Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 255

self is what intellectual love is.^53 If Hegelian thought had been animated by such

“love” it would have “offered itself up” and progressed to activity. In intellectual

love, self-possessed subjectivity opens or sacrifices itself and participates in, and

joyfully knows itself to be participating in, dynamic processes greater than any

it can claim as its “own.”

Does Hess’s conception of human freedom really negate individuals, as

Breckman’s critique of Hess’s Spinozism has it? Hess, at any rate, does not

think so and elaborates an argument to the contrary. His aim is not simply to

level individuality but to rethink it with Spinoza and to draw out the ethical

(sociopolitical) implications of such a rethinking. Later in Die Europäische Tri-

archie Hess explicitly refutes Hegel’s reading of Spinozan substance as a kind of

ontological hoarder that negates all particularities (or subjects). Against Hegel’s

charge of acosmism, Hess insists that in Spinozan ethics human beings par-

take of substance only as the particular entities (minds and bodies) that we are;

substance, insofar as we partake of it, has no residence beyond its immanent

manifestation in us. Spinozan substance thus in no way levels particular indi-

vidualities:

Hegel said, and many repeated after him, that in Spinoza the world vanishes

in God, diversity in unity, the subject in the substance.... You believe you

discern contempt for the world and for life in Spinoza’s ethics, and see cor-

roborated therein [the argument]: everything for substance, nothing for the

subject [Alles der Substanz, Nichts dem Subject darin vindicirt zu sehen]. But

the last ( 5 th) chapter of the Ethics consists almost exclusively of propositions

in which the divinity and eternity of the subject, the person, or as you like to

express yourselves, the “personality of God” is deduced. Now tell me then,

how is your understanding of Spinoza’s Ethics compatible with its state-

ments that place so much weight on the preservation of life that even a propo-

sition like this can appear there: “An idea which excludes the existence of

our body cannot exist in our mind, but is contrary to it.”—A proposition that

brands “letting oneself merge with God” or, in a word, acosmism, as a form

of in sanity? This proposition, however, follows completely logically from the

principles of the Ethics. For what constitutes the true life of the human being,

according to these principles, is not the substance, as you seem to believe,

not God as such, but God insofar as He lives in us, forms the essence of our

existence. Precisely contrary than you think, we do not partake of the divine

life insofar as God is substance and inheres in everything, but only insofar

as He is subject and inheres in us. In his metaphysics Spinoza recognizes

only substance; in his ethics, however, only the subject. Our idealists seem