History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 45-68 Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10694





LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
HENNING TRPER
1
ABSTRACT
This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of
Karl Lwith. By unity of history I understand the notion that all history constitutes one
and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues
that the problem of the unity of historythough often neglected as a matter of mere argu-
mentative infrastructureis central to a number of wider problems, most prominently
the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately
avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Lwiths writings and proposes
a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring
diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to
have informed Lwiths work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans
Blumenberg. The foundations of Lwiths discussion of the problem are pursued across
his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heideggers model of an ontology of historic-
ity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the
manner in which, after the Second World War, Lwiths philosophy of history sought to
salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of
plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives
for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Lwiths reception
of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy
of history.
Keywords: unity of history, plurality of history, historical ontology, Karl Lwith, Martin
Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper undertakes a rereading of Karl Lwiths work concerning the problem
of the unity of history. Lwith remains best known for his formulation, in the
1949 classic Meaning in History,
2
of the so-called secularization thesis, which
proclaims the purportedly eschatological origins of the modern understanding of
historicity. In part drawing on earlier work,
3
Lwith set out to demonstrate that
1. For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Danielle Allen, Kelly Grotke, Niklas Olsen and
Ralph Weber. In the writing of this paper, I have received support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
2. Karl Lwith, Meaning in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
3. Especially Karl Lwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionre Bruch im Denken des
19. Jahrhunderts [1941], in Lwith, Smtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Stichweh and Marc de Launay
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 198188), IV; Karl Lwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des
Gleichen [1935], Smtliche Schriften VI, 101-384; and Karl Lwith, Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch
inmitten der Geschichte [1936], Smtliche Schriften VII.
HENNING TRPER
46
the modern notion of historicity in general, and of historical time in particular,
from the late eighteenth century onward, could only be understood as a result
of the afterlife of defunct Jewish and Christian eschatologies in the modern era.
Though sublimated and severed from religious meaning, theological notions
of goal-directed, finite temporality continued to provide an implicit domain of
meaning tacitly informing all modern historical consciousness. The seculariza-
tion thesis was an argument of amnesia lifted and shameful reality uncovered,
an entry into the large and diverse hermeneutics of suspicion, targeting, after the
First World War, the optimisms and progressivisms of the nineteenth century.
Tremendously influential for its critical dismissal of earlier philosophies of his-
toryno matter in which sub-Hegelian, sub-Comtean, or sub-Marxist vein they
had been formulatedLwiths line of critique nonetheless faced serious ques-
tioning in debates of the 1960s and 70s. Afterwards, it was, for the most part,
relegated to the status of a topos one did or did not frequent.
The present article aims to spend a bit of time there and to cast another, and
closer, look. The purpose of this sojourn is not so much a re-evaluation of the
validity of the secularization thesis but an examination of how it was constructed.
I will argue first that the question of whether it might be possible to avoid posit-
ing the unity of history was at the core of the entire argument; second, that the
problem of the unity of history emerged in the context of Lwiths conflicted
appropriation and critique of Heidegger; and third, that rejecting the unity of his-
tory remained the underlying project of Lwiths writings on the philosophy of
history after Meaning in History, marked by the project of refounding historicity
in the temporality of a natural cosmos.
The notion of the unity of history entails that what is historical is unified, is
one, is of a piece. In practice, it tends to indicate that historicity (the quality of
being historical) is a singulare tantumby meaning, if not by grammar. To be
sure, historical does not mean the same as being located in past time. On the
contrary, the quality of being historical excludes large swaths of things past.
Historicization disunifies the past by establishing entities and kinds of entities
that are accepted as historical while others are excluded. This operation pertains
to a layered array of objects and classes of objectsfor instance, the French
Revolution is historical, and so are all revolutions, since they can only ever occur
within a setting conceived of in terms of history. Historicization thus comprises
the positing of kinds of objects that provide specific avenues of individuation
(again, revolutions are a case in point).
4
Arguably, then, historicization is as
much a matter of the production of entities as it is a matter of the acquisition,
arrangement, and justification of knowledge about such (and other) entities. In
short, it exhibits an ontological and an epistemological aspect. Franois Hartog
has labeled the cultural patterns of making things historicaland, it might be
4. This roughly follows Ian Hackings notion of what it means to be ontologically productive,
as laid out in his Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also
Dipesh Chakrabartys discussion, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), for a number of striking and far-reaching
examples of the ways in which regimes of historicity can clash with regard to the kinds of objects,
events, and agents they both comprise and constitute.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
47
added, of making historical thingsas regimes of historicity.
5
Such regimes,
as the metaphor already suggests, tend to be unstable and processual; they can
themselves become historical, and they are not merely orders of knowledge, but
also modes of production.
Accordingly, the notion of the unity of history can be spelled out in at least
two ways, an epistemological and an ontological one: that is to say, in relation to
what is and can be known of history, or in relation to what kind of object history
is and what kinds, and instances, of objects it comprises and produces. On the
epistemological side of the divide, the unity of history might be understood in
the following way: historical explanations can attain some kind of validity that
is exclusive in the sense of at least ruling out other explanations. Moreover, such
explanations are consistent with one another, and even combinable, so that they
form a unified field of knowledge. On the ontological side, the handiest prima
facie interpretation is by reference to history as a temporal continuum, an unbro-
ken chain of events following one another chronologically. Widely held notions
such as that of a totality of facts or a chain, or web, of causes and effects seem
to be consistent with either side of the divide, depending on how they are con-
structed. This paper will not venture into an exhaustive debate as to the respective
virtues and vices of epistemology and ontology with regard to historicity. Yet it
does share in recent pleas for revisiting historical ontology.
6
What hinges on the problem of the unity of history is the very possibility, for
history, of being plural. It has often been stated, to an extent that it presently
seems to be a clich, that indeed history exists only in the plural and that it was
the grand mistake of nineteenth-century historicism to conceptualize history
as a collective singular, allegedly supplanting a preceding understanding of
histories-in-multitude.
7
The historical analysis of the emergence of history-in-
the-singular neatly appears to suggest the conceptual possibility of histories-
in-the-plural. As problems regarding historicity were increasingly discussed in
relation to the constructive work of narrative, the plurality of history became a
foregone conclusion; yet history has continued to operate, and increasingly so,
under the assumption of the total interconnectedness of the historical past. Tra-
ditional boundaries and hierarchies of research domains were leveled, and the
unity of history returned through the back door. Although much literature today
sees entanglement in everything, the problem of disentanglement remains mar-
ginalized. Globalization, that ambiguous master narrative, implicitly governs
much historical research today, re-introducing teleological structures presumed
vanquished, and belying its own programmatic pluralism.
By contrast, in early and mid-twentieth-century philosophy of history, the
meaningfulness of plural historicity was treated as by no means self-evident. The
discussion of Lwiths writings undertaken in this article means to retrieve some
5. Franois Hartog, Rgimes dhistoricit (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
6. Borrowing Michael Bentleys phrase from Past and Presence: Revisiting Historical Ontol-
ogy, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 349-361.
7. As argued by Lwiths student Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichte (with Christian Meier, Odilo
Engels, and Horst Gnther) in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), II, 593-
717; see also Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck
(New York: Berghahn, 2012).
HENNING TRPER
48
of the labor that once was invested in scrutinizing the conditions of possibility
of history-in-the-plural and that since has been half forgotten. This retrieval
does not merely follow a historical interest, but also seeks to contribute to the
understanding of the problem of the unity of history in present-day terms. This
feature is shared with the writings under examination, in which historical and
conceptual investigation were enmeshed in an intractable fashion. Lwiths argu-
ment pertained to the historical past (or one among others) in that it concerned
the purported trajectory of certain, entirely contingent ideas through European
history; and it broached conceptual problems in that it concerned the semantic
understanding of history and historicity tout court. The relation between
these sides of the argument remained unstable, difficult to fathom, and potentially
aporetic.
8
The present article inhabits the same impasse, conductingif perhaps
unevenlya conceptual and a historical inquiry at once. Ultimately, the question
is both: What did Lwith have to say on the unity of history? and: What is
the unity of history and how is plural historicity possible? In consequence, the
argument is inevitably, with Burckhardts famed quip about the philosophy of
history, a centaur, a hybrid and impossible creature
9
properties it shares
with the works it examines.
II. AN ANATOMY OF THE SECULARIZATION THESIS,
AND A DIGRESSION ON BLUMENBERG
In Meaning in History, Lwith proposed regarding European philosophies of
history, as written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, as a
decisive step in the secularization of Christian eschatology, producing a model
of history as a unified, teleological process. This type of history partook in the
unity of eschatology; it shared the religious promise of salvation at the end of the
historical process. However, since it had emancipated itself from the transcendent
agency of the deity, secularized eschatology had to seek this promise within the
world, and more precisely, within itself. In this way, the goal of history could
become immanent to the process. This was realized in the form of progressive
histories that were teleological in spite of being seemingly open-ended, since they
explained the past as a directional process by reference to the goal of improve-
ment.
10
Lwiths argument built on a notion of meaning that was translated from the
German Sinn. This term tends to refer to practical meaning, function, purpose,
or end, rather than to semantic meaning. Lwiths notion of meaning was related
to intentionality, as understood in terms of access to the world and interpretable
in terms of teleological explanation. This is a very peculiar notion, certainly in
keeping with Heideggers transformation of the phenomenological project from
consciousness to praxis, but arguably also akin to Nietzsches understanding of
8. Regarding Lwiths attempts to overcome this aporia, see the discussion in Enrico Donaggio,
Una sobria inquietudine: Karl Lwith e la filosofia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), here esp. 56-58.
9. In the introduction to the so-called Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, now ber das Studium
der Geschichte in Jacob Burckhardt, Werke, ed. Peter Ganz (Munich: Beck, 2000), X.
10. As is evident from Lwiths discussions of the role of the unknown future in modern philoso-
phies of history, esp. Meaning in History, 3f., 10-18.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
49
the ontologically foundational nature of will. Moreover, the notion is related
to what has been made or created, either by God or by man: the meaning of
chairs is found in their function of being used as seats, a function that determines
their production. If history is to have a meaning, that is to say, some purpose
transcending the facts, it has to fulfill the condition of being an object produced
by some sort of purposive agency. Lwith goes on to stipulate, since history is
a movement in time, the purpose is a goal.
11
With this subtle distinction, Lwith
introduces not only temporality but also the future-directedness of meaningful
history. Purposes are present or future-directed, but usually concrete. The notion
of goal, however, appears to serve the function of suggesting a substantial pro-
jection into a future that remains undetermined in detail but maintains a sense of
finality, of conclusion. As applied to history as a wholethat is to say, as unified
and not yet concludedthe goal is by necessity an ultimate purpose, hence an
eschatological future, a matter merely of expectation and hope.
12

Lwith interprets eschatology in terms of the past as constituting a promise to
a distant future that can be expected, and is expected on grounds of prophetism,
but the exact course toward which cannot be known. Prophetic knowledge is a
matter of divine revelation; and revelation is always to some extent obscure and
open to varying interpretation. In fact, the prophet (other than the seer of classi-
cal mythology) does not provide knowledge of the future; only knowledge of the
overall meaning of history as to be borne out by the future. The modern notion of
history, according to Lwith, rests on exactly the same conception of an unknown
future that is vaguely promised by historical events; and the point of his argu-
ment is that this entire structure of ideas is inconceivable outside the conceptual
framework created by biblical prophetism. Especially this part of the argument
(but others also) draws on Hermann Cohens works on the philosophy of religion,
which Lwith also quotes prominently.
13
It amounts to a historical claim as to the
semantic meaning of history. Only over the course of a particular historical,
thus contingent, development did the modern notion of history become possible:
by prophetism as formulated in the Hebrew Bible, and its secularization.
This notion of history was vulnerable to criticism because it disposed of an
alternative, if apparently much less efficacious heritage, Greek antiquity. The
Greeks, according to Lwith, disposed of an entirely different conception of the
future: it was considered both predetermined and knowable, for instance by way
of divine intervention in oracles. However, Lwiths Greeks had no notion of
the future as constituting a goal to reach, or even an end of time, or of time as
carrying meaning. History was not made, and in the absence of a goal, it was
not unified. But this meant that the very nature of the temporality that ancient
Greek history utilized was different. Conversely, in the context of prophetism,
eschatologyas a form of unified historyenjoyed primacy over temporality. It
11. Lwith, Meaning in History, 5; Lwiths preferred piece of exemplary philosophical furniture
is the table.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Ibid., 17f.; Lwiths late paper Philosophie der Vernunft und Religion der Offenbarung in
H. Cohens Religionsphilosophie [1968], Smtliche Schriften III, 349-383 permits following the
conceptual transfers in detail.
HENNING TRPER
50
was eschatology that defined the terms in which the future was conceptualized.
Eschatology could acquire this surprising function solely as a result of its being
unified: the future, too, had to be part of eschatology. In this way, the unity of
history was at the core of Lwiths argument.
Still, Lwith does not single out this unity as a core feature. As the title of his
study indicates, from his point of view the central problem is that of meaning,
that is to say, teleology. At first glance, it may be difficult to see why teleology
should actually acquire such a status in the argument. Quite apart from the ques-
tion as to the plausibility of assuming that teleology is a constitutive feature of
the practice of all modern historical writing, Lwiths position also incurs the
potential liability of binding together the notion of an open future with that of
directionality in a not entirely intuitive manner. Arguably, the position might be
explained by reference to the prominence of teleological arguments in the works
of Heidegger, Cohen,
14
and various other authors. Perhaps more to the point, the
explanation might also be found in the Hegelian, or quasi-Hegelian, disposition
underlying the entire problematic. Teleology, as one of the four types of causes,
according to Aristotles definition,
15
carries a double function. On the one hand,
as Lwith stresses, it serves as a unifier of the process it describes. On the other
hand, teleology constitutes the intelligibility of the historical process as a whole.
In the quasi-Hegelian argument, as stated in its crudest, not necessarily most
authentic form, history is progress toward freedom. Freedom is guaranteed by
increased understanding of the world and humanitys place in it, since the growth
of understanding increases our freedom to act. It is a precondition for this argu-
ment that history be intelligible and unified. If so, the increase of knowledge
about history always already marks its progressive nature. Since understanding
takes place within history, its augmentation alone already constitutes historys
progressive and purposive nature.
16
In this disposition of the basic mode of move-
ment in which the world spiritcollective human reasonprogresses toward
ultimate freedom, any successful understanding of anything historical, whichever
may be the precise epistemological character of this understanding, constitutes
the very goal-directedness of history. Lwiths notion of meaning combines
the two premises of the intelligibility and unity of history, but unity takes center
stage.
A number of further conceptual features are worth noting. In the framework
of Lwiths argument, teleology allows for the conflation of the epistemological
and ontological aspects of the notion of history. Teleology states a claim to unity
that is both ontological and epistemological: ontological, since it assumes that an
object amenable to description as teleological is a unified whole; epistemological,
since it assumes that at least in principle a unified explanation is available. The
notion of the unity of history might therefore be regarded as ambiguous. Still, this
14. As discussed for instance in Lwith, Phnomenologische Ontologie und protestantische
Theologie [1930], Smtliche Schriften I, 1-32.
15. In Aristotle, Physics, ed. R. P. Hardie, R. K. Gaye (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), II, 3; and in
Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), V, 1013a.
16. As most famously laid out in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesung ber die Philosophie
der Weltgeschichte, Berlin 1822/23, ed. Karl Heinz Ilting, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann
(Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1996).
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
51
ambiguity does not cripple Lwiths argument. His presentation of the material as
a whole is so slanted toward ontological matters that de facto he suppresses the
question of whether epistemological unity might occur without ontological unity.
Moreover, in Meaning in History, Lwith differentiates between the unity
and the universality of history. When he discusses the orienting effect of the
eschatological vision of an ultimate endthe Kingdom of God or its functional
equivalents in secular understandings of historyfor the flux of historical time
he avers:
It is . . . only within this teleological, or rather eschatological, scheme of the historical
process that history became universal, for its universality does not depend merely on the
belief in one universal God but on his giving unity to the history of mankind by directing
it toward a final purpose. . . . Mankind, however, has not existed in the historical past,
nor can it exist in any present. It is an idea and an ideal of the future, the necessary horizon
for the eschatological concept of history and its universality.
17

This passage does some conceptual work in pointing out that a historical process
becomes unified by the extraneous agency of God setting a goal to history. Only
by dint of such goal-directedness and unity does history acquire universality. The
universality of the deity alone is insufficient for creating a notion of the universal
historical process. In addition, the deity acts upon the world in such a way that
history becomes a unified process.
As the passage also demonstrates, the universal came into the argument as
an afterthought. Lwith here imported a highly abridged argument from a 1938
article whose title is translated as The Unity and Diversity of Man.
18
As this lat-
ter paper argued, the universality of humanity as an eschatological promise was
bound to the Christian notion that the deity was there for all humans. It was
thus a historical product itself. The unity of humanity stood and fell with the
Christian God, thus disappearing as an effect of secularization, as exemplified
by the unabashedly particularist works of Max Scheler, Heidegger, and Carl
Schmitt. Thus, universality was not continuous in the transition from eschatol-
ogy to secularized eschatology. One universal God giving unity to the history of
mankindthis formulation did not actually mean that universality derived from
the unity of the historical process; it derived from that of mankind instead.
19

History was universal to the extent that it claimed universal humanity as the
ontological framework within which historical knowledge could establish perti-
nence to entities. Secularized eschatologies forfeited this claim and yet preserved
the unity of the historical process. This shows that in Lwiths usage, unity is a
formal feature, whereas universality concerns the substantial content of the form.
As far as Lwiths use is concerned, it seems that he regarded universality as a
quality of the specific area of pertinence that belonged to Christian eschatology
as a given particular regime of historicity; this area comprised humankind as a
17. Lwith, Meaning, 18.
18. Karl Lwith, Die Einheit und Verschiedenheit des Menschen [1938], Smtliche Schriften I,
243-258. The article had originally appeared in the Belgrade-based exile journal Philosophie.
19. The German translation makes this point a bit clearer, though perhaps still insufficiently: The
universality of history beruht nicht schon auf dem Glauben an einen allmchtigen Herrn, sondern
auch darauf, da er der Menschheitsgeschichte Einheit verleiht, indem er sie von Anfang an auf ein
letztes Ziel hin lenkt.
HENNING TRPER
52
whole. Unity, by contrast, referred to the formal feature of a given regime of this
kind to dispose of a unified area of pertinence at all. Therefore, the primary point
of Meaning in History in particular and Lwiths writings on the philosophy of
history more broadly is not to defeat, for example, a Schmittian antihumanism.
The point is to defeat the unity of history as a formal feature that remains continu-
ous through the secularization of eschatology.
However, Meaning in History makes a double argument: a formal and a histor-
ical one. Relations between these arguments remained problematic. In the intro-
duction of the German translationcarried out by Hanno Kesting and Reinhart
Koselleck under the close supervision of the author
20
Lwith decided to delete a
passage whose original function had been to negotiate the authors philosophical
and historical positions, with the help of the term modern:
We of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward
an ultimate goal or at least toward a better world, are still in the line of prophetic and
messianic monotheism; we are still Jews and Christians, however little we may think of
ourselves in those terms. But within this predominant tradition we are also the heirs of
classic wisdom. We are in the line of classical polytheism when we are concerned with the
plurality of various cultures as such, exploring with boundless curiosity the whole natural
and historical world for the sake of a disinterested knowledge which is quite untouched
by any interest in redemption.
We are neither ancient ancients nor ancient Christians, but modernsthat is, a more or
less inconsistent compound of both traditions.
21
This passage, which immediately follows the previous quotation, provides a clear
image of the contrast Lwith imagined lay between the Greek and the biblical
heritages of the occident. The unity of universal history is a formulation that
might even suggest the possibility of disunified universal historyan option one
might, on a conceptual level, find worthwhile to explore. Yet its prime function
is to mark the transition from matters of a formal nature to questions of historical
standpoint. Presumably, Lwith eliminated the passage because it suggested the
historically given inescapability of the formal errors of eschatology and secular-
ized eschatology. If we moderns are a compound of both views of history
Greek historein, enveloped by an ordered cosmos, and Jewish and Christian
prophetic anxietiesthen we cannot suppress either side. Still, this diagnosis
requires a historical argument, and one that unifies at least European history from
antiquity until the present. In his later work, already from the early 1950s onward,
Lwith seems driven by the ambition to escape from the inescapability of history.
It was the formal argument against secularized eschatology on which he focused
his theoretical hopes. Surely, we could return to the Greek understanding of
the world. Since such a return was the consequence of a decision on the formal
level, we could simply opt out of secularized eschatology. There is something
unusual in this attitude. Quite commonly, modernity as an epoch was conceived
of as a trap, as exemplified by Max Webers steel casing (sthlernes Gehuse)
20. Kesting alone is named as translator in the preface; Koselleck discusses his collaboration in
Reinhart Koselleck, Formen der Brgerlichkeit: Reinhart Koselleck im Gesprch mit Manfred Hett-
ling und Bernd Ullrich, Mittelweg 36 12, no. 2 (2003), 77.
21. Lwith, Meaning in History, 19.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
53
of rationality from which we moderns could never again break free.
22
Argu-
ably, Lwith had come to reject this notion of modernity-as-entrapment. For the
secularization thesis, this meant jettisoning the historical argument and refocus-
ing on the formal one. The modification of the translation of Meaning in History
would then testify to a revision of the central argument, in the period of Lwiths
re-migration to Germany.
However, the apparent decision was less final than one might imagine, and
certainly than Lwith himself imagined, since he liked to present the develop-
ment of his philosophical thought as a stringent and linear process.
23
Rather, the
status of the secularization thesis remained the object of an ongoing negotiation
between the two lines of argument. This was probably one of the reasons for the
rather acrimonious tone of the widely known debate Hans Blumenberg initiated
with his attack on Meaning in History in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
24

Blumenberg privileged the historical argument; Lwith, however, failed to make
use of the opportunity to clarify his point. In the aftermath, most readers seemed
to agree that Blumenbergs position was more convincing. A variety of voices,
the most prominent among them perhaps that of Jrgen Habermas, diagnosed a
deep-seated, involuntary, and tragic irony in Lwiths course of argumentation,
which seemed to base an invective against history on an account of historyfrom
ancient Greek innocence via Jewish and Christian eschatology to modern abjec-
tionthat appeared no less teleological than what it purportedly criticized.
25

Blumenberg raised a number of arguments against the idea that modern notions
of historicity derived from eschatology. One of these arguments was primarily
of a formal kind, aimed at Lwiths alleged use of historical constantsgiv-
ens outside the ambit of historical changefor explaining the contrast between
eschatology and secular historicity. Blumenberg charged that Lwith had
embraced a rigid notion of history, ultimately reducible to
the unique epochal break that in one stroke decided in favor of both the Middle Ages and
the modern age: the turning away from the pagan cosmos of antiquity, with its cyclical
structure of security, to the one-time temporal action of the biblical/Christian type. For
one concerned with the fateful disjunction of nature and history, the accent shifts from the
beginning of the modern age to the end of antiquity; for everything that followed, this gave
rise to something like a collective historical liability, whose sum total is progress as fate.
26

So the constants were the two concrete historical patterns of historicity as
connected with the notions of the natural cosmos and of Jewish and Christian
eschatology, respectively. Yet from an epistemological perspective, this was,
according to Blumenberg, an illegitimate procedure: No a priori statement
22. In the closing pages of his Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus [1904
05], in: Die protestantische Ethik I: Eine Aufsatzsammlung, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Hamburg:
Siebenstern, 1965).
23. See, for example, Karl Lwith, Curriculum vitae [1959], Smtliche Schriften I, 450-462.
24. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA,
and London: MIT Press, 1985).
25. Jrgen Habermas, Karl Lwiths stoischer Rckzug vom historischen Bewutsein, in Haber-
mas, Philosophisch-kritische Profile (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 195-216.
26. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 28. Note that the translation is of the second edition in which Blu-
menberg reworked the text so as to reply to Lwiths review of the original version.
HENNING TRPER
54
whether there are substantial constants in history can be made; all we can say is
that the historians epistemological situation cannot be optimized by the determi-
nation of such stable elementary historical quanta.
