• CHAPTER FOUR •

Karl Löwith
The Stoic Response to Modern Nihilism

We find ourselves more or less at the end of the modern rope. … To ask earnestly the question of the ultimate meaning of history takes one’s breath away; it transports us into a vacuum which only hope and faith can fill.
KARL LÖWITH, Introduction to Meaning in History (1947)

One repays a teacher badly if one remains a student.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

European Nihilism

KARL LÖWITH is one of the most significant figures of twentieth-century German philosophy. In the English-speaking world, he is perhaps best known for his landmark studies of modern historical consciousness. Two of his works have attained the status of minor classics: From Hegel to Nietzsche, an erudite account of the decline and fragmentation of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, a controversial reading of the relationship between modern philosophies of history and their theological predecessors. When one combines these works with the more recent translation of his pathbreaking study of Max Weber and Karl Marx (first written in 1932), one gains a sense of the impressively original oeuvre that Löwith was able to assemble over the course of an extraordinarily prolific philosophical life.¹

The dislocations and upheavals of modern historical life were the point of departure for Löwith’s thought. In the tradition of Geistesgeschichte, his inquiries centered on the cultural and intellectual preconditions for the European catastrophe. In Löwith’s view, the European crisis was in the first instance a spiritual crisis. The fatal die had already been cast by the mid-nineteenth century, as the educated elite decisively turned their backs on the classicism of Goethe and Hegel. Increasingly, they grew impatient with values that were “timeless” or that transcended the finitude of human temporal existence. Nature and the heavens ceased to be the touchstone for value and meaning. Instead, “man” became the measure. A sense of disorientation became pervasive. As Löwith observes, “Since the middle of the nineteenth century, European historians no longer follow the pattern of progress, but that of decay.”²

Europe’s poets and literati sensed the dislocations most acutely. In a 1825 letter to Zelter, the elderly Goethe proffered the following observations concerning impending European decline:

No one knows himself any longer, no one understands the element in which he moves and works, or the subject which he is treating. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of simpletons we have enough. Young people are excited much too early and then carried away in the whirl of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires and what everyone strives to attain. Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of rapid communications are what the educated world has in view so that it over-educates itself and thereby continues in a state of mediocrity…. This is a century for men with heads on their shoulders, for practical men of quick perceptions who, because they possess a certain adroitness, feel their superiority above the multitude, even though they themselves may not be gifted in the highest degree…. We and perhaps a few others will be the last of an epoch which will not soon return.³

In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert satirized the philistinism of the bourgeois-European mind. His eponymous protagonists present inane disquisitions on learned matters of every sort, about which they know nothing. They busy themselves by mindlessly copying passages out of weighty books, as if this rote exercise will somehow make the knowledge sink in.

At about the same time, Baudelaire composed a series of portentously titled prose fragments, “The End of the World.” After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, his sense of European decline exceeded that of Goethe and Flaubert.

The world is drawing to a close. Only for one reason can it last longer: just because it happens to exist…. Suppose it should continue materially, would that be an existence worthy of its name and of the historical dictionary? … We shall furnish a new example of the inexorability of the spiritual and moral laws and shall be their new victims: we shall perish by the very thing by which we fancy that we live. Technocracy will Americanize us; progress will starve our spirituality so far that nothing of the bloodthirsty, frivolous or unnatural dreams of the utopists will be comparable to these positive facts…. Universal ruin will manifest itself not solely or particularly in political institutions or general progress or whatever else might be a proper name for it; it will be seen, above all, in the baseness of hearts.⁴

Only in “artificial paradise” could Baudelaire find solace and consolation for this distressing train of events.

In Löwith’s view, Europe’s descent into nihilism was a trend that culminated in Marx’s veneration of the proletariat and Nietzsche’s celebration of the “superman.” For Löwith, this pattern signified a fatal anthropocentric misstep. It meant that there no longer existed any effective limitations or constraints upon the sovereignty of the human will. Marx endorsed the imperatives of proletarian violence—for example, in his famous characterization of revolutions as “the locomotive of history”—as an essential element of the philosophy of history he outlined in the Communist Manifesto and other works. Nietzsche’s later philosophy celebrated the amoral excesses of “the will to power.” As he remarks in the notes collected in The Will to Power: “A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! … A doctrine is needed powerful enough to act as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary … A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. Problem: where are the barbarians of the twentieth century?”⁵

For Löwith, the removal of all traditional ontological constraints, along with the triumph of radical historicism, loosened the floodgates of European nihilism. Today he remains the unsurpassed chronicler of this trend.

In Löwith’s estimation, those who wish to exempt the Christian tradition from being implicated in the European crisis have not thought the situation through deeply enough. Löwith embraced the so-called “secularization” thesis, according to which the fundamental categories of modern historical consciousness were merely secularized versions of theological positions.⁶ Christian eschatology, with its conception of man as imago dei, sanctioned a radical anthropomorphization of experience and meaning that anticipated “modern” developments. The idea of redemption, which plays a central role in the foundational narratives of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is merely secularized in modern theories of history, claims Löwith. “Marx’s historical materialism,” he observes, “which seeks to change the world programmatically through a critique of existing reality, is only the most extreme atheistic consequence of the Biblical idea of creative will.”⁷ Whereas antiquity embraced a cyclical view of history, the historical consciousness of the post-traditional West is radically oriented toward the eschaton or end state.

Europe’s descent into barbarism constitutes the background and subtext to Löwith’s emphatic rejection of philosophies of history. As he remarks in the Preface to Meaning in History: “To the critical mind, neither a providential design nor a natural law of progressive development is discernible in the tragic human comedy of all times.” “Nietzsche was right,” Löwith continues, when he mocked the idea of regarding “nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of God [or] interpreting history as a constant testimony to a moral order and purpose.” In the last analysis, man’s “planning and guessing, his designs and decisions, far-reaching as they may be, have only a partial function in the wasteful economy of history which engulfs them, tosses them, and swallows them,” observes Löwith, in a spirit of Stoic resignation.⁸ In Löwith’s view, amor fati, or acquiescence to fate, constitutes the better part of wisdom.

Nietzsche was among the first European philosophers to sense the impending catastrophe. Löwith, who during the 1930s labored concertedly on Nietzsche, regarded his work with a mixture of fascination and dread. In his view, Nietzsche was not only the most astute diagnostician of the European crisis, he was simultaneously its consummation and most acute representative. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche portentously announced the death of God. He viewed this proclamation as an exhortation toward “self-overcoming,” the transcendence of “man” in the direction of the superman. But his summons fell on deaf ears. Zarathustra, who uttered a similar pronouncement, was greeted with the derisory laughter of the proverbial “last men”—“the most contemptible man … the man who can no longer despise himself,” the man whom Nietzsche, in an earlier work, had disparaged as “human, all-too-human.”⁹ In relationship to the superman, the “last men” are an inferior breed; they are essentially “subhuman”—a classification that, in Löwith’s view, was an ominous portent of things to come.¹⁰

Thus for Löwith, Nietzsche was Europe’s foremost prophet of moral and intellectual nihilism. As a proponent of radical “will,” of the virtues of self-assertion rephrased in the idiom of domination and conquest, Nietzsche’s thought meshed seamlessly with modernity’s Faustian self-understanding. In the half-century following his death, virtually all the events and catastrophes he had prophesied came true—in part, Löwith contends, because Nietzsche’s own idiom of “active nihilism” helped to prepare the way.

