Leo Strauss on Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche"

Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru of American neoconservatives, reviewed Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, which I recently discussed here, in the 8:1/4 (1941) issue of Social Research, the journal of the New School of Social Research where Strauss taught and where the Troskyist trend that became neoconservatism had its genesis.

Strauss frames Löwith's book as a description of "the emergence of European, and in particular of German, nihilism." This is, at best, an imaginative way to construe Von Hegel zu Nietzsche.

Its subject, he writes, "may be said to be the transformation of European humanism, as exemplified by Goethe and Hegel, into German nihilism, as exemplified by Ernst Jünger." Actually, Löwith says very little about 20th century philosophy or the historical trends leading to Jünger's rightwing militarist sentiments and his nihilistic literary work.

Tags: karl löwith, leo strauss, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche

Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (2 of 2)

Karl Löwith (1897-1973)

This is the second of two parts of a discussion of Karl Löwith's 1941 book, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Marx und Kierkegaard (I'm working here from the second edition of 1949).

Hegel's historical scheme of development implied that history had reached a kind of culmination point. His successors and contemporaries were very much influenced by the religiously founded but secularly oriented end-times mood of Hegel's philosophical system. Including Marx and Kierkegaard. Löwith writes of their respective works, The Communist Manifesto (1847, in Löwith's dating) and the Literary Applications (1846):

Dieser Gegansatz bedeutet aber geschichtlich betrachtet nur zwei Seiten einer gemeinsamen Destruktion der bürgerlich-christlichen Welt. Zur Revolution der bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Welt hat sich Marx auf die Masse des Proletariats gestützt, während Kierkegaard in seinem Kampf gegen die bürgerlich-christliche Welt alles auf den Enzelnen setzt. Dem entspricht, daß für Marx die bürgerliche Gesellschaft eine Gesellschaft von "vereinzelten Einzelnen" ist, in welcher der Mensch seinem "Gattungswesen" entfremdet ist, und für Kierkegaard die Christenheit ein massenhaft verbreitetes Christentum, in dem niemand ein Nachfolger Christi ist.

[But this opposition {between the viewpoints of Marx and Kierkegaard} merely represents two sides of a common destruction of the bourgeois-Christian world. Marx counted on the masses of the proletariat {working class} for a revolution of the bourgeois-capitalist world, while Kierkegaard in his fight against the bourgeois-Christian world staked everything on the single individual. This corresponds to the fact that for Marx, bourgeois society is a society of "isolated individuals" in which the person is alienated from his "genus essence," and for Kierkegaard Christianity is a widely disseminated institutional Christianity in which no one is a follower of Christ.]

Löwith brings a range of 19th century philosophers into the discussion of the longer-range implications and development of Hegel's thinking in addition to Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, especially Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), Max Stirner (1806-1856) and David Friedrich Strauß (1808-1874). Those five were among the Left Heglelians, as were Marx and Friedrich Engels also. The Left Hegelians developed the implications for social theory and radical politics. Bauer, Feuerbach and Strauß were also important in developing the historical-critical school of Biblical studies, which American fundamentalist would later deride as "Higher Criticism."

The Old Hegelians Löwith discusses only briefly, in the persons four of the most important: Rudolf Haym (1821-1901), Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805-1892), and Kuno Fischer (1824-1907) and Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879). Of Rosenkranz, Löwith approvingly cites Arnold Ruge's comment that he was "by far the freest Old Hegelian." He notes that originally, Old Hegelian referred to Hegel's direct students who propagated his ideas during Hegel's lifetime. But, he writes, “For the historical movement of the 19th century, they are without significance.” And he provides a short discussion of New Hegelians like Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Julius Ebbinghaus (1885-1981), Richard Kroner (1884-1974), Georg Lasson (1862-1932), Johann Max Emanuel Plenge (1874-1963), Heinrich Scholz (1884-1956) and Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915).

Löwith has a fascinating section comparing the perspectives of Hegel and Goethe on history. He uses the comparison to raise several issue about the grand theories of history from both Hegel himself and his followers, which also had great influence on those who were not admirers or followers of Hegel. Löwith argues that Hegel's concept of world history, by which the World Spirit develops in ever greater stages of freedom, is essentially Christian teleology dressed up in more scientific trappings. It contains within it the danger of arrogance in having people assuming they understand the nature of history and the direction it is going and needs to go. Hegel's concept of the world-historical individual carries with it the risk over over-estimating the significance as well as the virtues of the showy and the powerful.

Löwith also sees an element of Hegel's view of history that celebrates the successful in the form of the dominant and powerful, a variant of which can look a lot like Social Darwinism. Or, as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher put it, "God intended the great to be great and the little to be little.” As a caution against such a view, Löwith quotes Nietzsche, "Der Erfolg war immer der größte Lügner" ("Success has always been the biggest liar.")

