Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

68 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

tation points up the profound role of performance in Hegelian Wissenschaft.

Hegel’s written deferral to an oral supplement in the preface to the 1817 Encyclo-

pedia is of a piece with the philosopher’s famous ambivalence toward the genre

of the preface and introduction. First and most famously in the preface to the

Phenomenology of Spirit, and subsequently in the introductions to the Science

of Logic and the Encyclopedia, Hegel negotiates the embarrassment of having

to begin a project for which he regards all possible starting points as prema-

ture by definition. Unlike other disciplines, whose objects can be assumed to

exist outside and prior to their elaboration, philosophy, for Hegel, generates and

demonstrates its own subject matter and form (or methodology) in and through

the necessary process of its unfolding in consciousness.^87 No grounding propo-

sitions can be posited at the outset, and proof can only come at the end: proof, in

other words, is immanent in Hegel’s intellectual performance itself. In Frederick

Beiser’s characterization, “Hegel’s hermeneutical method leaves us with only

a promissory note. There is no a priori guarantee that a system or organized

whole will emerge from any dialectic, whether it is that of consciousness or

world history. This is a point that Hegel himself... stresses.... In the end, ev-

erything depends upon the specific arguments of the dialectic and whether the

philosopher has reported them correctly.”^88 Whether in its deferral to the literal

oral performance of the lecturer speaking to students, or to the unfolding of an

argument that both recounts and enacts a conceptual process, Hegel’s style of

thinking emerges as intimately tied to its very articulation. In this sense, Hegel is

doubtlessly one of the most performative of all philosophers.

The texts and lectures by Hegel with which the Vereinler engaged most inten-

sively were Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History, History of Philosophy, and

Philosophy of Religion. The relationships between performativity and history

that animate Hegel’s thought are salient for understanding the Vereinler’s the-

orization of Wissenschaft des Judentums as a historical and philosophical dis-

cipline and their self-conception vis-à-vis both Jewish history and the state. As

Beiser argues, the novelty of Hegel’s conception of Wissenschaft lay neither in

its historicism nor in its systematicity, but in its joining of the two.^89 If “it was

Hegel’s unique and grand ambition to historicize the Kantian ideal of science

and to systematize historicism,”^90 he viewed this project as feasible because he

assumed history to be rational and systematic. Beiser’s comment that Hegel’s

history of philosophy “is a kind of phenomenology, the story of the inner dialec-

tic of philosophical history, the stages of philosophy’s self-discovery”^91 applies

mutatis mutandis to Hegel’s accounts of the evolution of historical formations

(religion, law, and world history) generally.

With his historicist bent, Hegel purports to appreciate historical formations