Yet, there is another dimension of Nietzsche’s thought that one must not lose sight of, for it expresses a kernel of ancient wisdom that has been neglected and repressed amid the frenetic busy-ness of modern civilization: the doctrine of eternal recurrence, to which Löwith dedicated a book-length study in 1934. As Löwith explains, Nietzsche was not only a soothsayer of catastrophe, but also:

a true lover of wisdom, who as such sought the everlasting or eternal, and therefore wanted to overcome his time and temporality altogether. Nietzsche experienced the fullness of time, when to him the world became “perfect,” in an ecstatic moment to which he gave the name “noon and eternity.” An eternity at noon does not negate time … rather it means the eternity of time itself in the world: the eternally recurring cycle of coming into being and passing away that is always the same, a cycle in which the permanence of “Being” and the change of “becoming” are one and the same.”¹¹

In Löwith’s view, Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence represents a much-needed corrective to the discourse of European nihilism, including Nietzsche’s own voluntarist fantasies as embodied in the “will to power” ideal.

World and Human World

In his later writings, Löwith, increasingly dissatisfied with the gamut of “modern” alternatives, actively embraced the standpoint of the ancients.¹² The Stoics, for example, viewed cosmos and nature as superior to the transient vagaries of human history. This perspective, argues Löwith, presents a much-needed corrective to the Cartesian desire to ontologically elevate the human world above the cycles of nature. Hans-Georg Gadamer felicitously characterized Löwith’s perspective as follows: “We should look at the eternal cycle of nature in order to learn from it the equanimity that alone is appropriate to the minuteness of human life in the universe.”¹³

One of the keys to understanding Löwith’s mature thought concerns the distinction between “world” and “human world.” For him, it was essential that all historicist attempts to subsume the concept of “world” by “human world” be kept at bay. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Löwith’s stoicism has much in common with the “Oriental wisdom” he found so congenial during his five-year sojourn in Japan (1936–41), where he sought refuge from a Nazi-dominated Europe. This amalgamation of European and far-Eastern sensibilities emerges clearly in his claim that, “Once we have acceded to complete insight, then the mountain will simply become a mountain again and the river simply a river. In this final recognition of Being-so-and-not-otherwise, the world and man show what they are originally and ultimately.”¹⁴

In Löwith’s view, the West, to its own detriment, failed to heed such insights. Instead, it erroneously conflated “world” and “human world,” resulting in modernity’s unbridled anthropocentrism. Having been subjected to the imperious nature of human design and planning, the integrity and simplicity of the world has been degraded and misconstrued. As Löwith observes:

The supra-human world of heaven and earth, which are entirely independent and self-sustaining, infinitely surpasses the human world. World and human world are not equivalents. Whereas the physical world may be thought of without any reference whatsoever to the existence of man, man cannot be thought of without the world. We come into the world and we separate from it. It does not belong to us; instead we belong to it.¹⁵

Taking his cue from Heidegger’s influential critique of the modern “world picture,” Löwith shows how the ancient Greek concept of essence (ousia) transcended the machinations of subjectivity.¹⁶ For the Greeks, nous or Reason reflected a set of robust, divine, cosmological ends. Conversely, in modern times, reason has been subjectively truncated. Max Weber’s concept of “instrumental reason” best captures spirit’s fate in the modern world, where reason has been redefined as the most efficient means of attaining a preestablished goal or end. Thereby, the notion of “essence” has been subjectively debased, reduced to the idea of human ends or purposes. When all is said and done, such human ends are the only ones that count.

Resolutely opposing such trends, Löwith insists that

world and human world are not equivalents…. The world is not simply a cosmological “idea” (Kant) or a mere “total-horizon” (Husserl) or a world-“project” (Heidegger), but itself, absolutely independent: id quod substat. Only various world-pictures can be projected, never the world itself…. [The world] itself never appears as an object like other objects; it encompasses everything, without itself being comprehensible. It is what is greatest and richest, and at the same time as empty as a frame without a picture.¹⁷

Even Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of “world” remains too anthropocentric for Löwith: “Since Heidegger’s Being and Time one often speaks of Dasein as Being-in-the-world; but the world of Dasein is not the ordered cosmos, but our … co-world and environing world [Mitwelt und Umwelt], whose order is determined by the care and solicitude of man.”¹⁸ Conversely, the sublimity of the “world” in Löwith’s sense lies in the fact that, like the aforementioned mountain and river, it is without a goal and without a purpose.

The Stoic standpoint venerated by Löwith has been overwhelmed by modern intellectual tendencies. Foremost among these, in Löwith’s estimation, is existentialism—a worldview ideally suited to the contingencies of modern life. For the Greeks, the structure of the world was eternal; for Christianity, it was created by God. Modernity, as an ideology of radical immanence, brusquely dismisses both standpoints and finds itself, unsurprisingly, destitute and disoriented, lacking a permanent “ground.” Existentialism is thus an intellectual perspective ideally suited to the “groundless” character of modern existence, to the experiential flux that defines of modern life. As Löwith concedes, traditional ethical and philosophical orientations inevitably appear outmoded in light of the challenges and disruptions of modernity—hence, the “timeliness” of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of which make their peace (albeit, in different ways) with the standpoint of modern nihilism.

Yet, despite Löwith’s concerted attempt to distance himself from a Heideggerian philosophical mode, one wonders how successful his efforts were in the end. Were not his criticisms of Heidegger’s residual anthropocentrism merely attempts to outflank the Master’s own self-criticism of his early work as too beholden to the paradigm of the modern “subject”? In the last analysis, didn’t Löwith essentially share Heidegger’s own marked generational (and, as we shall see, confessional) prejudices against the modern world and its predominant political forms: individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, public opinion, and so forth? And with regard to ethical and political questions, didn’t he ultimately share Heidegger’s standpoint of “total” (as opposed to “immanent”) critique, implying that the injustices of modernity could not be remedied via recourse to internal methods and approaches? Indeed, Löwith’s ultimate defense of a “Stoic withdrawal” from the challenges and problems of modern “society” (an intrinsically pejorative designation) bears an uncanny resemblance to Heidegger’s own final standpoint of “Gelassenheit,” or “releasement,” as embodied in the philosopher’s oft-cited admonition to “let beings be.” Hence, despite his insightfulness as a historian of philosophy and critic of modern “spirit,” it seems that the distortions and biases of Heidegger’s philosophical temperament resurface in the key dimensions of Löwith’s own mature thought.

