Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 127

That which cannot answer for and justify itself before consciousness has

above^124 been identified as the trivial and ephemeral, with which time dis-

penses. Whatever in Judaism is incapable of accounting for itself before Wis-

senschaft in its contemporary form will not fall away or require a special act

to be overthrown. Rather, it has already fallen away and been overthrown

by virtue of the fact that it could offer no justification for itself to Wissen-

schaft. Since you recognize and honor existence as such [das Seyende als

solches], any particular phenomenon that makes no claim to such recogni-

tion has vanished and quit the very circle of life. What is scientific in you

is also what is practical in you. What is untenable flees like smoke as soon

as you attempt to hold the torch of knowledge up to it, but what earlier had

an utterly inconspicuous existence develops with giant advances and be-

comes a mighty edifice by virtue of having science and knowledge on its

side.^125

Gans’s wissenschaftliches Ressentiment approaches a form of magical thinking.

The Hegelian intellectual declares what exists but that, according to his knowl-

edge of the essential structure and trajectory of the historical process, lacks

justification for existing to be essentially nonexistent, devoid of “existence as

such.” Gans’s Hegelian insistence on the agency of the idea, of the practical

force of a conceptual architecture, emerges as a fantasy of power compensat-

ing for weakness and exclusion. In Gans’s description the Vereinler become

superheroes of Wissenschaft. They can fix their scientific gaze on nonessential

objects and virtually vaporize them. They can disperse the degradations of an

idiotic world like so much smoke. Moreover, Gans predicts dramatic reversals of

fortune: what appears powerful can crumble almost instantaneously, and what

appears weak can grow swiftly into a mighty edifice.

As in his penultimate address, however, Gans’s assertion of scientific power

is directed at two targets. If it is the Jews’ unbearable banality that Gans points to

explicitly as the obstacle to the realization of the Verein’s version of Wissenschaft

des Judentums as a political project, the other, implicit object of his critique is

the Prussian government, which had demonstrated so emphatically, and with

such personal consequence for Gans, that it was not Hegel’s state. The prob-

lem for Gans was not only a Jewish community that, marked by Enlightenment

epistemology, subjectivism, and sheer banality, refused to be brought to a uni-

fying scientific consciousness of itself. Even more intractable, arguably, was a

state that had barred access even to the most qualified Wissenschaftsjuden. One

can view Gans’s fantasy of scientific power as ludicrous or poignant, or some

combination of the two, and one can view his harsh critique of the maddeningly