| Abstrakt: |
With the expression "alles zermalmend" from his Morgenstunden (1785) Moses Mendelssohn provides the perhaps most famous catchphrase to describe the great upheaval that came along with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Its provenance, however, is still unclear. In this article the author argues that Mendelssohn – by picking up an allusion made by Kant himself in Die falsche Spitzfijindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren (1762) – probably refers to the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar as presented in Dan 2. If he does, a closer look, particularly at the root דקק in Dan 2,34f.44f., reveals that Mendelssohn's expression is not based on the Yiddish translation (Blitz and Witzenhausen), but on the Protestant translation in the tradition of Martin Luther, presumably the one of Johann David Michaelis. If it is true that Mendelssohn with his famous catchphrase took up Kant's allusion to Dan 2, it seems more than likely that Mendelssohn and Kant had some kind of hidden conversation here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
