Meaning in eternity

Löwith’s early years: I, thou, and ‘encompassing reality’

Throughout Löwith’s career his philosophical focus continually returns to the phenomenon of the inherent naturalness in human life as the ground of reality, and the basis for reflection. This is partly due to his reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the question of nature, and especially the study of ‘philosophy and biology side by side’ (1994: 157). But it is also inspired by Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel, and his philosophy of ‘incarnate’ and ‘realized’ ideas, which forms the basis of Löwith’s Habilitation thesis: ‘[For Feuerbach] ideas should not remain above the sensuous in the realm of the universal, but should descend from the “heaven of their colorless purity” and “unity with themselves” to observable particularity, in order to incorporate themselves into the definiteness of phenomena’ (1964: 72).

Löwith would come to argue that the ordinary lives of human beings, in their particular everyday joys and suffering, contain more truth than universal concepts that exclude the specific human elements. This critical viewpoint, which Gadamer called a critique of ‘the school’, is an important touchstone that can be found throughout Löwith’s works, from his 1928 Habilitationschrift to his essays of the 1960s, and links the phenomenological to the historical. It also contains the seed of Löwith’s discontent with Heidegger’s existential analytic, which he first develops in his Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen.

In this work, the role of the individual as Mitsein or ‘with-being’ is added to the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time, drawing on both Feuerbach’s insistence on the ‘realization’ of ideas in the world and more significantly his concept of self as being co-constituted in the I-thou relationship (Riesterer 1969: 12–23; Moyn 2005: 70–77). Löwith opposes Heidegger’s one-dimensional analysis of communality in Being and Time with his own existential structure: the Mitwelt, ‘with-world’ or ‘primordial togetherness’ (Riesterer 1969: 16). The possibility of an authentic existence is in the recognition of one’s ethical relation with the others who all share the Mitwelt together. Where Heidegger had attempted to eliminate the metaphysical divide between subject and object, mind and world, by illuminating the ecstatic nature of being-in-the-world as a single, undivided phenomenon, Löwith reasserts those traditional differences in order to preserve the potential for a rationally grounded ethical existence. The human being is unique in his ‘ontological dual nature’, the ‘original disunity’ between nature and spirit. The Umwelt or world of nature remains partly hidden from human awareness, thus having an element of eternal autonomy, and so do the Others of the Mitwelt. The hope of bridging this original disunity is in one’s own attitude towards existence as such: ‘once man decides to be, i.e., once he willingly accepts that which already is, namely, his existence as a persona together with others in the Mitwelt and Umwelt, he overcomes his primordial disunity and exists authentically’ (Riesterer 1969: 19). The subconscious or ‘natural’ component of human beings plays a role in individual life as well as history, on which Löwith later bases his critique of rational philosophies of history.

In a private letter to Heidegger, Löwith discussed his interest in grounding ontology in the phenomenological investigation of the ontic (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 293). The I–thou relation was intended to be a beginning to such a philosophy, where existential relatedness was ‘to be understood as an originary co-being, in which Dasein is concerned about and with others as well as itself’ (Löwith in Moyn 2005: 73). Heidegger responded how one might expect at that time: that any such ontic investigation will ultimately fail without the appropriate ontological foundation, a foundation that Heidegger himself was pursuing. Nevertheless, he accepted the Individuum as Löwith’s Habilitation thesis, noting that his ‘hidden attacks and supercilious jabs are part of the attunement in which one presents his first undertakings’ (Heidegger in Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 299). While at this stage the master and student were able to respectfully observe each other’s positions, Löwith would become increasingly critical of the diminutive position accorded to moral life and subsequently to nature and the eternal in Heidegger’s philosophizing, especially after his ‘turn’. The ‘turn’ for Löwith signified, amongst other things, the growing distance between Heidegger and the concrete phenomenal experience of human life.

From his initial analysis of Feuerbach’s transformation and ‘realization’ of Hegel, Löwith turned to Marx and the problems of the bourgeois capitalist world. The publication of Marx’s early works prompted his shift from the ‘all-to-human horizon of the world’ found in Individuum to the ‘objective power of the historically developed structure of society’ (1994: 159). The published result of this interest was the monograph Max Weber and Karl Marx (1982 [1932]), which attempted to align the thought of these seminal ‘social philosophers’. The originality of its ‘Heideggerian’ interpretation, which enabled Löwith to link apparently opposing figures, ensured that this work would remain ‘crucially important’ even today (Turner 1999: 52). In this work he discovers that, despite the significant differences in Weber’s and Marx’s conclusions and reception, they began with the same intentions and the same subject matter: the ‘encompassing reality’ into which modern man is thrown (Löwith 1982: 69). The socio-economic force of capitalism dominates the reality or culture of the modern world. However, the source of this reality originates in man himself. Both figures try to make sense of the effect that this contradiction has on human consciousness, with Marx describing it as ‘alienation’ and Weber as ‘rationalization’. Löwith claims that they are both describing the same phenomenon: the everyday naïve experience of ‘what is the case’ in the world as an objective and ahistorical phenomenon, rather than as a historical and all-too-human construction. In order to step away from and criticize the given, Marx and Weber each utilize an ‘idea of man’, which Löwith identifies as their fundamental presuppositions. These presuppositions ultimately shape their predictions and prescriptions for modern life, with Marx’s revolutionary return to unalienated Man in communism and Weber’s Stoic individual who survives by striving for freedom and self-responsibility in the cracks of rationalization and bureaucracy (1982: 58–60).

With Max Weber and Karl Marx, Löwith succeeded in his explicit intention, that of aligning two important critics of life in modernity. With the concept of ‘encompassing reality’ he neatly uncovered the overlap between two of the great critics of Western society. However, Weber and Marx were unable to provide Löwith with an answer to the deeper question that had been raised by Heidegger via Nietzsche: the problems of rationally-grounding human life after the ‘death of God’, and the loss of objective principles. Commenting on this work in his 1959 ‘Curriculum Vitae’, Löwith stated that ‘it ended inconclusively, because Weber’s existential relativism with reference to the free choice of the highest value seemed to me as untenable as the Marxist thesis of the human being as a social species being whose task it is to realise the universal tendency of world history’ (Löwith 1994: 160).

Recovery of the eternal cosmos

Between 1932 and 1935, while he completed his major work on Nietzsche, his teaching position and life situation were thrown into turmoil by the onset of the Nazi regime, because his Jewish heritage attracted the attention of the new ‘political zoology’ that was attempting to strip German universities of ‘Jewish intellectual culture’. Anticipating his forced departure from Germany in 1935, Löwith deliberately chose Nietzsche as the topic of his final lectures, because he ‘wanted to make clear to the students that Nietzsche was a precursor of the German present, and the same time its sharpest negation – “National Socialist” and “Cultural Bolshevik” – either, depending on how he was used’ (1994: 83). Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same was published from these lectures, and therefore can be read as a careful re-evaluation of Nietzsche’s philosophy with a distinct political, albeit intellectual, goal. The ‘active’ and ‘perfect’ nihilism present in Nietzsche’s writings had become part of the Nazi ideology, and the will-to-power was understood as the central tenet, particularly for the youthful supporters and members of the regime. ‘He became, last but not least, the supreme authority of that German youth which is now fighting all over Europe’ (Löwith 1944: 163). In Löwith’s lectures, and in his debate with Alfred Baeumler and others, he opposed this vulgar and simplistic interpretation by offering his own meticulous and ‘faithful’ rendering of Nietzsche’s philosophy. As esoteric in content and inaccessible to the layman as it was, the book was refused by all the German publishers, eventually being published in Switzerland – with the condition that his reviews of the other Nietzsche interpreters be left out. And Löwith himself, because of his Jewish heritage as much as his critique of Nazi ideology, was then forced into exile.

His central thesis is that Nietzsche’s diagnosis of European nihilism was the crystallization of the cultural decline sweeping Europe and the Western world, and is to be overcome through the teaching of the eternal recurrence. The notion of the will-to-power – and also perhaps the Superman – emphasized by the racial ideologues, actually sabotaged the movement towards the eternal. This is because, in Löwith’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s ‘system in aphorisms’, the overcoming of nihilism consists of a three-stage process: from the ‘Thou Shalt’ of the pre-modern, to the ‘I Will’ of the free-spirit, to the ‘I Am’ of the eternal. The will-to-power is not the consummation of Nietzsche’s teaching, but it is a necessary phase in which the will of the infinite subject – God – is assumed by the finite subject: the human being. Through this movement the subject experiences the nihilism of total freedom, but also realizes the truth of Being as eternally recurring, and chooses to love its fate: amor fati. The will-to-power is not the end of but the means for the consummation of European nihilism, and the restoration of the greater cosmological truth.

But in Löwith’s estimation, the will-to-power is a modern novelty that negates the essence of the Heraklitean cosmological wisdom. The inherent double meaning of the eternal recurrence contains a fatal contradiction: on the one hand it is a positivistic and mechanical theory of Being and time; on the other it is a fundamental ethical principle that guides the individual in their self-overcoming. These are the ‘cosmological’ and ‘anthropological’ equations of eternal recurrence. The former advocates a deterministic view of human beings and nature, where one’s fate is wrought by destiny, and the latter a doctrine of free willing that urges one to choose their life as if they would live it again and again for eternity. The anthropological meaning of the eternal recurrence is a subjective construction, which is annulled by the objective positivist meaning of the cosmological. It would be impossible to believe in both one’s own free will and simultaneously the fated destiny of the cosmos. The problem lay in Nietzsche’s particular cultural and philosophical inheritance: ‘The teaching of the eternal recurrence is equally essentially an atheistic substitute for religion and a “physical metaphysics’” (1997: 94, emphasis in original). Nietzsche’s attempt to unify man and nature once again through the restoration of the pre-Socratic view of the world failed because ‘he remains tied both to the positivism and to the nihilism of his century’, namely, the collapse of the system of ethical values and the rise of the system of scientific research (1997: 95). As the particular history of the Occident unfolds, ‘the age-old idea of the eternal recurrence does not rise again unchanged, but instead is calamitously modernized’ (1997: 120). Löwith concludes that Nietzsche, as a modern man, ‘was so hopelessly separated from an original “loyalty to the earth” and from the feeling of an eternal security under the vault of heaven, that his effort to “translate” man “back” into nature was condemned to failure from the outset’ (1997: 121). He had to assert his will-to-power in order to experience again fate.

Despite arguing consistently against Nietzsche, the concept of the eternal offered Löwith a fundamental counterpoint to what he saw as the aporia of linear history: the path that led from idealist philosophy to positivist science and historical relativism leads also to an insurmountable rift between humanity and nature. Eternity remains outside of this descent; it is a way for humanity to comprehend existence writ large, grounded by a principle after the Death of God. Therefore:

Nietzsche is the last within the ancient tradition, and the first within the modern, historical consciousness, who had in what is forever or the eternal a philosophic yardstick by which to measure the experience of time and of the temporal. (Löwith 1997: 136)

The eternal thus became the (a)temporal counterpart to the immediacy of the natural, and Löwith appeals to both in his critiques of historicism and anthropocentric theory. But it also marked the beginning of a departure from the phenomenology of the social and the intersubjective, which perhaps was the result of Löwith’s reading of Nietzsche’s extreme atheistic metaphysics.

From ontic phenomenology to historical deconstruction

If there is a definite turning point in Löwith’s literature, it begins with Nietzsche’s Philosophy and ends with the 1941 work From Hegel to Nietzsche. The latter appears to be in two halves: the first half is a cohesive historical study examining the transformation of the ‘old world’ of Goethe and Hegel by the ‘decisions’ of the young Hegelians, followed by the diagnosis of nihilism by Nietzsche; the second is a collection of ‘Studies in the History of the Bourgeois-Christian World’, which are short vignettes on society, work, education, Man, and Christianity. It is tempting to conclude, given Löwith’s almost exclusive later interest in philosophy of history and temporality, shown in the first half, that these vignettes are sketches for larger projects that were set aside in the face of a more pressing concern. They would seem to follow on from his early intention to develop an ontic philosophical anthropology, and his interest in the objective established powers that form society. From this point forwards, Löwith focuses instead on the historical causes and conditions for European nihilism, which was manifesting all around him in totalitarianism. According to his colleague Leo Strauss, the purpose of From Hegel to Nietzsche was to catalogue the events of intellectual history in the 19th century, in order to better understand the chaos and deprivation of the 20th. In Löwith’s words:

To transcribe history does not mean to counterfeit the irrevocable power of what has taken place once and for all, or to increase vitality at the expense of truth, but to do justice to the vital fact of history so that the tree may be known only by its fruits, the father by his son. (1964: v–vi)

The fruit that appeared in the 1930s was European nihilism, the tree that bore it the destruction of idealist philosophy in the wake of fallen Christianity. These events occurred in the long 19th century, which Löwith measures from the French Revolution to the First World War. As a study of ‘interpretations of existence’, it recounts a seismic shift between two worlds, an old and a new, where attitudes towards and thinking about Being and time are fundamentally changed. Löwith argues that there is a ‘deadly consistency’ with which the ‘spirit of the ages’ devolved into the ‘spirit of the age’, whereby the sense of a universal spirit that permeates all happenings of human community is levelled down into a historical and particular spirit that exists only for one time and place.

Hegel’s privileging of the Idea to absolute status enables a total philosophy of history that vindicates the present as a consummation. The Young Hegelians ‘turn Hegel back on his feet again’, to assert the importance of lived over abstract reality; thus the philosophy of history becomes a programme for the future realization of its promises. Finally, Nietzsche destroys all doctrines that plan a better tomorrow, positing instead an Idea that affirms the eternal Now as a path out of his predecessors’ ontological nihilism. But there is more to From Hegel to Nietzsche than an existential evaluation of different forms of Hegelianism. As an intellectual history, it also argues for a particular understanding of the underlying causes of thought. In other words, it is a meta-history, one characterized by eschatology: the expectation that history is travelling towards an absolute end, a final event that contains some purpose. Temporality and history as linear eschatology are counterposed by the idea of eternity, or timelessness. While in his assessments Löwith finds admirable aspects in all of his subjects, he ultimately judges by these two categories. Most fail to meet the demand of eternity.

Löwith had already concluded that Nietzsche’s retrieval of the eternal recurrence on the ‘peak of modernity’ was doomed to fail because of his entanglement with the dominant worldviews of his own time, namely positivism and nihilism. In Burckhardt the ancient Greek view of history was also revived, but at the same time he recognized that antiquity was gone forever. A philosophy of history was impossible; he presented the sobering insight that the study of history reveals only ‘struggle and suffering, short glories and long miseries, wars and intermittent periods of peace’ (Löwith 1949: 25). History and historiography mean the stringing together of dissociated events while philosophy subordinates them to principles that attempt to uncover a logic greater than the events themselves. ‘Progress’ (the idea of perfecting culture through reason) is therefore impossible; in history, ‘beginning and end are unknown and where the middle is in constant motion’, so understanding is attained only through ‘continuity’ with the past (1982: 21). Löwith positions Burckhardt between the classical and Christian interpretations of temporality: on the one hand, Burckhardt asserts the wisdom of the eternal cycles of the cosmos, and on the other, the historicizing categories of epochs.

