The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn

Aesthetics, Religion & Morality in the Eighteenth Century

Leah Hochman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317669968
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn examines the idea of ugliness through four angles: philosophical aesthetics, early anthropology, physiognomy and portraiture in the eighteenth-century.

Highlighting a theory that describes the benefit of encountering ugly objects in art and nature, eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn recasts ugliness as a positive force for moral education and social progress. According to his theory, ugly objects cause us to think more and thus exercise—and expand—our mental abilities. Known as ugly himself, he was nevertheless portrayed in portraits and in physiognomy as an image of wisdom, gentility, and tolerance. That seeming contradiction—an ugly object (Mendelssohn) made beautiful—illustrates his theory's possibility: ugliness itself is a positive, even redeeming characteristic of great opportunity.

Presenting a novel approach to eighteenth century aesthetics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Philosophy and History.

1 Moral aesthetics

What is the Ugly?

That rocky cliff that juts high over the river rushing by is a terrifying sight. The dizzying heights, the swerving through the air, and the plunge that seems to threaten the curved area compel us more often to avert our confused gaze. Yet, after a brief recovery, we direct our eyes again to this dreadful object. The terrifying sight pleases. Whence this peculiar pleasure?¹

When the 26-year-old Mendelssohn turned his attention explicitly to aesthetics, he was already deeply immersed in the study of classical literature, metaphysics, British empiricism, French rationalism, and German perfectionism. Unhappy with Hume’s skepticism and Rousseau’s pessimistic view of human endeavor and deeply influenced by the work of Locke and Shaftesbury, Mendelssohn brought together different strands of Enlightenment thinking and utilized them to create an innovative aesthetic that supplemented and significantly advanced the thought of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten. As a voracious reader he was inordinately attuned to the variances of language, literature, and the arts; his engagement with the field of belle lettres was intense, energetic, and thorough. Working together with friends Lessing and Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) he co-edited the highly influential literary journal Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (1757–59) and its successor Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759–65) both of which afforded Mendelssohn the opportunity to review the vast output of Enlightenment thinking published across Europe and an outlet for his opinion on its content and quality. As Frederick Beiser writes in his study of the rise and success of the aesthetic in the German context before Kant,

In metaphysics Mendelssohn is on par with Wolff and Baumgarten; but he far surpasses them in aesthetic sensitivity. In aesthetic sensitivity he is the equal of Lessing and Winckelmann; but he far exceeds their powers as metaphysicians. In short, Mendelssohn’s combination of philosophical depth and aesthetic sensitivity was unique and peerless.²

Mendelssohn put this combination of talents and skill to use in crafting the theory of “mixed sentiments” in which he articulated the complicated and often contradictory range of human emotions – both pleasing and displeasing – provoked by natural phenomena and objects of art. He described the mixture of feelings that one feels when one encounters something beautiful but also disturbing in some way: seeing a character die on stage, for example, brings up several simultaneous emotions, one is sad at the death yet one feels admiration – or disdain – for the character if not also, separately, the actor. The conceptual flexibility required to maintain such a dissonance, Mendelssohn argued, leads to further cognitive improvement and refinement of intellectual acumen. The fact that objects are not always perfect in their most natural state does not preclude one’s enjoyment of them; such enjoyment is actually enhanced when imperfect or ugly objects are represented beautifully or when their significance brings to mind some meaning more than their mere appearance might suggest (a noble failure, for example, or the awe invoked by a natural disaster). In doing so, he proffers a theory that turns discord and disarray into a valuable commodity. This inclusion of ugliness and the unpleasant as potential sources of aesthetic pleasure and profit comes as early as the first of his aesthetic essays (1755) and remains a crucial part of his philosophy even as he developed it further in later essays and books. Among its other advantages, the theory of the mixed sentiment allowed him to craft a hermeneutic by which to integrate seemingly unwanted or disagreeable objects into a discourse that appeared to have little place for and less understanding of the worth (and potential value) of anything less than beautiful (understood, as he began writing on the topic, as a reflection or manifestation of perfection). In aesthetics, his discussions of the imperfect opened an avenue to initiate a conversation about the concept of the Sublime (different from both Beauty and Ugly) and gave him specific opportunity to reflect on the benefits of language and literature as particular exemplars of the most fruitful kind of aesthetic experience (and those most capable of expressing and generating the joining of two or more emotions simultaneously). Mendelssohn used the literary arts to demonstrate the best forms of aesthetic achievement. These three aspects of Mendelssohn’s philosophy – the inclusion of ugliness by way of the mixed sentiment, an emphasis on the literary arts, and the introduction of the Sublime – remained a part of Mendelssohn’s philosophical agenda throughout his life.

