Volume 5, Tome I: Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions - Philosophy

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754668183
• eBook ISBN: 9781351874571
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome I is dedicated to the philosophers of the early modern period and the Enlightenment who played a role in shaping Kierkegaard's intellectual development. He was widely read in German and French philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making reference to the leading rationalist philosophers Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in his journals and published works. Further, connections have also been pointed out between his thought and the writings of the French thinkers Montaigne, Pascal and Rousseau, who share with Kierkegaard a form of philosophy that is more interested in life and existence than purely conceptual analysis. Through the works of the authors explored here Kierkegaard became acquainted with some of the major philosophical discussions of the modern era such as the beginning of philosophy, the role of doubt, the status of autonomy in ethics and religion, human freedom, the problem of the theodicy found in thinkers such as Bayle and Leibniz, and the problem of the relation of philosophy to religion as it appears in the German writers Jacobi and Lessing.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:
Appropriating the Testimony of a Theological Naturalist

Curtis L. Thompson

Søren Kierkegaard recognized in the writings of the early modern critic, playwright, and littérateur Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) a kindred spirit with whom he could profitably form an alliance. On the surface it appears an unlikely partnership, with Kierkegaard defending religious faith in all its paradoxical irrationality and Lessing instigating the German Enlightenment with its advocacy of reason as the true basis of authority. Closer scrutiny, though, doing justice to the complex interaction of faith and reason in Kierkegaard, uncovers his appreciation of Lessing’s independent thinking, valuing of subjectivity, self-awareness in the modes of communication, acknowledgment of reason’s limits, and avowal of the unending quest for truth. Such an investigation also exposes the complexity of Lessing who—behind the veil of ambiguity created by prudent care not to parade his heterodox philosophical, religious, and theological viewpoints—is finally endorsing a theological naturalism that affirms the divine while insisting that all things must be understood within the confines of a natural account. The purpose of this essay is to tell the story of the unholy alliance Kierkegaard made with Lessing. It will unfold by first giving a synopsis of Lessing’s life and work, then treating Lessing as a source for Kierkegaard’s writings, and finally offering an interpretation of the relationship between these two fascinating intellectuals separated by a century in time but united in outlook on issues of existential import.

I. Lessing's Life and Work

Lessing was born on January 22, 1729 in the quiet country town of Kamenz, located 30 miles north-east of Dresden between the Elbe and Oder rivers in the Oberlausitz region of Saxony, Germany.¹ His father was Johann Gottfried Lessing (1693– 1770)² and his mother was Justine Salome Lessing (1703–77).³ He was raised in an environment dominated by the strict lutheran piety and orthodoxy of his father. Educated in the classics in the Latin grammar school at Kamenz, Lessing then at the age of twelve, after passing a rigorous examination in Greek, mathematics, and the Lutheran Catechism, was given a free place—as the result of the scholarship his father obtained for him through the Elector of Saxony—at St. Afra, Meissen, one of three “Princes’ Schools” of Saxony, an elite boarding school. After five years of education at this fine school, Gotthold had been immersed in classical learning that was a gift of the Lutheran ethos of which it was a constitutive part. He would later criticize Lutheran Christianity with a passion, but he would always be unable to deny its inherent value and goodness.

That same year Lessing matriculated as a student of Theology at the University of Leipzig. In this thriving cosmopolitian setting Gotthold sensed the possibilities open to him, and his independent spirit found its expression. He soon lost interest in theological lectures and was most intrigued by those of Johann Friedrich Christ (1700–56) in philology, Johann August Ernesti (1707–81) in biblical studies, and Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800) in mathematics, science, and the philosophy of leibniz.⁴ The University of Leipzig also housed the most powerful literary movement of the day, led by Professor Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66).⁵ Lessing was in no sense interested in Gottsched, though he did become friends with the shy and awkward but talented C.F. Weisse (1726–1804) who was also interested in the theater and eventually became a dramatist; together, night after night, the two of them enjoyed the living action on the Leipzig stage, gaining free admission into the theater of Caroline Neuber and her acting company by translating French plays for her. At this time Lessing also became friends with Christlob Mylius (1722–54), the gifted, worldly, free-thinking renegade from Kamenz, seven years his senior, who enticed him even further away from books and into the world of sociality.⁶ In January, 1748, Frau Neuber’s company performed lessing’s The Young Scholar, a comedy—ridiculing pedantry and his own tendencies in that direction—that he had sketched out during his Meissen days and now reworked in Leipzig. Lessing soon abandoned his career in theology for one in medicine.

