Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

122 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

quer the world at will.^104 Just as it is Hegel who allows them to dismiss their

hypothetical skeptics as trapped in the perspective of narrow subjectivity (“the

layer of ice of their personal concerns”), it is also Hegel—and only Hegel—who

allows them conceptually to overcome such subjectivity and grasp humanity,

their coreligionists, and the fatherland as thoroughly compatible ethical collec-

tivities. Certainly neither their coreligionists nor their king, to whom the Verein-

ler claimed to be repaying a debt of gratitude, recognized the the propinquity

of these entities or the Verein’s capacity to mediate between them.^105 Instead of

finding itself confirmed in history’s ineluctable progress, Hegelian theory had

begun to compensate for reality’s lack of cooperation.

After being expressly and legally excluded from the state in August 1822 ,

Gans had to revise his initial views on the relation of theory to reality more

dramatically still. In his final address of May 4 , 1823 (the familial metaphorics of

which I discussed above), Gans reverses the position he had articulated in his

address of April 1 , 1821 , and reiterated on October 28 , 1821 , regarding how the

Vereinler would have to interpret their eventual hypothetical failure. As we have

seen, Gans’s earlier caution against seeking out external alibis in the event of

failure issued from his confidence in the rightness and agency of his historical

conception; in a manner of speaking, Gans was playing chicken with world his-

tory, daring it to try to prove him wrong. Presuming to speak from the vanguard

of the triumphalist march of reason, Gans had hewn closely to Hegel’s famous

Doppelsatz in the preface to Philosophy of Right: “what is rational is actual; what

is actual is rational.”^106 What was not rational, however, had now become actual

and had thrown into crisis Gans’s already strained identification of himself and

the Verein with the state. This turn of events required a dramatic rethinking of

the relation of theory to actuality and of the Verein’s relationship to the move-

ment of world history.

The opening rhetorical gambits of Gans’s final address enact the acute prob-

lem of the status of the Vereinler’s subject position in the face of their failure and

explicit exclusion from the state. The thrust of their political project, after all,

had been to model and promote a rationalized Jewish particularity that could

be woven into the differentiated fabric of the Hegelian state, whose hallmark is

the mutual penetration of the particular and the universal, of subjective freedom

and universal ethical substance. Now the Prussian state had defined Gans as a

sort of Jewish Fremdkörper, unfit to hold an official state position regardless of

his cognitive prowess and other talents. Gans responds to this predicament with

various attempts to evade the vexed position of his Ich. He begins with a meta-

commentary on the duty of the historian to become transparent and let events

speak for themselves: “The highest demand made of the historian is to anni-