"We would be able neither to remember nor to reflect nor to compare nor to think, indeed, we would not even be the person who we were a moment ago, if our concepts were divided among many and were not to be encountered somewhere together in their most exact combination"
About this Quote
The sentence reads like a calm panic attack: take away the mind's ability to gather its concepts into one place, and the self evaporates. Mendelssohn is arguing that personhood is not a mystical substance humming behind the eyes; it is a practical achievement of organization. Memory, reflection, comparison, thought: he stacks these verbs with courtroom precision, building a case that cognition depends on integration. If your concepts are "divided among many" and never "encountered somewhere together", you cannot perform the simplest mental act of lining one thing up against another. The subtext is brutally modern: a fragmented mind is not just distracted, it's metaphysically endangered.
Context matters. Mendelssohn writes in the Enlightenment, when empiricism and materialist accounts of the mind were threatening older ideas of the soul. His rhetorical gambit is to show that unity is non-negotiable: even if you explain perception as a bundle of impressions, you still need a single arena where those impressions can meet in an "exact combination". Otherwise continuity collapses; you are not even "the person who we were a moment ago". It's a deliberately unsettling claim, smuggling existential stakes into what could have been a dry theory-of-concepts debate.
The intent, then, is defensive and ambitious at once: to protect the coherence of the self against reduction into scattered parts, and to redefine identity as the mind's capacity to synthesize. He makes unity feel less like a doctrine and more like the precondition for being anyone at all.
Context matters. Mendelssohn writes in the Enlightenment, when empiricism and materialist accounts of the mind were threatening older ideas of the soul. His rhetorical gambit is to show that unity is non-negotiable: even if you explain perception as a bundle of impressions, you still need a single arena where those impressions can meet in an "exact combination". Otherwise continuity collapses; you are not even "the person who we were a moment ago". It's a deliberately unsettling claim, smuggling existential stakes into what could have been a dry theory-of-concepts debate.
The intent, then, is defensive and ambitious at once: to protect the coherence of the self against reduction into scattered parts, and to redefine identity as the mind's capacity to synthesize. He makes unity feel less like a doctrine and more like the precondition for being anyone at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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