Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 75

faith, but belongs to determinate thought.”^108 And more explicitly still: “Since

the essential principle of the form of the state as a universal is thought, it was in

fact from the state that freedom of thought and science first emerged.... Thus,

science, too, is to be found on the side of the state, for it has the same element of

form as the state, and its end is cognition, by means of thought, of objective truth

and rationality.”^109 The fact that the secular, law-governed state is the matrix

out of which “freedom of thought and science first emerged” is not a matter of

historical accident but of rational affinity, for science and the state embody the

same—express, objective, “determinate”—form of rational cognition. Both Wis-

senschaft and law embody thought as the “essential principle of the form of the

state as a universal.” Just as the state becomes explicit to itself in expressly ar-

ticulated thought (law, constitution), Wissenschaft overcomes religion’s merely

subjective feelings and convictions by grasping and articulating objective deter-

minate truths. In Hegel’s more expansive conception of the state (incorporating

religion, art, and science), Wissenschaft takes on crucial political functions.

Hegel’s emphasis on “cognition... of objective truth and rationality” as the

nexus where science and the state converge illustrates what Paul Franco aptly

describes as “the essentially cognitive, nonvoluntaristic, character of Hegel’s

model of political participation.”^110 The importance of Hegel’s politicization

of cognition itself—his view of rational thought’s constitutive role in realizing

ethical spirit—can scarcely be overstated for an understanding of the Vereinler’s

self-conception. It allowed and encouraged them to imagine that by articulating

knowledge (by engaging in Wissenschaft), they were participating in the state.

As a form of determinate thought, scientific discourse distills thought and ren-

ders it explicit, in seductive analogy to how free rationality becomes objecti-

fied (that is, becomes what Hegel calls an Idea) in the state. The strong analogy

Hegel draws between determinate thought and actualized reason (objective

spirit) opened the door wide to the Vereinler’s fantasies that they could indeed

do something quite substantial—help actualize the rationality of the state—by

producing Wissenschaft. This parallel between law and Wissenschaft as related

forms of self-conscious rational articulation goes far in explaining the Verein’s

emphasis on elaborating formal statutes and bylaws and gaining state recogni-

tion for them. The prolonged effort this required seemed warranted because of

the theoretical and symbolic importance the Vereinler ascribed to the express

articulation of rational principles, and because of the modicum of real integra-

tion into the state that such recognition would have bestowed on the Verein.

In Philosophy of Right § 270 Hegel theorizes the same relationship between

the actual and the real that is at stake in the famous Doppelsatz of the book’s

preface (“what is rational is actual; what is actual is rational”). The focus, how-