Lessing – Nathan the Wise

• Theme: Religious tolerance, Enlightenment humanism, narrative ethics, dialogic subjectivity.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Lessing’s Nathan the Wise is not only a defense of religious pluralism but a radical performance of ethical subjectivity, as imagined through Enlightenment parrhesia—the act of speaking truth with moral courage, especially when it defies institutional dogma. The drama, set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, unfolds a luminous ethical parable: a Jewish merchant (Nathan), a Christian Templar, and a Muslim Sultan converge to discover their kinship—literal and metaphorical.

Through the Foucauldian lens, Nathan’s ethical life represents a practice of self, rooted in dialogic openness, narrative care, and the rejection of rigid identity categories. His “care of the self” is not isolationist—it is relational, built on an inner ethos that sees the self in the other. When the Sultan asks which religion is true, Nathan tells the Parable of the Three Rings, displacing the question of doctrinal truth and replacing it with ethical praxis: the value of a ring lies not in what it claims, but in how it is lived.

This is a profound instance of ethical parrhesia—a truth-telling that does not destroy, but unbinds. Foucault argued that in antiquity, ethics involved stylizing one’s existence, shaping it as a work of art. Nathan performs precisely this: his life is a practice of moderation, kindness, and truthfulness, not in the name of God, but in the name of human relationality.

Whereas Voltaire’s Mahomet showed how truth can enslave, Nathan the Wise reveals how truth—when unshackled from power—frees the subject to dwell in uncertainty with compassion. This is not truth as doctrine, but truth as ethical comportment, what Foucault would call technologies of the self: voluntary, iterative, and grounded in care.

In addition, Nathan the Wise exposes the discursive production of enmity. The Templar, for instance, initially views Nathan with suspicion because of his Jewishness, a suspicion produced by Christian polemical discourse. But through interaction, the narrative unwinds these discourses, showing how subjectivity can be unlearned and refashioned through ethical encounter.

Foucault also reminds us that power is everywhere—not just repressive, but productive. The play dramatizes this through its setting: Jerusalem, city of intersecting empires and theologies, becomes an ecology of overlapping truth claims. Yet Lessing dares to imagine a world where dialogue, rather than war, becomes the means of truth.

In this way, Nathan the Wise performs the impossible task of Enlightenment parrhesia: to speak outside the regimes of one’s own tradition. It offers not the destruction of religion, but its transformation—from law into love, from boundary into bond.