Pope ein Metaphysiker!

(lit.: Pope a Metaphysician!)

Two young friends answer a royal academy's prize question by denying that its subject was a philosopher at all.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing59 passages held

German, the original language

First published: 1755(aged 26)
Original language: German

Overview

In 1753 the Berlin Academy of Sciences, led by its president Maupertuis, set a prize question for 1755: examine the system of Alexander Pope contained in the proposition that all is well, and compare it with the optimism of Leibniz, the academy's founding president. Lessing and the Jewish scholar Moses Mendelssohn, his closest friend in Berlin, replied that the question was badly put. Pope wrote An Essay on Man as a poet, and a poet takes each truth from whichever system makes it strike hardest — from Epicurus when he praises pleasure, from the Stoics when he praises virtue. To ask for Pope's system was to mistake a poem for a treatise. The essay then does what the academy asked anyway, in three sections that follow the three parts of the question, and finds that Pope and Leibniz do not even mean the same thing by the best of all worlds: Pope pictures a chain of beings descending step by step with no link missing, a picture that, the authors argue, Leibniz never drew. The manuscript was ready, but Mendelssohn refused to be named as an author, and in February 1755 Lessing decided not to enter it. It came out later that year in Danzig as an anonymous pamphlet, its preface joking that a prize would only have set the two authors quarrelling over it. Readers took it for Lessing's work alone, and it made little stir. Its separation of the poet from the philosopher returned eleven years later as the starting point of Laocoön.

Key concepts

What does "all is well" mean in Pope's poem?

That whatever happens belongs to a whole ordered by God, so that what looks like evil from one place serves the good of the whole. The Berlin Academy treated the line as a philosophical system and asked how it compared with Leibniz's optimism. Lessing and Mendelssohn read it instead as a poet's conviction, backed by whatever arguments strike hardest.

What is the great chain of being?

Pope's picture of creation as an unbroken ladder of beings, descending by degrees from the infinite through humans down to the smallest creatures, with no rung empty. Each being holds the place its degree of perfection requires, and humans must appear somewhere in it. The pamphlet argues that the picture is Pope's own, and that Leibniz never made it the ground of his best world.

What counts as a "system" in this essay?

A body of truths strictly connected with one another, each following from those before it, as in a philosopher's treatise. The authors ask whether the Academy meant the word in this strict sense. If it did, Pope has no system: a poem gathers striking truths from many schools, Epicurean and Stoic alike, without binding them into one chain of proofs.

Why do the authors link Pope to Malebranche rather than Leibniz?

Because Pope defends God by saying he governs through general laws and will not reverse them for favourites, as if Etna should stop erupting at a sage's request. That, the authors say, is the system of the French philosopher Malebranche, which makes only general laws the object of God's will. On that view the evil that follows in particular cases was never what God willed.

Themes of the book

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

A Poem Is Not a System

Can a poem hold a philosophy that a learned academy can examine? Lessing and Mendelssohn answer that the question mistakes what poets do.

The Berlin Academy asked for Pope's system and a comparison with Leibniz's optimism. The pamphlet first asks whether the word system is meant in its strict sense, then answers that a poet has none. A poet takes each truth from whichever school makes it strike hardest, speaking with Epicurus when he praises pleasure and with the Stoics when he praises virtue. Expecting a system from An Essay on Man mistakes a poem for a treatise. Having said so, the authors examine the question anyway, part by part.

poetry
philosophy and poetry
philosophical systems
philosophical method
genre
interpretation
rhetoric
authorship
logic
irony
philosophy
intellectual history

Enter a dialogue

The Great Chain and the Best World

Do Pope and Leibniz mean the same thing when they call this world the best? The pamphlet argues that they do not, and that the difference shows in Pope's pictures.

Pope pictures a great chain of beings descending by degrees from the infinite to humans and below, with no link missing, and somewhere in it there must be beings like us. The authors argue that Leibniz never drew that picture. Where Pope justifies the evils of the world, asking whether Etna should stop erupting because a sage requests it, he seems to them to adopt Malebranche's system, which makes only general laws the object of God's will. Pope's optimism and Leibniz's share a phrase, not a foundation.

theodicy
problem of evil
divine providence
metaphysics
best possible world
best of all possible worlds
cosmic order
leibnizian metaphysics
human nature
degrees of perfection
causality
natural law
natural laws
laws of nature
cosmology
hierarchy
divine immanence
human place in nature

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 59
distinct concepts: 91
by passages held, corpus-wide: #626

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine providence” and “problem of evil”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 13 pairings. 71 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
divine providence	problem of evil	8
philosophical systems	poetry	7
problem of evil	theodicy	7
divine providence	theodicy	6
metaphysics	poetry	4
best possible world	cosmic order	3
cosmic order	metaphysics	2
metaphysics	philosophical systems	2
philosophical systems	theodicy	2
best possible world	metaphysics	1
divine providence	metaphysics	1
metaphysics	problem of evil	1
poetry	theodicy	1

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.

1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker! you are here DE
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
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
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
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
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
1778 Anti-Goeze
The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.
DE
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
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
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
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
1795 Philosophischer Nachlass
Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.
DE

— or open another of their works