Schorch, Grit
Senior Fellow: November 2020–March 2021
Research Project: Seeing the Sounds, Hearing the Colors: Moses Mendelssohn on Vision, Optics, and Geometry and Its Impact on Philosophy and Law
Moses Mendelssohn’s sceptical approach to philosophy and aesthetics has many different layers, one of which will be analysed in the framework of this project. His paradoxical dictum—“den Schall sehen, die Farben hören, oder den Hunger mit Fingern greifen” (Die Bildsäule, 1784)—points to an epistemic problem in science and philosophy. It contains in a nutshell the key question that this project intends to discuss, following in Mendelssohn’s footsteps: What are the procedures we use to systematise sensual perception in order to produce universal concepts, and how do these procedures—which mainly relate to the visual sense—deal with the dilemma of diversity in terms of sensual perception on the one hand and its dependence on particular, natural, and/or conventional languages on the other? This philosophical, aesthetical, and anthropological approach to the question of sense perception will be compared with the exegetical discussion of Ex 20.15 in Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur and beyond. When the people on Mount Sinai “see the sounds” of revelation, the paradox does not challenge the visual nature of science and philosophy, but rather points to the boundaries of human capability when it comes to the revelation events, testimonies, and laws handed down by Jewish tradition.
Before coming to Hamburg, Grit Schorch was a senior fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.