Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

88 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

language, such “being-for-myself of subjectivity in relation to objectivity”—

distinguishes human beings from animals. For “as sentient, I am something

entirely particular, thoroughly immersed in determinacy.... I am subjective,

only subjective without objectivity and without universality.”^142 True religion

requires representation, a mode of thought. The immediacy of feeling does not

define my relationship to God; rather, God, as active thought, liberates me from

my sentient determinacy. Religion that is not a form of thought is not religion

at all.^143

Hegel makes explicit the way thought constitutes the essence of God and

the fact that religion has its precise analogue in the way thought constitutes the

essence of ethical life (that is, the state). “God is only in and for thought,” Hegel

maintains, against the “usual” contention “that religion is something apart from,

independent of, and alien to thought, indeed that thought is opposed to and

detrimental to religion.”^144 Moreover,

it is precisely the same [with thought in regard to religion, as (my addition)]

with thought in regard to right and ethical life: I have right and ethical life

only insofar as I know myself to be free and know ethical life [to be] free

substance. [I] know myself as this essential, infinite [being]; [I] know this in-

finitude, universality, [as] the substantiality of [my] will—speaking generally,

[as] the rationality of will. All this is not my willing, my interest and purpose,

as this single, particular individual, but rather simply my universality, my

essentiality. Otherwise [there is] only desire, force, free choice, etc. It is one

of the gravest and crudest errors of our time that thought is not recognized to

be the element and essential form in all of this, as well as the sole fundamental

content.^145

Hegel emphatically underscores the idea that participation in true religion and

ethical life is cognitive. Universal subjectivity in both its religious and political

forms is achieved in a self-recognition that is likewise a self-negation: I know

myself as essential, infinite substantiality when I recognize that the rationality

of my will is not merely “my willing, my interest and purpose” but understand

that I am most fully myself in my identification with a substantive rational total-

ity. There is more than an analogy between the agency of thought in religion

and in ethical life; coaxing religious subjectivity out of its immediate feeling and

harmonizing it with universal rationality is a prerequisite for a viable state. And

defining religious subjectivity correctly emerges as the key means of keeping

potentially “polemical” religious subjects in check.

Hegel’s theorization of the political stakes of a Wissenschaft der Religion gave

the Hegelians in the Verein every reason to understand their project of a Wis-