  The two theses, appearing as they did one year after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, may be taken as a tacit criticism of Kant’s strategy of defining the problem of freedom in the form of an antinomy. Jacobi’s two theses do not constitute an antinomy because, from their perspective, any apparent opposition between mechanistic explanation and moral demands is already resolved in the propositions detailing the second thesis. Presupposed by both sets of propositions is the assumption, which Jacobi accepts, that beings (at least, created beings) exist in limiting relationships, and that such relationships entail an irreducible element of passivity as well as activity on both the sides entering into them. The difference between the two sets of propositions is that the second (the one defending freedom) respects this necessary condition of any relationship, whereas the first does not. Only the philosopher, because of his passion for abstractions, is tempted to conceive, on the one hand, a purely mechanistic relation, one which in fact negates activity altogether and thus removes the basis for the desired relationships; on the other hand, one which is purely active, exclusively spontaneous, and thus attains the same result by the opposite route. For this last point, Jacobi could have easily connected Kant’s notion of freedom as purely spontaneous activity with Spinoza’s causa sui. Only then, when one has thus given way to the philosopher’s passion for abstractions, is one faced with the Kantian kind of antinomy — a conflict of opposing yet conceptually valid views that can be controlled, though never truly resolved, only by appeal to the unknown.