348 } Notes to Chapter 6
argues that property and possessive individualism negate true individuality. He follows a
recognizably Spinozist line of thought in his critique of the bifurcation of immanent prac-
tice, which is its own inherent reward (true Eigentum), into a false, dichotomized relation
between Arbeit and Lohn. False property is the external, abstract value assigned to labor
(paradigmatically in terms of money). Crucial to note is that it is Spinozan immanence that
for Hess accurately recognizes real individuals and allows them to thrive: “The false sense
that now attaches to the word ‘property’ should not prevent us from giving it back its true
sense. True property denotes nothing but the specific characteristic of the individual. True
property cannot be appropriated without negating the individual [Man kann das wahre
Eigenthum nicht aufheben, ohne das Individuum afuzuheben]. Our current property is, how-
ever, so different from true property that it cancels [aufhebt] precisely the life of the indi-
vidual” (“Zur Philosophie der Tat,” 51 ). In the same paragraph Hess critiques Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and Charles Fourier along similar lines for perpetuating, rather than overcoming,
egoism by engaging in a “false and immoral determination of the value [Wertbestimmung]
of a person’s individual activity” in terms of false, external property (Besitz) rather than true
property intrinsic to the unique individual (ibid.). Hess, then, clearly does not understand
his ethico-political project in terms of negating individuals; rather, he is committed to rescu-
ing individuals, as he understands them according to the principles of his Spinozist com-
munism, from their devaluation and deactivation. For Hess ownership can only consist in
an individual’s active relationship to materials and ideas. To claim ownership beyond such
immanent activity presupposes a subject-object dualism that is epistemologically erroneous
and ethically detrimental because it impedes productive activity (interdicts relationships that
other individuals could have with the social goods one claims to own). The legal self who
lays claim to materials beyond the real self ’s assimilation of them, in other words, is a version
of the theological subject that Hess identifies as the chief obstacle to socialism. It is this same
fiction of an immortal subject capable of laying claim to property beyond the limits of the real
individual at which Hess takes aim in his attack on heritability in The Holy History.
81. Hess, PSS, 212.
82. For Hess’s understanding of subjectivity as rooted in a false dualism between material
individual and abstract universal that also structures religious and political institutions, see,
for example, ibid., 216 – 17.
83. Quoted in Silberner, Moses Hess, 128. Silberner does not date the “extant draft manu-
script of ‘Philosophy of the Act’” from which he quotes this passage, but he identifies the
draft as “Hess-Nachlaß, Signatur: B 21 (unveröff., IISG), S. 4 f ” (ibid.).
84. Hess, PSS, 220. In Spinoza’s Ethics, see, for example, III, p 53 ; IV, p 18 S; V, p 42.
85. Hess, PSS, 220 – 21.
86. Ibid., 224. Compare Spinoza’s statement: “The highest good of the mind is the
knowledge of God, and the highest virtue of the mind is to know God” (Ethics, IV, p 28 ). In
The Holy History Hess makes a similarly provocative point: “We do not belong to those who
have such a fear of real equality as of real death because the later, as the former, destroys a
phantom to which their life and their spirit are bound, and besides which they know noth-
ing” (HHM, 65 ; PSS, 51 ). The sovereign individual, in other words, is essentially a phantom,
something to which people cling as to a fetish because they lack an understanding of the
wider totality that truly constitutes them.
87. Hess, PSS, 225. Hess expressly rejects a kind of nihilistic pantheism that claims that