Mendelssohn’s Stutter and the Collisions of Modern Thought

The critical reception of Moses Mendelssohn tends to see tension or even contradiction in his dual commitment to the Enlightenment and to Judaism. Recent reappraisals manifest a continuing need to make sense of that tension and of its resonance with tensions in our own thought. In “Mendelssohn’s Stutter and the Collisions of Modern Thought,” I focus on a little-known text from 1783 in which Mendelssohn presents a theory of stuttering with theoretical resources for thinking about such tensions, without falling into simplistic affirmations either of muddled thinking or of direct creative productivity.