Philosophical Apprenticeship

Löwith was born to an assimilated German-Jewish family in Munich in 1897. His father, Wilhelm Löwith, a convert to Protestantism, was a successful artist and stimulated his son’s early interests in European cultural life. After attending high school in Munich, Löwith volunteered for World War I and was seriously wounded in the Italian campaign of 1915. He spent the next three years in a prisoner of war camp near Genoa, an experience that inspired a lifelong affection for the Mediterranean sensibility. He was deeply impressed by the rather un-German traits of his Italian captors—their spontaneity and warmth, their ability to live for the moment, their acceptance of fate. Löwith returned to Italy twice, as a student and during his initial years of exile from the Nazi dictatorship (1935–36).

In 1919, Löwith was privileged to hear Max Weber’s famous Munich lecture “Science as a Vocation.” The address was delivered during the height of Germany’s postwar revolutionary tumult. Weber’s concluding plea for an “ethic of responsibility”—he recommended that, rather than chasing after false prophets, “We set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day,’ in human relations as well as in our vocation”—had a marked impact on the development of Löwith’s ethical vision.¹⁹ It served as an astute warning concerning the perils of turning the academic lectern into a political platform, as well as the dangers of political Messianism.

Following the war, Löwith moved to Freiburg to study philosophy with the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl. However, instead of continuing his studies with Husserl, Löwith found himself seduced by the phenomenologist’s brilliant young assistant, Martin Heidegger, whom he followed to Marburg in 1924. According to Löwith, “the palpable intensity and impenetrable profundity of Heidegger’s spiritual drive caused everything else to pale and made Husserl’s naive belief in an ultimate philosophical method seem irrelevant.”²⁰ In Heidegger, Löwith, like so many others, found a challenging alternative to the sterile academicism of the reigning German school-philosophies.

In 1928, Löwith defended his habilitation study, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, which was written under Heidegger’s direction. Subtitled “A Contribution to the Anthropological Foundation of Ethical Problems,” this “Jugendschrift” represented a polemical response to Heidegger’s interpretation of “Being-with” (Mitsein) in Being and Time.

In Being and Time, the hallmark of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) was a Self radically enclosed in its own Selfhood or “ownness” (Jemeinigkeit); a being—Dasein—that displayed all the traits of a Kierkegaardian, existential loneliness, culminating in the irreducible singularity of his or her confrontation with death. However, Heidegger’s Kierkegaardianism was emphatically “post-theological”: having internalized Nietzsche’s adage concerning the “death of God,” his understanding of Kierkegaard was correspondingly disillusioned. In Heideggerian Angst, one finds a de-theologized version of Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling.” For Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” the prospect of salvation was, if never certain, always a possibility. Correspondingly, existential decision meant a wager on the prospect of an omniscient and benevolent deity. However, with Dasein—Heidegger’s “modern knight of faith”—prospects for transcendence were blocked: consigned, as it were, to a pre-Nietzschean sphere of metaphysical delusion. Dasein’s predominant “mood” (Stimmung) was one of forlorn existential abandonment. Moreover, insofar as Heidegger had bracketed off the realm of “everydayness”—which had been colonized by the “they”—as “inauthentic,” possibilities for meaningful social choice were correspondingly restricted.

In fundamental ontology, the majority of “Selves”—das Man—systematically avoid the demands of authenticity via the ruses of social conformity: “busy-ness,” “idle talk,” “curiosity,” and “publicness.” As such, their Dasein remained ontologically mired in the nether sphere of inauthenticity. One consequence of this characterization is that, in Heidegger’s framework, the sphere of “Being-with-others” or Mitsein seems a priori devalued. Thus, in Being and Time, prospects for meaningful human intersubjectivity seemed to be either negligible or nonexistent.

It is this dilemma of failed intersubjectivity that Löwith seeks to address in his youthful treatise on philosophical anthropology—a work that the philosopher Dieter Henrich characterized as an “as yet unsurpassed” exemplar of the genre.²¹ Löwith takes aim at all claims concerning the ontological primacy of transcendental subjectivity, Heidegger’s included. As such, his démarche displays marked commonalities with the dialogical thought of Martin Buber as well as the “symbolic interactionism” of Alfred Schütz and George Herbert Mead. All of these approaches emphasize that identity or the formation of the self is a product of intersubjective relatedness. As Löwith argues, the meaning of a Self is essentially defined by a network of social relationships: family, friends, associates, community, and acquaintances. In lieu of such relatedness, the very concept of selfhood ceases to be sociologically intelligible or philosophically meaningful. Thus Löwith claims that the “I” is primarily formed and shaped by a world of human intimacy, the “thou.” As Gadamer has remarked: “If one may put into an abbreviated form what Löwith’s book sought to bring into philosophical discussion at this time, it was to shed light on what the ‘thou’ in its radical particularity signifies for mankind.”²²

Before it is “my world,” the human world is a “Mitwelt,” a “co-world.” Identity formation occurs nonsolipsistically, via a complex process of “reflection”: by the individual seeing herself in the other and by the other seeing himself in her. Taking this insight a step further, Löwith goes on to claim that never—not even in the Heideggerian ultimate instance of Being-toward-death—does the individual stand in an immediate or non-reflected relation to Self. Instead, as a phenomenological construct, the Self is always mediated by preexisting structures of inter-subjectivity:

Man returns to himself, not primarily from objects, but from subjects, i.e., from Beings who are like him; for the “world” to which he principally turns is the co-world [Mitwelt] that corresponds to him. From the outset and without his doing, his own world is ever and always determined through the Dasein of Others, such that it would not be there at all or in this way without the having-been-there of determinate Others…. When we inquire about the Other or the co-world, this question implies inquiring about one’s own Self, for whom others are “Other” and a “world”—i.e., one is making inquiries about Being-with-others [Miteinandersein].²³

In the annals of transcendental philosophy, the notion of a “mediated self” stressed by Löwith has received scant attention. If one scrutinizes its leading representatives—from Descartes to Kant to Husserl—all proceed from a “more or less abstractly conceived self-consciousness,” observes Löwith. Much of Löwith’s critical inspiration derived from Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropological humanism. As Feuerbach claims in the opening paragraphs of Principles of a Philosophy of the Future, “The true dialectic is never a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself; it is a dialogue between I and thou.”²⁴ By the same token, for an insight to be “true,” it must not be true for me alone. Instead, being true expresses a dimension of universality: the claim must be true for a plurality of others as well. Feuerbach gives voice to this idea when he remarks that, “Certainty about the objective reality of other things outside of me is for me mediated by the certainty of the reality of another person outside of me.”²⁵

In Being and Time, Heidegger questioned the adequacy of transcendental subjectivity as a basis for rigorous philosophical questioning. In his view, it was a standpoint that remained existentially impoverished, insofar as it falsely assumed the primacy of a theoretical standpoint (the Cartesian “I think”) in trying to understand a being—Dasein—that was essentially defined by a series of more primordial, ontological world-involvements: “mood,” “care,” “solicitude,” as well as the practical significance of objects for use, such as tools. Nevertheless, in Lowith’s eyes the Master’s philosophy had not gone far enough.

