Delambre, Anaïs
Junior Fellow: October 2023–January 2024
Research Project: Moses Mendelssohn’s Conception of the Beautiful: Scepticism and Rationalist Aesthetics in Jewish Philosophy
This research project aims to shed light on the contribution of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) to German aesthetics, in this case through his conception of the Beautiful, as it emphasises his original image as a Jewish philosopher doing German philosophy. More precisely, Mendelssohn’s position on the Beautiful can be studied and understood as an articulation between rationalism and scepticism. In other words, by overturning sensualism, Mendelssohn displays an intellectual scepticism, denying human reason the capacity to fully access the Beautiful.
Moreover, Mendelssohn’s involvement in the field of aesthetics goes beyond the mere desire to participate in contemporary debates (the definition of the sublime, the theory of mixed feelings, and so on), for such a field requires a great deal of culture, ranging from antiquity to his own time period. He proves that he is just as worthy as anyone else to take part in the debates on the Beautiful, the tragic, or aesthetics as a science that has developed since Baumgarten’s work. This project also intends to study Mendelssohn’s aesthetics regarding his status as a maskil, a man of the Haskalah promoting Jewish emancipation and the Jews’ exit from the ghetto. Although his aesthetic works were written in German and his religious texts were written in Hebrew, it would be a mistake to treat them separately. Instead, this project seeks to bring the two fields into dialogue and to rethink Mendelssohn’s aesthetics through his role as a maskil. In this way, it intends to show that he is a paradigmatic example of how Jewish and German cultures were able to exchange and collaborate as aesthetics emerged in Germany.
Anaïs Delambre is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Université de Montréal.