Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 137
tential use to him as so much mere moaning about lacking the requisite gifts to
pursue Wissenschaft.
Replying on October 16 , 1823 , Wohlwill refines his comments on the rela-
tionship between Wissenschaft and the subjectivity of its would-be practitio-
ner. First, where Moser had interpreted him to be making excuses for biding
his time, his orientation toward a more auspicious future must not be confused
with capitulation; it is “a brooding for the future in a barren and unedifying
[unerquick lichen] present.”^153 Second, he complicates Moser’s tendency to cast
scientific productivity as a matter of sheer will:
Even if the scientific activity is very much, indeed thoroughly, a matter of
individual freedom, it is nonetheless only true and pure when, at its center, is
the whole person.... Whoever has only tangential or secantial contact with
the circle of Wissenschaft touches its inner essence in only a few points and
cannot boast of having completely penetrated and grasped it. Now this cen-
trality, the real touchstone of true scientificity [Wissenschaftlichkeit], it seems
to me—as some lack the capacity for it altogether—is not always something
we can freely choose [wohl nicht immer in unsere Freiheit gegeben]. For me at
least, wherever I am capable of it, it is completely contingent upon the state
[Standpunkt] of my inner life, my disposition; and this has not yet come
close to achieving consistency.^154
For Wohlwill no will-to-Wissenschaft can offer a way out of the subjective pre-
dicament of its would-be practitioner, for the simple reason that the pursuit of
Wissenschaft remains contingent on the spiritual well-being of those who would
engage in it. He explains that he can only really do Wissenschaft when his Gemüt
is in balance, which—especially given the bleakness of the age—it generally is
not. Whereas Moser calls for the subordination of one’s self to the higher cause
of Wissenschaft, Wohlwill characterizes Wissenschaft as a practice carried out by
embodied persons who sometimes are, and sometimes are not, up to it for both
personal and wider historical reasons. There is simply no stepping beyond the
contingencies of one’s inner life—or historical realities—in the name of Wis-
senschaft.
In his next letter (of March 14 , 1824 ) Moser remains typically dismissive of
Moser’s “thoughts about the centrality of the soul, etc.” which made him think of
the sixteenth-century mystic Jacob Boehm.^155 Moser spins out his associations
into a sarcastic parable of how “Immanuel Wohlwill, or, when he was still an au-
thor, Wolf ” had been transformed into a sigh (Seufzer) that drifts down the Elbe
by moonlight into the fog with a buxom female sigh as his companion. Moser’s
sardonic reverie concludes the following morning in the Freischule in Hamburg,