Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 243

The once intimate friendship between Hess and Auerbach had effectively dis-

solved under the strain of their political differences over the course of 1842 – 43 ,

and when Hess wrote these lines, the two had not corresponded in over a year.

Hess laments to Auerbach:

O, if we had stuck together, then you wouldn’t have become the sentimen-

tal esthetician of the Black Forest and the asshole [Podex] of salon literature

in this clique of Honeks and Andrés! You would not have retreated from

the misery of life back into your foreskin in order to coquet with your own

Gemütlichkeit [comfort, congeniality] while people are reduced to animal exis-

tence, become destitute, and starve. You would have with me entered the hovels

of the unfortunate and discovered the terrible secrets of depraved humanity,

and depicted them perhaps better than [Eugène] Sue, the French bourgeois,

and thus lent your hand to the liberation of humanity, whereas you now, like

Honek, write another sort of fairy tale for winter evenings to chase away the ter-

rible boredom of idlers who, for variety’s sake, wish for once to call on the lower

strata, as long as the Ciceros beautify the paths with flowers and whitewash so

that they needn’t feel ill at ease!^5

The clique of “Andrés and Honeks” requires clarification. “André” was Karl

Andree, who became the editor of the Kölnische Zeitung shortly before the

paper published Freiligrath’s paean to Auerbach’s Dorfgeschichten in Novem-

ber 1843. “Honek” was the pen name of Auerbach’s friend Max Cohen, editor

of a popular Volkskalender with the title Das Buch für Winterabende (Book for

winter evenings).^6 What surely stung Auerbach most was Hess’s charge that

he had “retreated into his foreskin” in adopting his new folksy and widely cel-

ebrated literary persona, since Auerbach obviously wanted to understand his

successful turn to all things volkstümlich precisely as proof of an essential har-

mony between Judentum and Deutschtum.^7 Whether we view Hess’s remark as

cruel or apt, ungenerous or hilarious, or some mixture of these, it is important

to understand the double aspect of the retreat or retraction it signals: it is at once

to play the goy and to shirk an ethical obligation—one Hess here understands

as Jewish—by luxuriating in idyllic pseudorealism that apologizes for the status

quo instead of advancing the cause of the most needy.

In this chapter, I analyze some of Hess’s varied—and sometimes obscure—

attempts to draw on Spinoza to critique the autonomous individual as an episte-

mological error with harmful ethical consequences. Spinoza also provided Hess

with inspiration and tools to think human individuality otherwise than accord-

ing to the logic of Cartesian dualism. Hess’s abiding critique of the illusions and

human cost of sovereign subjectivity took different forms at different times in