Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

260 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

abstract, divine being. The senses, says Descartes, give neither true real-

ity, being, nor certainty; only mind separated from the senses gives truth.

Whence this cleavage between the mind and the senses? It is derived only

from theology. God is not a sensuous being; he is, rather, the negation of all

sensuous determinations and is only known through the abstraction from

sensation.... Descartes transforms this objective being into a subjective one

and the ontological proof into a psychological one; he transforms the propo-

sition, “because God is thinkable, therefore he exists,” into the proposition,

“I think, therefore I am.”^66

For Feuerbach, Hegel is the “culmination of modern philosophy,” inaugurated

by Descartes.^67 The entire philosophical tradition since Descartes, including

Hegel, in fact perpetuated the theology it displaced insofar as it continued on-

tologically to privilege abstract thought over immediate sensuous objectivity.^68

The “new philosophy”—Feuerbach’s own—“is the realization of the Hegelian

philosophy or, generally, of the philosophy that prevailed until now.”^69

There are many broad similarities between Feuerbach and Hess at this mo-

ment, especially regarding their conceptions of man’s social essence. As Feuer-

bach writes near the end of Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, “the single

man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being

nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in

the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests

only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”^70 Rather than try-

ing to provide a new ground for being, however, Hess assesses the costs of our

investments in counterproductive notions of being, self-contained subjectivity

chief among them. Even at the point where Hess is closest to Feuerbach, in his

vision of human essence as social rather than individual, crucial differences in

emphasis are evident. Feuerbach’s theory of love, dependency, community, and

the intersubjective I-thou relation “rests,” as Feuerbach puts it in the passage

quoted above, “only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.” Feuer-

bachian totality is assembled, as it were, out of the building blocks of unique

human beings. For all their radical incompletion and lack as individuals, Feur-

bach’s human beings are still the foundation on which the greater human total-

ity “rests.” There is an evident tension between Feuerbach’s social ontology, on

the one hand, which denies full human being to discrete individuals, and his

emphasis on the ontological primacy of concretely existing singularities, includ-

ing human beings, on the other hand.

Feuerbach’s critique of the cogito proceeds by pointing up the theological

nature and ontological nullity of the I’s abstract consciousness and inverting the