Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 25 9

kowski, had issued in Die Europäische Triarchie.^62 Hess opens “Philosophie

der Tat” with a Spinozan critique of contemplative subjectivity as modeled in

the Cartesian cogito. His critique of the self-contained Cartesian subject remains

crucial throughout.

As noted in chapter 4 , Feuerbach’s “Provisional Theses for the Reforma-

tion of Philosophy” ( 1842 ) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future ( 1843 )

strongly influenced Hess’s and Marx’s evolving attempts in late 1843 and 1844

to “realize” philosophy by acting to transform society. In these works Feuer-

bach takes aim at what he saw as the lingering theological thrust of philosophy

from Descartes (and Spinoza) to Hegel.^63 Hess’s and Feuerbach’s critiques of

modern philosophical subjectivity, though coeval, move in different directions.

Where Feuerbach sees a way to overcome the dualism of thought and being

by inverting the theological hierarchy and assigning primacy to the objective

world, Hess—following Spinoza—views thought and material existence as par-

allel phenomena, neither of which is prior to or more fundamental than the

other. Within a Spinozan conception of monistic immanence, the whole ques-

tion of grounding being simply cannot arise in the form that was such an abiding

preoccupation for Feuerbach.

For Feuerbach modern philosophy continues to err in assigning primacy to

thought and consciousness because concrete being resides in the natural ob-

ject, which can be perceived immediately through the senses. The hallmark of

the natural object is its irreducible singularity, which defies translation into the

abstract philosophical categories and concepts that make up speculative phi-

losophy’s hermetic bubble. In vigorously privileging sensual perception of the

concrete natural object in this way, Feuerbach’s voice became the most incisive

and influential in the chorus critiquing Hegel’s reconciliation of thought and

being as in fact one-sided and remaining within speculative thought, this side of

concrete reality.^64 But Feuerbach’s particular way of coming at Hegel—and the

philosophical tradition he saw culminating in Hegel—preserves a subject-object

dualism, even as Feuerbach subverts the subject-object hierarchy: now the ma-

terial object and its immediate sensuous perception are primary, and “abstract”

reflection and consciousness, privileged since Descartes as the guarantor of the

subject’s being, is secondary.^65 For Feuerbach objective being is independent of

and prior to thought; man does not exist because he thinks, but rather because

he exists in flesh and blood and perceives through the senses:

Modern philosophy proceeded from theology; it is indeed nothing other

than theology dissolved and transformed into philosophy.... In order to

transform God into reason, reason itself had to assume the quality of an