Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 137

tential use to him as so much mere moaning about lacking the requisite gifts to

pursue Wissenschaft.

Replying on October 16 , 1823 , Wohlwill refines his comments on the rela-

tionship between Wissenschaft and the subjectivity of its would-be practitio-

ner. First, where Moser had interpreted him to be making excuses for biding

his time, his orientation toward a more auspicious future must not be confused

with capitulation; it is “a brooding for the future in a barren and unedifying

[unerquick lichen] present.”^153 Second, he complicates Moser’s tendency to cast

scientific productivity as a matter of sheer will:

Even if the scientific activity is very much, indeed thoroughly, a matter of

individual freedom, it is nonetheless only true and pure when, at its center, is

the whole person.... Whoever has only tangential or secantial contact with

the circle of Wissenschaft touches its inner essence in only a few points and

cannot boast of having completely penetrated and grasped it. Now this cen-

trality, the real touchstone of true scientificity [Wissenschaftlichkeit], it seems

to me—as some lack the capacity for it altogether—is not always something

we can freely choose [wohl nicht immer in unsere Freiheit gegeben]. For me at

least, wherever I am capable of it, it is completely contingent upon the state

[Standpunkt] of my inner life, my disposition; and this has not yet come

close to achieving consistency.^154

For Wohlwill no will-to-Wissenschaft can offer a way out of the subjective pre-

dicament of its would-be practitioner, for the simple reason that the pursuit of

Wissenschaft remains contingent on the spiritual well-being of those who would

engage in it. He explains that he can only really do Wissenschaft when his Gemüt

is in balance, which—especially given the bleakness of the age—it generally is

not. Whereas Moser calls for the subordination of one’s self to the higher cause

of Wissenschaft, Wohlwill characterizes Wissenschaft as a practice carried out by

embodied persons who sometimes are, and sometimes are not, up to it for both

personal and wider historical reasons. There is simply no stepping beyond the

contingencies of one’s inner life—or historical realities—in the name of Wis-

senschaft.

In his next letter (of March 14 , 1824 ) Moser remains typically dismissive of

Moser’s “thoughts about the centrality of the soul, etc.” which made him think of

the sixteenth-century mystic Jacob Boehm.^155 Moser spins out his associations

into a sarcastic parable of how “Immanuel Wohlwill, or, when he was still an au-

thor, Wolf ” had been transformed into a sigh (Seufzer) that drifts down the Elbe

by moonlight into the fog with a buxom female sigh as his companion. Moser’s

sardonic reverie concludes the following morning in the Freischule in Hamburg,