Michah Gottlieb's new book offers an introduction to Moses Mendelssohn's theological-political thought, highlighting Mendelssohn's lifelong engagement with the legacy of Spinoza. It was Mendelssohn's youthful study of Spinoza and Maimonides, and his reflections on their respective heterodoxies, Gottlieb claims, that led him to develop his own views regarding the role of the philosopher in the public sphere. Spinoza served as a model in Mendelssohn's early thinking, according to Gottlieb, for the kind of enlightened Jew who would contribute to eighteenth-century European culture and who should thus be accepted and tolerated within it. As Gottlieb shows, finally, questions over the ramifications of Spinoza's thought for the enlightenment—and over the compatibility of a “refined Spinozism” with enlightened theism—challenged Mendelssohn into his last days.
Gottlieb's admirable background in the history of Jewish philosophy enables him to examine Mendelssohn's relation to Maimonides and to Spinoza in clear, readable fashion. He is sufficiently at home in post-Leibnizian enlightenment philosophy to be able to explain with real clarity and precision some of Mendelssohn's metaphysical arguments, especially those Mendelssohn proposed as the basis of Lessing's “refined Spinozism.” His focus on the political side of the Pantheism Controversy builds on Alexander Altmann's work and reminds us of an under-explored aspect of this crucial episode in late eighteenth-century European thought and culture. There are moments in the book, moreover, when Gottlieb skillfully conveys precisely why the questions surrounding freedom, faith, and reason that arose during the Pantheism Controversy should still matter to us today.
Although Gottlieb's book is, as Lawrence Kaplan states in a blurb on the book's back cover, “a study of Moses Mendelssohn that successfully integrates the Jewish and German sides of his thought,” the book also displays shortcomings in the scholarly apparatus that detract from Gottlieb's intellectual portrait of Mendelssohn. In a number of instances, Gottlieb attributes positions and statements to the figures he depicts without providing readers with sources. At times, Gottlieb's argument is based on quotes apparently taken out of context; at others, sources cited as evidence do not in any obvious way support the argument set forth by the author.
This can be seen, for example, in a discussion of Jacobi's attitude toward Mendelssohn's political views. While noting that Jacobi “did not mention Mendelssohn explicitly” (62) in his essay “Something Lessing Said,” Gottlieb generally suggests that Jacobi had quite a lot to say directly about Mendelssohn's politics. Thus, he writes, “Jacobi questions Mendelssohn's affinity for Frederick's enlightened despotism on two counts” (62); “Jacobi claims that Mendelssohn regards freedom as of instrumental value” (63); and “Jacobi sneers at Mendelssohn's ‘moderate’ commitment to political freedom” (64). Jacobi likewise “has much more hatred for Mendelssohn's enlightened theism than for an Epicurean atheist” and he “disdains Mendelssohn's enlightened despotic politics much more than open defenders of despotism such as Hobbes”; for while the Epicurean and Hobbes are at least consistent, Mendelssohn “confusedly tries to unite egoism with religious belief” on the one hand, and “inconsistently defends despotism by claiming [it to be] compatible with moral freedom” on the other (66). These statements appear to attribute to Jacobi concrete assertions about Mendelssohn's politics. But Gottlieb offers no source for Jacobi's alleged claim that Mendelssohn's view of freedom is instrumental, or for Jacobi's alleged criticism of Mendelssohn's affinity for enlightened despotism. For his claim that Jacobi “sneers” at Mendelssohn's political moderation, Jacobi's open letter to J.G Schlosser of 1788 is given as a source. But the pages cited from this letter contain no mention of Mendelssohn or of politics. For the author's claim regarding Jacobi's alleged preference for Epicureans over Mendelssohn, a source is cited in which Mendelssohn refers to his own early thought as “Epicurean.” For the assertion that Jacobi “disdains” Mendelssohn more than he does a consistent defender of despotism like Hobbes, the author provides a source in which Jacobi does praise Hobbes, but says nothing at all about Mendelssohn.
Gottlieb sheds some light on his approach when he writes, “Jacobi often does not specify whom his precise target is when critiquing German Enlightenment thought. As my interest is in Mendelssohn, I will frame the discussion in terms of Mendelssohn unless there are reasons not to” (155–6, n. 19). In saying this, the author seems to imply that since Mendelssohn shared many of the views Jacobi criticized, one may legitimately describe Jacobi's criticism as directed at Mendelssohn himself “unless there are reasons not to.” Given the evidence that primary sources provide, however, the extent of “sneering” and “disdaining” and “hatred” that Jacobi is said to have directed at Mendelssohn here exceeds reasonable license, and should have been presented as conjecture regarding what Jacobi might have thought about Mendelssohn rather than as a report on views Jacobi directly expressed about Mendelssohn.
