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?