Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 25 1

claim, diminishes Hegel’s political relevance. As Hess puts it, “the Hegelian

concept trails behind the facts of history but in no way underlies them [liegt

ihnen... zu Grunde], neither prophetically, mystically nor speculatively.”^36

(Hess’s three modes of perceiving the workings of holy history—prophetic,

mystical, and speculative—correspond to the three stages of his tripartite phi-

losophy of history.) Since Hegelian thought can identify the spirit’s trajectory

only in retrospect, so this critique went, it could never actively shape history,

never become what Cieszkowski was the first to call praxis. Hess is obviously

indebted to Cieszkowski, yet their visions for concretizing abstract subjectivity

differ in crucial ways that go to the heart of the specifically Spinozist cast of

Hess’s understanding of the deed, subjectivity, and socialist politics.^37 Hess af-

firms Cieszkowski’s charge that Hegel privileges consciousness over activity. As

Cieszkowski writes, “in Hegel consciousness is the Alpha and Omega, and in

general he derives the entire system of his philosophy from consciousness and

he subordinates the entire process of world history to consciousness.”^38 Hege-

lian thought thus amounts to a reflection on “facts” that cannot generate “acts.”

Hess likewise follows Cieszkowski in identifying their contemporary mo-

ment as a threshold in world history at which human consciousness can trans-

form its passive relation to facts into an active one. In Cieszkowski’s words, “we

are... at a world-historical turning point in the conversion of facts into acts.

That is, consciousness occupies a distinct place in the true system of philoso-

phy; thus the universe is not therefore closed with it. What lies before it (accord-

ing to thought) is unconscious, i.e. fact, but what follows from it must develop

itself consciously, and that is the deed.”^39 Cieszkowski assigns the apogee of

consciousness in Hegelian philosophy a place “within” philosophy and thereby

subverts its claim to have brought history or “the universe” to a close. Ciesz-

kowski’s ingenious strategy of historicizing Hegel brings Hegel’s assessment of

art to bear on Hegel’s own philosophy. Hegel considered art to have reached its

perfection in classical Greece. Modern art (Romanticism) brought conceptual

advances but entailed a loss of the perfect harmony between idea and material

being. In its very perfection, art reveals its limitation; and in the modern age,

art becomes spiritually subordinated to the all-synthesizing discourse of phi-

losophy. Cieszkowski historicizes the purportedly “absolute” nature of Hegel’s

synthesis of thought and being by praising it as the perfection of philosophy

(or philosophical consciousness). Just as art’s limitation becomes evident in its

own perfection, philosophy’s limitation emerges in its apogee in Hegel. The

nature of Hegel’s shortcomings, moreover, revindicate the superseded realm

of the esthetic: “Just as art, when it had attained the classic form, proceeded

beyond itself and dissolved itself in the romantic form of art, but also at the