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Lessing and the Reformation of Aesthetic Rationalism

Frederick C. Beiser

in Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing

This chapter focuses on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who is considered as the last great thinker in the rationalist tradition of aesthetics. Lessing occupies a unique place in the rationalist tradition. ... More

This chapter focuses on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who is considered as the last great thinker in the rationalist tradition of aesthetics. Lessing occupies a unique place in the rationalist tradition. He was its single thinker to be not only a great aesthetician but also a great writer. No one else in this tradition combined so well critical reflection on the arts with the practice of them. Lessing's work as a dramatist shaped his aesthetic thought, which in turn altered the course of the rationalist tradition. Since he saw that writers need inspiration, Lessing became more sceptical of rules, and more appreciative of genius, than most of his predecessors and contemporaries.Less

Strains and Stresses

Alexander Altmann

in Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study

This chapter returns the focus to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. It first discusses the final phase of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn, as shown through their correspondence regarding his final ... More

This chapter returns the focus to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. It first discusses the final phase of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn, as shown through their correspondence regarding his final work. Lessing's youthful comedy The Jews had helped to initiate his friendship with Mendelssohn. His last play, Nathan the Wise, became the crown and glory of their relationship. Lessing died in 1781, leaving behind a distraught Mendelssohn. However, Mendelssohn could bear the loss somewhat because he had so integrated the image of Lessing, his “friend and judge,” into his own being that death could not rob him of it. Aside from Lessing, the chapter also turns to another individual—Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi—with whom Mendelssohn would have a rather tense relationship, particularly on the matter of Lessing's own work.Less

two Jacobi and Mendelssohn: The Tragedy of a Messianic Friendship

Bruce Rosenstock

in Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond

This chapter deals at length with the Spinoza Quarrel and how it reflects to be Friedrich Jacobi's gnostic assault on the Jewish God as the true face of the abstract and ... More

This chapter deals at length with the Spinoza Quarrel and how it reflects to be Friedrich Jacobi's gnostic assault on the Jewish God as the true face of the abstract and lifeless God of Enlightenment Reason. The Spinoza Quarrel began when Jacobi confronted Moses Mendelssohn with a story about Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's confession to him, shortly before his death in 1781, that he was a Spinozist. The personal animus involved in Jacobi's attempt to divide Mendelssohn from his late friend contributed to the fact that, tragically, neither could understand what the other was saying. Ironically, both Jacobi and Mendelssohn attempt to defend the claim of revelation against the excesses of Enlightenment Reason, but they are unable to find any common ground of dialogue. Jacobi views Judaism through the figure of a hyper-rationalist Baruch Spinoza and he understands Mendelssohn as committed to replacing revelation with a religion of reason.Less

Years of Growth

Alexander Altmann

in Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study

This chapter explores Moses Mendelssohn's formative years. It first takes a look at his childhood in Dessau, Germany, before tracking his early journeys to the capital city of Berlin. From there, the ... More

This chapter explores Moses Mendelssohn's formative years. It first takes a look at his childhood in Dessau, Germany, before tracking his early journeys to the capital city of Berlin. From there, the chapter explores Mendelssohn's first brushes with philosophy, including non-Jewish philosophy and theology. His philosophical undertakings matured further after his first meeting and subsequent friendship with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Both men had many things in common—and here, Lessing was able to bring out the best of Mendelssohn's talents. With Lessing, Mendelssohn was able to develop his metaphysics further before both men parted ways. From there on, Mendelssohn cultivated his philosophic leanings and steadily transformed into a bel esprit as he went on to join the “Learned Coffeehouse”—a society of scholars and artists. Finally, the chapter traces the publication of Mendelssohn's Kohelet Mussar (“Preacher of Morals”), a Hebrew weekly meant for Jewish youth.Less

The Average Audience (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy)

in Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche declares that when the “man of everyday life” assumes the tragic stage, it spells doom for tragedy—and with it great art. This chapter ... More

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche declares that when the “man of everyday life” assumes the tragic stage, it spells doom for tragedy—and with it great art. This chapter examines bourgeois tragedy by focusing on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–1768). In particular, it considers the theoretical underpinnings of lending “dear mediocrity” a tragic nimbus as well as the aesthetic-ethical stakes of wanting to move an audience to feel compassion. The chapter discusses Lessing's theory as well as his correspondence with Friedrich Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn. It also analyzes bourgeois tragedy's rejection of sublime, public heroes in favor of common, domestic protagonists and how it aesthetically enacts the end of the age of heroes while ushering in the age of the common man. Finally, the chapter explores how Lessing establishes theater as the educative arena for converting an average audience into an exemplary public and considers his view that it is the common hero, not the exceptional one, who instigates exemplarity.Less

Interfaith Love and the Pursuit of Emancipation: Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Katja Garloff

in Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

This chapter reads Lessing's and Mendelssohn's reflections on interfaith love and marriage in the light of their interventions in the debates about Jewish emancipation. In Jerusalem (1783), ... More

This chapter reads Lessing's and Mendelssohn's reflections on interfaith love and marriage in the light of their interventions in the debates about Jewish emancipation. In Jerusalem (1783), Mendelssohn affirmatively cites the Judaic injunction against interfaith marriage while appealing to the “brotherly love,” or political goodwill, of his Christian readers. Lessing plots his famous plays on religious tolerance, The Jews (1749) and Nathan the Wise (1779), around impossible Christian-Jewish romances. The plays' logic is best described as one of incomplete sublimation, a redirection of erotic energies that never comes to a standstill and that thwarts any complacent vision of interfaith harmony. Both Lessing and Mendelssohn suggest that “affective kinship” may serve as a foundation of communities in which different religious groups enjoy political equality. At the same time, their awareness of the precariousness of such kinship— and of all interreligious love—enhances the appeal character of their texts.Less

the Fate of A Daughter: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Laurence A. Rickels

in Aberrations of Mourning

This chapter provides an overview of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s works. Upon his father’s death Lessing returned to—Emilia Galotti, which he had conceived as turning on the absence of the father. In ... More

This chapter provides an overview of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s works. Upon his father’s death Lessing returned to—Emilia Galotti, which he had conceived as turning on the absence of the father. In Emilia Galotti, every trace of that Lessing so garrulously present in Nathan the Wise seems effaced; instead, at the end of the series of removals and retreats, which characterized Lessing’s search for the “true father,” we find a daughter who, alone in Lessing’s works, achieves through her suicide mission the father’s corporeal resurrection. According to Lessing, metaphor stimulates natural signification through “another similarity” whereby two things are associated and subsumed under one concept which remains renewable.Less

Mobilizing a Critical Public

Dorothea E. von Mücke

in The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, By (author)ship, and the Public

This chapter examines some of the writing and publication strategies that invoked and expanded existing conventions of the traditional republic of letters, making deliberate use of the vernacular, ... More

This chapter examines some of the writing and publication strategies that invoked and expanded existing conventions of the traditional republic of letters, making deliberate use of the vernacular, and consciously provoked and called attention to questions of authority and censorship. It begins with an analysis of Immanuel Kant's programmatic essay “What Is Enlightenment?” in the context of the academy competitions as a reflection on the expansion of the conventions of the republic of letters. It then discusses Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's so-called theological writings and how he postulates a radically different public from the corporate model he is criticizing. It interprets Lessing's writings on religion as active interventions in the position of authority claimed by theologians in matters of belief. It shows that the relatively deregulated, open boundary between the group that constitutes an audience or readership and the group that publishes positions, findings, opinions, and theories as polemicists, reviewers, scholars, or scientists constitutes the crucial background for Kant's and Lessing's model of a critical public that would further the cause of the Enlightenment.Less

Images and Texts Compared: A Diagnosis of Contrasts

Luca Giuliani

in Image and Myth: A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art

This chapter discusses the narrative nature and content of mythological images and aims to show how to distinguish narrative images from nonnarrative ones. It argues that, without a clear idea of ... More

This chapter discusses the narrative nature and content of mythological images and aims to show how to distinguish narrative images from nonnarrative ones. It argues that, without a clear idea of this nonnarrative antithesis, the distinctiveness of the narrative mode of representation itself remains unclear. This issue was already addressed in the mid-eighteenth century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his treatise Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing systematically compared narration and description as two fundamental possibilities of representation that are both antithetical and complementary. Laocoon provided both a significant impulse and a conceptual framework for this book. Since this framework will not be explicitly addressed in the following chapters, it is important to recall here the major features of Lessing's argument, not least to emphasize those points that are in need of revision and reformulation.Less

Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing

Philipp Hunnekuhl

in Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790-1811

Chapter four focuses on Robinson’s five-letter series on German literature, in particular Goethe and Schiller, in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03) that accompanied his ... More

Chapter four focuses on Robinson’s five-letter series on German literature, in particular Goethe and Schiller, in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03) that accompanied his transmissions of Kantianism to England, as well as his articles on Lessing in the Unitarian Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1806). Read against the backdrop of Robinson’s explications of Kant and informal discussion of August Wilhelm Schlegel, all of these writings emerge as erudite, autonomous attempts at resolving the impasse between aesthetic autonomy and literature’s moral relevance detailed in the preceding chapter. These attempts are further characterized by an experimental oscillation between Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to art, and demonstrate that Robinson was increasingly regarding literary form as those universal parameters that may facilitate moral discourse across national, cultural, and historical gulfs. The letters on German literature, and afterwards the appreciation of the ‘free-thinking spirit and love of humanity’ (Diana Behler) in Lessing’s cosmopolitanism, hence enabled Robinson to establish in terms of practical criticism his ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of full aesthetic autonomy and towards his critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’.Less

