Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn

He became fully aware of his illness one night when he awoke after a short and restless sleep. He found himself incapable of moving and had the feeling of something lashing his neck with fiery rods, his heart was palpitating and he was in an extreme anxiety, yet fully conscious. This spell was than broken suddenly by some external stimulation. Attacks of this kind recurred. This sort of attack, in milder form however, had presumably occurred many years earlier. His physicians and especially Dr. Marcus Elieser Bloch diagnosed the disease as due to congestion of blood in the brain, and after some controversy this diagnosis was also accepted by the famous Hanoverian court physician, Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann, an admirer of Mendelssohn. Brand Auraban, Aron, The Illness of Moses Mendelssohn, "Koroth" 6, 421-426, 1974 Mendelssohn was treated With China bark, blood lettings on the foot, leeches applied to the ears, enemas, foot baths, lemonade and mainly vegetarian food. No mental stress whatsoever was ordered. Mendelssohn took his suffering with calm resignation. He tried to avoid mental stress. However, he later wrote many learned treatises and also his main philosophical work on Judaism Jerusalem (1783) and The Morning Hours (1785).

Ever since his friend Lessing had died, he had wanted to write an essay or a book about his character. When Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, an acquaintance of both men, heard of Mendelssohn's project, he stated that he had confidential information about Lessing being a "spinozist", which, in these years, was regarded as being more or less synonymous with "atheist" - something which Lessing was accused of being anyway by religious circles Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study, p. 733 f. . This led to an exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn which showed they had hardly any common ground. Mendelssohn then published his Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen ber das Dasein Gottes ( Morning hours or lectures about God's existence ), seemingly a series of lectures to his oldest son, his son-in-law and a young friend, usually held "in the morning hours", in which he explained his personal philosophical world-view, his own understanding of Spinoza and Lessing's "purified" ("gelutert") pantheism. But almost simultaneously with the publication of this book in 1785, Jacobi published extracts of his and Mendelssohn's letters as "Briefe ber die Lehre Spinozas", stating publicly that Lessing was a self confessed "pantheist" in the sense of "atheist". Mendelssohn was thus drawn into a poisonous literary controversy, and found himself attacked from all sides, including former friends or acquaintances such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Georg Hamann. Mendelssohn wrote a reply addressed "To Lessing's Friends" (An die Freunde Lessings) and died on January 4, 1786 as the result of a cold contracted while carrying this manuscript to his publishers on New Year's Eve.

Source: Wikipedia > Moses Mendelssohn