Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 145

ing my own.”^179 Moser here ironically echoes a sentiment broadly similar to the

one for which he had earlier lambasted Wohlwill. His existence is structured

in an unproductive, indeed crippling, way by an irreconcilable opposition be-

tween individual life and his will to Wissenschaft. As a principle that Moser can

at most subjugate himself to but never generate and embody, Wissenschaft offers

at best a standard by which to measure the fractures of his Selbstheit, in which

Moser now seems to see Wissenschaft itself as profoundly implicated. His irony

intact, Moser sees the split between the universality of spirit and the inescapable

isolation of the individual as tragicomic. He casts himself as a hapless extra in

God’s world tragedy, which ham actors are spoiling: “Is it not a misfortune that

our spirit [Geist] has become so universal yet we still have to kick around in the

straitest circumstances? Stand like common extras at the back of the stage, while

in the evening actors puff themselves up in front and botch up dear God’s world

tragedy for him.”^180 Although Wissenschaft still is the way to connect oneself

to the great world-historical drama, to embody and activate Wissenschaft in a

world-historically meaningful way would require a sort of intellectual heroism

that Moser cannot muster.

Even though Moser and Wohlwill did not produce any Wissenschaft to speak

of, a Hegelian phantasm of Wissenschaft had an abiding presence in their lives.

If in its most confident phase the Vereinler sought in Wissenschaft the glue that

would bind together Judentum and humanity (Europe, the state), it took on the

role of a kind of superego in the post-Verein correspondence of the haplessly

isolated Jewish Hegelians Moser and Wohlwill. It figured the elusive interface

between their private subjectivities and the grand drama of world history. In

this way Wissenschaft continued to inflect how Moser and Wohlwill understood

the world and their individual places in it. Even as non-Wissenschaftler, they

consistently measured themselves against Wissenschaft and sometimes asserted

themselves in defiance of it.