Date:
Location:
"A Jewish 'Port Royal': Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Canon of Linguistic Logic and the German Enlightenment that Never Knew It Existed"
Speaker:
Zachary Hayworth, PhD Candidate, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.
Contact:
Ilana Freedman
ifreedman@g.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
Moses Mendelssohn’ Phädon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Phaedo, or concerning the immortality of the soul), at once a literal translation of and allegorical elaboration (midrash) on the ancient Greek dialogue, presents an argument for the necessity of postulating the immortality of the human soul in the afterlife which, despite Kant’s criticism in a footnote to the Transcendental Dialectic of the First Critique of the materiality Mendelssohn attributes to the soul, exerted significant influence on Kant’s moral philosophy, providing the lynchpin in Kant’s notion of the highest good. But the metaphysical postulate for the immortality of the soul, presented in allegorical terms in the Phädon, is rigorously argued in purely analytical terms in Mendelssohn’s little-read and largely untranslated Rabbinic Hebrew commentary on Maimonides’ Milot Ha-higgayon (Concepts of Logic) and introductions to his Bi’ur (commentary) on the Pentateuch and the book of Psalms. There, Mendelssohn argues for the unique coextensivity of Hebrew grammar with Aristotelian logic, which makes it possible to discuss transparently in Hebrew metaphysical issues which in other languages like German and Greek can be treated only with ironic self-consciousness of their incommensurability with theological truth. Through three close readings of linguistic-philosophical passages in Mendelssohn’s commentary on Maimonides and introductions to the Old Testament, this paper will develop Mendelssohn’s unique theory of the linguistic sign, paying close attention to the Talmudic and radically non-Enlightenment rhetorical idiom of these texts. This analysis of Mendelssohn’s largely unknown position on the relationship between language and philosophical discourse, between rhetoric and metaphysics, will provide an occasion to examine on a preliminary basis Mendelssohn’ political emancipatory agenda in introducing into 18th-century Jewish philosophical discourse an analytically rigorous theory of the metaphysical advantages of the Hebrew language which he avoided presenting in any of his German writings.
