Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

124 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

redouble their efforts and correct their course. The real culprit, though, is the

unresponsive coreligionists with whom the Vereinler have had to contend: “The

ground in which it [the perversion of the Verein’s efforts] is rooted is, alas, the

life of our coreligionists in general. I am, however, justified, indeed obligated,

to speak of it, because we have devoted our most vigorous activity to the culti-

vation of this ground, because in its character [Beschaffenheit] and receptivity

we await the first condition of the success of so much endeavor and effort!”^112

This sort of looking for insurmountable obstacles outside themselves in order

to salvage their vision of history is exactly what Gans had repeatedly insisted

his colleagues must never do. Gans blames not the Vereinler’s understanding

of the necessary movement of history, but rather the incorrigible mediocrity of

their fellow Jews. In his earlier exuberance Gans had insisted that the evolution

of events would reveal the rightness or error of the Vereinler’s theoretical vi-

sion, but he now has little choice but to reverse himself and assert the essential

reality of the Verein’s conception over against the merely accidental nature of

contemporary circumstances. Gans confesses a certain tedium and exhaustion

at having, semiannually or annually, to reiterate the conceptual architecture of

the Verein, to so little avail. Not only the uneducated masses, but even the “bet-

ter” social strata (hopelessly infatuated as they are with passé Aufklärung) fail,

year after year, to grasp or help realize the Verein’s Gedanke.^113 Gans does not,

however, express doubt in the rightness of his grasp of the Verein’s concept; he

only bemoans its not having been understood.

Evidently inspired by Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history that would

have been fresh in Gans’s mind (Hegel gave them for the first time in winter 1822 –

23 ), Gans defines the highest achievement of the “history of the human race” as

the reconciliation of subjectivity and objective conditions in self-consciousness,

which occurs when consciousness recognizes itself in the world while also know-

ing that world to be the necessary culmination of the rational historical process.

Such reconciliation is “the highest stage that can ever be attained” and therefore

also provides the “greatest calm,” for consciousness is finally at home in the

world; it “knows itself to be at home in the phenomena of life to the same degree

as these find in consciousness their justification and explanation.”^114

As a sort of mirror image of the function Gans had earlier assigned to reality

as the judge of theory, reconciled consciousness (absolute knowledge) now as-

sumes the power to judge reality:

Since consciousness has reconciled itself with the phenomena [Erschei-

nungen] and knows itself to be one with them, it presses with greater vigor

than before for this justification and accounting of things before its Judg-