Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

252 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

same time ceded world dominion to philosophy, so also has philosophy itself

attained such a classic point where it must go beyond itself and thereby at the

same time must cede true world dominion to another.”^40 This “other,” postphi-

losophical force poised to claim world dominion is praxis. It will go beyond

philosophy by overcoming the opposition between philosophy and art—that is,

by embodying absolute thought once again in an actual substrate. The identity

that Hegel claimed to have achieved between thought and being—this is at the

center of both Cieszkowski’s and Hess’s critique of Hegel—in fact remained

within thought.^41 The “new demand” for a synthesis of thought and being in

the deed, in contrast, is a demand “to develop a substantial identity from the for-

mal one.”^42 Resolving this contradiction “is the destiny of the highest, practical,

social life”; “being and thought must... dissolve in action, art and philosophy

in social life.”^43

Cieszkowski critiques Hegelian philosophy as a secularized Christian mode

of thought that remains more like theology than it acknowledges. Through

speculation, philosophy replaces belief with thought as the highest form of

truth, yet the synthesis this thought achieves remains confined to abstract sub-

jective consciousness, in the religious and political guises of Protestantism and

liberalism, respectively, which “are merely the peaks of abstract subjectivity.”^44

Hess agrees with Cieszkowski that Hegel’s synthesis of thought and being re-

mains one-sided (within thought), abstract, and subjective, and also agrees that

world history is moving toward a more profound synthesis of thought and being

in deeds or sociopolitical praxis.^45

Hess emphatically parts ways with Cieszkowski, however, regarding the

role of property. Cieszkowski sees in proprietorship the path by which modern

subjects can overcome the abstraction of Protestant and liberal subjectivity and

achieve real ethical agency: “Only as proprietor is man a particular and real

man. This is the most immediate stage of his concreteness, which we take here

not at all in the abstractly legal sense, but rather in the highest moral sense.”^46

Instead of seeking to concretize the abstract self through proprietorship, Hess

tries to expose the discrete self as an epistemologically and morally insidious

error that both perpetuates and is perpetuated by the socially atomizing institu-

tion of private property.

Whereas Cieszkowski deployed Hegel’s historicization of art to historicize

Hegel’s own philosophy of consciousness, and to expose it as lacking in pre-

cisely the concretion that was art’s chief virtue, Hess turns the tables on Hegel

in a different way, by deploying Hegel’s critique of Spinoza against Hegel. As

noted in chapter 3 , Hegel deemed Spinozan substance incapable of becoming

an active, conscious, or differentiated subject. In his view the awesome unity of