10.54103/ai/18189
The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early modernity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the context of construction of a future community.
Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object, the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode of construction for a future sharing.
Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open problems, which continue to question our time.
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Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection
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Sulzer, J.G., “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773) (Hildesheim: Olms 1974).
Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/18189/17770
1
             Imagination and
             Körperzustand:
illusion and play
in Moses Mendelssohn’s
aesthetic reflMendelssohn
                ection
by Salvatore Tedesco
                       Aesthetics
                       Illusion
                       Play
                       Imagination




                              Issue №2 Year 2022
                              → Just an illusion? Between simulation,
                              emulation, and hyper-realism
                              Edited by Pietro Conte
                              and Lambert Wiesing
Imagination and Körperzustand:
il usion and play in Moses
Mendelssohn’s aesthetic
reflection
SALVATORE TEDESCO, Università degli Studi di Palermo – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-5455
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189




Abstract                        The aesthetic reflection in the eighteenth century
                 is deeply traversed by an experience perceived as capable of
                 disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive system of early moder-
                 nity: To feel the “own body,” that is, to feel its state of well-being
                 or discomfort means to somehow modify from the inside the
                 anthropological project of the Century of Enlightenment and
                 to create the space and the lexicon of a modality of relation-
                 ship (play, aesthetic illusion) that redefines the relationship with
                 oneself and the context of construction of a future community.
                                Whereas “Knowledge” and “Will” articulate the
                 same strategy based on the relationship between the spiritual
                 activity of a subject and the semiotic properties of an object,
                 the orientation towards the condition of one’s own body defines
                 in the play and in the aesthetic illusion the space of an imag-
                 inative reserve which is above all a reserve of time and mode
                 of construction for a future sharing.
                                 Moses Mendelssohn’s thought constitutes the ex-
                 emplary arrival point of an era of theoretical research that we
                 are interested in investigating not only in terms of the solutions
                 it has found for his time, but also in relation to the open prob-
                 lems, which continue to question our time.

Keywords         Mendelssohn           Aesthetics         Illusion     Play       Imagination
To quote this essay: S. Tedesco, “Imagination and Körperzustand: illusion and play in Moses
Mendelssohn’s aesthetic reflection,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2
(2022): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18189

SALVATORE TEDESCO                               22                                       AN-ICON
                           The philosophical and aesthetic reflection in the
            eighteenth century is deeply traversed by an experience per-
            ceived as capable of disrupting the disciplinary and cognitive
            system of early modernity: Feeling the “own body,” that is,
            feeling its “state” of well-being or discomfort – before and
            in a way different from the cognitive approach of a subject
            with an object or from the desire that moves towards that
            object – means to somehow enter the anthropological proj-
            ect of the Century of Enlightenment and to create the space
            and the lexicon of a modality of relationship (play, aesthetic
            illusion) that redefines the relationship with oneself and the
            context of construction of a future community.
                           In fact, where “Knowledge” and “Will” articu-
            late, albeit in different ways, the same strategy based on
            the relationship between the spiritual activity of a subject
            (typically, to formulate it according to the terminology of
            Moses Mendelssohn: geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie
            Entschließung des Willens) and semiotic properties [Merk-
            male] of an object, the orientation towards the condition of
            one’s own body (towards the Zustand des Körpers, as we
            will see, in the sign of Johann Georg Sulzer’s work) defines
            in play and in aesthetic illusion the space of an imaginative
            reserve which is above all a reserve of time and a mode of
            construction for a future sharing.
                           In this dynamic, which for example the aforemen-
            tioned Sulzer tries to describe starting from the conceptual
            couple Empfinden/Erkennen (“feeling/knowing”), but which
            in fact would not be conceivable except as a Bewegung, that
            is, certainly, as a “theoretical dynamics,” but even before that
            as a movement of the body and soul, is profoundly inserted
            another decisive lexical graft, which acquires its most com-
            plete theoretical profile in the reflection of Johann Gottfried
            Herder: I mean the field of fühlen, of the tactile feeling, and
            therefore of its declination as hinein fühlen (“internal feeling”);
            Gefühl, which means a thousand things but here I would
            try to render it as a “tactile feeling;” Einfühlung, “empathy;”
            Mitgefühl, “to feel together,” “community feeling;” and finally


