Table Of ContentKarl Lowith's View of History:
A Critical Appraisal of Historicism
Karl Lowith's View of History:
A Critical Appraisal of Historicism
by
BERTHOLD P. RIESTERER
•
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE /1969
ISBN-l3: 978-94-011-7839-6 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-011-7837-2
DOl: 10.1007/ 978-94-011-7837-2
@1969 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
To my Parents
PREFACE
This brief survey of Professor Karl LOwith's analysis of the modem histori
cal consciousness is the outgrowth of a year's study at the University of
Heidelberg while Professor L6with was still an active member of the faculty.
An early version, in the form of a dissertation, was submitted to the History
Department of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.
Numerous friends and colleagues have helped me at various stages of this
work and I am indebted to them even though I cannot name them all indi
vidually. However special thanks must be accorded to Professor W. J. Bos
senbrook of Wayne State University for introducing me to the entire prob
lem of anti-historicism and to Professor LOwith's work. I am also greatly
indebted to Professor John Barlow of Indiana University for his patient
assistance with the translations, however the final responsibility for all
renditions rests, of course, solely with the author.
Last but not least, I am grateful to Mrs. James Work of Bloomington,
Indiana, for providing a quiet retreat on the shores of Lake Michigan where
much of the actual writing was done.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Chapter I. Reaction to Heidegger 12
Chapter II. Historicism as Humanism 24
Chapter III. Hegel and Goethe 39
Chapter IV. Meaning in History 56
Chapter V. History as a Natural Happening 79
Bibliography 100
INTRODUCTION
The rise of our modem historical consciousness or historicism has long been
the subject of careful analysis and study.l Most scholars agree that it arose in
Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century and that it constituted a
definite reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis upon universal, immuta
ble, and all-sovereign natural law. Where Voltaire and Turgot were con
vinced that the general rather than the particular was the chief concern of
historical investigation - " 'The core is always the same' " as Voltaire stated
- men like Herder, Hegel, and Ranke placed great stress upon the con
creteness and particularity of individual historical phenomena. Moreover,
in direct opposition to Voltaire's interest in " 'that great society of all-wise
men which exists everywhere and which is everywhere independent,' "2 they
emphasized the importance of the various national units and their unique
and peculiar historical development.
But while it is thus legitimate to speak of a "historical school" opposed to
the Enlightenment's natural law orientation, this historical school in itself
was not a homogeneous group. Recent scholarship has indicated that pro
found differences existed between its various representatives. And one
scholar has even gone so far as to reassess the entire historical school in the
light of these differences. He has found that in sharp contrast to Hegel's
conviction, that without the postulate of absolute reason man can never
attain to a conceptual mastery of history, Ranke and his successors, espe
cially Droysen, inaugurated an approach which sought to understand history
1 Among the better studies are those of Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des
Historismus, 2 Vols, (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1936). Friedrich
Engel-Janosi, The Growth of German Historicism (''The Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Sciences," Vol. LXII; Baltimore: The Johns Hop
kins Press, 1944). R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Galaxy Books,
1956). G. G. Iggers, The German Conception of History, (Mid{tletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 1968).
2 Quoted in Engel-Janosi, op cit., pp. 15-16.
2 INTRODUCTION
from within or, as it were, to read and interpret the "text" of history accord
ing to its own intrinsic principles. Only through this kind of "internal" ap
proach, it was argued, could the genuine character of individual accomplish
ment properly emerge. Thus the basic model for the Ranke-Droysen ap
proach to history was not a modified speculative idealism, as once believed,
but rather the Romantic hermeneutic of their day, particularly the Schleier
macher variety.3
However, whether "idealistic" or "hermeneutic," the new historicist ap
proach did not enjoy a complete triumph in the nineteenth century. By the
1870's its general validity as well as its social and aesthetic usefulness were
seriously questioned. One of the earliest manifestations of this nascent "anti
historicism" can be discerned in Nietzsche's aversion to the enervating and
politically servile fact-gathering into which Rankianism had by then degen
erated. Nietzsche argued that the Rankians had emasculated history as a
vital source of action by reducing it to a mere passive cataloguing of the
minute occurrences which taken together constitute the historical event.
Thereby, they not only fragmented the great event, preventing the rise of a
healthy "monumental" or "critical" perspective, but they also played down
the role of the individual in effecting decisive changes. Instead, Nietzsche
wanted a historiography which would stimulate man's vital and essentially
irrational will impulses; for these alone, he felt, gave rise to new and fruitful
attempts to master reality.4
Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche's older contemporary, was also displeased
with the academic historical scholarship of his day but not so much because
he found it uninspiring and enervating. Rather Burckhardt was convinced
that its excessive preoccupation with documents and statistics only revealed
the superficial material interests of men instead of what they "really felt,
thought, and believed." For the kind of knowledge Burckhardt was inter
ested in, art and literature seemed better sources than archival materials.
Yet his study of these sources yielded a knowledge of generalized character
istics or types rather than individual facts. Thus instead of focusing upon the
specific institutions and events elicited by the historical school, Burckhardt
preferred the aesthetic supra-historical contemplation of general types: "the
man of the Renaissance," "the Greek of the heroic age," etc. within the
universal historical continuum.5
3 H. G; Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (2nd ed. Tiibingen: Mohr, 1965) pp.
185-205.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Histo,rie fiir das Leben" in
Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1955) pp. 95-195.
5 Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: an Interpretation of History ed. by James
H. Nichols (New York: Meridian Books, 1955) pp. 60-61. Also see Benedetto Croce's
INTRODUCTION 3
Nineteenth century anti-historicism was also evident in the attempt of the
positivist thinkp,rs to transform history into a predictable science analogous
to the natural sciences. In sharp opposition to the historicist emphasis upon
the uniqueness and peculiarity of human accomplishments, the positivists
argued that human life was in no way fundamentally different from other
forms of life. Hence historical processes were considered identical in kind
with natural processes, and the methods of natural science were judged ap
plicable to the interpretation of history. In fact as early as 1864, Comte
himself proposed that there should be a new science called "sociology"
whose initial work, the gathering of facts about human life, was to be done
by the historian but whose ultimate goal was the discovery of the causal
connections between these facts. "The sociologist would thus be a kind of
super-historian raising history to the rank of a science by thinking scien
tifically about the same facts about which the historian thought only em
pirically."6
Moreover, as the century drew to a close, many thinkers grew increasingly
sceptical of the historicist orientation particularly because of its failure to
provide a firm basis for an objective ethical system. This destruction of the
ethical is clearly manifest in the demands of hermeneutic historicism. If we
are not to judge historical phenomena by a priori standards but rather to
derive the standard of measurement and understanding from the "text" of
history itself, then obviously there can exist no universally binding norms
for human action. All the goals of human striving are seen to be relative to
the standards of a particular time and therefore subject to change with the
changing times. Consequently, there remains nothing but a surveying under
standing of the course of history without any criteria for the ultimate right
or wrong of our actions.
Initially, this problem of historical relativism appeared in the guise of a
theoretical inquiry into the nature of the knowledge acquired in the cultural
or historical sciences Geisteswissenschaften as juxtaposed to the kind of
knowledge acquired in the natural sciences N aturwissenschaften. The leader
of this inquiry was the Neo-Kantian South-West German School of Wilhelm
Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Here the principle question was: what is
the meaning and significance of a knowledge which does not understand the
individual as an instance of a universal law - as does scientific knowledge -
but instead wants and claims to be a valid knowledge of the individual and
particular per se? Or, to put it more concretely, how do individual events of
comments on Burckhardt in his History as the Story of Liberty, Tr. by Sylvia Sprigge
(New York: Meridian Books, 1955) pp. 93-103.
6 Collingwood, op. cit., p. 128.
4 INTRODUCTION
the past become history and what are the criteria for determining the truth
of the knowledge of such individual events? The only answer the Neo
Kantians could provide was to claim that the cultural sciences constituted a
completely different field of investigation from that of the natural sciences;
that, in fact, they were a kind of special "noumenal" realm in which alone
meaning and value could be located. However this recourse to a special
value realm was obviously no satisfactory answer to the problem of histori
cal relativism nor did it afford any real insight into the nature of historical
knowledge as such.7 The real pioneer in laying the foundations for a thor
ough-going reconsideration of the entire problem of history both as know
ledge and as a way of approaching reality was Wilhelm Dilthey.
Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey began his inquiry into the nature and
meaning of historical knowledge from the theoretical standpoint, i.e. by
undertaking a "critique of historical reason."s But this "critique" soon led
him to a series of much deeper insights which centered in his discovery that
it was wrong to distinguish a separate knowing "subject" from a mere "ob
ject" of knowledge in the cultural sciences. This was done by the Neo
Kantians following the model of the natural sciences. Rather, Dilthey was
convinced that" 'the first condition which makes historical knowledge [Ge
schichtswissenschaft] possible consists in the fact that I myself am a histori
cal being; [thus] whoever studies history is the very same individual who
makes history.' "9 The discovery of this essential similarity of subject and
object in tum led Dilthey to an inquiry into the "basic structures of human
life itself." These basic structures of life, he found, consist of various "for
mations" Gebilde, both scientific and cultural, which possess an innate tend
ency to express or objectify themselves. Yet he also emphasizes that these
"objectivations" are always relative to the particular level of reflection em
bodied in a specific historical epoch. And every historical epoch, in tum, is
based upon a constitutive set of conditions or "vital moods" Lebensstim
mungen as Dilthy preferred to call them. These "vital moods" determine the
character or the "spirit" of the epoch in everything that it produces. Thus
all of the varied "objectivations" of the "spirit" only really become intelli
gible when seen in the light of these underlying and ever changing "vital
moods". In short, only after one has become aware of the importance of
7 Gadamer, op. cit., pp. 205-208.
B As Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason attempted to reestablish and justify the
methodology of the natural sciences, so Dilthey initially regarded it as his task to
develop a methodological foundation for the cultural sciences. L. Landgrebe, Major
Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy, Tr. by K. F. Reinhardt (New York:
F. Ungar, 1966) p. 108.
9 Quoted in Gadamer, op. cit., p. 209.
Description:This brief survey of Professor Karl LOwith's analysis of the modem histori cal consciousness is the outgrowth of a year's study at the University of Heidelberg while Professor L6with was still an active member of the faculty. An early version, in the form of a dissertation, was submitted to the Hi
