Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp LaRouche keynoted the Presidents' Day conference of the Schiller Institute/International Caucus of Labor Committees in the United States on February 14, 1999 with this presentation. It is excerpted here to feature her remarks on Moses Mendelssohn, both his philosophy in the footsteps of Socrates and Plato, and a sketch of his life's work.
The Immortality of the Soul
I want to look at this question from the standpoint of a different one of Plato's dialogues, namely, the Phaedo, which is a discussion between Socrates and his friends after the verdict of his death penalty had been pronounced. So the dialogue takes place in the very last hours of Socrates' life. And I want to look at both Plato's Phaedo, as well as the work Phaedon by Moses Mendelssohn, which is in part a translation of Plato's dialogue, but in part a powerful elaboration on his own, written nearly two thousand years later.
Plato's Phaedo, in which he discusses the immortality of the soul, is perhaps the most moving, most elevating of all of his writings. Here is Socrates, the one person who is completely just, yet whom his oligarchical enemies have surrounded with the total appearance of injustice—namely, by charging him with corrupting the morals of the youth, for which they condemn him to death—and who is in his last hours of life.
And while his friends are very upset, Socrates is completely happy, calm, and peaceful—like an immortal who is certain that where he will go, he will be completely blissful. Phaedo, a young man whom Socrates saved from slavery, gives a moving account of the last hours. And he says "We experienced a strange mixture of loss and bitterness, because the pleasure was constantly interrupted by the corroding sensation: 'Soon we will lose him forever.'"
What better poetical setting for Plato to choose to discuss the immortality of the soul, than the moment where the existential question that we are born, that we will die, is made actual in this powerful way? Socrates, the wisest, most noble man of his time—will his soul disappear with him when his body dies?
I will now discuss the arguments for the immortality of the soul, not in the exact way that Plato argues in his Phaedo, but I want to look at how Moses Mendelssohn—the Socrates of the Eighteenth century, as he was called—develops that argument.
You should know, first of all, that nearly one hundred years before Mendelssohn, Leibniz had already translated the better parts of this dialogue, because he admired Plato and especially the Phaedo, whose arguments he found in complete conformity with his own thoughts on the subject.
Moses Mendelssohn only translated the first part of Plato's Phaedo accurately, to then use the Socratic method to develop the arguments to convince his Eighteenth-century contemporaries of the immortality of the soul. "I may risk making my Socrates a Leibnizian," he said. "Alone, that does not matter. I'd rather commit an anachronism, than miss a possible argument to convince them," said Mendelssohn.
So, in the second discussion, the second part of the dialogue Phaedon, where Mendelssohn develops his own arguments, he emphasizes that the question of the immortality of the soul touches upon everything, and that whoever denies it, thereby shakes everything, and that everything believed to be good and truthful, goes out the window.
So, which arguments would a Socrates of our time use to prove this to his friends?, he asks. "Is our soul mortal? Then reason is only a dream. Our virtue then looks phony. Then we are only like cattle, put here to search for food and die, and in a few days, it does not matter if I was an ornament or a shame to creation—to the human race; if I increase the number of the blissful or the miserable of my time. Then the state of free-thinking people is nothing but a herd of unreasonable animals, and I horrify myself. Then, without the hope of immortality, man is the most miserable creature on earth, since, to his misfortune, he can reflect about his condition and fear death, and become desperate.
"And whatever human beings do when they enjoy friendship, when they recognize the truth, when they honor the Creator, when they get excited about beauty and perfection, the horrible thought of destruction appears like a ghost in their souls, and throws them into despair. But fortunately, my notion of God, of virtue, of the dignity of man, and of the relationship in which he stands with God, does not leave any doubt about his determination."
Mendelssohn then develops various proofs of the immortality of the soul, the most important being the argument that unlike matter, the soul is indivisible; and without saying so at this point, Mendelssohn makes the argument of Leibniz, that the soul is a monad. And therefore, every soul, being a monad, contains the entirety of the universe in its eternity in it; it holds eternity in it in germ form.
But most interesting is the argument he makes in the third discussion, where he points to the difference between animals and man. "Animals do not have a purpose, to have a continuous progress toward perfection. But their final determination is a certain degree of ability, and on their own, they never attempt to try things in a higher domain, and they are never motivated by themselves."