SALVATORE TEDESCO                    23                                AN-ICON
                Familiengefühl, in which this feeling of community undoubt-
                edly reveals a social dimension of identity.
                             In this sense, decisively rethinking the Leibnizian
                and Baumgartenian tradition, Moses Mendelssohn speaks
                of a vis repraesentativa which is in and of itself indetermi-
                nate, but which through the reference to the state of the soul
                [Zustand der Seele] and of the own body is determined as
                Einbildungskraft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen ad-
                hering to the present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future.
                             But let’s look at the theoretical complex a little
                more closely at this point. Referring to the two short writ-
                ings De anima and De DEO, placed in the appendix to the
                famous Philosophiae naturalis Theoria by Roger Boscovi-
                ch,1 Moses Mendelssohn in the fifty-sixth of the Briefe, die
                neueste Litteratur betreffend2 proposes to take into account,
                together, the proximity and the difference between the laws
                of movement [Gesetze der Bewegung] of inorganic bodies
                and those brought about by the union of soul and body in
                the human organism, which causes

from certain spatial movements [aus gewissen örtlichen Bewegun-
gen] in the external limbs to derive certain spiritual movements [geis-
tige Bewegungen] in the soul; some in a necessary way, like sensa-
tions, others through a free choice, like the determinations of the wil .
                            This is precisely the bipartition and parallelism be-
                tween geistige Bewegung der Seele and freie Entschließung

       1 R.J. Boscovich, Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria (Vienna: Apud Augustinum Bernardi, 1758):
       280-295.
       2 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844): vol. 4, 566. The
       secondary bibliography on Mendelssohn is very rich, and ranges from historical-critical
       questions, to aesthetics and the theory of art, to ethics and philosophy of religions, and so
       on. In these notes - which obviously take into account the overall developments of that critical
       debate, from the “classic” studies by Fr. Braitmaier, Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und
       Kritik von den Diskursen der Malern bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1888-1889) and
       L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Ästhetik (Königsberg: Gräfe & Unzer,
       1904), up to M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, N. Hinske, eds., Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise
       seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), and M. Albrecht, E.J. Engel, eds., Moses
       Mendelssohn in Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung (Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000),
       with particular reference to the large, still decisive monograph by J.P. Meier, L’Esthétique de
       Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) (Paris: Atelier Lille III, 1978), and for Italy refer in particular to
       the excellent work of L. Lattanzi, Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa: ETS, 2002),
       and M. Mendelssohn, Scritti di Estetica, ed. L. Lattanzi (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2004) - we limit
       ourselves to refer from time to time to some texts by Mendelssohn himself, of which we will
       provide a quick theoretical framework for the purposes of our argument.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                                 24                                            AN-ICON
                des Willens mentioned at the beginning, according to a cog-
                nitive procedure that is exercised on a “semiotically config-
                ured” reality, in which the knowing subject captures certain
                Merkmale, notae characteristicae, in fact we could say se-
                miotic3 “representative marks” of the object, of the known
                reality.
                             In this phase, therefore, Mendelssohn theorizes
                a perfect parallelism between the sphere of knowledge and
                the sphere of the will, thus inscribing himself perfectly in
                that theoretical tradition of the so-called “German rational-
                ism” which can be summarized in the positions of Christian
                Wolff’s Psychologia empirica or the psychological sections
                of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica – yet, in Mendelssohn’s par-
                ticular thematic declension, the salient term is certainly Be-
                wegung, that is the reference to a motility, of the body and
                of our representative faculty in relation to it, which in fact
                sets the whole system in motion.
                             The theoretical framework thus “photographed”
                by Mendelssohn in 1759 will undergo a rapid evolution, of
                which we will try to retrace some passages below. At the
                moment, we limit ourselves to referring to that decisive turn-
                ing point entrusted by the author to a short private annota-
                tion in 1770,4 which Mendelssohn, critically returning to the
                path traveled by gnoseology in Germany in the eighteenth
                century, states that


Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate
awareness that representation “a” improves our state; the wil , on the
other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this representation.
                           The Leibnizian affectus, Baumgarten’s sensi-
                tive knowledge “capable of driving force,” is now definitely

