Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 125

ment [Richterstuhl]:^115 it wants to penetrate them, to know itself in them;

and the possibility of this penetration is nothing other than this justification.

If it [consciousness] cannot penetrate a particular phenomenon, if it can-

not know itself in it, oh, then the phenomenon’s death sentence has been

declared; it is not at all real but its existence is rather only an ephemeral one,

temporary and trifling.^116

The critical utility of absolute consciousness here lies in its availability as a Rich-

terstuhl apparently in advance of the eventual reconciliation of subjectivity and

objectivity in the objective Idea, the state, or what have you.^117 Even prior to the

achievement of the state in objective spirit, consciousness reconciled with the

world can serve as a lens to train on historical phenomena to evaluate whether

they possess true or merely accidental existence. Because reason knows itself in

part of the world, or in the fundamental movement of the historical process, it

can diagnose the circumstances and phenomena in which it cannot recognize

itself as insubstantial and ephemeral. If Gans’s earlier hubristic prognostica-

tions that reality would substantiate the Verein’s conception of Judaism’s central

idea took the form of wissenschaftlich triumphalism, his flight into defensive

intellectual elitism takes the form of wissenschaftliches Ressentiment: seeing the

values and prognoses of Wissenschaft contradicted by reality, Gans insists that

reality in truth does harmonize with Wissenschaft and that facts contradicting

Wissenschaft have only an accidental, ephemeral, and vacated existence.^118

Faced with the Verein’s objective failure to translate its Gedanke into practi-

cal success, Gans does not discern a flaw in the Gedanke (the conclusion he

had earlier insisted would be inescapable in this circumstance) but rather gives

voice to one of the most recurrent laments of the modern intellectual: the horror

of banality. It is not conceptual opposition that worries Gans, for the Hegelian

concept would emerge victorious, and merely dialectically enriched, out of any

conceptual conflict. Rather, it is the subconceptual quotidian world that pre-

sents the real challenge. The obstacles that have opposed the will (Wollen) of the

Verein “consist in that which has always proven to be the most irreconcilable

enemy of thought because it is precisely that which has remained devoid of any

thought, namely the pure externality and materiality of everyday life and the life

of idle pleasure [des Alltags- und Schlaraffenleben] .”^119 Everything has a dou-

ble nature, Gans submits, both a universal and a particular aspect. In pursuing

the universal, the Verein has not been able completely to detach itself from its

own particular Boden—which is to say, from the simply incorrigible mediocrity

of the Jews.

The conflict Gans sets up between the Hegelian philosophical reality of the