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Home , Averroes, Immanuel Kant

CHAPTER THREE

CHALLENGE OF THE IDEALIST IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT: IN THE OF

Reason Addressing Religion’s Perennial Questions

Signs of subversion of the Enlightenment as established by Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff, and of the idealist revolu- tion that took place in the German Enlightenment, were already in formation when Mendelssohn wrote his two last philosophical works, and Morning Lessons. The last was written as an impassioned response to the philosophical and personal attack of the religious Romantics Friedrich Jacobi and Georg Hamann against the rational- ists of the Enlightenment in general, and against Lessing and Men- delssohn in particular.1 Jacobi and Hamann presented Mendelssohn and Lessing as secret disciples of Spinoza, digging secretly under the foundations of Judaism and together. Before he was free to respond to these arguments, there appeared Kant’s revolutionary philosophical work of Pure , that ousted the Leibnitz-Wolff philosophy from the German academy and would eventually enthrone in its place the idealist philosophy—established by him and by his principal disciples and critics: Fichte, Maimon, Hegel, and Schelling. Jacobi and Hamann argued that every rationalistic philosophy, as such, is anti-religious in its , and that it is completely absurd to speak of and reason as of two sides of the same coin. Thus, they rejected out of hand Mendelssohn’s doctrine of tolerance and subverted his life’s hope—to combine Judaism with the Enlightenment and to integrate it into the fabric of modern humanist without surrendering its .

1 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelsohn, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); , “Golgatha und Scheblimini. Von einem Prediker in der Wüste”, (Gütersloh: Brock- haus Verlag, 1999). 118 chapter three

Kant had been among the many responders to Jerusalem; he related to Mendelssohn with admiration which followed from the latter’s essential identification with the Enlightenment and with . But Kant regarded as strange and self-contradictory Mendelssohn’s to combine emancipation with preserving the religious-halakhic Jewish identity. In Kant’s major philosophical work, he undermined the epistemological foundations of all his predecessors, including Leib- nitz, thus in effect pulling the philosophical rug out from under Men- delssohn’s project.2 As we said, in Morning Lessons Mendelssohn defended himself, Less- ing, and to a certain extent also Spinoza from the charge of secret heresy, and sought to demonstrate that Spinoza’s was only a philosophical error committed in all innocence by a man whose exalted ethical conduct was worth the testimony of a hundred wit- nesses to the purity of his faith. Thus, Mendelssohn sought to reassert his fundamental premise, that religion and reason complement each other, and that Judaism is in every respect a purely rational religion. However, Mendelssohn did not attempt to respond to Kant’s critical challenge. He acknowledged that he had not the strength to come up with new arguments to grapple with the idealist revolution. Thus, he cleared the stage and left it for those who would come after him. In any case, from that point on, every new philosophical attempt to reconstruct the enlightened Jewish stance of Mendelssohn—a combi- nation of faith and reason, together with defense of Judaism’s unique- ness through its integration in the enlightened state and humanistic culture—had to contend on the basis of the idealistic foundation that Kant and his disciples laid. Just as the philosophy of and Aris- totle (and their Arab followers , , and others) was absorbed into medieval Jewish , and just as the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff was absorbed as the foundational layer of Mendelssohn’s Jewish religious philosophy, so the of Kant and his two greatest disciple-critics, Hegel and Schelling, was absorbed as the foundational layer of the Jewish religious philosophy

2 In his , Kant refuted all proofs for , immortality of the , and of the as hubristic pretensions of reason exceeding its proper boundaries (though he later went on to reaffirm them as postulates of in Critique of Practical Reason).