Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
158 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
(my addition)] this animal kingdom and ruling over it, for here, as every-
where, ruling and exploiting [Benutzung (my addition)] are a single concept.
And when they have homage paid to themselves and survey the swarming
mass of these brainless beings, what is more likely to occur to them than the
thought that Napoleon had at the Berezina? It is said of him that he pointed
to the crowd of drowning people below and exclaimed to his companion:
“Voyez ces crapauds!” This is probably a fabrication, but it is true nonethe-
less. Despotism’s only thought is contempt for humanity, the dehumanized
human being, and this thought has the advantage over many others of at the
same time being a fact. The despot always sees people as degraded. They
drown before his eyes and for his sake in the slime of vulgar life, from which,
like toads, they continually reemerge. If such a view obtrudes even upon men
who were capable of great aims, such as Napoleon before his dynastic mad-
ness, how can a completely ordinary king in such a reality [in einer solchen
Realität (my addition)] be an idealist?^52
In labeling the Germans “realists” Marx is not paying them a compliment, but
rather assailing their failure to achieve what we could call the “good idealism”
of politics. If politics is the Aristotelian measure of man, the Germans remain
animals, reduced to the prepolitical concerns of “bare life” (das kahle Leben).
The collective German failure to achieve political consciousness attenuates
(without, to be sure, erasing) the distinction between the ruled and their rul-
ers. Marx’s idealist conception of human rationality leads him to focus, above
all, on German rulers’ incapacity to think of their subjects as human beings. In-
stead, they regard them with a self-fulfilling dehumanizing contempt. The Ger-
man toads die and are continuously reborn out of the German muck, and neither
these brainless, abjectly dehumanized beings nor “even” the mediocre despots
who lord it over them are capable of transcending German animal Realität
and achieving the consciousness of homo politicus. Although Marx refuses to
give up on the Volk as the collective subject that will eventually realize itself in
a democratic republic, real existing Germans remain a sub-Volk, a primordial
political animal kingdom outside the narrative of modern political history. Marx
makes no attempt here to ground his theoretical discourse in, or ally it with,
Germany’s materiality or “reality.” On the contrary, abject German reality is the
emphatic Other of democracy and humanity and of “idealists” like Marx and
his dissident colleagues “who have the audacity to want to turn men into human
beings.”^53
It bears underscoring that even in his “idealist” conception of politics and
the state as the realization of human rationality, Marx did not champion the state