Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 26 3

freedom, and power to act. To bank on one’s being in the form of an abstracted

consciousness—or thinking divided from content, the “thought about”—is to

believe obscurely and ignorantly in one’s I instead of gaining the empowering

knowledge of how the world works, the world of which I am a part. In this way,

the belief in one’s self—subjectivity—is for Hess of a piece with belief in other

abstract religious and political categories that dominate and deactivate us as in-

dividuals and collectivities, such as God, heaven, and the state.

Hess’s intervention at bottom faults Descartes for attempting to derive some-

thing as paltry and closed as subjective being from as dynamic and open-ended

an activity as thinking: “Only the first word of the Cartesian philosophy is true

... I know that I think... that I am active, not, however, that I am.”^77 Hess’s

point is not only that trying to derive “I am” from “I think” results in an abstract

“I” devoid of content, but, more consequentially, that the preoccupation with

consolidating subjectivity actually impedes the vital act of thinking that it tries,

as it were, to contain within narrow ontological parameters—“being.”

The simple “I,” the thinking in distinction from the thought-about, is empty,

has no content.... Only the “I think” amounts to anything, that is, the like-

ness to itself of the one in the other. What the “I”-sayer believes, the “I,” the

identity, here becomes the imminent content of the act—In contrast to which

[wogegen] the mathematical point, the black nothingness that calls itself

Being, reveals itself to be the frozen act of self-consciousness, arrested in its

activity. The act thus becomes only half-realized, the thinking becomes ar-

rested in the process of differentiation from the thought-about, which is re-

ally itself, so that the spirit runs its head against the wall, against the barrier

that it has created and not broken through; it runs itself into a dead end.

The act becomes frozen.... Living Becoming is turned into dead Being,

and self-consciousness into theological consciousness, which now must lie

its way out of black nothingness into pallid Being.^78

Hess objects to a conception of being constituted through an act of fixing or

arresting dynamic activity in a thinking subject sealed off from its thought ob-

jects. In Hess’s conception the act of thinking traverses the limit that separates

thinking subject from thought object, the very limit, that is, that constitutes the

subject of the cogito. For Hess, the “fixed and frozen act of self-consciousness”

of the transcendent and contentless “I” is merely a crippled and poorly under-

stood version of dynamic, active spirit; it is spirit uselessly suspended in opposi-

tion to itself. The wall that this divided spirit runs up against and cannot break

through, then, is the discrete self. The Cartesian subject, Hess seems to argue,

can only run its head against a wall, but not break through, because this dividing