History and Historicism

From Hegel to Nietzsche:
The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought
by Karl Löwith
Trans. David E. Green.
New York: Columbia UP, 1991, xvii + 464 pages
ISBN 0-231-07498-0 $60.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-231-07499-9 $16.50 softcover

Originally published in 1941 in the German under the title, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, this is a reissue of the 1964 translation of Löwith's greatest work. Regrettably, what the publisher forgot to include in this reprint is the author's dedication of his book to the memory of Edmund Husserl. For whatever the reason, the dedication is not included in the 1964 issue either. That's regrettable, not least because it serves as a reminder to the reader that with the Nazification of Germany, both Löwith (1897-1973) and Husserl (1859-1938) had been excluded, for reasons of race, from any meaningful participation in German affairs. Such was the political landscape in which this book was written, and for which it was, in part, written to explain.[1]

One suspects that in this dedication there is something about Heidegger as well. It could be said, more or less, that Heidegger had historicized Husserl's approach to phenomenology. It was this "historicist" orientation that had exercised such a profound influence on a student of Heidegger in the 1920s, the young Karl Löwith. This influence, however, was not to last for long. Löwith had dissociated himself, little by little, from Heidegger's teachings. Indeed, by around 1935, Löwith went on to dissociate himself entirely from historicist thought in general. Given Löwith's intellectual biography, not to mention Heidegger's unconscionable betrayal of his master, the reader can only assume that there was something polemical intended by Löwith in the dedication of his book to the memory of Husserl.

In view of the controversy surrounding Heidegger's connections with National Socialism, and some of the hard things that Löwith later had to say about the teachings of his one-time mentor, his writings merit that much more attention. In any case, these were the unhappy events, political and philosophical, which must surely have influenced Löwith's assessment of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. In fact, he goes out of his way to say as much in the 1939 "Preface": "[T]he tree may be known only by its fruits, the father by his son," he writes. "The twentieth century has clarified and made explicable the actual events of the nineteenth" (xvi). Which events were these? What has been clarified? What is this book, which touches on many things, basically about?[2]

Basic to it is a chronicling of the different answers, starting with Hegel's and ending with Nietzsche's, to this question. Simply put, what relation obtains between "being" and "time"? Or roughly, when will the "fully real," what is of utmost significance, appear? However profoundly different the various answers are, they seem to fall into two categories: now and not yet, or today and tomorrow. Today, according to Hegel, on whose account, of course, history has come to an end. Tomorrow, according to the "Young Hegelians," a term that Löwith applies to the "radical left" among Hegel's successors.[3] Today, according to Kierkegaard (his notion of the "moment"). Today, according to Nietzsche (his notion of the "eternal return"). But there is at least one other way to answer this question, and this is Goethe's. His answer is neither "today" nor "tomorrow," but "always." The question of "what is," so far as it seeks an answer, in one way or other, in reference to the workings of history, is for Goethe simply the wrong question to ask. The "parousia," for Goethe - and for Löwith - has always been at hand.

Goethe's poetic and scientific reverence for the here-and-now, for the concreteness of things, predisposed him to see at work in history not the "cunning of reason" (Hegel), but, rather, a vast interplay of mostly natural forces and flukes, and then, maybe, a few successful plans.[4]

"What one can observe on the whole," he writes in a letter to Schiller (March 9, 1802), with reference to Napoleon, "is a tremendous view of streams and rivers which, with natural necessity, rush together from many heights and valleys; at last they cause the overflowing of a great river and an inundation in which both perish, those who foresaw it and those who had no inkling of it. In this tremendous empirical process you see nothing but nature and nothing of that which we philosophers would so much like to call freedom."[5]
Goethe was not taken up with the question of "world history" precisely because, in the root sense of that word, he was a "historian." "In the Greek," Löwith notes, "historein means `to inquire after something,' or `to investigate something,' and by report and description to give information about what has been inquired after and investigated." "Ever since Hegel," he goes on to say, "world history, in contrast to historia, seems to be precisely what one has not seen and experienced, inquired after and investigated for himself" (213). What, then, about Goethe's contemporary, Hegel? And why do they so profoundly differ over the question of "what is"? Löwith's answer goes something like this. "What is," according to Hegel, is revealed not as an emanation of visible reality, but, rather, as the history of the world and as spirit. Accordingly, the classical notions of chance and fate, and the importance of the role of the everyday details of human affairs, all but drop out. As Hegel understands history, the early deaths of Alexander and Caesar, for example, or the length of Cleopatra's nose, such fortuitous things have had no decisive say in the final outcome of history. This marginalization, if not plain dismissal, of the role that such concrete and chance happenings incontestably play in the course of history, says Löwith, is in fact a symptom of a "pseudo-theological schematization of history ... it does not correspond at all to visible reality" (219).

