Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 99

achieves active independence. Such speculative self- consciousness is an act of

cognitive mirroring whereby the self overcomes alienation and restores itself

to the absolute by recognizing itself in, and recognizing its identity with, its

own objects. (Indeed, the subject’s grasping of its identity with the object of

its self-consciousness is what self-consciousness is.) In self-conscious thought

(and, most perfectly, in Wissenschaft), the undifferentiated absolute obtains, and

recognizes itself as, differentiated unity. Thus with the advent of Hegelian self-

consciousness, Spinoza’s (“mere”) modes attain true existence (“the existent

as such”):^37 they become part of a dynamic differentiated speculative unity. In

Hegel, Spinoza’s infinitely distant God becomes mediated, differentiated, mani-

fest; the Christian differentiated unity of Hegelian science fulfills Spinoza’s Jew-

ish abstract unity.

Such was the image—and allegory—of Spinoza that the Verein Hegelians took

away from Hegel’s lectures and his various published remarks on Spinoza. Wolf

theorizes the fundamental Jewish idea of unity not, like Hegel, in terms of ab-

straction in need of mediation by Christianity and its secularized spiritual mani-

festations, but, much more affirmatively, in terms of conceptual purity. Follow-

ing, it would seem, a Maimonidean tradition, Wolf argues that the conceptual

purity of the Jewish idea has had to make certain concessions to limited stages

of human understanding:

This concept is revealed to the Jewish people, i.e., posited as a datum. But

this took place at a time when man’s mind was far from ready to grasp it in all

its universality. For man needs time in order to raise himself from the world

of the physical and the many to that of the universal unity, the all-embracing

and all-existing Monas. Thus the idea of the unity of God, as taught by Ju-

daism, could only gradually be comprehended and recognized by a people

which had not yet raised itself from the physical world. At first, therefore,

the idea of God had to be conveyed in personal and individual shape and

could only gradually be revealed in is full universality. Therefore the idea of

God, if it was to continue and develop among mankind, had to be clothed in

a body and thus brought nearer to human understanding. In this way Judaism

intimately united the world of the spiritual and the divine with the world of

human life. But it depicted the divine in its first revelation as a living, spiritual

entity, incommensurable with the world of matter and incapable of physi-

cal representation. But the body surrounding the divine idea, in which its

gradual unfolding and development proceeded, was Mosaic theocracy. Thus

the Jewish people became a nation of priests in the sense of guardian of the

idea of God—a people of God.^38