"God has sent me to Germany": Solomon Maimon, Friedrich Jacobi, and the Spinoza Quarrel

“GOD . . . HAS SENT ME TO GERMANY”: SALOMONMAIMON, FRIEDRICH JACOBI, AND THE

SPINOZA QUARREL

Bruce Rosenstock

ABSTRACT: Salomon Maimon’s Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Tran-scendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks Kant’s arguments in the Kritikder reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the founda-tions of natural science and of Newtonian physics in particular. Kant himself wasimpressed both with Maimon’s grasp of his critical project and also with the force ofhis challenge to it. While Maimon’s significance on the later development of GermanIdealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of Maimon’s Versuch has notbeen fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of theSpinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of FriedrichHeinrich Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn[Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The SpinozaQuarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy’s rational understandingof God needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experi-ence. This paper is the first extended effort at placing Maimon’s Versuch into thecontext of the Spinoza Quarrel. I argue that the Spinoza Quarrel and Maimon’sself-proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealedfaith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch. I show howMaimon’s Versuch can be read as not only a response to Kant, but also to Jacobi’sdefense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in David Hume über den Glauben(1787), the book in which Jacobi offers his own skeptical challenge to Kant’s Kritik.Situating Maimon’s Versuch as a response to Friedrich Jacobi’s David Hume allows us tounderstand how one of Maimon’s objectives in his Versuch is to keep Jacobian Glaube[faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised Kantian framework, the conditions ofthe impossibility of experiencing miracles.

Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on modern German-Jewish intellectual history. He is theauthor of three books, most recently a translation with philosophical commentary of MosesMendelssohn’s Morgenstunden and An die Freunde Lessings.

The Southern Journal of PhilosophyVolume 52, Issue 3September 2014

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 3 (2014), 287–315.ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12077

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1. INTRODUCTION: “GOD . . . SENT ME TO GERMANY”

In the seventh chapter of Part Two of his Lebensgeschichte, Salomon Maimon(1753/4–1800) explains how Maimonides in the Guide to the Perplexed interpretssuch biblical expressions as “God commanded” and “God sent.”1 Maimonsays that, according to Maimonides, “everything that happens has its proxi-mate cause, and this in turn has its proximate cause, until one reaches theFirst Cause, that is, the will of God.”2 Therefore, when Jonathan tells Davidto flee from Saul with the words “God is sending you away,” this does notassert that God is the proximate cause of David’s flight. Rather, it only impliesthat David’s flight, among whose proximate causes are Saul’s anger andDavid’s fear for his life, conforms to God’s will. At this point, Maimon breaksoff his summary of Maimonides’ views. He opens a parenthesis to indicate thebreak, apostrophizes the reader, and allows himself to employ a biblical modeof expression to explain his own life’s journey. He writes:

Now, dearest reader!, God, who, as is clear from what has just been said, has sent meto Germany and commanded me to describe for you my life’s story, commands menow to bring to your attention this section [of Maimonides’ Guide] in which it ismade clear how, by means of rational exegesis, belief [Glaube] and reason [Vernunft]can be reconciled and brought into perfect harmony.3

This passage is certainly a fine example of Maimon’s humor, but it alsosuccinctly captures one important aspect of Maimon’s sense of his philosophi-cal mission. Maimon says that one purpose for which “God sent” him toGermany was that he might show his contemporaries how it is possible toreconcile belief and reason. In his Geschichte seiner Autorschaft (1804),4 Maimonmakes it clear that “reconciliation” and “harmonization” of reason and beliefdid not, in fact, mean giving equal weight to both, but rather “freeing theformer from the chains imposed upon it by the latter” and making belief “evermore rational” [immer vernünftiger]. Maimon goes on to explain that whenhe speaks about the “harmony between belief and reason,” he meansnothing less than “the entire replacement of the one through the other”

1 Salomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte. Von ihm selbst geschrieben und herausgegeben von K. P. Moritz.In zwei Theilen Erschienen (Berlin: bei Friedrich Vieweg dem ältern, 1792/93), hereafter abbre-viated SML. This edition is reproduced in Salomon Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, ed. ValerioVerra (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000), 1: 1–589. Citations will be to the GesammelteWerke edition (hereafter abbreviated GW), followed by a citation to the original German edition(SML). Translations from the Lebensgeschichte are mine throughout.

2 GW, 437; SML.2, 107.3 GW, 440; SML.2, 111.4 Salomon Maimon, Geschichte seiner Autorschaft, in Dialogen, Aus seinen hinterlassenen Papieren,

Neues Museum der Philosophie und Literatur (1804), Bd. II.1, 125–46. Reproduced in GW VII,627–48.

288 BRUCE ROSENSTOCK

[die gänzliche Aufhebung des erstern durch die letzere].5 In a footnote to this passage,Maimon says that by “Glaube” he means to refer to “Offenbarungsglauben”[belief in revealed truths], and most specifically, belief in revelation itself.Maimon’s “God-sent” philosophical mission is, in other words, the replace-ment [Aufhebung] of truths legitimated by an appeal to revelation by truthslegitimated through reason alone. If Maimon succeeds in his philosophicalmission, therefore, then revealed beliefs about God [Offenbarungsglauben] willhave been eliminated in favor of rationally demonstrable knowledge.

Replacing revelation with reason, however, does not remove one fromcontact with God; on the contrary, it brings the limited human intellect intogreater conformity with the infinite divine mind. Abraham Socher quite aptlydescribes this as Maimon’s quest for a “radical Enlightenment” in which “thesubject strives for a perfect knowledge that would be equivalent to union withthe divine mind.”6 It is important to note that Socher describes Maimon’senlightened subject as one who strives for union with the divine mind.Maimon’s “mission to Germany” is not about replacing one form of dogma-tism with another, merely substituting dogmatic faith with dogmatic ratio-nalism. Maimon describes his own position as a conjunction of “rationaldogmatism and empirical skepticism.”7 Disagreeing with Kant about reason’scapacity to form only a regulative Idea of God, Maimon, as rational dogma-tist, argues that human reason is in fact a finite or limited version of the divine,infinite intellect. Human reason stands in a continuum with divine reason.But in agreement with Kant’s skeptical strictures about the unbridgeable gapbetween reason’s regulative Idea of God and God an sich, Maimon, as empiri-cal skeptic, acknowledges that human reason can only approach but neverfinally attain union with God’s infinite reason. Further, human reason’sapproach to God depends upon the scientific elaboration of natural lawswhose universal and necessary applicability to the phenomenal world cannotever be demonstrated with certainty, since this would demand union with thedivine mind, the creative source of the world. Maimon’s philosophicalmission, then, consists in replacing dogmatic faith in revealed truths with askeptically-inflected rationalism as the best path for humanity to approachGod.

5 GW VII, 639–40.6 Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and

Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 159.7 Salomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie mit einem Anhang über die symbolische

Erkentniß und Anmerkungnen (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß und Sohn, 1790), 436. The Germanoriginal is reproduced in Salomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, ed. FlorianEhrensprenger (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), hereafter “Versuch.” English translationin Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgley, Henry Somers-Hall,Alistair Welchman, and Merten Reglitz (London: Continuum, 2010), hereafter “Essay.”

MAIMON, JACOBI, AND THE SPINOZA QUARREL 289

In this paper I will explain in more detail what Maimon means when hespeaks of the Aufhebung of revelation by reason. I will focus primarily onMaimon’s first major German-language philosophical work, his 1790 Essayon Transcendental Philosophy. I will argue that Maimon’s self-proclaimedphilosophical mission, if it is to be properly understood, needs to becontextualized within the framework of the Spinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel]and, more particularly, in relation to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s attempt inDavid Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus [David Hume onFaith, or Idealism and Realism] (1787) to defend revelation as the unme-diated experience of the living force of God in the everyday sensation of theexternal world. For Jacobi, as we will see, revelation is the experience ofGod’s power to continually create the world ex nihilo. The experience ofrevelation for Jacobi is, in effect, the experience of the miraculousness of thesheer givenness of the world, its very existence, in other words. For Jacobi,God’s power to bring the world into being out of nothing cannot be sub-sumed beneath any law; it is, Jacobi insists, the expression of God’s per-fectly free will. For Maimon, on the contrary, God’s creation of finiteparticulars is the expression of God’s perfectly complete cognition. The taskof human reason is to constantly pursue the complete comprehension of thehow of creation. The goal of reason, in other words, is the Aufhebung of themiraculousness of creation.

Previous scholarship has not compared in any detail Maimon’s Essay withJacobi’s David Hume on Faith, despite the fact that both works draw fromLeibniz and Hume in order to offer a revision of Kant’s first Critique.8 Paul W.Franks, however, has noted that Maimon’s views seem to directly contestthose of Jacobi, and he reminds us of the importance of Jacobi for Maimon’ssignificant interest in Giordano Bruno,9 but he does not carry out a closeexamination of Jacobi’s David Hume. Franks does, however, provide a clearand powerful summary of what separates Maimon’s goals in his Essay andJacobi’s in David Hume. Franks homes in, correctly I believe, on their differingassessment of the sheer givenness of the world, what Franks speaks of as “theeveryday.” Franks writes: “Maimon’s attitude is roughly the opposite ofJacobi’s. Jacobi wants to save the everyday from annihilation, whereasMaimon regards the everyday as something like superstition and would be

8 Frederick Beiser has pointed to the way that Maimon continues Jacobi’s critique of Kant’sthing-in-itself in David Hume, but he does not offer a detailed analysis of Maimon’s relation toJacobi. Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: Germany Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1897), 306–7.

9 Paul Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, andMaimon,” in Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Americks (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), 95–115. References are to pages 105 and 109.


only too glad to see it go.”10 Franks is spot on about Jacobi’s attempt to “savethe everyday from annihilation,” for Jacobi, as I have said, considers “theeveryday” to be the site of the experience of God’s power to bring the worldinto being out of nothing. When reason attempts to subsume everything in theworld within the framework of universal and necessary natural laws, it losescontact with the immediate, “everyday,” experience of God’s creative power.It enters a path toward what Jacobi will call “nihilism” in which the experi-ence of the miraculousness of the world’s existence—its grounding in God’sfree, creative power—is replaced with reason’s faith in its own power toexplain every phenomenon as part of a strictly deterministic causal nexus.11

Reason, cutting itself off from the experience of the world as created by Godout of nothing, cuts the link between the world and God and thereby, at leastas far as the experiencing subject is concerned, annihilates the everyday, inFranks’s felicitous formulation.

Taking Franks’s insightful but rather terse contrast between Jacobi andMaimon as my point of departure, I will argue in this article that Maimon’sdistrust of the everyday as “superstition” can be best appreciated if we read itin the context of Jacobi’s argument that the everyday is the site of theunmediated experience of God’s miraculous power (miraculous because it issubsumable within no rational law) to bring the world into being out ofnothing. In his Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn[Concering the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn](1786),12 Jacobi argues that the way to reach God is not through reason butthrough a “salto mortale” [death-defying leap, or “somersault”] into faith inrevelation [Offenbarungsglaube] as directly given in experience. Maimon, in anunmistakeable reference to Jacobi, describes his Essay as offering a different

10 Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in GermanIdealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 175.

11 Jacobi introduces the term for the first time in his open letter to Fichte, Jacobi an Fichte(Hamburg: Perthes, 1799). English translation is in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philo-sophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, 1994), 497–536. Jacobi explains how nihilism arises from searching for anonmiraculous ground of the world and the self: “as I explore the mechanism of the nature ofthe I as well as of the not-I, I attain only to the nothing-in-itself ” (519; German text, 38).

12 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn(Breslau: 1785). The definitive German edition is found in F. H. Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinozain Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, ed. Klaus Hammacher, Irmgard-Maria Piske, andMarion Lauschke (Hamburb: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000). English translation in Jacobi, TheMain Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, 171–251. Unless otherwise noted, quotations arefrom the English translation, abbreviated hereafter as Spinoza Letters, with page reference addedto the German text. The reference to salto mortale is on p. 195 of Spinoza Letter, p. 32 in theGerman text.


salto mortale.13 If Jacobi recommends a downward leap from the heights of an“empty” reason into the givenness of experience, Maimon calls for an upwardleap toward the infinite mind of God. Maimon’s leap, like Jacobi’s, requiresfaith, but one that is grounded only in a “limiting concept” [Grenzbegriff ]beyond all possible experience, as I will explain in the next section. Thecourse of the argument in this paper begins with a general outline, offered insection 2, of Maimon’s views about how reason can gradually replace rev-elation through the scientific quest to subsume all of experience within theframework of rational law. I begin with Maimon rather than Jacobi in orderto provide at the outset a better idea of the nature of Maimon’s self-proclaimed “mission to Germany” of replacing revelation by reason. My aimin this paper is to situate this mission in the context of the Spinoza Quarreland Jacobi’s David Hume on Faith in particular, and it is useful to have a generalgrasp of the plan Maimon has in mind for accomplishing this mission beforeturning to a detailed examination of Jacobi’s text. In section 3, I turn fromMaimon to Jacobi and his 1787 text, David Hume on Faith, or Idealism andRealism. Finally, in section 4, I return to Maimon and offer a reading of his1790 Essay as a response to Jacobi’s David Hume on Faith. In section 5, I bringthe paper to a conclusion with some reflections about the ultimatelyunresolvable nature of the conflict between Jacobi and Maimon over thepossibility of experiencing miracles.

2. CONSTRUCTION EX NIHILO: MAIMON ON HUMAN ANDDIVINE REASON

Maimon’s analysis of the relationship between human and divine reasoncan be seen as a way to dissolve one of the central dogmas of revealed faith,namely, creatio ex nihilo. Maimon does not so much argue against creatio exnihilo as against its miraculousness. Human reason, following the scientific pro-cedure of subsuming the particular within the lawful patterns of the ever-more general, continuously ascends to the point where the materialparticular (Maimon sometimes speaks of it as “the given” [das Gegebene])vanishes into nothingness, and all that remains is the mind of God. From

13 Salomon Maimon, Gesammelte Werke III: 455, note. This reference to Maimon’s use of“salto mortale” is quoted in Carlos Fraenkel, “Maimonides, Spinoza, Salomon Maimon and theCompletion of the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy,” in Sepharad in Ashkenaz: MedievalKnowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, ed. Resianne Fontaine, AndreaSchatz, and Irene Zwiep (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007):193–220. The quotation is on p. 193. Although Fraenkel notes the use of “salto mortale,” he doesnot connect it to Friedrich Jacobi and the Spinoza Quarrel.


the perspective of God, this is the point where the particular emerges fromnothingness, the point of the world’s creation, or, as Maimon would put it,the point of the world’s construction. Maimon’s understanding of divine cre-ation is modeled on mathematical construction, as when in geometry acircle is constructed by rotating a line about one fixed endpoint. Theconcept of the circle (a figure all of whose points are equidistant from agiven point) is lifted from mere possibility into reality once its method ofconstruction is known. Thus, to fully comprehend the circle, one must havea grasp both of its concept (its logical possibility) and of its method of con-struction (how it can become actual). The fully comprehended circle is dif-ferent from any particular circle. Maimon says that a particular object’svanishing point, the point where the particular is fully explicated accordingto its concept and also its method of construction, corresponds to whatKant calls the “thing in itself”: “what is required for completeness in thethought of an object is that nothing in it should be given and everythingthought.”14 This perfect completeness is never fully attainable by ourlimited intellects, but is rather a “process in which matter approaches evercloser to form to infinity.” This process follows in reverse the process of thecreation/construction of the object. In his Essay, Maimon says that thequestion of how thought brings form to matter—how the space, time, andcategories of the understanding are applied to what is given in sensation—isthe same as the question about the “world’s arising [Enstehung] (with respectto its matter) from an intelligence.”15

For God’s infinite intellect, to think an object is already to constructit. This is different from what our finite intellect is capable of. Maimonsometimes uses the example of the square root of two to show the diff-erence between God’s infinite intellect and our finite intellect. We can sym-bolize the real number corresponding to the square root of two with aradical sign over the number two, and we know the procedure for gettingever closer approximations of this real number, but we can never actuallygrasp this number. God, however, grasps the square of two in one cognitiveact. Our finite intellect, to take another example, can have a “symboliccognition” of an exceedingly large number (Maimon gives the example of1000) or an exceedingly large figure (a thousand-sided polygon). But suchsymbolic cognition is not the same as the intuitive cognition of the numberor the figure. “I possess only a concept of the form, or the way thatthe object is possible, but not an intuitive cognition of it itself as

14 Essay, Appendix III, 240.15 Essay, 37; Versuch, 62.


object.”16 “Symbolic cognition,” Maimon writes, “comprises only forms, orrules guiding the way that objects arise.”17 The infinite intellect of God,however, can directly intuit not only the formal rule according to which anobject can arise, but the object itself constructed according to this rule.Abraham Socher offers a concise description of the relationship betweenhuman symbolic cognition and divine intuition: “Our noetic striving for theperfect knowledge of the infinite intellect is like the endless asymptotic pro-gression of a curve toward its limit.”18

In his study of Maimon’s notion of the infinite intellect as combiningthe rule for the construction of objects with their actual materialization,David Lacthterman speaks of this as God’s “atemporal logical genesis” ofobjects.19 The human intellect in so far as it seeks scientific understandingof an object given in experience follows the path of this atemporal genesisin reverse. The infinite task of our limited intellect is to follow in reverseorder the steps of the object’s creation in the divine mind, not only under-standing what the object is (its formal definition or concept), but themanner of its coming into being (its construction, that is, how the formorganizes the sensible manifold into a unity). “Taking his cue from Kant’stheory of ideas,” Frederick Beiser explains, Maimon “suggests that weregard the idea of the infinite understanding, the intellectus archetypus, as aregulative ideal, the goal of all inquiry.”20 This means, for example, thatone would know not only how to classify a particular animal under itsspecies and genus, but also how its various parts are shaped into a single,living organism. We might say today that the scientific understanding of anorganism requires not only a knowledge of its phylogeny (its place in theevolutionary tree, from species to genus, family, and so on), but also itsontogeny (how it organizes itself into a mature example of its species). Thehuman intellect slowly pieces together the phylogenic tree and ontogenicprocess as two separate, though related, aspects of the scientific cognition ofthe organism. The divine intellect instantaneously grasps phylogeny (itsplace in a conceptual grid) and ontogeny (its method of construction) as asingle unity.

16 Essay, 142; Versuch, 272.17 Essay, 145; Versuch, 276.18 Socher, Solomon Maimon’s Radical Enlightenment, 99.19 David Lachterman, “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite

Intellect: Reflection on Maimon and Maimonides,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (1992):487–522; the quoted phrase is found on p. 513.

20 Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 256–57.


In his Critical Investigations Concerning the Human Mind (1797),21 Maimon offersa clear presentation of the relationship between the finite and infinite under-standing of an object:

We have seen that the types of activity of the higher and lower capacities forknowledge stand opposed in the very same instance of knowledge, but both arenevertheless linked in this very same knowledge. For example, with the lower capacityfor knowledge, the manifold [that is unified in] the concept of the object is necessarilyrepresented by means of a temporal series, whereas with the higher knowledge, themanifold is necessarily represented without reference to time. . . . In order to resolvethe contradiction [between the difference and identity of both kinds of knowledge], weare led to the idea of an infinite capacity for knowledge that constitutes both theterminal point of our ever-progressing knowledge and its full perfection. This infinitecapacity has in common with us the highest formal conditions of understanding (whatcounts for us as universally applicable), and differs from us in relation to the materialconditions of the objective presentation of the object. The infinite knowledge not onlyextends to all possible objects at one and the same time, but also its presentation [ofeach object] is not individual like ours is, but is rather special [related to the object onlyin so far as it displays the features of its species or kind], so that in its presentationnothing more is included than what is inseparable from its concept, and time is notincluded as a condition [of the object’s presentation].22

The terminal point of scientific knowledge would be achieved when theindividual as a temporally conditioned object is analyzed into its “highestformal conditions” of existence as an object of a certain kind or species. At thisinfinitely distant point, the finite mind would grasp the object as it is presentin God’s mind. It would, in effect, know how God created this particularindividual.

One can go so far as to say that, for Maimon, reason’s scientific ascentto the divine mind is the progressive self-revelation of the infinite mind ofthe Creator to the finite mind of the human being. Perhaps that is whyMaimon says that it is a “sublime idea” that the human understanding is“just the same [as God’s], only in a limited way.”23 At the vanishing pointwhere the infinite process of human understanding ridding its thought ofmatter is consummated, reason will have replaced revelation. If revelationis a sheer “given” (as we will see Jacobi takes it to be), then as the finitemind approaches God, the given is analyzed away. At the point when all thatis given in experience will be dissolved into the formal laws of the infinite

21 Salomon Maimon, Kritiische Untersuchungen über den menschlichen Geist oder das höhere Erkentniß-und Willensvermögen (Leipzig: bei Gerhard Fleischer dem Jüngern, 1797). Reprinted in GW VII,1–373.

22 GW, 246.23 Essay, 38; Versuch, 64.


mind, the secrets of creation will have been fully understood. To pointscience and philosophy on its path toward the replacement of revelation byreason is Maimon’s self-proclaimed philosophical mission.

Maimon’s theory of God’s mind as the source of particular existentsstands in sharp contrast to Jacobi’s conception of God’s will as the miracu-lous power that brings the world into being out of nothingness. In the nextsection, I will examine Jacobi’s argument that experience offers an unme-diated revelation of God’s creative power, an argument that makes its firstappearance in Jacobi’s challenge to Mendelssohn (and Leibnizian-Wolffianmetaphysics more generally) that has come to be known as the “SpinozaQuarrel.” The Spinoza Quarrel erupted in 1785 when Friedrich HeinrichJacobi (1743–1819) published the private correspondence that in the pre-vious several years had been exchanged between himself and MosesMendelssohn. This correspondence, together with Jacobi’s commentaryupon it, appeared in his Spinoza Letters. Yossef Schwartz has persuasivelyargued for the need to place Maimon’s Hebrew commentary onMaimonides’s Guide, Giv’at Hammore (1791),24 within the wider context of theSpinoza Quarrel.25 Schwartz shows how Maimon’s engagement withSpinoza in the commentary is mediated by Moses Mendelssohn’s treatmentof Spinoza’s pantheism in his Morgenstunden (1785).26 Schwartz, however,does not undertake to analyze Maimon’s Essay in relation to Jacobi’s pre-1790 texts. In taking this further step, my argument seeks to add support toSchwartz’s intuition about the historical context of Maimon’s pre-1791writings. In the next section, therefore, I provide a more detailed account ofJacobi’s major pre-1790 philosophical text, David Hume on Faith, or Idealismand Realism: A Dialogue.27

24 Salomon Maimon, Giv’at Hammore, ed. Samuel Hugo Bergman and NathanRothenstreich (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1965). Available online:http://www.teachittome.com/seforim2/seforim/moreh_nevuchim_1.pdf (accessed July 16,2012).

25 Yossef Schwartz, “Causa Materialis: Solomon Maimon, Moses ben Maimon and thePossibility of Philosophical Transmission” in Solomon Maimon: Ratioanl Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic:Critical Assessments, ed. Gideon Freudenthal (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003),125–43.

26 Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesunger über das Dasein Gottes (Berlin: ChristianFriedrich Voss und Sohn, 1785). Reprinted in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte SchriftenJubiläumsausgabe, ed. Alexander Altmann et al. (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1971–1998), vol. 3.2, 1–175. English translation in Moses Mendelssohn, Last Works, trans. BruceRosenstock (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 1–137.

