Notes to Chapter 6 { 345individuality. The human body cannot exist in isolation from the surrounding totality that
provides and sustains its individuality. The isolated body would cease to exist. The mind,
likewise, can exist as an individual only in the context of other modes of thought. But the
mind, unlike the body, has open to it a false version of individuality. Minds, unlike bodies,
can know what they are. And as well as being capable of knowledge they are capable of error.
The mind can think of the body, and hence it itself, falsely—it can think of itself as substance”
(Part of Nature [hereafterPN], 28 – 29 ).
33. Spinoza, Ethics, IV, p 35 d. Spinoza also says: “The good which each person who fol-
lows virtue seeks for himself he also desires for all other men, and the more so, the more he
has a greater knowledge of God” (ibid., IV, p 37 ).
34. See Hess, PSS, 79 , 83 , and 89.
35. See ibid., 77.
36. Ibid., 86.
37. On how Hess’s negation of private property in The Holy History differs from Ciesz-
kowski’s Hegelian understanding of the necessity of property for actualizing abstract subjec-
tivity in his “Prolegomena to a Historiosophy.” see Breckman, DS, 195.
38. Cieszkowski, “Prolegomena to a Historiosophy,” 64.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 66.
41. Cieszkowski refers to Karl Ludwig Michelet’s characterization of Hegel’s project of
“uniting idealism with realism” as “absolute idealism,” a formulation Cieszkowski sees as both
accurate and highly revealing of “the one-sidedness of this [Hegel’s] standpoint” (ibid., 67 ).
42. Ibid., 68.
43. Ibid., 69 , 70.
44. Ibid., 82.
45. For Hess, like Cieszkowski, the abstract interiority and subjectivity of Hegelian phi-
losophy keeps it from becoming truly active and productive: “German philosophy does not
really get out of this interiority and manage to create. As little as we e.g. can create a tree be-
cause we have its concept within us, Hegelian philosophy is as little capable of engendering
a historical deed” (PSS, 85 ).
46. Cieszkowski, “Prolegomena to a Historiosophy,” 83.
47. On this aspect of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza, see Lloyd, PN, 5 – 7.
48. Hess writes: “Not only the Phenomenology and Logic, but the entire Hegelian system
belongs to the philosophy of the substance becoming subject, the subjectively active, com-
prehending spirit” (PSS, 80 ).
49. Ibid., 78.
50. Ibid., 80.
51. Ibid., 81. G. H. R. Parkinson renders the proposition that Hess quotes in Latin from
Spinoza this way: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connec-
tion of things” (Ethics, II, p 7 ).
52. Hess, PSS, 86.
53. In contrast to the self-exceeding dynamic of love, Hess associates the opponents of
love with Einzelheiten removed from their wider context; see, for example, PSS, 155 and 157.
54. Ibid., 148 – 49. I use Parkinson’s rendering of Hess’s internal quote from Spinoza, Eth-
ics, III, p 10. Rotenstreich (“Moses Hess—ein Jünger Spinoza’s?,” 241 ) finds it a “somewhat