Sergei Volzhin. Friedrich Jacobi and Immanuel Kant: The metacriticism of the nihilism of the pure reason. Vol. 4. No. 1. 2019

Publication Details

Friedrich Jacobi and Immanuel Kant: The metacriticism of the nihilism of the pure reason
Title in the language of publication: Ф. Г. Якоби и И. Кант: метакритика нигилизма чистого разума
Author:
Sergei Volzhin
PhD in Philosophy, Associate Research Fellow at the Sociological institute of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Address: 25/14 7-ya Krasnoarmeyskaya str., St. Petersburg 190005, Russia.
Issue:
P. 184–199.
Language: Russian
Document type: Research Article (introdaction)
DOI
 

Abstract

The article studies the philosophical strategy of Friedrich Jacobi’s interpretation and criticism of Kant’s сritical philosophy, which allows to reveal better not only the specifics of the argumentation Jacobi directed against the one-sidedness of Kantian epistemology, but also to deeper understand the very nature and structure of the argumentative basis of Kant’s theoretical philosophy as well as to clarify the internal contradictions of Kant’s model of transcendental philosophy.

In the published essay “On the Attempt of Criticism to reduce Reason to the Understanding and to give a new Direction to Philosophy generally” (“Über das Unternehmen des Criticismus die Vernunft zu Verstande zu bringen und der Philosophie überhaupt neue Absicht zu geben”) (1801), Jacobi seeks to uncover all the consequences of the contradictions arising in the theory of Kant’s knowledge due to uncertainty of the status of the thing-in-itself. Jacobi argues that in the “Critique of Pure Reason”, which should have explained the possibility of synthetic proposition a priori, Kant does not examine the possibility of an a priori antithesis: the manifold that is to be synthesized is only empirically presupposed by Kant. An analysis of Kant’s theory of knowledge leads Jacobi to thesis: the reason is reduced by Kant to understanding, which is correlated through the imagination with sensibility, which depends on the imagination as an capacity of a priori contemplation. The productive and reproductive functions of the imagination should, as by Kant, ensure the constitution of the object of cognition and the reproduction of it as a representation. But since in the “Critique of Pure Reason”, Kant does not indicate the conditions for the self-distinction of pure space, time and consciousness, Jacobi states that with the premise of the pure as continuous, equal to himself and indefinite, it is impossible to achieve a pure difference, a pure multitude, and to come from them to definitiveness: the question of the possibility of a priori synthetic proposition is not solvable, since the very possibility of synthesis is inexplicable. According to Jacobi, Kant’s theory of knowledge could explain the possibility of cognition only in one case: proceeding from the activity of the power of imagination in its genesis from the blind (sensual) to the sighted (intellectual) capasity of the soul; but the internal contradictions of the foundations of the Kantian theory of knowledge disclosed by Jacobi have lead him to the conclusion that nihilism and solipsism are inevitable consequences of this theory. In his argument represented in this work, Jacobi appeared one of the first to point out the fundamental character of the concept of time in the Kantian system.

Keywords

Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, philosophy of belief, сritical philosophy, transcendental philosophy, epistemology.

References 

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© Sergei Volzhin, 2019

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