Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 26 7

how institutions of power, privilege, and private property fix unjust social rela-

tions under the sway of a false ontological premise. In a striking neologism, Hess

calls this “Seinsucht”: “It is precisely Seinsucht, the obsession with continued

existence as a particular individuality, as a limited I, as a finite being—that leads

to Habsucht.”^87 Seinsucht—ontological obsession or addiction to being—pre-

cedes and animates Habsucht (avarice or, literally, addiction to having). Our

fateful confusion of what we have with what we are rests on our deeper need—

or addiction—to having being in the first place. Only because we fail to see the

products of our labor as part of us through our productive activity—and regard

them instead as foreign objects—do we feel the need to lay claim to them, and

to our own being through ownership of them. If we identify with our produc-

tive activity itself, however, we do not enter into this false subject-object du-

alism and do not become addicted to being and owning. The institutions of

money and private property perpetuate alienation and inequality. We become

weighed down—alienated and enslaved—by so much accumulated baggage,

through which we try to secure our being. Our egos insidiously limit us even as

we mistake them for the condition of possibility of our existence. We imagine

that we are confirming ourselves in our individuality when we grasp at and try to

own our being, but—Hess argues, following Spinoza—we fail to understand our

individuality when we fail to grasp the context that constitutes and sustains it.

In committing the error of possessing ourselves, we relinquish the greater power

and freedom to which only self-knowledge beyond the self can give access.^88

Hess sees the truest freedom decidedly not in possessive individualism and the

social institutions that it supports and that are supported by it, but rather in the

endlessly dynamic principle of action or deed (Ta t), a never-ending intellectual

and material creative process and an end in itself.

Rome and Jerusalem

Hess was a highly eclectic thinker who drew significantly, at various moments,

on Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, among others. Throughout his varied career,

however, Spinoza remained for Hess, as Francesco Tomasoni notes, “the most

important point of reference... in interpreting his own identity and under-

standing the modern world.”^89 If Spinoza was Hess’s most enduring intellectual

inspiration, his most consistent object of critique was the atomized egoistic in-

dividual and the conceptual structures and religious, political, and commercial

institutions that perpetuated it and that it perpetuated. Spinoza’s presence in

Hess’s critiques of the causes and disastrous effects of modern individualism

is sometimes explicit, as in his important 1843 essay “Socialismus und Com-