Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

134 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Gans for giving the Jews such a philosophy lesson in his 1823 presidential ad-

dress, even as he remarks (passively aggressively) that it was nice to learn from

Gans’s address—no one had been keeping him in the loop—how intensively the

Vereinler had been studying “our” Hegel. Yet Wohlwill voices his lament that

Gans’s sophistication is wasted on the Jews, even the supposed intellectuals

among them, seemingly with a forked tongue that impugns both the Hamburg

crowd’s intellectual mediocrity and Gans’s ineffectual elitism.

Moser responded that, when he suggested that Wohlwill make light of his

own pedantic streak, he did not have in mind being given such short shrift

as he had received in Wohlwill’s letter—yet he would generously leave Wohl-

will’s cocky [übermütig] joke to one side. Moser assures his friend that he is

not one to moan and groan about unfulfilled youthful dreams and adds that he

has no time for the “slavery of eudemonism” [Knechtschaft der Glückseligkeits-

Philosophie] .”^142 In this letter Moser twice reiterates his call for Wohlwill to put

an end to his hypochondria and self-indulgent doldrums through concerted

wissenschaftlich labor.^143

Wohlwill’s response to Moser of July 18 , 1823 , persists in resisting Moser’s

wissenschaftlich cure for his private disappointments. He starkly, if only implic-

itly, contests the position Gans had taken in his final presidential address, that

only awareness of the total conceptual architecture of the historical process and

the place of Jews and Judaism in it could lend local interventions true practical

value. Wohlwill questions the value of thought and consciousness, especially for

young people, who might be far better served by acting, even if such action were

naive and not conscious of its own sources:

One thing is becoming ever clearer to me: it is neither natural nor beneficial

for youth to direct all its energy into pure thought, for the element of pure

thought is unity; in turbulence and confusion it [pure thought] bewilders

and ruins its author [Schöpfer]. Is turbulent, restless youth really made for

finding the way to this unity?—The free act: even as it is something singular,

it is something whole; and even if, in its greatest liveliness and energy, it must

be the product of a rigorous conceptual unity, it still does not require con-

sciousness of this source; and certainly the greatest actions have flowed from

the naive immediacy of life’s driving forces.^144

In a clear retort to Hegel and the evolution of the Verein under Gans’s leader-

ship, Wohlwill insists that the naive act is more beneficial for youth than pure,

self-conscious, and unified (or systematic) thought. Young people’s lives lack

the unity that such thought requires, and it thus only bewilders and ruins young

minds. To be effective, action must accord with, but does not require conscious