Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 135
awareness of, an underlying conceptual unity (Gedankeneinheit). On the con-
trary, acts are often of the greatest consequence when performed naively. The
Hegelian wissenschaftlich ideal of spirit self- consciously knowing itself is not all
it is cracked up to be.
Wohlwill elaborates further on his psychic state as he tries to make the tran-
sition from youth to adulthood and social integration. He writes a good deal
about the dissolution of youthful Traumleben, Phantasie, and so forth, and how
difficult it is to come to terms with something more solid. His allegorical de-
scription of this process would seem to be largely (though not only) a reckoning
with the Verein and its Hegelian dreams:
Soon we tread nearer the bustle of social intercourse; the sun of life no lon-
ger shines in a reflection, its rays no longer fall on us obliquely; they burn
at the zenith. We hold our dream images [Traumbilder] up to the so-called
real ones in the midday sky: they no longer correspond; the representation
does not resemble the model [das Abbild will dem Vorbilde nicht gleichen]:
we pull out our instructions for life and its joys [ziehen unsere Anweisung
an das Leben und die Lebensfreude hervor]; no one comes to us and wants
to hear and recognize our most ponderous demands. It is no longer enough
that our imagination [die Phantasie] be engaged, will and vigor demand
their right. Spirit seeks, since nothing was realized [weil ihm nichts gewor-
den], all the more eagerly to comprehend and appropriate [sich aneignen]
the whole, or at any rate to find a place in the universe [im All] from which
it might survey the Other [das Andere]. It searches for unity and truth; who
finds these and holds on to them? The age’s complex [verworrene] and de-
manding conditions and unfortunate, unpleasant individual circumstances
proliferate the bleakness and bitterness of this view of the world and of
life.^145
As Wohlwill struggles to find a viable professional and social position, he real-
izes that the fantasy life in which he had been living corresponds to no avail-
able reality. He describes spirit’s attempt to comprehend unity and truth as an
essentially defensive action: because it has not been able to realize itself (weil
ihm nichts geworden), spirit tries to compensate by comprehending the whole,
by searching for unity and truth. This attempt is doomed to fail, however, and
indeed seems only to repeat the Traumleben to which the world has already
given the lie. The grasp of the whole that spirit achieves is not Hegel’s ideal of
the identity of spirit and world but rather an alienated perspective on the world
as Other. The age does not correspond to the image that sprit would like to
make of it.