27
Blumenbergs formulation
was extremely guarded and geared to an epistemology of history in terms of a
grid of functions, to be filled by wildly varying quanta. In this way, he posited
historicity as an autonomous epistemological function, independent from any
pregiven constants, any objects or concepts capable of permanently eluding
historicity. Thus, everything that had ontological status was potentially subject to
historical explanation. Yet in this way, Blumenberg embraced the epistemologi-
cal unity of history. If nothing was exempt from historical explanation, there were
no boundaries in the respective field of knowledge, and it was therefore unified.
One might say that Blumenbergs argument distinguished between acceptable,
inevitable and unacceptable, unnecessary constants. The substantial constants
mentioned in the quotation were of the latter kind. They pertained to the events,
actors, ideas, and so on that were the objects of the intended historical explana-
tionits ontology, as one might say. Blumenberg phrased his critique in terms
of an attack on the substantialistic ontology of history
28
that he (indirectly)
claimed Lwith deployed. The latters constants were of the wrong kind because
they were illicitly introduced where historical change alone was to reign: in this
case, in the history of ideas, to which eschatology and other notions of history
belonged. In the referenced passage, retained from the original version of the
book, Blumenberg recognized the crucial instability of the distinction: he himself
worked with formal constants that were withdrawn from the sphere of history.
Yet it would be difficult to draw a clear distinction between, say, experience and
ideas. So he insisted that his criticism was meant primarily to safeguard the
possibility of other lines of inquiry
29
for which Lwiths monolithic argument
did not allow. Blumenbergs entire study meant to trace these other lines in the
realm of actual historical inquiry. In the second edition, by contrast, Blumenberg
seemed more outspokenly critical of the substantialism he had perceived in
Lwiths admittedly rather woodcut history of eschatology and its secularization.
Yet this charge, too, addressed the relative poverty, and the alleged epistemic
closure, of Lwiths account as a historical explanation of eschatological and
secularized notions of history.
Blumenberg sketched the historical argument against the secularization thesis
as follows:
Naturally the idea of progress did not generate the instances of progress that have always
occurred in individual human lives, individual generations, and the combination of
generations, as results of experience, will, and practice; progress is the highest-level
generalization, the projection onto history as a whole, which evidently was not possible
at just any point in time. We have to ask what it was that made it possible. My opinion is
that it was novel experiences involving such a great extent of time that the spring into the
final generalization of the idea of progress suggested itself as a natural step. One such
experience is the unity of methodically regulated theory as a coherent entity developing
independently of individuals and generations. The fact that hopes for the greater security
27. Ibid., 29.
28. Ibid., 113.
29. Ibid.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
55
of man in the world grow up around this expansionism of progress, and that these hopes
can become a stimulus to the realization of the idea, is demonstrable. But is such hope
identical with Christian eschatology, now gone over into its secularized form?
30
Thus, Blumenbergs alternative to the secularization thesis was founded on the
purported novel experiences resulting from developments in scientific theory.
From these experiences, the notion of a Gesamtgeschichte, history as a whole,
was then supposedly extrapolated by way of a sudden leap of inductive concep-
tualization.
31
Blumenberg insisted that progress was actually an experientially
given notion of change-for-the-better, a constant, supposedly of a formal kind.
Hence, it was only the hypostatization of progress as the one and only line of
development of all history that was the explanandum. This hypostatization was
rendered possible by the notion of history-as-a-whole, the unity of history.
Historically speaking, it is plausible to derive precisely this latter notion from
eschatology in the way Lwith does; eschatology indeed offered a powerful and
widely known model of unified history as extending from creation to doomsday.
In his prickly review, Lwith suggested that Blumenberg regarded the hypos-
tatization of progress in terms of Gesamtgeschichte as a mere leap of thought,
which meant overstraining rationality. Precisely because the unity of history was
an otherwise implausible phenomenon, the transfer of the given model of escha-
tological Gesamtgeschichte was a strong argument, Lwith contended.
32
Clearly,
he agreed to debate in terms of history proper because he thought he had the
upper hand. As for the formal problem involved, he simply rejected the accusa-
tion of having posited historical ideas of such stability that they could be regarded
as actual constants. Instead, he claimed, he had simply referred to the relative
stability and the great traditional force of the Christian heritage.
33
Yet in this man-
ner, he had followed Blumenbergs move away from a formal toward a historical
argument. Nonetheless, both authors maintained notions of a distinction between
formal mattersconceptual as well as ontologicalas pertaining to history and
the substantial historical content of these forms. The balance between the two
sides of the distinction remained unsteady. The pattern of argument with which
Blumenberg sought to replace Lwiths view of eschatologization and seculariza-
tion as the prime movers of the history of historicity relied on a notion of scien-
tific and technological progress as historical events. At the end of the day, the
finely delineated distinction between function and substance appeared blurred.
30. Ibid., 30f.
31. Cognate notions of the emergence of history-in-the-singular by way of the experience of
technologically induced acceleration have become extremely widespread as a genealogical plotline
for explaining modern and contemporary notions of history. Experience trumps eschatology,
even in the writings of so ardent an admirer of Lwith as Reinhart Koselleck; see, for example, his
Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizontzwei historische Kategorien, in Reinhart Koselleck,
Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 349-
375; Hartog, Rgimes, and Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy
of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) are among the authors who similarly
postulate a process of historical acceleration and an increasing rift between the experience of the past
and the present.
32. Karl Lwith, Besprechung des Buches Die Legitimitt der Neuzeit von Hans Blumenberg
[1968], Smtliche Schriften, II, 458.
33. Ibid., 454.
HENNING TRPER
56
III. HISTORICAL TIME, MEAGER TIME
When Lwith returned to Germany he set great store in marking his philosophical
rupture with his former teacher, Heidegger. To this end, he published a small but
scathingly critical study, Heidegger: Denker in drftiger Zeit, which appeared
in 1953, the year after his return to Germany after eighteen years of exile.
34
The
title alluded to a well-known line in Hlderlins elegy Brod und Wein: und wozu
Dichter in drftiger Zeit? (and of what use are poets in such meager times?).
35

The implication was that the poeton whom Heidegger had focused much work
from the mid-1930s onwardcould also be turned against his interpreter.
36
The
apposition thinker in meager time was meant to express several things at once.
Lwiths Heidegger was a philosopher in a time that was found wanting. More
precisely, he was enclosed in a history that was found so; and not only had he
locked himself in, but he also lacked any intention of breaking free. The depri-
vation of the times was the Germans own doing. Yet at the same time, meager
time was also historical time as such, the unified historical time of secularized
eschatology, into which Heidegger had thrust himself with quasi-messianic zeal.
Lwiths study made a forceful case for the existence of a far-reaching connec-
tion between Heideggers philosophical thought and his participation in the polit-
ical cause of Nazi Germany.
37
In this way, indirectly, Lwith also interrogated
himself about the roots of his own fascination with the philosophical work of his
erstwhile master, and with history as secularized eschatology. As this tangle of
allusions indicates, the philosophy of history, in an odd, uneven combination with
actual historical events of the timethat is to say, a combination of the formal
and substantial aspects of historywas at the center of philosophical concerns
as well as lived lives.
38

The second chapter of Lwiths study provides an in-depth discussion of the
themes of Meaning in History as applied to Heidegger. Meaning in History had
not moved beyond the nineteenth century and Jacob Burckhardt in particular;
Nietzsche was discussed only in an appendix, and later writers were mentioned
cursorily at most. The Heidegger book, however, explicitly argued that secular-
ized eschatology, in the guise of an escalating nihilism, had reached its inher-
ent telos only in the twentieth century. The urgency of Lwiths critique of the
34. Karl Lwith, Heidegger: Denker in drftiger Zeit [1953], Smtliche Schriften VIII, 124-234;
English translation in Karl Lwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin and
transl. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 31-134.
35. Steiner and Wolin translate drftig as destitute. English translators of Hlderlins poem have
used lean (Michael Hamburger) or meager (Maxine Chernoff/Paul Hoover).
36. Heidegger, Wozu Dichter? [1946], in Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe (Tbingen:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), V, 269-320.
37. This is also the gist of Richard Wolins remarks in his introduction to the English version in
Lwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 1-25.
38. See also Lwiths posthumously published autobiography, penned in Japan for a Harvard-
based essay-writing competition in 1940: Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht,
ed. Frank Rutger Hausmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006).
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
57
philosophy of history was derived from the murderous present. Heidegger had
become a privileged piece of evidence for the collusion of a philosophical regime
of unified historicity with a political regime of atrocity. This is the pivot on which
twentieth-century European philosophies of history turn. Denker in drftiger Zeit
thus ventured into a central component of the argument Meaning in History had,
by design, eschewed. Heidegger, predictably, did not react to Lwiths criticism
in public.
39
In the following pages, I will sketch only roughly Lwiths remarks
on Sein und Zeit in relation to historicity, leaving out most of the discussion of
Heideggers philosophy after circa 1930, the time of the so-called Kehre or turn-
around, which Lwith regarded as a mere intensification of errors present already
in the earlier work.
Heideggers philosophical project (in the crudest of surveys) departed from
the phenomenological preoccupation with the specific quality of consciousness
as an experience irreducible to anything that could be described in terms of an
empirical science, for example, physiological psychology. Heidegger intended
a broader conception that sought the specificity in question not in conscious-
ness but in human existence in the world, Dasein, comprising all intentional-
ity and practical activity, and thoroughly temporalized. He made the notion of
Sinn, meaning, foundational for Dasein. This meant to claim that, as human
existence was temporal, the world was constituted by intentionality and thus
teleologically structuredthe same notion Lwith used to describe meaning in
history. In Sein und Zeit, meaning enjoyed primacy over the range of kinds
of objects that made up the world. Dasein, as a precondition of meaning, was
thus made prior to the question as to what entities the world contained. The lat-
ter question is merely an ontic one in Heideggers terminology. By contrast,
the question as to the foundation of the ontic, the reason for which there exists
anything at all, rather than nothing, is ontological.
40
Heidegger went to great lengths to explain how the temporal structure of Das-
ein constituted historicitythe objective of the much-debated 72-77 of Sein
und Zeit.
41
According to Lwith, the argument was roughly as follows: Being
foundationally temporal, Dasein was meaningful only by orientation toward a
future end. This orientation was to be identified with the recognition of, the prac-
tical projection toward, Daseins own finality. Anticipating its own future ending,
Dasein was enabled to accept finality as its fate (Geschick). This acceptance or
appropriation of its own finality was an act in which Dasein gained the freedom
of disposing of its own time, so to speak. By becoming aware of this fundamental
freedom (most crudely, freedom toward death), Dasein could gain a perspective
on itself as a complete being, or rather, it became intelligible to itself as a uni-
fied being that would, as such, end and could also end itself. In this way, being
39. Donaggio, Sobria inquietudine, 126f., summarizes Heideggers offended reactions in corre-
spondence with other scholars. A reconciliation with Lwith occurred only in 1969, when the latter
attended celebrations for Heideggers eightieth birthday; on this occasion, Lwith presented yet
another, though less harshly critical paper, Zu Heideggers Seinsfrage: Die Natur des Menschen und
die Welt der Natur [1969], Smtliche Schriften VIII, 276-289.
40. Once again, note that this use of ontological does not coincide with the overall use of the
term in the present article.
41. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927] (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 372-404.
HENNING TRPER
58
able to be whole (Ganzseinknnen) was a necessary condition for there to be
meaning in Dasein. Moreover, actually being whole was a sufficient condition
for meaning; being whole meant to anticipate the end, death, as a goal and thus
conceiving of ones existence as a unified process.
42

Heidegger distinguished a primary historicity that was existential and con-
stituted by Daseins temporality from a secondary historicity that derived from
the common, vulgar notion of the historical. According to Lwith, Heidegger
presented secondary historicity as derivative. It existed merely as a background
to the existentially relevant matters of Dasein as embracing its fate. Primary
historicity was primary because it was more primordial (ursprnglicher) than
secondary historicity. Dasein was at once the place for the problem of history
and the condition for the possibility of historicality.
43
Without Dasein, neither
an analysis of what it meant to be historical nor any notion of history itself was
possible. At the same time, secondary historicity always threatened to dominate
Dasein. Primary historicity needed to assert itself destructively against the debris
of tradition. This self-assertion was the defining aspect of primary historicity,
which was achieved precisely when there emerged a moment of pure decision,
44

of the shedding of tradition, the unmitigated pursuit of what was projected in the
future. Primary historicity entailed the negation of secondary historicity. Primary
historicity required the creation of unity out of something disunified. Secondary
historicity was dispersed and fragmented. Regardless of whether it was primary
or secondary, however, historicity required content. Historicity thus always went
along with a particular ontology, no matter whether it displayed unity or disper-
sion. This was a decisive opening for a pluralization of historicity.
Heidegger singled out the cohesion of Dasein between birth and death as the
central problem of historicity/historicality. Arguing against a phenomenologi-
cal conception of this cohesion in terms of a continuous sequence of conscious
experience in time, he insisted on the agency of Dasein as making itself, both
in terms of the random thrownness of its having been born and in terms of its
being toward death, which required rupture with the determination by thrown-
ness.
45
For Heidegger, this is the core of temporality, as deriving as well as
departing from the phenomenological problematic. Geschichtlichkeit reproduces
the features of temporality; it, too, is marked by a rupture within itself, between
existential-primary and vulgar-secondary history. Historicity/historicality is then
not a quality of unlimited applicability because it is always to be understood
within the boundaries of concrete situations of self-assertion. It is not so much
42. Lwiths account of historicity in Sein und Zeit is in Lwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 73f.
43. Ibid., 73. The translator uses historicality in order to convey Heideggers distinction of
geschichtlich (as pertaining to Geschichte, the historical past) and historisch (as pertaining to
Historie, the representation of the past as scientific knowledgeperhaps most clearly established in
Sein und Zeit, 378f. and 392-397). Since the distinction is of little consequence for Lwiths reading
of Heidegger, I opted against reproducing it consistently here and to retain the more common term
historicity in its potential ambiguity.
44. Wolin rightly points to the proximity Lwith perceived between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt,
in Der okkasionelle Dezisionismus von Carl Schmitt [1935], Smtliche Schriften VIII, 32-71 (Eng-
lish translation in Lwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 137-169); the motive is also pursued in Lwith,
Einheit und Verschiedenheit.
45. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 373f.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
59
the quality of belonging to the historical past tout court; instead it is the more
complex quality of belonging to the two-sided process of constituting tradition
as the random condition of thrownness, and of constituting the openness of the
future in the existential projection toward death. Historicity/historicality was thus
always already cleft, that is to say, marked by the impossibility of unity. This
impossibility derived precisely from its inescapable pertinence to content. The
historical was ultimately the result of a form of agential, situated intentionality.
In this way, historical ontology (in the not-so-Heideggerian sense laid out above
in the introduction) provided a powerful argument against the unity of history.
Yet Lwiths Heidegger was guilty of squandering this potential. Since in the
odd loop-structure of Heideggers thought, Dasein was foundational for ontol-
ogy, it was foundational for historicity (and vice versa). At least in Lwiths
reading, foundational here meant transcendental in the Kantian sense of
providing the a priori conditions of possibility; or partly so, for this was a crux in
Heideggers argument Lwith could not avoid emending if he was to make sense
of the text. As is well known, Heidegger sought foundations not in a Kantian
vein, but rather in a temporalized and essentialized fashion.
46
Lwiths somewhat
mystifying double formulationat once the place . . . and the condition of pos-
sibilityindicates awareness of the problem. Heideggers notion of foundation
was in some basic way temporal, and the temporal was inextricably interlaced
with the historical. Reverting to Kantian terminologycondition of possibili-
typrovided an alternative stance from which Heideggers temporalization and
historicization of the exercise of identifying foundations could be criticized.
Although Lwith suggested that Heidegger also (at once) meant to include
Kantian transcendentalism in his notion of foundation, the underlying interpre-
tive maneuver certainly verged on, and likely committed, a misrepresentation
of Heideggers position. Presumably, from Lwiths point of view, this was an
inevitable move if the shell of Heideggers argument was to be cracked open.
Lwith interpreted the notion of primary historicity as the result of a transfer of
the eschatological model of temporality into the temporality of human existence.
Heideggers creation of unity through finality, his talk of the decisive moment,
the emphatic Now, was then only the backside of a future-oriented notion of
temporality, intelligible only in light of its eschatological forebears. Accordingly,
it was Daseins eschatologically blueprinted creation of unity in time that was
constitutive of historicity in Heideggers sense. In a perverse twist, the place of
the eschaton was thus occupied by individual death, and more precisely, freedom
toward death. In Lwiths eyes, this was an ultimately absurd philosophical proj-
ect. He outlined his two main lines of criticism in the form of a series of rhetorical
questions:
The question arises: [1] can world-history, as humans in the West from the Persian Wars
up to the last World War have in a thousand ways experienced and endured it, and have
contemplated it, reported on it, and thought it through philosophicallycan world-history
be recognized once again in this self-willed project of history on the basis of Being
46. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Potique de lhistoire (Paris: Galile, 2002), chap. 1, for a far-
reaching discussion of the connections among Heideggers essentialism, Kants transcendentalism,
and Rousseaus notion of nature.
HENNING TRPER
60
toward the end, which is always ones own? [2] Does this existential interpretation of
history on the basis of the historicality of finite Dasein render comprehensible what we
commonly call history? [3] Does not the experience of Being-mortal, without which there
would also be no freedom towards death, instead connect us with the nature of everything
living? [4] And does not the transition from the finite temporality of a Dasein that is indi-
viduated unto itself in the face of death remain a leap which, rather than illuminating the
shared destinings of history, simply leaps over them?
47
[1], [2], and [4] basically belabor the same theme, namely the inability of deriv-
ing anything from temporal Dasein that might be recognizable as historicity. This
was the first line of Lwiths criticism of Heideggers notion of historicity. The
second line of criticism emerges from question [3], which leads to the core of the
positive conception of historicity Lwith pursued, in response to the seculariza-
tion thesis and its application to Heidegger. The remainder of this section will
focus on the first line.