Herein lay the superiority of Goethe's insight into "what is." Goethe was not taken up with the question of the "whence" and the "whereto" of history, and this was because, unlike Hegel, he was a "genuine pagan." Goethe's way of seeing the world around him was not transcribed within an eschatological and, therefore, according to Löwith, a Christian horizon. He was one of the few in the nineteenth century - and this century? - who was able to stand outside that occidental horizon, which will not settle for a pagan acceptance of fate (xii). As Gadamer puts it in the "Foreword," Löwith's own "plea for nature allowed him to share in Goethe's dissatisfaction with history - and that concerned particularly the history of salvation, as his famous book, Meaning in History, makes clear" (xii).[6] In brief, Goethe is the hero in From Hegel to Nietzsche. Or at least he comes across that way, in the first of the two parts of the book anyhow. But is he the hero? Or does he occupy a more ambivalent place in the book? That is a key problem for the reader who would like to know where Löwith takes his final stand, in this work as well as in his later work, Meaning in History (1949).

In the second part (entitled "The History of the Bourgeois-Christian World"), Goethe comes to occupy only a minor role. This sudden demotion of his stature in the text, I suspect, is the result not of a structural flaw, but, rather, of Löwith's own indecision as to which road he would wish to travel. The one road, of course, is the road of Goethe. But other road, of all things, is apparently the road of Christianity in the essential meaning of that much abused term. In the second part, and especially in the closing pages, the author writes from an evidently theological, almost devout, perspective. The last line of the book could have been written by that "inventor" of history, Augustine himself: "For how should the Christian pilgrimage in hoc saeculo ever become homeless in the land where it has never been at home?"

Which road, then, does Löwith wish to travel? Of classicism or Christianity? Of fate or providence? Of scepticism or faith? The suggestion might be that these two heritages can be brought together to forge an alliance, even if only an uneasy one. But philosophically, at least according to Löwith, the prospect of such an alliance is highly doubtful. The fact that Hegel's system could not hold together for long testifies, according to Löwith himself, to how doubtful such a prospect really is. And culturally, the desirable thing to do, it seems, is to leave every last trace of Christianity behind. At least that seems to be the position that Löwith takes in the way that he compares Goethe's amor fati to Nietzsche's.

Classicist and "true to the earth" that he so wanted to be, Nietzsche still required a superhuman effort to love and will his fate. And how very un-pagan of him. His amor fati - an affirmation of the nunc stans, let us say - was for him still the "hardest to bear."[7] In other words, he remained unsettled by his own conclusion, namely, that about the only meaningful lesson that history can teach is the message to "be hard." Try as he did, then, Nietzsche still fell short of transcending a concept of time on which historicism, not to say nihilism, is founded. "Of course" history manifests no meaning. But the fact that the very thought of this should have even troubled him, according to Löwith, reveals that, in spite of his own contra Christianos, Nietzsche was still marked by a Christian conscience. In spite of himself, Nietzsche still philosophized within the framework of eschatological thinking, if only because he philosophized against it.

Not so with Goethe, who, says Löwith, had neither the wish to reconcile classicism with Christianity, as did Hegel, nor even the need to oppose it against Christianity, as did Nietzsche. Goethe was the "more genuine pagan"; his "god," unlike Nietzsche's, "had no need to oppose the other, because by his positive nature he was disinclined to any such denial" (179). For that reason, briefly, does Löwith rank Goethe's amor fati above Nietzsche's. But in that case, should not Löwith himself, in spite of his own occasional lapses into theology, look forward to a post-Christian world? After all, in such a world, in a "genuinely pagan world," wouldn't the misguided question about the "ground of history" cease to be of cultural significance and finally wither away. That raises a few other questions, which, by way of closing, I shall only mention only in passing. To answer any one of them would go beyond the scope of this review.

Can a culture's idée fixe, in this case of historicism, be deconstructed merely by tracing its origin and genealogy; or by saying that so-and-so said this or that in the nineteenth century, and that it really wasn't all that original, but that it was a reworked and secularized version of the writings of someone by the name of Joachim of Floris, who lived very long ago?[8] Might not the application of this method of discrediting an idea by way of a study of the "history of ideas" - a method that Löwith himself applies - be itself fundamentally historicist in spirit? And anyhow, is it possible to "unreinvent" the invention of the idea of historicism? Is it possible to do this even if its theological source - the "tree" or the "father," as Löwith might say - has since become a thing of the far remote and dead past? Moreover, what would crowd out this corrosive attitude of "what is," which one can find at work almost everywhere in the assessment of almost anything we say and do? How would we get around our deepest prejudice of all, namely, that history is the measure of the worth - and that most often means its lack of worth - of every speech, decision, revelation, science, philosophy, deed, value, headline, footnote, book, and review?

