«Wissenschaft»

On several occasions Jacobi found himself fending off the charge of being hostile to science and the advocate of "“unbedingten blinden Glauben”" (JWA 2,1: 18). Even late in life, in the 1815 Einleitung, Jacobi recalled having written David Hume (1787) in order to reject the "“angefochtene Behauptung [...] daß ich ein Vernunftfeind sey, ein Prediger des blinden Glaubens, ein Verächter der Wissenschaft und zumal der Philosophie, ein Schwärmer, ein Papist”" (JWA 2,1: 375). Jacobi regarded this charge as a very serious misunderstanding of his basic tenets. Whether his protesting can be seen as well-grounded, though, depends on how Jacobi’s notions of science and scientific knowledge are understood. This requires, then, an elucidation of some ambiguities and tensions inherent in these notions. To this aim, the distinction of three fundamental aspects of Wissenschaft in Jacobi’s philosophical production can be useful. In a first sense, (1) science is connected to the investigation of nature, and coincides with the construction and demonstration of explanatory laws starting from the observation of phenomena. In a second sense, (2) Wissenschaft points to the ontological monism of Spinoza, and later of Fichte and Schelling. In this regard, it stands for the idea of a systematic, self-grounded rational totality embracing the whole of reality. In a third meaning, (3) Wissenschaft means instead ‘true science’ as the supreme interest of human reason; in the latter connection – partly akin to the spirit of Kantian criticism – science goes beyond theoretical knowledge, and it becomes a ‘Wissenschaft des Nichtwissens’, i.e. a science of the limits of knowledge.