At the other end of the 19th century, following the ‘series of revolts’ against Hegel’s system by his pupils, stands Nietzsche. Despite seeing Hegel as an ‘insidious theologian’ and Goethe as an ‘upright hero’, Nietzsche recognized in them both the ‘will to divinise the universe and life’ (1964: 176–7). He had special admiration for Goethe, who was for him ‘theoretical man at his highest. He keeps alive upon the earth only by assembling for his nourishment everything great and noble’ (1964: 177). Goethe became the prototype for Nietzsche’s own amor fati, the lived freedom in a natural world. However, for Löwith Goethe is ‘the more genuine pagan’, because he did not need to oppose the Christian religion – he was not anti-Christian like Nietzsche (1964: 179). He differed from Nietzsche by ‘really living within the totality of all that has being and not transcending himself’, so he ‘could achieve the insight that the entire circle of apprehension is included in the unification of “will” and “must’” (1964: 197).

Nietzsche remained forever of his time, despite being ‘untimely’; Goethe, by contrast, ‘can never become timely or untimely, because he is forever a pure spring of truth in the relationship of man to himself and to the world’ (1964: 200). It is this ‘pure spring of truth’ that Löwith attempts to tap in his critique of historicism. At the same time, he acknowledged the impossibility of returning to Goethe or to anyone else (Löwith 1994: 146).

It is frequently, and of course correctly, observed that Löwith criticizes the appearance of redemptive eschatological philosophies in the modern period. This is a large part of the story in From Hegel to Nietzsche. But Löwith also finds fault in the excessive and deliberate privileging of ideas-as-such, over against the particular lives of ordinary people.

The prejudice to which world history as a whole can seduce us consists in viewing this history in the abstract, without the realities of human life and real situations, as though it were a world in itself without relevance to people that act and are acted upon within it. (1964: 221)

This perspective is again raised in Meaning in History as a corrective to what Löwith saw as the improper and grossly speculative character of the redemptive philosophy of history.

The illegitimacy of modern eschatology

In Meaning in History (1949), Löwith expands the theme of ‘secularization of eschatology’ into a wider historical gamut: from early Christian history, through Enlightenment and up to Burckhardt, presenting the writings of various thinkers as they implicitly and explicitly transformed the classical view of the cosmos into theological ideas of history, and then subsequently into secular philosophy. Along with his critical review of the history of ideas, Löwith wants to demonstrate the ‘impossibility of a philosophy of history’ (Löwith 1994: 164). In modern times, philosophy of history has manifested itself as both the inner justification for past history and in hopes aimed towards the future. This is the idea of ‘progress’, whereby the apparent contingency of the natural world is shaped into a coherent story of human achievement, which has the perfection of the human race as its indeterminate end. But, Löwith claims, this modern consciousness is simply the secularized eschatology of Christian traditions, the vision of a coming Kingdom of God that will end history and bring eternity, in either this world or the next. This work is widely known today as the precursor to Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which was generated by his attempt to refute Löwith’s secularization thesis, and will be discussed in a moment.

In his exegesis he illustrates that not only is the idea of progress an illegitimate blend of reason and faith, but even the older belief in theological providence within world-history is a profanation of the true Christian gospel. The biblical understanding of time is ahistorical, in the sense that events in history are insignificant to the divine project of the salvation of each individual. For Augustine, the only truly new event was the appearance of Christ, which divides history into before and after. ‘Now’ is merely the interim between that First coming and the Second. It is the eschatological meaning of the Hebrew Old Testament, where the imminent end of the human world signals the end of temporality, combined with the Christian sense of ‘creation, incarnation and consummation’, which divides up the cyclical cosmos of antiquity into ‘before and after Christ’ as the only important new event, that enabled the modern philosophy of progress to arise. The biblical understanding of the human saeculum is derived from a confrontation with the pagan natural theology of antiquity. The ancients viewed time and history as circular, bound up with the natural turning of the seasons and celestial revolutions, within which human actions, as part of this system, subsequently followed. The world was not created out of nothing but had always existed; the human role in the cosmos was of such infinitesimal importance that humans could not imagine changing it as a whole for better or worse. The cosmos enveloped them, and they dwelled within it, forever unchanging. Augustine, in his arguments against the pagan beliefs, ultimately challenged them with a moral stance rather than with an ontological claim about the nature of the universe:

the pagan doctrine is hopeless, for hope and faith are essentially related to the future and a real future cannot exist if past and future times are equal phases within a cyclic recurrence without beginning and end. On the basis of an everlasting revolution of definite cycles, we could expect only a blind rotation of misery and happiness, that is, of deceitful bliss and real misery, but no eternal blessedness – only an endless repetition of the same but nothing new, redemptive and final. ¹ (Löwith 1949: 163)

The Christian doctrine of salvation and damnation offers human existence hope for an eternal happiness out of the misery and suffering of the ‘interim’ world. Christ’s appearance and the dispensation of the New Testament changes completely the pagan natural cosmos: ‘What really matters in history, according to Augustine, is not the transitory greatness of empires, but salvation or damnation in the world to come’ (1949: 168). The meaning of world-history is the possibility of redemption for each individual, when they either accept or reject Christ as the incarnation of God, the creator.

Joachim of Floris, the doctrinal authority for the later Franciscan Spirituals, transformed the supernatural redemption of the established Church into a worldly expectation for the realization of providence. For the first significant time, the present is shown to be deficient in view of a worldly future. But, while his well-calculated prophecy did not eventuate, the vision of redemption in this world – as part of God’s creation – remained. For Löwith, Joachim’s Kingdom of God on earth represents a paradigm shift in thinking that continues through modernity right up to Soviet Russia and the Third Reich in Germany. ‘The third dispensation of the Joachites reappeared as a third International and a third Reich, inaugurated by a dux or a Führer who was acclaimed as a saviour and greeted by millions with Heil!’ (1949: 159). The eschaton or final end appears not as a transcendent hope that provides a moral compass, but as a realizable state within the history of the created earth. ²

In Joachim a new worldview became possible. Salvation was no longer a transcendent possibility but a worldly one. From this point forwards, theology and philosophy of history began to converge by different measures in different thinkers; worldly ideas were used in the prophetic statements of heretical theologians and theological ideas were incorporated by secular philosophers. Progress as a principle becomes fully fledged in the works of Proudhon, Comte, Condorcet and Turgot, who each develop it into a philosophy of history. For each of them divine providence is replaced by some measure of belief in progress and the perfectibility of the human mind, and religion is demoted to either a sociological phenomenon or an ‘irrational superstition’. The passionate irreligion of a character like Proudhon in his fight against God for the right of humanity to create paradise on earth almost certainly requires the faith of a believer. And Comte, despite designing a secular and positive method to discover the meaning of social development, ‘was a “pious atheist,” rejecting the divine subject but retaining its traditional human predicates, such as love and justice’ (1949: 91). His philosophy of history still incorporates the principle of progress in the advancement of primitive to higher stages of humanness, which ‘made him blind to the perpetual possibility and actuality of historical losses, reversions, and catastrophes’ (1949: 89). Hegel, with the transformation of the Christian eschatology into Absolute Spirit, introduces the ‘cunning of reason’ into the philosophy of history. This principle enables the rational comprehension of tragedy and suffering, which are now part of the progression of the Spirit. Marx inverts Hegel’s mediation of the real and the rational, and judges reality to be deficient in the eyes of the idea. It was therefore necessary to revolutionize the actual world to realize the ideal. For Löwith, Marx epitomizes secular eschatology, in his hopes for future redemption in a worldly utopia.

Löwith famously concludes that the ‘modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or biblical thinking’ (1949: 207). He views the modern understanding of history as an aporia, a philosophical cul-de-sac. History, the collected actions of human beings in traditions and significant events, is the horizon of meaning for a world that has no ‘onto-theological’ support. Löwith wants to shatter any illusions about the self-importance of human beings who imagine their role in the universe as a journey to paradise, citing Burckhardt’s classical view of the world as cyclical. But what of Augustine’s moral critique of paganism, that it is only a hopeless repetition of misery and happiness? Löwith would say that Augustine’s Christian solution was legitimate within its own context, but has since expired with the dawn of modernity. The cosmos, on the other hand, is objectively apparent and can be observed. It is only modern philosophy that keeps human beings separate from nature, in a historically entrenched solipsism. ‘Progress’ is a narcissistic illusion that Löwith has therefore attempted to discredit.

The question of the meaning of phusis

In 1953, Löwith published Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time, which is not only a polemic targeted at Heidegger’s philosophy, but also a platform for Löwith to state conclusively how his own position on nature, history and Being differs from his former teacher. His method of deconstructing of philosophies of history to expose their theological presuppositions is turned on Heidegger in order to criticize his later works and their connection to the earlier Being and Time. A careful reading of this work is needed if the claim that Löwith’s disparaging critique of modern self-consciousness is essentially identical to Heidegger’s own ‘history of Being’ is to be substantiated (for example, in Habermas 1983, Wolin 2001). It also is an important companion piece to the earlier essays on Heidegger’s ‘political ontology’ and Schmitt’s decisionism (Löwith 1995).

Löwith makes several claims against Heidegger, focused around his famous ‘turn’, the Kehre, where he turned away from philosophy to ‘thinking’: from the existential analytic of the human being to a mystical pensiveness awaiting the return of Being. For Löwith, hidden within the movement of Heidegger’s later thought is a powerful undercurrent of the theological and the revelatory – a shift from the existential and the rigorously phenomenological. This is unacceptable to Löwith, who, as discussed above, strives to expose the inappropriate debts of philosophy and rational discourse to theology. A key piece of evidence for Heidegger’s theological presuppositions is an admission in a private letter to Löwith stating that he is a ‘Christian theologian (with the accent on the “logos”)’ (1995: 128). As a thinker who approaches the Christian theos from the philosophical logos, ‘Being’ can be understood as a secular stand-in for the infinite God. The particular Christian element in Heidegger is his proximity to theologians like Augustine, who emphasized the importance of the human soul over worldly history. Hence the existential analytic that stresses that Dasein in each case is always its own, and who must overcome the inauthentic life of absorption into the They to redeem itself in Being. After the turning, Heidegger’s thinking of Being became more or less explicitly theological, understanding the modern condition as a ‘double lack’: ‘in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and the not-yet of the one to come’, and wonders if ‘Being will again become capable of a God’ (1995: 69–70). For Löwith, this history of Being is eschatological and thus irrational. It makes claims beyond what can reasonably be known, and ignores the ahistorical world of nature that is more or less the permanent supporting background to the travails of humanity.

Heidegger’s view of nature is also unacceptable to Löwith as it is reduced to a mere existential of Dasein. For Heidegger ‘[t]he human being is not an animal rationale, but rather is an ecstatic existence’ (1995: 87). Nature is the most distant being in Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and only reveals itself as objectively present-at-hand, or as that against which human artifice is constructed, i.e. shelter from the elements, bridges spanning rivers. In contrast to this, for the later Heidegger nature is understood as phusis in the widest possible sense: rather than the being of nature it is ‘the clearing of Being pure and simple’ (1995: 88). Now the history of humanity is absorbed into the history of the happening of Being as phusis, reducing the distinction between nature and history. Löwith thinks that such a reduction eliminates the possibility of historical time completely, because, as Being can only be encountered through the mediation of an extant being, and time and history belong to the extant, nothing can be ‘distinguished by historicality but instead everything is subsumed into one pseudohistorical and historiologically undefinable Being’ (1995: 93). In other words, because all Being is the timeless phusis, nothing can emerge with historical significance as an ‘event’. Against Heidegger’s contradictory notions of history and the natural world, Löwith sets the common sense of the Greeks: the natural cosmos has always existed, and always in the same way. ‘Even in the epoch of the “completion of subjectivity,” “nature” is still the same as two thousand years ago, and it is mightier than all the variations in the realm of historical essence’ (1995: 85). Humanity and its historical existence is only ever within the world of nature.

Löwith’s retrieval of the cosmos, when set alongside Heidegger’s history of Being, has several important differences. Löwith continually stresses the eternal over against the ‘merely’ historical; Heidegger’s Being takes place and changes its character within history. Löwith’s aim is to leave behind the impossible task of a philosophy of history, with all of its theological presuppositions; Heidegger makes the future the horizon for the return of authentic Being. Löwith’s nature permeates human beings and throughout the world as both an ontological and cultural foundation; Heidegger’s nature is first a noumenal background to human action, and subsequently the indistinct revealing of Being-as-such. The cosmos is, and has been, the continuously accessible and commonsensical basis of human life. Falling back into history and spirit as the sole source of meaning is so incredulous to Löwith that he does not indicate how cosmological thinking is a more powerful argument. ‘But if common sense were really a philosophical argument, then that would be the end of all philosophy and, with it, the end of any appeal to common sense’ (Gadamer 2006: 501).

A perspective emerges

Throughout his critique of historical consciousness, Löwith poses the notion of the eternal as a universal principle, with the intention of developing a standpoint outside of temporal history. It is therefore an intrinsic component of his critical view of intellectual history, and, like Nietzsche, Löwith uses it as a ‘philosophical yardstick’ to measure up different ‘interpretations of existence’. Through his favourable appraisals of Goethe, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, a sense of its meaning and import emerges, but in no way is a reasoned ‘system’ expounded. This fact led Gadamer to think that it is merely a negative concept, posited as ‘the antithesis of the desperate disorder of human affairs’ (Gadamer 2006: 528). Löwith carefully exposes the naïve faith of modern philosophies of histories in their eschatological utopian visions, but leaves little room for alternatives to this historical entrenched nihilism, other than his oblique references to the eternal cosmos standing outside of time. However, after examining the fuller extent of Löwith’s work, it becomes possible to interpret the secularization thesis as a tool used to attain certain effects. The inner logic of Löwith’s thinking, from his Habilitation thesis to the later essays, indicates a concern for the possibilities of establishing boundaries to action, boundaries that both limit the scope of human endeavour and also provide a sense of enduring belonging and order. A limit also provides balance in the idealist dialectical manner of self-determination: ‘there is no more temporality without a horizon of eternity than an isolated personal existence without reference to the universe’ (1994: 158). It connects his later historical works to the earlier Habilitation, where the individual recognizes itself as a primordial member of the human community of Mitwelt, and the groundedness of the Mitwelt in the encompassing world of the Umwelt.

The history of Western philosophical discourse has slowly undermined both the Greek world of the cyclical cosmos and the Christian world of the divine Creation, and so has fallen back on human finitude as the basis and source of all meaning. This is problematic because, without transcendent limits that are above human striving, human beings – or rather, moderns – will continue to do everything that is possible and beyond. Löwith asks: ‘is it inevitable that man will do everything and anything that he is able to do? Are there any bounds to the freedom for everything and nothing?’ (1966: 159, emphasis in original). He wants to undermine that nihilistic freedom, by demonstrating its complicity with Christian theological concepts, i.e. that the world was created for Man, and that it is his own for subduing and controlling. The secularization thesis excoriates the layers of intellectual folly that prevent the modern thinker from seeing the simple truths of natural existence. Stripped bare of its theological presuppositions, modern thought and praxis must acknowledge its shaky foundations – real and ideal – and adopt a more humble position in the face of Being.