And Löwith raises an important point about Hegel's theory that neither his more traditional-minded nor his more radical followers in the 19th century were inclined to challenge: Hegel's philosophy assumed a sharp distinction between humanity and Nature, between the person as Subject and Nature as object. This sharp distinction has long since become highly problematic. Löwith makes the point well through a contrast of Hegel's view of history to Goethe's:

Hegel hat seine Vorlesung über die "Philosophie der Geschichte" in den Jahren 1822/3-1830/1 vorgetragen. Die Einleitung dazu erklärt das Prinzip seiner Betrachtung, welches die stufenweise Entfaltung des Geistes und mithin der Freiheit ist. Der Geist, welcher als Weltgeist die Weltgeschichte beherrscht, ist gegenüber der Natur negative, d. h. der Fortschritt in der Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit ist ein solcher in der Befreiung von der Gebundenheit an die Natur. Die Natur als solche hat daher in Hegels Philosophie der Geschichte keine selbständige und positive Bedeutung. Sie ist nicht der Grund der Geschichte der Welt, sondern nur ihr geographischer Boden. Das naturgegebene Verhältnis von Land und Meer, die Gestaltung der Küsten, der Hochländer und Ebenen, der Lauf der Flüsse und die Form der Berge, Regen und Trockenheit, das heiße, kalte und gemäßigte Klima – das alles ist zwar immer von Einfluß auf das geschichtliche Leben der Menschen, aber es nie schlechtweg bestimmend. Dem "Naturtypus" einer bestimmten "Lokalität" entspricht Typus und Charakter des darin lebenden Volkes, weil sich der Geist überhaupt in Zeit und Raum auseinanderlegt. Diese Entsprechungen zwischen der natürlichen und der geistigen Welt hat Hegel oft bis ins Eizelne ausgeführt. Im Prinzip galt ihm die Natur aber doch nur als der natürliche "Schauplatz" des geistigen Geschehens der Welt. Für Goethe ist die Natur der Schlüssel für dessen Verständnis.

[Hegel delivered his lectures on the "Philosophy of History" in the years 1822/3-1830/1. The Introduction to them declares the principle of his treatment, which is the stage-by-stage unfolding of the Spirit and with it freedom. Nature as such has here no self-standing and positive meaning in Hegel's philosophy of history. It is not the basis of the history of the world, but rather only its geographical grounds. The naturally established relationship of land and sea, the formations of the coasts, the highlands and the plains, the course of the rivers and the form of the mountains, rain and dryness, the hot, cold and mild climate – all of that is certainly always an influence on the historical life of humanity, but never absolutely determines it. The "natural type" of a particular "locality" corresponds to the type and character of the people living there, because the Spirit lays itself out in time and space in any case. Hegel often explained these influences between the natural and the spiritual world in detail. But in principle, he held Nature to be only the natural "showplace" of the spiritual occurrences of the world. For Goethe, Nature is the key to its understanding.]

Nietzsche

Löwith has written extensively on Nietzsche's philosophy in other works as well as this one. Nietzsche, even more so than Hegel, suffered from association with National Socialism in both Anglo-Saxon and orthodox Marxism-Leninism traditions. In a reflection of the latter, Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995), who was persecuted as a dissident Marxist in Communist East Germany, wrote even in the late 1980s about Nietzsche as a hidebound reactionary in "Revision des marxistischen Nietzschebilds?" Sinn und Form 5/1987 (Sept/Okt). Writers from Leon Uris to Walter Kaufmann have written at length about the problems with such an interpretation. In the philosophical tradition in which Löwith and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were working, Nietzsche’s thought was seen as a source of valuable insights, though scarcely accepted uncritically. (Is it possible to accept Nietzsche's thinking uncritically?) Psychoanalysis also has generally had a high regard for Nietzsche’s psychological insights.

Löwith in this book gives a succinct definition of what he sees as Nietzsche’s philosophical system:

Nietzsches eigentlicher Gedanke ist ein Gedanken-System, an dessen Anfang der Tod Gottes, in dessen Mitte der aus ihm hervorgegangene Nihilismus und an dessent Ende die Selbstüberwindung des Nihilismus zur ewigen Wiederkehr steht.

[Nietzsche's real though is a thought system, in whose beginning stands the death of God, in whose middle stands the nihilism that proceeds from it and at whose end stands the self-unwinding of nihilism in the eternal return.]

Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return had to do with the idea that a person would live his life again and again in exactly the same way. Löwith takes that concept as a sign of how indebted Nietzsche's thinking always remained to Christianity:

Sie ist ein ausgesprochener Religionsersatz und nicht weniger als Kierkegaards christliches Paradox ein Ausweg aus der Verzweiflung: ein Versuch aus dem "Nichts" in "Etwas" zu kommen.

[It is an outspoken substitute for religion and not less than Kierkegaard’s Christian paradox a way out of despair: an attempt to get to "something" out of the "nothing."]

Löwith also spends some time on aspects of the work of Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891), Nietzsche’s close friend Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905) and Georges Sorel (1847-1922).

Löwith in the final section of his book focuses on "The Problem of Christianity." Löwith's discussion of Kierkegaard uses three different German words that all translate into "Christianity" in English: Christlichkeit, Christenheit, Christentum. Christlichkeit in the chapter title isn’t much of a problem. But Kierkegaard used terms that translate into German as Christenheit, by which he meant the present state of the Christian institutional churches, and Christentum, which he regarded as the true, original core of Christianity.

Both the real nature of Christianity and the state of institutional Christianity are problems with which the thinkers of this time were concerned, not only Kierkegaard. Löwith here calls attention to the heavily Protestant cast of 19th century German philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Strauß, calling again on Nietzsche, who wrote, "Der protestantische Pfarrer is Großvater der deutschen Philosophie, der Protestantismus selbst ihr peccatum originale." ("The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself its peccatum originale [Original Sin].")

Tags: goethe, hegel, karl löwith, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche

Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (1 of 2)

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.

[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.]

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.

Hegel

Hegel 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.

[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.]

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.

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.

[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.]

Tags: hegel, karl löwith, von hegel zu nietzsche