Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

70 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

“This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is spirit, the life

of spirit itself. Its result is the concept (Begriff) that it grasps of itself: the his-

tory of philosophy [is] the clear discernment (klare Einsicht) that this is what

spirit has wanted throughout its history. This work of the human spirit in the

recesses of thought is parallel in all stages of reality. No philosophy oversteps its

own time. The history of philosophy is the heart of world history (das Innerste

der Weltgeschichte) .”^96 Given the strict parallel Hegel draws between history and

the history of philosophy, his insistence that no philosophy can transcend its

moment emphasizes the limitations of earlier historical stages of thought and the

realized self-comprehension of Hegel’s own.^97 If Hegel can, at last, comprehend

Geist’s ultimate pattern and goal, then history (and not merely philosophy) must

necessarily have progressed to something like its culmination point.

This is not to say that Hegel claims that philosophy or Wissenschaft as such

drive the historical process. Instead, Hegel’s hubris is dialectical and takes the

form of what we could call a List der Demut, or cunning of humility. Part of

his philosophical gambit is to insist on taking himself out of the equation: he

claims to speak not as a subjective thinker but rather as ( just) the messenger of

the Weltgeist. Because he rhetorically erases his own contingent agency in the

production of his thought, agency is returned to Hegel in absolute terms. Given

his insistence on the necessity of spirit’s dialectical progress and his claim that

spirit achieves its goal of becoming fully conscious of itself as absolute spirit in

his own philosophy, the ability to produce Hegelian discourse, although not an

agent of world history per se, becomes something so exactly coordinated with

history’s direction and ultimate aim that the distinction becomes frivolous. The

very ability to produce Hegelian Wissenschaft demonstrates history’s fulfillment

of its essential goals, for this is the condition of possibility of Hegel’s bring-

ing these goals to conscious in Wissenschaft. To speak Hegelian, then, is not

to make history happen, exactly, but it is to claim—or rather performatively to

demonstrate—that a certain version of history necessarily has already happened.

This sense of world history already having reached an apotheosis of Geist and

now merely awaiting the surface details to fall into place almost exactly describes

the messianism of the Verein’s Wissenschaftler.

If the Hegelian Vereinler confused theory and reality and attached secular

messianic importance to their practice of Wissenschaft des Judentums, their ex-

aggerated faith in the power of Wissenschaft is not a wild appropriation of Hegel

but is instead inherent in certain moments in Hegel’s thought. At the close of his

history of philosophy lectures, for example, Hegel casts Wissenschaft (a term he

frequently uses interchangeably with philosophy to describe his own project) as

the apotheosis of historical development in which absolute spirit comes finally