Now, you will notice when you read Lyndon LaRouche's new book, The Road To Recovery, that he discusses there the concept of Nicolaus of Cusa, that when a person plays with his pet, the pet participates in human abilities; the spieltrieb—the play-instinct—is the most human part of the animal.
"But we can assume," Mendelssohn's Socrates says, "that this drive towards perfection, this increase, this growth of inner excellence, is really the determination of beings of reason, and, therefore, the highest goal of Creation. That means," he says, "the immeasurable, vast cosmic system has been created so that beings capable of reason could exist, who progress from step to step, so that their perfection is increasing, and so that they find their happiness in this increased.
"As simple beings in the sense of monads, they are eternal, and they continue to exist, their perfection is continuous, and has a limitless consequence. They are the final goal of Creation, and there is not another more important purpose to Creation."
He says, which I find absolutely remarkable and worth really thinking about, that "the goal of Creation lasts as long as Creation itself." Now, if the perfection of the human soul is the goal of Creation, and that lasts as long as the Creation—because how could the goal of Creation last less long than Creation?—I think this is a pretty compelling argument.
"Therefore, if however, the immortality of the soul is denied, for such a person, the love of the here-and-now has to be the highest good. Because, if a person denies his immortality, and only believes in the here-and-now, what consideration could be powerful enough for him to engage in the slightest risk of life? Honor? A place in history? The well-being of his children, his friends, his fatherland, and even the well-being of the entire human race?
"The most miserable enjoyment of a few moments, is everything he can console himself with, and is therefore of limitless importance. How can he give it up?
"If tyranny threatens your nation with collapse, if justice is in danger of being suppressed, if virtue is assaulted and religion and truth are persecuted, then use your life for the purpose for which you have it," says Mendelssohn. "The merit of having furthered the good with such selflessness, gives your existence an unspeakable value, which at the same time is of eternal duration."
But, if an individual thinks that with his short life, everything is finished, it is totally impossible to believe that he, according to his principles, would sacrifice himself for the well-being of his nation or the entire human species.
For example, if the nation is threatened, has the fatherland not a right to demand that the citizen sacrifice himself? But the citizen, if he sticks to this mentioned principle, can he not—must he not—seek the fall of his nation, just to prolong his dearest life for a few days?
And, according to this assumption, every moral being has the decisive right to cause the destruction of the whole world, if only he can keep his life, his existence, says Mendelssohn. And is this not the morality of George Soros, Camdessus, and Wolfensohn? It is for sure the philosophy of the London and Wall Street bankers' financial system.
And once these forces have this right, so have all their associates, all the little hangers-on to power, all the parasites who live off this immoral system. And then Mendelssohn writes, "What a general upheaval is the result! What derangement! What a confusion of the moral world!" And this is exactly the condition of the world today.
The Prophet Moses Mendelssohn
Now, who is this Moses Mendelssohn, to be such a prophet for today's situation?
Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729 in the Jewish ghetto of Dessau, a city about 80 miles from Berlin, the son of Mendel Dessau, who ran a little Hebrew school for Jewish boys who all came from poor families like himself. His mother's name was Suschen.
Moses, who was the brightest among the pupils of this little school, soon started to complement the limited religious Hebrew teachings through his own studies. And he learned Hebrew, not according to a memorization of the liturgical texts, but through rigorously studying the grammar. Through the highest rabbi of Dessau, David Fraenkel, he got a copy of a book by the philosopher Moses Maimonides, The Guide To the Perplexed, written in a.d. 1190. This book was a groundbreaking effort to show the coherence of faith and reason.
Moses Mendelssohn absorbed these ideas with total excitement, since they represented a completely different domain than what he had learned in the legalistic arguments of the Talmud exegeticists. He was able to follow his teacher Fraenkel to Berlin, and then use the opportunity to immediately take up the kinds of secular studies which he had been denied in the ghetto. And, as Lyndon LaRouche mentioned yesterday, the condition of Jews in Europe in the Eighteenth century was really quite miserable. It was totally contained, poor, no equal status, isolated, contempt, and so forth.
So Moses Mendelssohn started to investigate all fields of knowledge around him. He studied the history of Protestantism, but also of literature, philosophy, natural science, languages. He learned German, Latin, English, French. He invited a young person named Israel Samoscz, a gifted young mathematician who had been forced to leave Poland; he offered him his room—a little attic someplace—and he learned from him, both mathematical questions and engineering. And they got involved in heated debates about aesthetical theory. He read Locke and Leibniz, Locke's Essay on Human Understanding.
In 1750, Moses Mendelssohn was hired by Isaac Bernhard, a rich Jewish merchant, as a teacher for his four children. With his new income, he started to take music lessons. He went to concerts and theater performances. When the children were beyond school age, Moses became first an accountant in this firm of Bernhard—something which he always complained of as being a boring and horrible job, one which he hated, and many accountants probably know exactly what he meant.
But, because he later became a joint owner in Bernhard's silk business, he had a decent income for the rest of his life. He began to write about aesthetical questions in the "Letters About Perception," and probably no Jew before him had mastered the German language in such an elegant way, or developed an almost-beautiful artistic style.
He decided at that point to change his name from Moses Dessau, which was the name of his father, with which he had come to Berlin, and to call himself, in the Jewish tradition, as the son of his father—but not in the Hebrew form, Moses bin Mendel, but in German, Moses Mendels-sohn, son of Mendel: Mendelssohn.
A number of independent-thinking young intellectuals, authors, and publishers who were Christians, took notice of this young Jewish accountant who wrote these passionate philosophical treatises in the Leibniz tradition, something which was completely unusual for a Jew at that time.
And one of these intellectuals was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the poet to whom Moses was introduced when both were twenty-five years of age. A very fruitful collaboration and friendship between the two began.
One of Mendelssohn's first writings was the Philosophical Observations, in which he called upon the Germans to free themselves of the French influence, and to follow their own philosophical tradition. Mendelssohn showed this manuscript to Lessing, who immediately brought it to the printer and had it published, and instantly the book became a complete sensation. Never before had a Jew published a book in German.
What was the philosophical and intellectual life in Berlin at that time? Well, King Frederick II, who regarded himself as a pupil of Voltaire, and was eventually able to attract this guy to the court, was really a passionate hater of Leibniz. And he pulled leading opponents of Leibniz to the court, to the Berlin Academy of Science, which had been created by Leibniz in 1701 under Frederick I, to stamp out all of Leibniz's influence.
And Berlin at that time was a complete swamp of liberals, pagans, atheists, British agents, and so forth. The oligarchy of that time was completely rotten and frivolous in their lifestyles, and they used the French and the English Enlightenment as a counter-offensive against Leibniz by playing up Newton, and by calling such conceptual opponents as Euler and Maupertuis to the Academy. Maupertuis later became the president of the Academy.
Lessing and Mendelssohn took up the fight, against both the French and the English Enlightenment. In the Treatise About Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences, Mendelssohn defends Leibniz's concept of "the best of all possible worlds," which had just been drawn through the mud and ridiculed by Voltaire with his story "Candide."
Mendelssohn: "Out of the necessary character of God, follows the immeasurable multitude of Creation, which permits the highest degree of freedom, and out of the beauty and well-ordering of the world, one can conclude the evidence of the existence of God."
Mendelssohn also developed a new theory of aesthetics, in which he emphasized that beautiful art has a moral effect on the audience, without preaching it. In the famous letter exchange between Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai, a publisher and friend of the two, about the trauerspiel, which is a form of tragedy, they discussed how art must be composed to awaken passion and compassion.
Mendelssohn makes the point that the audience has experienced human destiny on stage in a perfect presentation of art, and has been moved by its command over a reservoir of experience, and that this will enable the individual, in moments of moral decision, to make those in the right way, since they have become part of his, or her, experience.
Lessing points out that through tragedy on stage, one can exercise—train—the feeling of compassion, and that this would be good, since the best human beings would be the compassionate ones.
Mendelssohn argues that this exercise or training would be advisable for the reason, that in moments of moral decision, a very fast reflection about the problem would be necessary, which without training would be hard to accomplish. For the trained person, the moral decision would become as natural as playing the piano is for the accomplished pianist. The highest virtues would be those where there is no fight with the fulfillment of duty, because cognition and exercise would have transformed duty into passion.
Most of you have probably recognized that these ideas of Lessing and Mendelssohn, are the ones which Friedrich Schiller would later take up so beautifully with his notion of moral beauty and the concept of the beautiful soul, as well as his writings about "Theater as a Moral Institution."
But also, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had the fortune, together with his brother Alexander, to be a frequent guest in the house of Mendelssohn, and to be part of the lectures he was giving to his children, took the idea of the moral purpose of art from Mendelssohn.
One can actually say that the two towering giants of the Weimar Classical period—Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt—were more influenced directly by Lessing and Mendelssohn, than by anybody else. By reviving Plato, the Greek Classics, and by defending Leibniz against the swamp of the Enlightenment, they laid the foundation of the German Classical period.
The next major move of the oligarchy was the deployment of Immanuel Kant, whom Mendelssohn called the "Alleszermalmer," which literally means "The Terminator." I actually was quite amused when I noticed that.
Now, Kant's Critiques are a vicious attack on both Leibniz and Mendelssohn. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant directly attacked Mendelssohn's aesthetical theory by denying the possibility of a moral purpose for art: "An arbitrary arabesque thrown onto a wall by an artist, would be more beautiful than a piece of art in which the moral intention of the artist would be recognizable." It was that Critique by Kant which infuriated Schiller such that he wrote his own aesthetical theory. And he said about Kant, that for Kant to have such ideas, he must have had a very unhappy childhood.
In his Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter about paralogisms, Kant directly attacks Mendelssohn's proof of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, by insisting that these could not be proven and therefore had to be reduced to the level of postulates, that both the existence of God and the immortality of the soul would be res fidei, matters of faith only. By attacking the knowability and existence of the individual soul as a monad, and the knowability of God through reason, Kant probably did more than almost anyone else to cause the evil ideologies of the Twentieth century, ranging from neo-Kantianism, to existentialism, nihilism, or the Frankfurt School.
But Mendelssohn had one big advantage over Kant—and Hegel, for that matter—which Goethe notes in Dichter und Wahrheit, a sort of biographical work of his; namely, that Mendelssohn and Garve, another contemporary philosopher and influence on Schiller, did write in a clear and understandable, beautiful German, something which can not be said about Kant. If you have ever tried to read Kant or Hegel, you will completely agree with me: He is un-understandable. It's not your problem if you don't understand it.
While Mendelssohn was not solely responsible for the revival of the Greek Classical tradition, which had already started as a result of Leibniz and his networks, he definitely helped to explode it. Mendelssohn had studied Classical Greek, read Homer, Xenophon, and later all of Plato's works, in the original.
When Mendelssohn decided to write his own Phaedon in 1767, this mixture of Plato and the Leibnizian Plato of the Eighteeth century, was a total attack against the Siégcle de Lumiégre, the French Enlightenment, in defense of the Platonic tradition. Mendelssohn, who already had a great reputation at that time, became absolutely famous, and his Phaedon was translated immediately into Dutch, Italian, French, Russian, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, and English. And there was a fast sequence of editions, and it became the most popular book, the best-seller of its time.
It influenced and excited Herder and Winkelman, who called it one of the best books he ever wrote, and it was extensively discussed by Goethe, the Humboldt brothers, Schiller, and Heine. Sulzer proposed that Mendelssohn be nominated as a member of the Berlin Academy, which Frederick II then refused, mainly because of the fact that Mendelssohn was a Jew. There were many other reasons; for example, it is interesting that Mendelssohn did a beautiful translation of Hamlet's soliloquy, and Frederick hated Hamlet and Shakespeare. He said, "The fact that the horrible Shakespeare is on the German stage, is proof that the Germans have no culture."
Now, Mendelssohn also committed the crime of writing a critique of Frederick's poetry, in which he attacked both the fact that it was written in French, and also that the philosophical standpoint which came across in these poems, namely, that Frederick denied the immortality of the soul, was bad.
Not only had Mendelssohn taken the moral high ground by arguing that the state is not allowed to pass legislation which is not sanctioned through natural law, which was an attempt to prevent the degeneration of the state into barbarism, but now a Jew from Dessau had gone to give lectures to the King about his mother tongue! I mean, that was just too much for the oligarchs at that time.
Now, a certain Mr. von Justi made a formal complaint, and Mendelssohn's literary magazine was forbidden. Mendelssohn was summoned to the Court to defend himself, which he did very eloquently. And he met Maupertuis, and strangely enough, his newspaper was allowed again, and his apology was accepted.
