Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond

Introduction: Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig Beyond 1800

i n t r o d u c t i o n Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig Beyond 1800 No Jewish philosopher of religion in Germany until Rosenzweig followed Mendelssohn’s lead entirely . . . This is a remarkable fact: it seems as if German-Jewish philosophy went full circle to return to its point of origin. a m o s f u n k e n s t e i n , Perceptions of Jewish History (228) Seldom can the historian indicate the beginning and end of a movement with such a precision as in the case of German-Jewish philosophy. It started with Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) and ended with Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung (1921). f u n k e n s t e i n , Perceptions of Jewish History (257) 1800 The year 1800 marks a moment when, according to Rosenzweig, history takes a false turn. The generation living around the year 1800, having witnessed an unprecedented popular revolution in France, sensed that they stood on the cusp of a new and glorious future. Rosenzweig finds this sense of nearly messianic expectancy in a verse from Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem of 1800, ‘‘To the Germans’’ (‘‘An die Deutschen’’), which he uses as an epigraph to his book Hegel und der Staat (1920): Aber kömmt, wie der Strahl aus dem Gewölke kömmt, Aus Gedanken vielleicht, geistig und reif die Tat? Folgt die Frucht, wie des Haines Dunklem Blatte, der stillen Schrift? (But as lightning from clouds, out of mere thoughts perhaps, Will the deed in the end, lucid, mature, leap out? 1 2 Introduction As from dark orchard leaves, from Quiet scripts does the fruit ensue?’’)1 In the British tradition, the well-known lines of William Wordsworth convey the same sense of a generation’s new hope: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven; . . . Not favour’d spots alone, but the whole earth The beauty wore of promise, that which sets, To take an image which was felt, no doubt, Among the bowers of paradise itself, The budding rose above the rose full blown. (The Prelude [1805] 10.693–706) The year 1800 thus represents a moment of world-renewing hopefulness, but the hope was not fulfilled. After initially waging its battles in defense of liberty, it seemed to many that the French revolutionary army was corrupted by a lust for conquest. But the hope of the youthful German generation of 1800 was not entirely abandoned. Rather, it was transferred to the world of speculative thought, the world of Spirit. Near the conclusion of Glauben und Wissen (Faith and Knowledge) (1802), G. W. F. Hegel (1770– 1831) declares that a ‘‘speculative Good Friday’’ will soon take the place of the ‘‘historic Good Friday’’ (Hegel 1977: 191). After quoting Hegel’s statement that his speculative philosophy marks an ‘‘important epoch in time, a time of ferment, when the Spirit has made an about-face, shed its prior form, and acquired a new one,’’ Rosenzweig continues: Thus is the self-consciousness of the thinker swollen to bursting. He stands eye to eye with his time. Even more: he speaks to it and it speaks to him. He is actually ready and able to enter into it, ‘‘to be’’ it. He has stepped beyond what Dante called the middle of our life’s way. The stations of life have for him become the epochs of the world. The stream of thought has crested its banks and waters the thirsty acres of time. (Hegel-Staat 1:220–21.) According to Rosenzweig, the messianic hope of the German generation of 1800 was betrayed when that generation took refuge in a world built by speculative philosophy. Speculative philosophy, Rosenzweig explains as he traces the development of Hegel’s thought in the decades after 1800, ultimately made common cause with the brutality and violence of history when Introduction 3 Hegel proclaimed that ‘‘what is rational, is actual; and what is actual, is rational [was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig].’’2 The messianic hope of 1800 was replaced by an unholy alliance of philosophy and the German state. A thinker had dared to become one with his time,3 to fuse his life with world history, but in doing so he had managed only to ‘‘water the thirsty acres’’ of his own Prussian...