Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 53

Prussian realities was destined to shrink, not widen, and that his work at the

university would play a key role in the process of liberalization.

The strong position Hegel took in this address against philosophical sub-

jectivists like Jakob Fries would have been particularly inviting to Jewish stu-

dents. In 1816 Fries had published a notorious anti-Jewish tract.^38 A further

component of Hegel’s address that must have been exhilarating to the likes of

Moses Moser,^39 who attended the talk and became the first Hegelian enthusiast

among the future Vereinler, was its—in Dickey’s characterization—“call to the

young people of Germany to become more engaged in public life—first through

their achievements in education (Bildung) and then by applying what they have

learned about ‘the ethical power of the spirit’ (die sittliche Macht des Geistes) to

public life.”^40 Hegel’s call to unlock “the ethical power of the spirit” through

university education and to use that sittliche Macht to transform public life was

virtually a recipe for the Verein. Hegel invites his future students into a partner-

ship to advance the politically saturated cause of Wissenschaft, concluding with

rousing remarks that could only have encouraged the sort of overvaluation of the

political effectuality of philosophical thought and consciousness that would so

characterize the Vereinler’s self-conception:

I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit^41 and I address myself to

it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content (Gehalt) and

when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal

to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one

is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity (Not) and is

inherently (für sich) capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activ-

ity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical

drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the

courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is

at home, which it [itself ] constructs, and which we share in by studying it.

Whatever is true, great and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal

of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature

is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit

is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value

and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely

through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of

Ideas.

May I express the wish and hope that I shall manage to gain and merit

your confidence on the path, which we are about to take. But first of all, the

one thing I shall venture to ask of you is this: that you bring with you a trust in