In his other work, these emphases bear fruit by becoming particularly important in his unique conception of Judaism as a literary, aesthetic-driven language divinely created and humanly enacted. Toward the end of his career, when the rationality of Judaism as a religion and the veracity of his fealty to it were publicly questioned and challenged, Mendelssohn relied on his aesthetics and on the mixed sentiment to demonstrate the authenticity of both. The benefits of the mixed sentiment as he described them in his aesthetic writings – intellectual improvement, societal harmony, heightened taste – find their climax in his description of Judaism as an ethical, moral, lively, highly energetic (that is, not concrete or unyielding) “script” that epitomizes rational philosophy at its best. Mendelssohn used the mixed sentiment to argue against the “ugliness” projected in the Enlightenment conception of Judaism – its rigidity, its maintenance of legalistic rituals, its irrationality – thereby justifying not only his continued adherence to Judaism but Judaism itself. The questions of social acceptability, religious legitimacy and moral authenticity that the aesthetic brings up are brought to bear – and answered – in Mendelssohn’s use of a theory of language and theory of religion made possible in his aesthetic theory. It is the context in and out of which he developed his ideas to which this study turns first.

The rise of the aesthetic

The modern study of beauty and ugliness, and their echoes morality and immorality, begins well before the benchmark 1750 publication of Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetika to which Mendelssohn’s earliest essays responded.³ In queries about the relationship between moral behavior and human knowledge (especially as accessed by sensory input) early modern British philosophers, working within the broad program begun by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) of reducing abstraction to its foundation in the senses, redefined the origin of both, and in doing so exerted an immense influence on the philosophical project of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As early as Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) defined morality as the result of the projection of private desires onto a common sphere of interest which generalized these desires as matters of the “good.” Although Hobbes’ assessment of human behavior as self-interested preservation (and the moral relativism it invoked) alternately fascinated and horrified those who came after him – Mendelssohn dedicated the first part of Jerusalem to proving him wrong – they still maintained a dialogue with his arguments and laid the groundwork for a moral philosophy that could accommodate a natural science founded on the senses (i.e., both sensory perception and sensations) and a more altruistic sense of the Good. Eventually, such studies branched out into a sustained study of the Good and its traditional associate, the Beautiful. As he writes in Leviathan,

The Latin tongue has two words whose significations approach to those of good and evil; but are not precisely the same; and those are pulchrum and turpe. Whereof the former signifies that, which by some apparent signs promiseth good; and the latter, that which promiseth evil. But in our tongue we have not so general names to express them by. But for pulchrum we say in some things, fair; in others, beautiful, or handsome, or gallant, or honourable, or comely, or amiable; and for turpe, foul, deformed, ugly, base, nauseous, and the like, as the subject shall require; all which words, in their proper places, signify nothing else but the mien, or countenance, that promiseth good and evil. So that of good there be three kinds; good in the promise, that is pulchrum; good in effect, as the end desired, which is called jucundum, delightful; and good as the means, which is called utile, profitable; and as many of evil: for evil in promise, is that they call turpe; evil in effect, and end, is molestum, unpleasant, troublesome; and evil in the means, inutile, unprofitable, hurtful.⁴

Evil, as the opposite of the Good was still conceived by the British school, remained largely a category into which criminal and unethical actions fell. When John Locke (1632–1704) took up the challenge of supplying a foundation for natural philosophy in an epistemology that ultimately derives the content of knowledge from sensory perception, he showed how different means of categorization, refinement, and organization operate; he influenced an entire ethical attitude that attributes moral value to ideas as “coeval with sensation.”⁵ The formation of ideas is tied to the biological development of the human being who eventually reflects on the ideas generated by sensation, which then become what Locke calls “ideas of reflection.”⁶ Moral values are generated by such ideas of reflection, which are, in turn, based on the content of the impressions they represent; in that content they find a correspondence in the signs (i.e., words) that represent them both in language and the commerce of everyday life. Mendelssohn picked up on Locke’s theory in his own interpretation of the chain of ideas as they develop from sensory input to complex association.

