Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
76 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
ever, falls on the distinction between the actuality of the rational state (in which
the particular embodies the universal) and the mere existence of a state lacking
such unity. Hegel posits rational totality as the principle of the truly actual state
and attenuates the reality of the merely existing state. Such an ontological hier-
archy gave the Vereinler license to attribute substance to their theoretical vision
of the state—their philosophical politics—and, at times (for example, in Gans’s
final presidential address, as I discuss in the following chapter) to derealize Res-
toration Prussia as merely existing. Hegel writes:
Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity, the resolution
of universality into particularity; the latter then appears to be self-sufficient,
although it is sustained and supported only by the whole. If this unity is not
present, nothing can be actual, even if it may be assumed to have existence
(Existenz). A bad state is one which merely exists; a sick body also exists, but
it has no true reality. A hand which has been cut off still looks like a hand
and exists, but it has no actuality.... An essential part of the fully developed
state is consciousness or thought; the state accordingly knows what it wills
and knows this as an object of thought (ein Gedachtes). Since, then, the seat
of knowledge is within the state, science also has its seat here and not within
the Church.^111
The theoretical distinction between the true and the merely existing state
permitted the Vereinler to maintain a highly ambiguous relationship to “the
state,” which was anything but synonymous with Prussia. Systematic scientific
thought grasps the organic whole, which is what lends the parts true actuality.
In the absence of totalizing scientific insight, severed parts merely exist, devoid
of essential reality. In this way scientific self-knowledge participates in and com-
pletes the state.
In Hegel’s view, the foundation in universal determinate reason that the
state and science share guarantees their harmony. Conversely, religious orien-
tations defined in opposition to reason must conflict with the state. One can
legitimately perceive a threat to particularist identities and commitments (in-
cluding forms of Judaism and Jewish identity) in Hegel’s discounting of par-
ticular religious elements purportedly incapable of being subsumed under the
universal. Franco rightly cautions against the anachronism of reading Hegel’s
support for Jewish civil rights in Philosophy of Right § 270 as a celebration of
cultural pluralism. Hegel’s explicit hope, rather, is that equal rights will lead to
greater assimilation.^112 It is nonetheless crucial to appreciate that Hegel’s lit-
mus test for a religion’s salubriousness was not its self-proclaimed Christianity
but its “objective” rationality. Far from arguing for a “Christian state,” Hegel