       3 Obviously I am referring in this way to a very long-term semiotic strategy in the theoretical
       discourse that interests us here. See, limiting ourselves here of necessity to mentioning the
       immediate context of reference, the occurrence of the term in the fifty-fifth M. Mendelssohn,
       Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin:
       Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol.1, 565.
       4 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
       1929): vol.1, 225.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                                25                                           AN-ICON
              characterized as pleasure, with the further clarification that
              this modality acts on (and therefore it is appropriate to say
              more precisely to the interior of) our state [Zustand] – we
              would perhaps say modernly on our “psycho-physical bal-
              ance” – and is therefore to be considered in reference to
              our intimate awareness of ourselves, rather than continuing
              to refer to the scope of a cognitive relationship with some
              external object.
                            It is precisely here that we cross in a more articu-
              lated way the theories of Sulzer5 who, at the end of a long re-
              search path that we would define “psycho-physiological,” as
              well as at the start of a new season of German Enlightenment
              thought, definitively breaks the parallelism and the alliance
              between knowledge and will by contrasting, in the context
              of extensively understood “knowledge,” knowledge in the
              proper sense (i.e. the semiotic-representative relationship of
              a knowing subject with a known object) to a feeling devoid
              of an object, through which, in the strict sense, our sensory
              apparatus experiences itself, its own state of well-being or
              discomfort.
                            But let’s take a closer look at Sulzer’s argument,
              in which the eye performs the function of a real paradigm of
              the human soul.6 Our cognitive faculty, says Sulzer develop-
              ing considerations that we can trace back to Christian Wolff,
              is structured in a way that is perfectly analogous to the sense
              of sight and that, in analogy to it, can be described on the
              basis of the laws of optics. Objects present themselves to
              our eye and to our cognitive faculty with a greater or lesser
              degree of clarity, the focus of our attention progressively
              focuses on every single element (imaginable as a physical
              point), leaving the rest of the representation in the twilight.
                           Therefore the objects are known through a pro-
              cess that allows to obtain a clear knowledge of every single
              component of the object, so as to finally have a distinct vi-
              sion of the compound object; for this process to take place,
      5 J.G. Sulzer, “Anmerkungen über den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey
      Ausübung ihrer Hauptvermögen, nämlich des Vermögens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des
      Vermögens zu empfinden befindet” (1763), in Vermischte Philosophische Schriften (1773)
      (Hildesheim: Olms 1974): vol.1, 225-243.
      6 Ibid.: 226.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                            26                                       AN-ICON
              however, adequate light is required, which allows the eye to
              perceive the object.
                            Conversely, when the light is so dazzling as to
              injure the eye, there is no longer any perception of the object,
              but the eye feels tactile, that is, in the manner of the darkest
              sense, itself, its own condition: “The luminous glow touches
              the ocular nerves in such a way that seeing is transformed
              into feeling;”7 this process represents in the best way for
              Sulzer the passage from the state of thinking [Nachdenken]
              to that of feeling [Empfinden]: the representation is no longer
              a representation of the object, but of my condition of plea-
              sure or displeasure: “We do not feel the object, but ourselves.
              When it reflects, the intellect takes care of something that it
              considers to be placed outside of it; when it feels, the soul
              only takes care of itself.”8
                            In this way, however, at the very moment in which
              a fundamental distinction of levels and functions of the soul
              is created, a very precise relationship is established between
              knowing and feeling, in the sense that there is a proportion-
              ality between the degree of darkness of our knowledge and
              the strength of our “sensations” and that the “sensations”
              are aroused, so as to give rise to the transition from the state
              of thinking to that of feeling, when a certain idea arouses a
              crowd of other obscure representations.
                            The characteristic fact of Sulzer’s anthropolog-
              ical vision is that this obscurity of feeling is, in itself, an in-
              surmountable datum: “We feel desire or aversion without
              knowing why: We are moved by forces we do not know.”9
              Precisely from this state of affairs – we observe here in pass-
              ing – the arts derive their origin and at the same time their
              function, destined to enter into a relationship with the darkest
              part of feeling and to turn it to the advantage of humanity.
                            The caesura between knowing and feeling the-
              orized by Sulzer – it would be rather simple to argue – more
              than corresponding to a deepening of the eighteenth-century
              physiological discourse, more than opening a philosophical

