ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several ideas that originally appear in Lessing's Letter's and to assess the Letters' revolutionary proposal regarding linguistic form and meaning. Though the Letters were not the first of Lessing's Streitschriften, they follow the format of an 'open quarrel' that Lessing continues using throughout his career. Lessing makes clear that his own attempts at dialogic writing are modeled on the Socratic method. For Lessing the arts are neither inferior to morality and rational cognition, nor a derivative of them, so their role in education ought not to be the lesser of these. Since Lessing is closely concerned with poetic genius while worked with arduous care, reads as if it were a product not of labor but of spontaneity. Language demands to be used meaningfully; poetic genius reveals that its relative success commands an appositeness that erases all verbality. More significantly, Lessing denies that the refutation of revelation is tantamount to the renunciation of God or of religious truth.