27 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. EinGespräch (Breslau: Gottl. Löwe, 1787). English translation in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The MainPhilosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, 1994), 253–338. Abbreviated hereafter as David Hume, citations to the Englishtranslation.


http://www.teachittome.com/seforim2/seforim/moreh_nevuchim_1.pdf

3. FRIEDRICH HEINRICH JACOBI’S DEFENSE OF REVELATION

The Spinoza Quarrel was centered precisely on the question that definedMaimon’s self-proclaimed philosophical mission. It concerned the ability ofrationally discovered truths to replace religion’s (putatively) revealed truths asthe source of humanity’s knowledge of God. Jacobi claimed in his SpinozaLetters that reason’s most consistent concept of God is presented in Spinoza’smetaphysical system. For Jacobi, Spinoza had reduced the personal God ofrevelation to an immutable and impersonal substance, a pure self-positingBeing without any individuating properties. Particular finite beings, inSpinoza’s system, are completely dependent upon and completely deter-mined by God’s single, undifferentiated Being. Spinozism’s God stands in nopersonal relation to any finite human being, and no finite human beingpossesses a free, self-determining individuality. According to Jacobi, oncesomeone has been brought to see that his reason can only construct animpersonal and immutable Being as his God, the only choice left was to eitherembrace fatalism or perform a daring somersault leap [salto mortale] out ofreason’s impersonal God into a purely felt experience of a personal God. Godas an object of feeling that is immediately given in experience is the God ofrevelation who created the world out of nothing by means of his free andunconstrained will. Only a free God can be said to act benevolently andgraciously toward humanity. Jacobi claimed that reason’s fully consistent ideaof God (Spinozism) was empty of all reality because reason had replaced thefelt God given immediately in experience with reason’s own purely logicalnature. Reason cannot tolerate a freely acting cause, that is, a cause that doesnot operate in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. InSpinozism, God is the infinite totality of the causal nexus of nature viewedunder the aspect of what all finite particulars share in common, namely, theirdetermined being. God is the infinite and undifferentiated substance that makesthe “all” [pan] of finite beings, each determined by an infinite chain of priorcauses, into “one” [hen] completely determined Being. Transforming Godinto the homogeneous Being underlying nature’s strictly deterministic causalchain, reason’s logic overrides the immediate experience of God’s freelyacting creative power which expresses itself differently in each finite being.Summarizing his position in his Spinoza Letters, Jacobi writes:

Obsession with explanation makes us seek what is common to all things so passion-ately that we pay no attention to diversity in the process; we only want always to jointogether, whereas it would often be much more to our advantage to separate. . . .Moreover, in joining and hanging together only what is explainable in things, there alsoarises in the soul a certain lustre that blinds us more than it illumines. And then wesacrifice to the cognition of the lower genera what Spinoza (being of profound sense


and sublime as he was) calls the cognition of the supreme genus; we shut that eye ofthe soul tight by which the soul sees God and itself, to look all the moreundistractedly with the eye of the body alone.28

Jacobi’s stress here is on the “cognition of the lower genera” in all theirdiversity, a cognition in which “the soul sees God.” He criticizes the “obses-sion” of reason with explanations that lead away from concrete particulars tohigher and more abstract categories. One can already see how this is, as itwere, the very opposite of Maimon’s conception of the relation among God,reason, and the given data of experience. Jacobi’s critique of reason, it shouldbe emphasized, does not advocate the abnegation of reason, but ratherdemands that it remain anchored in the “cognition of the lower genera”where the unmediated experience of God’s creative power is found.

In his David Hume on Faith, Jacobi attempts to flesh out the rather sketchyand somewhat confusing claim in Spinoza Letters, published the year before,that the “cognition of the lower genera” offers a revelation of God. Jacobiargues that sensibility, corresponding to the “cognition of the lower genera,”offers a direct intuition of the creative power of God. Sensibility, he willexplain, is essentially an organ of revelation. Reason, Jacobi claims, can donothing more than lose itself in empty abstractions if it departs from itsgrounding in sensibility. In his 1815 Preface to David Hume in which he looksback upon his philosophical career from its beginnings with the SpinozaQuarrel in 1785, Jacobi summarizes his position as follows: “the jewel of ourrace is not a science that does away with all miracles, but a faith [Glaube] thatstands next to science and is not to be surmounted by it—the faith in a Beingwho can only do miracles [Wunder], and who created man miraculously.”29

This statement is the very antithesis of Maimon’s “God-sent” philosophicalmission to Germany.

As Jacobi notes in the opening of David Hume on Faith, the text is composedof three distinct parts. The first part sets out to explain that when Jacobi usedthe term “belief” [Glaube] in his Spinoza Letters to refer to that which permitshumans to have access to certain truths that do not depend upon rationalproof, he did not mean to refer to the revealed truths of the orthodoxChristian “faith” (another possible translation of “Glaube”). Rather, Jacobiclaims to be using the term “Glaube” as David Hume used the term “belief.”He quotes a long passage from Hume’s Philosophical Essays Concerning Human

28 Spinoza Letters, 195; p. 32 in the German text.29 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Vorrede, zugleich Einleitung in des Verfassers sämtliche philosophische

Schriften, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, Zweiter Band, ed. J. F. Köppen and J. F. Roth(Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1815), 3–126. English translation in The Main Philosophical Writings,537–90. The quotation is found on page 561 of the English translation of the Preface.


Understanding where he provides the following definition of “belief ”: “I saythen that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steadyconception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able toattain.”30 Hume offers the example of the feeling we have when we see onebilliard ball rolling toward another billiard ball on a smooth table. “I caneasily conceive it to stop upon contact,” Hume asserts, because “such aconception implies no contradiction.” And yet, there is “some sentiment,” a“belief,” associated with the expectation that the first billiard ball will com-municate its motion to the other that “feels very differently” from the con-ception of the first ball simply coming to a stop upon contact with the secondball without causing the second ball to move. Belief, Hume explains, is notabout the content of the ideas we have of an object, but, as he says, “themanner of their conception.” Belief, although it is admittedly “impossibleperfectly to explain,” nonetheless is the mark that distinguishes “ideas of thejudgment” from “fictions of the imagination.” Jacobi explains that he hadtaken over Hume’s term “belief ” and had used it in his Spinoza Letters to referto a knowledge of the “very existence of things and their properties,” aknowledge that does not depend upon inference or rational demonstration.

Despite Hume’s caution that belief is “impossible perfectly to explain,”Jacobi tries to get to the source of Hume’s “feeling” or “belief ” that the ballwill communicate its motion to the other ball. Jacobi finds the source of thisbelief in the feeling one has when one experiences being struck by an externalobject. We feel that one billiard ball will move another because we feel thatour own body is moved by other bodies. Jacobi claims that the force that onebody communicates to another is the force that comes to consciousness in theresistance that our body “feels” upon contact with another. Each body, Jacobiconcludes, has a force that makes it capable of resisting the force of another.What is this force? Jacobi argues that this force is the very same force thatmaintains the object in existence by holding it together as a unified object.This unifying force grows in intensity as the complexity of the objectincreases, so that living objects possess a greater force than nonliving ones,although the difference between organic bodies and inorganic bodies is onlya matter of degree. Jacobi follows Leibniz, whom he explicitly invokes inDavid Hume on Faith, in arguing that the unifying force in all beings is alwaysassociated with a self-representation of the being as a unified whole. As thecomplexity of the being increases and its unifying or life force gains inintensity, its self-representation or consciousness gains in clarity, until itreaches the level of consciousness that humans possess.

30 David Hume, Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1748),Essay V, part 2, 82.


In the second part of David Hume on Faith, Jacobi shows how our perceptionof external objects contains a noninferential belief in the existence of thoseobjects. This belief arises from our unmediated sense of resistance comingfrom an external body with its own unifying force of existence. The subtitle ofDavid Hume on Faith is Idealism and Realism, and Jacobi means by “realism” thephilosophical position that asserts that the existence of external objects isimmediately given through the direct perception of their unifying force.Jacobi’s realism directly contests the “idealism” of those who claim that wehave no unmediated contact with objects but that the perceived object, itsqualities, and our belief in its existence, is an amalgam of various inferencesdrawn from mental copies or appearances. In the second section of DavidHume on Faith, Jacobi is at pains to show that the existence of an externalobject is immediately given in the perception of the object. The existence ofthe object is no less immediately believed in than is the existence of the self.Rather than following Descartes and deducing the existence of the externalworld from the certainty of the self ’s existence as given in consciousness,Jacobi claims that the consciousness of the existence of the externalobject and the consciousness of the self ’s existence are inseparably linked:“the two [consciousness of self and object] (arise) in one flash, in the sameindivisible instant, without before or after, without any operation of theunderstanding—indeed, without the remotest beginning of the generation ofthe concept of cause and effect in the understanding.”31 The resisting force ofthe external object is felt as immediately as the pressing force of the self.Indeed, both forces stand in reciprocal vectors of resistance.

