Lowith’s book recapitulates nineteenth-century German philosophy using Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as the intellectual jumping-off point. In fact, Lowith stresses that all continental philosophy after Hegel is best seen through his thought—either in agreeing with him or pushing against him, but always in conversation with Hegel. Lowith first introduces Hegel in comparison with his slightly older contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the only German of the early nineteenth century who could be considered his intellectual superior. Lowith compares the similarities between Hegel and Goethe, two men who respected and were in correspondence with each other, while each recognizing their own superiority in their respected fields of talent. “Both attempted the “adventure of reason” by placing themselves—disregarding discursive understanding—in the middle between personal existence and the existence of the world. The difference between their ways of mediation resides in the fact that Goethe sees the unity from the point of view of nature as it is perceived, but Hegel from the point of view of the historical spirit…. In each case, it lies in the fact that the affairs of men are subordinated to the service as a whole…. When Goethe speaks of nature, trusting that it also speaks through him, he means the reason behind everything that lives, just as the primary phenomena are themselves a kind of reason, more or less permeating all created things. When Hegel speaks of spirit, confident that it also speaks through him, he understands thereby nature as otherness of the idea, while the spirit is a “second nature.””
Hegel saw philosophy as progressing through time. He wrote, “As concerns the individual, each is a son of his time; and philosophy is their time comprehended in thought. It is just as foolish to imagine that some philosophy transcends its present world as to imagine that an individual can transcend his time.” Lowith expounds, “The absoluteness of his system would then consist in an absolute relativism, because Hegel—in contrast to Kant—represents the absolute as an ever-present spirit, immanent in reality…. A basic evaluation of Hegel’s meaning for the present has to proceed from the fact that he was the first to make philosophy aware of itself as the thought of time…. By viewing the past as having an effect on the future, philosophy becomes the consciousness of the age, and continuity becomes the principle of the historical process.”
Lowith later relates Hegel’s philosophy of history, “Hegel delivered his lecture on the philosophy of history in the years 1822-23 and 1830-31. The introduction explains the principle of his study: the unfolding of the spirit, and also of freedom, in stages. The spirit, which, as world spirit dominates history, is negative vis-a-vis nature; that is, progress in the unfolding of the spirit towards freedom is progress in liberation from subjection to nature. In Hegel’s philosophy, therefore, nature as such has no independent positive significance…. Furthermore, the everyday life of mankind is without substantial significance for Hegel’s idea of world history…. World history moves upon a higher plane than that of everyday life, whose ethical criteria do not obtain for political events…. Within the movement which involves the “world as a whole,” individuals are only means to the end of this whole.”
Another of Hegel’s primary goals was to preserve Christian religion within the framework of the primacy of the bourgeois State. “Thus [Hegel] sees Jesus as a “man who sought to restore man in his totality” by combining within himself, the God-man, both human and the divine…. The outcome of this absorption of religion into philosophy is Hegel’s philosophy of religion.” Hegel explains, “If there is to be no knowledge of God, the only realm which remains to interest the spirit is the realm of the ungodly, the limited, the finite. Of course man must be content with the finite; but it is an even higher necessity that he have a Sabbath in his life, in which he may transcend his workaday affairs, in which he may devote himself to what is truly genuine and come into awareness of it…. The object of religion, as of philosophy, is the eternal truth of its own objectivity.” Lowith concludes with Hegel’s attempted reconciliation between Athens and Jerusalem, “Hegel still belongs to the “Old Testament” of philosophy, for his philosophy is still based on the standpoint of theology. His philosophy of religion is the last great attempt ever made to “resolve” (ambiguously) the conflict between Christianity and paganism, between Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Hegel is the culmination of the ambiguity of the modern age, which equates the negation of Christianity with Christianity.”
