Identity or History? Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (review)

140 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 Identity or History? Marcus Herz and the End ofthe Enlightenment, by Martin L. Davies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. 344 pp. $39.95 (c). Marcus Herz (1747-1803) was one ofthe most important students ofImmanuel Kant. Born in Berlin on January 17, 1747, he came to Kt>nigsberg in 1762, being apprenticed to a merchant. Kt>nigsberg had at that time one of the largest and most significant Jewish communities. One of its most important members was Joachim Moses Friedllinder, whose support allowed Herz to enter the University of Kt>nigsberg four years later as a student of medicine. Like all students, he had to take courses in philosophy during his first two years ofstudy. And this is how he came to know Kant, who soon appreciated him as a gifted student, with whom he could discuss some ofthe philosophical problems that were troubling him. When he was promoted to the position offull professor and had to publicly defend an Inaugural Dissertation, Kant chose Herz as his "respondent" whose task it was to defend Kant against the objections of two "opponents." Kant's choice was controversial and contested by the senate of the university; Jews did not enjoy the full rights of "academic citizenship." But Kant prevailed. Herz left Kt>nigsberg in 1770 to study in Berlin and Halle. After receiving his doctorate in medicine in 1774, he set up practice in Berlin and married beautiful Henriette de Lemos in 1779. She held a salon, which became one ofthe most important in Berlin. Indeed, her fame today outshines that of her more homely husband. But Marcus Herz was in some sense more important than Henriette Herz. Though a philosopher in his own right, he put much of his energy into the popularization and defense of Kant's philosophy. His first book Observations on Speculative Philosophy (1771) critically discussed Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and probably influenced his teacher in changing his view and writing the Critique ofPure Reason of 1781. His correspondence was clearly important to Kant, his lectures on Kantian philosophy, starting in 1779, had a lasting influence on Minister Karl Abraham von Zedlitz, and his friendships with such philosophers as Moses Mendelssohn and especially Salomon Maimon were important in changing the course ofthe discussion ofKant in Germany. Herz's works on medical, aesthetic, and anthropological subjects were at least as important, but his name will forever be associated with Kant's critical philosophy. Davies's well-informed account ofHerz's life is awelcome addition to scholarship. He shows that Herz, while clearly not as important as Mendelssohn and Maimon, was a significant figure in the intellectual and social life ofBerlin during the period that saw the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. It is an important source of information on a minor Jewish German philosopher and medical researcher, who is interesting in his own right. But Davies himself is not primarily interested in giving a scholarly account of Herz's life and his cultural connections. Rather, he wants to explore questions of Book Reviews 141 Gennan Jewish identity, and, even more ambitiously, "the fundamental issue ofhistory: the fate of personal identity in time" (p. 10). Herz is for him "a symbol pf the contingency ofexistence, an image ofthe similarly contingent nature of our own life" (p. II). Davies believes that Herz was denied lasting historical recognition because he was Jewish. While recognized in his own life time, in "the end this recognition proved to be futile in that it did not prevent Herz's ultimate demise from the public sphere and from the common memory ofhistory." And Davies thinks that "this futility reflects as much on the internal dynamics ofthe set of ideas and principles within the Enlightenment that caused it to abandon one of its own adherents, as on the inherent precariousness of Herz's own situation as a Gennan Jew" (p. 219). But all this seems false or at least misleading. Isn't most recognition by contemporaries "futile" in Davies's sense? How can such recognition ever "prevent" the forgetfulness of later generations? And what does Enlightenment have to do with it? In fact, exactly the opposite of what Davies...