Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Locating Themselves in History { 145
ing my own.”^179 Moser here ironically echoes a sentiment broadly similar to the
one for which he had earlier lambasted Wohlwill. His existence is structured
in an unproductive, indeed crippling, way by an irreconcilable opposition be-
tween individual life and his will to Wissenschaft. As a principle that Moser can
at most subjugate himself to but never generate and embody, Wissenschaft offers
at best a standard by which to measure the fractures of his Selbstheit, in which
Moser now seems to see Wissenschaft itself as profoundly implicated. His irony
intact, Moser sees the split between the universality of spirit and the inescapable
isolation of the individual as tragicomic. He casts himself as a hapless extra in
God’s world tragedy, which ham actors are spoiling: “Is it not a misfortune that
our spirit [Geist] has become so universal yet we still have to kick around in the
straitest circumstances? Stand like common extras at the back of the stage, while
in the evening actors puff themselves up in front and botch up dear God’s world
tragedy for him.”^180 Although Wissenschaft still is the way to connect oneself
to the great world-historical drama, to embody and activate Wissenschaft in a
world-historically meaningful way would require a sort of intellectual heroism
that Moser cannot muster.
Even though Moser and Wohlwill did not produce any Wissenschaft to speak
of, a Hegelian phantasm of Wissenschaft had an abiding presence in their lives.
If in its most confident phase the Vereinler sought in Wissenschaft the glue that
would bind together Judentum and humanity (Europe, the state), it took on the
role of a kind of superego in the post-Verein correspondence of the haplessly
isolated Jewish Hegelians Moser and Wohlwill. It figured the elusive interface
between their private subjectivities and the grand drama of world history. In
this way Wissenschaft continued to inflect how Moser and Wohlwill understood
the world and their individual places in it. Even as non-Wissenschaftler, they
consistently measured themselves against Wissenschaft and sometimes asserted
themselves in defiance of it.