Lowith explains how Hegel’s followers, on both the German left and right, tried to espouse his logic, even while vehemently disagreeing with their master. “It is the task of the progressive spirit of the age to free Hegel’s philosophy from itself by means of the dialectic method. According to Hegel’s statement that “the present is uppermost,” it is the absolute right of the age which superseded him to defend his system critically against himself, in order to accomplish the principle of unfolding and freedom.” The neo-Hegelian Johann Scholz posited, “Prior to Hegel, no great thinker dared so courageously to put philosophy into the stream of life. They all stood on the bank, thinking it their job to build a bridge across it, for eternity.”
Perhaps the philosopher who took Hegel’s philosophical system most-beyond what was originally intended was Karl Marx. “Marx’s criticism of the existing order is not motivated by mere “desire for change.” It has its roots in a Promethean rebellion against the Christian order of creation. Only the atheism of man with faith in himself must also see to the creation of the world…. For [Marx], Epicurus is the greatest representative of the Greek enlightenment. He was the first among mortal men to dare to defy the gods of heaven…. The destruction of the Christian religion is the prerequisite for the construction of a world in which man is his own master.” Marx claimed, “It is therefore the duty of history, the beyond of truth having vanished, to establish the truth of this world. Philosophy is in the service of history.” Lowith explains, “Criticism of heaven is transformed thereby into criticism of earth, criticism of religion into criticism of right, criticism of theology into criticism of politics.” The political sphere has replaced the religious as the space in which man interacts with his fellows in Marx’s system. Politics has been elevated to the supra-position in society. However, Marx’s communism is placed squarely within the structures of Hegel’s system. Communism “is intended as the realization of the dialectical unity between independent action and depersonalization which is the outcome of Hegel’s history of philosophy. It is the practical way in which man, living in society, keeps the entire objective world in subjection, as self-generated, and also remains himself in his otherness. Thus according to Marx’s idea, it is not only the expropriation of private property, but also the “vindication of real human life as man’s property,” a total return to himself of man who has become a stranger to himself within the objective world which he has generated…. True communism… as Marx, the Hegelian, conceives it, is a reappropriation of human nature at the stage of development which civilization has attained in capitalism. Within this context, it is the “genuine resolution of the conflict between… existence and essence, between depersonalization and independent activity, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved.”” Lowith concludes by describing the new Marxian man, “The man who lives in a communistic society does not possess objective reality in the form of ownership common to private capital, but rather through the fact that all objects are for him a positive, depersonalized objectification of himself. He is the man to whom the world indeed belongs, because its manner of production does not alienate him, but establishes him.”
Another later philosopher who interacted with Hegel was the Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, who looked inward towards the individual man, instead of out to the society of men. Kierkegaard complains, “Spoiled by continuous converse with the historical, man seeks solely that which is significant, man concerns himself solely for what is accidental, the historical issue, rather than what is essential, what is innermost, freedom, morality.” Lowith contrasts, “The Hegelian refuses to be content with the subjectivity of existing.” For Kierkegaard, everything rests upon the individual at base. “What is an individual existing man? Yes, our age knows only too well how little he is; but this is the peculiar immortality of the age…. Without ethical or religious enthusiasm, a man must despair upon finding himself an individual man—but not otherwise.”
For Lowith, this epoch of German philosophy, in which every new thought was in response to Hegel, ends with Friedrich Nietzsche. “Nietzsche’s actual thought is a thought system, at the beginning of which stands the death of God, in its midst the ensuing nihilism, and at its end the self-surmounting of nihilism in eternal recurrence…. The problem of eternity, how it comes to mean eternal recurrence, is found in the way by which Nietzsche surmounted “time” with “man.” It is a way of escape from the history of Christianity.” Nietzsche did not place much faith in bourgeois society, “The center of gravity of necessity belongs among the mediocre: mediocrity, as the surety and vehicle of the future, consolidates its position against the rule of the mob and the eccentrics (both usually in league). This produces a new opponent for the exceptional man, or a new temptation.” Nietzsche concludes with his own prophetic warning, “Who still desires to rule? Who to obey? Both are too burdensome. One herd, without a shepherd! Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is equal: if anyone feels differently, he goes of his own accord to the madhouse.”
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