Revolution from the Right

Following Heidegger’s triumphant enlistment in Germany’s National Revolution, his contingent of talented Jewish students was faced with the conundrum of trying to reconcile their devotion to him with his new political faith. Often, their attempts to “account for the unaccountable” complemented one another. As trained philosophers and as eyewitnesses to the political tumult of 1929–1933, they shared a privileged perspective that enabled them to perceive the elective affinities between Heidegger’s early philosophy and the politics propagated by the new regime. That there were elements of Heideggerian Existenzphilosophie that made it susceptible to a “national revolutionary” or proto-fascist reading was a point on which all would agree.

How might one account for the paradoxical fact that Heidegger, whom Husserl had accused of growing anti-Semitism in the years prior to 1933, had so many gifted Jewish students?²⁶ The explanation lies in the fact that, for the most part, these students did not regard themselves as Jewish, nor did Heidegger so regard them. Instead, they viewed themselves as fully assimilated Germans. Heidegger never shared the Nazis’ version of biological anti-Semitism. Rather, his distaste for Jews was of the traditional cultural order—a mentality that, as a rule, was accepting of acculturated or baptized Jews. With the advent of the April 1933 Law for the Reconstitution of the German Civil Service, which banned Jews from civil service professions (including university teaching), Heidegger’s Jewish students experienced a rude awakening. For many Jews who stemmed from the milieu of Germany’s well-assimilated Bildungsbürgertum, it was the first time they felt themselves to be Jewish—a fact to which Löwith eloquently attests in his autobiography.

Löwith set forth his views on the problem of Heidegger and politics in his autobiography.²⁷ Written during Löwith’s Japanese exile on the occasion of a fellowship competition for German émigrés sponsored by Harvard University, the work is a masterpiece of intellectual concision and insightful portraiture. Löwith devotes perceptive aperçus not only to Heidegger’s milieu, but also to the Stefan George Kreis, Nietzsche’s heirs, Spengler, the theologian Karl Barth, and Husserl. A type of Bildungsroman in reverse, Löwith’s text is also a fascinating chronicle of the way Germany’s most gifted philosophers and intellectuals were seduced by the promises of political redemption offered by Nazism.

For those who are interested in exploring the spiritual preconditions of the “German Revolution,” there are few better sources than Lowith’s account. He shows, for example, how the aristocratic pretensions of the George Kreis gradually became diffused throughout German society as a whole:

The ideals of this exclusive elite soon became generally accepted commonplaces, and it is hardly an accident if the [Nazi] minister and journalist, Goebbels, the mouthpiece of National Socialism, studied with the Jew [Friedrich] Gundolf. For these men, the entire bourgeois Christian world was already dead long before Hitler. They loathed the “bloodless intellect” and distinguished between “cultural” and “primal experiences,” as well as propagating the hierarchical distinction between nobles and commoners against the universality of human rights.²⁸

After Spengler’s Decline of the West, the idea of “decline” was so pervasive among the German intelligentsia that even the most varied right-wing groups could agree that a program of radical dismantling or “destruction” was, for Germany (and, by extension, Europe), the preferred course: “In general, long before Hitler, the fact and consciousness of collapse had flourished to a point where it could transform itself into the idea of radical change”—at which point National Socialism stepped into the breach to give the will to destroy positive content and meaning.²⁹

In general, Heideggerians have been at a loss to explain Heidegger’s partisanship for Hitler. Part of this explanatory incapacity is undoubtedly defensive-psychological in nature: an innate human propensity to rationalize troublesome or inconvenient facts. But there is also a substantive dimension to such interpretive myopia, which suggests the perils of an exclusively textual approach to the understanding of philosophical works. In Heidegger’s case in particular, a narrowly hermeneutic approach risks bypassing or misconstruing the historical-ideological dimensions of his thought that struck so many of his contemporaries.

Löwith’s understanding of the entwinement of philosophy and politics in Heidegger’s work is particularly illuminating. Because he was a philosophically informed contemporary, his critique stands as an indispensable counterweight to the commonplace ahistorical approaches to Heidegger’s thought. Löwith’s meditations on the philosopher’s “Fall” (which in German means both “case” and “fall”) provide us with an insightful account of the way in which Heidegger’s own life and thought succumbed to the vicissitudes of the “historicity.”

One of the common reactions to Heidegger’s Nazism is the contention that his support for Hitler had nothing to do with his philosophy. Nazism, it is claimed, was too base and vulgar a phenomenon for there to have been meaningful linkages between it and Heideggerian “fundamental ontology.” Such reservations fail to acknowledge the way Heidegger himself understood the demands of Germany’s political situation circa 1933. In many respects, his case was paradigmatic for a great number of right-wing intellectuals who were convinced that liberalism and democracy were, in essence, un-German and that a “national authoritarian” solution was required if Germany were to surmount the crises of the Weimar years and aspire to the “great politics” (Nietzsche) of authentic German traditions.³⁰

Heidegger, moreover, always understood himself as a radical nonconformist among the German mandarins.³¹ Given his humble background, he always felt ill at ease among the largely upper-class professorate. Consequently, as someone who always felt out of step with the dominant intellectual trends—be they positivism, neo-Kantianism, or the sociology of knowledge—Heidegger adopted the persona of an “anti-intellectual intellectual.” This self-understanding as an outsider goes far toward explaining his attraction to philosophical and political radicalism. Following the precedents of Nietzsche, Spengler, and Jünger, in his view European traditions had so far decayed that only a wholesale break with the complacency and corruption of the bourgeois world seemed to offer a legitimate way out. As Löwith observes: “By birth a simple sexton’s son, by profession Heidegger became the pathetic representative of a [professorial] estate that he despised…. The destructive radicalism of the [Nazi] movement and the petty bourgeois character of all its ‘strength-through-joy’ institutions failed to make an impression on him because he himself was a radical petty bourgeois.”³² And to those who claim that Heidegger “compromised” fundamental ontology by allowing its categories to serve as ideological window-dressing for National Socialism, Löwith rejoins that, because his was a philosophy of human existence, it makes perfect sense that the philosopher would seek to actualize his doctrines in temporal-historical fashion in the sphere of the “everyday”:

Given the significant attachment of the philosopher to the climate and intellectual mood of National Socialism, it would be inappropriate to criticize or exonerate his political decision in isolation from the very principles of Heideggerian philosophy itself. It is not Heidegger, who, in opting for Hitler, “misunderstood himself”; instead, those who cannot understand why he acted this way have failed to understand him. A Swiss professor regretted that Heidegger consented to compromise himself with the “everyday,” as if a philosophy that explains Being from the standpoint of time and the everyday would not stand in relation to the daily historical realities that govern its origins and effects. The possibility of a Heideggerian political philosophy was not born as a result of a regrettable “miscue,” but from the very conception of existence that simultaneously combats and absorbs the Zeitgeist.³³

What, then, were the precepts of Heidegger’s thought that bore such profound affinities with “the climate and intellectual mood of National Socialism”? Löwith’s explanation centers on the philosopher’s response to the problem of European nihilism.

According to Löwith, nihilism was the cultural predicament to which Heidegger sought to respond via the method of radical questioning he developed following World War I. The Freiburg sage was as much influenced by the cultural and religious standpoint of Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Van Gogh, Rilke, and Dostoevsky as he was by the leading representatives of Western metaphysics. Hence, from the beginning, Heidegger’s conception of “first philosophy” was inseparable from his self-understanding as Zivilisationskritiker—a critic of the moribund value structure of the modern West. By the war’s end, Heidegger had fully internalized the nineteenth century’s negative verdict on the totality of inherited values. In Being and Time, he celebrated the nihilistic resolve of “authentic decision” (Entschlossenheit) in face of the “Nothing” (das Nichts), the groundless “abyss” of human Being-in-the-world. As he wrote in a 1920 letter to Löwith: “I do only what I must and what I consider to be necessary, and I do this as I am able to—I do not slant my philosophical work toward cultural tasks for a universal present…. I work form out of my ‘I am’ and my spiritual, indeed factical heritage. With this facticity, existence rages!”³⁴

Löwith perceived more than a passing affinity between National Socialism’s animating spirit of revolutionary nihilism and the existential radicalism of Heidegger’s philosophy.³⁵ In the early 1930s, Heidegger effortlessly transposed the essential concepts of Being and Time—au thenticity, resolve, fate, potentiality-for-Being-a-Self, Being-toward-death, and Jemeinigkeit (“ownness”)—from the individual “Self” to the Dasein of the German Volk. Moreover, the transition from an individual to a collective understanding of authenticity required less of a ideational leap than one might suspect. The conceptual structure of Being and Time Division II—which has been strangely neglected in the secondary literature—lays the groundwork for the transition from an individual to a collective standpoint. Categories such as Gemeinschaft, “destiny,” “historicity,” “choosing-one’s-hero,” and “das Volk” provide warrant for translating the individualistic standpoint of Division I into collective-political terms.³⁶ A historical and political reading of Being and Time, therefore, is hardly alien to the spirit of Heidegger’s enterprise. In many respects, such a reading is in fact demanded. As the political biographies of Heidegger by Ott and Farias have shown, many of Löwith’s suppositions concerning the affinities between Heidegger’s philosophy and the Nazi movement have become a matter of historical record.

Heidegger and National Socialism shared an existential radicalism that responded in a “nihilating” manner toward traditions and values deemed unserviceable for the ends of historical greatness. Philosophically, Heidegger sought to promote the “Destruktion” of the traditional categories of Western metaphysics, just as the radical political movements of his day sought to eliminate those aspects of the past that were deemed unserviceable for the ends of “total mobilization” (Jünger). In Löwith’s pithy characterization: “Instead of giving oneself over to the universal enterprise of education, as if one had been given the mission of ‘saving the culture,’ according to Heidegger one must engage in a ‘radical dismantling and rebuilding’ or a ‘destruction’ … without concerning oneself with the idle talk and the bustle of those sensible and enterprising people who reckon time with clocks.”³⁷

Löwith’s most detailed assessment of Heidegger’s case, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes at a tenuous point in Heidegger’s professional life. A Freiburg University denazification commission found Heidegger guilty of “having placed the prestige of his scholarly reputation … in the service of the National Socialist Revolution and thereby contributing to the legitimation of this Revolution in the eyes of educated Germans.”³⁸

According to Hannah Arendt, in fall 1945 Heidegger sought to ingratiate himself with the French occupation authorities, offering his services for purposes of politically reeducating the German people.³⁹ Since Baden’s political future was in the hands of the French occupiers, the philosopher desperately sought out contact with French intellectuals who might help him plead his case. He first tried contacting Sorbonne philosophy professor Emile Bréhier, but Bréhier refused to respond: in his opinion, Heidegger’s letter had come five years too late.

Next, Heidegger tried contacting Sartre himself. In a fulsome letter, Heidegger stressed the profound affinities he detected between Being and Nothingness and his own work. Here, remarked Heidegger, “I encounter for the first time an independent thinker who has fundamentally experienced the realm out of which I myself think. Your work is dominated by an immediate understanding of my philosophy the likes of which I have not previously encountered.” Heidegger continued by distancing himself from the categorial framework of Being and Time (especially the concepts of “Being-with” and “Being-toward-death,” which Sartre had criticized). He proposed a “philosophical ski trip” through his native Schwarzwald and urged an immediate German translation of Sartre’s work.⁴⁰

Yet the admiration Heidegger expressed for Sartre’s philosophy on this occasion dovetails poorly with other accounts. Gadamer, for example, reports that upon receiving Being and Nothingness, Heidegger “cut” merely the first forty pages of the book before bequeathing it to his former student.⁴¹ Moreover, a year later, as it became clear that Heidegger’s profession of interest in Sartre’s work remained unreciprocated, the German philosopher was moved to characterize Sartre’s version of existentialism in less charitable terms. In the “Letter on Humanism,” written in the fall of 1946, Heidegger pillories Sartre’s philosophy for remaining imprisoned in the categories of Western metaphysics: “Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence…. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement.” In his programmatic postwar lecture, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” Sartre had famously attempted to reconcile humanism and existentialism. “We are precisely in a situation,” he declared, “where there are only human beings.”⁴² In the “Letter,” Heidegger responded ungraciously by invoking the basic tenets of “philosophical antihumanism”: “We are precisely in a situation where principally there is Being.”⁴³

The Critique of Carl Schmitt

In a landmark essay on the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, first published in 1936, Löwith pursued the important parallels between Heidegger’s existential decisionism and Schmitt’s political decisionism. Schmitt was one of Germany’s leading legal theorists during the Weimar Republic. Like Heidegger, in 1933 he became a vigorous supporter of National Socialism. Heidegger and Schmitt were the two most celebrated academics to lend their support to the new regime. Acknowledging their mutual intellectual and political affinities, in August 1933 Heidegger wrote to Schmitt urging that the two make common cause on behalf of the German “Awakening.” “The gathering of the spiritual forces, which should bring about what is to come, is becoming more urgent everyday,” insisted Heidegger.⁴⁴

According to Schmitt, in the modern world the traditional concepts of political obligation have been delegitimated and, consequently, have lost their power and influence. “Sovereignty,” “king,” “state,” “majesty,” “divine right”—even the concept of “the political” itself—have forfeited their authority in the wake of the antipolitical energies of liberalism. State authority, once majestic and robust, has progressively deteriorated, reaching a nadir with the “night watchman state” of the liberal era. (Schmitt treats the age of absolutism as a historical benchmark.) Traditional, étatiste-oriented genres of political discourse have thereby been deprived of their very ground. Along with his fellow conservative revolutionaries, Schmitt attempted to forge new concepts of political authority in order to counter the fateful “eclipse of the political.” In his view, liberalism’s ascendancy was primarily responsible for this eclipse. Under political liberalism, socioeconomic “interests” usurped the autonomous prerogatives of political rule.⁴⁵

Though rich and informative in many respects, Schmitt’s uncharitable depiction of modern politics compelled him to regard political authoritarianism as a desirable remedy. His 1920 book on the concept of “dictatorship” endorsed autocracy as a method of keeping at bay forces and interests that threatened to deplete the substance of political sovereignty. In Political Theology (1922), he contested the legitimacy of political modernity by claiming that its concepts were merely secularized variants of theological motifs. His influential study of “parliamentarism” concluded with an encomium to Mussolini’s march on Rome:

Until now the democracy of mankind and parliamentarism has only once been contemptuously pushed aside through the conscious appeal to myth, and that was an example of the irrational power of the national myth. In his famous speech of October 1922 in Naples before the March on Rome, Mussolini said, “We have created a myth, this myth is a belief, a noble enthusiasm; it does not need to be a reality, it is a striving and a hope, belief and courage. Our myth is the nation, the great nation which we want to make into a concrete reality for ourselves.” … The theory of myth is the most powerful symptom of the decline of the relative rationalism of parliamentary thought.

