(Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich). Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [“Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn.”]

(MENDELSSOHN, MOSES)

Gottl. Löwe

Breslau

1785

FIRST EDITION. German text

Hermann M.Z.Meyer, Moses Mendelssohn: Bibliographie (1965), 333 (p.60)

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) turned from an early admirer of German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1796) into a bitter adversary. The most basic touchstone of their debate was that Mendelssohn, a spokesman for the Enlightenment, firmly believed that Reason provides the key to human morality, while Jacobi in an attempt to dethrone Reason, called into question its ability to provide ultimate answers, and argued on behalf of pure feeling. When Jacobi claimed that Mendelssohn's colleague Gottthold Lessing (1729-1781) confided to him (Jacobi) in his final days that he was a Spinozist, which is to say a pantheist, Mendelssohn took this as a pesonal attack. The present volume contains Jacobi's correspondence with Mendelssohn on this matter. This first edition contains insults by Mendelssohn suppressed in the second edition of 1789. "The contest between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, known as the Pantheismus-streit [Pantheism dispute], proved to be anything but a display of knightly chivalry." See A. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (1973), p.638.