Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 26 5

A parallelism runs through Hess’s critique of religious, philosophical, politi-

cal, commercial, and subjective forms of dualism. The way our individuality is

dominated by our “I’s” (a sort of external sovereign within) is structurally analo-

gous to and crucially interlinked with how we are dominated and deactivated by

external illegitimate religious and political authorities and institutions. One’s

“I,” conventionally understood, is for Hess born of the misguided attempt to

usurp being, and it results in the enslavement, not freedom, of the individual.

The attempt to understand our true situation, in a plane of immanence, in the

false terms of dualistic hierarchy (mind versus body, self versus other, God ver-

sus humanity, ruler versus subject) serves to deprive us of our reality and liberty.

Hess, then, does not call for the negation of individuality in the name of collec-

tive ontology. Rather, he wants to overthrow dualistic conceptions of the self,

religion, and politics in order to activate free individuals, who can be seen only

as part of, not constituted in opposition to, the whole that indeed constitutes

them as individuals.

Hess argues that the modern subject does not overcome but rather contin-

ues the individuality-leveling dualistic principle that culminated, religiously, in

Christianity and, politically, in monarchy. Religious and political absolutism

could advance no further and so gave rise to revolution—the political revolution

in France and the Young Hegelian critical revolution in Germany.^82 Anticipating

and likely influencing Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage,” Hess critiques both these revo-

lutions as marred by latent, secularized Christian dualism, which they have only

displaced and disseminated in the form of modern philosophical subjectivity

and modern political subjectivity, rooted in the dualistic and abstract concep-

tion of human rights that emerged from the French Revolution. In place of a

single tyrant, modern subjects are so many tyrants, and also slaves. Thus the

modern alienated subject is constituted in an ontological elsewhere, which it

constantly strives to reclaim by identifying with abstractions (such as self, God,

and state) and by laying claim to or dominating the material world (for example,

property, money, and other people).

The crucial prerequisite for ethical progress is to overcome, by identifying

with creative action, our obsession with possessing being. In a draft manuscript

of “The Philosophy of the Act,” Hess writes: “I am only what I engender out

of myself. My act is my life. Whatever is created through my power, potency,

vigor, that alone bears witness to, that alone convinces me of my I. The products

[Erzeugnisse] of [one’s] vigor are so many testimonials [Zeugnisse] to it. I am as

much as I do, without holding on to any scrap [einen Rest] for myself.”^83 There

can be no guarantor of being beyond the plane of one’s immanent activity. One’s

being is synonymous with one’s doing; there is no being unresolved into im-