Hans Blumenberg’s anti-substantialist attack

Löwith’s analysis of secularization and modernity, expressed definitively in Meaning in History in 1949, did not go without criticism; but more than decade passed before it was challenged: ‘Perhaps it is an index of the exhaustion of our times that Löwith’s thesis was not systematically criticized … until 1962’ (Wallace 1981: 68). In that year, Löwith’s position was challenged by Hans Blumenberg in a paper delivered to the Seventh Congress of German Philosophy. Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith remains the most discussed of all engagements with his work, not least because of its trenchancy and comprehensiveness, but also because of the book and proposition to which it gave rise: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Blumenberg refutes the claims of the secularization thesis, thereby constraining its function in undermining the imputed illegitimacy of modern thinking. He aims to reintroduce a more subtle interpretation of modernity that redeems what he calls ‘human self-assertion’, a truly modern phenomenon that has unfortunately taken upon itself the ‘canon of great questions’, questions that it cannot (and should not) answer. Examining the Legitimacy and its alternative perspective alongside Löwith’s works provides a historical and logical counterpoint, which is useful in illuminating their core values and presuppositions.

Blumenberg calls attention to secularization as a hermeneutical tool and the presumptions that theorists make in using it, in particular Gadamer’s claim that it is useful in identifying a hidden dimension of meaning that is unavailable in examining something as it is. Modern ideas of progress are unaware of their theological origins before the hermeneutical exercise. For Blumenberg, this analysis presupposes an ‘unequivocal nexus of dependence’ between the original state and the ‘secularized’ (1983: 17). He questions this relation, because it means that ‘[e]verything turns on the question whether the worldly form of what was secularised is not a pseudomorph – in other words: an inauthentic manifestation – of its original reality’ (1983: 18). An analogical relation cannot therefore be claimed as a secularized thing. How can the secularization theorists be certain that what ‘seems’ like transformative appropriation is not actually just a parallel process? Secularization is a ‘substantialism’: it demands that a substance is transformed from one state to another, without which ‘no recoverable sense could be attached to the talk of conversion and transformation’ (1983: 16). Blumenberg himself opposes substantialism – despite demanding of Löwith the burden of proof for his alleged substance – for the reason that it stops the process of theory with an unchangeable constant. ³ This is also a serious problem for Habermas and Richard Wolin, who see a potential totalization of discourse under the rubric of the ‘cosmos’ (Habermas 1983; Wolin 2001). Philosophy should accordingly always remain open to the free self-determination of fundamental concepts in debate; Löwith, in their view, predetermines those concepts in advance. Whether or not Löwith does in fact impose a totalizing principle is questionable. ⁴ Gary Steiner (2005, 2008) and Josef Chytry (2005) point towards an undeveloped but promising concept in Löwith’s later work: the idea of ‘cosmopolitics’. The world and human world are not collapsed into one; instead humanity is ‘subject to the same inalterable laws of fate that govern other natural beings, and in this respect we share a basic kinship with all beings that suffer and struggle’ (Steiner 2005: 233).

Blumenberg avoids the problem of an unchangeable constant limiting thought by making the essential epochal shift into modernity the inner-worldly work of human beings. This point is also part of his critique of secularization, where he questions the difference between transcendent and immanent notions of eschatology in theology and philosophy. In biblical eschatology, the world would be consummated by God who intervenes from ‘outside’. By contrast, the scientific model of progress has the human will at its core, and in philosophy of history the same human will completes itself from within the world. This difference Blumenberg holds as proof that the substantialism of the secularization theory reads the evidence incorrectly, because the immanence of modern eschatology implies an important and original innovation.

These two main criticisms appear to dismantle Löwith’s theoretical apparatus, which assumes the more or less simple transference of ideas from one domain to the next. It exposes the lack of consideration of practical life and the experimental method of science in his study of history, which, for Blumenberg, is the central innovator in the production of the novel world orientation. Löwith, by contrast, focuses nearly exclusively on Geistesgeschichte, the history of intellectual and cultural consciousness and its presuppositions. This difference may reveal that there are in fact two (or more) overlapping ‘streams’ of discourse in modernity, one in which the practical and technological life of humanity is developed, the other where the implications of the transformation of knowledge and culture are felt and discussed. Löwith cannot deny the logic of scientific progress and its central place and importance in modern society. He rather catalogues – in the genre of Romanticism – the growing discontent with the disappearance of transcendental norms and an improper and hubristic seizing of destiny by an emerging anthropocentric and immanent worldview.

The disjunct between these two possible domains of discourse is accounted for in Blumenberg’s own explanation for the modern idea of progress. He argues for a different understanding of the transference of ideas, where their function and content are distinct. The function (the question) is transferred through the epochs, but not the content (the answer). In this sense, it is the questions of previous epochs that are given to the emerging understandings, which are then ‘reoccupied’ by the new answers. For example, rather than the secularization of eschatology in the idea of progress, which assumes that the ‘transcendent’ agent of consummation has been somehow replaced by the ‘immanent’, Blumenberg argues that philosophy was compelled to incorporate into the new, human-centred notion of progress an anachronistic question of the meaning of history:

What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization, as least (so far) in all but a few recognizable and specific instances, should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into the secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated. (1983: 65)

The novel production of knowledge and methods by a nascent experimental science, freeing itself of the taboo on curiosity, changed the conditions for thinking; but the existing discourse that sought to explain the meaning of all human existence passed on to it its questions. It is for this reason that the ambitious ‘philosophy of history’ imposed such encompassing theories of all human life and time. One discourse is engaged in the scientific investigation of nature, the other in the possibility of guaranteeing a transcendent meaning for human life in the universe.

