Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

262 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

is outside ourselves. It is not that Hess wants to move beyond the self, because

it is not real or true, into some transcendent beyond that is; rather, Hess under-

stands our selves as part of a wider environment that our dualistic, theological

notions of subjectivity keep us from grasping and participating in with freedom

and power. Lloyd’s formulation of how Spinoza understands thought to extend

beyond the self-contained individual is helpful: “Self-awareness is not aware-

ness of something whose limits can be independently circumscribed.”^74 The

Spinozan self is constituted relationally and only ever perceived from a more

or less incomplete and confused perspective; it is not a clearly delineated, self-

contained substance. To understand my mind’s individuality in Spinozan terms

requires that I understand it as a site and source of ideas and equally that I un-

derstand that my ideas exist only by virtue of their relationships to other ideas.

To turn once again to Lloyd’s apt formulation, “we must both think of our-

selves as knowing subjects, with particular perspectives on the world, and place

ourselves outside that perspective, to think of relationships among ideas that

include ourselves.”^75 By getting beyond our narrow selves, we more fully be-

come ourselves; we participate more extensively and powerfully in the universe.

Hess’s critique of “theological” subjectivity (Descartes and after), as well as of

politics and religion, is rooted in a Spinozan rejection of dualism. Hess sees the

division between inner and outer, self and other, as issuing from the mistaken

metaphysical distinction between God and the universe. Spinoza recognizes no

seat of the divine beyond the universe—no place, given God’s omnipresence

in the universe, for a personalist God to be. For Hess, analogously, there is no

place beyond other people and the world where humanity’s freedom can be

said to reside, be it heaven, the political state, or the theological self. There is

no transcendent mental sphere beyond or external to oneself where one is es-

sentially and pristinely oneself. Such a narrow conception of the self, moreover,

does not transcend the material world but only narrows one’s possibilities for

participating in it.

Hess’s critique of the cogito—“Whoever says: I am I, or: I know that I am—he

knows nothing. He simply believes in a mathematical point; he’s staring into the

dark and sees only what is not real, namely the distinction of the thinking from

the thought, the subject from the object, not their identity”—proposes, with

Spinoza, that we are what we are not.^76 Not because we melt into cosmic unity

with all that is, but because the wider totality in which our bodies and minds are

embedded is what constitutes us in our very individuality. To construe myself

as a subjective being is to miss the opportunity to discover the wider conceptual

and material contexts and the dynamic relationships by virtue of which I am

constituted as me. Only by letting go of my being can I gain greater knowledge,