Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 23 7

out, even for characters who can claim no direct knowledge of the sage’s ideas.

Edmund, for example, arrives at the following view of happiness: “Joy in exis-

tence, knowledge of one’s existence elevated into pleasure, is the root and crown

of happiness,” a paraphrase of Spinoza’s conception of intellectual love.^155 The

professor’s view of freedom is also evidently borrowed from Spinoza: “Nature’s

endowments, internal and external, impose a necessity upon us that we cannot

suspend but that we can elevate ourselves above through consciousness and

knowledge, by conforming to it out of self-determination. We become free not by

suspending the laws of the universe or of our own nature but by fulfilling them,

for natural necessity and order is freedom’s essential form.”^156 Such intellectual

love, a wider participation in nature achieved through greater knowledge—that

is, Spinozan virtue—lifts us out of our illusory pursuits of egoistic pleasure and

grants true happiness, the professor argues.^157

How wedded Spinozan happiness is to patriotic dedication to a just German

Vaterland becomes evident in the story’s closing lines. Despite the personal sad-

ness Edmund has endured, he has redoubled his commitment to the common

good. True (Spinozan) happiness, readers are to understand, lies in personal

renunciation and altruistic dedication to the higher cause of the community of

the Vaterland:

Edmund is loved and honored as a champion of the fatherland and a devotee

of justice by all those who support the fatherland and justice; all his love is for

[gilt] the common weal, and all his striving. He devoted himself to it when he

still had reason to hope for personal happiness; he has only remained true to

it. His happiness now consists only in the welfare of others.

Who is happy?^158

Spinoza’s presence in Auerbach’s 1842 story “Liebe Menschen” is only im-

plicit, though no less pervasive. The story’s Christian protagonist, Rudolph,

travels to Cologne to pay a visit to his university friend Karl, whom he has

not seen in years. When Rudolf arrives Karl has not yet returned home from

work. Rudolf is therefore greeted by his friend’s sister Elisabetha, with whom

he immediately falls in love, and by their mother, in whom Rudolf finds a new

“Herzensheimath.”^159 Auerbach’s original title for the story, “Intellectuale

Liebe,” works on two levels.^160 It refers to the key Spinozan concept of intel-

lectual love and to the story’s romantic plot, in which Rudolph and Elisabetha

quickly grow attached to each other through a series of intellectual conversa-

tions with unmistakable Spinozistic themes. Philosophical dialogue both dis-

places, and serves as the medium of, romance. This Spinozan romance ends

more happily than is the case in “Deutsche Abende: Wer ist glücklich?” The