Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

248 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

in the external world. Here, the narrow gap between freedom and necessity van-

ishes: ‘The freedom of humans exists not in their arbitrariness, but in conscious

obedience to the divine law. Obedience is the virtue of the pure human.’”^19

Breckman’s interpretation of Hess’s conception of activity—which, influenced

by Cieszkowski, Hess, would soon take up as a central concern—as mere passive

obedience to divine necessity is plausible, yet it ignores Hess’s own arguments

for why activating human freedom required overcoming what he viewed as the

detrimental illusion of subjective freedom. Hess embraced Spinoza’s proposi-

tion that we are active to the extent that we have adequate ideas and passive to

the extent that we have inadequate ones.^20 Since Hess views individual auton-

omy as an epistemological error, he is consistent, as paradoxical as it may seem,

in insisting that we actually limit our freedom and action to the extent that we

conceive of our ability to act as part and parcel of our being free individuals.

Breckman illuminates the vehemence and originality of Hess’s attack on per-

sonality when he notes that in The Holy History Hess motivates his argument

for abolishing the institutions of private property and inheritance not, primarily,

by appealing to economic justice but by assailing the dependence of property

and inheritance on “the personalist theology of monotheism.”^21 For Hess, “in-

heritance depends... on the belief in personal immortality, on the belief in the

eternal integrity of the person who may thus rule over his property equally in life

and death.”^22 Hess sees possessive individualism, modeled on personalist theol-

ogy and sustained by the institutions of property and heritability, as a form of

false consciousness that impedes human activity. He saw his age as moving be-

yond this limiting form of self-conception and the property relations in which it

is thoroughly implicated: “Our age has become aware that it is to eternal God—

the great Whole—that the eternal law of inheritance belongs; that, by contrast,

nothing can be possessed by individuals and nations in perpetuity since they

are fleeting and limited.”^23 Hess points to how the universe reclaims the “capi-

tal” it has loaned to the individual (that is, her body) to illustrate the justness of

the state’s reclaiming from its members, upon their death, the capital “which in

principal [im Grunde] is its property.”^24 Here, as elsewhere in The Holy History

and in other texts, Hess holds up the ancient Jewish state as a sort of blueprint

for a state operating according to the principle that no property can be appro-

priated eternally by individuals or nations: “[The old holy covenant] stipulated

that all property should revert after fifty years to its original owner (to whom it

had fallen during the original, just distribution of property). Because the divine

legislator considered all land as the property of the invisible national God.”^25

Although the Jewish state—as both a national rather than a universal state, and

an agrarian rather than a modern one—cannot serve as a model for modern poli-