Schmitt punctuates these claims with a suggestive comparison between Mussolini and Machiavelli.⁴⁶ In his view, Italian fascism’s glorification of authority and myth was necessary in order to restore the lost primacy of the political.

In the Weimar Republic’s waning years, the fascist elements of Schmitt’s work came unambiguously to the fore. In his most influential book, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt, inspired by Nietzsche’s musings on the importance of “having enemies,” coined the infamous “friend-enemy” distinction to define the essence of the political: “The pinnacle of great politics,” observes Schmitt, “is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy.”⁴⁷ According to Schmitt, in war—the “ultima ratio” of politics—one does not kill the enemy for aesthetic, moral, or for other nonpolitical reasons. Instead, in a classical justification of political existentialism, Schmitt argues that the enemy should be killed on strictly “existential” or “ontological” (seinsmässige) grounds.

As Löwith’s essay demonstrates, in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt vigorously endorsed the notion of “homogeneity” (Artgleichheit)—an idea with unmistakable racial overtones—as essential to the modern state’s self-preservation. Moreover, as a logical corollary of the “friend-enemy” distinction—and as an eerie portent of Nazi policy and practice—he stressed the importance of rooting out and annihilating the “domestic enemy”: communists, Jews, social democrats, and other undesirables. Needless to say, in a historical era whose signature feature was concentration camps whose barracks were reserved for political and racial “enemies,” such hypothetical prescriptions quickly lose their innocence.

An admirer of Jünger and the Soviet experiment in modernization from above, in the early 1930s Schmitt flirted with the notion of the “total state,” according to which all domestic concerns must be subordinated to the primacy of foreign policy and, ultimately, preparation for war. The step from his authoritarian political doctrines of the 1920s to his support of Hitler’s dictatorship in the early 1930s was, to be sure, a short one.⁴⁷ In addition to his books and articles endorsing the new regime, in 1933 Schmitt co-authored Gleichschaltung legislation.⁴⁸

In Löwith’s view, the intellectual affinities between Heidegger’s philosophical existentialism and Schmitt’s political existentialism are important and revealing. As he argues in “European Nihilism”:

It is no accident if Heidegger’s existential ontology corresponds to a political “decisionism” in Carl Schmitt, a decisionism that shifts the “capacity-for-Being-a-whole” of Dasein which is always on its own, to the “totality” of the state which is always one’s own. To the self-assertion of political existence and to “freedom towards death” corresponds the “sacrifice of life” in the political exigency of war. In both cases the principle is the same, namely “facticity,” i.e., what remains of life when one does away with all life-content.⁴⁹

The more one heeds Löwith’s illuminating account of Germany’s reigning spiritual mood during in the 1920s—a mood of existential nihilism, in which the pathos of resolute decision appeared as an obligatory standpoint—the more one appreciates the symptomatic profundity of the generational phenomenon at issue.

Heidegger’s Retreat from Logos

Löwith’s most enduring contribution to understanding Heidegger’s philosophical legacy is the monograph, “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time,” which has enjoyed the status of a minor classic since it first appeared in 1951.⁵⁰ The essay addresses the change of perspective or “epistemological break” between the early and later Heidegger—the Kehre, or “turn,” in Heidegger’s thinking. Perhaps nowhere is this shift of focus more evident than in the conceptual antitheses Heidegger used to describe his philosophical enterprise: whereas he characterizes Being and Time as a study in “existential ontology,” his later philosophy seeks to fathom the “history of Being.”

More than a few terminological subtleties are at stake in this momentous theoretical transmutation. As Löwith was perhaps the first to discern, at issue in the “turn” is fundamental ontology’s viability as a mode of public discourse. Circa 1935, as Heidegger’s political radicalism began to wane, his philosophical approach underwent a profound and lasting radicalization. Whereas in his early work Heidegger had engaged in a constant and productive dialogue with the major representatives of the tradition (a fact to which the lecture courses during the 1920s, recently published in the Gesamtausgabe, testify), from this point hence, he began to regard the tradition in its entirety as a “Verfallsphänomen”: as a manifestation of decline.

According to this new understanding of the history of philosophy, Heidegger ceased to regard Platonism as the generative basis of Western metaphysics; he viewed it instead as the tradition’s despoiler. According to Heidegger, with Plato there emerged the fateful ontological distinction between “sensible” and “supersensible” realms, from which our historical understanding of Being has never fully recovered. Thereafter, the truth of Being would be conceived as “Idea” or “representation”—as something subjective or proper to the subjectum. In Heidegger’s view, Plato’s misstep foreshadowed the post-Cartesian degeneration of philosophy to the terms of “calculative thinking.” For Heidegger, “calculative thinking” and “reasoning” were the intellectual corollaries of the will to technological mastery characteristic of the modern “world-picture.” According to this “picture” (Bild), Being—and beings—become grist for the mill of scientific manipulation simpliciter.⁵¹

Heidegger’s sweeping repudiation of Western thought prefigures Derrida’s disparagement of Western philosophy as “logocentric.” This bold and totalizing maneuver had a debilitating effect on the communicative capacities of Heidegger’s philosophy. Reconceptualized in the quasi-mystical idiom of the “destining of Being” (Seinsgeschick), Heidegger’s thought forfeited its dialogical and argumentational character. Insofar as he was convinced that the entire philosophical tradition was contaminated by a progressively degenerative “abandonment by Being” (Seinsverlassenheit), there was little sense in engaging it in immanent or reasoned criticism. In fact, in his later work, he openly disavowed the standpoint of “philosophy” in favor of “thought” or “Denken.” The etymological proximity between “thinking” and “thanking (denken und danken) becomes a recurrent leitmotif. “Thinking is thanking” (Denken ist danken) is an adage repeated ad nauseum.

