Abstract
In the foreword to Von Hegel, Löwith states that he has no intention of writing a “Geistesgeschichte in the usual sense of the word” since its principles “evolving from Hegel’s metaphysics of the spirit have become so attenuated that they are now trivial.” Rather he seeks “to bring accurately to life the epoch which starts with Hegel and ends with Nietzsche, ‘transcribing’ the philosophical history of the nineteenth century within the horizon of the present.” But in sharp contrast to the “transcribing” activities of many of his contemporaries, Löwith emphasizes that “to transcribe history does not mean to counterfeit the irrevocable power of what has taken place once and for all, or to increase vitality at the expense of truth, but to do justice to the vital fact of history that the tree may be known only by its fruits, the father by his son.” Thus Löwith’s “transcription” of the intellectual developments of the nineteenth century is based on the view that past and present are intimately related and manifest fundamental similarities. “Hegel seems to stand very far removed from us and Nietzsche very near, if we consider only the latter’s influence and the former’s works. In fact, though, Hegel’s work mediated through his pupils had an effect upon intellectual and political life which it would be difficult to overestimate, while the numerous influences exerted by Nietzsche since 1890 have given birth to a German ideology only in our own time. The Nietzscheans of yesterday correspond to the Hegelians of the 1840’s.” 1
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References
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, pp. v–vi.
Löwith, first edition of Von Hegel, p. 530.
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, p. 64.
Ibid., p. 67. This is certainly a far cry from Löwith’s earlier view of the young-Hegelians as writers “whose real ambitions were not to surpass the experiences of life per se and of human understanding. They return again to the ‘human all too human,’ even to the all too human dimension of knowledge.” Along with the belief in something like “pure thinking” or “absolute consciousness,” they also lack every real potentiality for the extravagance of conceptual thinking. “Feuerbach und der Ausgang,” p. 327.
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, pp. 80–82.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 102.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 161.
Ibid., p. 179.
Ibid., pp. 123–124.
Ibid., p. vi. For a remarkably similar view of the development since Hegel see G. Lichtheim, “On the Rim of the Volcano, Heidegger, Bloch, Adorno,” Encounter, XII (1964), pp. 98–105.
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, pp. 202–205.
Ibid., p. 209.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 84.
“If Hegel causes the eternal to be manifest in the temporal, this is not the result of any formal dialectics, but an intrinsic metaphysics of the Christian logos.” In fact “his philosophy includes within itself the Christian consciousness of the absolute significance of the historical appearance of Christ.” Therefore “not any present moment at all was for him ‘the highest’ but only that which like his own, is a ‘final link’ in the’ sacred chain’ of the past, now appropriated by thought in its full extent.” Hence it is only the time which extends from Thaies to Proclus and from thence to his own age which makes it possible for Hegel to write a period after the ‘now’ of ‘up to now.’ In his unification of all previous history, the accent “is on the entire ‘thus far now,’ that is, ‘finally’ the world spirit has come; and this entirety is a deliberate goal.” Hegel left the question open as to what might proceed from this goal in the future, but because three epochs have now been concluded [one free, some free, all free], “Hegel considered history, taken abstractly, to be ended.” Ibid., pp. 127–129.
Ibid., p. 84 and p. 205.
Ibid., p. 210. In the original German the first sentence of this passage reads “Das wirkliche Kreuz in Hegel’s Analyse der Zeit... etc.” The translator has rendered this as “The true crux in Hegel’s analysis of time” which is literally correct but somewhat vague, hence my interpolation of “crucial point.”
Ibid., pp. 213–214.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid., pp. 214–215.
Ibid., p. 216.
Ibid., pp. 216–217. But if Löwith is here highly critical of the consequences of Hegel’s “metaphysical historicism,” his judgment of the young-Hegelians is even more severe. “The actual pupils of Hegel converted his metaphysics of history into an absolute historicism; that is, they retained merely the historical aspect of the absoluteness of the spirit which unfolds historically, and made the events of the age into the supreme power over even philosophy and the spirit.” Thus the young-Hegelians transform Hegel’s retrospective and reminiscent historicism into an historical futurism; they desire to be more than the consequence of history, they want themselves to be epoch-making and thus ‘historic’ Ibid., p. 217.
Ibid., p. 219.
Ibid. In the original German, the last sentence of this paragraph reads, “Und wenn man etwas an der Weltgeschichte bewundern kann dann ist es die Kraft, die Ausdauer und Zähigkeit, mit der sich die Menschheit aus allen Einbussen, Zerstörungen und Verwundungen immer neu wieder herstellt.” The translator has rendered it as follows: “If there is anything in world history to be admired it is the power, the patience, and stubbornness with which it continues to recreate mankind after all losses,, destructions, and injuries [italics mine].”
Ibid., pp. 219–220.
Ibid., pp. 221–222. This tendency to allow the moment to take precedence over other considerations was an underlying motif in all of Goethe’s writings. In his drama Egmont, Goethe has the hero remark, “Do I but live to think about life,” i.e. to speculate historically, “Should I not rather enjoy the present moment?” And in his Faust, Goethe created a character for whom complete bliss can only be attained when he finds the perfect moment, that moment of which he demands, “Please linger; you are so beautiful.” Egmont, III, ii, and Faust, I, iii, in Goethes sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1854), I, p. 69 and IX, p. 175.
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, p. 222.
Quoted in Ibid., p. 223, 225. Löwith also illustrates the primacy of nature in Goethe’s thought by pointing out that “in the midst of the French Revolution, he occupied himself with the metamorphosis of plants, during the campaign in France, with the phenomena of color, and during the July Revolution, with morphology.” Ibid., p. 225.
Ibid., pp. 225–227.
Ibid., p. 227.
Ibid., p. 230.
Ibid., pp. 324 and 200.
Löwith, first edition of Von Hegel, p. 530.
Löwith, translation of Von Hegel, p. 181.
Ibid., p. 82.
Ibid., pp. vi–vii. Löwith also observes in not a single moment of their perpetual change, do time and history per se offer us a place where one can stand firmly. Continuity, duration, and eternity are — independent of the faith in progress, reason, and freedom — [extra-temporal] presuppositions of each and every philosophy of history. First edition of Von Hegel, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 530.
Ibid., p. 9.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Riesterer, B.P. (1969). Hegel and Goethe. In: Karl Löwith’s View of History: A Critical Appraisal of Historicism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7837-2_4
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