Maggs Bros.

The rare first edition of Jacobi’s unauthorised publication of his private correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn regarding the alleged Spinozism of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a key text in the so-called pantheism controversy (‘Pantheismusstreit’) that gripped German philosophy during the 1780s. The correct first issue, with the footnote to p. 11.

‘In 1780, Jacobi met Lessing in Wolfenbüttel. During their conversations Lessing supposedly confessed his Spinozism. When Lessing died in 1781, Mendelssohn began drafting a laudatory portrait of this great champion of the German Enlightenment. Jacobi felt obliged to inform Mendelssohn of Lessing’s true philosophical tendency, but Jacobi;s report shocked Mendelssohn: being a Spinozist entailed being an atheist and a subversive who disregarded all morality and religion. Mendelssohn engaged with Jacobi to assess Lessing’s Spinozism and, more importantly, Spinoza’s own teaching. This exchange between the two began in 1783 and eventually provided the basis of Jacobi’s 1785 famous volume Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn’. In addition to Mendelssohn’s response of 1786, to which Jacobi replied the same year, the extent and acrimony of the debate that Jacobi aroused led this work to be a milestone in the prehistory of Classical German Philosophy. Jacobi’s controversy with Mendelssohn led to an unearthing of the peculiar humanism and the distinct rationality that were part of the vision of the Enlightenment, to which Jacobi proposed a reasoned rejection, uncovering its Spinozian hidden soul. The so-called Spinozarenaissance that followed this public exchange between Jacobi and Mendelssohn made Spinoza’s Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata a touchstone for any philosophical system to come. At the same time, Spinoza’s renaissance fostered the so-called Spinoza controversy, or that of Pantheismusstreit, which ignited passionate disputes around the nature of freedom, the reality of final causes, and the actual existence of individual entities. For Jacobi, finding a route through Spinoza’s philosophy was the best opportunity to thoroughly discuss the essence of rationalism, which dismisses free human actions and puts in their place the pure atheistic fatalism that a coherent system of knowledge implies’ (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy).