Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

244 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

his career and drew not only on Spinoza but on many other conceptual models

as well, most notably Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of species-being.^8 Yet Hess

is at his most original, and strange, when he thinks most closely with Spinoza,

for it is then that he attempts not simply to negate the individual or to sublate

individuality in, say, the concept of species-being, but rather to conceive of mu-

tually constitutive relations between human individuality and totality in monis-

tic terms. Hess’s ambitious and elusive project of imagining a supra-individual

Spinozan humanism took vastly different forms over the course of his career, but

the history of this preoccupation allows us to see not only a rupture but also a

great deal of continuity between Hess’s socialist writings of the late 1830 s and

1840 s and his turn to Jewish nationalism in the 1860 s.^9

The fact that Hess could derive inspiration from Spinoza from his first

through his last writings underscores how Hess saw in Spinoza not so much

a philosopher as a prophet of a coming age of supra-individual humanistic co-

operation. This allowed Hess to continue to embrace Spinoza even as Hess’s

Young Hegelian contemporaries were scrambling to leave behind and “realize”

philosophy. Feuerbach served Marx for a period as a model antiphilosopher,

but when Marx came to see Feuerbach as, alas, also a philosopher stuck in the

German ideology and incapable of theorizing material praxis, there was no next

antiphilosopher to turn to. For Hess, Spinoza was this antiphilosopher from be-

ginning to end; for him, Spinozism ultimately implied a revolution in ethical life.

Spinoza allowed Hess to critique the abstraction of philosophy and the phil-

osophical subject from Descartes through Hegel and the Young Hegelians, “the

latest philosophers,” to quote the title of Hess’s 1845 polemic against Bruno

Bauer and Max Stirner. The central target of Hess’s critique of philosophy was

the abstraction and dualistic subjectivity at its heart. He extended his critique

beyond philosophy and theology to attack subjective dualism and abstraction

in its political and economic guises. In all its various forms, dualism repre-

sented for Hess the legacy of Christianity. He was at times more and at times

less explicit about viewing Spinoza as the quintessential distillation of the es-

sence of Judaism, yet he consistently saw Spinoza as the liberating, spiritually

and materially unified alternative to Christian and post-Christian dualism and

abstraction, even as his vision of the form that Spinozan ethical unity would take

changed dramatically.

The Holy History of Mankind

Hess’s first book, The Holy History of Mankind (Die heilige Geschichte der Men-

schheit), appeared anonymously in 1837 as the work of a “disciple of Spinoza.”