Abstract
The Spinozism controversy remains one of the formative disputes of late modernity. It has decisively shaped both the development of post-Kantian philosophy in general and the development of Jewish philosophy in particular. Yet Mendelssohn and Jacobi, its principal protagonists, talk almost entirely past one another.
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Notes
- 1.
I hope in the future also to explore in this light Kant’s contribution to the Spinozism controversy, along with the account of sensus communis developed in his Critique of the Power of Judgement.
- 2.
Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 99.
- 3.
See Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 113–18 on Mendelssohn; 143–46, 162–66 on Jacobi. The case for Jacobi’s dependence on Reid was first made by Günther Baum, Vernunft und Erkenntnis: Die Philosophie F. H. Jacobis (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969).
- 4.
Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, in Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 3.2 (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Fromman-Holzboog, 1974), 5. Hereafter cited as JubA and volume number, followed by a colon and page number.
- 5.
See Kuehn, 103, citing Mendelssohn, Neuerschlossene Briefe Moses Mendelssohns an Friedrich Nicolai (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1973), 32.
- 6.
Mendelssohn, JubA 3.1:305. On the importance of Reid’s rejection of the view, held by both Berkeley and Hume, that our ideas of body are ideas of sensation and not of reflection, see Keith DeRose, “Reid’s Anti-Sensationalism and his Realism,” Philosophical Review, 98:3 (July 1989), 313–48.
- 7.
Mendelssohn to Winkopp, March 24, 1780, JubA 12.2:184–85.
- 8.
“Die Bildsäule,” JubA 6.1:67–87, esp. 84.
- 9.
JubA 2:325.
- 10.
Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense, 116n42.
- 11.
Thomas Reid, Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1785), 6, ii, 433.
- 12.
“Verwandtschaft des Schönen und Guten,” JubA 2:179–85. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 659–60.
- 13.
René Descartes, Oeuvres (Paris: J. Vrin, 1908–1957), 6:1–2.
- 14.
Descartes, Oeuvres, 7:32.
- 15.
However, it is not at all clear to me that Descartes would identify bon sens with sensus communis that is common in sense (A2). I suspect that, by bon sens or reason in a philosophical as opposed to common usage, Descartes means the power of judging in accordance with clearly and distinctly perceived ideas. In principle, every human being has this power, but only a few overcome the dependence on authority and on the senses that is natural to humans during their immaturity.
- 16.
Mendelssohn accepts that there are some non-representational Darstellungen, but he sees this as an adjustment, not as an abandonment, of representationalism. See JubA 1:337.
- 17.
JubA 2:290.
- 18.
Note that Mendelssohn, following a Leibnitzian tradition, would have been deeply sympathetic to Frege’s project of developing a Begriffschrift or perspicuous notation for inference. The passage cited from the prize essay is perhaps on Kant’s mind when, in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Bvii, he writes that the need to constantly return to the beginning is a sign that a discipline is not yet a science. For discussion of Mendelssohn’s prize essay as the exemplary presentation of rationalism to which Kant’s critical philosophy is responding, see Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–59.
- 19.
JubA 2:294.
- 20.
JubA 2:294.
- 21.
JubA 2:325.
- 22.
JubA 2:325.
- 23.
JubA 3.2:197.
- 24.
See Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense, 144, on Jacobi’s explicit but retrospective acknowledgment of Reid, and 163n66, on the deletion of Reid’s name from published versions of Hamann’s letters to Jacobi. Jacobi’s main, public acknowledgment of Reid’s significance occurs in the novel Woldemar. See Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig, 1812–1825), 2:170.
- 25.
Jacobi, Werke, 1:125–39.
- 26.
Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau, 1785), 162–63; trans. George di Giovanni in Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 230–31 (henceforth MPW).
- 27.
Among those who misread Jacobi in this way are Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1900–; Berlin/Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1968–), AA 8:143–44, against which Jacobi protested in correspondence, and, more recently, Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 83, who speaks of Jacobi’s “irrational faith.”
- 28.
Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder: Idealismus und Realismus. (Breslau, 1787), 64; MPW, 277.
- 29.
Jacobi, David Hume, 179; MPW, 320.
- 30.
Jacobi, David Hume, v; MPW, 256.
- 31.
Jacobi, Werke 2:9; MPW, 540.
- 32.
Jacobi, Werke, 2:59; MPW, 563.
- 33.
Jacobi, David Hume, 34–35; MPW, 268–69.
- 34.
Jacobi, Werke, 2:37; MPW, 553.
- 35.
See Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihlism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); “Ancient Skepticism, Modern Nihilism, and Naturalism in Hegel’s Early Jena Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and the Nineteenth Century, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- 36.
Jacobi, Werke, 2:11; MPW, 541. “Ever since Aristotle,” because Aristotle invented logic as the study of the form of reflection in abstraction from the matter of cognition. In an adjacent footnote, Jacobi approvingly cites J. F. Fries, Hegel’s nemesis, with whom he has formed an alliance. See Franks, “Serpentine Naturalism and Protean Nihilism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 253–56. Jacobi also follows Fries – as well as Reid on common sense – in maintaining that reason’s cognitions are judgements. “For we do commonly say also of the eye, the ear, the taste of the tongue, that they make judgements, indeed, that they discriminate, although we all know that the perceiving sense only reveals, whereas judgements belong to the reflective understanding.” See Jacobi, Werke, 2:109–10; MPW, 584.
- 37.
Jacobi, Werke, 2:39; MPW, 549n.
- 38.
Jacobi, Werke, 2:75; MPW, 568–69. Jacobi goes on to cite Plato, Republic, Book VII, 518c.
- 39.
I gratefully acknowledge Reinier Munk for organizing the conference at which an earlier version of this paper was given, and also for helpful conversation. Also helpful were conversations with Fred Beiser, Dan Dahlstrom, Gideon Freudenthal, Robert Gibbs, Willi Goetschel, Ursula Goldenbaum and Paul Guyer.
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Franks, P. (2011). Divided by Common Sense: Mendelssohn and Jacobi on Reason and Inferential Justification. In: Munk, R. (eds) Moses Mendelssohn's Metaphysics and Aesthetics. Studies in German Idealism, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2451-8_10
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