Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

250 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

ing subjectivism and narrow particularism in its various iterations: philosophi-

cal, political, social, and national. Against what Hess sees as the epistemological

errors and negative ethical and political consequences of narrow self-assertion,

he proposes an alternative, Spinoza-inspired way to think of the relationship

of parts to wholes. He continues, explicitly, to understand the movement of his

philosophy of history toward his vision of European unity in terms of the re-

alization of truths revealed in Spinoza’s Ethics.^30 Although Hess understood

Die Europäische Triarchie in political terms, the balance of the book is quite

abstract. This is in keeping with the lingering abstraction of the various Young

Hegelian calls for a shift from abstraction to action, but it also stems from Hess’s

Spinozan understanding of thought as a kind of action. For Hess, thought does

not need to become something that it is not in order to become activity; rather, it

must come to see itself as the intregal part of free human activity that it already is.

Intellectual freedom—free intellectual activity—is for Hess the key to achieving

social, ethical, and political freedom: “Ethical and social bondage ensue only

from spiritual bondage. Conversely, the emancipation of laws and of morals is

likewise a necessary consequence of the emancipation of the spirit. This conclu-

sion must either be reached or the premise, spiritual freedom, denied. Freedom

is an organism that cannot be missing even one limb without being maimed.

The three emancipations that have been elaborated here [Germany, France, and

England] are merely different emanations of one and the same essence, human

independence.”^31 As abstract as Hess’s Spinozan political vision was, Hess,

however naively, understood it to have the highest possible practical stakes. The

chief obstacle Hess sees to the realization of freedom is our enthrallment to false

and deleterious understandings of subjectivity.^32 Though Hess does not refer

here (and only infrequently refers anywhere) to specific propositions or argu-

ments in Spinoza, it is clear enough that in Die Europäische Triarchie he has

in mind Spinoza’s contention that as knowledge, power, and virtue—which are

all essentially synonymous for Spinoza—increase, so does social cooperation,

and simultaneously strife, born of unfreedom and bondage to the passions, de-

creases. As Spinoza states in Ethics, for example, “men, in so far as they live

in accordance with the guidance of reason, to that extent alone necessarily do

those things that are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for

each man.”^33

In the substantial introduction to Die Europäische Triarchie Hess refers

repeatedly to Cieszkowski’s “Prolegomena to a Historiosophy.”^34 Hess follows

Cieszkowski in calling for a move from contemplative philosophy to a philos-

ophy of the deed.^35 And, again like Cieszkowski, Hess critiques Hegel’s phi-

losophy for its orientation to the past and neglect of the future, which, both