Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

264 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

wall—the false distinction between self and other, subject and object—is what

constitutes the Cartesian self in the first place. In Hess’s view the price we pay

in order to lay claim to such paltry being is exorbitant. A clearer and more em-

powering understanding of ourselves, conversely, would involve relinquishing

our epistemologically and ethically misguided insistence on self-possession.^79

Hess draws on Spinoza to theorize individuality and particularity otherwise

than as dualistic subjectivity and self-possessed being, which he sees as such a

drag on our intellectual and ethico-political potential. Hess’s understanding of

individuality (whether the individual person or an individual people) is uncon-

ventional but by no means consists in mere negation.^80 On the contrary, Hess

argues that the universal has no existence other than as it immanently manifests

itself in individuals:

The universal is thus unreal, merely an abstraction of the individual, which

reflects the idea to which it belongs yet to which it understands itself in oppo-

sition instead of as its [the idea’s] reality. The life idea [Lebensidee] in general,

the eternal law, “absolute spirit,” “world spirit,” “God,” or however one may

properly or improperly [eigentlich oder uneigentlich] call the universal and

eternal, is only real in fluctuation, in becoming-other [Sichanderswerden], in

diversity, in the individual or, more accurately, in an infinite series of individu-

als, in an infinite becoming-other or self-generation [Sichselbsterzeugen]. The

universal, in other words, comes to its self-consciousness through individu-

als [aus den Individuen], and the person who recognizes the life idea, the

universal, as his life is its [the universal’s] highest or most perfect reality.^81

With Spinoza, Hess understands ideas and bodies as different modes of the

same substance. Given the correspondence between idea and individual body,

it is erroneous to construe their relationship dualistically and oppositionally.

The misconception of the individual in terms of a mind-body opposition—the

already abstract individual or theological subject—engenders, in turn, the ab-

straction of das Allgemeine (the universal, absolute, God, and so forth) in op-

position to the world. In fact, the universal just is the totality of the universe in

flux, constantly constituting itself as different, ever-changing particularities or

individualities. This would seem to be why Hess moves from “the individual” to

an infinite series of “individuals,” constantly becoming themselves by becom-

ing other than themselves. The discrete individual has no purchase on being

and cannot suspend the dynamic set of relations in which it participates and

that constitute it as an individual. The person who recognizes the universal as

his life understands himself, then, as not merely himself but as part of this much

greater totality.