Education Quote by Moses Mendelssohn

Socrates doesn’t just teach here; he magnetizes. Mendelssohn frames him less as a thorn in Athens’ side and more as a cultural event: “fame spread,” the “most respected and educated” arrive, and the motive is tellingly not duty but pleasure - “to enjoy his friendly company.” That phrasing is strategic. It domesticates philosophy, relocating it from the courtroom drama we associate with Socrates to the salon, the dinner table, the public square as a kind of social technology. Wisdom becomes something you want to be near, not merely something you submit to.

The subtext is Mendelssohn’s own 18th-century project. As a leading figure of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and a major German Enlightenment thinker, he’s invested in the idea that reason can circulate through civility. A philosopher’s authority, in this telling, doesn’t come from office, ancestry, or even institutional power; it comes from charisma disciplined by conversation. “Instruction” is paired with “friendly company” to imply that the best education is not coercive. It’s attractive. People cross distances for it.

There’s also quiet agenda-setting in “the most respected and educated.” Mendelssohn is arguing, without arguing, that the elite are persuadable by open inquiry - and that intellectual prestige can grow outside official channels. Socrates becomes a prototype for Enlightenment public reason: a figure whose influence spreads because he makes thinking feel like belonging.