According to Jacobi, therefore, neither the existence of the self nor theexistence of the external world are inferences drawn from representations,nor are they somehow connected to a priori forms of intuition or categoriesof the understanding. Existence of both self and object are sensed in thereciprocal exercise of the forces of existence themselves in self and object.Jacobi calls this reciprocal interaction a “twofold revelation” [zweifacheOffenbarung].32 It is important to note that in this indivisible unity of theconsciousness of the existence of self and object there is no conceptualunderstanding at work, no intuitions of space and time, but only the simpleand unmediated consciousness of existence itself, my own and that of thething outside me. This is not a representation at all. It is, according toJacobi, the meeting of two forces, two forces of existence, and consciousnessitself at this conjunction is nothing additional to these forces. Rather, con-sciousness is the revelation of these existence-forces to one another. Jacobi says

31 Jacobi, David Hume, 277.32 Ibid., 277.


that it is “the I and the Thou” that are the “two in one flash.” This unme-diated perception of the existence of self and object is at the heart of Jacobi’srealism. Significantly, Jacobi’s realism is grounded on the immediacy ofwhat he insists is a revelation. Besides being the revelation of the force ofexistence in self and other, the “two in one flash” also reveals God as the“spirit that calls being forth from nothingness.”33 The unifying force of exis-tence in every being does not arise from a prior cause, but arises directlyfrom the all-unifying force of God himself: “So every system, even the small-est, of which there can be millions contained in one mite, requires a spiritthat unifies it, moves it, and holds it together—a Lord and King of Life.”34

Since a disaggregated material body lacking a unifying force “borders onnothing because of its unsubstantial divisibility in infinitum,”35 the divine forcethat infuses a unifying force—the finite spirit—into each thing lifts lifelessmatter from nothingness into being.

In the third section of David Hume on Faith titled “Leibniz,” Jacobi identifiesthe force of existence that is revealed in the consciousness of self and object asthe force that unifies a manifold into a single object. Jacobi argues that everyfinite being exists in virtue of this force. Having claimed that consciousness ofthis force in both self and object arises in an indivisible unity in which both selfand object are revealed to one another as existing realities, Jacobi undertakesto explain how spatial distance between self and object is established and howtemporal duration arises from this “twofold revelation.” Jacobi reverts to theimmediate facts of experience, in this case, to the experience of resistance[Widerstand] that accompanies the consciousness of the existence of the objectand the self. Jacobi claims that consciousness of the external world is insepa-rable from a living body that confronts the world as a resisting obstacle to itswill. The will is the unifying ground of the living being’s individuated exis-tence, and it perdures by overcoming obstacles in the world. In unifying itself,the body directs itself against an opposing force. The living body encountersresistance. While the consciousness of the existence of object and self aregiven in one single “flash,” the feeling of resistance outside the self on the partof another willing being and the perdurance of this feeling is the basis for theconsciousness of extended space and temporal duration. The living, mobilebody of a conscious being is, in other words, the condition of possibility ofspace and time. “If, besides the immanent activity by which each preservesitself in being, the individuals also have the faculty for external action, then, inorder for an effect to follow, they must come into contact (either immediate

33 Ibid., 306.34 Ibid., 323.35 Ibid.


or mediate) with other beings.”36 In moving and acting, the individualencounters the force of existence in another individual, and this is resistance.And, Jacobi asserts without further ado, resistance in space “is the source ofsuccession in time.” Resistance, he seems to be saying, takes time, that is, it isa perdurance through time. To push against another object requires more than aninstantaneous contact, but a continuous duration. Time is thus given in theexperience of perduring resistance.

Space and time are the necessary accompaniments of any consciousness ofan existing object, because the existing object, whose existence is expressed inits living, self-individuating will, is the ground of space and time. The extend-edness of space and the duration of time are produced through the self-unifying, individuating will of the living body meeting the same will inanother body (resistance), and the abstract forms of space and time thatoverlay the abstract representations of bodies in general result from under-standing’s analysis of an undivided extension and a unitary duration intopoints and instants. Jacobi thus overcomes Kant’s transcendental idealism:“So it would seem that we have shown that the concepts of reality, substance,or individuality, corporeal extension, succession, and cause and effect, to beconcepts that must be common to all finite, self-revelatory beings; and wehave shown also that these concepts have their concept-independent object inthe things themselves—consequently they have a true, objective, meaning.”37 Bygrounding all these concepts in the living will that is the very force of existencein all finite beings, Jacobi claims to have shown, as Kant could not, that theconcepts apply to objects in themselves, and he also claims to have demon-strated their unconditional universality, where Kant could only showthat beings with understanding would employ such concepts. In Jacobi’sLeibnizian universe, all objects are, to one degree or another, self-unifyingentities whose existence consists in maintaining their boundaries against theforce of other beings. In this way Jacobi answers the quid juris question: by whatright does the understanding apply its categories (cause, effect, and so on) toexperience? The sensation of actuality outside oneself is the basis of all ourcategories: “the perception of the actual and the feeling of truth, conscious-ness and life, are one and the same thing.”38 Understanding and reason arenot faculties separate from sensation, but further refinements of it.

The problem confronting reason and the understanding, as Jacobi willexplain, is to avoid substituting an abstract fiction for the reality of sensedexperience. If the immediate and instantaneous experience of the force of

36 Ibid., 294.37 Ibid., 296.38 Ibid., 305.


actuality is the ever-present touchstone of reason and understanding, thenreason and understanding will not delude themselves about what they them-selves actually are, namely, advanced forms of the living sensation of actual-ity. With living sensation as their origin and touchstone, reason andunderstanding will be able to hold fast to experience’s faith [Glaube] in a forceof existence that brings the disparate elements of an object (infinitely divisibleto nothingness) into a single, unified being. Untethered from a connection tothe perception of the actuality of a unified being, however, reason andunderstanding will confuse the account of how the object as an amalgamationof properties ( Jacobi calls this the explanation of the object’s principiumcompositionis) with the actual originating force of existence that is the unifyingforce behind the object’s manifold of properties (its principium generationis).When reason confuses the description of an object’s properties with anexplanation of how the object holds these properties together as a unity,reason sees a dead mechanism (whose disaggregated parts can be infinitelydivided into nothingness) where it ought to see a living organism.

Jacobi offers a mathematical analogy for the difference between under-standing an object by analyzing its principium compositionis and grasping itsunifying principle, or principium generationis. Jacobi relates how, in order tounderstand “line” or “surface” or “point,” he first had to imagine the objectthat, his geometry text told him, would be put together out of these things. Hefirst had to make “graphically present” to himself the image of a three-dimensional body, then see one surface as the outer extremity of the body,then the line that the extremity of one surface formed, then the point at theintersection of two such lines. If he started with the abstract geometricelements, he “took them to be mere fancies of the mind.”39 And he could notunderstand the definition of a circle (a plane figure of which it is true thatthere is one point equally distant from all points on the figure) until he sawhow one line can produce a circle by rotating around one of its endpoints.This congenital defect of Jacobi, it seems, inoculated him against the funda-mental error of reason, namely, confusing the principium compositionis with theprincipium generationis. Jacobi could only begin with the unanalyzed whole“made graphically present to me through sensation or through feeling,” evenif that were in his imagination and not in the world itself. Maimon, as Idiscussed above, shared Jacobi’s sense that a geometrical object, to be fullyunderstood as an essentia realis [real being] and not merely an essentia nominalis[definitional being] must be understood through the method of its construc-tion rather than through analysis into its elements. In fact, Maimon uses the

39 Ibid., 279.


example of the construction of the circle just as Jacobi had previously done.40

However, unlike Jacobi, Maimon believed that only the infinite mind of Godcould perfectly intuit in a single instant the complete construction of a geo-metrical object like the circle. The finite mind can imagine a line rotatingaround one point, but it cannot instantaneously intuit the infinite number oflines radiating from the center and therefore judge them all to be to be equalwith apodictic certainty. A circle’s “material completeness (completeness ofunity in the manifold) cannot be given in intuition, because only a finitenumber of equal lines can be drawn.”41 For Maimon, the geometrical objectdoes not reveal itself to intuition in a single flash, but is rather the ideal limit ofan infinite process of rational construction—“something that we can comeinfinitely close to in intuition,” but not something that can be revealed in aflash, so to speak. For Jacobi, the intuition of an object is simply the comingto consciousness of God’s free, creative power—his ability to create exnihilo—in so far as it is the ground of the object’s existence (the single forceunifying the manifold), but for Maimon the intuition of an object neverprovides direct and instantaneous access to the ground of its existence. Intu-ition, Maimon will say, is the coming to consciousness of a force differential, achange in the way the object’s unity-in-the-manifold gets expressed. Tocomprehend the ground of an object’s existence is to be able to subsume itschanging force differentials under a universal rule (like the law that forceequals mass times acceleration). This, for Maimon, is how the finite mindapproximates the infinite mind of God, but for Jacobi it is the way thatunderstanding dissolves the object into the nothingness of abstraction. WhereJacobi finds God in the immediacy of “the perception of the actual,” Maimonfinds the limit point where the differential approaches zero. Where Maimonfinds God at the infitinte limit where the object is fully subsumed within therules of the understanding, Jacobi finds only nothingness. In the next sectionI will explain in greater detail how Maimon’s Essay can be read as a responseto Jacobi’s defense of the possibility of experiencing revelation—the miracleof creatio ex nihilo—in the immediacy of “the perception of the actual.”

