Philosophical Vignettes from the Political Life of Moses Mendelssohn
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Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 1999 Philosophical Vignettes from the Political Life of Moses Mendelssohn by David Shavin To think the true, to love the good, [T]o you, immortal Leibniz, I set to do the best. up an eternal memorial in my Moses Mendelssohn, July 6, 1776 heart! Without your help I would have been lost for ever. I never met The happiness of the human race was you in the flesh, yet your imperish- Socrates’ sole study. able writings . .. have guided me to the firm path of the true philoso- Moses Mendelssohn, 1769 phy, to the knowledge of myself and of my origin. They have ow can the “temple of lib- engraved upon my soul the sacred erty, and beacon of hope” truths on which my felicity is for the world be in mortal founded . [I]s there any slavery H harder to bear than the one in jeopardy of ending its days as a dumb, blind giant for the same which reason and heart are at log- gerheads with one another? British Empire families that we defeated? The methods by which The individual to whom evil has insinuated itself upon, and Moses Mendelssohn gave his heart- confounded, the good, are not unknowable. Moses felt gratitude for his emancipation was Gottfried Wil- Mendelssohn’s life, in thought and action, uniquely con- helm Leibniz. Mendelssohn, a short, hunch-backed Jew, veyed “the pursuit of happiness” in the two decades by mastering the higher unity of his heart and his mind, before, and one decade after, the Declaration of Indepen- became the powerful, towering intellect of Western civi- dence, when that evil was defeated. The enemies whom lization during the seven decades between the figures of he showed how to successfully wage war against are, Leibniz and Friedrich Schiller. There is no other figure today, those to whom we are in danger of succumbing. during this period who had so thoroughly delved into The episodes of his life encapsulate in the small what the Leibniz’s thinking, or was so well-immunized against the American experiment is all about. deficiencies of the well-publicized British empiricism and In an early dialogue, Moses Mendelssohn wrote: French materialism. 29 © 1999 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. MOSES MENDELSSOHN, born Sept. 6, 1729, grew up in pursuit of astronomy. A fellow student of Samoscz, a Dessau, Germany ghetto, in a time when Jewish com- Aaron Gumpertz, brought the sixteen-year-old Moses munities were suffering from severe external limitations, with him to learn Latin, French, and English, in their but even more so, from the devastation that had swept quest for knowledge of the heavens in texts written in across Europe during the irrationality of the Thirty Years those languages. War (1618-1648). Mysticism—specifically, cabbalism— Gumpertz was the model for the Jewish hero in Die had gripped an unhealthy percentage of the rural, peas- Juden (1749), an early work by Mendelssohn’s life-long ant Jewish populations. Moses Mendelssohn found in the collaborator Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The twenty- ancient writings of Judaism a place to fight for truth. A year-old Lessing used humor to introduce a Jew, who is a new edition of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was man of culture and virtue. He saves a baron’s life, who produced in nearby Jessnitz, for the first time in almost exclaims, “Oh, how worthy of esteem would the Jews be, two hundred years, in 1742, when Moses was thirteen. if they resembled you!” The Jew, modeled upon The next year, the Nehmad Ve-Na’ im, an astronomical Gumpertz, answers: “And how worthy of love would the and geographical treatise by David Gans, a student of Christians be, if they all possessed your qualities!” Mendelssohn’s ancestor Rabbi Moses Isserles, was pub- Mendelssohn began his collaboration with Lessing, from lished. Gans also was an associate of Kepler and Tycho an introduction by Gumpertz in 1754. The story is that Brahe. Mendelssohn followed his rabbi, David Fraenkel, Mendelssohn was recommended to Lessing as a chess to Berlin in 1743, where he intensified his search for the partner! truth of the heavens. Mendelssohn’s great-grandson, Wilhelm Hensel, the Champions of Leibniz family biographer, described the situation: “The Chris- tians of those times [1740’s Berlin] considered the Jews as THE PARTNERSHIP of Mendelssohn and Lessing was little their equals in mind and faculties as in our days forged in battle, when the two twenty-five year olds [1869] the white inhabitants of America regard the found that the Berlin Academy, the last major holdout of Negroes.” Jews were denied education, denied most Leibniz’s influence in the academies of Europe, was occupations, denied citizen status, and were the first ones being overwhelmed by ugly, thuggish operations. Leibniz to be blamed for problems. However, Mendelssohn still had formed scientific academies as the center of nation- took the sovereignty of his own mind as primary, and he building in Berlin and found that astronomical