      7 Ibid.: 231.
      8 Ibid.: 229-230.
      9 Ibid.: 241.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                      27                                AN-ICON
            question destined to be very influential, is in a certain way the
            symptom, the surface effect, so to speak, of a deep landslide
            destined to cross the whole thinking of the second half of the
            eighteenth century, that of the so-called Popularphilosophie.
                          In light of what has been seen in Mendelssohn’s
            Briefe, that is, in light of the attempt to describe the “mo-
            tions of the soul” along the lines of the laws of physical
            movement, it is striking that the distinction made by Sulzer
            undoubtedly places at the center of the analysis the opacity,
            the resistance of the body to the gnoseological strategies
            by which the body itself is crossed throughout the Leibniz-
            ian-Wolffian season, but the fact that this happens (and this
            precisely affects, and perhaps explains the intimate distrust
            towards Sulzer himself of many of the major protagonists of
            the Aufklärung), creating a static contrast between the state
            [Zustand] of the body and the faculty of knowledge.
                          Conversely, it is precisely the relational dynamics
            that remain at the center of Moses Mendelssohn’s interests,
            as already exemplarily shown in his reference to Boscovich’s
            theses on motor skills in the investigation of the physical
            body and the living organism. And it is precisely here that
            the space for reflection opens up for the concept of illusion,
            destined to become central in Mendelssohn’s aesthetic re-
            flection.
                          Mendelssohn’s aesthetic thought, as it is actu-
            ally quite well known, is very troubled and passes through
            different and sometimes quite intricate theoretical phases;
            all the more noteworthy is the fact that from the first theori-
            zations to the definitive results, the link between an attempt
            at a rational description, even a mathematization of the re-
            lationship between physical movements and “motions of
            the soul,” and the enucleation of the way to function of the
            aesthetic illusion.
                          It is in fact in the correspondence on the tragic
            with Lessing, and therefore already in the years 1756-1757,
            that Mendelssohn starts his reflection on the “ästhetische” or
            even “poetische” Illusion, which is considered the instrument
            through which the dramatic poet can give space - against
            Aristotle and his modern followers – even to the most violent
SALVATORE TEDESCO                   28                               AN-ICON
               feelings, such as hatred or repugnance [Abscheu], on the
               condition that the reader and viewer are under the aesthetic
               effect of the illusion.10
                            Faced with the hesitations manifested by Less-
               ing in the correspondence, Mendelssohn tries to organize
               the theme in a more extended form by articulating a short
               essay Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen (About the
               dominion over inclinations),11 which starts from an attempt
               to mathematize the dynamics of motions of the soul, the-
               orizing a direct proportionality between the kinetic force of
               motivation and the expected good, as well as between the
               kinetic force itself and the clarity of the representation that
               one possesses of it, while this force would be expressed
               according to an inverse proportionality in relation to the time
               necessary for the representation itself to take shape: “Quan-
               tity of motivation = good × clarity ÷ time.”12
                            On this Platonic theoretical basis Mendelssohn
               also explains the effect of illusion, saying that:

When an imitation bears so much resemblance to the original that our
senses can be persuaded at least for a moment to see the original
itself, I call this deception an aesthetic il usion. The poet must speak
in a perfectly sensitive way; for this reason all his speeches must
deceive us in an aesthetic way. For an imitation to be beautiful, he
must deceive us aesthetically; at the same time the higher cognitive
faculties must be aware that it is an imitation, and not nature itself.13
                              Mendelssohn therefore bases the anthropologi-
               cal effect of the aesthetic illusion on the discrepancy between
               sensitivity and intellect. The illusion is aesthetic and it is not
               a common deception when it is addressed directly to the
               sensitivity by involving the higher faculties only indirectly.
                             This discrepancy is first of all a temporal hiatus
               in the effect of the aesthetic representation:

