History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 45-68 © Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656DOI: 10.1111/hith.10694

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY

HENNING TRÜPER1

ABSTRACT

This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of Karl Löwith. By “unity of history” I understand the notion that all history constitutes one and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues that the problem of the unity of history—though often neglected as a matter of mere argu-mentative infrastructure—is central to a number of wider problems, most prominently the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Löwith’s writings and proposes a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to have informed Löwith’s work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans Blumenberg. The foundations of Löwith’s discussion of the problem are pursued across his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heidegger’s model of an ontology of historic-ity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the manner in which, after the Second World War, Löwith’s philosophy of history sought to salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Löwith’s reception of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy of history.

Keywords: unity of history, plurality of history, historical ontology, Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper undertakes a rereading of Karl Löwith’s work concerning the problem of the unity of history. Löwith remains best known for his formulation, in the 1949 classic Meaning in History,2 of the so-called secularization thesis, which proclaims the purportedly eschatological origins of the modern understanding of historicity. In part drawing on earlier work,3 Löwith set out to demonstrate that

1. For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Danielle Allen, Kelly Grotke, Niklas Olsen and Ralph Weber. In the writing of this paper, I have received support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

2. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 3. Especially Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des

19. Jahrhunderts [1941], in Löwith, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Stichweh and Marc de Launay (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981–88), IV; Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen [1935], Sämtliche Schriften VI, 101-384; and Karl Löwith, Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte [1936], Sämtliche Schriften VII.

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the modern notion of historicity in general, and of historical time in particular, from the late eighteenth century onward, could only be understood as a result of the afterlife of defunct Jewish and Christian eschatologies in the modern era. Though sublimated and severed from religious meaning, theological notions of goal-directed, finite temporality continued to provide an implicit domain of meaning tacitly informing all modern historical consciousness. The seculariza-tion thesis was an argument of amnesia lifted and shameful reality uncovered, an entry into the large and diverse hermeneutics of suspicion, targeting, after the First World War, the optimisms and progressivisms of the nineteenth century. Tremendously influential for its critical dismissal of earlier philosophies of his-tory—no matter in which sub-Hegelian, sub-Comtean, or sub-Marxist vein they had been formulated—Löwith’s line of critique nonetheless faced serious ques-tioning in debates of the 1960s and 70s. Afterwards, it was, for the most part, relegated to the status of a topos one did or did not frequent.

The present article aims to spend a bit of time there and to cast another, and closer, look. The purpose of this sojourn is not so much a re-evaluation of the validity of the secularization thesis but an examination of how it was constructed. I will argue first that the question of whether it might be possible to avoid posit-ing the unity of history was at the core of the entire argument; second, that the problem of the unity of history emerged in the context of Löwith’s conflicted appropriation and critique of Heidegger; and third, that rejecting the unity of his-tory remained the underlying project of Löwith’s writings on the philosophy of history after Meaning in History, marked by the project of refounding historicity in the temporality of a natural “cosmos.”

The notion of the unity of history entails that what is historical is unified, is one, is of a piece. In practice, it tends to indicate that historicity (the quality of being historical) is a singulare tantum—by meaning, if not by grammar. To be sure, “historical” does not mean the same as “being located in past time.” On the contrary, the quality of being “historical” excludes large swaths of things past. Historicization disunifies the past by establishing entities and kinds of entities that are accepted as historical while others are excluded. This operation pertains to a layered array of objects and classes of objects—for instance, the French Revolution is historical, and so are all revolutions, since they can only ever occur within a setting conceived of in terms of history. Historicization thus comprises the positing of kinds of objects that provide specific avenues of individuation (again, revolutions are a case in point).4 Arguably, then, historicization is as much a matter of the production of entities as it is a matter of the acquisition, arrangement, and justification of knowledge about such (and other) entities. In short, it exhibits an ontological and an epistemological aspect. François Hartog has labeled the cultural patterns of making things historical—and, it might be

4. This roughly follows Ian Hacking’s notion of what it means to be ontologically productive, as laid out in his Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussion, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), for a number of striking and far-reaching examples of the ways in which regimes of historicity can clash with regard to the kinds of objects, events, and agents they both comprise and constitute.

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 47

added, of making historical things—as “regimes of historicity.”5 Such regimes, as the metaphor already suggests, tend to be unstable and processual; they can themselves become historical, and they are not merely orders of knowledge, but also modes of production.

Accordingly, the notion of the unity of history can be spelled out in at least two ways, an epistemological and an ontological one: that is to say, in relation to what is and can be known of history, or in relation to what kind of object history is and what kinds, and instances, of objects it comprises and produces. On the epistemological side of the divide, the unity of history might be understood in the following way: historical explanations can attain some kind of validity that is exclusive in the sense of at least ruling out other explanations. Moreover, such explanations are consistent with one another, and even combinable, so that they form a unified field of knowledge. On the ontological side, the handiest prima facie interpretation is by reference to history as a temporal continuum, an unbro-ken chain of events following one another chronologically. Widely held notions such as that of a totality of facts or a chain, or web, of causes and effects seem to be consistent with either side of the divide, depending on how they are con-structed. This paper will not venture into an exhaustive debate as to the respective virtues and vices of epistemology and ontology with regard to historicity. Yet it does share in recent pleas for “revisiting historical ontology.”6

What hinges on the problem of the unity of history is the very possibility, for history, of being plural. It has often been stated, to an extent that it presently seems to be a cliché, that indeed history exists only in the plural and that it was the grand mistake of nineteenth-century “historicism” to conceptualize history as a “collective singular,” allegedly supplanting a preceding understanding of histories-in-multitude.7 The historical analysis of the emergence of history-in-the-singular neatly appears to suggest the conceptual possibility of histories-in-the-plural. As problems regarding historicity were increasingly discussed in relation to the constructive work of narrative, the plurality of history became a foregone conclusion; yet history has continued to operate, and increasingly so, under the assumption of the total interconnectedness of the historical past. Tra-ditional boundaries and hierarchies of research domains were leveled, and the unity of history returned through the back door. Although much literature today sees “entanglement” in everything, the problem of disentanglement remains mar-ginalized. “Globalization,” that ambiguous master narrative, implicitly governs much historical research today, re-introducing teleological structures presumed vanquished, and belying its own programmatic pluralism.

By contrast, in early and mid-twentieth-century philosophy of history, the meaningfulness of plural historicity was treated as by no means self-evident. The discussion of Löwith’s writings undertaken in this article means to retrieve some

5. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité (Paris: Seuil, 2003).6. Borrowing Michael Bentley’s phrase from “Past and ‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontol-

ogy,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 349-361. 7. As argued by Löwith’s student Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichte” (with Christian Meier, Odilo

Engels, and Horst Günther) in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), II, 593-717; see also Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (New York: Berghahn, 2012).

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of the labor that once was invested in scrutinizing the conditions of possibility of history-in-the-plural and that since has been half forgotten. This retrieval does not merely follow a historical interest, but also seeks to contribute to the understanding of the problem of the unity of history in present-day terms. This feature is shared with the writings under examination, in which historical and conceptual investigation were enmeshed in an intractable fashion. Löwith’s argu-ment pertained to the historical past (or one among others) in that it concerned the purported trajectory of certain, entirely contingent ideas through European history; and it broached conceptual problems in that it concerned the semantic understanding of “history” and “historicity” tout court. The relation between these sides of the argument remained unstable, difficult to fathom, and potentially aporetic.8 The present article inhabits the same impasse, conducting—if perhaps unevenly—a conceptual and a historical inquiry at once. Ultimately, the question is both: “What did Löwith have to say on the unity of history?” and: “What is the unity of history and how is plural historicity possible?” In consequence, the argument is inevitably, with Burckhardt’s famed quip about the philosophy of history, a “centaur,” a hybrid and “impossible” creature9—properties it shares with the works it examines.

