor of a personalistic theism that disclaims the possibility of philosophical knowledge of God. It goes on to reconstruct Hegel’s alternative to Jacobi’s famous salto mortale before considering how Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, as well as the personalism of the so-called Positive Philosophy (inspired by the late Schelling), was influenced by both Spinoza and Jacobi in ways that have not yet received sufficient attention.