4. MAIMON’S ESSAY AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST THEPOSSIBILITY OF EXPERIENCING MIRACLES

Maimon’s philosophical project involves, as we have seen, the overturning ofrevelation by reason, and his appropriation of Kant counters Jacobi’s point bypoint. In this section I examine Maimon’s Essay as an attempt to overturn

40 E.g, Essay, 26; Versuch, 40 and Essay, 31; Versuch, 51.41 Essay, 44–45; Versuch, 75–76.


what might be called Jacobi’s “revelatory realism” in David Hume on Faith infavor of a form of idealism that can justify his philosophical mission ofreplacing revelation with reason. In this way, I hope to shed light on the waythat Maimon’s Essay participates centrally in the larger concerns of theSpinoza Quarrel. In particular, Maimon seeks to deploy Kant’s first Critique,repurposing the thing-in-itself as the vanishing point of a perfect intellectualgrasp of the created world, in order to deduce the condition of impossibility ofexperiencing miracles.

Maimon, in complete contrast with Jacobi, argues that a cause-and-effectrelation can only be understood by abstracting from the existence of the objects. Thefeeling that one object causes another object to alter its state (from rest tomotion, for example) is precisely due to our mixing the existence of the objectinto our cognition, that is, “we relate the concepts of cause and effect to theexistence of the objects, i.e., we believe that the existence of the cause makesthe existence of the effect necessary.” What we sense is what Maimon calls aminimun difference or a maximum identity between two phenomena (we will seebelow how important is the idea of what later was called by psychologists“threshold differences” in perception). We then, mistakenly, construct anunderlying object that undergoes the transition.42 We tend to reify or objectifythat which is only a relationship between things: “the concept of alterationcannot be thought of as an inner modification of things, but only of theirrelations to one another.”43 So, Jacobi is exactly right about what we imaginea cause to be, namely, an inherent force in an object, but he was wrong tothink that this is directly perceived. In his chapter on “Alteration” (ch. 8),Maimon will explain how continuity is an a priori condition of possibility ofexperience that lies at the basis of our construction of enduring objects. ButMaimon insists that we perceive only relations, and then we synthesize theserelations into objects. The only way truly to understand the so-called “com-munication of motion” is by looking at it in abstraction from the actualexistence of the objects and only as a relationship among variable quantitieslike mass and acceleration. And when we do this, we do not really need tospeak about causes and effects but only about alterations in variable quantitiesand the relations between these alterations. If, to take an example Maimonoffers, we see a ball fall from a height into soft clay, we are tempted to say theball caused a depression in the clay. But this would be wrong. We canmeasure variation in the size of the depression in relation to the distance ofthe fall, we can measure a force acting on the ball “at every point of thedistance so as to produce a uniformly accelerated motion,” but this force is

42 See Maimon, Essay, 78.43 Ibid., 118.


not in the ball, nor is it in the earth. Rather, the force is only understandableas a measurable relationship between uniformly varying magnitudes. We can with equaltruth, and therefore equal falsehood, say the earth attracted the ball or theball impelled itself downward. Neither the earth nor the ball, from theperspective of the law governing the motion of falling bodies, is a cause.

Maimon’s analysis of cause and effect is thus the very opposite of Jacobi’s.Like Jacobi, he understands that action and reaction are indivisible, andtherefore it is impossible to differentiate cause from effect, as when we cannotsay whether the ball or the earth caused the depression in the clay. But unlikeJacobi, he does not take this indivisible unity to be given in the consciousnessof the existence of self and object. It is not given with what Jacobi calls animmediate and foundational “perception of the real.” Rather, Maimon seesthe indistinguishability of cause and effect as the end result of abstracting fromexistence and analyzing sensation into magnitudes and their relationships,and this requires focusing attention away from objects and attending touniformly varying relationships between and among objects. GideonFreudenthal nicely captures the difference between Maimon and Jacobi in hisdescription of the difference between Maimon and Kant on the concept of“real opposition,” which, for Kant, was a relation of two real forces thatcancel each other, whereas for Maimon “real opposition” refers to “concepts(not to causal agents).”44 For Maimon, then, Kant’s categories of the under-standing are rules for establishing relations among uniformly measurable andcontinuously varying magnitudes, whereas for Jacobi, Kant’s categories arisefrom the felt resistance between two unanalyzable forces of existence thathold all (living) beings together as individuated unities. Jacobi claims thatunderstanding abstracts from this felt force to create the categories of causeand the concepts of space and time. Jacobi simply evades the problem of howlawful regularities obtain among the varying forces of living beings, or, in hismore disdainful moments, he speaks of lawful regularity as a sort of rationalillusion. But Maimon does not evade the question of how mathematicallyrigorous laws can be applied to the behavior of the objects of experience.Indeed, Maimon’s entire project stands or falls on his ability to address thisquestion.

Maimon’s answer to this question is the answer he gives to the quid jurisquestion, the question as to by “what right” the understanding imposes itscategories on the raw data of experience. Maimon claims that Kant dividedunderstanding from sensation and made them into two separate faculties.This separation of understanding from sensation, Maimon argues, exposedKant to the quid juris question about the legitimacy of applying categories of

44 Gideon Freudenthal, “Maimon’s Suberversion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” 168.


one faculty to the given material of the other. But Maimon is equally requiredto answer this question. And his answer is this: measureability is a feature ofperception itself, even before the categories of understanding are applied to it.“I differ [from the transcendental idealist] in that the transcendental idealistunderstands by matter what belongs to sensation in abstraction from therelations in which it is ordered, whereas I hold that what belongs to sensationmust also be ordered in relations if it is to be perceived. . . .”45 Consciousness, Maimonclaims, emerges only at a determinate threshold of perceived differencebetween two qualities. Thus, red is distinguishable from other colors becauseit is at a certain determinate distance from those other colors.

When a perception, for example red, is given to me, I do not yet have any con-sciousness of it; when another, for example green, is given to me, I do not yet haveany consciousness of it in itself either. But if I relate them to one another (by means of the unityof difference), then I notice that red is different from green, and so I attain consciousness of each ofthe perceptions in itself.46

This remarkable description of how color is perceived only within a differ-ential field of colors divided from one another is very close to the insight thatwill allow Gustav Fechner to begin to quantify sensations as regularly varyingperceptions of “threshold differences” [Unterschiedsschwelle].47 Maimon saysthat red is a “differential.” One way, perhaps, to understand this is to relateit to the point he makes about the perception of red being made possible byits differentiation from another color. The issue is how the differentiationtakes place. We know that there are an infinite number of possible colors veryclose to red, but not all of them can be perceived as distinct from red becausethey fall under the threshold of difference that consciousness can perceive.Each finite consciousness therefore organizes colors into differentials, that is,it divides the continuum of color into cuts of determinate size, minima ofperceivable difference ordered in succession. Each cut in the continuum ofcolor is the limit, or differential, at which the threshold of perceptible differ-ence is reached. It is a new perceptible quality. “Consciousness first ariseswhen the imagination takes together several homogeneous sensible represen-tations, orders them according to its forms (succession in time and space), andforms an individual intuition out of them.”48 However we understand

45 Essay, 109; emphasis added.46 Ibid., 74; emphasis added.47 See Gustav Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 3rd Auflage, (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel,

1906), I: 244ff.48 Ibid., 20. On this point, see also Florian Ehrensperger, “Weltseele und Unendliche

Verstand ” (Dissertation, München, 2006), http://salomon-maimon.de/forschung/Dissertation_Ehrensperger_13.9.06.pdf), 90ff.


http://salomon-maimon.de/forschung/Dissertation_Ehrensperger_13.9.06.pdf

http://salomon-maimon.de/forschung/Dissertation_Ehrensperger_13.9.06.pdf

Maimon’s claim that red is a differential, the important point is that con-sciousness by its nature is a medium in which differences among intensivemagnitudes are generated. Upon these magnitudes, measurements can ulti-mately be performed. In the chapter in the Essay devoted to magnitude (ch.7), Maimon will explain that all intensive magnitudes can be measured onlyif they are rendered as extensive magnitudes: heat must be represented as therising or falling of mercury in a thermometer along a uniform scale. Trans-lating differences among intensive magnitudes into relations among measur-able extensive magnitudes makes them calculable (as when a force acting onan object is measured by measuring its weight and its change of velocity overa certain distance during a certain time), and thus consciousness, by organiz-ing a homogeneous continuum into differences among differentials (intensivemagnitudes), prepares the ground for the scientific work of measuringexperience.

