Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

256 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

here, as everywhere, to have studied the metaphysics at the expense of the

ethics.^54

Hess could not be more explicit or adamant in his rejection of the widespread

Hegelian reading of Spinozan monism as entailing the negation of particulari-

ties.^55

The stakes of Hess’s defense of a different reading of Spinoza entail his abil-

ity to redefine individuality and the relation between individuals and society. He

vehemently rejects the view that Spinozan substance negates human individual-

ity or subjectivity. He first paraphrases, then contests, the argument that Spi-

noza negates all particularities. In his paraphrase, “destruction of oppositions is

destruction of life. Individuals, families, classes [Stände], tribes, nations, races

are concrete organizations. If you destroy these natural oppositions, you destroy

concrete creations of which human society consists, etc.”^56 The counterargu-

ment Hess offers stresses repeatedly that the system of relationships, in which

particularities participate, in no way negates those particularities: “Through

sublation [Aufhebung] of oppositions the lower organizations [Organisationen]

of love indeed become sublated, not destroyed, however, but rather raised up

out of raw, natural life to cultivated, spiritual life. When husband and wife unite

in love, two individuals form one essence, the family; but the original two are

not destroyed in this One. And when one day tribes, nations, races unite in love,

form One big family, pursue One interest, these earlier organizations of love will

not thereby be destroyed.”^57 With Spinoza, Hess argues that subjects become

more, not less, free, and more, not less, active and powerful when they come

to understand themselves as part of the wider totality to which they owe their

particular existences. Selves are not negated by, but rather exist only by virtue

of, their wider contexts. To activate themselves, then, subjects must come to

know their true relationship to the material world, which, in turn, requires that

they move beyond their illusory self-definition as sovereign selves in opposition

to the merely material world. Such one-sided, dualistic thinking can arrive only

at a negative freedom, never at the synthesis of mind and matter required for

positive activity.

What is striking about Hess’s Spinozan conception of freedom—and start-

ling to our Cartesian sensibilities—is his contention that freedom and activity

necessarily exceed the claims that any given subject can make on them. Freedom

and activity are not things that subjects can possess; subjects can only partici-

pate in them in a manner that necessarily exceeds subjective self-delimitation.

For Hess, paradoxically, subjects remain incapable of knowing and participat-

ing in true freedom unless they move beyond themselves. Subjective freedom