However, in his exposure of the continuity and expansion of self-assertion, there is a sense in which Blumenberg is asserting and legitimizing exactly that which Löwith has attempted to expunge: a notion of humanity as a contingent creature infinitely pursuing its ends within an immanent and historical frame. But Löwith’s suggestion – finding an eternal and transcendental principle through that same temporal immanence – delivers only a dilemma and a paradox. Blumenberg’s human subject grounds itself in its own needs, desires and the will and reason to attain its existential goal of ‘orientation’; Löwith wants to renounce the striving and instrumental principle and instead restore to human consciousness wonder and humility before the enveloping cosmological order – perhaps something that is in tune with many observers of the evolving planetary environmental crisis.

Löwith’s contribution

As an interpretation of the history of the modern age, Blumenberg’s notion of self-assertion legitimates the position of human beings in a disenchanted (although ultimately within mythical/metaphorical bounds) and atheistic universe, but does not prescribe any other kind of course of action or historical project. A possible future is that what Löwith hopes for could come to pass through the collective action and agreement of human beings in concert, who are together facing the historically enacted and anthropogenic disappearance of the means for life-as-such. What is lacking in Löwith’s gestures to humanity’s – or consciousness’s – reintegration into the order of the living cosmos is a way or path. He attacks the logic of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence for attempting to will the moment of eternity, which corrupts the purity of the transcendental with human interests. However, he also agrees with Hegel that history delivers the parameters and limits of thought. ‘Don’t start from here’ is Löwith’s apparent advice to modernity. ⁵

As noted above, Habermas has signalled the totalizing potential of such a concept of nature, which would halt the process of philosophy under a ‘doctrine of invariants’. He argues that the legacy of theological ideas could instead, through analyses such as Löwith’s, be incorporated into the store of concepts available to a critical culture that recognizes their origins. ‘Secularisation is then admittedly the progressive critical appropriation of traditions which are the sole source of logos of a humanity that is to be realized through the historical mediation of nature with the human world’ (1983: 93). In his review of Blumenberg’s major works, Austin Harrington (2008) also discusses the future of theological concepts used in the social sciences. While Blumenberg has demonstrated that there is no substance that is continuous between theology and secular philosophy, his ‘functional occupation’ explanation means that ‘modern social science traffics in certain kinds of metaphors and rhetorical figures that can be seen as related to a theological heritage without being substantially identical to that theological heritage’ (2008: 24, emphasis in original). This is distinct from Habermas’s programme of the ‘secular translation of religious language into formally universalizing practices of discursive moral argumentation’, because of the way in which the theological and the secular are able to preserve their relative autonomy, while recognizing the transmission of influences (2008: 25). In both, the theological is given a different treatment in which it does not attempt to reduce modern rationality down to a logical core. Instead, they acknowledge a legitimate intellectual debt to a necessary history of myth and metaphor that continues to up the present.

The traditions of cosmological thinking, from the ancient Greeks to Nietzsche’s retrieval, could also be drawn on with similar caveats and cautionary clauses, and incorporated into the discourses on human nature, environment and justice. This has already begun under the rubric of the relatively novel ‘isms’ –‘posthumanism’ and ‘cosmic holism’ – whose ‘ists’ ask again the question of the relation between human beings and their natural environment. While each has its own worldview and philosophical genealogy, both could profit from Löwith’s insistence on the historical imperative for cosmological thinking. Blumenberg would counter that these perspectives are unlikely to become dominant, for the reason that they contradict the fundamental mythology of modern Man – Promethean rebellion and struggle against the forces of nature. But the motifs of order, beauty and belonging are as powerful (and potentially dangerous) as those of striving, rebellion and exploration.

From his earliest work to his latest, Löwith articulates a concern with the fate of humanity in modernity. This fate he reveals as being the historical loss of a transcendental and eternal perspective. He also argues that the opposing notions of eternity to temporality, infinite to the finite, are essential to their proper determination. The collapsing of these terms into the anthropocentric and the immanent not only prevents modern philosophy from perceiving the truth of existence, it also allows it to take on inappropriate eschatological ideas about the completion of the meaning of the world through the human will alone. Recognition of the cosmos as the source of all and the limit of all is the hesitant antidote from a seasoned skeptic. Blumenberg and Habermas challenge this critique of modernity, because it posits a totalizing and substantial solution to the ‘problem’ of history. They disagree that history is problematic in Löwith’s sense: the legitimacy of the modern age is gained through its novel achievements (Blumenberg) or that the theological heritage of philosophy can be acquired by rational thought in a legitimate way in history (Habermas). However, the notions of the cosmos and the ‘cosmopolitical’ may indeed be included in the store of logos for the continual interpretation of modernity and progress, without necessarily bringing about totalization or abandoning all hope.