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Polemicist, socialite, and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken critic, first of the rationalism of German late Enlightenment philosophy, then of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, especially in the form that the early Fichte gave to it, and finally of the Romantic Idealism of the late Schelling. In all cases, his opposition to the philosophers was based on his belief that their passion for explanation unwittingly led them to confuse conditions of conceptualization with conditions of existence, thereby denying all room for individual freedom or for a personal God. Jacobi made this point, in defence of individualism and personalistic values, in a number of public controversies, in the course of which he put in circulation expressions and themes that resonate to this day. He was the one who invited Lessing, who he thought was walking on his head in the manner of all philosophers, to perform a salto mortale (a jump heels over head) that would redress his position and thus allow him to move again on the ground of common sense. He was also responsible for forging the concept of nihilism -- a condition of which he accused the philosophers -- and thereby initiating the discourse associated with it. His battle cry, which he first directed at the defenders of Enlightenment rationalism and then at Kant and his successors, was that consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist. The formula had the effect of bringing Spinoza to the centre of the philosophical discussion of the day. In the face Kant and his idealistic successors, Jacobi complained that they had subverted the language of the I by reintroducing it on the basis of abstractions that in fact negated its original value. They had thus replaced real selfhood with the mere illusion of one.
But perhaps the most influential of Jacobi's formulas was the claim that there is no I without a Thou, and that the two can recognize and respect one another only in the presence of a transcendent and personal God. Because of his defence of the individual and the exception, Jacobi is sometime taken as a proto-existentialist. This view must be balanced by the consideration that Jacobi was a defender of conservative values that he felt threatened by the culture of the day; that he never considered himself an irrationalist; on the contrary, that he thought his faith to be essentially and truly rational; and that he tried more than once to develop a positive theory of reason. As a literary figure, he criticized the Sturm und Drang movement and dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligation. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution, the destructiveness of which he considered the practical counterpart of the speculative nihilism of the philosophers.