Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 21 5

from a historical point of view, as something objective, or to grant subjectiv-

ity a breakthrough and elevate the suffering and hopes of the individual—

as resonant in the revelation of the age—to a higher universality. Freiligrath

can in many respects be seen as the diametric opposite of the Ichspoeten

who can never get beyond their contingent experiences [Begebnisse]; he

keeps his subjectivity mostly to himself. He strives with laudable energy

after an objectivity in which he can maneuver freely [in der er frei schalten

könne].^82

Auerbach locates the strength of the historical portrait in its ability to put sub-

jectivity into a universal perspective. The Ichspoeten indulge in the contingen-

cies of subjectivity, but a “poetic” gaze on history distills its higher “objective”

truth. Such a perspective on the past also offers a model for how to look at

the subjective vicissitudes of the present, whereby these, too, reveal the age’s

“purely human” essence.

In Auerbach’s appreciative assessment, Freiligrath’s poetry deploys histori-

cal distance and perspective to look at subjectivity and contemporaneity (das

Zeitgenossische) in a manner that approaches the Spinozan ideal of regarding

events sub specie aeternitatis. Such a view approaches timeless rational truth

and reveals subjective problems as the ephemeral, illusory product of a limited

perspective. Freiligrath’s historical perspective, in other words, offers a way to

grasp not only what has been universal and objective in subjective experience

in a past moment, but it also offers a corrective to understanding the present in

terms of contingency and subjective experience. Freiligrath’s poetic historical

perspective offers a way to look at contemporaneity as though from a historical

remove. It is in this sense that Auerbach sees Freiligrath’s perspective as the

opposite of that of the despised Ichspoeten. Such a perspective is the vanish-

ing point of subjects into humankind, particularities into generality, and con-

temporaneity into the revelation (Offenbarung) of history. Auerbach’s linking

of Freiligrath’s pursuit of objectivity to the exercise of free agency (in der er frei

schalten könne) likewise jibes with Spinoza’s conception of virtue and true free-

dom, which is achieved by overcoming subjective passions and acting in unity

with the objective world. The implicit Spinozist subtext for Auerbach’s literary

criticism emerges more starkly in view of how, in both his novelistic portrait and

biography of Spinoza (which I will examine in a moment), Auerbach identifies

the sage’s most profound ethical legacy to be having shown that what human

beings have in common embodies more rationality, virtue, and freedom than

whatever might be peculiar to individuals.

In another 1838 Europa review, “Bemerkungen über Titel und Vorreden in