  In other words, the choice with which Jacobi confronted his readers at the opening of his new edition of the Spinoza Letters was not between two conceptually valid yet contradictory claims, but between the anti-humanism of the philosophers — based at it was on an abstraction — and a humanism that on the contrary stays close to the facts of experience. In this respect, Jacobi was reaffirming the point he had already made to Lessing ten years earlier, namely, that the only way to deal with the irrational results of philosophizing is to know when to stop philosophizing. Ironically, however, he had used the same general paradigm of two interacting forces to define, in his two sets of propositions, both the system of mechanical causes and the system of freedom. This was a point that did not get lost. Fichte was soon to use the paradigm as his basis for resolving Kant’s antinomy, by arguing that freedom requires as its counterpart the kind of mechanistic organization that scientific explanation demands. Where Jacobi had tried to circumvent the antinomy altogether by suspending philosophical reflection at the right moment, Fichte was to try to resolve it by prompting that same reflection to a higher level of abstraction instead. So far as Jacobi was concerned, the results of any such move could only be disastrous. And it was indeed against Fichte that, ten years later, he felt compelled to repeat in stronger terms than ever before his original interdiction against philosophers.