Frederick Beiser’s chapter demonstrates the palpable impact of Moses Mendelssohn on Lessing’s Laocoon. Mendelssohn composed his own treatise about the differences between the arts in 1757, paying particular attention to hybrid artistic forms that combined ‘natural’ and ‘arbitrary’ signs through their fusion of ‘successive’ and ‘instantaneous’ elements. In his comments on an early draft of Laocoon, Mendelssohn reminded Lessing that poetry—due to the arbitrariness of its signs—could also successfully express objects that coexist with one another rather than consecutive actions in time. Of all Mendelssohn’s comments on Laocoon, Beiser argues, this was the one that most troubled Lessing as he tried to develop a system for understanding ancient ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’.
Im Rückgriff auf die Ursprünge der philosophischen Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert (Johann Georg Sulzer, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Schiller, Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, Immanuel Kant) analysiert Konrad Paul Liessmann die Vielfalt ästhetischer Empfindungen.
Er verteidigt sie gegen die Beschränkungen durch die Kunsttheorien der Moderne ebenso wie gegen die These, dass in Geschmacksfragen alles subjektiv und damit gleich gültig sei.
Does Judaism Have Dogma? Moses Mendelssohn and a Pivotal Nineteenth-Century Debate
