Chapter 19 examines Goethe’s relationship to philosophy, which throughout his life was one of both interest and guarded distance. It considers the transformations which philosophy as a discipline underwent during his lifetime, details Goethe’s attitudes to intellectual developments in his own time, above all the work of Kant, and devotes particular attention to Spinoza, without whose inspiration Goethe’s work is unthinkable, even if it cannot be reduced to a Spinozist position. The chapter also emphasises the singularity of Goethe’s own thought, which was forever transforming any influences that it received, becoming a source of inspiration and critical reflection for contemporary and succeeding generations of philosophers.

IT HAS OFTEN been noted that quotes, resonances, and the style of Goethe permeate if not inform the writing of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Viewed as fashionable mannerism in the tradition of bourgeois culture that liberal German Judaism liked to embrace, the adoption of Goethe played an important role in nineteenth-century Jewish cultural life. Serving cultural as well as sociological and political functions, Goethe reception had become a central fixture in the arsenal of a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture war, and not just with regard to the positioning of liberal German Jewry. A central asset of the cultural capital backed by Germany's national ambitions, Goethe's stock, however, had not remained uncontested, and his valorization saw occasional fluctuations nervously reacting to the upheaval of an unsteady market. Participating in the Goethe cult could mean many different— and at times opposite—things. Many motives, interests, concerns, and agendas intermingled, but first and foremost, the appropriation of Goethe had become an affair of the liberal bourgeoisie.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Goethe reception had become a matter of particular Jewish interest. Without the salons of Jewish women such as Rachel Varnhagen and the rise of Goethe philology in the late nineteenth century (spearheaded by Jewish scholars such as Michael Bernays and Ludwig Geiger, to name just the exponents among the Jewish Goethe philologists), Goethe reception would be hard to imagine. At the home of Heine's parents, for example, Goethe had become such a towering presence that Heine's father worried: “Wie soll mein Junge aufkommen … wenn man immer und immer nur von Goethe sprechen will?” (How shall my boy succeed if everybody only wants to talk about Goethe all the time). Whereas Goethe had become politically unreliable for many nationally conservative Germans, his cosmopolitan and forward-looking vision of culture and Bildung (education) promised the emancipatory development that German Jews had so eagerly been looking forward to since the days of Moses Mendelssohn. If Goethe had become suspect to conservatives, liberals embraced him as an exponent of a reluctant modernity. In embracing a culturally liberal position, Goethe stood for the combination of the best that German culture had to offer.

With the Enlightenment begins what is considered the period of modern philosophy, a period that starts with a tabula rasa, returning to reason as the pure source of understanding – or so it is often argued. Ironically, by addressing the contributions of Jewish philosophers in terms of their “universal” significance, the conventional accounts, however, fail to attend to the specificity of modern Jewish thought, whose particular positioning challenges these very claims and universalist assumptions themselves. The critical significance of the trajectory of Jewish philosophers in the Enlightenment lies precisely in the way they use their particular perspective to examine reason's universalist claim. In so doing, Jewish philosophers have rethought, through reason, the very project of modern philosophy – a critical challenge that seems often lost in conventional accounts of philosophy in modernity. For while secularization is often seen as the condition of the new science and philosophy that emerge from the cultural rebirth in the Renaissance, this move to secularization reveals a selective blindness with regard to the contributions of Jewish philosophers curiously at odds with the period's claim to a universal scope. Though the middle ages had relegated Jews to a distinct if subaltern place of negative significance, modern universalism was no longer interested in a distinct Jewish difference when secularized post-Reformation Christianity had become the undisputed and single paradigm for spiritual and intellectual life.

Celebrated for the enlightened humanism of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and its positive portrayal of the play's Jewish protagonist — a portrayal many understood to be Lessing's tribute to Moses Mendelssohn — Lessing's entire work and thought have also encountered strong reservations and criticism. His sympathies for the Jews cost him the respect of those preoccupied with the myth-building of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. In fact, Lessing was taken to task by some for his “un-German,” even for his “Jewish” character. This controversial status during the establishment of a national canon of German literature has defined the interest and concern for the subject “Lessing and the Jews.” As a consequence, the way in which the subject would be addressed was shaped by the interests of the cultural war about national identity that was to characterize much of nineteenth-century Germany's cultural politics. The emergence of Germanistik in a climate determined by the agenda of this ongoing culture war had a profound impact in framing the subject of Lessing and the Jews as a question of national and ideological rather than religious or philosophical concern. Indeed, this went so far as to define both the sympathies and antipathies for Lessing in a lasting manner. While Lessing thus served as a key figure in the struggle of staking out the claims and counter-claims of both German nationalists and German Jews, the situation has changed little after Auschwitz except for the participants. With the Jews gone, Lessing has become a curiously absent presence in Germany, just as the Jews once had been. Against those critics who consider Lessing as a liability of an obsolete canon, others maintain the signal importance of Lessing as a rare champion of tolerance and freedom of thought.

Yet for Lessing the problem presented itself differently. For him, the importance of Jews presented less a challenge to an emerging national sentiment than to the question what role Christian identity was to play in this national project. For Lessing this was less ethnically determined than imagined as a new political space yet to be constituted, and therefore open to all regardless of their religious affiliation. To Lessing the challenge of the Jews posed itself in terms of Christianity. For if Christianity were to play any role in the age of Enlightenment, its assumptions and presuppositions had to be examined.

LET ME START WITH AN OBSERVATION from Leo Baeck that highlights not only the work of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt but, I would argue, the decisive point we must take in discussing the subject of German literature and its Jewish critics. The statement occurs in the concluding paragraph of Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism. “Nicht nur um uns handelt es sich, wo es sich um uns handelt.” In English: “Not only we are concerned when we become a matter of concern.”

To speak of identity means to speak of the intricately winding road along which self-determinations are expressed in a cultural environment which, in all its contingency, determines the nature of the discourse. The peculiar economy of self-explanation which comes into play here forces a compromise that precariously navigates between a heteronomous dictate and what we wish to view as authentic and autonomous interventions. For identities, like traditions, do not spring from pristine origins. Rather, they represent complex mediations of the crisis of modernity itself. Like symptoms, identities function as a compromise formation, and in the best cases, as a workingthrough of conflicts. Instead of originary positions of sorts, they are by definition fragile, precarious, strategic, and often dynamic.

In modernity, Jewish identity is, like any other identity construction, a result of the epistemological crisis that marks the emergence of modernity. This crisis meant that the social order had to be reinvented from the bottom up. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the new political models of the absolutist state and, eventually, the nation state were introduced to replace the model of the Holy Roman Empire, which had become increasingly precarious in the face of the new science and the emerging philosophies of nature and natural rights. This watershed marks the Jews as a particular group left out in the conceptual cold of societal reorganization. For the process of transition to the modern nation state is realized on the grounds of a Christian, if secularized world view that determines its outcome. The disintegration of the old Christian world order also meant that the place of the Jews had to be renegotiated. With the demise of the early modern Holy Roman Empire and the emergence of the nation state, there arose the new problem of nation building, and as one of its consequences, a problem termed the “Jewish question.”

Whether it has been the result of the unquestioned hold of convention or the consequence of the division of labor between the academic disciplines dictated by the institutional organization of research, Heine's prose and poetry are still widely viewed as two distinctly different literary projects. But the separation of the aesthetic from the political significance of his work has limited the comprehension of the critical scope of Heine's writing. Almost exclusive focus on the aesthetic and political implications has led many critics to the assumption that there are two neatly disjunctive spheres, which, in turn, can be equally neatly integrated into one unproblematic, whole Heine. However, Heine challenges precisely such dichotomy. Whereas much of Heine criticism argues as if the aesthetic and political presented two separate, but complementary halves, Heine's work seems, on the contrary, to call for readings more attuned to the problem of their intricate interdependence. Gesturing to a principal questioning of the conceptual grasp of distinctions such as the one between the aesthetic and the political, his writing alerts to the need to reach beyond the constraints of conventional poetics and, instead, to critically refashion and rewrite the author as publicist; as an author whose poetics reflects the problem of tackling the precarious border between reason and imagination that separates but also conjoins thought and the creative forces of the subconscious, the two crucial agents of philosophy and literature. However, the divided reception of Heine as the lyrical genius who would inspire the musical imagination of scores of Romantic composers and even make a Metternich shed a tear, on the one hand, and as an invidious “shadow image of the German intellectual” and provocative scare of the bourgeoisie, as Habermas so succinctly put it (96), on the other hand, has produced a deeply split image of the poet. As a consequence, the philosophically critical impulse at the heart of Heine's work has been lost on most readers. Certainly, Heine's comments on philosophy and intellectual history have received, if not necessarily their deserved theoretical attention, at least praise for their spirited eloquence. But his writing on religion has also presented some hermeneutic challenges. Yet, the recognition of the importance of philosophy in Heine has remained limited to sporadic acknowledgments of the passages in which he addresses philosophy in explicit terms.