Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 20:00:37 -0500
Subject: [HAB:] GERMAN IDEALISM & THE JEW [2]: counterattack of the Jewish


Mack, Michael.
German idealism and the Jew: the inner anti-semitism of philosophy and 
German Jewish responses.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Again, I did not have the opportunity to take serious notes, so I can only 
vaguely sketch the content of what I read.

The counterattack of the Jewish Enlightenment against Kant's bigotry 
reveals an interesting internal logic, but I don't consider what I've read 
so far particularly brilliant.  If anything, it reminds me of the ultimate 
dead end of the Young Hegelian movement and the reason Marx broke with it, 
for its inability to break through the self-enclosed world of 
ideology.  (Marx's intervention on the Jewish Question marks an incipient 
effort to break out into historical materialism, but only programmatically, 
and rather unflattering to the real Jew as well as the Sabbath Jew.)

Moses Mendelssohn's strategy does not strike me as altogether brilliant, 
and others were not satisfied either.  His strategy seems to be what we 
would today call multiculturalism.  He also had an argument about 
revelation and the codification of laws, claiming, strangely enough, that 
divine revelation is a counter to absolutism.  The basis for his refutation 
of Kant's position is a distinction between the moral and the epistemological.

Heinrich Heine's strategy is different.  He denies the bigoted opposition 
between German and Jew, arguing for similarity instead.  Judaism is in fact 
German--"Nazarene"--idealist, ascetic, a form of negation; as opposed to 
the Hellenic, the this-worldly and sensuous.  Mack distinguishes between a 
counterhistory and a counternarrative, but I can't recall which of these 
thinkers represents which.  Borne, who also converted to Christianity with 
Heine, figures into this somehow.  Heine ultimately rejects asceticism.

A noted German thinker by the name of Treitschke played a significant role 
in generating anti-semitic propaganda.  Here we have an important specimen 
of anti-capitalism and anti-materialism coupled with anti-semitism.

Heinrich Graetz did not seek reconciliation; he went on the offensive 
against Kant and others, emphasizing differences rather than sameness  He 
argued for sensuousness (supposedly a Jewish characteristic).  His argument 
was more radical than that of Herzl, my notes tell me, but I'm not sure 
what this means.  Naturally, Graetz infuriated his Gentile audience.

Chapter 6 begins with a treatment of Hermann Cohen.  The emancipation of 
the Jews led to a more virulent round of anti-semitic propaganda.  Here a 
very important theme is introduced: the intersection of pseudotheologies 
(volksgeist-based thinking) and pseudoscience (the new biological racism) 
(p. 110).  Make a note of this for further investigation.  From here my 
scribbling is almost completely illegible.  Something on p. 111.   Cohen 
against Kantian autonomy (p. 112).  Something on p. 115.

I have another note on the marriage of pseudotheology and pseudoscience.

Otto Weininger, who I believe was a Jewish convert who ultimately committed 
suicide, was a Kantian who wrote a scurrilous misogynistic anti-semitic 
treatise.

I also noted a footnote to by Moishe Postone (p. 180) in an anthology on 
19th century German history, I think, on anti-semitism and romantic 
anti-capitalism.

I have some more chapters to go, and then I will have to re-read the whole 
book when I can and do a better job the second time round.  This is not one 
of my more brilliant moments in notetaking.

Let me summarize major points for further research and deliberation:

(1) The notion of pseudotheologies, & their relation to rationalized 
Protestantism and pseudoscientific biological racism.

(2) The consequences of Kantian dualism (my favorite study is Adorno's 
PROBLEMS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY), with attention to autonomy & heteronymy and 
the association of the latter with Jewish materialism.

(3) Is idealism in fact the principle of negation it is proclaimed to be 
(note Marcuse again), or is it at the end of the day an ideological 
principle disguising an apologetic character?  Does hated materialism & 
sensuousness, associated with the hated Jew, represent the negation of the 
negation that serves as the true principle of emancipation?  Who's the man, 
Spinoza, Hegel, or Marx?

(4) The dangers of Romantic anti-capitalism and its association with 
anti-Semitism and ultimately fascism.  (But note the curious example of 
Moses Hess who takes Romanticism in a utopian socialist and ultimately 
Zionist direction.)

(5) Note the similarity between these philosophical arguments and 
theological arguments in general, which recapitulates my argument about the 
arbitrariness and reversibility of symbolic/mythical interpretation.  On 
the inside of ideology, any system of symbols can be interpreted and 
reinterpreted to mean, esoterically, any different number of things.  All 
of the twisting and turning outlined here shows the consequences of the 
inability to break out of mythical thinking.  The Young Hegelians were 
productive thinkers who could not do this either, but look at how bad the 
record is of everyone else.  Hegel also stands condemned here in a specific 
sense, with certain provisos: (1) Hegel is not content to describe 
mythologies but connects them with real social institutions; (2) Hegel 
represents the beginning of the process of German secularization and hence 
analytically fuses rational reconstruction of traditional beliefs by the 
progressive civil servant class, traditional belief systems (relegated to 
vorstellung but not rejected), and social institutions, and hence cannot 
see how his schema will soon be rendered obsolete.  The detachment of 
mythologies and their arbitrary reinterpretation not only becomes a social 
reality, but becomes ever more of a social possibility the more separation 
actually occurs between the content of old religious systems the cultures 
of modern societies.  In some sense, that process has been going on for 
centuries, as the majority of the world's population that looks to 
Bethlehem, Jerusalem, or Mecca never lived in the originating circumstances 
wherein those mythological systems were organically shaped in connection 
with their originating societies; but as secular modernity advances, the 
process of mythical reorganization by religious rationalizers becomes more 
detached and arbitrary.

(6) This subject matter serves as an outstanding example of the poverty of 
philosophy.  I think people who want to study racism ought to abandon 
philosophy and take up a more substantial subject, a more thoroughgoing 
history that incorporates the history of ideas into real 
historiography.  Or, if they are stuck with philosophy, they need to 
recognize that the conceptual history of anti-Semitism provides the master 
key to all of European racism no matter which group is victimized.


___________________

"People who believe absurdities commit atrocities."--Voltaire



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