Löwith, of course, would have us return to nature. But what is that? Nature as manifested to us, or in any event most certainly to Nietzsche, no longer culturally reveals itself as a "primary phenomena," or as a mysterious and recurring order. It may have revealed itself that way to Goethe, and perhaps, for that matter, to the Greeks, but not, it seems, to us. What we see, self-consciously, is rather "nature" in inverted commas, a product of our own "pressing upon becoming the character of being." Nature is "nature" according to the "world-view" of a given society or individual - according to Aristotle, Newton, Goethe, Darwin, the industrialists, the luddites, the tree-huggers, and the druids. Apparently, that is how we look at the way we look at "nature."

Perhaps there is good reason to renounce history as the measure of all things, and to opt instead for nature. But then in what spirit should we speak about the possibility of such a cultural change of heart? As a change of our "commitment" or "paradigm"? As a change to an "environmentally friendly world-view"? Any well-intentioned call for a change of a "world-view" surely runs the risk of philosophical insincerity. This is all the more so when a call for such a change has to do with what is taken to be a "cultural" need to foster a naturalist and ahistoricist "world-view." This is hardly to outflank historicism. On the contrary, the very use of the vocabulary of "cultures" and "world-views" is simply to reintroduce historicism by the back door.

There is one final question. It is a "conservative" question put to someone who obviously takes a stand somewhere on the side of conservatism. Should Löwith, rather than lament the rise of bourgeois existence, as he does in the second part of his book, not welcome such a way of life instead? Should he not rather, on his own grounds, endorse a political existence according to which, as a good liberal, I am not called upon to be a "unified whole"? That's not an unreasonable question to put to Löwith. After all, what is often at the heart of secular eschatological thinking is the hope for the elimination of the "unauthentic" and "selfish" existence of the individual, and, thereby, the reconciliation of the individual and the citizen. For good or ill, bourgeois existence does not seem to entertain such an earthly hope. Arguably, it renounces it. To fine-tune the point, let me say something about the rather recent and best seller eschatologist, Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man [1992]).

Fukuyama has come up with the remarkable claim that history with a big H has come to an end. (The claim is especially remarkable, of course, for those of us who were not told beforehand that it even began.) Now that history has been consummated, Fukuyama goes on to say - and this is the part for those who like their sermons dark - there has emerged, alas, the "last man." Of course, this is in obvious reference to Nietzsche's prototype, who could be described, among other ways, as that flabby, complacent, and liberal creature. Now, that is Fukuyama's story. But maybe his story should have been told the other way around, and maybe something like this. To the extent that a culture is willing to make allowances for bourgeois existence, it is the very idea of history with a big H that loses it charm and comes to an end. It is the "triumph" of bourgeois existence and of the belief that everyone has a right to be "unauthentic" that helps disarm the view that history has some particular place to go. Whether bourgeois existence is actually something to be desired, that, of course, is for the reader to decide. But as to the author, perhaps he should endorse such a way of life which is devoid of "eschatological" hope.


Reviewed by John Bruin
University of Guelph

  1. The "Preface" is dated 1939. Löwith (1897-1973) was at that time teaching in Japan, and then, with Japan's entry into the war, in the United States. The book was originally published in Zurich (Europa Verlag, 1941), but was not, I suspect, issued in Germany at that time, let alone "originally published in Germany," as the title-page of the 1991 reprint would have it.

  2. There are a number of quite different perspectives that one can take on this text, and of course mine is not the only one. I refer the reader to a sample of perceptive readings of Löwith's text: Hanna Hafkesbrink in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, II (1941-42), pp. 257-59; Leo Strauss in his work, What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Illinois: Free Press, 1959), pp. 268-70; George Lichtheim, "The German Ideology," in The New Statesman, April 23, 1965, pp. 648-650 (a critique of Löwith's conservatism); and Berthold P. Riesterer, Karl Löwith's View of History: A Critical Appraisal of Historicism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), Chapter III.

  3. This is with the exception of Kierkegaard, whom Löwith, for whatever his reason, includes among the "radical left" of Hegel's pupils and successors.

  4. There seem to be some similarities between Goethe's ahistoricist view of history and Tolstoy's "naturalistic-fatalistic" view of history. See Isaiah Berlin's analysis of the Tolstoy's understanding of history in his The Hedgehog and the Fox, an Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York: Mentor Books, 1957).

  5. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications if the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 53.

  6. Added to this reissue is a somewhat helpful foreword by Hans-Georg Gadamer. For a fuller account of his one-time fellow student and colleague, see Gadamer's Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 169-75.

  7. Meaning in History, pp. 220-22.

  8. Ibid., p. 145. "There have always occurred and recurred apocalyptic speculations and expectations of an imminent consummation, but never until Joachim of Floris (1131-1202) have they been elaborated into a consistent system.... Far remote and dead as this quarrel of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seems to be today, there can be little doubt that it re-enacts the spiritual fervour of early Christianity and also conditions the modern irreligions of progress."