  In sum, Jacobi’s figure, including its place within the Enlightenment, is much more complex than usually assumed, and still in need of discussion. In our own times, Leo Strauss did his PhD on Jacobi. Perhaps this is still another way in which Jacobi is working his influence on us and still bringing Spinoza centre stage, exactly where he did not want him to be. It might well be that the secret of this complexity is that Jacobi, just like Kierkegaard after him, was motivated by deeply conservative beliefs which he saw threatened by the culture of the day; but, again like Kierkegaard, in trying to reassert them, developed a language that was later to be used, contrary to anything he would have ever imagined, to undermine them instead.