A pergunta pelo real na obra de Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi : David Hume sobre a crença ou idealismo e realismo, um diálogo (1787)

Abstract

F. H. Jacobi’s (1743-1819) main objections in his work David Hume on Belief, or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue (1787) have to do, on the one hand, with his opposition to Kantian philosophy, due to his own conception of realism; and, on the other, to G. E. Lessing’s (1729-1781) presumed Spinozism, which came to the fore with Jacobi’s work Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (1785) and eventually led to the debates surrounding that which has since been known as the “Pantheism Controversy”. Jacobi’s philosophical conceptions go back to an act of immediate apprehension of the Real, which can also be called “being born and living in belief”. Such a conception begins with immediate, first-hand knowing. As is well known, Jacobi’s thought gains momentum in the period marked by the reception of critical philosophy. All the same, it constitutes the genesis of the immediately following philosophical developments, especially as it proposes a salto mortale as the only way out of the vacuity of theoretical speculation, signaling that “the true resides outside science”. In this way Jacobi rejects all attempts at rational demonstration of reality, and as a matter of fact so much so that his conception comes very close to a form of philosophy of life. What is real can never de proved, only lived out. The thought efforts of the philosophers of so-called “German idealism” will amount to showing that it is possible to reconcile life with philosophical discourse, and vice-versa. One hight suppose that both the fruitfulness and the vagueness of their systems derive to a great extent from that intent. The final result is to endorse the continuation of the task of theoretical philosophy, albeit in new forms – if no longer as straight scientific knowledge, then at least with the assurance of its necessity.