The Decline of Reason
From Hegel to Nietzsche: the Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought.
by Karl Löwith.
Translated by David E. Green. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 447 pp. $8.50.
This book was completed in Japan in 1939 and first published in Switzerland in 1941. At that time its author—at present a distinguished teacher of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg—was in exile from Germany. The Nazis were then illustrating the possible and dreadful consequences of precisely that “revolution in 19th-century thought” which is described in Professor Löwith’s study. But the book, which in large part deals with the emergence of nihilism and the concurrent critique of liberal democracy, is no less relevant now that fascism has been defeated. Having survived an attack from the Right, liberal democracy continues to be threatened by the Left, and nihilism in various guises continues to plague us. It is therefore good to have this book in English at last, especially since it is a very fine book indeed.
Professor Löwith brings imposing credentials to his task. As a former student of Husserl and assistant to Heidegger, he has been in direct contact with the two most important heirs of the 19th-century tradition of German philosophy. As a meticulous scholar, he shows himself completely familiar with both the thought and history of the period which he discusses. Dealing with matters inherently controversial, he manages to sustain a detachment that is far different from the mere absence of concern. It is difficult to pin a label on his views. One might call him a conservative if that term could be stripped of its current opprobrium; Professor Löwith’s conservatism is of the type that does not, for instance, preclude either a fair presentation of Marx’s thought, or a delicate appreciation of his philosophic gifts. As a historian of ideas, finally, Professor Löwith manages to transcend the methodological squabbles that afflict his discipline. His own approach is disarming; he seeks to understand the men he discusses on their own terms—that is, as they understood themselves. He begins by assuming that they know whereof they speak, and whenever possible he lets them speak for themselves. He is saved from the temptation to reduce intellectual history to biographical or psychological trivia because he knows a simple and a big thing: what is most interesting about a thinker is his thought.
The book resulting from the application of these considerable talents is dense, fascinating, and useful in various ways. On one level it resembles an ordinary history of 19th-century philosophy. It concentrates heavily on German thought, to be sure, but as there is much truth in the saying that since Kant philosophy has spoken German, it is easy to justify such a limitation. In the first half of the book the focus is on individual thinkers and their affinities or hostilities to each other. This part is especially useful in informing the reader about the various philosophical camps that emerged after Hegel’s death. I have never, for instance, read a clearer exposition of that murky phenomenon, the split between right-wing (or old) Hegelians and left-wing (or young) Hegelians. In addition, the first half of the book has the merit of doing justice to several thinkers (Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, for example) who at present are known mainly—and unfairly—through the polemics of Marx and Engels.
The second half of the book is organized around the main themes of 19th-century thought. Professor Löwith devotes a chapter each to the concepts of society, education, work, Christianity, and humanity or humanism, showing how all of them were gradually transformed from ideals to problems. For example, work was first viewed as man’s way of dominating nature, and therefore a great good, and later—by Marx—as man’s alienation from himself, and therefore bad. Similarly, Hegel used the word “humanity” as a term of approbation; Nietzsche, however, spoke of the “human, ail-too human” and of the need for a superman who could overcome his own humanity.
Throughout the book, Professor Löwith succeeds in his stated intention of “bringing accurately to life the epoch which starts with Hegel and ends with Nietzsche.” He is not, however, primarily concerned with writing a conventional and chronological intellectual history, but rather with articulating a specific movement of thought, with tracing “the deadly consistency of philosophical development since Hegel.” That development is a movement away from Hegel’s grand synthesis which saw the world as a cosmos, an ordered place in which man occupies a central niche, toward Nietzsche’s view of the world as chaos, a meaningless place in which man’s fundamental experience is one of anguish and pain. In seeking to determine what happened, Professor Löwith begins by subjecting Hegel’s all-inclusive philosophical system to a sympathetic but critical analysis. Hegel emerges as the grand mediator between opposites who attempted, and perhaps was able, to abolish all tensions between faith and reason, objectivity and subjectivity, the individual and the state, theory and practice. His successors, especially Marx and Kierkegaard, ripped asunder what Hegel had joined. By the time of Nietzsche, Hegel’s world-view, along with just about every world-view of the past, was thought to be discredited, so that Nietzsche was forced into that attempt at reconstruction which ended in his madness.
The above is what happened, according to Professor Löwith. To ask why it happened is to ask, as he also does, whether there was anything in Hegel’s thought which was responsible for the later and fateful developments. One should realize at the outset that Hegel was not necessarily proved wrong by those thinkers who criticized him. It might be the case—and Professor Löwith is willing to entertain it—that Hegel was simply a greater man than anyone who came after him. In other words, Hegel might have been able to think on a plane where all opposites were really reconciled, a plane which it was impossible for his successors to reach. Indeed, according to Professor Löwith, what comes after Hegel “cannot be compared for breadth of vision and energy of accomplishment; it is exaggerated or exhausted, extreme or mediocre, and more promising than productive.”
At a time when what most people think, they know about Hegel is that he identified the Prussian State with God, it is refreshing to find his philosophy taken so seriously. But this does not prevent Professor Löwith from looking very closely at the nature of Hegel’s syntheses in order to discover the problems they revealed—or concealed. And there were, of course, problems. Thus, Hegel might reconcile Christianity with just about everything else, but the result was an “amorphous” Christianity, a faith so secularized and pallid that Kierkegaard could echo Pascal, who against earlier reconciliations had insisted that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not the God of the Philosophers.
The greatest difficulty of all was posed by a single, cryptic sentence in which Hegel expressed the epitome of his philosophy: “Whatever is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational.” This statement affirms that reason is capable of understanding the world, and that the world grasped by reason is somehow the embodiment of rationality. It is a demonstrably idiotic statement unless one thinks in terms of a hierarchy of realities, and Hegel did, of course, distinguish between that which exists accidentally and that which is truly real. But one may wonder whether he always applied this distinction correctly when speaking about his immediate environment. In any case, his successors could not agree about what was truly real in the world they encountered. One could argue, as did the right-wing Hegelians, that the monarchies of Europe were real, and therefore rational. Or, one could insist along with Marx that existing social conditions were patently irrational and therefore, not being truly real, ripe for abolition. Thus Marx denied that Hegel had succeeded in reconciling reason with reality; moreover, he denied that philosophy was capable of doing so. He came to see philosophy as the irrelevant attempt to understand the world: the problem was not to understand but to change it. Kierkegaard, too, albeit in a different way, challenged philosophy’s competence to come to grips with reality. And again: what Hegel had joined was ripped asunder.
As modern men we are likely to be convinced by these strictures against Hegel. It is difficult to think of the world as rational when one remembers Hitler and Stalin. Furthermore, it is difficult to take seriously Hegel’s claim to have found the final truth; it is easier to dismiss him as a dogmatist. We deny that eternal truths can be found; we even tend to deny that they exist and are therefore led to dismiss the very quest for them as futile, even though that quest be free of dogmatism. In other words, we not only reject Hegel; we no longer believe in the possibility of philosophy as such. Our rejection is based on our view that one’s philosophy is the product of the times and is steeped in the limitations, the prejudices, and the preoccupations of one’s time. We reject the claims of philosophy in general, and of Hegel in particular, on the basis of our historical consciousness.
_____________
There is a consummate irony in this, for we are using a kind of popularized Hegelianism to discredit Hegel. It was, after all, Hegel who brought the idea of a philosophy of history to maturity; it was Hegel who maintained that the philosopher was the son of his time; it was Hegel who couched his own philosophizing in historical terms. He did not, to be sure, view his own thought as historically ephemeral, but maintained that in his time history had reached an absolute moment when true understanding of the world became possible. History had culminated in rationality: on the one hand there was the rational world that the French Revolution had inaugurated; and, on the other hand, there was the mind to comprehend it fully—Hegel’s own. Marx can be said to have retained Hegel’s historical consciousness while denying that rationality’ had triumphed in the world. Hegel’s absolute moment was postponed, so far as reality was concerned, until “after the Revolution.” So far as reason was concerned, the absolute moment was here in the form of Marx’s teaching.
Nietzsche, unlike Marx, never acknowledged his debt to Hegel and he was indeed more critical of the latter than Marx had been. Against Hegel’s assertion that history was a rational process, Nietzsche insisted that it was full of “blindness, madness, and injustice,” and he therefore denied the possibility of its culmination in a rational world-order. Yet Nietzsche, too, was proud of the century’s historical consciousness, and Nietzsche, too, thought of his own philosophy as occupying a privileged or absolute moment, a “great noon” when it becomes possible to see the world as it is. His successors were to deny that history could be transcended even in theory, and to dismiss Nietzsche’s yearning for eternity and eternal truth as the last gasp of discredited metaphysical speculations. The consequence was nihilism—as Nietzsche had foreseen—for a world in which man is the prisoner of a meaningless historical process is a meaningless world, a world in which nothing is true and everything permitted, a world in which man’s will has no objective goals to will, a world in which those strongest of will are therefore likely to will nothingness.
That, in crude caricature, is the “development” which is traced by Professor Löwith. Was it a necessary development? Professor Löwith suggests it was necessary only on the basis of Hegel’s philosophy. He does not, however, so much criticize Hegel directly as confront Hegel’s philosophy with the thought of the latter’s great contemporary, Goethe, who emerges as the hero of the book. The place occupied by history in Hegel’s thought is taken by Nature in the thought of Goethe; instead of a systematic philosophy such as Hegel’s, Goethe offers a series of unconstrained, remarkably free, and amazingly deep insights. But Goethe, alas, remained an accident in German history, as Nietzsche was to say.
One can learn to love Goethe by reading this book. One is not, however, told whether Goethe was right, whether he can serve as our mentor today. Professor Löwith does not show us whether and how we can go beyond the development he has outlined. One might say that he has not written a book of philosophy but a book of the history of philosophy. One might even say that his writing of a history of philosophy betrays an immense indebtedness to Hegel and thus cannot offer us any liberation from the fateful legacy of the tradition that developed from Hegel. But one should also realize that he raises questions of the most fundamental kind. While he does not present us with answers, he does clarify those questions. And in a very old-fashioned way, as old as Socrates, the clarification of questions can be seen as one of the abiding tasks of philosophy.