II. AN ANATOMY OF THE SECULARIZATION THESIS, AND A DIGRESSION ON BLUMENBERG

In Meaning in History, Löwith proposed regarding European philosophies of history, as written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, as a decisive step in the secularization of Christian eschatology, producing a model of history as a unified, teleological process. This type of history partook in the unity of eschatology; it shared the religious promise of salvation at the end of the historical process. However, since it had emancipated itself from the transcendent agency of the deity, secularized eschatology had to seek this promise within the world, and more precisely, within itself. In this way, the goal of history could become immanent to the process. This was realized in the form of progressive histories that were teleological in spite of being seemingly open-ended, since they explained the past as a directional process by reference to the goal of improve-ment.10

Löwith’s argument built on a notion of “meaning” that was translated from the German Sinn. This term tends to refer to practical meaning, function, purpose, or end, rather than to semantic meaning. Löwith’s notion of meaning was related to intentionality, as understood in terms of access to the world and interpretable in terms of teleological explanation. This is a very peculiar notion, certainly in keeping with Heidegger’s transformation of the phenomenological project from consciousness to praxis, but arguably also akin to Nietzsche’s understanding of

8. Regarding Löwith’s attempts to overcome this aporia, see the discussion in Enrico Donaggio, Una sobria inquietudine: Karl Löwith e la filosofia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), here esp. 56-58.

9. In the introduction to the so-called Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, now Über das Studium der Geschichte in Jacob Burckhardt, Werke, ed. Peter Ganz (Munich: Beck, 2000), X.

10. As is evident from Löwith’s discussions of the role of the unknown future in modern philoso-phies of history, esp. Meaning in History, 3f., 10-18.

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 49

the ontologically foundational nature of “will.” Moreover, the notion is related to what has been made or created, “either by God or by man”: the meaning of chairs is found in their function of being used as seats, a function that determines their production. If history is to have a meaning, that is to say, “some purpose transcending the facts,” it has to fulfill the condition of being an object produced by some sort of purposive agency. Löwith goes on to stipulate, “since history is a movement in time, the purpose is a goal.”11 With this subtle distinction, Löwith introduces not only temporality but also the future-directedness of meaningful history. Purposes are present or future-directed, but usually concrete. The notion of “goal,” however, appears to serve the function of suggesting a substantial pro-jection into a future that remains undetermined in detail but maintains a sense of finality, of conclusion. As applied to history as a whole—that is to say, as unified and not yet concluded—the goal is by necessity an “ultimate purpose,” hence an “eschatological future,” a matter merely of “expectation and hope.”12

Löwith interprets eschatology in terms of the past as constituting a promise to a distant future that can be expected, and is expected on grounds of prophetism, but the exact course toward which cannot be known. Prophetic knowledge is a matter of divine revelation; and revelation is always to some extent obscure and open to varying interpretation. In fact, the prophet (other than the seer of classi-cal mythology) does not provide knowledge of the future; only knowledge of the overall meaning of history as to be borne out by the future. The modern notion of history, according to Löwith, rests on exactly the same conception of an unknown future that is vaguely “promised” by historical events; and the point of his argu-ment is that this entire structure of ideas is inconceivable outside the conceptual framework created by biblical prophetism. Especially this part of the argument (but others also) draws on Hermann Cohen’s works on the philosophy of religion, which Löwith also quotes prominently.13 It amounts to a historical claim as to the semantic meaning of “history.” Only over the course of a particular historical, thus contingent, development did the modern notion of history become possible: by prophetism as formulated in the Hebrew Bible, and its secularization.

This notion of history was vulnerable to criticism because it disposed of an alternative, if apparently much less efficacious heritage, Greek antiquity. The Greeks, according to Löwith, disposed of an entirely different conception of the future: it was considered both predetermined and knowable, for instance by way of divine intervention in oracles. However, Löwith’s Greeks had no notion of the future as constituting a goal to reach, or even an end of time, or of time as carrying “meaning.” History was not made, and in the absence of a goal, it was not unified. But this meant that the very nature of the temporality that ancient Greek history utilized was different. Conversely, in the context of prophetism, eschatology—as a form of unified history—enjoyed primacy over temporality. It

11. Löwith, Meaning in History, 5; Löwith’s preferred piece of exemplary philosophical furniture is the “table.”

12. Ibid., 6.13. Ibid., 17f.; Löwith’s late paper “Philosophie der Vernunft und Religion der Offenbarung in

H. Cohens Religionsphilosophie” [1968], Sämtliche Schriften III, 349-383 permits following the conceptual transfers in detail.

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was eschatology that defined the terms in which the future was conceptualized. Eschatology could acquire this surprising function solely as a result of its being unified: the future, too, had to be part of eschatology. In this way, the unity of history was at the core of Löwith’s argument.

Still, Löwith does not single out this unity as a core feature. As the title of his study indicates, from his point of view the central problem is that of “meaning,” that is to say, teleology. At first glance, it may be difficult to see why teleology should actually acquire such a status in the argument. Quite apart from the ques-tion as to the plausibility of assuming that teleology is a constitutive feature of the practice of all modern historical writing, Löwith’s position also incurs the potential liability of binding together the notion of an open future with that of directionality in a not entirely intuitive manner. Arguably, the position might be explained by reference to the prominence of teleological arguments in the works of Heidegger, Cohen,14 and various other authors. Perhaps more to the point, the explanation might also be found in the Hegelian, or quasi-Hegelian, disposition underlying the entire problematic. Teleology, as one of the four types of causes, according to Aristotle’s definition,15 carries a double function. On the one hand, as Löwith stresses, it serves as a unifier of the process it describes. On the other hand, teleology constitutes the intelligibility of the historical process as a whole. In the quasi-Hegelian argument, as stated in its crudest, not necessarily most authentic form, history is progress toward freedom. Freedom is guaranteed by increased understanding of the world and humanity’s place in it, since the growth of understanding increases our freedom to act. It is a precondition for this argu-ment that history be intelligible and unified. If so, the increase of knowledge about history always already marks its progressive nature. Since understanding takes place within history, its augmentation alone already constitutes history’s progressive and purposive nature.16 In this disposition of the basic mode of move-ment in which the world spirit—collective human reason—progresses toward ultimate freedom, any successful understanding of anything historical, whichever may be the precise epistemological character of this understanding, constitutes the very goal-directedness of history. Löwith’s notion of “meaning” combines the two premises of the intelligibility and unity of history, but unity takes center stage.

A number of further conceptual features are worth noting. In the framework of Löwith’s argument, teleology allows for the conflation of the epistemological and ontological aspects of the notion of history. Teleology states a claim to unity that is both ontological and epistemological: ontological, since it assumes that an object amenable to description as teleological is a unified whole; epistemological, since it assumes that at least in principle a unified explanation is available. The notion of the unity of history might therefore be regarded as ambiguous. Still, this

14. As discussed for instance in Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie” [1930], Sämtliche Schriften I, 1-32.

15. In Aristotle, Physics, ed. R. P. Hardie, R. K. Gaye (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), II, 3; and in Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), V, 1013a.

16. As most famously laid out in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Berlin 1822/23, ed. Karl Heinz Ilting, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1996).

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 51

ambiguity does not cripple Löwith’s argument. His presentation of the material as a whole is so slanted toward ontological matters that de facto he suppresses the question of whether epistemological unity might occur without ontological unity.

Moreover, in Meaning in History, Löwith differentiates between the unity and the universality of history. When he discusses the orienting effect of the eschatological vision of an ultimate end—the Kingdom of God or its functional equivalents in secular understandings of history—for the “flux of historical time” he avers:

It is . . . only within this teleological, or rather eschatological, scheme of the historical process that history became “universal,” for its universality does not depend merely on the belief in one universal God but on his giving unity to the history of mankind by directing it toward a final purpose. . . . “Mankind,” however, has not existed in the historical past, nor can it exist in any present. It is an idea and an ideal of the future, the necessary horizon for the eschatological concept of history and its universality.17

This passage does some conceptual work in pointing out that a historical process becomes unified by the extraneous agency of God setting a goal to history. Only by dint of such goal-directedness and unity does history acquire universality. The universality of the deity alone is insufficient for creating a notion of the universal historical process. In addition, the deity acts upon the world in such a way that history becomes a unified process.

