Karl Löwith (1897-1973) was a German philosopher who shared a great deal with the Frankfurt School in his perspective on philosophy, having studied under Martin Heidegger and giving special attention to Nietzsche and the Hegelian tradition in his life's work. He also shared a great deal biographically with other Frankfurt School notables. Although he was a Protestant Christian by baptism, under the Nazi standards he was considered Jewish by descent and left Germany in 1934, living and working first in Italy, then Japan, then the United States (Theological Seminar of Hartford, New School for Social Research in New York), returning to Germany in 1952 and finishing his academic career at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.
His concerns with Nietzsche and the Hegelian tradition are both very much visible in his book Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Marx und Kierkegaard (first published 1941; I’m working here from the second edition of 1949). The "Marx and Kierkegaard" of the subtitle is somewhat misleading. He gives a great deal of attention to both in the book, but as part of Hegelian tradition as it was reflected in a line of thinkers up to Nietzsche, and to some extent beyond.
Marx and Kierkegaard represent for Löwith the two extreme sides in the development of Hegel's basic thought as it applies to society, while Nietzsche represented a different fundamental perspective on the present world. (All translations here are mine.)
Marx und Kierkegaard war die Welt fremd geworden, in die sich Hegel noch "eingehaust" hatte; sie waren hinüber und hinaus, oder "absurd" und "transzendierend," wie Goethe den kommenden Geist des Jahrhunderts benannt hat. Und vollends Nietzsche war nirgends mehr zu Hause, sondern ein "Übergang" und ein "Untergang," so daß er sogar im griechischen Dasein nicht mehr die existierende Heimatlichkeit und den plastischen Sinn erkannte, sondern nur noch das tragische Pathos und den Geist der ihm durch Wagners Modernität inspirierten Musik.Löwith provides a good discussion of Hegel's concept of history, particularly his famous/infamous statement that the real is rational. He also compares Goethe’s concept of history with Hegel's, finding Goethe's sympathetic while not quite rejecting Hegel's notion of broader historical laws. And he gives a very good summary of Nietzsche's thought, providing yet another reminder that even refugees from Nazism like himself and Max Horkheimer did not buy into the Nazis pseudo-scholarship claiming that Nietzsche was an intellectual predecessor of National Socialism.
[The world had become foreign to Marx and Kierkegaard, in which Hegel had “made himself at home”; they were beyond and outside, or “absurd” and “transcendent”, as Goethe called the coming spirit of the century. And finally Nietzsche was no longer at home anywhere, rather he was a “going-over” and a “downfall”, so that even in the Greek mode of existence he no longer recognized the no longer existing being-at-home and the three-dimensional sense, but rather only the tragic pathos and the spirit of modernity as he was exposed to it in Wagner’s music.]
HegelHegel famously wrote in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig": "What is rational, that is real; and what is real, that is rational." This has caused much metaphoric shredding of clothing and gnashing of teeth on the part of later scholars and ideologists. As Löwith puts it:
Wir können uns heute nur noch schwer den ganzen Ernst des Streites und die tiefe Erregung vergegenwärtigen, die dieser Satz schon zu Hegels Lebzeiten ausgelöst hat, weil wir als Erben des 19.Jahrhunderts unter der "Wirklichkeit" vollendete "Tatscachen" and "Realitäten" eines Realismus verstehen, der erst nach dem Zerfall des Hegelschen Real-Idealismus hervortreten konnte.I still remember an undergraduate political theory text I had that used the controversial sentence to justify including an excerpt from Hegel together with one from Mussolini (!?!) in a chapter on "Cult of the State" or something similar.
[Today, it is only with difficulty that we can get an immediate sense of the complete seriousness and the deep agitation that this sentence had already set off during Hegel’s lifetime. Because we as the heirs of the 19th century understand by "reality" finished "facts" and "realities" of a realism that could only emerge after the collapse of the Hegelian Real-Idealism.]
Wrong-headed as it is to lump Hegel in with Mussolini in such a way, it has been a common thing in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, though hopefully it has fallen into disrepute now. Both the lazy anti-German version of Anglo-American Hegel scholarship and the post-Second World War Soviet-line Marxist versions shared something of this attitude, which was derived from the Left Hegelians. Their criticism was correct in so far as Hegel did see his philosophy in his later years as supporting the existing Prussian forms of royal rule.
