SKC Workshop 2024

James Kreines

(Claremont McKenna College, USA)

Jacobi’s Leap and the Polarizing Idea of a System: For the Importance of Leaps Before and After Hegel

The philosophers of classical German philosophy accord great philosophical importance to a demanding idea of a “system”. In journals of contemporary philosophy, the idea would likely be dismissed as a matter of indifference, relative to more today’s deflationary projects. But such dismissal, I argue, would miss much of philosophical interest and importance, beginning with Jacobi’s system-critical leap, or salto mortale. System-critique, in this sense, is opposed to the German Idealist system-builders, but it is not deflationary or indifferentist: it agrees about the importance of the idea of a system throughout philosophy. And the case for its importance is much stronger for the presence of the leap. After defending Jacobi and the importance of the idea of a system, I suggest some lessons downstream: those of us working charitably on Hegel and similar system-builders should be less interested in post-Hegelian deflationary rejoinders, and more in finding post-Hegelian forms of non-deflationary critique in the late Schelling, Kierkegaard and others who follow