As the passage also demonstrates, the “universal” came into the argument as an afterthought. Löwith here imported a highly abridged argument from a 1938 article whose title is translated as The Unity and Diversity of Man.18 As this lat-ter paper argued, the universality of humanity as an eschatological promise was bound to the Christian notion that the deity was there for all humans. It was thus a historical product itself. The unity of humanity stood and fell with the Christian God, thus disappearing as an effect of secularization, as exemplified by the unabashedly particularist works of Max Scheler, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Thus, universality was not continuous in the transition from eschatol-ogy to secularized eschatology. “One universal God giving unity to the history of mankind”—this formulation did not actually mean that universality derived from the unity of the historical process; it derived from that of “mankind” instead.19 History was universal to the extent that it claimed universal humanity as the ontological framework within which historical knowledge could establish perti-nence to entities. Secularized eschatologies forfeited this claim and yet preserved the unity of the historical process. This shows that in Löwith’s usage, unity is a formal feature, whereas universality concerns the substantial content of the form. As far as Löwith’s use is concerned, it seems that he regarded universality as a quality of the specific area of pertinence that belonged to Christian eschatology as a given particular regime of historicity; this area comprised humankind as a

17. Löwith, Meaning, 18.18. Karl Löwith, “Die Einheit und Verschiedenheit des Menschen” [1938], Sämtliche Schriften I,

243-258. The article had originally appeared in the Belgrade-based exile journal Philosophie.19. The German translation makes this point a bit clearer, though perhaps still insufficiently: The

universality of history “beruht nicht schon auf dem Glauben an einen allmächtigen Herrn, sondern auch darauf, daß er der Menschheitsgeschichte Einheit verleiht, indem er sie von Anfang an auf ein letztes Ziel hin lenkt.”

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whole. Unity, by contrast, referred to the formal feature of a given regime of this kind to dispose of a unified area of pertinence at all. Therefore, the primary point of Meaning in History in particular and Löwith’s writings on the philosophy of history more broadly is not to defeat, for example, a Schmittian antihumanism. The point is to defeat the unity of history as a formal feature that remains continu-ous through the secularization of eschatology.

However, Meaning in History makes a double argument: a formal and a histor-ical one. Relations between these arguments remained problematic. In the intro-duction of the German translation—carried out by Hanno Kesting and Reinhart Koselleck under the close supervision of the author20—Löwith decided to delete a passage whose original function had been to negotiate the author’s philosophical and historical positions, with the help of the term “modern”:

We of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a “better world,” are still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism; we are still Jews and Christians, however little we may think of ourselves in those terms. But within this predominant tradition we are also the heirs of classic wisdom. We are in the line of classical polytheism when we are concerned with the plurality of various cultures as such, exploring with boundless curiosity the whole natural and historical world for the sake of a disinterested knowledge which is quite untouched by any interest in redemption.

We are neither ancient ancients nor ancient Christians, but moderns—that is, a more or less inconsistent compound of both traditions.21

This passage, which immediately follows the previous quotation, provides a clear image of the contrast Löwith imagined lay between the Greek and the biblical heritages of the occident. “The unity of universal history” is a formulation that might even suggest the possibility of disunified universal history—an option one might, on a conceptual level, find worthwhile to explore. Yet its prime function is to mark the transition from matters of a formal nature to questions of historical standpoint. Presumably, Löwith eliminated the passage because it suggested the historically given inescapability of the formal errors of eschatology and secular-ized eschatology. If “we” moderns are a “compound” of both views of history—Greek historein, enveloped by an ordered cosmos, and Jewish and Christian prophetic anxieties—then we cannot suppress either side. Still, this diagnosis requires a historical argument, and one that unifies at least European history from antiquity until the present. In his later work, already from the early 1950s onward, Löwith seems driven by the ambition to escape from the inescapability of history. It was the formal argument against secularized eschatology on which he focused his theoretical hopes. Surely, we could “return” to the Greek understanding of the world. Since such a return was the consequence of a decision on the formal level, we could simply opt out of secularized eschatology. There is something unusual in this attitude. Quite commonly, modernity as an epoch was conceived of as a trap, as exemplified by Max Weber’s “steel casing” (stählernes Gehäuse)

20. Kesting alone is named as translator in the preface; Koselleck discusses his collaboration in Reinhart Koselleck, “Formen der Bürgerlichkeit: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Manfred Hett-ling und Bernd Ullrich,” Mittelweg 36 12, no. 2 (2003), 77.

21. Löwith, Meaning in History, 19.

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of rationality from which “we” moderns could never again break free.22 Argu-ably, Löwith had come to reject this notion of modernity-as-entrapment. For the secularization thesis, this meant jettisoning the historical argument and refocus-ing on the formal one. The modification of the translation of Meaning in History would then testify to a revision of the central argument, in the period of Löwith’s re-migration to Germany.

However, the apparent decision was less final than one might imagine, and certainly than Löwith himself imagined, since he liked to present the develop-ment of his philosophical thought as a stringent and linear process.23 Rather, the status of the secularization thesis remained the object of an ongoing negotiation between the two lines of argument. This was probably one of the reasons for the rather acrimonious tone of the widely known debate Hans Blumenberg initiated with his attack on Meaning in History in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age.24 Blumenberg privileged the historical argument; Löwith, however, failed to make use of the opportunity to clarify his point. In the aftermath, most readers seemed to agree that Blumenberg’s position was more convincing. A variety of voices, the most prominent among them perhaps that of Jürgen Habermas, diagnosed a deep-seated, involuntary, and tragic irony in Löwith’s course of argumentation, which seemed to base an invective against history on an account of history—from ancient Greek innocence via Jewish and Christian eschatology to modern abjec-tion—that appeared no less teleological than what it purportedly criticized.25

Blumenberg raised a number of arguments against the idea that modern notions of historicity derived from eschatology. One of these arguments was primarily of a formal kind, aimed at Löwith’s alleged use of “historical constants”—giv-ens outside the ambit of historical change—for explaining the contrast between eschatology and secular historicity. Blumenberg charged that Löwith had embraced a rigid notion of history, ultimately reducible to

the unique epochal break that in one stroke decided in favor of both the Middle Ages and the modern age: the turning away from the pagan cosmos of antiquity, with its cyclical structure of security, to the one-time temporal action of the biblical/Christian type. For one concerned with the fateful disjunction of nature and history, the accent shifts from the beginning of the modern age to the end of antiquity; for everything that followed, this gave rise to something like a collective historical liability, whose sum total is progress as fate.26

So the “constants” were the two concrete historical patterns of historicity as connected with the notions of the natural cosmos and of Jewish and Christian eschatology, respectively. Yet from an epistemological perspective, this was, according to Blumenberg, an illegitimate procedure: “No a priori statement

22. In the closing pages of his “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus” [1904–05], in: Die protestantische Ethik I: Eine Aufsatzsammlung, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Hamburg: Siebenstern, 1965).

23. See, for example, Karl Löwith, “Curriculum vitae” [1959], Sämtliche Schriften I, 450-462.24. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA,

and London: MIT Press, 1985).25. Jürgen Habermas, “Karl Löwith’s stoischer Rückzug vom historischen Bewußtsein,” in Haber-

mas, Philosophisch-kritische Profile (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 195-216. 26. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 28. Note that the translation is of the second edition in which Blu-

menberg reworked the text so as to reply to Löwith’s review of the original version.

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whether there are substantial constants in history can be made; all we can say is that the historian’s epistemological situation cannot be optimized by the determi-nation of such stable elementary historical quanta.”27 Blumenberg’s formulation was extremely guarded and geared to an epistemology of history in terms of a grid of functions, to be filled by wildly varying “quanta.” In this way, he posited historicity as an autonomous epistemological function, independent from any pregiven “constants,” any objects or concepts capable of permanently eluding historicity. Thus, everything that had ontological status was potentially subject to historical explanation. Yet in this way, Blumenberg embraced the epistemologi-cal unity of history. If nothing was exempt from historical explanation, there were no boundaries in the respective field of knowledge, and it was therefore unified.

