Karl Löwith
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 127th anniversary of the birth of Karl Löwith (09 January 1897–26 May 1973), who was born in Munich on this date in 1897.
Löwith’s classic work Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History essentially found philosophy of history to be an illegitimate enterprise that merely secularizes Christian conceptions of salvation and eschatology and presents them disingenuously as the product of authentic philosophical thought. The book is a skeptical look at speculative philosophies of history, according to which philosophies of history are bastardized expressions of traditional Christian eschatology.
Löwith says he will use philosophy of history to mean “…a systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning.” Reading between the lines of Löwith’s philosophy of history stalking horse it appears that there is still room for philosophy of history of, say, a more humble sort — secreted among the ellipses and interstices of speculative philosophy of history in the grand style. For example, Löwith cites universal history, so a systematic interpretation of regional history might yet pass muster, or events and successions not unified and not directed to an ultimate meaning, or events and successions unified and directed toward a meaning that is not ultimate, but which falls short of ultimacy, and so on. This is not how Löwith has been read, but I will return to this below, so I mention it now.
Löwith’s work takes on the fundamental question of the meaning of history. According to Lowith, there is no intrinsic meaning in historical events. Meaning in history is effectively what W. B. Gallie called an essentially contested concept. As such, it is going to subject to any number of uses. Lowith locates the origins of his concept of historical meaning in theology, and this provides him with an argument for the principled rejection of philosophy of history, which has only a counterfeit meaning borrowed from Christian theology, and he puts in place of philosophy of history, as we have understood it to date, a non-philosophy of history.
What remains after draining the meaning out of history? Löwith implies that very little or nothing remains. Philosophy of history is an illegitimate enterprise, and in this respect it resembles what Voegelin called ersatz religion, Bertrand Russell called surrogate religions, and others have called “political religions” — that is to say, ideological substitutes for religion (like nationalism and communism) that have played the role in modern societies that religion played in traditional society. For Lowith, philosophy of history is an ersatz philosophy.
Tracing philosophy of history to his origins, we find that it is distinct from other ancient branches of philosophy, which have their origins in ancient Greece. Philosophy of history, by contrast, has its origins in St. Augustine’s City of God, written in response to the sack of Rome in 410 AD, in other words, philosophy of history has its origins in the late antique world or the early medieval world (depending on the periodization we employ), which gives it a notably different flavor than those branches of philosophy that originate in the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, none of whom had anything to say about the philosophy of history. There are scholars who have argued that Augustine’s City of God is not really philosophy of history, as Augustine’s conception of history is so different from ours that he is essentially engaged in some other kind of enterprise that cannot be accurately called philosophy of history. I disagree.
Augustine’s City of God is a large book, with a great deal between its covers, and much of it is not philosophy of history, but there are chapters that cannot be construed in any other way if we read Augustine with an open mind. Part of the problem, here, I think is a problem partly created by Löwith, which is that philosophers look into Augustine expecting the kind of philosophy of history that Löwith attributes to him, so that the debates with pagan philosophers over the eternity of the world, and whether history has a beginning and an end, don’t really seem to be philosophy of history, except insofar as the treatment of the beginning and the end of history can be interpreted in an eschatological context. I find Augustine’s discussions of time and history fascinating and I wonder that more philosophers haven’t taken his arguments on face value; philosophy of history would only gain if we did so, but this would involve a shockingly naturalistic way of reading Augustine.
If philosophy of history originates in Augustine, and others like Augustine’s protégé Orosius, and their providential conception of history, it is no surprise that this tradition was secularized in the fullness of time. The only way to produce a philosophy of history within this tradition is to take the concepts that originated in this providential and theological context and to secularize them. How could it be any other way? Have we not secularized Plato and Aristotle in this same way when it comes to metaphysics and epistemology?
Secularization has a distinct but overlapping meaning in sociology. The Encyclopedia of Sociology, second edition, defines it thus: “Secularization is the process by which the sacred gives way to the secular, whether in matters of personal faith, institutional practice, and political power.” This is a similar but slightly distinct meaning from Löwith’s conception of secularization, which latter could be characterized as a special case of sociological secularization, but I think we could better understand Löwith’s conception as a reductive concept of secularization, according to which, “X is nothing but secularized Y,” that is to say, philosophy of history is nothing but theology of history — a salvation history dressed up in secular clothing, which ultimately makes modernity illegitimate.
Secularization in sociology reached a high water mark in the middle of the twentieth century, when many scholars viewed the advance of secularization as inevitable. However, when fundamentalist religious movements gained political power in the late twentieth century, sociologists began to rethink the presumption of inevitable secularization. There was also a response to Löwith’s conception of secularization, in the form of the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate. Hans Blumenberg and Löwith were both at a conference in Munster in 1962, at which Löwith delivered a talk that was later published as “Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts” (“The Fate of Progress”), while Blumenberg, then a young scholar, argued that the use of secularization as an illegitimate concept was itself illegitimate. Blumenberg later wrote a book, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, to give a full exposition of his view. There is now a large literature on the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate, which debate continues to this day. It has expanded beyond Löwith’s original argument about the philosophy of history to be about the legitimacy of modernity, and especially about the legitimacy of the concept of progress, which is taken as a central tenet of the ideology of modernity.
Löwith’s criticism of theology passed off as philosophy has much in common with Voegelin’s famous warning, “Don’t immanentize the Eschaton!” This latter is a warning not to project the transcendental into the immanent. The complementary principle would be to issue a similarly strong warning not the project the immanent onto the transcendent. Each principle implies the other by implying a strict separation of the transcendental and the immanent — i.e., the strict separation of Heaven and Earth, or, if you like, God and the world — but we have only focused on the dangers posed by making the unworldly worldly.
In his work following Meaning in History, Löwith did not abandon his critique of received philosophy of history, but he does find a way to continue to do philosophy of history, by insinuating his thought into those interstices and ellipses of his earlier conception of philosophy of history, which I mentioned above. He begins to elaborate a naturalistic view of history in “Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts” (“The Fate of Progress,” mentioned above) and especially in “The Human and History” (1960), which introduces themes that sound all-too-familiar today — the vastness of the cosmos, the smallness of man within the cosmos, and the relative irrelevance of human hopes and fears in this cosmological context. Richard Wolin came to attribute Stoic detachment to Löwith, and I think there is some truth to this, although Wolin’s valuation of this Stoic detachment is wide of the mark. What other response to such a universe is legitimate? Löwith’s work is predicated on the concept of what constitutes a legitimate philosophy of history, and when any association with providential and eschatological meaning is stripped away, we stand naked before the cosmos and have only Stoic detachment between ourselves and madness.
