Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

98 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

denied, while in the Christian religion every individual appears as determined to

salvation. Here, on the contrary, the individual spirit is only a mode, an accident,

but not anything substantial.”^31 If, for Hegel, Jacobi and Schleiermacher privi-

lege an irrational form of subjectivity, Spinoza’s abstract rationalism leaves no

room for self-conscious subjectivity at all. In Spinoza “thoughts form the con-

tent, but they are not self-conscious thoughts or Notions: the content signifies

thought, as pure abstract self-consciousness, but an unreasoning knowledge,

into which the individual does not enter: the content has not the signification of

‘I.’ ”^32 Because Hegel’s Spinoza permits no mediation with the absolute, there is

“an utter blotting out of the principle of subjectivity, individuality, personality,

the moment of self-consciousness in Being.”^33

Hegel links Spinoza’s purported inability to think particularity, including

human subjectivity, as anything but negation of the one substance with Spi-

noza’s mathematical method of argumentation, which merely postulates claims

without deducing them.^34 The implication is that Hegel’s own method, in con-

trast, performs the very kinds of mediations it theorizes, and thereby manifests

the dynamism of spirit that evades Spinoza in both his conception of substance

and his geometric method of demonstration. Spinoza’s substance is unable to

self-differentiate into dynamic spirit in the way the God of Christianity differen-

tiates itself in the trinity: “His philosophy has only a rigid and unyielding sub-

stance, and not yet spirit; in it we are not at home with ourselves. But the reason

that God is not spirit is that He is not the Three in One. Substance remains rigid

and petrified.”^35

In the concluding passage of the section on Spinoza in History of Philosophy

Hegel nicely condenses the way he has set himself up as the secular Christian

fulfillment, in both method and content, of the secular Jewish philosopher. Hegel

contends that his philosophy yields two related forms of self- consciousness lack-

ing in Spinoza. First, the absolute differentiates itself and obtains an object of

self-consciousness, with two consequences that mirror each other: the absolute

acquires objectivity, and objective reality immanently participates in—is imbued

with—the absolute. Second, there emerges a related new form and appreciation

of self-conscious free subjectivity that, precisely in its self- consciousness, par-

ticipates in—is returned to—the absolute or universal. Once again, we see how

Hegel understands subjectivity in Spinoza— subjectivity as negation of substance,

incapable of reflecting or recognizing itself in substance—as a variant of Jewish

unhappy consciousness. Such deficient Spinozan subjectivity stands in a relation

of exteriority and radical dependency vis-à-vis the absolute. It is wholly depen-

dent on—as Hegel says, born from the “ocean” of—absolute substance.^36 With

Christian mediation, and Hegel’s speculative philosophy, self- consciousness