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STE ́PHANE MOSE`S

to a higher order, free will is transcended and realized as rational freedom; but in this
permanent movement toward greater generality, freedom does not cease denying itself in
favor of the Law, so that ultimately the moral subject also finds realization in its identifi-
cation with reason.
It is this eclipse of self in the totality of the Logos that Rosenzweig divines behind the
general mobilization of individuals and their transformation into so many anonymous
elements lost in the great machinery of war. In that, he is merely following the spirit of
Hegel’s philosophy, in which the dialectic of history is nothing but the dialectic of reason
itself. But Rosenzweig’s reading of that identity is the opposite of the one Hegel suggests.
While for Hegel the historical process, through which the unfolding of the absolute is
manifested, reveals the deep rationality that informs the universal spirit, Rosenzweig sets
out from the empirical observation of the chaos into which Europe has been plunged and
denounces the conception of reason to which that nameless catastrophe bears witness.
Thus, it is on the basis of the spectacle of historical reality that Rosenzweig completely
subverts the spirit of Hegel’s philosophy, which represents for him, as we have seen, the
last metamorphosis of the history of Western ontology.
In order to bring about this reversal, all he has to do is concentrate on the develop-
ments Hegel devotes to war in the last part of thePhilosophy of Right. True, it is not a
case of direct reference: Hegel’s theory of war, alluded to in Rosenzweig’sHegel and the
Statein the context of the Hegelian vision of the state, is not explicitly quoted in theStar.
But it is constantly present—negatively, so to speak—behind the analyses of the role of
war in the ‘‘messianic politics’’ of modern nationalisms, especially behind the meditation
on war and death with which the book begins. The revolt of the individual against the
violence war inflicts on him, this central theme of the introduction to theStar, must be
read as a response to the Hegelian metaphysics of war, as expressed in a passage fromThe
Phenomenology of Spirit:

In order not to let them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up

the whole and letting the [communal] spirit evaporate, government has from time to

time to shake them to their core by war. By this means the government upsets their

established order, and violates their right to independence, while the individuals who,

absorbed in their own way of life, break loose from the whole and strive after the

inviolable independence and security of the person, are made to feel in the task laid

on them their lord and master, death. Spirit, by thus throwing into the melting-pot

the stable existence of these systems, checks their tendency to fall away from the

ethical order, and to be submerged in a [merely] natural existence; and it preserves

and raises conscious self into freedom and its own power.^3

For Hegel, the ethical vocation of the individual can be carried out only within ever
more general communities to which he belongs: the family, the civil society, and the state.

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