Il miracolo nel pensiero di Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: salto mortale, percezione e libertà

Abstract

In my article I analyse the topic of the miracle in the thought of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). I start with the question of whether the movement of the somersault (salto mortale), which is used by Jacobi in The Spinoza Letters (1785) as a metaphor for faith, can be interpreted – because of its acrobatic difficulty – as something miraculous or as something that arouses wonder. Furthermore, I show the meaning of this metaphor in the Letters. Finally, I analyse the expressions ʻmiracle of perceptionʼ (in the Letter to Fichte - 1799) and ʻmiracle of freedomʼ (in the Introduction to the Author’s Collected Philosophical Works- 1815), which Jacobi explicitly combines with his somersault.