Jacobi, Kant and the Manifest Image

The article tackles some key points in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s critique and interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. According to Jacobi, transcendental idealism is the accomplished expression of the long-standing tendency of systematic philosophy to reduce reason [Vernunft] to understanding [Verstand]. The fundamental operation of Verstand is the annihilation of all natural certainty, and its replacement with a world artificially produced by the blind synthetic activity of imagination, which provides the material for the intellectual unification of the manifold. Kant’s problematic notion of an unknowable thing-in-itself is both a protest against the primacy of understanding, and the ultimate output of this primacy. Aim of the contribution is to discuss Jacobi’s arguments supporting natural certainty and im- mediate intuition as the genuine basis of philosophy in light of his Kant-critique. To this end, the article proposes to frame this critique against the background of Sellars’s distinction between manifest and scientific image of the world.