Lessing and the Enlightenment , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Henry E. Allison

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

154 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Although only one aspect of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's diverse oeuvre, his religious thought had a significant influence on thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and present-day liberal Protestant theologians. His thought is particularly difficult to assess, however, because it is found largely in a series of essays, reviews, critical studies, polemical writings, and commentary on theological texts. Beyond these, his correspondence, and a few fragmentary essays unpublished during his lifetime, we have his famous drama of religious toleration, Nathan the Wise, and his philosophical-historical sketch, The Education of the Human Race. In these scattered texts, Lessing challenged the full range of theological views in the Enlightenment, from Protestant orthodoxy, with its belief in Biblical inerrancy, to a radical naturalism, which rejected both the concept of a divine revelation and the historically based claims of Christianity to be one, as well as virtually everything in between. Since he refused to identify himself with any of these parties, Lessing was an enigmatic figure, and a central question from his time to today is where he stood on the issue of the truth of the Christian religion. Now back in print, and with the addition of two supplementary essays, Henry E. Allison's book argues that, despite appearances, Lessing was not merely an eclectic thinker or intellectual provocateur, but a serious philosopher of religion, who combined a basically Spinozistic conception of God with a sophisticated pluralistic conception of religious truth inspired by Leibniz.
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition

1. The Historical Background
I. English Rational Theology and Deism
II. Pierre Bayle and the Enlightenment
III. Leibniz and the German Aufklärung

2. Lessing's Philosophical and Theological Development
I. The First Period—1748–55
II. The Second Period—1755–60
III. The Breslau Years—1760–65

3. Lessing versus the Theologians
I. Lessing versus Neology
II. Lessing and Reimarus
III. Reactions to the Fragments
IV. Goeze's Attack
V. Lessing's Counterattack

4. Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and Its Leibnizian Roots
I. The Problem
II. The Solution
III. The Exemplification

Conclusion
Appendix A. Lessing's Conception of Revelation as Education
Appendix B. Lessing's Spinozistic Exercises
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Lycée

Philosophie

History of philosophy

Philosophy

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	29 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438468044
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

