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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious Enlightenment and Awakening: Historical Consciousness and Protestant Identity

Andrew Kloes

in The German Awakening: Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815-1848

This chapter examines how a distinctive historical consciousness informed how awakened Protestants understood their religious beliefs and activities. An intrinsic problem that is common to the ... More

This chapter examines how a distinctive historical consciousness informed how awakened Protestants understood their religious beliefs and activities. An intrinsic problem that is common to the historical study of all strongly partisan movements in the history of Protestantism is understanding the mentality, or worldview, of those who desired to see religious changes. To understand the Awakening movement, there is a need to understand what the Protestant activists wanted to awaken. This chapter answers this question by considering two competing interpretations of the history of modern Protestantism that appeared within the Protestant churches of Germany before and during the Awakening. The former of these narratives perceived changes in faith and theology as signs that Christianity was progressively advancing through the providential enlightenment of the church. The latter regarded these same changes as a falling away from the forms of faith and theology that were taught by the Bible.Less

The Empty Heavens: From Dogma to Ethics

T.J. Reed

in Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment

Religion was a major restriction of freedom of thought, hence a prime object of Enlightenment criticism. Speaking out still carried risks—to career, status, even one—s life. Gradually the pressure ... More

Religion was a major restriction of freedom of thought, hence a prime object of Enlightenment criticism. Speaking out still carried risks—to career, status, even one—s life. Gradually the pressure eased as writers and thinkers gained a sense of solidarity. Goethe, Kant, Lichtenberg, Lessing (only he concerned to rescue what Christian substance he could) moved independently of one another in a common direction: away from dogmatic belief and the intolerance it entailed and towards a secular ethics which reversed an ancient order. It became clear that true morality was not something merely prescribed by a god, and that the idea of god itself grew out of human moral aspiration.Less

The Human Sciences as a Religious Duty: Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, the Early Romantics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Vittorio Hösle

in A Short History of German Philosophy

This chapter considers the origin of the German human science. At the end of the eighteenth century, a transformation of Lutheranism took place among Germany's intellectual elites involving the ... More

This chapter considers the origin of the German human science. At the end of the eighteenth century, a transformation of Lutheranism took place among Germany's intellectual elites involving the retention of the religious motivation of philology, which was now extended to universal history and philosophically grounded, i.e., creating a trinity of theology, philosophy, and philology. The word of God was no longer limited to the Bible but manifested itself in the whole history of the human spirit. Understanding it as a unity is not only a valid scholarly interest; it is a religious duty, and presumably it is only by fulfilling such a duty that one has a chance to do something really lasting. No one so energetically pursued the breakdown of the old Lutheran orthodoxy as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781).Less

Epilogue: The Drama of Recognition

George Oppitz-Trotman

in Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and their Reception

The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment ... More

The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment theatre projects. Theatre-historical chronicles began to be written in the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time there was already a vocabulary for itinerant theatre ready to be applied to the English Comedians in order to understand their effect on national dramatic culture. Setting these relations next to the development of Theaterwissenschaft out of philology in early twentieth-century German universities, this concluding chapter reflects on the influence of disciplinary structure upon the investigation of controversial historical phenomena. Various sorts of patriotism and methodologism have distorted the comprehension of the itinerant theatre and concealed its involvement in the generation of dramatic art. The contemporary crisis within the discipline of theatre history is explained with reference to the underestimation of theatre professionalization, which was a profound discontinuity in the history of Western culture.Less