events did not bend to backward St. Petersburg, and political conditions. had made major inter- He studied with Israel ben Moses Ha’Levi Samoscz, ventions into similar who is described by Mendelssohn’s biographer, Alexan- institutions in Paris, der Altmann,1 as: “the last representative of the rabbini- Vienna, Rome, and co-philosophical synthesis that had its heyday in medieval elsewhere. The main Spain. [A] hostile attitude toward philosophy and outpost of the Venet- secular learning had set in . due chiefly to the influ- ian counter-intelli- ence of Kabbala. ... But Israel Samoscz reincarnated gence against Leibniz, the old spirit in a noble way . .. he treated mathematical was based out of the and astronomical passages in the Talmud. An astro- British Royal Society, nomical treatise by him, entitled Arubot Ha-Shamayim, with virulent opera- remains unpublished.” Samoscz wrote in his patron’s tions from the 1710’s The Granger Collection house, that of Daniel Itzig, a banker for the Berlin Court. onwards. In 1740, the Gotthold Ephraim Lessing The Itzigs, like the Mendelssohns, were descendants of Berlin Academy was Rabbi Isserles of Cracow. The Itzigs and the still accepting members with Leibnizian outlooks, e.g., Mendelssohns would prove to have a very fruitful part- Johann Suessmilch, who based upon his demographic nership in years to come. study of the need for the state to promote population Schiller’s beautiful description in William Tell, of growth, explicitly upon the principle of Genesis, to be snatching one’s inalienable rights from the heavens, could fruitful, and multiply, and have dominion over nature. have had no better exemplification in his day, than that of Beginning the early 1740’s, the assault upon the Berlin Moses Mendelssohn. Even Mendelssohn’s acclaimed mas- Academy was conducted by such as Maupertuis, Euler, tery of the “non-Jewish” languages was driven by his Voltaire, and Algarotti. In 1748, Maupertuis and Count 30 Dohna, in a political fix, awarded the prize essay against anonymously in 1755, undercutting Maupertuis’ faction Leibniz’s philosophy to von Justi, for (what Euler was to in their attempt to rub salt into the wounds of Leibniz, call) the “most complete refutation of the monadists.” and making Mendelssohn and Lessing the proven leaders Most would-be defenders of Leibniz, probably including of science and culture, while in their mid-twenties. the nineteen-year-old Mendelssohn, expected Christian Wolff to defend Leibniz’s monad philosophy. However, Wolff, who had sponsored Suessmilch’s membership into Freed from the Prison the Academy a few years earlier, now yielded to political pressure. Euler’s smug description in letters to Frederick MENDELSSOHN had worked diligently for years, and the Great’s daughter found that Leibniz had freed him from the prison where (1761) was: “[Wolff’s] reason and heart are at constant loggerheads with each followers, who were other. The essays that Mendelssohn composed in 1754, then much more including “On the Sublime and Naive in the Sciences of numerous and more Beauty,” against Voltaire’s influence, were the deepest formidable than at studies of Leibniz since his death in 1716. It is here that present, exclaimed in Leibniz’s character, Palemon, declaims the above-cited high terms against the passage: “. to you, immortal Leibniz, I set up an eternal partiality and injustice memorial in my heart! Without your help I would have of the Academy; and been lost for ever. I never met you in the flesh, yet your their chief had well imperishable writings . have guided me to the firm nigh proceeded to path of the true philosophy, to the knowledge of myself launch the thunder of and of my origin. They have engraved upon my soul the The Granger Collection a philosophical anathe- sacred truths on which my felicity is founded. .. .” G.W. Leibniz ma against it. I do not Mendelssohn thought that the French and the English now recollect to whom we are indebted for the care of suffered from their aversion to Leibniz. He criticized the averting this disaster.” French for being “too fickle to read through a systematic With this travesty established, Maupertuis felt treatise with due effort.” In reviewing Burke’s work on emboldened to hijack Leibniz’s development of the least the sublime and the beautiful, he notes: “It would be action principle, and to trivialize it as an extension of desirable that the English study our philosophy as pro- Occam’s razor. His 1750 work, Cosmologie, promoted a foundly as we consult their observations . .. the French conception of physical action that minimized scalar val- philosophize with wit, the English with sentiment, and ues—the equivalent of “God, the Lazy Creator, as the the Germans alone are sufficiently sober to philosophize Chief Cost Accountant.” It took another two years, for with the intellect.” the scientific community to accept this ugly butchery of Mendelssohn’s assessment of his world’s culture, was the Academy.2 that it was suffering from a retreat from the more power- Mendelssohn and Lessing publicly intervened into the ful “analysis situs” method of Leibniz.