One might say that Blumenberg’s argument distinguished between acceptable, inevitable and unacceptable, unnecessary constants. The “substantial constants” mentioned in the quotation were of the latter kind. They pertained to the events, actors, ideas, and so on that were the objects of the intended historical explana-tion—its ontology, as one might say. Blumenberg phrased his critique in terms of an attack on the “substantialistic ontology of history”28 that he (indirectly) claimed Löwith deployed. The latter’s constants were of the wrong kind because they were illicitly introduced where historical change alone was to reign: in this case, in the history of ideas, to which eschatology and other notions of history belonged. In the referenced passage, retained from the original version of the book, Blumenberg recognized the crucial instability of the distinction: he himself worked with “formal” constants that were withdrawn from the sphere of history. Yet it would be difficult to draw a clear distinction between, say, experience and ideas. So he insisted that his criticism was meant primarily to safeguard “the possibility of other lines of inquiry”29 for which Löwith’s monolithic argument did not allow. Blumenberg’s entire study meant to trace these other lines in the realm of actual historical inquiry. In the second edition, by contrast, Blumenberg seemed more outspokenly critical of the “substantialism” he had perceived in Löwith’s admittedly rather woodcut history of eschatology and its secularization. Yet this charge, too, addressed the relative poverty, and the alleged epistemic closure, of Löwith’s account as a historical explanation of eschatological and secularized notions of history.

Blumenberg sketched the historical argument against the secularization thesis as follows:

Naturally the idea of progress did not generate the instances of progress that have always occurred in individual human lives, individual generations, and the combination of generations, as results of experience, will, and practice; “progress” is the highest-level generalization, the projection onto history as a whole, which evidently was not possible at just any point in time. We have to ask what it was that made it possible. My opinion is that it was novel experiences involving such a great extent of time that the spring into the final generalization of the “idea of progress” suggested itself as a natural step. One such experience is the unity of methodically regulated theory as a coherent entity developing independently of individuals and generations. The fact that hopes for the greater security

27. Ibid., 29.28. Ibid., 113.29. Ibid.

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 55

of man in the world grow up around this expansionism of progress, and that these hopes can become a stimulus to the realization of the idea, is demonstrable. But is such hope identical with Christian eschatology, now gone over into its secularized form?30

Thus, Blumenberg’s alternative to the secularization thesis was founded on the purported “novel experiences” resulting from developments in scientific theory. From these experiences, the notion of a Gesamtgeschichte, “history as a whole,” was then supposedly extrapolated by way of a sudden leap of inductive concep-tualization.31 Blumenberg insisted that “progress” was actually an experientially given notion of change-for-the-better, a constant, supposedly of a formal kind. Hence, it was only the hypostatization of progress as the one and only line of development of all history that was the explanandum. This hypostatization was rendered possible by the notion of history-as-a-whole, the unity of history.

Historically speaking, it is plausible to derive precisely this latter notion from eschatology in the way Löwith does; eschatology indeed offered a powerful and widely known model of unified history as extending from creation to doomsday. In his prickly review, Löwith suggested that Blumenberg regarded the hypos-tatization of progress in terms of Gesamtgeschichte as a mere leap of thought, which meant overstraining rationality. Precisely because the unity of history was an otherwise implausible phenomenon, the transfer of the given model of escha-tological Gesamtgeschichte was a strong argument, Löwith contended.32 Clearly, he agreed to debate in terms of history proper because he thought he had the upper hand. As for the formal problem involved, he simply rejected the accusa-tion of having posited historical ideas of such stability that they could be regarded as actual constants. Instead, he claimed, he had simply referred to the relative stability and the great traditional force of the Christian heritage.33 Yet in this man-ner, he had followed Blumenberg’s move away from a formal toward a historical argument. Nonetheless, both authors maintained notions of a distinction between formal matters—conceptual as well as ontological—as pertaining to history and the “substantial” historical content of these forms. The balance between the two sides of the distinction remained unsteady. The pattern of argument with which Blumenberg sought to replace Löwith’s view of eschatologization and seculariza-tion as the prime movers of the history of historicity relied on a notion of scien-tific and technological progress as historical events. At the end of the day, the finely delineated distinction between function and substance appeared blurred.

30. Ibid., 30f.31. Cognate notions of the emergence of history-in-the-singular by way of the experience of

technologically induced acceleration have become extremely widespread as a genealogical plotline for explaining modern and contemporary notions of history. “Experience” trumps eschatology, even in the writings of so ardent an admirer of Löwith as Reinhart Koselleck; see, for example, his “‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’—zwei historische Kategorien,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 349-375; Hartog, Régimes, and Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) are among the authors who similarly postulate a process of historical acceleration and an increasing rift between the experience of the past and the present.

32. Karl Löwith, “Besprechung des Buches ‘Die Legitimität der Neuzeit’ von Hans Blumenberg” [1968], Sämtliche Schriften, II, 458.

33. Ibid., 454.

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III. HISTORICAL TIME, MEAGER TIME

When Löwith returned to Germany he set great store in marking his philosophical rupture with his former teacher, Heidegger. To this end, he published a small but scathingly critical study, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit, which appeared in 1953, the year after his return to Germany after eighteen years of exile.34 The title alluded to a well-known line in Hölderlin’s elegy Brod und Wein: “und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” (“and of what use are poets in such meager times?”).35 The implication was that the poet—on whom Heidegger had focused much work from the mid-1930s onward—could also be turned against his interpreter.36 The apposition “thinker in meager time” was meant to express several things at once. Löwith’s Heidegger was a philosopher in a time that was found wanting. More precisely, he was enclosed in a history that was found so; and not only had he locked himself in, but he also lacked any intention of breaking free. The depri-vation of the times was the Germans’ own doing. Yet at the same time, meager time was also historical time as such, the unified historical time of secularized eschatology, into which Heidegger had thrust himself with quasi-messianic zeal. Löwith’s study made a forceful case for the existence of a far-reaching connec-tion between Heidegger’s philosophical thought and his participation in the polit-ical cause of Nazi Germany.37 In this way, indirectly, Löwith also interrogated himself about the roots of his own fascination with the philosophical work of his erstwhile master, and with history as secularized eschatology. As this tangle of allusions indicates, the philosophy of history, in an odd, uneven combination with actual historical events of the time—that is to say, a combination of the formal and substantial aspects of history—was at the center of philosophical concerns as well as lived lives.38

The second chapter of Löwith’s study provides an in-depth discussion of the themes of Meaning in History as applied to Heidegger. Meaning in History had not moved beyond the nineteenth century and Jacob Burckhardt in particular; Nietzsche was discussed only in an appendix, and later writers were mentioned cursorily at most. The Heidegger book, however, explicitly argued that secular-ized eschatology, in the guise of an escalating “nihilism,” had reached its inher-ent telos only in the twentieth century. The urgency of Löwith’s critique of the

34. Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit [1953], Sämtliche Schriften VIII, 124-234; English translation in Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin and transl. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 31-134.

35. Steiner and Wolin translate dürftig as “destitute.” English translators of Hölderlin’s poem have used “lean” (Michael Hamburger) or “meager” (Maxine Chernoff/Paul Hoover).

36. Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” [1946], in Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), V, 269-320.

37. This is also the gist of Richard Wolin’s remarks in his introduction to the English version in Löwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 1-25.

38. See also Löwith’s posthumously published autobiography, penned in Japan for a Harvard-based essay-writing competition in 1940: Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht, ed. Frank Rutger Hausmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006).

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philosophy of history was derived from the murderous present. Heidegger had become a privileged piece of evidence for the collusion of a philosophical regime of unified historicity with a political regime of atrocity. This is the pivot on which twentieth-century European philosophies of history turn. Denker in dürftiger Zeit thus ventured into a central component of the argument Meaning in History had, by design, eschewed. Heidegger, predictably, did not react to Löwith’s criticism in public.39 In the following pages, I will sketch only roughly Löwith’s remarks on Sein und Zeit in relation to historicity, leaving out most of the discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy after circa 1930, the time of the so-called Kehre or turn-around, which Löwith regarded as a mere intensification of errors present already in the earlier work.

