Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

CHAPTER 13 Toward a New Concept of Truth

through the 1760s, it is the Ethics that seems to determine Lessing ’s reception of Spinoza. On the one hand, its innovative ontological framework draws the attention of Mendelssohn and Lessing; on the other hand, its theory of the affects, along with Mendelssohn’s version of it, comes to play a crucial role in the redeWnition of the stage and of dramatic theory. Spinoza’s other key work, the Theological-Political Treatise, comes to take center stage in Lessing’s thought only in the context of his renewed interest in theology and the philosophy of religion and history. At the same time that Mendelssohn intensiWed his preoccupation with the central issues of Spinoza’s Treatise in the work that would lead up to his Jerusalem, the trajectory taken by Lessing’s studies of the 1770s follows the path staked out by the complex of concerns the Treatise raises. The critical agenda of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise can be found in the activity and ensuing debates set off by Lessing’s publication of selected sections from the “fragmentist” Hermann Samuel Reimarus ’s Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes and its discussion of theological, philosophical, and religious issues.1 Lessing , who creatively used his recently assumed position as chief librarian of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel, claimed to have “found” Reimarus’s papers among the treasures of the library, treasures that he hurried to bring to the attention of the public along with his commentaries, his 196 c h a p t e r 1 3
toward a new concept of truth “counter-observations.” The way in which Reimarus’s work poses the problem of interpreting history, justice, revelation, secrecy, and the role of political institutions shares its critical angle with Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise, philosophically the most consistent and compelling theoretical groundwork for the critical study of the Bible and the sociopolitical study of religion of the time. In Lessing, the speciWcs and, more crucially, the overall method of theorizing theological-political issues all take their cue from Spinoza, for Spinoza’s reformulation of the theological-political nexus provides a platform allowing Lessing to present the intricacies of current theological debates in a new and theoretically productive light. In a way, the development of Lessing’s writing in the 1770s, leading up to Ernst and Falk, Nathan the Wise, and the Education of the Human Race, can be described as the unfolding and productive reception of Spinoza that carries out the consequences of the argument presented in the TheologicalPolitical Treatise. In this last phase, Lessing reaches a stage of critical reXection that produces a theoretical framework clarifying what he had practiced all along in his publicistic, dramaturgic, poetic, and philological career, making it apparent that his diverse literary, scholarly, and polemical projects together form a comprehensive attempt to achieve a critical understanding of praxis, an understanding that leads to a profound reconceptualization of history, tradition, reason, and religion. Lessing’s uncompromising search for the nature of truth, his enduring concern for the public and the practice of free and transparent dialogue, and his radical rethinking of the question of history and tradition thus emerge as elements of the single concern around which his thought revolves: his attempt to realize the full potential of the radical and hidden core of the nexus of the theological and the political. The virulence of the question of what constitutes history, tradition, truth, and the public that runs through Lessing’s work suggests less the turbulence of a restless, ever-struggling mind, as is often claimed, than an unXagging commitment to look critically at the factors that constitute culture in its constantly shifting shapes. At the heart of Lessing’s concerns stands the question of the nature and status of truth. Although it was already a crucial, focal theme in Lessing’s Wrst writings, the notion of truth and the question of the conditions for its constitution reaches a new stage in his late thought. In his analysis of the elements that deWne history, tradition, culture, and the public, Lessing breaks new ground for a critical and challenging Toward a New Concept of Truth 197 reexamination of the philosophical underpinnings of the constitutive elements of the idea of truth. He bases his approach on the recognition that truth consists in a speciWc effect of certain constellations rather than in an ensemble of Wxed contents. The traditional concept of...