Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

86 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

state and becomes oppositional to it. It falls to the new science of religion to

demonstrate the continuity between religion, the higher rationality of science,

and the state by coming to know religion’s determinate content. A fragment al-

most certainly stemming from a transcript of the 1821 religion lectures records

this statement: “Spirit may have something in its possession without having a

developed consciousness of it.”^136 To remain in Hegel’s idiom, the urgent task

of Wissenschaft der Religion is to explain to religious spirit what it has in its pos-

session yet lacks developed consciousness of.

The urgent political function of Hegel’s project of philosophy of religion,

then, is to check finite—and promote infinite—subjectivity, the better to recon-

cile particular subjects with the totality of Sittlichkeit. True religion would serve

as a foundation for Hegel’s rational ethical state by providing a capillary exten-

sion of rationality into particular subjectivities. True religion moves rationality

inside, sutures the individual into a rational totality that, though not yet the state

itself, is a kind of prerequisite for integration into it. The reason Hegel takes so

seriously the contest between his conception of religion’s rational, knowable

content and Schleiermacher’s religiosity of sentiment is that subjectivity, and

religious subjectivity in particular, is vital yet highly problematic for Hegel’s

conception of how to overcome abstraction in the state.

A mark of the actualized state is that its subjects both know and feel them-

selves to be meaningful parts of a rational order. The complex mediations Hegel

theorizes between individuals and the state are meant to insure that individu-

als achieve this sort of deep identification with the state. Properly functioning

religion ensures a foundation of what we might call proto-rational sentiment.

When religious subjects overcome their atomizing subjective abstraction, the

state likewise sheds its abstraction; its rational totality becomes embodied in

individual subjectivities. Although mere subjectivity is an obstacle to the realiza-

tion of objective spirit, universal subjectivity is an indispensable site where the

rational becomes actual.

Religious subjectivity, then, becomes for Hegel the site of a contest between

abstract and universal subjectivity, with high political stakes. The new project

of a science of religion must demonstrate religious subjectivity to be a universal

relation to absolute spirit, rationality, and truth. Religion must be the site where

mere subjectivity transcends itself:

Precisely God should be for [Spirit] something different from its subjectiv-

ity and finitude.... Religious sensibility should contain just this, being set

free from its subjectivity and possessing within itself what is substantial, as

against the accidental character of our opinions, preferences, inclinations,