Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity

6. Innocence and Experience in Rome and Jerusalem

Bernard Williams distinguishes between two kinds of philosophers: those who believe in an underlying pattern and structure to human history and reason, and those who see no such order. While the comparison is overdrawn, it still offers a valuable guide to evaluate philosophical commitments: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations. Sophocles and Thucydides, by contrast, are alike in leaving us with no such sense. Each of them represents human beings as dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly, with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency and in itself is not necessarily well adjusted to ethical aspirations.1 I have argued throughout this work that Moses Hess, even as he yearns for a pattern that makes sense of modern identity, often betrays the tragic sentiment that human agency is only partially intelligible to historical persons. It is this dynamic between openness and concealment, clarity and obscurity, and coherency and con-®ict that is most expressive in Hess’s works. One detects a constant presence of revisionary forces that undermine dominant motifs. Here we ¤nd a coherent, uni-¤ed narrative of national identity, yet elsewhere discover moments of chance encounters that challenge such totalizing, inescapable frameworks. If Hess at times reads like a Hegelian philosopher, the Sophoclean tragic vision is always present, too—revising, containing, challenging. Charles Taylor’s account of modern identity is a robust, persuasive, and highly in®uential contemporary revision of what Williams labels the “Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel” school of philosophical analysis. Taylor, like Hegel before him, af-¤rms that “human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations.” His conceptual categories adopted here—narrative identity, inescapable frameworks, tradition, and strong evaluation—all work to uncover the moral and religious sources that inform a coherent , secure identity in the modern world. Hess, as we have seen, embraces much of Taylor’s position. But as we trace those revisionary pressures that threaten Taylor ’s approach, Hess’s works uncover features of modern identity that are left unexplored in Taylor’s thesis. One such feature is the role that con®ict and ambiguous relations play in enriching notions of modern identity. In the middle chapters of this book, we have Innocence and Experience in Rome and Jerusalem 6 120 seen Hess struggling to balance con®icting commitments and values. Recall the discussion in chapter 3, where Hess attempts to integrate competing narrative accounts of his “return” to Judaism. The balance that Taylor seeks among various competing commitments cannot but minimize the serious disintegrating pressures that are produced by con®icting narrative accounts of return. When Hess af¤rms the one narrative, he only intensi¤es the pull of the other. Hess’s return to Judaism is problematic because these countervailing stories disclose an identity in con®ict. The notion of countervailing forces extends the self and broadens our notion of identity. Hess’s works show us that identity relies upon the interplay and authority of multiple narratives. Taylor’s hierarchy of values offers little solace for a modern Jew steeped in the ambiguity and pressures of con®icting accounts of identity. Moses Hess is a con®icted and often tormented ¤gure who de¤es exact categorization —religious Zionist, socialist, philosopher, Jew—precisely because he feels the narrative pull of each. He so often disappointed and angered friends, and still today confounds his interpreters, who look for the one category only to ¤nd that he ¤ts so many others. But this is, to my mind, what makes his work so challenging and rewarding for contemporary Jewish thought. As I argued in chapter 2, Hess’s early works express a singleness of purpose unmatched in his later texts. Only in Rome and Jerusalem (and later pieces) do we ¤nd other voices overtly, and sometimes covertly, threatening what once were secure and “scienti¤c” claims. But those former commitments remain strong and de¤ant, resisting the displacement and authority of other narratives. They cannot be summarily resisted nor undermined by new portrayals of identity. Hess’s construction of identity in Rome and Jerusalem is a contested site that continuously endangers the integrity of the work as a whole. This is so because Hess himself is sensitive (however unconsciously) to the multiple threads...