Letters about the sensations

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The letters about feelings form the second publication by the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn . With this book, Mendelssohn devoted himself to the subject of aesthetics for the first time and developed a theory of pleasure or pleasant sensation.

Mendelssohn's aesthetic sensation is upgraded to a faculty of knowledge. The demand for its own morality for the "Schaubühne", as the theater was called at the time, was essentially new. Mendelssohn's thoughts thus led to a separation between ethics and aesthetics, as was finally carried out by Kant in the subsequent period .

In the second part of the text, on this basis, a. discussed the problem of suicide . Mendelssohn tried to show that the moral and the aesthetic valuation of an object must be very different. Mendelssohn thus rejects any moral justification for suicide. Its representation in aesthetic contexts is justified. Because the Schaubühne has its own morality. The purpose of the tragedy is to arouse passions. Suicide is therefore well suited to theatrical staging. The vehemence of the passion that drives the suicide arouses pity in the audience without, however, denying the inadmissibility of such an act.

literature

Moses Mendelssohn: About the sensations; Berlin 1755