Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

126 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Jews and the mundane sociological reality of the Jewish community pivots on

which reality is essentially, and which is only apparently, real. Gans attempts

to maintain a purchase on reality and authority in the face of irrelevance and

exclusion. The self-transformation that Jews must undertake hinges on achiev-

ing self-consciousness as an ethical unity within a broader totality. The Verein’s

task was and remains “to bring Jewry, as the object to which it [the Verein] is

solely committed, to self-consciousness, to make the Jewish world apparent to

itself [das Judenthum als den Gegenstand, auf den er ausschließlich angewiesen

ist, zum Bewußtseyn zu bringen, die jüdische Welt sich selbst vorstellig zu ma-

chen].’’^120 Since true reality lies in the organic unity toward which world history

is ineluctably progressing, what is paramount is not pragmatism and remedia-

tion on the local level.^121 Rather, it is a new conscious knowledge among Jews of

this “higher unity” structuring their existence: “what appears in the most varied

expressions of a still merely naive vegetable life, what wilts and dies through its

isolation devoid of context, to this we want to provide a central point toward

which to steer its life [wohin es sein Leben hinzuleiten habe] and from which it

can once again deduce itself [von dem es sich wieder herleiten kann]: it is this

higher unity on which we had our eye, not any particular this [irgend ein bestim-

mtes Dieses] with which one might like to saddle us. This unity, however, is

the consciousness of all that occurs, or becomes phenomenon [zur Erscheinung

wird], the knowledge of Judaism and of the Jews.”^122 It is only Wissenschaft des

Judentums (or das Wissen vom Judenthum und von den Juden) that can pro-

vide the needed consciousness of Judaism and the Jews as a rationally coherent

ethical totality (which, as such, is integratable into the state) rather than as the

mere aggregate of atomized individuals and local concerns. It is this totality of

conception that constitutes the indispensable political function of the Verein’s

version of Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Gans can attribute such agency to ideas, knowledge, and Wissenschaft pre-

cisely because access to Hegel’s state is, arguably, primarily cognitive. Without

the requisite knowledge and consciousness, all local practical interventions will

amount to nothing. It is precisely in absolute consciousness, when one knows

oneself in the world, that one overcomes the subject-object split and becomes

truly at home in the world’s differentiated unity (the modern state). This is why

the Verein’s central task becomes “to bring Jewry... to self-consciousness, to

make the Jewish world apparent to itself.” Having put forward his rationale for

why the Vereinler’s activity is and must be a quintessentially wissenschaftlich

one, Wissenschaft being “the purest consciousness of things,” Gans turns to the

question of how far the Vereinler’s practical activity should extend.^123 He argues

that what is truly practical is precisely what is wissenschaftlich: