Projects of Enlightenment: The Work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Cultural, Intercultural, and Transcultural Perspectives by Steven D. Martinson (review)

The study, consisting of new material as well as reworked and expanded versions of previously published articles, is Martinson’s contribution to the large-scale overviews of Lessing’s life and work published in the last few years. Martinson emphasizes a strong historicization of Lessing’s work within the particular cultural circumstances of eighteenth-century Europe. Instead of looking for unity or larger connections in Lessing’s œuvre, the book focuses on “the inconsistencies, contradictions, and occasional sloppy scholarship that characterize his writings” (11). Martinson links Lessing’s mode of participation in public debate to his lifelong fascination with gambling, where the goal is not a final win, but the creation of “new directions (strategies) of inquiry” by “taking risks” (219), often resulting in a playful and constantly self-questioning argumentative style. Martinson sees this strategic pragmatism as the most efficient way for an eighteenth-century writer to achieve not only theoretical advances in art and philosophy, but also practical consequences in the lives and habits of his readers, or “the actualization of enlightened values in the present” (219). In his interpretation, then, Lessing’s famous statement in the Duplik about the search for truth is indicative not only of the writer’s final years but forms a core of flexibility necessary for all his interventions into an emerging and ongoing project of creating, sustaining, and reflecting on an enlightened public engagement with art, philosophy, and religion.

The book is divided into three parts corresponding to the subtitle’s cultural, intercultural, and transcultural perspectives. Part I, “Historical-Cultural Dynamics of Lessing’s Life and Works,” is by far the longest. It is a more or less chronological investigation of Lessing’s life stations and his major and minor works within the context of eighteenth-century German states. Part II, “Intercultural Encounters. Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Melchior Goeze, and German Scholarship around 1900,” revisits Lessing’s contributions to the debate regarding the status of Jews in German states, the polemics surrounding Christian religion, and the connection between Lessing and reform projects around 1900. Part III, “Transcultural Affinities. The European Enlightenment, World Citizenry, and Lessing’s Reception Today,” looks at various central figures of the European Enlightenment (Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Ferguson) to trace commonalities between Lessing’s projects of enlightenment and the situation in other European intellectual centers, with an emphasis on the role of the search for—rather than the possession of—truth in the various thinkers’ works.

The book opens up new perspectives on the strategic employment of arguments, counter-arguments, and omissions that characterizes Lessing’s works. Martinson emphasizes the preliminary nature of his texts and the fluidity of the social, philosophical, cultural, political, and economic developments of his time, to which Lessing contributed a great deal. One of the strong parts of the study is its repeated call for an investigation of Lessing within the many different cultures of eighteenth-century European and German-speaking lands. Martinson rightly points out that one should never forget just how fragmented “Germany” was at the time, and how important it was for a writer who attempted to establish his own reading public to navigate the many cultural, intercultural, and transcultural moments entailed in trying to expand an enlightened perspective on the world. In Part I, for example, Martinson reminds us of an important but often marginalized aspect of Lessing’s concept of Mitleid, namely, the necessity of such an idea and practice of compassion to “bridge gaps [ . . . ] between individuals both within and beyond their specific cultural environments” (105), i.e., he emphasizes the important social function of pity within the larger project of expanding and enlightening the public beyond the cultural confines of their cities and states. In Part II, Martinson’s analysis of “silence” in Lessing’s work deserves special mention as a reminder to pay close attention to the ways in which Lessing organizes...