Karl 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.