       10 See K.W. Segreff, M. Mendelssohn und die Aufklärungsästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn:
       Grundmann, 1984): 94.
       11 M. Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
       Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1931): vol. 2, 149-155.
       12 Ibid.: 149.
       13 Ibid.: 154.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                             29                                       AN-ICON
It is easy to see that that judgment [that is, the aesthetic judgment]
must precede, and that therefore the conviction about the similarity
must be intuitive, that is, take place through il usion, while on the other
hand, the conviction that it is not the original itself may come a little
late, and therefore be dependent on symbolic knowledge.14
                              The argument itself is not fundamentally new,
                and to give a single example relating to a possible source,
                it is enough to recall Bernard de Fontenelle, who in the Ré-
                flexions sur la poétique of 1742 declares that our pleasure in
                following the painful events of a hero that we love, crying and
                consoling ourselves alternately for what we see, depends
                on our awareness that it is a fiction.15
                              What is new in Mendelssohn is the temporal
                scheme, and the theoretical framework in which it is inscribed,
                which is evidently influenced by the thought of Baumgarten,
                of which Mendelssohn becomes a continuer: While, so to
                speak, the awareness of the fictional character holds true
                in Fontenelle as an undoubtedly presupposed guarantee
                of “poetic” enjoyment, Mendelssohn is instead interested
                in the path that leads from the touched soul of the user to
                the aesthetic object, and in this path he discovers a double
                semiotic-cognitive modality, and precisely two different tem-
                poralities, which, however, are valid as the two necessarily
                coexisting stages for the realization of aesthetic pleasure.
                              Sensitive knowledge intuitively grasps an iden-
                tity between original and copy where only the greater slow-
                ness of intellectual knowledge, due to its symbolic character,
                will be able to reformulate the relationship as a similarity of
                elements (intellectually) recognized as distinct.
                              Only in the temporal interplay between the two
                cognitive stages is aesthetic pleasure realized for Mendels-
                sohn, which takes the form of the subsequent recognition
                of the similar in the imitative representation as identical and
                different. Identical for sensitivity and – with a short hiatus –
                different for the intellect. Aesthetic pleasure therefore allows

       14   Ibid.
       15   B.L.B. de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la Poétique (Paris: M. Brunet, 1742): XXXVI.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                                30                                             AN-ICON
              us to penetrate into the human soul, indeed to say more
              precisely within the motivational dynamic that governs the
              movements of the soul, so as to relate sensitivity and intel-
              lect not for the purpose of a progressive “unveiling” of re-
              ality that destroys illusion and error, but on the contrary for
              the purpose of an enjoyment that finds its root in imitation,
              capable of emerging with particular evidence right in the
              case of the imitation of passions that are violent and pain-
              ful,16 which would not only turn out to be such if they were
              experienced in reality, but which would be no less painful
              if we were simply faced with an “interpretative error” of our
              sensitivity destined to be rationally overcome.
                           In the same year 1757, one of the decisive writ-
              ings of Mendelssohnian aesthetics, the Betrachtungen über
              die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und
              Wissenschaften (Reflections on the Sources and Connec-
              tions of the Fine Arts and Sciences),17 added a further de-
              cisive element to this descriptive framework, clarifying that,
              from the semiotic point of view, intuitive knowledge concerns
              both the case in which the object is immediately present to
              our senses, and the case in which it is represented through
              signs [Zeichen] through which the ideas of the designated
              [Ideen des Bezeichneten] can be seen more distinctly than
              those of the sign.
                           The beauty of the aesthetic relationship (but
              by now Mendelssohn’s discourse – precisely through the
              reference to the designation process – strongly gravitates
              towards artistic beauty) therefore offers the example of a
              peculiar transparency of the medium, and it is right through
              the transparency of the sign that the object appears with
              an evidence that captures and sets in motion the faculties
              of our soul.
                           In the same years, in controversy with Reimarus,
              Mendelssohn will also return to the nature of the imagina-
              tion and to the overall relationship of the faculties of the