According to this new interpretation of Western thought, philosophy experienced a brief efflorescence with the pre-Socratics—Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander, on whom Heidegger labors and lectures during the 1940s—whose philosophical fragments maintain a fragile sense of the truth of Being as “unconcealment” (aletheia). But, according to Heidegger, the pre-Socratic breakthrough was quickly covered up or re-concealed by post-Platonic “onto-theology.” However, as Löwith points out: “The other side of Heidegger’s endeavor toward a reappropriation of the originary thinking and discourse of the Greeks is the disparagement and the elimination of the entire philosophical language and conceptual apparatus of the modern age.”⁵²

In his reassessment of Western thought, Heidegger concluded that, owing to the causal relationship between metaphysics and the world-picture of modern technology (das Gestell), philosophy had forfeited its traditional cultural centrality. Today, poets rather than philosophers have proved most faithful to the oblique manner in which Being “comes to presence.” Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger offered several lecture courses on Hölderlin, in which poetry’s paramount role in the “setting-to-work of truth” received pride of place. Unsurprisingly, his conception of the essence of poetry was radically opposed to modernism’s emphasis on formal experimentation or the aestheticism of art for art’s sake. Nor was it entirely free of ideological taint. For Heidegger, the task of the poet is to ground the historical existence of a people or Volk. It is in this spirit that he proclaims Hölderlin to be both the poet of “German destiny” and the “voice of the Volk.”⁵³

Neologisms and terminological difficulties notwithstanding, the philosophical perspective Heidegger articulated in Being and Time was worldly and practical. Even though in Heidegger’s eyes it remained a partial success (for example, the announced Part II on “Time and Being” was never written), it was a work that went far toward accomplishing the goal of reconciling the requirements of philosophical inquiry with the demands of human practical life. Being and Time repudiated transcendental philosophy’s traditional point of departure—the monological self-enclosedness of the “thinking subject”—in favor of a rich plethora of “world-relations.” At issue for Heidegger was Dasein’s open-ended Being-in-the-world, rather than the self-referential insularity of “consciousness.”

However—and herein lies the basis for Löwith’s incisive and powerful critique—in Heidegger’s later thought, such worldly concerns become, at best, a dim and distant memory. He no longer speaks from the engaged standpoint of Dasein’s practical involvements or “worldliness.” Instead, his discourse proceeds from the hermetic standpoint of Being itself. It attempts to give voice to the mysterious “destinings of Being,” and he philosophizes from the standpoint of Being qua “fate” (Seins-geschick). Heidegger’s later philosophy seeks to articulate the ineffable, which defies the habitudes and terms of public discourse. The history of Being is a story that can be told only via insinuation and evocation. Thus, in the “Letter on Humanism,” in response to the question, “What is Being?”, Heidegger can only offer the feeble rejoinder: “It is It itself,” “transcendens pure and simple”—a self-identical, primordial substratum that resists the “logos,” the philosophical method of providing coherent, intelligible accounts.⁵⁴ Instead, with the later Heidegger, we are confronted with mandates and claims that function as ex cathedra pronouncements, with positions that often defy the norms of intersubjective accountability. As Löwith observes, “Heidegger’s claim concerning the necessity of his thinking will only convince those who along with him believe that his thinking has itself been sent by Being, a ‘destining of Being’ [Seinsgeschick] that expresses a ‘decree concerning the truth of Being.’”⁵⁵ Heidegger’s “farewell to reason” is epitomized by his conviction that, “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.”⁵⁶

As Löwith points out, the difficulty in evaluating the merits of Heidegger’s later approach “lies in following a thinking that fundamentally disapproves of arguments and a ‘logical’ development…. Instead of proof on the basis of demonstration and evidence, there are only cryptic ‘gestures’ and hints.”⁵⁷ Whereas Hegel’s philosophy still moved comfortably within the orbit and terminology of Western metaphysics, “Heidegger’s language dissociates itself from this very rationality. As an ‘overcoming’ [Überwindung] of onto-theology, it does not merely seek to avoid all conceptual determinacy but rather passes over into a ‘saying Non-saying’ [ein sagendes Nicht-sagen].” In Heidegger’s quasi-apocalyptical worldview, continues Löwith: “Human beings are not ‘rational animals’ but instead ecstatic ‘shepherds of Being’; all theoretical representing and technological producing, in which scientific thinking is grounded, is a degeneration of subjectivity to objectivity and a decline to unconditional objectification.”⁵⁸

Heideggerian “thinking” intentionally flirts with a prophetic-oracular rhetorical mode—to wit, the oft-cited claim from the 1966 Der Spiegel interview that “only a god can save us.”⁵⁹ His later philosophy tends to provoke either fascination or repulsion; rarely does it elicit the type of sober and measured evaluation conducive to appraising its genuine intellectual worth. As Löwith points out, the danger of a discursive mode like Heidegger’s is that, insofar as it claims for itself privileged access to a “kind of Being that not only surpasses all beings (including humans) but, like an unknown God, lingers and ‘essences’ in its own truth,” it risks assuming the character of an impenetrable, hieratic doctrine. By seeking to articulate events that defy “experience,” Heidegger risks forsaking the “bounds of sense,” the intelligible limits of the phenomenal world. As Kant demonstrated in the Critique of Pure Reason, the distinction between sense and non-sense remains meaningful only in the case of judgments that respect the limits of experience—judgments that fall this side of the phenomenal/noumenal tandem. Conversely, Heidegger was fond of citing a portentous (and potentially anti-intellectual) Kierkegaard maxim: “The time of distinctions is past.”

To inquire after the cogency of Heidegger’s later thought means that ethical and political issues are never far removed. Although the doctrine of the “history of Being” studiously avoids the bustle of current events, it nevertheless scrutinizes modern politics under a harsh and unforgiving metapolitical optic. The later Heidegger remains a philosopher of “time” and “historicity”; as such, he is also a philosopher of his time, whose reflections on technology, politics, and society derive from his own historical situatedness. To the end, however, his summary pronouncements on postwar life (e.g., his claim in the aforementioned Spiegel interview that “modern literature [is] predominantly destructive”)⁶⁰ expressed both insight and extreme judgmental myopia. As Löwith observes with reference to the later Heidegger’s tendency to collapse history into “Being” qua physis or nature: “Is Heidegger’s artful linguistic structure really able to illuminate the essence or nonessence of history, if history, with respect to Being as such, coincides with nature as physis? … History, which for Heidegger was at issue from the beginning, loses all definite and demonstrable meaning if, like physis, it is a ubiquitous emergence into the open and a retreat into what is closed off.”⁶¹ The rarefied metapolitical standpoint from which Heidegger’s pontifications concerning politics and history proceed often acts as a hindrance to an immanent and fair-minded consideration of events in the world.

Needless to say, it would be erroneous to conclude as a result of such criticisms that one should no longer read Heidegger. Instead, one should no longer read him naively—that is, without careful attention to those aspects of his thought and intellectual habitus that facilitated his alliance with the Nazis in the early 1930s. Yet, as Löwith’s arguments suggest, even Heidegger’s postwar thought is hardly above taint. Years after the war ended, Heidegger continued to wax lyrical about the “inner truth and greatness of the National Socialism.”⁶²

Löwith’s criticisms and observations remain timely. As a Heidegger student and intimate, his reflections present a unique vantage point from which to judge the complexities of Heidegger’s case. Without malice or prejudice, he was able to expose those aspects of Heidegger’s thought that evolved out of the Zeitgeist of the interwar period. Löwith disputes not Heidegger’s greatness as a thinker, but the uses to which Heidegger allowed that greatness to be put. Heidegger’s was an ambiguous greatness, one that was convinced of the need for a “total critique” of the modern world. In his view, the demands of total critique—a Spenglerian legacy of the 1920s—justified the adoption of any and every means in order to hasten the redemption of a degenerate historical present. But as Löwith inquires appropriately: “Is such a totalizing claim the result of historical knowledge and philosophical thinking or is it instead the translation of the doctrine of original sin into the perdition of the world of beings?”⁶³ With Heidegger’s case, we are offered a parable concerning the perils of redemptory metapolitics. Few better understood the implications and import of this parable than Löwith.

