Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 135

awareness of, an underlying conceptual unity (Gedankeneinheit). On the con-

trary, acts are often of the greatest consequence when performed naively. The

Hegelian wissenschaftlich ideal of spirit self- consciously knowing itself is not all

it is cracked up to be.

Wohlwill elaborates further on his psychic state as he tries to make the tran-

sition from youth to adulthood and social integration. He writes a good deal

about the dissolution of youthful Traumleben, Phantasie, and so forth, and how

difficult it is to come to terms with something more solid. His allegorical de-

scription of this process would seem to be largely (though not only) a reckoning

with the Verein and its Hegelian dreams:

Soon we tread nearer the bustle of social intercourse; the sun of life no lon-

ger shines in a reflection, its rays no longer fall on us obliquely; they burn

at the zenith. We hold our dream images [Traumbilder] up to the so-called

real ones in the midday sky: they no longer correspond; the representation

does not resemble the model [das Abbild will dem Vorbilde nicht gleichen]:

we pull out our instructions for life and its joys [ziehen unsere Anweisung

an das Leben und die Lebensfreude hervor]; no one comes to us and wants

to hear and recognize our most ponderous demands. It is no longer enough

that our imagination [die Phantasie] be engaged, will and vigor demand

their right. Spirit seeks, since nothing was realized [weil ihm nichts gewor-

den], all the more eagerly to comprehend and appropriate [sich aneignen]

the whole, or at any rate to find a place in the universe [im All] from which

it might survey the Other [das Andere]. It searches for unity and truth; who

finds these and holds on to them? The age’s complex [verworrene] and de-

manding conditions and unfortunate, unpleasant individual circumstances

proliferate the bleakness and bitterness of this view of the world and of

life.^145

As Wohlwill struggles to find a viable professional and social position, he real-

izes that the fantasy life in which he had been living corresponds to no avail-

able reality. He describes spirit’s attempt to comprehend unity and truth as an

essentially defensive action: because it has not been able to realize itself (weil

ihm nichts geworden), spirit tries to compensate by comprehending the whole,

by searching for unity and truth. This attempt is doomed to fail, however, and

indeed seems only to repeat the Traumleben to which the world has already

given the lie. The grasp of the whole that spirit achieves is not Hegel’s ideal of

the identity of spirit and world but rather an alienated perspective on the world

as Other. The age does not correspond to the image that sprit would like to

make of it.