Heidegger’s philosophical project (in the crudest of surveys) departed from the phenomenological preoccupation with the specific quality of consciousness as an experience irreducible to anything that could be described in terms of an empirical science, for example, physiological psychology. Heidegger intended a broader conception that sought the specificity in question not in conscious-ness but in human “existence” in the world, Dasein, comprising all intentional-ity and practical activity, and thoroughly temporalized. He made the notion of Sinn, “meaning,” foundational for Dasein. This meant to claim that, as human existence was temporal, the world was constituted by intentionality and thus teleologically structured—the same notion Löwith used to describe “meaning in history.” In Sein und Zeit, “meaning” enjoyed primacy over the range of kinds of objects that made up the world. Dasein, as a precondition of “meaning,” was thus made prior to the question as to what entities the world contained. The lat-ter question is merely an “ontic” one in Heidegger’s terminology. By contrast, the question as to the foundation of the ontic, the reason for which there exists anything at all, “rather than nothing,” is “ontological.”40

Heidegger went to great lengths to explain how the temporal structure of Das-ein constituted historicity—the objective of the much-debated §§72-77 of Sein und Zeit.41 According to Löwith, the argument was roughly as follows: Being foundationally temporal, Dasein was meaningful only by orientation toward a future end. This orientation was to be identified with the recognition of, the prac-tical projection toward, Dasein’s own finality. Anticipating its own future ending, Dasein was enabled to accept finality as its “fate” (Geschick). This acceptance or appropriation of its own finality was an act in which Dasein gained the freedom of disposing of its own time, so to speak. By becoming aware of this fundamental freedom (most crudely, freedom toward death), Dasein could gain a perspective on itself as a complete being, or rather, it became intelligible to itself as a uni-fied being that would, as such, end and could also end itself. In this way, “being

39. Donaggio, Sobria inquietudine, 126f., summarizes Heidegger’s offended reactions in corre-spondence with other scholars. A reconciliation with Löwith occurred only in 1969, when the latter attended celebrations for Heidegger’s eightieth birthday; on this occasion, Löwith presented yet another, though less harshly critical paper, “Zu Heideggers Seinsfrage: Die Natur des Menschen und die Welt der Natur” [1969], Sämtliche Schriften VIII, 276-289.

40. Once again, note that this use of “ontological” does not coincide with the overall use of the term in the present article.

41. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927] (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 372-404.

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able to be whole” (Ganzseinkönnen) was a necessary condition for there to be “meaning” in Dasein. Moreover, actually being whole was a sufficient condition for “meaning”; being whole meant to anticipate the end, death, as a goal and thus conceiving of one’s existence as a unified process.42

Heidegger distinguished a primary historicity that was existential and con-stituted by Dasein’s temporality from a secondary historicity that derived from the common, “vulgar” notion of the historical. According to Löwith, Heidegger presented secondary historicity as derivative. It existed merely as a background to the existentially relevant matters of Dasein as embracing its “fate.” Primary historicity was primary because it was “more primordial” (ursprünglicher) than secondary historicity. Dasein was “at once the place for the problem of history and the condition for the possibility of historicality.”43 Without Dasein, neither an analysis of what it meant to be historical nor any notion of history itself was possible. At the same time, secondary historicity always threatened to dominate Dasein. Primary historicity needed to assert itself destructively against the debris of tradition. This self-assertion was the defining aspect of primary historicity, which was achieved precisely when there emerged a moment of pure decision,44 of the shedding of tradition, the unmitigated pursuit of what was projected in the future. Primary historicity entailed the negation of secondary historicity. Primary historicity required the creation of unity out of something disunified. Secondary historicity was dispersed and fragmented. Regardless of whether it was primary or secondary, however, historicity required content. Historicity thus always went along with a particular ontology, no matter whether it displayed unity or disper-sion. This was a decisive opening for a pluralization of historicity.

Heidegger singled out the cohesion of Dasein between birth and death as the central problem of historicity/historicality. Arguing against a phenomenologi-cal conception of this cohesion in terms of a continuous sequence of conscious experience in time, he insisted on the agency of Dasein as making itself, both in terms of the random “thrownness” of its having been born and in terms of its being toward death, which required rupture with the determination by thrown-ness.45 For Heidegger, this is the core of temporality, as deriving as well as departing from the phenomenological problematic. Geschichtlichkeit reproduces the features of temporality; it, too, is marked by a rupture within itself, between existential-primary and vulgar-secondary history. Historicity/historicality is then not a quality of unlimited applicability because it is always to be understood within the boundaries of concrete situations of self-assertion. It is not so much

42. Löwith’s account of historicity in Sein und Zeit is in Löwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 73f.43. Ibid., 73. The translator uses “historicality” in order to convey Heidegger’s distinction of

“geschichtlich” (as pertaining to “Geschichte,” the historical past) and “historisch” (as pertaining to “Historie,” the representation of the past as scientific knowledge—perhaps most clearly established in Sein und Zeit, 378f. and 392-397). Since the distinction is of little consequence for Löwith’s reading of Heidegger, I opted against reproducing it consistently here and to retain the more common term “historicity” in its potential ambiguity.

44. Wolin rightly points to the proximity Löwith perceived between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, in “Der okkasionelle Dezisionismus von Carl Schmitt” [1935], Sämtliche Schriften VIII, 32-71 (Eng-lish translation in Löwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 137-169); the motive is also pursued in Löwith, “Einheit und Verschiedenheit.”

45. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 373f.

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the quality of belonging to the historical past tout court; instead it is the more complex quality of belonging to the two-sided process of constituting tradition as the random condition of thrownness, and of constituting the openness of the future in the existential projection toward death. Historicity/historicality was thus always already cleft, that is to say, marked by the impossibility of unity. This impossibility derived precisely from its inescapable pertinence to content. The historical was ultimately the result of a form of agential, situated intentionality. In this way, historical ontology (in the not-so-Heideggerian sense laid out above in the introduction) provided a powerful argument against the unity of history.

Yet Löwith’s Heidegger was guilty of squandering this potential. Since in the odd loop-structure of Heidegger’s thought, Dasein was foundational for ontol-ogy, it was foundational for historicity (and vice versa). At least in Löwith’s reading, “foundational” here meant “transcendental” in the Kantian sense of providing the a priori conditions of possibility; or partly so, for this was a crux in Heidegger’s argument Löwith could not avoid emending if he was to make sense of the text. As is well known, Heidegger sought “foundations” not in a Kantian vein, but rather in a temporalized and essentialized fashion.46 Löwith’s somewhat mystifying double formulation—“at once the place . . . and the condition of pos-sibility”—indicates awareness of the problem. Heidegger’s notion of foundation was in some basic way temporal, and the temporal was inextricably interlaced with the historical. Reverting to Kantian terminology—“condition of possibili-ty”—provided an alternative stance from which Heidegger’s temporalization and historicization of the exercise of identifying “foundations” could be criticized. Although Löwith suggested that Heidegger also (“at once”) meant to include Kantian transcendentalism in his notion of “foundation,” the underlying interpre-tive maneuver certainly verged on, and likely committed, a misrepresentation of Heidegger’s position. Presumably, from Löwith’s point of view, this was an inevitable move if the shell of Heidegger’s argument was to be cracked open.

Löwith interpreted the notion of primary historicity as the result of a transfer of the eschatological model of temporality into the temporality of human existence. Heidegger’s creation of unity through finality, his talk of the decisive moment, the emphatic Now, was then only the backside of a future-oriented notion of temporality, intelligible only in light of its eschatological forebears. Accordingly, it was Dasein’s eschatologically blueprinted creation of unity in time that was constitutive of historicity in Heidegger’s sense. In a perverse twist, the place of the eschaton was thus occupied by individual death, and more precisely, freedom toward death. In Löwith’s eyes, this was an ultimately absurd philosophical proj-ect. He outlined his two main lines of criticism in the form of a series of rhetorical questions:

The question arises: [1] can world-history, as humans in the West from the Persian Wars up to the last World War have in a thousand ways experienced and endured it, and have contemplated it, reported on it, and thought it through philosophically—can world-history be recognized once again in this self-willed project of history on the basis of “Being

46. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002), chap. 1, for a far-reaching discussion of the connections among Heidegger’s essentialism, Kant’s transcendentalism, and Rousseau’s notion of “nature.”

