Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

224 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Compared to historical heroes, poets and philosophers leave a faint personal

imprint on their (intellectual) deeds. Auerbach, however, draws a distinction

between the poet and the philosopher. Since poets deal with particular human

beings and situations, they necessarily draw on their own experience and that

of their age. Philosophers, in contrast, deal with universal truths that have no

necessary basis in their particular existence.^110

Auerbach places Spinoza, however, in a special subcategory of philosopher

that defies, in a peculiar way, the general rule of the nonrelationship between a

philosopher’s Individualität and work. The philosopher who belongs to this

exceptional category manages to shed all subjective idiosyncrasies and become

one with his universal thought. As the exceptional convergence between phi-

losopher and philosophical work, Spinoza embodies the human freedom he

theorizes: Spinoza the person embodies his philosophy.^111

Later in the biography Auerbach refers to Spinoza’s critique of anthropocen-

trism to cast Spinoza as the anti-egoist par excellence: “Spinoza’s life and teach-

ing are the diametric opposite of all egoism in the broadest sense. ‘All prejudice,’

he understood, ‘stems from the fact that people view themselves as the center of

the universe and wish to comprehend everything only in relation to themselves.’

Thus elevated above all particularities he treated the workings of the human

soul so freely and independently, so objectively, ‘as if it were a question of lines,

planes and bodies.’ ”^112 Spinoza’s displacement of the human subject from the

center of the universe prepares Spinoza’s movement, in Auerbach’s portrait of

him, beyond the confines of subjectivity. The events of Spinoza’s life—the ban

pronounced against him by Amsterdam’s Jewish community, his break with

community and family, and so forth—uprooted him and rendered him the ulti-

mate modern individual, disentangled from familial and communal bonds. Even

more important, Auerbach sees Spinoza as embodying his own principle that

“the more decisively and consciously one displaces oneself out of the subjective

and individual [and] into eternal and infinite life, the more the infinite and the

finite are reunited, the more one lives in eternity, in immortality, in God.”^113 Spi-

noza’s existential freedom did not lead him to luxuriate in selfhood’s pleasures

or wallow in its miseries but was essentially synonymous with the harmony he

achieved between his particularity and God’s timeless universality.

Auerbach concludes his biography with a caution against two perilous ex-

tremes of misinterpretation of Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy. The one ex-

treme sees in Spinoza cause for total resignation. Auerbach takes issue with

Goethe’s interpretation of Spinoza along these lines.^114 If it is wrong to infer

from Spinoza’s pantheism that the self lacks agency, however, the other extreme,

which Auerbach calls “unconditional libertinage,” is infinitely more insidious.