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Mendelssohn: Series
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Mendelssohn was mainly self-taught. He learned to spell and to philosophize at the same time (according to the historian Graetz). With his scanty earnings he bought a Latin copy of John Locke's Essay concerning the Human Understanding, and mastered it with the aid of a Latin dictionary. He then made the acquaintance of Aaron Solomon Gumperz, who taught him basic French and English. Gumperz rendered a conspicuous service to Mendelssohn and to the cause of enlightenment by introducing him to Lessing in 1754. Mendelssohn actually met Lessing.
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In 1821 Mendelssohn became acquainted with Carl Maria von Weber, whose compositions served as a romantic model for his own. Later that year Zelter took him to Weimar to meet Goethe, who described the lad of 12 as having "the smallest modicum of the phlegmatic and the maximum of the opposite quality."
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There is one last aspect of Mendelssohn's aesthetics that deserves mention, not least for its bearing on subsequent developments in aesthetics. It has already been noted that the pleasures of beauty and sublimity are not to be identified as purely sensuous or purely intellectual pleasures. In keeping with this differentiation, Mendelssohn differentiates the sort of approval involved in aesthetic experiences from knowledge or desire, though he insists that aesthetic feelings of pleasure can, nonetheless, serve "as the transition (Uebergang) as it were from knowing to desiring" (Gesammelte Schriften, 3/2, pp. 61f; Philosophical Writings, pp. 169, 307-310). In his adoption of three distinct capacities of the mind and in his appraisal of the aesthetic dimension as providing a bridge between matters of truth and falsity (capacities of knowing) and matters of good and evil (capacities of desiring), Mendelssohn plainly anticipates central aspects of Kant's mature, critical philosophy.
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