Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

96 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

for” is annihilating nature and, more to the point, themselves.^23 The subjectiv-

ity Jacobi and, mutatis mutandis, Friedrich Schleiermacher are out to preserve

is not the universal subjectivity that Hegel deems to be missing from Spinoza’s

substance (which does not descend into self-differentiation) but, rather, the sort

of narrow subjectivity that fails to ascend to the universal at all.

Hegel is battling on two fronts: against what he sees as Spinoza’s abstract

universal substance, which cannot differentiate itself into particular forms and

thus preempts subjectivity altogether, and against Jacobi’s (and, by extension,

Schleiermacher’s) privileging of irrational finite subjectivity—which likewise,

if in a different way, forecloses on mediation between the finite and infinite.

Wolf deploys Spinoza in an equally complex way to position the Vereinler both

against forms of finite subjectivity that are incommensurable with spirit’s ratio-

nal development and against the secularized Christian supersessionism that un-

dergirds Hegel’s genealogy of the actualized free subject in the modern rational

state.

Hegel’s positioning of Spinoza (in contrast to his own completion of philoso-

phy) as the secular analogue to Judaism (in contrast to Christianity) is thorough-

going in his discussions of Spinoza and could scarcely have escaped the notice

of Wolf and his colleagues. Much as, in his philosophy of religion lectures, Hegel

appreciated Jewish monotheism as essentially true yet abstract, incomplete and

in need of being mediated through the Christian trinity and incarnation, he sees

Spinoza’s monistic understanding of substance as abstractly true but incapable

of actively differentiating itself into concrete spirit. It is in this sense that Spinoza

is the “foundation” and “commencement” of all philosophy (which finds its

completion in Hegel himself ):

This Idea of Spinoza’s we must allow to be in the main true and well-

grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in

order to be this it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and

by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with

Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determina-

tion of mind; it may undoubtedly be said that this thought is the founda-

tion of all true views—not, however, as their absolutely fixed and permanent

basis, but as the abstract unity which mind is in itself. It is therefore worthy

of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spi-

nozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all

Philosophy.^24

Hegel associates Spinoza with the Eleatics (who also stressed the unity of all

being) and explicitly contrasts the undifferentiated unity of Spinozan-Eleatic phi-