  All this infuriated Jacobi. No piece of his is as overflowing with religious language as this letter to Fichte. But the rhetoric exhibited here has none of the pious triumphalism, smacking of Lavater, that had vitiated his earlier productions. It seems born, rather, out of genuine fear in the face of what he thought was the ultimate nihilism of reason. Jacobi conceded that there was no argument against Fichte, no way of refuting him on his own conceptual grounds. He stood before him, therefore, as one who gave witness against the philosophers, forcing the audience to a choice between him and them. Against the universal norms of either Kant’s or Fichte’s morality, he stood rather as the champion of the exception — the one who, for the sake of the individual, would dare profane the sacred altars, indeed to lie and even murder (Jacobi, 1799: 32–33). This was a powerful individualistic manifesto that Jacobi was promoting, the kind not be heard again until Kierkegaard more than half a century later. But it had nothing to do with the asocial individualism typical of the Sturm und Drang movement that had been the cause of Jacobi’s concern in his younger years. On the contrary, even before this commotion with Fichte, and probably with Goethe in mind, Jacobi had long been meditating on the place of the individual in society, and had formulated for himself a definite social theory. To gather an idea of it, however, we must turn to his more literary works, as we shall do in due place (see Section 3).