Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 133

and Hegel’s Logic); how a certain pedantic strain need not be damaging,

and can even be beneficial, to a man’s character; how a real outbreak of this

moral Saint Vitus’s dance is not to be feared in a person who has the requi-

site power to abstract with ease away from life, with all its idolized miseries

[angebeteten Armseligkeit[en]], and to lift himself effortlessly above the entire

realm of form and appearance.

Give Gans my best. The Jews have probably never before received such

philosophical instruction as in his report for this year. It pleases me to have

seen en passant how intensively our Hegel has been studied this year.—A

pity that the Jews, who here could in specula intueri, don’t understand the

presentation. One of the leading local luminaries confessed to me “the read-

ing made his head spin.”^141

The layers of irony here include self-parody, a spoof of Hegel, and swipes at

Moser and Gans. Wohlwill’s protest that he wishes to avoid further exposing

rather than purging himself of his pedantic leanings is itself self-mockingly pe-

dantic. In detailing why he prefers not to follow Moser’s advice to mock his

own pedantry, he does precisely that. At the same time Wohlwill’s self-mockery

mocks its own Hegelian idiom. Ludic self-mockery shades into pointed critique

as Wohlwill identifies pedantry, for which Hegelian Wissenschaft has only con-

tempt, as the very quality that makes him a real, embodied person. The refer-

ence to Gans’s recent (final) presidential address and to Hegel’s Logic serve as

footnotes of sorts in this pedantic Hegelian spoof of (his own) Hegelian ped-

antry, but they also turn Gans’s and Hegel’s critiques of subjectivity on their

heads. However ironically articulated, Wohlwill’s argument is that he would be

susceptible to being attacked by strains of pedantry to the extent that he is not

a generic but rather a particular person, with a particular Bildungsgeschichte.

And so the defense of pedantry begins: a bit of it is a good thing insofar as it

individualizes a person. The person who is not susceptible to pedantry embod-

ies the greater danger, since he all too easily abstracts away from the banality

and self-indulgent misery that, after all, define so much of real life. In getting off

these promised “side digs” against Hegel, Gans, and, to be sure, Moser, Wohl-

will converts his own humorous self-mockery as a hopelessly Hegelian pedant

into the sarcastically articulated but substantive charge that Moser equates par-

ticular subjectivity with mere pedantry. Through his intricate comedy Moser

finally embraces an identity as an ironic “pedant,” but in a transformed sense

of someone who, rather than lose himself in soothing abstractions, chooses to

concern himself with something so “shallow” as lived experience.

The above passage’s second paragraph seems unresolved. Wohlwill praises