Abstract
In aesthetics, Moses Mendelssohn is famous for his theory of “mixed sentiments,” his solution to the “paradox of tragedy” discussed for decades after Jean-Baptiste Du Bos pithily stated that “the arts of poetry and painting are never more applauded, than when they are most successful in moving us to pity.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (1719), trans. Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London, 1748), 1:1.
- 2.
Moses Mendelssohn, On Sentiments (1761 version), translated in Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75. I will depart from generally very reliable Dahlstrom’s translation only where I find it misleading, in which case I will use as my text Mendelssohn, Ästhetische Schriften, ed. Anne Pollok (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006).
- 3.
The essay was originally published as “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,” in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste I (Leipzig, 1757): 231–68, then revised and reprinted as “Ueber die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” in Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Schriften (Berlin, 1761). See Ästhetische Schriften, 330.
- 4.
Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, new edition (Halle, 1751), §404; reprinted in Wolff, Metapfisica tedesca, ed. Raffaele Ciafardone (Milan: Bompiani, 2003), 344.
- 5.
In the 1757 version, this sentence reads: “Thus every perfection that is capable of being intuitively or sensuously represented can present an object of beauty”; see Moses Mendelssohn, Ausgewählte Werke: Studienausgabe, ed. Christoph Schulte, Andreas Kennecke, and Grażyna Jurewicz, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 1:175.
- 6.
Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 172.
- 7.
See Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrer Glückseligkeit, 4th ed. (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1733; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1996).
- 8.
Anne Pollok notes that Mendelssohn’s position even in the letters On Sentiments is “not to be interpreted as unambiguously Wolffian”; see her Facette des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Moses Mendelssohns (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010), 169.
- 9.
See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), §9, 10–11.
- 10.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, ed. Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), vol.1, §14, 20–21.
- 11.
In the first version, this statement had read “The essence of the fine arts and sciences consists in the sensuous expression of perfection,” Mendelssohn, Ausgewählte Werke, 1:175. At this point, then, the first version is more purely Baumgartian than the second.
- 12.
I thus disagree with Alexander Altmann’s assessment that Mendelssohn preferred a simpler, purely Wolffian formulation by Meier to Baumgarten’s “less clear formulations” that stress both the “metaphysical side of the imitation of the world-whole” and the “particular form of thinking” in aesthetic representation; see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohns Frühschriften zur Metaphysik (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1969), 111–12; on my account, Meier accepted the complexity of Baumgarten’s account even if he adopted a simpler definition of beauty, and Mendelssohn built upon the complexity of Baumgarten’s position, as fully understood in practice by Meier.
- 13.
Mendelssohn, “Main Principles,” Philosophical Writings, 172–73. I have translated künstlich as “artistic” rather than as “artful” as Dahlstrom does, because in ordinary English the latter connotes something cunning or deceitful, which Mendelssohn certainly does not intend to suggest here.
- 14.
Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §18. Baumgarten’s word turpia clearly connotes both physical and moral ugliness, that which is disgusting to the physical senses and that which is shameful to the moral sense.
- 15.
Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §§18–20.
- 16.
Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §13.
- 17.
Georg Friedrich Meier, Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Halle, 1757), §22, reprinted in Georg Friedrich Meier, Frühe Schriften zur ästhetischen Erziehung der Deutschen, ed. Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Günter Schenk, 3 vols. (Halle: Hallescher Verlag, 2002), 3:192.
- 18.
See also Altmann, Mendelssohns Frühschriften, 114.
- 19.
Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §115.
- 20.
Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §118.
- 21.
See Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 2:v–vi.
- 22.
Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Halle, 1754), §23.
- 23.
Meier, Anfangsgründe, vol. 1, §35.
- 24.
Meier, Anfangsgründe, §180, p. 426; emphasis added.
- 25.
Frederick Beiser suggests that Mendelssohn’s explanation of our pleasure in tragedy by the mixed nature of pity (as he translates Mitleid) is confined to the original 1755 edition of the letters On Sentiment, and is then replaced in the 1761 edition by the theory of mixed sentiments (see Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 206–17). But in the 1761 edition, Mendelssohn retains the analysis of the mixed emotion of sympathy in the letters and, as we will see, adds the contrast between object and representation to expand his account of mixed sentiments. Altmann notes the importance of sympathy for Mendelssohn’s theory of the mixed sentiments in the 1755 letters On Sentiment (Altmann, Mendelssohns Frühschriften, 133), and then adds that although Mendelssohn treats mixed sentiments from a “fundamentally new standpoint” in the Rhapsody, “he strives to maintain the older doctrine as far as possible” (134) and “in no way takes back what was said in the Letters” (136). This seems to me the correct assessment of the relation between the two treatments.
- 26.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 72.
- 27.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 73.
- 28.
See David Hume, “Of Tragedy” (1757), in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 216–25; esp. 219–21.
- 29.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 74.
- 30.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 75.
- 31.
Mendelssohn, Rhapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 131–32; Ästhetische Schriften, 143.
- 32.
Mendelssohn, Rhapsody, Philosophical Writings, 133–34; Ästhetische Schriften, 145.
- 33.
Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychologyn V (1912): 87–118, reprinted in Bullough, Æsthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 91–130.
- 34.
Mendelssohn, Rhapsody, Philosophical Writings, 134; Ästhetische Schriften, 145–46.
- 35.
Mendelssohn, Rhapsody, Philosophical Writings, 138; Ästhetische Schriften, 150.
- 36.
In recent aesthetics, Richard Wollheim argued that “twofoldness” or awareness of both the medium and what it represents and expresses at the same time is a characteristic feature of aesthetic experience. Wollheim developed this thesis particularly with reference to his favorite art of painting, but Mendelssohn’s example shows that it applies to other arts, such as drama, as well. See Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 21.
- 37.
Wolff offers imitation as his first illustration of the pleasure in the sensuous perception of perfection: “If I see a painting that is similar to the object that it is to represent, and consider its similarity, then I have a pleasure therein. Now the perfection of a painting consists in the similarity. For a painting is nothing other than the representation of a certain object on a tablet or flat surface; so everything in it is harmonious” – the criterion of perfection – “when nothing can be discerned in it that one does not also perceive in the object itself” (Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedanken über Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen, § 404, 344). Hutcheson treats “Imitation of some Original” as an instance of the general source of beauty, uniformity amidst variety, because such imitation is “a Conformity, or a kind of Unity between the Original and the Copy” (Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, First Treatise, section 4, §1; in the edition by Wolfgang Leidhold [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004], 42.). In both cases, the supposition is that the relation in which imitation consists is enjoyed in its own right, as a perfection, not that it is the means to the enjoyment of a further mental state like that of Mendelssohn’s mixed sentiments.
- 38.
Mendelssohn, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences,” Philosophical Writings, 173; Ästhetische Schriften, 193.
- 39.
Mendelssohn, “Main Principles,” Philosophical Writings, 174; Ästhetische Schriften, 194.
- 40.
In the first version of the essay Mendelssohn wrote “admire” (bewundern) rather than “perceive” (wahrnehmen). The other change in the second version of this paragraph is the insertion of the comment that the abilities of the artist “offer his entire soul for our intuitive cognition.”
- 41.
Mendelssohn, “Main Principles,” Philosophical Writings, 174; Ästhetische Schriften, 195.
- 42.
Mendelssohn, “Main Principles,” Philosophical Writings, 174–75; Ästhetische Schriften, 195.
- 43.
Ursula Goldenbaum has argued for the importance of Spinoza’s “doctrine of affects” in the genesis of Mendelssohn’s theory of the bodily effect of aesthetic perception; see for example “Mendelssohns Einsteig in die schönen Wissenschaften: Zu einer ästhetischen Rezeption Spinozas,” in Philosophie und die Belles-Lettres, eds. Martin Fontius and Werner Schneiders (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997), 71–76. Spinoza may well be considered a source for Mendelssohn’s emphasis on the bodily as well as intellectual aspect of aesthetic response. But as Anne Pollok has noted, Spinoza’s conception of the mind-body relation is that of a “parallelism,” whereas, as we will see, Mendelssohn proposes a genuine interaction between them, alien to all the heirs of Descartes, even Spinoza; see Pollok, Facetten des Menschen, 159. As Pollok further puts it, Mendelssohn attempts to move beyond “a manner of argumentation deriving solely from the rationalist tradition through an integration of corporeal and emotional needs [toward] a more complete image of human gratification,” 172.
- 44.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 29.
- 45.
Alexander Altmann argued that Mendelssohn graded the cognitive and bodily aspects of pleasure on a scale of degree of pleasure (see Altmann, Mendelssohns Frühschriften, 107). I will ignore that refinement here.
- 46.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 47. In the 1761 edition, the words “indistinct but lively” (undeutliche aber lebhafte) replaced the first edition’s word “obscure” (Ästhetische Schriften, 47; dunkele).
- 47.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 48.
- 48.
Pollok describes Mendelssohn’s overall conception of aesthetic response as a dynamisches Zusammenspiel between mere gratification, including its bodily aspects, and intelligible perfection (Facetten des Menschen, 177).
- 49.
Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, Philosophical Writings, 53.
- 50.
Mendelssohn, Rhapsody, Philosophical Writings, 140; Ästhetische Schriften, 152–53.
Bibliography
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Guyer, P. (2011). Mendelssohn’s Theory of Mixed Sentiments. In: Munk, R. (eds) Moses Mendelssohn's Metaphysics and Aesthetics. Studies in German Idealism, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2451-8_14
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