Meaning in History by Karl Löwith: Chapter 1 - Burckhardt (Part One)

In some ways the work of Jacob Burckhardt is a strange place to start for a book interested in the philosophy of history. Burckhardt himself wasn't interested in philosophy of history as he rejected the idea of an historical telos, be it a secular belief in progress or a theologically infused eschatology. Burckhardt was interested in developing "the historical sense" which can be thought of as a kind of continuity between past and present.

This can be a little misleading if we think of a "continuity" as being a thing that persists through time. Continuities, in Löwith's view of Burckhardt, are the products of the historical sense. Historians investigating, selecting, prioritizing and interpreting the facts of history uncover or create continuity. If this is true, however, the objection can be raised that isn't there the danger of the historian simply reading the concerns of the present day back into the past where they do not necessarily belong? To Burckhardt, however, these concerns are misplaced. Every generation will, of necessity, interpret the past in such a way to draw out continuities that were possibly not recognized before, or rediscover continuities long forgotten. Continuities will always connect the present with the past, so we shouldn't be surprised when it does so.

There are interesting consequences from such a view of history. Take, for example, the idea of tradition. Far from the stultifying force it is often presented as, for Burckhardt tradition is free and creative. "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." (MiH: pg. 22) In this conception, tradition is not an ossified thing but a perpetually revised and renewed understanding of the world and our place in it.

Burckhardt put forward his vision of tradition informed by historical continuity against the penchant of the 19th Century for permanent revolution. Indeed, there is something quixotic or pessimistic in Burckhardt's formula. The "civilized barbarians" of the revolutionary movements were everywhere and growing in influence, stature and power. Revolutions, in the mold of the French Revolution onward, do not seek continuity except to root it out and destroy it. Tradition, and the past more generally, is to be forever banished. These revolutionary movements were inherently and irrevocably radical. At this point Löwith quotes passages from Burckhardt that sound both prophetic and apocalyptic. Images of modern nation states turned into factories of war, where all liberal and democratic impulses are subsumed into the expediency of dutiful obedience to authority, bring images of the rise of 20th Century totalitarianism immediately to mind. However, prognosticating the future 70 years on most likely is not what Burckhardt was doing. Historical consciousness is a process of the past and present. The future, or at least the distant future, doesn't enter into it. Indeed, predicting the future in such a way would suggest a telos of some sort which Burckhardt flatly rejected. Being Swiss Burckhardt's "visions" probably had much more to do with the current state of affairs in neighboring Bismarckian Germany rather than Nazi Germany.

That being said, might it not be possible that we are engaged in an act of historical continuity building when we want to draw upon Burckhardt's work to bring to light such parallels?

Meaning in History by Karl Löwith: Introduction

Meaning in History
Karl Löwith
University of Chicago Press, 1949

Löwith begins his book, sensibly enough, by defining his topic. He is writing about the philosophy of history by which he means, "a systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning." (MiH: pg. 1) This definition has a noteworthy benefit for us, the readers. It narrows the field of inquiry considerably. We need not concern ourselves with either the voluminous content of history, nor with the techniques or methodologies of the historian. Only those, blissfully rare, attempts to construct universal historical meaning need be considered.

Löwith's approach, however, is broad enough to encompass ancient and medieval thought as well as modern approaches. Indeed, the entire premise of the book is to show how the attempts to construct universal historical meaning have their roots in the theological constructs of the Judeo-Christian worldview. The religious idea of salvation as a worldly reality (as opposed to an other-worldly fulfillment) is the point of origin for all attempts to find meaning in history. So, in a very Nietzchean manner, Löwith proposes to sketch a genealogy of the idea of universal history, tracing it backwards through time from more recent incarnations to its earliest manifestations in the ancient world.

That we would need to undertake such a work seems obvious to Löwith. As a German writing in the aftermath of the Second World War it is easy to understand how he views the world as "at the end of the modern rope." (MiH: pg. 3) The easy faith in reason and progress which dominated the modern mind in the 18th Century has been eroded by the actual path history has taken. If the idea of meaning in history is not to devolve into a impotent lament of "one damn thing after another," breaking the complex of ideas that is the philosophy of history might allow us to recover something helpful that had become obscured during the transition from a religious past to a secular present. Löwith suggests there is something within the Christian conception of history that makes a more compelling argument about the reality of evil and suffering in the world than in "the modern illusion that history... solves the problem of evil by way of elimination." (MiH: pg. 3) However, Löwith is not encouraging us to recover the philosophy of history inherent in ancient Christian or Judaic thought and make it our own. Instead he wants us to recognize that the manner in which human beings attempt to make sense of the world they live in will of necessity be religious and philosophic. It will not afford us the possibility to give a final and ultimate answer in the manner of working through a algebraic formula. It will always allow for further questioning.

It is this eternal questioning which the ancient pagan world did not allow. For them the world had known boundaries and was marked by the regular procession of moments: season followed season, death followed life, decay followed growth. The sheer regularity of these "movements" allowed for the ancient pagan to think of the world as filled with ends that could be rationally explained and planned for by people. However, none of these ends were ultimate. They simply were someplace on the cycle of existence, a someplace that is of no special significance. As such, history itself could not be meaningful for the ancient mind because there was no telos, no end to which historical existence was pointing.

Löwith sees a kind of neo-paganism at work in the attempts by writers such a Tocqueville, Spengler and Toynbee to prognosticate the future. As such they too do not represent a real attempt to provide meaning to history and, thus, fall outside the defined realms of the philosophy of history, as do their ancient predecessors.