The Rediscovery of the Eternal Evangel

Gould Warwick and Reeves Marjorie

in Joachim of Fiore

The burden of virtually all the early nineteenth-century visionaries — whatever their particular political or philosophical outlook — was the necessity of ‘religion’ in the approaching new era. They ... More

The burden of virtually all the early nineteenth-century visionaries — whatever their particular political or philosophical outlook — was the necessity of ‘religion’ in the approaching new era. They were remarkably vague in their definitions or descriptions of what they meant by ‘religion’, but — whether it would still be Christian, or would supersede Christianity — all emphasized the element of novelty. So far, however, we have found no evidence that Joachim of Fiore's doctrine of history was directly known or studied. This is all the more significant because many used concepts and language very close to those of Joachimism. This chapter focuses on the rediscovery of Joachimism and the Eternal Evangel by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Jules Michelet, and Edgar Quinet.Less

Reason, Toleration, Emancipation: Jews and Philosophical Purpose

Adam Sutcliffe

in What Are Jews For?: History, Peoplehood, and Purpose

This chapter centers on the eighteenth century as the period in which the primary purpose of Jews was to sharpen the elaboration of key philosophical concepts. It explores the work of Pierre Bayle, ... More

This chapter centers on the eighteenth century as the period in which the primary purpose of Jews was to sharpen the elaboration of key philosophical concepts. It explores the work of Pierre Bayle, whose Historical and Critical Dictionary in the 1700s baffled eighteenth-century readers over its elusive positioning of Judaism as the marker of the limits of rational philosophy. It also reviews the vexed preoccupation of Voltaire with Jews that stemmed from his structurally similar but temperamentally different positioning of them as fundamentally antithetical to enlightenment reason. The chapter also explains the paradigm of exceptionalism that framed the work and reception of Jewish thinkers in the period, including Moses Mendelssohn. It describes the penetrating mind and noble character of Mendelssohn that became the model for the dramatic hero of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's masterpiece Nathan the Wise, in which Jewish purpose was cast as the exemplification of rational universalism.Less

The Aesthetic-Historical Imaginary: On Shoah and Maus

Henry W. Pickford

in The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

This chapter considers Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus in light of the epistemology of testimony. Two epistemic dimensions are involved: (a) propositional knowledge, ... More

This chapter considers Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus in light of the epistemology of testimony. Two epistemic dimensions are involved: (a) propositional knowledge, conveyed by reports from speaker to listener; and (b) expressive knowledge, which under proper circumstances elicits appropriate responsiveness from the listener. The justification of testimonial knowledge is developed by considering work by Wittgenstein and Richard Moran. Shoah and Maus exhibit contrasting but complementary asymmetries in their aesthetic presentations of testimonies: Shoah eschews all historical illustration of the narratives (propositional knowledge) being recounted by the witnesses, but does focus, at times invasively, on the faces of the witnesses as they recount their narratives. By contrast, Maus eschews the portrayal of human faces (instead they are imaged as various kinds of animals) while illustrating the content of the eyewitness’s testimony (the story of Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust). Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, suitably modified in light of subsequent criticisms of it, explicates the witness’s and viewer’s distinctive roles in these works as required by the aesthetic presentation. In this way both artworks, each in its own way, fulfill the dual desiderata of Holocaust artworks.Less

Beautiful, Not Intelligent Design

Dorothea E. von Mücke

in The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, By (author)ship, and the Public

This chapter examines the use of teleological models to fuse or confuse the order of nature and how the resistance they generate characterizes an emphatic Enlightenment. It presents two examples of ... More

This chapter examines the use of teleological models to fuse or confuse the order of nature and how the resistance they generate characterizes an emphatic Enlightenment. It presents two examples of this discourse that call attention to the use of teleological explanations and argues that the inherent purposiveness of natural phenomena, with their appeal to a sense of harmony and beauty, cannot be used to justify human values and moral standards. More specifically, the chapter analyzes the highly engaged responses of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to such texts of their contemporaries, in which teleological models from nature are being smuggled into the moral domain by way of their appeal to beauty. First it offers a reading of one passage from Lessing's Laocöon before turning to a piece from Goethe's naturalist writings that discusses beauty from an evolutionary perspective. It also discusses each author's turn to aesthetics that involves a critique of teleology when discussing beauty in nature, and how they both criticize their opponent's uses of teleology through their rhetorical strategies.Less