The earlier Soviet scholar David Riazanov (1870-1938) expressed a more realistic view of this aspect of Hegel's philosophy in his Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1927 English version). Riazanov was head of the Marx-Engels-Institute in Moscow from 1920 to 1930 and worked on the comprehensive German edition of the works of Marx and Engels known as MEGA, from the German initials for Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Riazanov worked with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. He later fell out of official favor in Russia, and died in 1938. In his 1927 book, he wrote of Hegel’s philosophy:
Hegel regarded every phenomenon as a process, as something that is forever changing, something that is forever developing. Every phenomenon is not only the result of previous changes, it also carries within itself the germ of future changes. It never halts at any stage. The equilibrium attained is disturbed by a new conflict, which leads to a higher reconciliation, to a higher synthesis, and to a still further dichotomy on a still higher plane. Thus, it is the struggle between opposites that is the source of all development.(That passage from Riazanov uses the conventional terms of "synthesis" and "dichotomy", which aren't necessarily the best for describing Hegelian dialectic; "ablation" [Aufheben] and "contradiction" would be preferable, respectively. But they work well enough in that passage for our purposes here.)
In Hegelian philosophical terms, "the real" (Wirklichkeit; or "the actual," as it is also translated) is the unity of essence (Wesen) and existence. The appearance, the outward form that we experience and perceived as immediate fact, is not fully expressive of the inner truth, the essence, of a thing. In Hegel's dialectical understanding, processes develop by the essence continually emerging into outer form. In the Science of Logic, Hegel describes essence as the "unendliche Bewegung des Seins" (unending movement of Being). Hegel also says (Encyclopedia of 1831 § 112) that "mere appearance" is Being that has been ablated (aufgehobenes, preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level). What we see, in other words, what we today understand by "the real," is only part of what Hegel understood as the real.
As Löwith notes, Left Hegelians like Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx shared the Hegelian understanding of the Real as the unity of essence and existence, though they criticized the conservative conclusions that Hegel drew from it for social development toward the end of his life.
Löwith explains that the concept has a theological dimension, as well:
Den Theologen, meint Hegel, müßte der Satz ohne weiteres einleuchtend sein, weil ihn die Lehre von der göttlichen Weltregierung doch selber schon ausspreche, und die Philosophen müßten so viel Bildung haben zu wissen "nicht nur, daß Gott wirklich", sondern daß er "das Wirklichste, daß er allein wahrhalt wirklich" ist. Die Gleichsetzung der Vernunft mit der Wirklichkeit begründet sich also – ebenso wie die Wirksamkeit der "Idee" – aus einer Philosophie, die zugleich Theologie ist und deren Endzweck es ist: durch die Erkenntnis der Übereinstimmung des Göttlichen und des Weltlichen die Versöhnung der "selbstbewußten Vernunft" mit der "seienden Vernunft," d.i. der Wirklichkeit, endlich hervorzubringen. Die Wahrheit von Hegels Versöhnung der Vernunft mit der Wirklichkeit wurde von Ruge und Feuerbach, von Marx und von Kierkegaard in einer Weise betstritten, die auch schon die Argumente von Haym bis zu Dilthy vorwegnahm.Tags: hegel, karl löwith, von hegel zu nietzsche
[To the theologian, thought Hegel, the sentence must be enlightening without anything further said, because the teaching of the divine rule of the world has already expressed it. And the philosophers must have enough education to know "not only that God is real," but also that he is "the most real, that He alone is truly real." The equation of reason with reality is founded therefore – just like the effectiveness of the "Idea" – on a philosophy that at the same time is a theology and whose end goal it is: through the perception of the agreement of the divine and the earthly, to finally bring forth the reconciliation of the "self-conscious reason" with the "becoming reason," that is, the reality. The truth of Hegel's reconciliation of reason and reality was contested by Ruge and Feuerbach, by Marx and by Kierkegaard, in a manner that also anticipated the arguments from Haym until Dilthey.]
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