What is at stake in the conflict between Jacobi and Maimon about thenature of intuition (is it able to instantaneously perceive the “actual” or onlythrough force differentials?) is connected to their different conceptions ofGod’s relation to the world. As we have seen earlier in this essay, Maimonclaims that the quid juris question about the applicability of the categories ofunderstanding to the matter given in sensation is “one and the same” as thequestion about the arising [Enstehung] of the world “with respect to itsmatter.”49 Jacobi had made the same point in David Hume on Faith. ForJacobi, the arising of the world out of nothingness (the infinite divisibility ofmatter considered apart from its unifying force of existence) takes placewhen God parcels out living spirit to matter. Matter arises out of nothing,Jacobi says, because in its infinite divisibility it approaches nothing: “whatwe call matter borders on nothing because of its unsubstantial divisibility ininfinitum.”50 Matter, as an infinitely extensive magnitude, approaches the totalabsence of the intensive force of existence. At this limit, matter dissolves intonothingness. When matter is organized in a living organism with a unifying,individuating will to exist, matter’s nonbeing is transformed into a finite,intensive magnitude of being. God’s act of creating an individual finite being exnihilo is an ever-repeated miracle. For Maimon, the arising of the world, aswe will see, also involves matter. But there is no reference to God’s will,only his infinite understanding, and the creation of the world is a processanalogous to mathematical construction. And it is certainly not an ever-repeatedmiracle.

49 Essay, 37.50 David Hume, 322.


In the section of the Essay called the “Short Overview,” Maimonexplains how the world arises “in respect to its matter.” Matter is not anindependently existing stuff, but is a way of viewing the world as it is givento finite understanding. Matter is the world insofar as it is measurable ordeterminable but not-yet quantified or determined. It is the world as poten-tially measurable. Matter is always being “given” to finite understandings sothat, first of all, finite subjects can have a purchase on reality: this is the“arising” of the soul as a relation to a finite body. The task of finite under-standing, and of the soul, is to give measure (or form) to its given matter,that is, to lift it from potentiality to actuality or from undetermined mag-nitude to determinate magnitude. It takes a homogeneous continuum andfinds (or, with geometrical objects, constructs) the differentials within it, thuslifting undifferentiated “matter” into qualitatively heterogeneous magni-tudes. Finite understanding can perform this operation to generate twokinds of object, subjective (geometrical) and objective (real). The geometri-cal object method of construction can be understood by the finite under-standing, because it can discover the rule for the generation of thegeometric object. The finite intellect cannot intuit at once the constructionof the geometric object, because it cannot grasp an infinite number of linesas a single totality, but it can imagine the rotation of the line around apoint. A real, material object remains beyond the power of the finite under-standing to construct either in intuition or in imagination. The real objectis only a limit toward which the understanding strives as it abstracts fromthe matter that is given together with its perception of the world. This limit,says Maimon, is like Kant’s noumenon. By progressively abstracting from thematter, the finite understanding aims at discovering (and not inventing) therule by which the object was generated.51 The infinite understanding canconstruct real objects independently of all matter or imagination because itgrasps the continuum as a total unity and not as matter potentially divisibleinto heterogeneous qualities (differentials). Maimon explains how the infi-nite understanding holds all objects in its grasp: “the possibility of each andevery thing presupposes the possibility of a more general and a more par-ticular thing; as a result the series of subordinated things to which the givenbelongs, both a progress and a regress to infinity pertain to the completepossibility of a thing: this makes the idea of an infinite understanding anecessary one.”52 The world arises from God’s infinite understanding, as aconstruction out of the pure possibility of the most abstract concept towardthe reality of the most particularly determined real object. Stretched

51 Essay, 39–40.52 Ibid., 30.


between these two points is the finite understanding of the ensouled body.As Oded Schechter succinctly puts it: “the finite mind is inescapablytrapped in the middle.”53 Or, we might say that creation takes place in themiddle, for this is where both infinite and finite construction of objects takesplace, experienced instantaneously and immaterially by the former and asthe unending progress of scientific understanding’s mathematicization ofmatter by the latter. Florian Ehrensprenger stresses that the construction ofthe infinite understanding of real objects is an act of creation [schaffendesDenken] (emphasis Ehrensprenger), but it is certainly quite different fromJacobi’s conception of the miracle of creatio ex nihilo that is the heart of therevelation [Offenbarung] of the “perception of the actual.”54

For Maimon and Jacobi alike, creation involves the actualization of formin the infinite divisibility of matter. The actualization of form is, for Jacobi, aprocess of giving intensive magnitude (the unifying force of existence that isthe soul) to the infinite extensive divisibility of matter. God’s will punctuallyindividuates infinitely divisible matter, and it does so by imbuing it with theforce of existence rather than performing a mathematical process of differ-entiation upon it. Maimon has made God into the limiting concept of humanreason’s drive to measure the world. In his Philosophisches Wörterbuch [PhilosophicalDictionary] (1791), Maimon makes it particularly clear that religion groundedin reason necessarily and universally arises out of reason’s interest in alwaysseeking further causes in the chain of causes, ever approaching but neverreaching the first cause. “That which is sought for is, to be sure, no deter-mined object . . . but a necessary idea without which nature itself would notbe possible.”55 Religion, if it is rational, arises from reason’s interest in theunending task of understanding nature better and better. Jacobi’s entireproject, on the contrary, is to show that religion arises from the immediateexperience of the miracle of revelation.

For Jacobi, God’s incomprehensible will can only do miracles; forMaimon, God’s infinite understanding can only construct a world withoutmiracles. The difference between Jacobi and Maimon on this point can bedescribed as the real point of contention of the Spinoza Quarrel: the possi-bility of experiencing miracles. I want to conclude this essay with a fewremarks about why this possibility lies outside of either the system of Jacobi’srealism or Maimon’s idealism to decide.

53 Schechter, “The Logic of Speculative Philosophy,” 50. He is glossing Maimon’s remarkthat “we start in the middle with our cognition of things and end in the middle again” (Essay,181).

54 Ehrensprenger, Weltseele und Unendliche Verstand, 107–8.55 Maimon, Gesammelte Werke III, 99.


5. CONCLUSION: THE UNRESOLVABLE QUARREL OF JACOBIAND MAIMON ABOUT MIRACLES

What is a miracle? It would be a miracle if, to use Maimon’s example in hischapter on alteration (ch. 8) in the Essay where he introduces the principle ofcontinuity, “a small child would instantaneously turn into a giant.”56 Maimondoes not actually call such discontinuous change a miracle, but such discon-tinuous change is exactly the Maimonidean conception of miracle withwhich Maimon would be working. As Leo Strauss succinctly explains:“Maimonides’ doctrine of miracles assumes the distinction between theenduring and the transient, between what always occurs and what occursrarely, as an ontologically relevant distinction.”57 We cannot help but perceivechange as continuous, according to Maimon. It is “impossible for us tobelieve” in the discontinuity of experience. We could not persuade ourselves,Maimon says, that the child and the giant are one person. We cannot believein it, and God’s understanding could not construct a world with such gaps orleaps. According to Maimon’s principle of continuity, we cannot experiencemiracles, and according to his account of God’s construction of objects, therecan be no leaps. Everything in nature is built on the principle of continuity.