      16 M. Mendelssohn, Von der Herrschaft über die Neigungen: 155.
      17 M. Mendelssohn, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen
      Künste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-
      Verlag, 1929): vol. I, 169.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                            31                                       AN-ICON
              soul, saying that – far from being considered a faculty in its
              own right – the imagination is rather a modification of the
              unique, original and in principle completely indeterminate
              representative capacity of the soul which however “through
              the state of one’s own and of one’s body [durch ihren und
              ihres Körpers Zustand],”18 is addressed and configured in
              specific ways, articulating itself precisely as Einbildungsk-
              raft facing the past, Empfindungsvermögen adhering to the
              present, Vorhersehungsvermögen of the future.
                            The famous statement of Baumgarten – accord-
              ing to which the individual soul represents the universe pro
              positu corporis –19 is therefore changed in a decisive way
              by redefining the position of the body as Zustand, a state or
              more precisely a condition of well-being or malaise.
                            Let us pause for a moment to consider Men-
              delssohn’s path so far: The “aesthetic illusion” is clearly
              distinguished from mere “cognitive deception,” at the very
              moment in which the attention thus shifts one way in the
              direction of internal dynamics to our soul, that is towards
              the play, the balance of the faculties, present in our soul and
              set in motion by the aesthetic representations, and on the
              other hand it traces the dynamics of the relational movement
              between our soul and the aesthetic object, now more and
              more clearly distinguished from the cognitive one.
                            The brief note of 1770 to which attention has
              already been drawn testifies to a deepening of the first
              question – that relating to the internal dynamics of our soul
             – which would not be imaginable and would probably not
              have assumed that configuration without the openings on
              one’s own body and on his condition made possible by the
              almost contemporary theories of Sulzer.
                            Mendelssohn therefore writes:

Pleasure should not have been compared with wil . That is an intimate
awareness that representation “a” improves our state [Zustand];
      18 M. Mendelssohn, “Rezensionsartikel,” in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759-
      1765), 20 nov. 1760: 300 in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann-
      Holzboog,1991): no. 5,1.
      19 A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1779) (Halle: Hemmerde, 1939): § 512.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                              32                                         AN-ICON
the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the soul to realize this
representation. Pleasure is, so to speak, a favorable judgment of the
soul on her real state; the wil , on the other hand, is a tendency of the
soul to achieve this state.20
                             In this way, undoubtedly, Mendelssohn moves
              towards an overall redefinition of the “system of faculties”
              that distances him from the Wolffian tradition as well as from
              Baumgarten, his model, approaching that tripartite division
              between the cognitive sphere, the sphere of will and aesthet-
              ic pleasure that characterizes the second eighteenth cen-
              tury from the so-called Popularphilosophie to Kant. No less
              significant is that this occurs through a specific attention to
              one’s own body, and to the way in which the representative
              processes do not so much modify our relationship with reality
              on the objective side, as they redefine its internal resonance.
                             However, whereas precisely on this point Sulzer
              chose an “extremist” reading, speaking of a “feeling devoid
              of an object,” through which our body senses itself and not
              the object, and therefore sacrificed the understanding of the
              dynamic relationship to highlight the question of the Zustand,
              of the state/condition of the organ (remember what Sulzer
              says about the eye and sight), of one’s own body, of the soul
              vitalistically considered coextensive with the body, Mendels-
              sohn never loses sight of the relationality, the dynamism of
              the framework of faculty.
                             It is perhaps also for this reason that his is the
              most significant figure in the entire German debate from
              Baumgarten to Kant.
                             Another short essay is dedicated to what has
              just been defined as the dynamics of the relational move-
              ment between our soul and the object, dating back to June
              1776, in which, similarly to what we have just seen, Men-
              delssohn moves, so to speak, from “systematic reasons,”
              openly declared already from the title of the fragment: [Über


       20 M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
       1929): vol. 1, 225.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                            33                                      AN-ICON
                das Erkenntnis-, das Empfindungs- und das Begehrungsver-
                mögen] On the faculty of knowing, of feeling and of appetite.
                            What six years earlier had been entrusted to an
                almost incidental note here instead – even if the writing is
                destined not to leave the private workshop of Mendelssohn’s
                thought – acquires the characteristics of a system program:

Between the faculty of knowing and the faculty to appetite there is
the faculty of feeling [Empfindungsvermögen], by means of which
we feel pleasure or displeasure about something, we appreciate it,
approve it, find it pleasant, or we despise it, blame it and find it un-
pleasant [.. ]. The end of the faculty of knowing is the truth; that is, as
we possess a faculty of knowing, we strive to make the concepts
in our soul accord with the qualities of their objects. The end of the
faculty of hearing is the good; that is, insofar as we possess a faculty
of feeling, we strive to make the objective qualities accord with our
concepts of goodness, order and beauty.21
                              The truly innovative moment of this position lies
                in the clear distinction of areas between will and pleasure:
                The pleasure for a representation does not necessarily imply
                the desire for the object that underlies it.
                              Mendelssohn is above all interested in distin-
                guishing two modalities of relationship with the object: In the
                cognitive relationship we modify our representations to adapt
                them to the truth of the object, in the case of the faculty of
                feeling we aim instead to harmonize the properties of the
                object with our own concepts of good, order, beauty, and
                the tool for this to happen is clearly identified in the aesthetic
                illusion. The peculiarity of the statute of aesthetic illusion is
                then the true core of Mendelssohn’s discourse, when it is
                distinguished both from cognitive truth and also from the
                concrete modification of reality which the will aims at.
                              But there is more; Mendelssohn distinguishes
                two fundamental human attitudes, the first tending to truth,
                the second to poetic invention [Erdichtung]. If the first cor-
                responds to the work of the faculty of knowing, the poetic

       21   Ibid.: vol. 3, 1, 276.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                          34                                 AN-ICON
              invention will instead follow the intent of keeping in exercise
              [in Übung zu erhalten]22 the faculty of feeling. In the same
              days, another brief note23 completes the Mendelssohnian
              description, noting that this “faculty to entertain oneself” [Un-
              terhaltungsfähigkeit] (it is interesting how Mendelssohn tries
              to set the theoretical framework in motion even in proposing
              new names for a system of faculties perceived as in active
              transformation with respect to the Wolffian model) has an
              objective side (simplifying I would say the quantity and or-
              der of semiotic markers capable of “giving something to
              think about”) and a subjective side (the faculty itself and the
              ordering criteria it is able to set). The beauty will therefore
              reside in the harmony between the objective and subjective
              aspects of the new faculty, capable of arousing in us “in the
              contemplation of the object, the awareness of our strengths
              rather than our limits, and movement is pleasant.”24
                            Conversely, that disharmony that comes from
              the excess of the object over our faculties will cause dizzi-
              ness, and on a conceptual level it will give life to the sublime.
                            The conclusive synthesis of the Morgenstunden,
              in 1785, will insert the considerations that we have followed
              up to now into a much broader theoretical framework, without
              however further introducing profound changes; confirming
              and reformulating again the tripartition between the faculty of
              knowing, that of desiring and the “aesthetic faculty,” now re-
              defined as the capacity of appreciation [Billigungsvermögen],
              Mendelssohn now distinguishes between two fundamental
              aspects of human knowledge, depending on whether one
              considers its material relevance or the formal configuration.
                            From the material point of view, that is, a given
              notion can be true or false; considered from this point of view,
              knowledge knows no degrees, truth is an “indivisible unity.”25
              It is quite another thing to consider knowledge as capable
              of arousing pleasure or displeasure, that is, as an object of

      22 Ibid.
      23 M. Mendelssohn, “Über objektive und subjektive Unterhaltungsfähigkeit,” in Gesammelte
      Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1929): vol. 3, 1, 275.
      24 Ibid.
      25 M. Mendelssohn, “Morgenstunden,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe
      (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog; 1974): vol. 3, 2, 62.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                            35                                       AN-ICON
               the faculty of appreciation: precisely this can be defined as
               the formal aspect. And vice versa, this consists exclusively
               in evaluating, in comparison, in gradation, in plus and minus;
               moreover, every conceivable degree of this scale of values
               can be thought of “with the same truth,”26 which is evidently
               a truth of the formal aspect of knowledge, a peculiar truth
               of aesthetic illusion.
                            Moses Mendelssohn’s thought, in its different
               phases and declinations, through the collaboration with
               Lessing and up to the final results of the Morgenstunden,
               constitutes the exemplary arrival point of an era of theo-
               retical research that we are interested in investigating not
               only in terms of the solutions that he found for his time,
               but also in relation to open problems, which continue to
               question our time.




      26   Ibid.: 63.

SALVATORE TEDESCO                     36                             AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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