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toward the end,” which is always one’s own? [2] Does this existential interpretation of history on the basis of the historicality of finite Dasein render comprehensible what we commonly call history? [3] Does not the experience of Being-mortal, without which there would also be no freedom towards death, instead connect us with the nature of everything living? [4] And does not the transition from the finite temporality of a Dasein that is indi-viduated unto itself in the face of death remain a leap which, rather than illuminating the shared destinings of history, simply leaps over them?47

[1], [2], and [4] basically belabor the same theme, namely the inability of deriv-ing anything from temporal Dasein that might be recognizable as historicity. This was the first line of Löwith’s criticism of Heidegger’s notion of historicity. The second line of criticism emerges from question [3], which leads to the core of the positive conception of historicity Löwith pursued, in response to the seculariza-tion thesis and its application to Heidegger. The remainder of this section will focus on the first line.

Question [1] stresses that wherever “Westerners” have had documented access to history, Dasein cannot be regarded as having laid the foundations for either the experience of, or the reflection about, that history. History is supposedly “world-history,” a matter of mundane affairs understood as reaching beyond the life and death of the individual. History is the lives of all the others, too—a line of criti-cism against Heidegger that Löwith had pursued since his Habilitation.48 More-over, historicity was constituted not only by the empowerment of the individual appropriating its own finality, but also by suffering and disempowerment. Hei-degger had nothing to say on “endurance.”49 In Heidegger’s terms all this simply fell into the sphere of living-with, of the nameless crowd of the others, thus the realm of secondary historicity. Löwith’s specification in [2] therefore points out the actual target, which is the fact—says Löwith—that nothing in primary histo-ricity “renders comprehensible” the common notion of history (as a matter of the succession of wars and states and so on). In Löwith’s view, therefore, Heidegger understands primary historicity as a structure that guarantees the intelligibility of secondary historicity, be it in ontological or epistemological terms. Once again, this is a problematic construal of Heidegger’s argument, which does not have to be read as positing that secondary historicity is intelligible at all. Still, with [4], Löwith aims more broadly, and more convincingly, at the opacity of the connec-tion that the argument of Sein und Zeit posits between the two kinds of historic-ity when he states that the only way of going from one side to the other is by an abrupt “leap.” In this lack of a connection, Löwith suggests, it even becomes unclear why primary historicity should be regarded as a kind of “historicity” at all. The individual life, except perhaps for occasional episodes, eludes historicity.

47. Löwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 74 (numeration added). 48. Karl Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen [1928], Sämtliche Schriften I,

9-198.49. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner’s way of explaining the point was that the driving conundrum of the

philosophy of history since Vico’s works had been the notion that although humans produced their own history they had no control over their product; see, especially, Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Natu-rabsicht und unsichtbare Hand (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1980). From this point of view, Löwith’s diagnosis was that Heidegger’s understanding of historicity did not do justice to one of the most basic problems of the tradition of the philosophy of history.

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This was a classical position among nineteenth-century conceptualizations of historicity, especially in the work of Dilthey. If this tradition is taken into account, Löwith’s attack on the conception of historicity in Sein und Zeit was theoretically conservative. Indeed, he chided Heidegger for violating the notion of “historical meaning” Dilthey had proposed, which was “meaning” as inescap-ably relative to a historical situation, that is, historical relativism or “historicism.” Yet a “Dasein that exists temporally and historically in its essence, as opposed to one that is merely ‘in’ time and ‘has’ a history, is no longer relative to time and history.”50 From Heidegger’s position, the problem of relativism was void. How-ever, according to Löwith, Heidegger’s position only seemingly provided a viable alternative to Dilthey’s. In reality, Heidegger undertook a hysterical radicaliza-tion of “historicism.” This radicalization was made possible by the imposition of the structure of unified Dasein—in its orientation toward death—on history as a whole.51 According to Löwith, Heidegger uses the finality of the individual for the purpose of creating a notion of history as reaching beyond the individual. Therefore, in Löwith’s Heidegger, it is the unity of Dasein that is the condition of the very possibility of historicity, both in its unified primary and dispersed secondary form.

Heidegger’s failure to distinguish between history and the individual life showed itself in his political interventions in the Nazi period. Searching for the decisive moment at which the individual was to accept the fateful circumstances and make them his (always “his”) own, Heidegger believed “his time” had come in 1933. Yet, Löwith asks,

how is one supposed to be able to draw the line within a thoroughly historical thinking between ‘authentic’ happenings and that which ‘commonly’ happens, and be able to distinguish unequivocally between self-chosen fate and the destinings [Geschicke] which are not chosen and which befall humans or seduce them into a momentary choice and decision?52

In short, Heidegger’s course of action itself had demonstrated that the distinction between primary and secondary historicity did not hold; Heidegger had thrust himself into a historical cause he believed his own, but had only handed himself over to vulgarity. The distinction of the two historicities had failed in concreti-zation. That Heidegger had sought such a concretization was merely a random “practical consequence” of his thought, not entirely coinciding with the philo-sophical content, but exposing some presupposed notions that might otherwise have remained obscure.53 Thus, Löwith did not regard the practical concretization (Heidegger’s political actions) as a necessary component of the philosophical argument. Heidegger’s failure as a politician did not necessarily follow from his philosophical work, but his political failure was nonetheless philosophically revealing. To be sure, this was not an instance of a harmless and quietist shying away from political judgment. On the contrary, Löwith aimed to make the politi-cal complaints pertinent to Heidegger’s philosophical work and thus to undercut

50. Löwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 72.51. Ibid., 91f.52. Ibid., 75.53. Ibid., 76.

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the most common line of apology that denied any connection. However, it should also be added that Löwith intervened in matters of political theory only rarely and arguably did not prioritize the political sphere in his critique of history as secularized eschatology.

In Löwith’s interpretation, Heidegger’s political engagement did not merely reveal something about those presuppositions of his philosophical argument about historicity that remained stable throughout his career. The Kehre itself represented an escalation of the argument in which the political was inescapably caught up. Sein und Zeit only marked the first step in a further radicalization of historical relativism, taking on the form of a Hegelian Aufhebung, the subla-tion that contains and preserves the positions it resolves. Extrapolating from the event-structure of Dasein, Sein und Zeit had posited an ahistorical notion of death as a foundation for the finality that informed all historicity. After the Kehre, Heidegger shifted standpoints, moving from Dasein to the question of “the truth of Being . . . , defining truth as the happening of truth in a history of Being.”54 Thus, the event-structure was now provided by truth itself, a stance that exhibited an eerie parentage to theological concepts of revelation. Truth, in this temporal-ized guise, thus became the ultimate foundation of historicity. Truth constituted a foundational “history of Being” (Seinsgeschichte), which neatly coincided with the history of occidental metaphysics. This concretization demonstrated that the post-Kehre foundation of history was yet another source of unity. Moreover, the foundational argument was turned around: now it was not an ahistorical notion that ultimately provided the foundations of historicity, but one that was temporal itself. Löwith apparently did not think that Heidegger offered a solid argument as to the distinction between historicity and temporality. Temporalized “truth” as constituting a Seinsgeschichte was therefore supposed to act as its own foun-dation. That is to say, if “foundation” was temporal and historical itself, Hei-degger’s argument simply became circular.

Historical time, as laid out by Löwith’s Heidegger, was thus the most mea-ger of times: a totally unified, yet entirely empty time. Indeed, what Löwith’s analysis seeks to show is that Heidegger’s pursuit of a “foundation” of historic-ity—first in Dasein, then in “Being”—was a pursuit of unity. The exciting notion of a cleft historicity, as always already divided against itself and therefore never unified and singular, was only a transient by-product of this pursuit. Although the future-orientation of Dasein was arguably given up in the post-Kehre works, unity remained a common theme. Consequently, it was the stubborn assumption of the unity of history that marked Heidegger’s adherence to secularized eschatol-ogy. In this way, Löwith’s Heidegger completed the catastrophe of modern his-toricity. The unity of history had come to void any notion of history. Heidegger’s concretization of Seinsgeschichte by means of the alleged trajectory of occidental metaphysics—a continuing notion of European history in his work since the 1920s—further illustrated this catastrophe. Meticulously, he complied with the eschatological scheme. The original Platonic Fall from pre-Socratic Paradise was followed by misery and constant decline until a prospective moment of redemp-

54. Ibid., 92.

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tion, with which Heidegger wished to see his own thought associated. This self-aggrandizing self-historicization betrayed a pathological incapacity to look into the mirror without seeing history itself, and an unthinking lack of distance from history that informed Heidegger’s conduct in 1933.

