Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 26 1

subject-object hierarchy so that now sensual objectivity, rather than thought and

consciousness, provides the ground of being. In contrast, Hess attacks the cogito

by emphasizing how much productive activity, how much dynamic movement,

is arrested in our obsessive quest to lay possession to, or capture, being. Such

an orientation only limits our understanding of ourselves and our individuality,

for it is paradoxically only by understanding the wider whole in which we are

embedded that we fully grasp what constitutes us as individuals. We understand

ourselves most accurately and most productively, in other words, when we move

beyond our obsession with possessing being as discreet selves.

Genevieve Lloyd distills the crucial distinction between Descartes’s and Spi-

noza’s conceptions of individuality:

The Cartesian mind rightly prides itself on its god-like self-completeness. For

Spinoza we are not individual substances, either as bodies or as minds. But

we are nonetheless individuals. In withdrawing the status of substance from

the human mind, Spinoza does not deny its individuality. And the concept

of substance continues to have moral significance for human life, though in

a very different way. Spinoza calls into question the traditional links between

individuality and the concept of substance. And it cannot be denied that this

gives his treatment of individuality a paradoxical character. But he certainly

does not present individuality as an illusion. There is a false, distorted way in

which a mind can think of itself and of other things as individuals—a source

of error that must be transcended by a mind pursuing freedom and virtue.

But in that pursuit the mind comes to a true understanding of its own indi-

viduality.^71

For Spinoza, thinking of oneself as a discrete entity is both an epistemological

error and an error that impedes the exercise of power and freedom. As idiosyn-

cratic a thinker as Hess was, his variations on this theme have a firm basis in

Spinoza’s understanding of individuals as constituted by their place in a wider

immanent context. As Lloyd aptly remarks, “to be a Spinozistic individual body

is precisely to be part of wider wholes. It is being thus inserted into a totality that

constitutes a thing’s individuality.”^72 Hess is not simply calling for a politics that

negates individuality, but for a Spinozan politics that conceives of individuality

in non-Cartesian ways.

Reflecting on the messianic element in Hess’s political thought, Erich Thier

characterizes Hess as an “ecstatic” thinker.^73 It is useful to think of Hess’s as an

“ecstatic” understanding of the self, albeit in a particular way. He understands

human beings as always in excess of the narrow conceptions we have of our

selves, yet his is a Spinozan ecstasy of immanence: we simply are (part of ) what