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WorkGotthold Ephraim Lessing

Philosophischer Nachlass

(lit.: Philosophical Remains)

Private notes on Spinoza, on God and the world, on senses we lack, and on the difference between learning and wisdom.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing17 passages held

  • German, the original language
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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

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Overview

After Lessing's death, a remark he had made in conversation turned into a scandal. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, a philosopher from Düsseldorf, wrote to Moses Mendelssohn in November 1783 that during a visit to Wolfenbüttel in July 1780 Lessing had told him the orthodox ideas of God were no longer for him, and that if he had to name himself after anyone, he knew of no one but Spinoza. To contemporaries, Jacobi was calling Lessing an atheist. These papers let a reader weigh the report against what Lessing wrote for himself. In a letter-essay to Mendelssohn, answering the first of Mendelssohn's philosophical dialogues, Lessing agrees that Spinoza put Leibniz on the track of pre-established harmony, and only on the track: the working out was Leibniz's own. In 1763 he set down a short argument that he could form no idea of how things could be real outside God. If God's idea of a thing contains every determination it has, nothing is left over for a reality outside him, and the ideas God has of real things might as well be the things themselves. That essay was first printed in 1795, in the life of Lessing published by his brother Karl. Another fragment, in numbered propositions, argues that human beings may have more than five senses: the soul climbed through lower stages to reach its present five, and further senses may correspond to kinds of matter we cannot yet perceive, electricity and magnetism among them. The last piece is a set of private remarks, among them that he never wished to be learned, and that the wealth of other people's experience taken from books is learning, while one's own experience is wisdom.

Key concepts

What is pre-established harmony?

Leibniz's idea that body and soul do not act on each other but were arranged from the start to keep in step, each following its own laws. Lessing's point is that Spinoza was the first to show that the body's changes could follow from its own mechanical forces alone, which put Leibniz on the track of the idea. The working out was Leibniz's own.

What does it mean for a thing to be real "outside God"?

To exist with a reality of its own, beyond the idea God has of it. Lessing doubts this can even be thought. If God's idea of a thing already contains everything about it, its reality included, nothing is left over to exist separately. The ideas God has of real things might then simply be those things, and the world would exist within God.

What is the difference between learning and wisdom, in Lessing's remarks?

Learning is the wealth of other people's experience taken from books, and wisdom is experience of one's own. Lessing ranks the smallest chapter of wisdom above millions of learning. He says he never wished to be learned, and wanted only to be able to use a learned book when he had to, the way one keeps a tool for emergencies.

Why might human beings have more than five senses?

Because the soul, Lessing argues, did not start with five but reached them through lower stages, and nothing says the climb must stop here. Each sense answers to a kind of matter, and there may be kinds of matter, such as those at work in electricity and magnetism, that no present sense perceives directly. A future sense could open them to us.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Nothing Real Outside God

If God knows everything about a thing perfectly, in what sense does the thing exist apart from him? Lessing's private notes press the question to the edge of Spinoza.

Writing to Mendelssohn, Lessing agrees that Spinoza put Leibniz on the track of pre-established harmony, being the first whose system showed that every change in a body could follow from its own mechanical forces, but only on the track: the working out was Leibniz's. A short argument of 1763 goes further. If God's idea of a thing contains every determination it has, nothing remains to make the thing real outside him, and God's ideas of real things might as well be the things themselves.

  • metaphysics
  • substance monism
  • divine ideas
  • pre-established harmony
  • theology
  • mind-body problem
  • causation
  • existence
  • religion

Enter a dialogue

More Senses, Own Experience

How much of the world can human beings take in, and how should they come to know it? The fragment on the senses and the private remarks answer from opposite ends.

In the fragment on the senses, Lessing argues that the soul did not begin with its present five but climbed to them through lower stages, and that further senses may correspond to kinds of matter we cannot yet perceive, electricity and magnetism among them. The remarks turn the same modesty on scholarship. Lessing never wished to be learned, only able to use a learned book when needed. Other people's experience gathered from books is learning, one's own experience is wisdom, and the smallest chapter of wisdom outweighs millions of learning.

  • sensory perception
  • soul
  • matter
  • epistemology
  • nature
  • science
  • knowledge
  • wisdom
  • education
  • judgment

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
17
distinct concepts
61
by passages held, corpus-wide
#790

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!

    Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.

     DE
  2. 1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel

    The workshop of Lessing's dramatic theory: here, against Mendelssohn and Nicolai, he first tested the account of pity that he later rebuilt for the Hamburg Dramaturgy.

     DE
  3. 1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie)

    Prepared in Breslau, where Lessing served a Prussian general from 1760 to 1765, this is the one part Lessing published of a larger planned study, and it carries over the poet–philosopher divide of his Pope essay into the arts.

     DE
  4. 1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie)

    A periodical before it was a book, written week by week for a theatre that did not last, this became Lessing's principal work on the theory of drama.

     DE
  5. 1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit

    Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.

     DE
  6. 1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik)

    A reply to a single defender of the Easter accounts, written in the winter of 1777–78, just before the quarrel with Goeze crowded out every other exchange.

     DE
  7. 1778 Anti-Goeze

    The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.

     DE
  8. 1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)

    Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.

     DE
  9. 1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)

    Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.

     DE
  10. 1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)

    Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.

     DE
  11. 1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)

    An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.

     DE
  12. 1795 Philosophischer Nachlass you are here DE
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