IV. NATURE’S NATURE

Löwith’s second line of attack was that of question [3] from the passage quoted above, in which he wondered whether the experience of mortality was not rather that of a connection to the natural world instead of a prefiguration of historical consciousness. Löwith thus affirmed the “ahistorical” notion of death he claimed Heidegger also employed in Sein und Zeit. This is one of the reasons for which Löwith’s attitude toward Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus was on the whole more ambiguous than toward the later works. Although critical of his master, his argu-ments retained significant features from Sein und Zeit. Thus, Löwith upheld the centrality of the question as to the possibility of plural historicity; and he, too, suggested an answer that would draw on the ontology of history, and that was not entirely dissimilar to the Sein und Zeit notion of historicity as always divided against itself. Both philosophers appear to have held that historicity, if deter-mined in terms of ontology and internally differentiated, was best understood as constituted by the particular range of objects it covered; or negatively, by the range of objects it excluded. This conception of plural and particular historicity presupposed that history was not an ontologically empty form that would have been applicable to everything and anything. Löwith might be read as arguing that Heidegger kept lapsing from this position.

As question [3] suggests, Löwith’s proposal of how to construct plural historic-ity diverged from Heidegger regarding death. Instead of offering the existential opportunity of Ganzseinkönnen, for Löwith, death constituted a reconnection with living nature. This entailed that throughout life, the connection was some-how broken or at least suspended. The individual life, in its temporal unfolding, was placed in an antagonism not with secondary historicity, but with the natural cosmos. Only the cosmos could be whole; by contrast, finality did not offer a foundation of the wholeness of Dasein. Hence, the primacy of Dasein was canceled out. Death, the sovereignty of nature, was solely an indicator of the passing divergence of the historical from the cosmos. More precisely, death was a symptom of the unsustainability of all history, the tendency of the historical to collapse and give way to the all-embracing ordered and unified whole of “being.” Temporality, it seems, was meant to be a feature of this cosmic order. Historical time then deviated from this temporal order. Yet the underlying model, suppos-edly that of ancient Greece, made clear that this deviation could not assume the totalizing form of eschatology. History could not be unified because it could not encompass cosmic time. In this way, Löwith replaced the unity of history with the unity of nature. History was reduced to the episodic and incoherent form that is so famously censured in Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet, in this form, history could be plural, departing perhaps, in the way of a world of manmade constructions, from natural ontology—Löwith remained unspecific in this respect—but always

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breaking off, or petering out, returning to the eternal order of nature. The problem of pluralizing temporality was thus implicitly solved by inserting a multitude of times into eternity.

One of the most prominent formulations of the problematic is the 1960 paper “Welt und Menschenwelt” (“World and Human World”).55 Here, Löwith starts out with the present, the burden of historical consciousness:

We all think today within the horizon of history and its fortunes; however, we no longer live in the ambit of the natural world. Moreover, we know about a manifold of historical worlds while our own, old-European one is falling apart. We lack the one world, which is older and more abiding than man. . . . World and human world are not on a par. The physical world is thinkable without any relation to man that would be essential to it; yet no man is thinkable without world. We come into the world and we part from it; it does not belong to us, we belong to it.56

Löwith further remarks that the world is “absolutely self-sufficient” (absolut selbständig) and that his perspective is meant to be “cosmological” as opposed to “anthropological.” The world “is the greatest and the richest and at the same time as empty as a frame without a picture,” and “not merely the sum of all things known and unknown.”57 As far as this opening is concerned, Löwith is clearly interested in finding a way of formulating a unified totality of being, which at the same time is allowed to become “empty.” His cosmological “world” is not determined by its particular ontology, thus by particular Seiendes, since it over-rides all particular ontologies. Löwith thus retains a basic notion of ontology as resulting from intentional access to, and practical sojourn in, the world. There is a close kinship between this position and Heidegger’s in Sein und Zeit, yet an even closer one with some aspects of the phenomenological undertaking from which Heidegger sought to depart by shifting philosophical inquiry to “ontology” in his sense. Löwith’s cosmos, by contrast, was a world of natural life, a world to the understanding of which the quest for a purported “foundation” of “being” did not contribute anything.

In the historical process in which world-history was erroneously substituted for world, it was teleology that served as an ordering principle. In the case of the natural world Löwith suggests that such an ordering principle is supplied by necessity as opposed to contingency. Since history is based on the assumption of such contingency and excludes that which is necessary as ahistorical, the opposi-tion between history and nature becomes insurmountable. History is the human world; and in the process of a strange historical Verkehrung (“perversion”), it has usurped the place of the world proper. This perversion apparently results from the incongruence, the “standing out” of humanity from the world (Ek-sistenz, with another Heideggerian term), a distinction from the world, given up “only with the last breath of life.”58 Löwith holds that the distance between humans and the world may be conceptualized precisely by reference to the human ability to

55. Karl Löwith, “Welt und Menschenwelt” [1960], Sämtliche Schriften I, 295-328 (translations are mine).

56. Ibid., 295.57. Ibid., 295f.58. Ibid., 301.

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 65

regard, question, and explain matters of the world. However, this ability—in its most basic form the pure contemplation of Greek theoria—forms part of human nature.59 Yet how human nature can be both part of nature as a whole and stand out from it remains difficult to see, especially if one suspends usage of the spatial metaphors Löwith favors.

Some further indications are contained in the 1957 piece “Natur und Humanität des Menschen” (“The Nature and the Humanity of Man”).60 Here, Löwith describes human nature in terms of an ability to distance oneself and transcend what is naturally given (most prominently in language). Distance is bound up with objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation (Entfremdung). The latter opens the possibility of a reappropriation (Aneignung) of the object.61 Human nature is thus characterized in terms of a departure and a return, as a trajectory whose spatial metaphors do not point to concrete space so much as to temporality. Löwith insists that humans do not actually transcend nature, but rather speaks of a transgression (Überschreiten) that nonetheless remains within the “ambit” (Umkreis) of nature, in that “the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of human transgression would remain one and the same, nature itself.”62 Nature’s temporality is ahistorical, eternal (ewig).63 It is a temporality for which pertinence to a particular range of objects is not a relevant category. “Emptiness” would then mean that objects—capable of functioning as a content of knowl-edge—are only ever generated by the human departure from nature. Ontology under the aspect of objectification is alien to nature. Ontology under the aspect of the ahistorical temporality of nature itself is not marked by this condition. Löwith reserves the latter aspect for theoria, that is to say, nonobjectifying, nonalienated contemplation of physis, a term whose meaning he determines—with reference to Aristotle—as that which is born, grown, constant, thus-and-not-different. As opposed to that which is intentionally “made,” constructed, and thus teleological, physis is self-shaping, that is to say marked by entelechy.64 Thus Löwith clearly maintains that there is a primary and a secondary ontological condition. Indeed, repeatedly, he uses the Hegelian notion of “second nature” to indicate human departure from the first, the simply given nature.65

In this way, Löwith’s notion of nature is cleft by an internal antagonism, as is Heidegger’s historicity. Temporary cycles of departure from, and return to, first nature are natural. Historicity cannot be unified, in either temporal or in ontologi-cal terms, because there is always a pre-history and a post-history, a terminus a quo regarding departure, and a terminus ad quem, regarding return. Historical

59. For the philosophical development of Löwith’s thought on the matter of the contemplation of “life” since the time of his dissertation on Nietzsche, see the instructive discussion in Enrico Donag-gio, “Zwischen Nietzsche und Heidegger: Karl Löwiths anthropologische Philosophie des faktischen Lebens,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (2000), 37-48.

60. Karl Löwith, “Natur und Humanität des Menschen” [1957], Sämtliche Schriften I, 259-294. 61. Ibid., 285.62. Ibid., 291.63. Ibid., 266, a passage in which Löwith underlines the unchanging character of nature in spite of

such historical intrusions of humans into nature as symbolized in the formula of the “Atomic Age.” 64. Ibid., 267. 65. For example, ibid., 281; similarly in Löwith, “Welt und Menschenwelt,” 301; and in Karl

Löwith, “Zur Frage einer philosophischen Anthropologie” [1975], Sämtliche Schriften I, 335.

HENNING TRÜPER66

time is possible as constituted by ontology under the aspect of objectification, yet is never sustainable. Nature is not “made”; it is not “creation,” and it cannot be redeemed since it is not subject to agency. The basic categories of eschatology are thus inapplicable. Historicity remains, among other things, a quality applicable to elements of something that is unified, by dint of a beginning and an end, and thus not by necessity endlessly fragmented. Yet there have to be many such unified histories in order for historicity to be a meaningful category at all.

However, Löwith’s distinction of first and second nature was imbalanced in a fashion arguably alien to the conception of historicity in Sein und Zeit. Especially in his later writings, Löwith often came close to marginalizing history to an extent that it almost vanished as a philosophical problem. In this way, positing a very far-reaching connection between history and “second nature” almost became implausible. In the ancient Greek world of thought he continuously evoked, his-tory figured not as a necessary field of the activity of human reason, but almost as a mere accessory, a luxury, and a whim. Repeatedly, especially in the papers inspired by his years of exile in Japan, he also equated the cosmic perspective of the Greek logos with that of “oriental wisdom.”66 In this way, he postulated a common “pagan” way of thought. Accordingly, the appearance of Christianity, with its tremendous spread of eschatological thought, acquired the status of a decisive historical departure. The interpretation of some human affairs in terms of history lost its merely accessory character. Only through this historical event did history become so thoroughly entwined with “second nature” as to warrant Löwith’s theoretical argument. Since this argument requires a body of concrete historical knowledge, in itself it cannot be understood outside the historical context that made this knowledge possible. The nature of “nature,” in Löwith’s work, remained that of an inseparable union, and an inescapable aporia, of his-torical and theoretical reasoning. As already seen in the discussion of the debate between Blumenberg and Löwith, the philosophy of history, even in its suppos-edly terminal stage of withering self-critique, remained bound to the contingent regime of historicity that co-constituted the very notion the philosophy of history had of its object.

V. EPILOGUE: THE HABITAT OF THE CENTAUR

The concrete regime of historicity in place in Löwith’s writings is a remarkable one. Its conflation of the ancient Greek and the “oriental” thought-world of Japan points to a specific, highly intricate context: the history of the uses of antiquity in nineteenth-century German-language Geisteswissenschaften and the surround-ing domains of discourse.67 Traditionally—or at least in the form of an invented

66. Most prominently in his occasional writings on Japan: Karl Löwith, “Japan’s Westernization and Moral Foundation” [1942–43], Sämtliche Schriften II, 541-555; Karl Löwith, “The Japanese Mind: A Picture of the Mentality that We Must Understand if We Are to Conquer” [1943], ibid., 556-570; and Karl Löwith, “Bemerkungen zum Unterschied von Orient und Okzident” [1960], ibid., 571-601. All three papers share a common stock of anecdotal observations.

67. See for this Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Ger-many, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

LÖWITH, LÖWITH’S HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY 67

tradition—the Greco-Roman and the Hebrew canons of ancient texts had defined separate epochs of reference neither of which could be entirely dismissed. From the eighteenth century onward, the traditional patterns of staging this dualism had eroded.68 The historical-critical reading of the Bible, almost exclusively target-ing the Old Testament, fed from a theological project of disparaging the Hebrew heritage of (initially mainly Protestant) Christianity. The disparagement of the normative character of Hebrew antiquity also pertained to contemporary Judaism. It further fueled contemporary customs of embracing ancient Greek philosophy, and of constructing a historical travesty of intellectual ancestry in which German intellectuals celebrated their imagined proximity to “Athens” (as opposed to “Jerusalem”). At the same time, however, antiquities multiplied as various bodies of scholarship on ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, and China grew rapidly. With the imagined historical community of the “Aryans,” novel, and often racist, dual-isms emerged.69 Hebrew antiquity was increasingly relegated to the margins of a wider context of heavily pluralizing Middle Eastern antiquity. Yet ultimately, the multiplication of antiquities also challenged the normative status of Greece; the intellectual “philhellenism” of the nineteenth century mutated into a defensive reaction to ensure the normative status of at least one of the traditional antiquities.

Löwith, by radically removing the thought of ancient Greece from that of modern Europe, as shaped by Jewish and Christian eschatology, opted for a specific position in which the Greeks were “orientalized” and the Hebrews “occidentalized.”70 The traditional confrontation of “Athens” and “Jerusalem” thus persisted, but all modern Europe was on the latter side. Although his fer-vent attacks on eschatology were genealogically related to the disparagement of Hebrew antiquity, Löwith clearly wished to brush aside the anti-Semitic con-notations this line of argument had acquired over the course of the nineteenth century.71 Hence the attraction of making eschatology the great historical water-shed from which Christianity and Judaism flowed in the same direction. Implic-itly, Löwith rejected the distinctions between Jewish Messianism and Christian Apocalypticism that Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, among others, had sought to establish. Löwith’s unreserved embrace of Greek thought entailed a negation of all European history. In this, he was uncompromising. It is important to note that Meaning in History was dedicated to the memory of his mother who, having emigrated no further than her native Vienna, had committed suicide in

68. See Joachim Dyck, Athen und Jerusalem: Bibel und Poesie in der Tradition ihrer Verknüpfung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1977).

69. Poignantly analyzed in Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

70. The model for this choice may well have been supplied by Nietzsche, who in his attacks on Christianity also emphasized the unbridgeable distance between the ancient Greek and the modern worlds of thought respectively.

71. James I. Porter, “Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2008), 115-147, has argued that Auerbach’s famous discussion of narrative time in Homer and the Old Testament, in the initial chapter of Mimesis, was a structurally similar reaction to the anti-Semitic connotations of “Athens” vs. “Jerusalem.” Auerbach stressed the foundational character of the Old Testament for all later European literature. Evidently, the values with which this European descent from Judaism was then charged were diametrically opposed to the ones with which Löwith, almost at the same time, saddled eschatology.

HENNING TRÜPER68

1942 upon receipt of her deportation order.72 The Holocaust—or perhaps, as far as Löwith is concerned, the World Wars more generally—provided the vanishing point at which all lines of “occidental” historical development converged.

Yet it is also undeniable that Löwith hardly cared to make this connection explicit. This may be precisely because it required a blending of a historical travesty—the competition of “Athens” vs. “Jerusalem” and all the faux genealo-gies and ludicrous dichotomies it entailed—with the most catastrophic aspects of the historical present. In its plain refusal to talk about concrete, detailed, politi-cally charged, complicated, and convoluted contemporary history, Löwith’s late work conceded the explanatory poverty of the atrophic histories that figured in philosophies of history—including his own. And more precisely, his late work conceded a specific regime of historicity as established in the specific patterns of philosophical discourse. The monotonous parcours from classical antiquity to modernity, the stringing together of great thinkers in a sort of transhistorical sacra conversazione, simply did not constitute a history in which the atrocities of the twentieth century could claim a legitimate place. Ultimately, this philosophi-cal tradition presupposed a historical ontology of its own, and thus the plurality of history. The discussion to which Löwith contributed required the regime of historicity it employed; and this regime had to have limited scope if it was to protect philosophy from the mess of other histories. The position on historicity Löwith developed in his late work, while participating in the travesty, nonethe-less displays in its silences the traces of an awareness of the implausibility it had acquired in Löwith’s lifetime. Possibly, though, this implausibility appeared less harmful when one accepted that history was not unified and that there could not be a single regime of historicity in the first place. In the end, the plurality of his-tory may have derived its urgency from the hope of salvaging the legitimacy of a specific tradition of philosophical thought, of salvaging the habitat of the centaur threatened by a history it could not contain.

Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social SciencePrinceton, New Jersey

72. Donaggio, Sobria Inquietudine, 113.