Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

76 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

ever, falls on the distinction between the actuality of the rational state (in which

the particular embodies the universal) and the mere existence of a state lacking

such unity. Hegel posits rational totality as the principle of the truly actual state

and attenuates the reality of the merely existing state. Such an ontological hier-

archy gave the Vereinler license to attribute substance to their theoretical vision

of the state—their philosophical politics—and, at times (for example, in Gans’s

final presidential address, as I discuss in the following chapter) to derealize Res-

toration Prussia as merely existing. Hegel writes:

Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity, the resolution

of universality into particularity; the latter then appears to be self-sufficient,

although it is sustained and supported only by the whole. If this unity is not

present, nothing can be actual, even if it may be assumed to have existence

(Existenz). A bad state is one which merely exists; a sick body also exists, but

it has no true reality. A hand which has been cut off still looks like a hand

and exists, but it has no actuality.... An essential part of the fully developed

state is consciousness or thought; the state accordingly knows what it wills

and knows this as an object of thought (ein Gedachtes). Since, then, the seat

of knowledge is within the state, science also has its seat here and not within

the Church.^111

The theoretical distinction between the true and the merely existing state

permitted the Vereinler to maintain a highly ambiguous relationship to “the

state,” which was anything but synonymous with Prussia. Systematic scientific

thought grasps the organic whole, which is what lends the parts true actuality.

In the absence of totalizing scientific insight, severed parts merely exist, devoid

of essential reality. In this way scientific self-knowledge participates in and com-

pletes the state.

In Hegel’s view, the foundation in universal determinate reason that the

state and science share guarantees their harmony. Conversely, religious orien-

tations defined in opposition to reason must conflict with the state. One can

legitimately perceive a threat to particularist identities and commitments (in-

cluding forms of Judaism and Jewish identity) in Hegel’s discounting of par-

ticular religious elements purportedly incapable of being subsumed under the

universal. Franco rightly cautions against the anachronism of reading Hegel’s

support for Jewish civil rights in Philosophy of Right § 270 as a celebration of

cultural pluralism. Hegel’s explicit hope, rather, is that equal rights will lead to

greater assimilation.^112 It is nonetheless crucial to appreciate that Hegel’s lit-

mus test for a religion’s salubriousness was not its self-proclaimed Christianity

but its “objective” rationality. Far from arguing for a “Christian state,” Hegel