A degree in medicine eventually did come, but not without much meandering. in Berlin, Lessing worked as a journalist and critic, wrote miscellaneous poems, and met Voltaire (1694–1778) and translated his Shorter Historical Writings into German. The Magister Artium degree was earned from the University of Wittenberg in April 1752, on the basis of coursework completed and Lessing’s translation of a pioneering sixteenth-century work showing the connection between psychology and physiology by Juan Huarte (1530–92), the Spanish physician and psychologist. The year at Wittenberg leading up to earning the Master of the liberal arts degree allowed him time for leisurely study and productivity and for finding his personal style as a writer by which he could express himself with efficacy of form and independence of thought. In the fall of 1752, he returned to Berlin where he worked again as a journalist, became friends with Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), and published his comedy, The Jews, which treated anti-Semitism and racial prejudice in advocating for Jewish rights. “In several of his early years he wrote as many as one hundred twenty book reviews,” crafting an approach and method that made him “the most literary author imaginable” and committed to “the exegesis and discussion of texts as the royal road to all knowledge.”⁷ His writing style attempted to engage the reader in a dialogue and was Socratically sensitive to the reality that truth needs to be appropriated by the subjective thinker.

Over the next many years—from 1755 to 1770—the meandering would continue, with time spent in Leipzig (three years), Berlin (two), Breslau (five), Berlin (two), Hamburg (two), and then the extended visit to Italy. During this protracted period Lessing published a number of works.⁸ In 1770 Lessing took the position of librarian at the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, and it was there that he would spend his years until his death in 1781. There he would marry Eva König, the widow of a Hamburg merchant and a lively, vivacious, cultured spirit with whom he had become intimate friends years earlier. Financial reasons delayed their marriage, but it finally occurred in 1776. Sadly, after a single year of wedded bliss, Eva gave birth to an apparently healthy boy who inexplicably died twenty-four hours later on Christmas Day, and about two weeks later, because of complications related to giving birth, she also died. Gotthold would live another three years, but for each of those days he carried deep within the pain of the tragic loss of Eva.

In 1772 Lessing published the tragedy Emilia Galotti.⁹ His Wolfenbüttel years, however, are generally remembered for Lessing’s publishing of extracts of a long writing on natural religion by the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1704–68).¹⁰ Lessing had been a welcomed guest among the family of Reimarus, and he became acquainted with Reimarus’ daughter Elise (1735–1805),¹¹ and her brother, the distinguished physician Johann Albrecht Reimarus (1729–1814). For two decades Reimarus had been working on the manuscript Apology or Defense for Rational Worshippers of God, and he had carefully kept its existence a secret. His enduring desire was that the manuscript remain a secret and available only to friends until a more enlightened climate would allow for its public acceptance.¹²

In 1772 Lessing received permission to publish materials from the library without submitting them to the censor, and between 1774 and 1778 he published in the library’s journal seven fragments from the Reimarus manuscript, claiming that it was an anonymous work discovered in the library’s holdings.¹³ The most provocative fragments were on the “Impossibility of a Revelation Which All Men Can Believe on Rational Grounds,” “On the Resurrection Narratives,” and “On the Intentions of Jesus and His Disciples.”¹⁴ The deistic view expressed by Reimarus actually shares much with the view of the Lutheran orthodox theologians, in so far as both thought that the truth of Christianity depended upon the factual truthfulness of the biblical accounts. On this point, Lessing disagreed with both of them.

The publication of Fragments from an Unnamed Author halted when Lessing was informed by the Duke of Brunswick that no further fragments would be published and other publications hereon would be subject to the censor.¹⁵ Lessing’s reservations about some of the views expressed in the fragments were registered in editorial comments in the 1777 publication of five of the fragments.¹⁶ Despite these “counter-propositions” against the deceased deist, Lessing made it clear that he did agree with the unnamed author (Reimarus) that belief in the literal truth of the Bible is no longer tenable or needed: “In short, the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. Consequently, objections to the letter, and to the Bible, need not also be objections to the spirit and to religion.”^1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Pierre Bayle: Kierkegaard's Use of the Historical and Critical Dictionary
• Rene Descartes: Kierkegaard's Understanding of Doubt and Certainty
• David Hume: Kierkegaard and Hume on Reason, Faith, and the Ethics of Philosophy
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Two Theories of the Leap
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Traces of Kierkegaard's Reading of the Theodicy
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Appropriating the Testimony of a Theological Naturalist
• Michel de Montaigne: The Vulnerability of Sources in Estimating Kierkegaard's Study of Essais
• Blaise Pascal: Kierkegaard and Pascal as Kindred Spirits in the Fight against Christendom
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Presence and Absence
• Baruch de Spinoza: Questioning Transcendence. Teleology, and Truth
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects