Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History / Edition 1

by Karl Löwith

Overview

Modern man sees with one eye of faith and one eye of reason. Consequently, his view of history is confused. For centuries, the history of the Western world has been viewed from the Christian or classical standpoint--from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles. The modern mind, however, is neither Christian nor pagan--and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result. To develop this theory, Karl Löwith--beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible--analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity and in Christian times. "A book of distinction and great importance. . . . The author is a master of philosophical interpretation, and each of his terse and substantial chapters has the balance of a work of art."--Helmut Kuhn, Journal of Philosophy

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226495552
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/1957
Series:	Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Karl Löwith (1897-1973) was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University, Germany.

Read an Excerpt

Meaning in History

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By Karl Löwith

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1949 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-49555-2

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CHAPTER 1

BURCKHARDT

BURCKHARDT'S VIEW OF HISTORY

THE proper purpose of Burckhardt's lifelong study and teaching of history was neither to construct "world history" philosophically nor to promote technical scholarship but to develop the historical sense. His course on history was intended as an introduction to the study of "the Historical," in order to stimulate the genuine appropriation of those periods of our history which may appeal individually. For to him history was not an objective science concerning neutral facts but "the record of facts which one age finds remarkable in another." As a record it depends on remembering, and each generation, by a new effort of appropriation and interpretation, has to remember time and again its own past unless it wants to forget it and to lose the historical sense and substance of its own existence. Such interpretation implies selection, emphasis, and evaluation. They are not regrettable or avoidable subjectifications of neutral facts but creative in regard to historical understanding as well as to historical facts; for it is only by selective interpretation and evaluation that we can determine which are, after all, the historically relevant, remarkable, significant, and important facts. "There may be a fact of first importance in Thucydides which will only be recognized a hundred years from now." Far from being neutral and therefore incapable of judgment, Burckhardt was the most consciously selective and critical historian of the nineteenth century. But he never pretended to be a philosopher.

From the beginning, Burckhardt declares that his Reflections on History cannot and will not compete with a philosophy of history. His task is more modest. He will merely "link up a number of observations and inquiries to a series of half-random thoughts." He rejects any attempt to form a "system" and anyclaim to historical "ideas." The philosophy of history is to him a contradiction in terms, inasmuch as history coordinates observations, while philosophy subordinates them to a principle. He dismisses likewise a theology of history. "The amelioration offered by religion is beyond our scope." The religious solution of the meaning of history belongs, he says, to a "special faculty" of man—to faith, which Burckhardt did not pretend to have.

He refers to Hegel and Augustine as the two who made the most outstanding attempts to explain history systematically by a principle: by God or the absolute Spirit, each working out his purpose in history. Against Hegel's theodicy, Burckhardt insists that the reasonableness of history is beyond our ken, for we are not privy to the purpose of eternal wisdom. Against Augustine's religious interpretation he says: "To us it does not matter." Both transcend our possible, purely human wisdom. Philosophy and theology of history have to deal with first beginnings and ultimate ends, and the profane historian cannot deal with either of them. The one point accessible to him is the permanent center of history: "man, as he is and was and ever shall be," striving, acting, suffering. The inevitable result of Burckhardt's refusal to deal with ultimate ends is his complementary resignation concerning ultimate meaning. He asks himself: "How far does this result in skepticism?" and he answers that true skepticism certainly has its place in a world where beginning and end are unknown and where the middle is in constant motion.

And yet there is some kind of permanence in the very flux of history, namely, its continuity. This is the only principle discernible in Burckhardt's Reflections on History, the one thin thread that holds together his observations after he has dismissed the systematic interpretations by philosophy and theology. The whole significance of history depends for Burckhardt on continuity as the common standard of all particular historical evaluations. If a radical crisis really disrupted history's continuity, it would be the end of a historical epoch, but not a "historical" crisis.

Continuity as understood by him is more than mere going on, and it is less than progressive development. It is less than progressive because it does not imply the complacent assumption that the whole process of history has the purpose of leading up to our contemporary mediocrity as its goal and fulfilment. According to Burckhardt, man's mind and soul were complete long ago. And continuity is more than mere going on, because it implies a conscious effort in remembering and renewing our heritage, instead of merely accepting the cake of custom. Conscious historical continuity constitutes tradition and frees us in relation to it. The only people who renounce this privilege of historical consciousness are primitive and civilized barbarians. Spiritual continuity, as constituted by historical consciousness, is "a prime concern of man's existence," because it is the only proof of the "significance of the duration of our existence." Hence we must urgently desire that the awareness of this continuity should remain alive in our minds. Whether such continuity exists outside our historical consciousness, in a divine mind concerned with human history, we can neither tell nor imagine.

Thus continuity points out not merely the significance of formal duration but also the need of preservation. The value of continuity consists in the conscious continuation of history as a tradition, and the historical tradition has to be continued and preserved against a revolutionary will to permanent revisions. Burckhardt's basic experience was that, since the French Revolution, Europe had been living in the state of a rapidly disintegrating tradition; and the fear of a threatening break with all that is precious and costly in European tradition was the background of his understanding of his historical mission. The personal motive of his study of history and of his almost desperate clinging to continuity was a passionate reaction against the revolutionary trend of his age. He realized that the restoration from 1815 to 1848 was but an "interlude" in a yet unfinished "era of revolutions," which began with the French Revolution and which proceeds in our days to the Bolshevist, the Fascist, and the National Socialist revolutions. By defending the mission of the historical consciousness, he tried at least to retard the imminent dissolution; and he defended his historical creed against the radical movement, in which some of his most intimate friends had taken an active part. He thought that a radically egalitarian democracy would not lead to individual liberty and responsibility but to a pretentious mediocrity and a new type of despotism. He feared that economic socialism would promote an overdeveloped state machine, which any bold demagogue might easily seize and exploit, combining social democracy with military dictatorship. This process seemed to him prefigured in the paradigmatic course of the French Revolution, for Napoleon's Caesarism was the logical consequence of the social revolution inaugurated by Rousseau and executed by the Jacobins. "The two claws of the pincers" between which so-called "culture" will then be caught are the emancipated working classes from below and the military hierarchy from above; for it is the emancipation of the modern masses from the ancient social hierarchy and religious authority which created on the Continent a nationalism and a corresponding militarism of a hitherto unknown thoroughness as the only remaining guaranty of social order.

Disgusted by contemporary history, Burckhardt escaped to Italy to write his Cicerone and to collect material for The Age of Constantine, which gave him a historical standard for an understanding and evaluation of contemporary events; for what happened in the third and fourth centuries, when the ancient world disintegrated, may occur once more: a radical change in the thoughts and hearts of men, from progressive optimism to ascetic pessimism. Feeling that minor amendments would not do when the whole social body is in anarchy, he resolved to retire into a sort of Stoic-Epicurean privacy. "Yes, I will escape them all: the radicals, the communists and industrialists, the sophisticated and presumptuous ... the philosophers and sophists, the state-fanatics and idealists.... You do not realize what tyranny will be imposed upon the spiritual life on the pretext that higher education be a secret ally of capital which has to be destroyed." Thirty years after his first premonitions, Burckhardt became even more keen and specific in his prognostications. It is possible, he thought, that a few half-endurable decades may still be granted to us until Europe, after a series of terrific wars and upheavals, will settle down into a kind of imperium Romanum, centralized by a military-economic despotism to which liberal democrats and proletarians alike will have to submit; "for this fine century [the twentieth] is designed for anything rather than true democracy." The vulgarization and standardization of life seemed to him inevitable. Instead of a liberal democracy, he foresaw the totalitarian state governed by terribles simplificateurs, who will overrun old Europe and rule with absolute brutality, scornful of law and quite unconcerned with the people's freedom and sovereignty. He writes in 1871 to a German friend:

I have a premonition, which sounds like utter folly and yet which positively will not leave me: the military state must become one great factory. Those hordes of men in the great industrial centers will not be left indefinitely to their greed and want. What must logically come is a fixed and supervised stint of misery, glorified by promotions and uniforms, daily begun and ended to the sound of drums.... Long voluntary subjection under individual Führers and usurpers is in prospect. People no longer believe in principles but will, periodically, probably believe in saviors.... For this reason authority will again raise its head in the pleasant twentieth century, and a terrible head.

But this new authority, by which nineteenth-century liberalism will find an unexpected end, is no longer an authority of tradition but the result of a revolutionary reaction against nineteenth-century makeshift provisions. Seen in this historical context, Burckhardt's emphasis on continuity is certainly understandable and yet remains astounding because it is the only desideratum (Wünschbarkeit) which he exempts from his devastating criticism of desiderata as standards of historical judgments. Historical continuity and consciousness have an almost sacramental character for him; they are his "last religion." Only in regard to those events which have established a continuum of Western tradition does Burckhardt retain an element of teleological, if not providential, interpretation.

Our own historical continuity, he declares, was created primarily by the Hellenization of the East after Alexander, the political and cultural unification under Rome, and the preservation of the whole complex of ancient Western culture by the Christian church. Here we can discern a historical purpose on the grand scale which is, "to us at any rate," apparent, namely, the creation of a common world culture, which also made possible the spread of a world religion. Both were capable of being transmitted to the Teutonic barbarians of the Völkerwanderung as the future bond of a new Europe. He adds, however, that the Roman Empire was inaugurated by the most frightful methods and completed in rivers of blood. And the question as to whether the forces that succumbed were perhaps nobler and better cannot be silenced by reference to the fact that there is nothing more successful than success.

However creative great upheavals and destructions may turn out to be, evil remains evil, Burckhardt maintains, and we cannot fathom the economy of the world's history. If there is anything to be learned from the study of history, it is a sober insight into our real situation: struggle and suffering, short glories and long miseries, wars and intermittent periods of peace. All are equally significant, and none reveals an ultimate meaning in a final purpose. "Ripeness is all." The existence of the many is at all times and everywhere such that "it just compensates the trouble." The most grandiose decisions and efforts may result also in an ordinary destiny. The only sound conclusion to be drawn from this spectacle is not a consolation with a higher world plan but a more moderate "taxation" of our earthly existence. The historical greatness of a nation does not make up for the annihilation of one single individual, nor are nations as such entitled to permanent existence. The balance between fortune and misfortune in history is kept not by a providential design but by the frailty of gain as well as of loss, and we are at a loss when we try to assess the historical losses and gains.

At the beginning of his lecture on "Fortune and Misfortune in History" Burckhardt illustrates our average judgments asfollows: It was fortunate that the Greeks conquered Persia; and Rome, Carthage; unfortunate that Athens was defeated by Sparta and that Caesar was murdered before he had had time to consolidate the Roman Empire. It was fortunate that Europe held Islam at bay, unfortunate that the German emperors were defeated in their struggle with the Papacy, and so on. But in the last analysis, Burckhardt says, all such judgments annul one another, and the nearer we come to the present, the more opinions diverge. If Burckhardt were alive today and were asked about his judgment of contemporary events, as a European he would probably say that the defeat of Nazi Germany was fortunate and desirable, the rise of Russia appalling and undesirable, though the first depends on the second. As a historian, however, he would refuse to predict whether the alliance and victory of the Allies is ultimately a "fortune" or a "misfortune" in this incalculable world-historical process.

It is obvious that, on the basis of such an outlook, neither a philosophy nor a theology of history can be constructed. The thin thread of mere continuity, without beginning, progress, and end, does not support such a system. And yet Burckhardt's is the soundest modern reflection on history. It is "modern," inasmuch as Burckhardt understands the classical as well as the Christian position, without committing himself to either of them. Over against the modern striving for social security, he praises the ancient greatness of passion and sacrifice for the sake of the city-state; over against the modern striving for a higher standard of living, he has a deep appreciation for the Christian conquest of all things earthly. At the same time he knows perfectly well that "the spirit of antiquity is not any longer our spirit" and that "from Christianity 1800 years are separating us." The Christian faith and hope in a moral purpose and meaning are toned down in Burckhardt's reflections to blind desiderata, "the deadly enemies of true historical insight." How different is this modern wisdom of Burckhardt's from all those philosophies of history—from Hegel to Augustine—which definitely knew, or professed to know, the true desirability of historical events and successions! They knew it, not as scientific historians, not even as philosophers, but as theologians who believed in history as a story of fulfilment.

BURCKHARDT'S VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY

At a time which appears to us as having still enjoyed stability, security, and freedom, Burckhardt considered himself already an uprooted refugee. "Set thy house in order," he warns a friend in the prosperous Germany of 1870; that "is the wisest thing to do for us in all of central Europe," for everything will radically change. Hence his deep understanding of that classical period of disintegration in which the followers of Christ opposed the pleasures and vices of a decaying society and conquered the souls of men. While the world and all worldly powers were corrupt, the Christian church spread charity, discipline, and asceticism, and even men and women of the Roman nobility gave away their possessions for the sake of the poor and resolved to live in the world without being of it. Others, still more radical, left the cities and went into the deserts or into monasteries. To Burckhardt these men were not unprofitable escapists but "heroes of the desert," who, after a tremendous struggle, had realized a profound need in an age of civilized barbarism. Without the extreme example of these early monks and hermits, the church would not have maintained its integrity and become the only spiritual institution which nursed and preserved all higher education. We, however, says Burckhardt, who take the pursuit of science and the freedom of intellectual work still for granted, like to forget how much we are indebted to the church of those "Dark" Ages for the cultivation of a knowledge which is not worldly and of practical purpose.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction
I. Burckhardt
II. Marx
III. Hegel
IV. Progress versus Providence
1. Proudhon
2. Conte
3. Condorcet and Turgot
V. Voltaire
VI. Vico
VII. Boussuet
VIII. Joachim
IX. Augustine
X. Orosius
XI. The Biblical View of History
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendix
I. Modern Transfigurations of Joachism
II. Nietzsche's Revival of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index