EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In 1785 the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) published his last work to appear during his lifetime, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence of God). As Mendelssohn himself conceded in the Preface, the work was written in virtual ignorance of the recent writings in metaphysics, including the critique of traditional metaphysics by the “all-crushing Kant” (des alles zermalmendenen Kant). Mendelssohn's apparently anachronistic attempt at a demonstration of the existence of a personal God by rational means belongs into the specific context of an intellectual dispute that shook the German lands in the 1780s.

In 1783 the writer and philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), had stated in a communication to Mendelssohn, which he made public in 1785, that the writer and philosopher, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), had confessed to Jacobi toward the end of his life to not being able to believe in a personal God any longer and to have become a pantheist or Spinozist. Jacobi considered Lessing's confession as evidence of the impossibility to safeguard the belief in a personal God by rational means and sought support for his own theistic religious convictions in a leap of faith that defied reason. Confronted with the dilemma of Lessing's alleged pantheistic atheism and Jacobi's professed irrationalist fideism, Mendelssohn retreated in Morning Hours to the very position of a rationalist theism that had been rendered obsolete by Kant's principal limitation of valid theoretical cognition to objects of sense and specifically by his systematic refutation of the traditional rationalist arguments for the existence of a personal God.