Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
126 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
Jews and the mundane sociological reality of the Jewish community pivots on
which reality is essentially, and which is only apparently, real. Gans attempts
to maintain a purchase on reality and authority in the face of irrelevance and
exclusion. The self-transformation that Jews must undertake hinges on achiev-
ing self-consciousness as an ethical unity within a broader totality. The Verein’s
task was and remains “to bring Jewry, as the object to which it [the Verein] is
solely committed, to self-consciousness, to make the Jewish world apparent to
itself [das Judenthum als den Gegenstand, auf den er ausschließlich angewiesen
ist, zum Bewußtseyn zu bringen, die jüdische Welt sich selbst vorstellig zu ma-
chen].’’^120 Since true reality lies in the organic unity toward which world history
is ineluctably progressing, what is paramount is not pragmatism and remedia-
tion on the local level.^121 Rather, it is a new conscious knowledge among Jews of
this “higher unity” structuring their existence: “what appears in the most varied
expressions of a still merely naive vegetable life, what wilts and dies through its
isolation devoid of context, to this we want to provide a central point toward
which to steer its life [wohin es sein Leben hinzuleiten habe] and from which it
can once again deduce itself [von dem es sich wieder herleiten kann]: it is this
higher unity on which we had our eye, not any particular this [irgend ein bestim-
mtes Dieses] with which one might like to saddle us. This unity, however, is
the consciousness of all that occurs, or becomes phenomenon [zur Erscheinung
wird], the knowledge of Judaism and of the Jews.”^122 It is only Wissenschaft des
Judentums (or das Wissen vom Judenthum und von den Juden) that can pro-
vide the needed consciousness of Judaism and the Jews as a rationally coherent
ethical totality (which, as such, is integratable into the state) rather than as the
mere aggregate of atomized individuals and local concerns. It is this totality of
conception that constitutes the indispensable political function of the Verein’s
version of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
Gans can attribute such agency to ideas, knowledge, and Wissenschaft pre-
cisely because access to Hegel’s state is, arguably, primarily cognitive. Without
the requisite knowledge and consciousness, all local practical interventions will
amount to nothing. It is precisely in absolute consciousness, when one knows
oneself in the world, that one overcomes the subject-object split and becomes
truly at home in the world’s differentiated unity (the modern state). This is why
the Verein’s central task becomes “to bring Jewry... to self-consciousness, to
make the Jewish world apparent to itself.” Having put forward his rationale for
why the Vereinler’s activity is and must be a quintessentially wissenschaftlich
one, Wissenschaft being “the purest consciousness of things,” Gans turns to the
question of how far the Vereinler’s practical activity should extend.^123 He argues
that what is truly practical is precisely what is wissenschaftlich: