See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/336903754

Jacobi and the Romantics

Conference Paper · October 2019

CITATIONS READS
0 10

1 author:

Alexander J. B. Hampton
University of Toronto
58 PUBLICATIONS   8 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Alexander J. B. Hampton on 31 October 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 ‘Jacobi and the Romantics’, American Academy of Religion, Nineteenth Century
Theology Group, San Diego, November 2019.

Abstract
Jacobi’s influence upon early German Romanticism is overwhelmingly considered in
relation to the pantheism controversy and the reception of Spinoza. Yet this only takes
account of part of his determinative influence. 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 immanentization of the Absolute, leading to the threat
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. This paper considers how Jacobi set the
context for the Romantic consideration of Spinoza and Fichte, and how in response,
Schlegel, Hölderlin and Novalis set out to recover the transcendent Absolute through the
development of Romantic aesthetics.

© 2020

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

View publication stats