MENDELSSOHN (Moses).
An die Freunde Lessings. Ein Anhang zu Herrn Jacobi Briefwechsel uber die Lehre des Spinoza.
Mendelssohn's counter-attack against Jacobi in the 'Pantheism Controversy'
A key text in the so-called pantheism controversy (‘Pantheismusstreit’) that gripped German philosophy during the 1780s, being Mendelssohn’s counter-blast against Jacobi over the alleged Spinozism of Lessing.
‘After Lessing’s death, F. H. Jacobi contended that Lessing embraced Spinoza’s pantheism and thus exemplified the Enlightenment’s supposedly inevitable descent into irreligion. Following private correspondence with Jacobi on the issue … Mendelssohn attempted to set the record straight about Lessing’s Spinozism in Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes. Learning of Mendelssohn’s plans incensed Jacobi who expected to be consulted first and who accordingly responded by publishing, without Mendelssohn’s consent, their correspondence a month before the publication of Morgenstunden. Distressed on personal as well as intellectual levels by the controversy over his departed friend’s pantheism, Mendelssohn countered with a hastily composed piece, An die Freunde Lessing’s: Ein Anhang zu Herrn Jacobi’s Briefwechsel über die Lehre des Spinoza (1786). According to legend, so anxious was Mendelssohn to get the manuscript to the publisher that, forgetting his overcoat on a bitterly cold New Year’s eve, he delivered the manuscript on foot to the publisher. That night he came down with a cold from which he died four days later, prompting his friends to charge Jacobi with responsibility for Mendelssohn’s death’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Kant had a copy of this book in his personal library (Warda, Kants Bücher, X, 36).