The situation is likewise problematic in a few cases in which the author addresses the Pantheism Controversy, delineating Jacobi's position, on the one hand, and Jacobi's framing of Mendelssohn's position, on the other. For example, Gottlieb claims that according to Jacobi, “we know God through a mystical sixth sense,” and “through this mystical sense we also come to know metaphysical entities such as our immortal soul” (72). One might overlook the fact that in the sources to which Gottlieb refers Jacobi does not identify his own position as “mystical.” But the source cited to support the claim that in Jacobi's view we can know the immortal soul mystically (72, fn. 90) is a section in On the Doctrine of Spinoza in which Jacobi explains Spinoza's view of the relationship between body and soul—not his own. Moreover, while Jacobi does accuse his “enemies” (i.e., plural, meine Gegner)—that is, those who opposed him in the wake of his fight with Mendelssohn—of “philosophical Papism” (Papismus), and while Mendelssohn no doubt counts as one of these unnamed enemies, it is imprecise to claim that “while Mendelssohn pretends to be intellectually open, Jacobi calls him a ‘philosophical Papist’” (64).
This same kind of misleading use, or perhaps simple misreading, of sources is particularly troubling in the context of the book's recurring claims about the attitudes Enlightenment figures adopted toward Judaism and toward the Jewishness of Spinoza or Mendelssohn. For example, by juxtaposing a few quotes from the first and second of Mendelssohn's Philosophical Dialogues, the author makes Mendelssohn appear to hold that Leibniz's failure to acknowledge his philosophical “debt to Spinoza” was a “slight” in the light of which Spinoza's “‘fate is to be pitied,’” and thus that Leibniz's treatment of Spinoza is exemplary of “how ‘unjust is the irreconcilable hatred of scholars towards someone so unfortunate’” (28). Gottlieb suggests that for Mendelssohn in this context, “Spinoza stands as a symbol for the way that Christians generally malign Jews as being incapable of rational inquiry” (28). But from the context of the provided quotes, it is clear that Mendelssohn respects Leibniz's prudence in not naming Spinoza as the discoverer of pre-established harmony (at least Leibniz “is to be excused in this case” [Mendelssohn, JubA: 346, translated in Philosophical Writings, 104]); and Mendelssohn believes Spinoza's “fate is to be pitied” not because he was maligned as a Jew incapable of rational inquiry, but because he fell into “the monstrous abyss lying between” Descartes and Leibniz, and because despite his moderate, irreproachable life, “he goes astray in the labyrinth of his meditations and, out of error, maintains much that agrees very little with his innocent way of life” (Mendelssohn JubA: 349–50; PW, 106).
At the end of the book's third chapter (73), the author offers an especially problematic series of attributions that would appear to offer damning evidence of what Gottlieb sums up as “Jacobi's disparaging statements about Judaism in the Spinoza Letters” (76). Here no source is offered to support the statement that “Jacobi casts his account of faith as Christian, which he contrasts with Mendelssohn's rationalistic Jewish teachings.” The pages cited as a basis for Jacobi's alleged view that “since Judaism is a religion of reason, it conceives of God as an abstract, lifeless, inert, intellectual concept” do not mention Judaism at all; rather, they include Jacobi's famous claim that all experience rests on faith, and the further claim that Christianity teaches an additional faith in the possibility of blessedness for the finite individual. Similarly, in support of the claim that “for Jacobi, Judaism's attachment to rationalism makes it idolatrous…. Worshipping the rationalist's God thus amounts to worshipping a human idol,” the author cites a passage from Jacobi's Letter to Fichte of 1799, in which Jacobi attacks the philosophical worship of concepts as idolatry, but says nothing about Judaism or Mendelssohn. Finally, the author claims that “Jacobi sees Mendelssohn's religious rationalism as reflecting a Jewish commitment to the clarity and certainty of the ‘letter,’ while Jacobi's mystical faith reflects Christianity's emphasis on the miraculous mystery of the ‘spirit.’” Two sources are given for this claim. The first is the preface to Jacobi's David Hume, in which Jacobi does indeed utilize the distinction between spirit and letter familiar from Christian polemics; but here the object of Jacobi's attack is philosophy (“This letter they call science”) and concerns neither Mendelssohn nor Jewishness. The second is a page from Jacobi's Letter to Fichte in which Jacobi calls Fichte the King of the “Jews of speculative reason.” Now, why Jacobi refers to the Kantians in this manner is a question worth exploring; but that does not make it a source for Jacobi's views about Mendelssohn.
What is unsettling about this last set of sources is that they all come together to suggest the Spinoza Letters are filled with “Jacobi's disparaging statements about Judaism” (76), painting a picture of Jacobi's challenge to Mendelssohn as largely an attack on his Jewishness. There is no doubt that Mendelssohn ultimately took Jacobi to have missionary designs on him. But just for the reason that issues of Jewishness and Christianness hover in vague ways in and around the arguments between Mendelssohn and Jacobi during the Pantheism Controversy, it is crucial that scholars be exceedingly careful in diagnosing where polemical motives may be rearing their heads. Even beyond the serious matter of scholarly standards, making claims that exaggerate the Jewish-Christian animosity between the actors in the Pantheism Controversy adds to the polemics surrounding this historical event; it does not explain these polemics. This hinders rather than helps efforts to achieve a measured understanding of the Pantheism Controversy, reinforcing old prejudices that clearly still hold sway even among scholars.
Gottlieb's knowledge of Jewish philosophy is broad, and he clearly has much to contribute to our understanding of the field. But it is hoped that future work on the Pantheism Controversy will enhance our understanding of this episode with greater accuracy and transparency.
