Humanist Antiformalism as a Theopolitics of Race: F.H. Jacobi on Friend and Enemy

Abstract

Humanist Antiformalism as a Theopolitics of Race: F. H. Jacobi on Friend and Enemy Jeffrey S. Librett (bio) there arose in his soul the plan for a work which...would display...humanity as it is. 1 Introduction In the following, I retrace the close connections among humanism, antiformalism, and stereotypical representations of religiocultural and racial identity in the German Counterenlightenment thinker, F. H. Jacobi. The critical reconstruction of this moment in the history of “humanity” is of some importance, because in a number of recent contributions to the historiography of modern German philosophy, an always laudable attitude of suspicion with respect to the claims of Enlightenment reason has given rise to an inadequate—because excessively credulous—reading of Counterenlightenment faith, and especially of Jacobi. This sympathetic reading has been insufficiently attentive to the metaphysical and cultural-political difficulties that I examine here, and which remain inseparable from the eighteenth-century German irrationalist vision of a community of friends rooted in a spiritual humanity beyond all restrictive, material forms. 2 Jacobi’s problematic contribution to the polemics around the definition of the human between the Enlightenment and Romanticism can best be [End Page 233] situated in a preliminary manner by means of a very brief reconsideration of the Enlightenment paradigm he contests at the outset of his career. The German Enlighteners make a concerted effort to characterize the essence of the human in terms of rational freedom. Since the most prominent Enlighteners, especially Lessing, Kant, and Mendelssohn, see clearly that rationality places certain formal limits on total freedom (in the sense of anarchic disorder) and that conversely freedom in its purest state would necessarily burst the bounds of reason, one can assume that they are well aware of the significant internal tension inherent in the notion of free rationality or law-governed freedom. Nonetheless, from their perspective this tension cannot be renounced because anarchy appears not as freedom but as heteronomy (as enslavement to the laws of contingent nature), while reason without freedom is irrationality itself, insofar as domination makes self-determined transparency impossible. For the Enlighteners, in one way or another, the internal self-harmonization of free rationality is the infinite project of a humanity in the process of becoming. The German Counterenlightenment—of which Jacobi is perhaps the most extreme representative—vigorously contests this conception of humanity, rejecting the notion that rationality is necessary for, and ultimately in harmony with, radical freedom. Instead, the opponents of Enlightenment insist that irrationality—as faith, cultural particularity, and/or imaginative-affective excess—is the very touchstone of the freedom of the will, which for them becomes the distinguishing trait of the human essence. 3 Jacobi’s entire project, as I retrace it here, attempts to present a version of this position. Although Jacobi argues for irrational freedom as the essence of the human, he by no means sees himself as participating in a merely intellectual or theoretical discussion. Rather, he is trying to wage discursive warfare. Jacobi explicitly attempts, in making this argument, to distinguish between the absolute friend and the absolute enemy of mankind (as of God), the absolute friend and the absolute enemy as such. In Jacobi’s discourse, if humanity consists in irrational freedom, then only the friend of such freedom is the friend as such; the enemy of this freedom, the enemy of humanity, is the enemy tout court. 4 But the absolute enemy does not merely set limits to freedom. Beyond this, he situates himself on the limit between the establishment of such limits and their suspension or denial. For the open enemy of freedom is, from Jacobi’s point of view, relatively unthreatening and easy to contest: this enemy cannot secretly infiltrate the space of the friends of humanity. Similarly, the merely nonhuman, insofar as it keeps its distance, is a potentially friendly opponent, since it gives definition to “the human.” In contrast, the most treacherous, most inimical enemy is the “human” being who both—apparently—affirms freedom and tacitly denies it by subjecting it to rational constraints. This truly absolute and indeed satanically monstrous enemy of humanity is the one who occupies and undermines the border between humanity and nonhumanity, turning each into the other...