This Day in Philosophy — 6 September: Mendelssohn and Haraway, two ways of asking who counts as a subject

Philosophy has a recurring question that changes costume every century: who is admitted to the community of reason, and on what terms?

Two people born on 6 September answered it, in circumstances so different that the continuity is easy to miss.

Mendelssohn: the Enlightenment's test case#

Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau on 6 September 1729, the son of a Torah scribe. He walked to Berlin at fourteen to follow his teacher, entered the city through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and worked as a bookkeeper in a silk factory while teaching himself Latin, French, English and mathematics.

He then became one of the most admired philosophers in Germany.

In 1763 he won the prize of the Prussian Royal Academy for an essay on evidence in metaphysics, beating an entry submitted by Immanuel Kant. His Phädon (1767), a reworking of Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, was a European bestseller and earned him the name "the German Socrates". Lessing modelled the title character of Nathan the Wise on him.

Jerusalem#

His most important philosophical work is Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (1783), and its argument has not aged.

Mendelssohn separates the sphere of the state from the sphere of religion by a clean criterion: the state may regulate actions; it has no jurisdiction over convictions. Belief cannot be commanded, because belief is not the sort of thing a will can produce to order. A religion that requires the coercive power of the state has already conceded that it cannot persuade.

He therefore argued against religious authorities holding powers of excommunication — including those of his own community. And he argued that a state has no business making citizenship conditional on a profession of faith.

The pressure on him was not abstract. The Swiss theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater publicly challenged him either to refute Christianity or to convert. Mendelssohn's reply — that he had no wish to attack another man's religion, and that his own required no such contest — is a model of how to decline a trap without conceding it.

The question of the Enlightenment#

In 1784 the Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its readers: What is enlightenment?

Mendelssohn answered in September of that year. Kant's answer, the famous one, appeared in December. Kant later noted that he had not seen Mendelssohn's essay when he wrote his own.

The two answers differ, and the difference is instructive. Kant defines enlightenment as emergence from a self-incurred immaturity — an act of courage, sapere aude. Mendelssohn is more cautious. He distinguishes enlightenment (the theoretical side, knowledge) from culture (the practical side, skill and social usage), and warns that the two can come apart: a society may be highly cultivated and unenlightened, or enlightened in ways that corrode its practical life. He adds that the abuse of enlightenment weakens moral feeling, and that a nation reaching the summit of culture is nearest to decline.

Read after the twentieth century, Mendelssohn's caution reads less like timidity than like foresight.

Haraway: the subject that was never pure#

Donna Haraway was born on 6 September 1944. She took a doctorate in biology at Yale and taught for decades in the History of Consciousness programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto is one of the few pieces of late-twentieth-century theory that has kept its charge.

The cyborg is not a prediction about robots. It is an argument about boundaries. Haraway takes three distinctions the Western tradition treats as basic — human and animal, organism and machine, physical and non-physical — and shows that late-twentieth-century biology and technology have already breached all three. The cyborg is the figure of a subject that was never pure to begin with.

The polemical target is a certain kind of politics that grounds itself in a natural identity — an authentic womanhood, an untouched nature to be returned to. Haraway's line, quoted ever since, states the choice: I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Situated knowledges#

Her more strictly epistemological contribution came in 1988, and it does real work.

Haraway rejects both of the standing options. The first is the view from nowhere — objectivity understood as the disappearance of the observer, which she calls "the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere". The second is a relativism in which every position is as good as every other.

Her objection is that these two are the same move. Both refuse to be accountable for a location: one by claiming no location, the other by claiming all of them equally.

Against them she proposes situated knowledges: all vision comes from somewhere, and knowing where it comes from makes it more objective, not less, because the position can then be examined, argued with and corrected. Objectivity becomes a practice of accountability rather than a claim to have escaped one's own standpoint.

That argument is the ancestor of a large part of contemporary social epistemology — including the work on epistemic injustice this site has covered.

Two hundred and fifteen years, one question#

Mendelssohn argued for the admission of a people to the community of reason on the terms that community already claimed for itself: if reason is universal, the gate cannot be conditional on creed.

Haraway argued that the community's picture of its own membership — the unified, disembodied, unmarked knower — was a fiction, and that better knowledge follows from admitting it.

One asked to be let in. The other asked what the room had been pretending about itself.

Also on this date#

Jane Addams was born on 6 September 1860. Founder of Hull House in Chicago, she was a philosopher in the pragmatist line as much as a social reformer; Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) argues that democracy is not a form of government but a way of associating, learned in practice. She was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Robert M. Pirsig was born on 6 September 1928. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), rejected by 121 publishers, made a Platonic question about the nature of Quality into a bestseller, and introduced more readers to the classical–romantic split than any university course.

Kate Millett died on 6 September 2017. Sexual Politics (1970), her doctoral thesis, made "patriarchy" an analytic term rather than a description of a household, and read literature as a site where power is transmitted rather than merely reflected.

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Each day in this column we take up an event from the history of philosophy that falls on today's date.