Locke’s student, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), who famously rejected his teacher’s empiricism, arguably played an even larger role than Locke, particularly in diffusing ideas relating to taste, sociability, and the role of art in Germany in general and for Mendelssohn especially. As Ernest Boyer wrote in his study of Shaftesbury’s influence on German thinkers, “the German Enlightenment as a whole was profoundly influenced by this philosopher long underappreciated in both England and America. Shaftesbury shaped eighteenth-century German thought to a degree that can now seem quite astonishing.”⁷ The essays and dialogues found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711) enjoyed enormous popularity in France and Germany. His emphasis on the civilizing effect of art on the senses and the ability of art to represent philosophical ideals was taken, by German Enlighteners (Aufklärer), as an invitation to substitute an ethically based aesthetics for theology. Suggestions of a “moral sense,” along with further refinement of notions of taste, implied a hierarchized image of the intellect. That image corresponded to a presumed, class-based social hierarchy in which those at the top were distinguished by the capacity for providing appropriate judgment on symbols of divinity (and examples of humanity) in the material world: virtue, beauty, perfection, pleasure.

An equally important figure in the line of the transmission of this premise was William Hogarth (1697–1794) whose prints attracted the commentary of many German thinkers including Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Georg Lichtenberg (1742–99). In Plastik: Some Observations On Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778), Herder took Hogarth’s prints to be exemplary for their lack of charm and beauty, for they are mostly “ugly caricature, but full of character, passion, life, truth.”⁸ As Ronald Paulson has observed, Hogarth, the product of a dissenter Protestant background, went against the Shaftesburian conventions that seemed to impose a hierarchy on the value of class as the arbiter of virtue. Herder was not the only commentator who saw, in Hogarth’s work, a separation of truth and beauty; indeed, his work shows that truth aligns better with caricature and ugliness. Still, Hogarth’s work reiterates the connection between moral behavior and physical appearance. For Mendelssohn, these thinkers formed the infrastructure of what would become his assessment of the psychological and societal advantages presented by contemplating beauty, valuing truth, and acquiring taste.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British school had separated the Beautiful and the Good as distinct objects requiring distinct modes of inquiry – different in kind from theology, metaphysics, and logic – and focused on the benefits of aesthetic perception and judgment. The articulation of those benefits – moral refinement, sharpened taste, and expansion in the exercise of freedom – exposed their opposites: immorality, vulgarity, and irrationality. Ideally, the illustration of morality as the consequence of beauty (in both word and form) could “help” (i.e., refine the taste of) those who could be helped (hence the proliferation of “moral weeklies” and the popularity of Hogarth’s didactic narratives in pictures). Identifying ugliness as a molestum, a real harm, provided a means to advance civility by protecting oneself – and one’s environs – from its negative influence. As the foil of the Beautiful, the Ugly defined the boundaries of beauty, intimated the dangers of immorality, and helped those who had developed their capacity for beauty to separate themselves from those who lacked taste. What began in the relationships that tied Beauty and the Good, and Ugliness and the Evil, developed into an area of inquiry that was riddled with issues related to moral perceptivity, the psychology of impressions, and the improvement of the intellect (each of which was related to but not synonymous with each other). In this minefield the relationship of physical appearance to moral aptitude became associated with intellectual potential and receptivity.

Thus, when Baumgarten gave name to the field of inquiry of aesthetics, he referenced a discourse that had already developed an internal vocabulary of words and signs recognized by Enlightenment intellectuals throughout Europe. As Mendelssohn’s innovations in it show, the field was by no means homogenous and its canonical issues were still mixed up with political and theological critique. One of the many consequences of the religious strife in Europe in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the eyes of the beholders
• 1 Moral aesthetics: what is the Ugly?
• 2 Comeliness, glamour, ugliness: physical descriptions and moral implications
• 3 Reading faces, reading souls: Johann Caspar Lavater’s new physiognomy
• 4 The Ugly made Beautiful: the meaning and appearance of Mendelssohn
• Conclusion
• Index