Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 127
That which cannot answer for and justify itself before consciousness has
above^124 been identified as the trivial and ephemeral, with which time dis-
penses. Whatever in Judaism is incapable of accounting for itself before Wis-
senschaft in its contemporary form will not fall away or require a special act
to be overthrown. Rather, it has already fallen away and been overthrown
by virtue of the fact that it could offer no justification for itself to Wissen-
schaft. Since you recognize and honor existence as such [das Seyende als
solches], any particular phenomenon that makes no claim to such recogni-
tion has vanished and quit the very circle of life. What is scientific in you
is also what is practical in you. What is untenable flees like smoke as soon
as you attempt to hold the torch of knowledge up to it, but what earlier had
an utterly inconspicuous existence develops with giant advances and be-
comes a mighty edifice by virtue of having science and knowledge on its
side.^125
Gans’s wissenschaftliches Ressentiment approaches a form of magical thinking.
The Hegelian intellectual declares what exists but that, according to his knowl-
edge of the essential structure and trajectory of the historical process, lacks
justification for existing to be essentially nonexistent, devoid of “existence as
such.” Gans’s Hegelian insistence on the agency of the idea, of the practical
force of a conceptual architecture, emerges as a fantasy of power compensat-
ing for weakness and exclusion. In Gans’s description the Vereinler become
superheroes of Wissenschaft. They can fix their scientific gaze on nonessential
objects and virtually vaporize them. They can disperse the degradations of an
idiotic world like so much smoke. Moreover, Gans predicts dramatic reversals of
fortune: what appears powerful can crumble almost instantaneously, and what
appears weak can grow swiftly into a mighty edifice.
As in his penultimate address, however, Gans’s assertion of scientific power
is directed at two targets. If it is the Jews’ unbearable banality that Gans points to
explicitly as the obstacle to the realization of the Verein’s version of Wissenschaft
des Judentums as a political project, the other, implicit object of his critique is
the Prussian government, which had demonstrated so emphatically, and with
such personal consequence for Gans, that it was not Hegel’s state. The prob-
lem for Gans was not only a Jewish community that, marked by Enlightenment
epistemology, subjectivism, and sheer banality, refused to be brought to a uni-
fying scientific consciousness of itself. Even more intractable, arguably, was a
state that had barred access even to the most qualified Wissenschaftsjuden. One
can view Gans’s fantasy of scientific power as ludicrous or poignant, or some
combination of the two, and one can view his harsh critique of the maddeningly