On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Reitter Paul

Author:Reitter, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

III

Lessing wrote his first substantial work about German Jewry’s predicament in 1901. By that time, much had changed. Having completed a course of study in medicine, as well as a dissertation in philosophy, Lessing had begun teaching at what we would today call an experimental school. This was the Landerziehungsheim in Haubinda, which stressed the importance of learning activities that take place outside the classroom, and especially ones that involve nature. Lessing had needed a job: he was married now, with a child on the way, and he had recently lost his main source of financial support. Lessing’s maternal grandfather, who had helped him make ends meet during his student years, died in 1899. But Lessing didn’t go into teaching for the money, needless to say. It stands to reason that he sought out the land school movement as a response to having been tormented in a conventional educational setting. Lessing was, in a sense, rejecting the system that had made his life so difficult. Yet the motivations behind his career choice also went beyond the hatred he harbored for traditional German pedagogy. When Lessing decided to become a teacher at a Landererziehungsheim, he was acting on his philosophical principles, too, and in more ways than one.

In his dissertation (1899), Lessing examines the thought of an obscure Russian-born Jewish philosopher, Afrikan Spir, whose noncanonical understanding of how knowledge is formed serves as the basis for Lessing to develop his own critical epistemology. Here Lessing begins to advance the notion that the incongruities between the empirical world and our theorizing about it aren’t simply unavoidable, they are also harmful. “Begins,” because he would offer further articulations of this idea in such books as Philosophy as Deed (1914), Europe and Asia, History as Giving Sense to What Is Senseless (1919), and Jewish Self-Hatred.

The premise of Lessing’s own theorizing is that life experiences are nonidentical and unrepeatable (hence the title of his autobiography: Once and Never Again). Building off of the work of the now-forgotten historian Johannes Scherr, Lessing also claimed about life experiences that they are filled with senseless suffering (hence again the title of his autobiography, which stands as both an observation and an exclamation). For Lessing, what has driven much of human mental activity, what more than anything else has fostered human consciousness itself, is our need to make sense of and justify our pain-filled, essentially senseless existence (hence the title History as Giving Sense to What Is Senseless). The problem is that if giving sense to what is senseless, and also imposing systems of order on what is nonidentical, can make for certain psychological comforts, doing so often has the added consequence of diminishing life experience. As Lessing’s (superb) biographer Rainer Marwedel has put it, reflection, according to Lessing, disturbs “the flow of life.”37 Or, to cite Lessing himself, reflection “wounds life,” thereby making our lot even worse (hence the title Accursed Culture: Thoughts on the Opposition between Life and Mind).38

But as drastic as some of Lessing’s pronouncements sound, he didn’t—and wouldn’t—treat the consciousness brought about by suffering as uniformly bad.

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