The impossibility of experiencing miracles depends upon the principle ofcontinuity not being a posteriori but a priori, and Maimon does insist that theprinciple is not “experiential.”58 But although Maimon claims, beyond whathis self-avowed “empirical skepticism” would seem to allow, that we cannothelp but experience, for example, the instantaneous transition from a child toa giant not as an alteration in one thing but as the replacement of one thingwith another, he is wrong to conclude that we cannot believe that the child isthe giant (“it is impossible to believe”). Maimon is actually using the term“believe” [glauben] as Jacobi does in David Hume on Faith, to refer to aninescapable aspect of our experience of the objects in the world. For Jacobi,this aspect of our experience is the sense of the existence of objects at anymoment, but for Maimon it is the sense of the continuity of their change. Jacobitakes the experience of the existence of an object to be the experience of thesheer thatness of the object, prior to any subsumption of the object under adefining concept. The thatness of the object is revealed in its power toorganize itself into a unity in space and time, and thereby display resistanceto other surrounding objects. This power inserts a disruptive presence, aresistive force, into space and time. It therefore constitutes, according to

56 Essay, 77.57 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965),

187; emphasis added.58 Essay, 77.


Jacobi, a revelation of the continuity-shattering intrusion of God’s creativepower into the world. When reason subsumes the object by tracing themultiple sources of each of the object’s component parts, it reduces theexistence of the object to a continuous series of prior causes and loses sight ofthe object’s unique power to exist here and now, a power revealing God’screative force. Thus, for Jacobi, the immediacy of the perception of the actualis a perception of a miracle, a discontinuous eruption of God’s power in thehere and now. To experience the object as existing is, for Jacobi, the expe-rience of the miraculousness of creatio ex nihilo. Toward the conclusion of DavidHume on Faith, Jacobi makes this point in terms that might even have Maimonas their target, had it not been the case that Maimon’s Essay postdates DavidHume.

Considered just by themselves, according their mere power to perceive relations,understanding and reason are entia rationis; their function, like their content, a nothing.In actuality they are instead the perfection itself of sensation, the nobler life, the highestexistence that we know. . . . The degree of our faculty for distinguishing ourselves fromexternal things, extensively and intensively, is the degree of our personality, that is,the degree of elevation of our spirit. Along with this exquisite property of reason [when itis the perfection of sensation—BR], we receive the intimation of God, the intimation ofHE WHO IS, a being who has life in its self. Freedom breathes upon the soul from there,and the fields of immortality become visible.59

For Jacobi, the miraculous power of God is not perceived in some discon-tinuous transition, as from a child to a giant, but rather in sensing immedi-ately the world’s power of existence and our own power of distinguishingourselves as separate from the world, of elevating ourselves in our freedomfrom being merely parts of a mechanical universe. Every object shares in thepower, but only the human being can be fully conscious of it.

While Maimon’s doctrine of continuity is directed against the possibility ofexperiencing a miraculous break in nature’s laws, it also challenges Jacobi’snotion that humans can sense the sheer power of existing in an object.Maimon would insist against Jacobi that sensation is only a “power to perceiverelations,” and understanding and reason are only refinements of this power.To perceive a nonrelational, intensive force would be, for Maimon, the sameas to perceive a break in the continuity of sensations. For Maimon, theexperience of the power of the object is a sort of optical illusion, arising fromabstracting the object out of its perceptual givenness in its differential relationwith other objects in the perceptual field. For Jacobi, the differential relationis the abstraction and illusory to the extent that it replaces the sensed

59 David Hume, 329; p. 202 in the German text.


immediacy of the object’s power of existing; for Maimon, it is the uniquesingularity of the object that is illusory, since everything given in conscious-ness is differential.

Jacobi argues, in effect, that the condition of possibility of experiencing anobject as actually existing is the condition of possibility of experiencing God’smiraculous freedom to bring the world into being out of nothing. He claimsthat this experience should serve as a corrective to reason’s “obsessive” questto explain all phenomena as parts of a single causal chain. Maimon, on theother hand, denies the possibility of experiencing actual discontinuity. Jacobiclaims that “belief” in the miraculous nature of the world is inseparable fromexperience of the world of objects existing outside ourselves, whereasMaimon argues that such belief is a priori excluded from experience.

But both Jacobi and Maimon are mistaken in thinking that by fixing theterm “belief” to experience in this way, they have grounded the possibility orthe impossibility of experiencing miracles. The belief or disbelief in miraclesis an attitude toward experience; neither one is given with experience or is ana priori condition of experience. The scientist who sees magic tricks performedcannot, as a scientist, believe that the illusions are really taking place, but achild can believe it. This important point, namely, that for an already “unbe-lieving mind,” miracles are impossible but that for a “believing mind” theyare possible, is central to Leo Struass’s appraisal of Spinoza’s critique ofmiracles in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. His conclusion is worth quoting atlength, and represents Strauss’s debt to Jacobi (he wrote his dissertation onJacobi’s epsistemology):

Positive critique [Strauss means critique based on the idea that science has a“limitless horizon of questioning,” what Maimon, following Kant, calls a “limitingconcept”] demonstrates that the positive mind, applying precise observation andstringent analysis, is incapable of perceiving miracles. Previous to this, positivecritique establishes that miracles must be accessible to the mind if they are to beindubitably established. But are miracles—understood as primarily meant—“established”? . . . Is the will to “establish,” which needs only to have becomevictorious for experience of miracles to become impossible, itself something to betaken for granted? Does not man come to his most weighty and impelling insightwhen he is startled out of the composure of observation by which facts are “estab-lished,” when he finds himself in the condition of excitation, in which alone miraclesbecome perceptible at all?60

Leo Strauss is challenging Spinoza’s attempt to rid the world of miracles, buthis point can equally be made against Maimon. In the end, Maimon’s

60 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 213–14. Strauss certainly read Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, but tomy knowledge he does not refer to any other of Maimon’s works.


alternative to Jacobi’s belief in revelation as given immediately in experiencecomes down to this: the assertion that the a priori conditions of any possibleexperience make the experience of miracles impossible. Jacobi wouldrespond: a priori principles can establish the law for any possible object ofexperience as one part of a spatio-temporal relational field of objects, butthese principles cannot account for experience itself, the givenness ofgivenness so to speak. But Jacobi for his part is wrong to think that theexperience of the miraculousness of the everyday is simply given. To experi-ence the everyday as miraculous is, like the “will to establish” that character-izes the “positive mind,” a question of one’s orientation to the world. Faith inthe miraculous is never forced upon us by experience as little as it is madeimpossible by the nature of experience. We are free to decide how we willexperience the world. There are passages where Jacobi shows he is aware thatour intimation of God in experience is not natural to us, but is a way of regardingourselves in relation to the world. But nonetheless, he also insists that whenwe fail to experience God we are betraying our most fundamental sensationof the world. In claiming this, I would argue, he is mistaken. He naturalizesour faith in the miraculous in the same way that Maimon naturalizes ourinability to experience miracles.

Let me make it clearer what I am talking about when I speak of “faith inthe miraculous.” I mean to refer to a global attitude toward the world as it isgiven in everyday experience. It is, indeed, not rational to believe that a childcan become a giant in one discontinuous leap, but it is not irrational to chooseto relate to the world as a whole not just as a given to be reduced tomathematical laws but as a gift to be received with gratitude. And perhaps itis better to say that one’s faith in the miraculous is ultimately not a matter ofchoice but is, rather, as Leo Strauss puts it, a “condition of excitation” inwhich one is able to be “startled” not so much by any particular event, but bythe very presence of the world as such.

Salomon Maimon is perhaps, after Spinoza, the most incisive critic of thepossibility of experiencing miracles, and his theory of the differential nature ofexperience (the threshold) will prove immensely powerful in nineteenth-century psychology’s effort to submit the human psyche to mathematicalmeasurement. It is Jacobi, however, to whom thinkers like Martin Buber,Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Heidegger will return when, after the GreatWar, faith in scientific rationality is shattered. But faith in the miraculous,which for Jacobi is something given with the “perception of the actual,”suffered no less than faith in reason. The everyday no longer seemed to be thesite of the sensation of God. After the war, the philosophical divide betweenJacobi and Maimon acquired a new and powerful salience. Both Jacobi andMaimon understood that the Spinoza Quarrel was ultimately about the


world’s emergence from nothingness, why there is something rather thannothing. The terms of their debate—is the world a miraculous creation or amathematical construction?—will be transformed into Buber’s distinctionbetween two possible ways of relating to the world, as a Thou or as an I. ForRosenzweig and Heidegger, the distinction may be differently expressed, butthe basic point remains the same: the quarrel between reason and revelationis not going to be settled by an analysis of the a priori conditions of experience.The quarrel hinges, rather, on what we make of our experience, of “theeveryday” that constitutes our lives.


"God has sent me to Germany": Solomon Maimon, Friedrich Jacobi, and the Spinoza Quarrel

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