But soon, many operations were started up to make Mendelssohn's life miserable. And I suspect that there is a causal relationship.
In 1783, he wrote a major work on the question of Judaism, which was called Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, in which he supported the thesis of his friend, Christian Wilhelm Dohm, who was a member of the Prussian War Council and historian, about the social equalization of the Jews, where Dohm had demanded the full civil integration of Jews and their right to do business—that the Jewish religion should be given the same rights as the Christian one, and that they should be allowed to enter the state service.
Now, Mendelssohn's Jerusalem did not quite receive the same spectacular reception as the Phaedon. But it was appreciated by all his progressive contemporaries for its noble views. Mendelssohn started with a polemic against Thomas Hobbes' notion that the crude power of the state is the only way to contain the war of each against all.
Against that, Mendelssohn posed the good state, in which education motivates the citizen to act for the common good. The strength of such a state obviously consists in the fact that it can draw and rely on the conscience of the citizen, for example, in the case of a necessary defense.
Mendelssohn advocated tolerance which treats all religions as equal. Throughout his life, he worked in collaboration with Lessing, whose famous play, Nathan the Wise, was really a tribute to the life of Mendelssohn, and a powerful continuation of Leibniz's work. So, together with Lessing and Winkelman, he was the founder of the German Classical period.
The Mendelssohn family from then on was really an absolute integral part of the humanist Classical tradition of German culture, in Classical music, with the grandson Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and with almost all leading people in literature, music, and science of their time.
So, what Moses Mendelssohn did, was to make a breakout for Jewry, and become an integral part of the German Classical culture, as did many Jews after him. His family, towards the end of the Eighteenth century and throughout the whole of the Nineteenth century, was at the center of the humanist networks, and became crucial for the legal emancipation of the Jews, and the total integration of Jews into German culture.
The World-Historical Individual
Why do I tell you all of this today? For one, to tell you that Jewish history didn't start with the Holocaust. It is not limited to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. One of the highest points of this history of the Jews, was when they participated in and helped to create the most recent period when mankind experienced a Classical culture, a culture which had a proud, marvelous image of man, capable of limitless perfectibility, that is, the German Classical period and its aftermath.
By eliminating the thousands of years of real Jewish history, and especially by denying the integral part Jews played in the German Classical period, by reducing the memories to the twelve years of the Nazi period, a terrible robbery is committed, not only against the Jews, but against everybody.
Moses Mendelssohn is a very good example of a world-historical individual. By breaking out of the containment of the Jewish ghetto, taking the best of humanist culture from Plato to Leibniz to Bach to everybody else, he is a model of what every suppressed minority can do today.
Take everything mankind has produced so far, add your own creative contribution, and be part of the creation of a new Renaissance, and all divisions in society will disappear. The big challenge in front of all of us is that the whole of human civilization is threatened by the onset of a new global Dark Age. If the presently escalating financial crisis is not overcome, it is quite possible that European, American, and Japanese civilization, will disappear. ...
We must understand that our existence today is the result of all the thousands of generations who lived before us, in which, again and again, there were creative individuals who developed qualitatively new ideas, crucial discoveries in science and Classical art and philosophy, which in a consecutive way led to the actual and potential richness we have today. Look at the beauty of all the cultural goods of the Classical and Renaissance periods. Listen to the dramatic power of great Classical music. Think about the glory of man's ability to conquer space and find out in a deeper and better way, how the universe is composed.
All of this beauty is the result of human beings who devoted their lives to a purpose way beyond their mortal existence. When you, with this in view, have a noble desire to make this common heritage of universal history your own possession by studying these ideas, by reliving the discoveries of these creative minds who have lived before us, and if you have the passion to enrich this knowledge, to add something new, to give more to future generations than you have received from the ones before you to the benefit of the future, then you are truly human.
In this way, we give immortality to the past. We make it richer by adding something new, because we make it the predecessor of something bigger than it was before. So in this way, we can change the past, as we definitely can change the present and the future. In this way, we create something which remains after our mortal existence. If we in this way contribute to the future condition of all of mankind, then our identity is the simultaneity of eternity, and we have become true world-historical individuals.
Next: Philosophical Vignettes from the Political Life of Moses Mendelssohn
