  Mendelssohn was bitterly to complain to Kant that Jacobi’s volume was like a monster that sported Goethe for head, Spinoza as torso, and Lavater for feet. There was a point to his complaint. Yet, despite the many divagations and the pervading preachy tone of the text, there was a definite philosophical message that Jacobi was conveying. Philosophers are temperamentally inclined to reconstruct reality according to the requirements of explanation, in total disregard of the requirements of existence. They are possessed, as it were, by a logical fanaticism that leads them to mistake the abstractive principles of explanation for principles of existence. Since the individuality of things is the first victim of this confusion, yet individuality is the necessary condition of all existence, it follows that in the world as reconstructed by philosophers there is no room left for truly existing subjects — least of all for agents who can seriously take responsibility for their actions and relate to one another as person to person, an ‘I’ to a ‘Thou’. All that is most noble in human nature (as depicted in Goethe’s first poem, Jacobi implies), notably the ability to make decisions and transcend brute nature, is thus denied, and there is no alternative left for human individuals, if they care to preserve at least a modicum of dignity, except to take pleasure in their avowedly only delusory sense of freedom (according to Goethe’s second poem, as Jacobi also seems to imply). The much vaunted Enlightenment humanism, based as it was on the ideal of pure rationality was only a sham. It led in fact to ‘nihilism’ (a term, incidentally, that Jacobi made popular).