Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 33

subject can be said to achieve autonomous freedom by submitting to (its own)

norms—that is, through a form of self-inflicted violence that, because it can only

take place in the space of Willkür and not in the pristine space of Wille, never

taints or stains the morality it in fact founds. Nietzsche perceived the foundational

violence of the Kantian moral subject keenly. In the course of elaborating his hy-

pothesis that moral concepts like guilt, duty, and conscience originate in the act of

exacting a price of violence, of Leiden-machen, Nietzsche suggests that the world

of such concepts has “never completely lost a certain odor of blood and torture,”

and he adds “not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty.”^56

The Moral Law, Jewish Alterity, and the State

The constitutive violence of Kant’s categorical imperative structures the way

both Bendavid and Fichte theorize the possibility of incorporating Jews into the

state and thus brings the two Kantians’ positions perilously close to each other.

The underlying similarity in how Bendavid and Fichte approach the question

of extending civil rights to Jews appears most clearly in the ways they each con-

ceive of the relation between moral Mensch and political Bürger. Each thinker

treats Mensch and Bürger as fundamentally synonymous, even though they en-

tertain different visions of what this basic unity of human being and citizen im-

plies for the state’s right to intervene in the lives of individuals.

Fichte’s philosophically radical project has the effect of stripping the state

as such of virtually all authority. His argument in Beitrag zur Berichtigung der

Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution is that the Mensch is sov-

ereign and not fundamentally dependent on the state. The state merely amounts

to one particular contractual agreement (the social contract, or Bürgervertrag)

into which autonomous Menschen may, or may not, choose to enter. In subor-

dinating all political authority to inalienable rights constituted and sanctioned

by the moral law (Sittengesetz) inherent in human beings as such, Fichte radi-

cally attenuates the authority of the state. Because Fichte’s citizens receive no

essential rights from the state, noncitizens (Menschen who have no contract with

the state) should theoretically enjoy the same human rights. The moral and po-

litical, Mensch and Bürger, are essentially similar in Fichte, then, because the

Bürgervertrag adds nothing, in moral terms, to the a priori Sittengesetz that hu-

manity possesses intrinsically. What I called the “absolute interiority” of Kant-

ian autonomous ethical subjectivity thus delimits the horizon of any politics for

Fichte: no political arrangements can legitimately contradict or alter humanity’s

inherent moral law, and any possible political sphere can legitimately occupy

only a restricted region within the sphere of human ethics itself, a region within