In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

f i v e Beautiful Life: Mendelssohn, Hegel, and Rosenzweig Sehen Sie nun, was uns verloren ging, als unsre Großväter das schöne Leben verließen und in ein Leben sich hinausreißen ließen, wo die Schönheit eine Insel, eine isolierte (l’art pour l’art) Erscheinung, ein Götze war. Und was wir widerzugewinnen haben und wiedergewinnen werden? Ein Leben, als ganz Kunstwerk, eines das ganz schön ist, weil es ganz Leben, ganz unser Leben sein wird. (Look what we have lost when our grandfathers abandoned the beautiful life and let themselves be seduced by a life where beauty was an island, an isolated appearance [l’art pour l’art], an idol. And what can we win back and what will we win back? A life that is wholly an artwork, that is wholly beautiful, because it will be wholly life, wholly our life.) f r a n z r o s e n z w e i g , ‘‘Anleitung zum Jüdischen Denken’’ (‘‘Instruction for Jewish Thinking’’) (1921), (Zweistromland 615) Introduction: Reading Mendelssohn through Hegel Hegel’s philosophical supersession of Judaism—perhaps the central theme of his early (pre-1800) theological writings—is the most challenging of those I will explore and the most consequential for Rosenzweig. Quite unlike Reinhold and Kant, Hegel acknowledges finite, embodied life as the heart of religion.1 To a great extent, Hegel comes to accept the point that Jacobi had been pressing against the new Spinozism in German philosophy, namely, that reason and universality were inimical to faith in a living God and that freedom begins with the defiant rejection of the God of the Enlightenment , the Supreme and Necessary Being. In the discussion of Jacobi that forms the second chapter of his work Faith and Knowledge (1802), Hegel quotes a passage from Jacobi to Fichte that states that ‘‘in defiance of the will that wills nothing’’ he, Jacobi, would ‘‘even will to pluck the ears of wheat on the Sabbath for no other reason than that I am hungry, and because the 205 206 Mendelssohn, Hegel, and Rosenzweig law is made for man and not man for the law.’’ Hegel says that these words are ‘‘beautiful and quite pure’’ and goes on to explain: Jacobi is speaking in the first person: I am and I will. But this cannot jeopardize the objectivity of the passage. The expression that the law is made for man and not man for the law—without regard to the meaning it has where Jacobi took it from—certainly acquires in this context a more universal meaning, but it also retains its true meaning. This is why we have called this passage quite pure. Ethical beauty . . . must have the vitality of the individual who refuses to obey the dead concept. (Hegel 1977: 144; italics mine.) Hegel finds in Jacobi’s insistence upon defiant subjectivity a salutary antithesis to the abstract, dead universality of Enlightenment reason. But Jacobi, Hegel argues, does not offer any objective content for the subjective will. Jacobi remains fixed at the level of defiance. Hegel will argue for an embodied fusion of finite subjectivity with the objectivity of infinite love as the way beyond Jacobi. Such a fusion of the finite and the infinite will also allow Hegel to get past the Kantian emphasis on the ethically sublime categorical imperative. Hegel will argue in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (1799) that the fusion of finite subjectivity and infinite love is given concrete and beautiful form in the commensality of the Last Supper. In this chapter I will show how Hegel’s conception of the beauty of the embodied love in the Last Supper is, in fact, deeply indebted to Mendelssohn ’s conception of the Jewish people as the ‘‘living script’’ of a revelation. This is a debt that Hegel nowhere openly acknowledges. Whenever Hegel explicitly discusses Mendelssohn in his early theological writings, it is only to attack him. Like Kant, Hegel inverts Mendelssohn’s claim that Judaism is the ideal configuration of a noncoercive society and he argues rather that Judaism is entirely composed of coercive laws. Hegel carries Kant’s characterization of Judaism as pure politics—the embrace of a life wholly oriented by a view of the world as a lifeless mechanism—to its extreme conclusion. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, Kant thought that the apparent absence of any reference to an afterlife in...

Share