Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
88 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
language, such “being-for-myself of subjectivity in relation to objectivity”—
distinguishes human beings from animals. For “as sentient, I am something
entirely particular, thoroughly immersed in determinacy.... I am subjective,
only subjective without objectivity and without universality.”^142 True religion
requires representation, a mode of thought. The immediacy of feeling does not
define my relationship to God; rather, God, as active thought, liberates me from
my sentient determinacy. Religion that is not a form of thought is not religion
at all.^143
Hegel makes explicit the way thought constitutes the essence of God and
the fact that religion has its precise analogue in the way thought constitutes the
essence of ethical life (that is, the state). “God is only in and for thought,” Hegel
maintains, against the “usual” contention “that religion is something apart from,
independent of, and alien to thought, indeed that thought is opposed to and
detrimental to religion.”^144 Moreover,
it is precisely the same [with thought in regard to religion, as (my addition)]
with thought in regard to right and ethical life: I have right and ethical life
only insofar as I know myself to be free and know ethical life [to be] free
substance. [I] know myself as this essential, infinite [being]; [I] know this in-
finitude, universality, [as] the substantiality of [my] will—speaking generally,
[as] the rationality of will. All this is not my willing, my interest and purpose,
as this single, particular individual, but rather simply my universality, my
essentiality. Otherwise [there is] only desire, force, free choice, etc. It is one
of the gravest and crudest errors of our time that thought is not recognized to
be the element and essential form in all of this, as well as the sole fundamental
content.^145
Hegel emphatically underscores the idea that participation in true religion and
ethical life is cognitive. Universal subjectivity in both its religious and political
forms is achieved in a self-recognition that is likewise a self-negation: I know
myself as essential, infinite substantiality when I recognize that the rationality
of my will is not merely “my willing, my interest and purpose” but understand
that I am most fully myself in my identification with a substantive rational total-
ity. There is more than an analogy between the agency of thought in religion
and in ethical life; coaxing religious subjectivity out of its immediate feeling and
harmonizing it with universal rationality is a prerequisite for a viable state. And
defining religious subjectivity correctly emerges as the key means of keeping
potentially “polemical” religious subjects in check.
Hegel’s theorization of the political stakes of a Wissenschaft der Religion gave
the Hegelians in the Verein every reason to understand their project of a Wis-