LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM. - German thinker, critic, poet and playwright, b. at Kamenz on 22 Jan. 1729, d. at Wolfenbüttel on 15 Feb. 1781. A pupil of Wolff at Leipzig and a student of Spinoza, a researcher tireless in the field of philological and theological sciences, he is one of the major representatives of the Enlightenment (v.) in Germany. He belongs to the ranks of those thinkers who were then designated as "Popularphilosophen," writers free from the technique and jargon of the school; he was averse to the system, even if sensitive to certain systematic demands of Enlightenment philosophy, and a shrewd reworker of the doctrines that characterize his age.
His thought, which moves constantly between Leibniz and Spinoza, attempts an accord between the two philosophers through the unity of the one in the whole, that is, through the conception of individuality that dilates until it encloses the universal within itself. L. wants to include pre-established harmony in Spinozism, to save the particular from absorption into the divinity while continually falling back into Spinozistic pantheism. In his pamphlet Über die Wirklichkeit der Dinge ausser Gott, he maintains in fact, despite his assertion that he wishes to adhere to Leibniz's thought, that if the concept of a thing is in God, the thing too must be in him, and that therefore the concepts of things in God are the things themselves. According to Jacobi, L. could not tolerate the idea of an absolutely infinite personal being, and therefore represented the divinity as the soul of the whole.
L. occupied himself at length with religious problems in writings, partly propagandistic and partly polemical, that are inspired by the dominant motifs of the Enlightenment, even if here and there some personal note betrays the impatience that he, with all his rationalism, harbored toward the closed attitude of the century. Particularly in the Anti-Goeze (Leipzig 1778) and in the Gespräche für Freimaurer (Göttingen 1778) he combats the traditional orthodoxy of the positive religions, and elaborates a philosophy of religion that should be founded above all on the internal connection of nature and history. "The best revealed religion is that which contains the fewest additions to natural religion" (Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion, § 11).
Against the "fanaticism" of biblical erudition and against the predominance of theology he maintains that the scriptural traditions must spring from intimate truth, and not vice versa, that religion is true not because the evangelists and apologists taught it, but that they taught it because it is true. In his polemic against Goeze he affirms that Christianity must essentially concern the heart, and that the critique of historical and philosophical proofs must rest on quite other principles than those hitherto followed by the theologies of the positive religions. The anti-dogmatic accents of the Anti-Goeze, of the Gespräche f. Freim., and his open struggle against orthodoxy, resurface under an artistic guise in Nathan der Weise (Berlin 1779), where the idea of natural religion is meant to be a symbol of peace among the positive religions of humanity.
In the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (ibid. 1780), which remains his philosophical masterpiece, religiosity rises to the principle of all human evolution. Education and religion serve to develop man's natural faculties and aptitudes. Through Revelation the human race is elevated from the lower degrees to the higher ones; revealed truths must gradually be transformed into truths of reason if the human race is truly to make them its own. For while God was educating his people with elementary means, the other peoples of the earth were advancing along the path of civilization with the sole light of reason. The two revelations are not substantially different; and when the age of Vollendung, of full maturity, comes, there will in fact no longer be any doubt concerning the intimate rationality of religious revelation. L. was above all concerned, in this work, with organizing his historical-religious experiences, his conception of religiosity and of Christianity, whose value presents itself to him as eminently ethical insofar as it must educate one to do good for good's sake.
Finally, of L.'s works, mention must be made of the Laokoon (1776), where he marks the limits between the figurative arts and poetry, and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-69), where he distinguishes poetry from history, and, within poetry, drama from the fable and the moral tale.
One must recognize in L. a rich and complex personality, not devoid of genius and of insights that, if on the one hand they betray his belonging to Enlightenment rationalism, on the other denounce the obscure tendency to surpass it. He expressed in an unequivocal manner that bold and self-assured attitude that is proper to the century, but he attempted at the same time to save man and every human value from the constraints of the narrow philosophy of the Aufklärung. From the most intransigent rationalism, by which all his thought had been inspired, L. had ended up seeking a liberation in the pantheistic and naturalistic tendencies that prelude the awakening of the new century, and in foreboding, above abstract reason, the rights of humanity. An apostle of the Enlightenment, he had perceived the gaps that were widening within it, and intuited the great questions that, only a few years later, would take shape before the rigid canons of that doctrine. His concept of tending incessantly toward truth, even if on condition of never reaching it, is already an anticipation of the motif that Rousseau would transmit to the leaders of the Sturm und Drang and then to the Romantics, that of an interiority that is passion and revolt, and therefore helps to revalue, in contrast to the Enlightenment conception, life, history and tradition.
Bibliography14 works
Bianca Magnino