LESSING AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
LESSING
AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought
Henry E. Allison
Cover adapted from Anton Graff, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , painting, 1771
First edition: University of Michigan Press, 1966
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Book design, Aimee Harrison
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Kate Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Allison, Henry E., author.
Title: Lessing and the Enlightenment : his philosophy of religion and its relation to eighteenth-century thought / Henry E. Allison.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007757 (print) | LCCN 2017050484 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438468044 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438468037 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438468020 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1729-1781—Religion. | Intellectual life—History—18th century. | Enlightenment.
Classification: LCC PT2418.R4 (ebook) | LCC PT2418.R4 A7 2018 (print) | DDC 832/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007757
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of my Mother
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Chapter 1. The Historical Background
I. English Rational Theology and Deism
II. Pierre Bayle and the Enlightenment
III. Leibniz and the German Aufklärung
Chapter 2. Lessing’s Philosophical and Theological Development
I. The First Period—1748–55
II. The Second Period—1755–60
III. The Breslau Years—1760–65
Chapter 3. Lessing versus the Theologians
I. Lessing versus Neology
II. Lessing and Reimarus
III. Reactions to the Fragments
IV. Goeze’s Attack
V. Lessing’s Counterattack
Chapter 4. Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and Its Leibnizian Roots
I. The Problem
II. The Solution
III. The Exemplification
Conclusion
Appendix A. Lessing’s Conception of Revelation as Education
Appendix B. Lessing’s Spinozistic Exercises
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface to the Second Edition
I am grateful to State University of New York Press for its willingness to publish a second edition of this work, which was based on my doctoral dissertation at the New School for Social Research under Professor Aron Gurwitsch in 1964, and to the University of Michigan Press, publisher of the first edition in 1966, for granting me the right to publish a second edition. In the preface to the original edition I noted that, despite an extensive German literature on the topic, it was the first full-length study of Lessing’s philosophy of religion in the English language. Today, some fifty years later, this can no longer be said, since Leonard P. Wessell’s G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation, A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment (The Hague and Paris: Mouton) was published in 1977 and Gordon E. Michalson Jr.’s Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch”: A Study of Theology and History (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press) in 1985. Moreover, both works, albeit in quite different ways, make important contributions to the understanding of Lessing’s philosophy of religion, though not, I think, in ways that render my work obsolete. The contribution of the former is mainly at the “meta-level.” It consists in a comprehensive overview of the extensive German literature on the topic, in which Wessell distinguishes and critically evaluates the various hermeneutical strategies at work, and underscores both the difficulty of distinguishing between the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of Lessing’s often seemingly paradoxical and contradictory claims and the unavoidability of attempting to do so. By contrast, Michalson’s monograph is more limited in scope; as the title indicates, it focuses on the problem of basing faith on historical fact. As such, it is forward looking, being primarily concerned with Lessing’s influence on the subsequent treatment of this issue by Kierkegaard and twentieth-century Protestant theology. Although, as I noted in the preface to the first edition, my interest in Lessing was initially occasioned by my reading of Kierkegaard, the central focus of the book is on Lessing’s polemical relation to the various strands of Enlightenment thought, though it does not totally ignore the question of the relevance of his views for later thought.
I would be amiss, however, if I did not at least call attention to an important French study of Lessing’s religious thought, which I did not mention in the first edition, even though it anteceded by two years the appearance of my work, namely, Georges Pons’s Gotthold Ephraïm Lessing et le Christianisme (Paris: Didier, 1964). On the one hand, this magisterial work provides an exhaustively documented account of Lessing’s relation to Christianity at various stages in his life, while, on the other, it rejects any “synthetic” attempt, which presumably would include my own, to attribute something like a systematic position to Lessing vis-à-vis Christianity. My explanation for the failure to mention this work in the original publication of my own is simply that I was then unaware of its existence, which I believe is easily understandable in view of the short time span between their appearances and the predigital era in which they were composed. Moreover, to deal with it adequately in a new edition would require substantial revisions, and while this might arguably have led to a better, certainly a lengthier and more comprehensive work, I have decided to reissue this work in its original form because I believe that core elements of my account of Lessing’s complex views and their Leibnizian and Spinozistic roots still stand.
Nevertheless, the work as a whole is not unchanged, since I have added as appendices two subsequently written essays that expand upon discussions contained in the body of the work: “Lessing’s Conception of Revelation as Education,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture , vol. 4, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 183–93, and “Lessing’s Spinozistic Exercises,” in Lessing Yearbook Supplement: Humanität und Dialog (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 223–33. The first of these deals with Lessing’s most important and widely interpreted religious-philosophical text in which the metaphor of revelation as divine education is used to assign to Christianity a historically conditioned place in the development of what might be termed the religious consciousness of the human race. It goes beyond the account of the text contained in the book through its increased focus on the question of the relation between its philosophical content and the literary form that Lessing imposes upon it. The second addresses the issue of Lessing’s Spinozism through a consideration of two fragments, “Durch Spinoza ist Leibniz nur auf die Spur der voherbestimmten Harmonie gekommen” (Through Spinoza Leibniz only Came upon the Track of the Preestablished Harmony) and “Über die Wirklichkeit der Dinge ausser Gott” (On the Reality of Things outside God) in which he expressed some dissatisfaction with his friend and then collaborator Mendelssohn’s views concerning the relation between these thinkers. These texts are of interest because they illustrate Lessing’s firm grasp of the metaphysical issues at stake and the subtlety with which he demonstrates to Mendelssohn his preference for Spinoza’s monism.
Preface to the First Edition
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was one of the seminal minds of the eighteenth century. In addition to being an important innovator in drama, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory, he was one of the most significant religious thinkers of his time. This has long been recognized by German scholars, who have devoted scores of volumes to an analysis of his religious philosophy, but as is unfortunately so often the case, he has been almost completely ignored by the English-speaking world. This work is, as far as I know, the first full-length study of Lessing’s philosophy of religion in the English language, and it is my fervent hope that it will help, in some small way, to stimulate interest in a figure whose conceptions of religious truth and the relation between religion and history underlie much of contemporary theological discussion.
My interest in Lessing was first aroused by the study of Kierkegaard, who, despite a vastly different temperament and view of the religious life, readily acknowledged the significance of his German predecessor. It was, Kierkegaard tells us, Lessing who first suggested to him the concept of the leap and the famous formula “truth is subjectivity,” and it was als