Abstract

Professor Löwith of the University of Heidelberg, former pupil and colleague of Martin Heidegger, whose Meaning in History and From Hegel to Nietzsche have already made a great impact on English-speaking philosophers concerned with existentialism, theology and Marxism, has here selected eleven essays. Eight of them first appeared in English between 1942 and 1954, when the author was Professor of Philosophy at Hartford Theological Seminary and later at the New School for Social Research. The other three essays were originally published in German, but their date and place of publication are not given. It would have been helpful to have the details of original publication in a footnote with each essay; for instance, the pessimistic ‘Historical Background of European Nihilism’ was written in exile in 1943. It is a vividly documented reminder that ‘Nihilism as the disavowal of existing civilization was the only real belief of all truly educated people at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nihilism is not a result of the Great War but, on the contrary, its cause’—a salutary corrective of the stereotype of the nineteenth century as a century of blind belief in progress. That notion is historically and critically examined in ‘Nature, History and Existentialism’, which shows that ‘the quest for the meaning of history is in itself historically conditioned. It is a specifically Western, even Christian quest. It can be traced back to the Old and New Testaments’ faith in a purposeful story of salvation’, as contrasted equally with the Oriental and Greek concepts of nature and time. But, historically, the ‘modern’ concept of nature as a blind material mechanism, and of man as either just another mechanism or a denatured, homeless spirit is shown to have produced the tormented reactions of Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. ‘What remains is total and radical contingency of existence, existence without support, a thought which Kant felt to be intolerable for human reason, while its opposite, inner necessity, is undemonstrable. The difference between Kant and modern French existentialists is that the latter seem to have managed to find radical contingency tolerable and even liberating, and the demonstration of an inherent necessity unnecessary’.