Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 99
achieves active independence. Such speculative self- consciousness is an act of
cognitive mirroring whereby the self overcomes alienation and restores itself
to the absolute by recognizing itself in, and recognizing its identity with, its
own objects. (Indeed, the subject’s grasping of its identity with the object of
its self-consciousness is what self-consciousness is.) In self-conscious thought
(and, most perfectly, in Wissenschaft), the undifferentiated absolute obtains, and
recognizes itself as, differentiated unity. Thus with the advent of Hegelian self-
consciousness, Spinoza’s (“mere”) modes attain true existence (“the existent
as such”):^37 they become part of a dynamic differentiated speculative unity. In
Hegel, Spinoza’s infinitely distant God becomes mediated, differentiated, mani-
fest; the Christian differentiated unity of Hegelian science fulfills Spinoza’s Jew-
ish abstract unity.
Such was the image—and allegory—of Spinoza that the Verein Hegelians took
away from Hegel’s lectures and his various published remarks on Spinoza. Wolf
theorizes the fundamental Jewish idea of unity not, like Hegel, in terms of ab-
straction in need of mediation by Christianity and its secularized spiritual mani-
festations, but, much more affirmatively, in terms of conceptual purity. Follow-
ing, it would seem, a Maimonidean tradition, Wolf argues that the conceptual
purity of the Jewish idea has had to make certain concessions to limited stages
of human understanding:
This concept is revealed to the Jewish people, i.e., posited as a datum. But
this took place at a time when man’s mind was far from ready to grasp it in all
its universality. For man needs time in order to raise himself from the world
of the physical and the many to that of the universal unity, the all-embracing
and all-existing Monas. Thus the idea of the unity of God, as taught by Ju-
daism, could only gradually be comprehended and recognized by a people
which had not yet raised itself from the physical world. At first, therefore,
the idea of God had to be conveyed in personal and individual shape and
could only gradually be revealed in is full universality. Therefore the idea of
God, if it was to continue and develop among mankind, had to be clothed in
a body and thus brought nearer to human understanding. In this way Judaism
intimately united the world of the spiritual and the divine with the world of
human life. But it depicted the divine in its first revelation as a living, spiritual
entity, incommensurable with the world of matter and incapable of physi-
cal representation. But the body surrounding the divine idea, in which its
gradual unfolding and development proceeded, was Mosaic theocracy. Thus
the Jewish people became a nation of priests in the sense of guardian of the
idea of God—a people of God.^38