Löwith’s Retreat from History

The substance and tone of Löwith’s critique incensed Heidegger. In a letter to a friend written shortly after the publication of “Thinker in a Destitute Time,” Heidegger reacted as follows:

I am not surprised that a fifty-five year-old man who, from 1919 on, took my courses and seminars for nine whole years and almost every other day in Marburg dashed into our house in order to squeeze something out of me can report on some things and thereby appear to many uninformed people to be in the know. The same author, while an immigrant in the United States, spread the most outrageous lies about me…. In 1929, when Löwith was the reddest Marxist (today he has turned Christian and occupies the chair at the University of Heidelberg), he wrote about Being and Time saying it was a “concealed theology.” Later on he changed that to “atheism”—as one uses that term.⁶⁴

Ironically, the pointed nature of Löwith’s criticisms masked his own continued philosophical indebtedness to Heidegger. After all, Löwith had studied with Heidegger for nearly a decade and had written a habilitation study under his supervision. His approach to the history of philosophy and understanding of philosophical method were profoundly beholden to Heidegger. Unsurprisingly, such formative intellectual influences continued to play a major role in Löwith’s mature thought.

Whereas Heidegger criticized the degeneracy of the modern world from the superordinate perspective of “Being,” Löwith perfected an analogous critique of modernity proceeding from a “cosmological” standpoint. In “Thinker in a Destitute Time,” Löwith objected to Heidegger’s metaphilosophical standpoint of the “history of Being,” which he claimed played the role of a first “unmoved mover,” fundamentally inaccessible to human experience. However, much the same can be said with reference to Löwith’s notion of the “cosmos.” The uncritical celebration of “origins” (das Ursprüngliche), moreover, is quintessentially Heideggerian. As one critic has astutely observed: “The beginning that is supposed to count as the ‘first’ is declared to be beyond the continuity of historical development and is legitimated in the end through the sheer aura of an immemorial primordiality.”⁶⁵

Of course, by “cosmos,” Löwith does not mean the heavens as an object of astronomical study. Instead, his standpoint is phenomenological. He seeks to convey the Stoic idea of the paltriness of human concerns when viewed against the backdrop of the universe as something eternal. The risks and uncertainties of modern historical consciousness—in essence, the problem of nihilism that occupied center stage in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger—compel Löwith to return to a purely “theoretical” standpoint: the classical ideal of the bios theoretikos. The virtue of “contemplation” is that it stands apart from the busy-ness and folly of worldly involvements.⁶⁶

It was this attitude of Stoic detachment, he claimed, that allowed him to avoid succumbing to the Faustian temptations of modern political extremism. But the idea that one must reject historical consciousness entirely is itself an extreme measure. It sanctions the abandonment of history as a realm of senseless contingency. It is to confuse the excesses of modern historical consciousness—the crimes of totalitarian states—with the entirely legitimate emergence of democratic freedoms coincident with the revolutionary era.⁶⁷ To his discredit, Löwith refuses to recognize the moral legitimacy of the modern age: the fact that acts of democratic self-determination are able to compensate for and offset historical contingency. Even Marxism, as a variety of modern historical consciousness, is not, as Löwith claims in From Hegel to Nietzsche, a nihilistic abandonment of German classical philosophy. Instead, it is a critique (in the Kantian sense) of an approach to philosophy—Idealism—that displays a principled indifference to the demands of historical change.

Stoic detachment can too readily be deployed as a pretext for simply avoiding taking a stand. As such, it threatens to become ideological, a strategy of complacency vis-à-vis the “human world” and its problems. When philosophers, as the self-appointed guardians of eternal value and meaning, shelter “nature” and “cosmos” from the real-world demands of history, the distinctiveness of the human world—forged in labor, language, and political practice—disappears. When one views the world of human affairs with cosmological detachment, one courts the risks of anachronism, of succumbing to an interpretive antiquarianism and judgmental irrelevance. Tellingly, in one of the few instances where Löwith deigned to comment on contemporary affairs—a radio series on the problem of death in the modern world—his thoughts turned predictably to the Stoic ideal of suicide, which he endorsed enthusiastically as an exemplary moral choice. He gave not a thought to the problem of industrialized mass murder, the risks of nuclear annihilation, or the immorality of capital punishment. Instead, Löwith remained satisfied with a Third Century B.C.E. credo, whose modern exponents were Goethe, Hegel, and Burckhardt.⁶⁸

Heidegger referred to his later standpoint as “releasement” or Gelassenheit. In stark contrast to his earlier Existenzphilosophie, which emphasized the importance of authenticity, resolve, and Dasein’s potentiality to be a “Self,” his later thought justified a quiescent adaptation to the mysterious dispensations of Being: “No mere [human] action will change the state of the world,” observes Heidegger, “because Being as effectiveness and effecting closes all beings off in the face of the Event.”⁶⁹ One would be perfectly justified in inquiring whether Lowith’s perspective of Stoic detachment—his Nietzschean amor fati and complacent endorsement of “the worldhood of the world”—does not in fact surreptitiously ape Heidegger’s own later approach, aptly summarized in Heidegger’s injunction to “let beings be.”

Both Löwith and Heidegger insist on the fecklessness of “action” or practical reason. They contend that the modern project of human self-assertion, beginning with the scientific revolution and the age of European expansion, has reaped nothing but disaster. But their understanding of the consequences and potential of the modern age remains limited and one-sided. In truth, the project of modernity is multidimensional. There are various logics or normative potentials at stake in each of modernity’s various spheres.⁷⁰

Both Heidegger and Löwith interpret modernity under the sign of “instrumental reason.” They steadfastly ignore the aspects of modernity that are irreducible to these terms. They hastily write off advances in universalistic morality that are coincident with the expansion of democracy and social egalitarianism: the progression from civil to political to social and cultural rights.⁷¹ Over the course of two centuries, the distinction between active and passive citizenship has largely been eliminated, culminating in the reality of universal suffrage. The claims of previously disenfranchised groups—women as well as various cultural and ethnic minorities—have also been acknowledged. Such sweeping social and political transformations, far from being “epiphenomenal,” have gone a long way toward approximating the ideals of political democracy: self-determination and popular sovereignty. Even institutionalized science, despite its self-proclaimed aims of “world-mastery,” possesses a reflexive dimension. With the disturbance of the balance of nature and other unintended consequences of untrammeled technological growth, concerned scientists have often organized themselves in a politically effective manner with the public interest in view. Yet, all such incremental transformations remain imperceptible from the “cosmological” perspective endorsed by Löwith and Heidegger.