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Two: Jacobi and Mendelssohn: The Tragedy of a Messianic Friendship
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t w o Jacobi and Mendelssohn: The Tragedy of a Messianic Friendship Vielleicht erleben wir es noch, daß über den Leichnam des Spinoza sich ein Streit erhebt, wie jener über den Leichnam Moses zwischen dem Erzengel und Satanas. (Perhaps we shall live to witness a battle over the corpse of Spinoza like that former one between the Archangel and Satan over the corpse of Moses.) Letter of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Moses Mendelssohn, April 26, 1785 Tragödie des Juden bis heute: Mendelssohn und Lessing . . . Die Freundschaft von Mendelssohn und Lessing war zu messianisch. (The tragedy of the Jew until today: Mendelssohn and Lessing . . . The friendship of Mendelssohn and Lessing was too messianic.) f r a n z r o s e n z w e i g , ‘‘Lessings Nathan’’1 Introduction: Background to the Spinoza Quarrel For nearly two years, from November, 1783 until October, 1785, Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi engaged in an exchange of letters that proved to be of overwhelming significance for the future of philosophy . Jacobi published the narrative of this epistolary philosophical quarrel, with full texts of his own letters and excerpts or summaries of Mendelssohn ’s, in a work entitled Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn).2 Jacobi’s central claim in his Spinoza-Letters was that Germany ’s most famous spokesperson for the Enlightenment vision of a religiously tolerant society, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, was a ‘‘decided Spinozist.’’ In his first letter to Mendelssohn (of November, 1783), Jacobi reported the details of conversations about Spinoza that he had had with Lessing in the summer of 1780, six months before Lessing’s death on February 15, 1781.3 79 80 Jacobi and Mendelssohn In those conversations, according to Jacobi, Lessing revealed himself to be a believer in the hen kai pan, the ‘‘One and All,’’ which he identified with the infinite, all-encompassing God of Spinoza, a God indistinguishable from the infinitude of Nature itself. The ‘‘One and All’’ has neither temporal beginning nor end, and no greater importance attaches to any single point or possibility within it than to any other. All things are equal insofar as they are the finite and evanescent manifestations of the one divine substance that underlies them all. The ‘‘One and All’’ does not give pride of place to human beings, with their hopes and aspirations; seen from the perspective of the unchanging reality of God, there is no freedom of the will and no capacity to alter the inexorable and infinitely extended chain of causes and effects in which the human subject is enmeshed. Nature is merely the endless shadow-play of coming to be and passing away, lacking design or moral purpose. George di Giovanni nicely summarizes the argument that Jacobi claimed to have had with Lessing:4 If one is to believe Jacobi’s report of his 1779 conversation with Lessing,5 the point he had been arguing with him was that the philosophers, driven by their enthusiasm for explanation, are given to mistaking conditions of explanation for conditions of existence, and hence to assuming that reality conforms to the abstractions that philosophers have created. Since such abstractions leave behind the individuality of actual human beings, and since, however, it is only as individuals that these beings can be the subjects of action, it follows that the philosophers ’ view of reality does not allow for genuine action. As Jacobi famously put it, in a world such as the philosophers conceive it, one should not say that Raphael painted the School of Athens, but rather that an anonymous efficacy has made its way across the world and had resulted in something that we call the School of Athens and associate with the name of Raphael. That, according to Jacobi, was the ultimate implication of the Spinozist formula of the hen kai pan (‘‘one and all’’). (di Giovanni 2005: 13) Jacobi’s target is the idea that for every existing thing, there must be an explanation for why it is the thing it is, i.e. why it exists with exactly the set of properties it has and why all other possible sets of properties were not actualized. Confusing conditions of explanation with conditions of existence ,6 philosophers then seek for a single cause of each thing’s existence. Since each source calls in turn for explanation, philosophers look for...