Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 87

etc.... [T]he drawing of lines, merely being oriented [toward God], does

not reach this genuine, unifying, self-subsistent object. It does not achieve a

true and actual renunciation of itself. For this acknowledgment of something

higher and wholly indeterminate, these lines that are drawn toward it, have

no hold on, determination by, or connection to this object itself; they are

and remain our doing our lines, our goal—something subjective.... [A] 11

worship shrivels into mere feeling.... What remains the foundation is only

subjective sensibility.^137

Insofar as it competes with, substitutes for, or obscures the pursuit of objective

knowledge and civic engagement, Hegel considers subjectivity a politically per-

nicious force.^138 True religion is what sets us free from our subjective limitations

and allows us to identify with determinate rational truth.

Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Religion was at once academic and preeminently

political, as it provided the conceptual basis for bringing potentially polemi-

cal religious subjectivity into harmony with the state. This is the background

against which we can see the theorists of early Wissenschaft des Judentums—

Gans, Wolf, and Moser, in contrast to the primary practitioner of the new Jew-

ish science, Zunz—as “state Jews” of the Hegelian state. By pursuing their new

academic practice, they understood themselves to be taking up positions in the

rational state as Hegel theorized it. They hoped to mediate between the wider

Jewish community and the state and to integrate the former into the rationality

of the latter.

Finally, Hegel’s religion lectures probably bolstered the Vereinler’s faith in the

agency of thinking. Hegel characterizes the progress from abstract to universal

subjectivity in both religion and ethical life as an activity of thought: “Thought

is intrinsically activity; [that is,] thought as such [is activity], not thought as

subjectivity.”^139 By participating in universal thought, subjects transcend their

abstraction and isolation, a necessary step toward eventual integration into the

substantive totality realized most fully in the state. This movement of thought

from abstract particular to concrete universal is for Hegel analogous in religion

and ethical life. In religion it is the relationship to thought that distinguishes uni-

versal from merely particular religious subjectivity, as Hegel elaborates at some

length.^140 Particular religious subjectivity is and remains affectively determined,

whereas “objective, universal subjectivity” is defined by “the externalizing of

sentient singularity.” I “externalize” determining affect when I make what I feel

to be an object of representation to myself, at which point this object ceases

to be “immediately identical with me; [I] withdraw myself from the injury and

from determinacy in general.”^141 Such self-conscious reflection—or, in Hegel’s