Question [1] stresses that wherever Westerners have had documented access
to history, Dasein cannot be regarded as having laid the foundations for either the
experience of, or the reflection about, that history. History is supposedly world-
history, a matter of mundane affairs understood as reaching beyond the life and
death of the individual. History is the lives of all the others, tooa line of criti-
cism against Heidegger that Lwith had pursued since his Habilitation.
48
More-
over, historicity was constituted not only by the empowerment of the individual
appropriating its own finality, but also by suffering and disempowerment. Hei-
degger had nothing to say on endurance.
49
In Heideggers terms all this simply
fell into the sphere of living-with, of the nameless crowd of the others, thus the
realm of secondary historicity. Lwiths specification in [2] therefore points out
the actual target, which is the factsays Lwiththat nothing in primary histo-
ricity renders comprehensible the common notion of history (as a matter of the
succession of wars and states and so on). In Lwiths view, therefore, Heidegger
understands primary historicity as a structure that guarantees the intelligibility of
secondary historicity, be it in ontological or epistemological terms. Once again,
this is a problematic construal of Heideggers argument, which does not have to
be read as positing that secondary historicity is intelligible at all. Still, with [4],
Lwith aims more broadly, and more convincingly, at the opacity of the connec-
tion that the argument of Sein und Zeit posits between the two kinds of historic-
ity when he states that the only way of going from one side to the other is by
an abrupt leap. In this lack of a connection, Lwith suggests, it even becomes
unclear why primary historicity should be regarded as a kind of historicity at
all. The individual life, except perhaps for occasional episodes, eludes historicity.
47. Lwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 74 (numeration added).
48. Karl Lwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen [1928], Smtliche Schriften I,
9-198.
49. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiners way of explaining the point was that the driving conundrum of the
philosophy of history since Vicos works had been the notion that although humans produced their
own history they had no control over their product; see, especially, Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Natu-
rabsicht und unsichtbare Hand (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1980). From this point of view, Lwiths
diagnosis was that Heideggers understanding of historicity did not do justice to one of the most basic
problems of the tradition of the philosophy of history.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
61
This was a classical position among nineteenth-century conceptualizations
of historicity, especially in the work of Dilthey. If this tradition is taken into
account, Lwiths attack on the conception of historicity in Sein und Zeit was
theoretically conservative. Indeed, he chided Heidegger for violating the notion
of historical meaning Dilthey had proposed, which was meaning as inescap-
ably relative to a historical situation, that is, historical relativism or historicism.
Yet a Dasein that exists temporally and historically in its essence, as opposed to
one that is merely in time and has a history, is no longer relative to time and
history.
50
From Heideggers position, the problem of relativism was void. How-
ever, according to Lwith, Heideggers position only seemingly provided a viable
alternative to Diltheys. In reality, Heidegger undertook a hysterical radicaliza-
tion of historicism. This radicalization was made possible by the imposition
of the structure of unified Daseinin its orientation toward deathon history
as a whole.
51
According to Lwith, Heidegger uses the finality of the individual
for the purpose of creating a notion of history as reaching beyond the individual.
Therefore, in Lwiths Heidegger, it is the unity of Dasein that is the condition
of the very possibility of historicity, both in its unified primary and dispersed
secondary form.
Heideggers failure to distinguish between history and the individual life
showed itself in his political interventions in the Nazi period. Searching for the
decisive moment at which the individual was to accept the fateful circumstances
and make them his (always his) own, Heidegger believed his time had come
in 1933. Yet, Lwith asks,
how is one supposed to be able to draw the line within a thoroughly historical thinking
between authentic happenings and that which commonly happens, and be able to
distinguish unequivocally between self-chosen fate and the destinings [Geschicke] which
are not chosen and which befall humans or seduce them into a momentary choice and
decision?
52

In short, Heideggers course of action itself had demonstrated that the distinction
between primary and secondary historicity did not hold; Heidegger had thrust
himself into a historical cause he believed his own, but had only handed himself
over to vulgarity. The distinction of the two historicities had failed in concreti-
zation. That Heidegger had sought such a concretization was merely a random
practical consequence of his thought, not entirely coinciding with the philo-
sophical content, but exposing some presupposed notions that might otherwise
have remained obscure.
53
Thus, Lwith did not regard the practical concretization
(Heideggers political actions) as a necessary component of the philosophical
argument. Heideggers failure as a politician did not necessarily follow from
his philosophical work, but his political failure was nonetheless philosophically
revealing. To be sure, this was not an instance of a harmless and quietist shying
away from political judgment. On the contrary, Lwith aimed to make the politi-
cal complaints pertinent to Heideggers philosophical work and thus to undercut
50. Lwith, Heidegger and Nihilism, 72.
51. Ibid., 91f.
52. Ibid., 75.
53. Ibid., 76.
HENNING TRPER
62
the most common line of apology that denied any connection. However, it should
also be added that Lwith intervened in matters of political theory only rarely
and arguably did not prioritize the political sphere in his critique of history as
secularized eschatology.
In Lwiths interpretation, Heideggers political engagement did not merely
reveal something about those presuppositions of his philosophical argument
about historicity that remained stable throughout his career. The Kehre itself
represented an escalation of the argument in which the political was inescapably
caught up. Sein und Zeit only marked the first step in a further radicalization
of historical relativism, taking on the form of a Hegelian Aufhebung, the subla-
tion that contains and preserves the positions it resolves. Extrapolating from the
event-structure of Dasein, Sein und Zeit had posited an ahistorical notion of death
as a foundation for the finality that informed all historicity. After the Kehre,
Heidegger shifted standpoints, moving from Dasein to the question of the truth
of Being . . . , defining truth as the happening of truth in a history of Being.
54

Thus, the event-structure was now provided by truth itself, a stance that exhibited
an eerie parentage to theological concepts of revelation. Truth, in this temporal-
ized guise, thus became the ultimate foundation of historicity. Truth constituted
a foundational history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), which neatly coincided with
the history of occidental metaphysics. This concretization demonstrated that the
post-Kehre foundation of history was yet another source of unity. Moreover, the
foundational argument was turned around: now it was not an ahistorical notion
that ultimately provided the foundations of historicity, but one that was temporal
itself. Lwith apparently did not think that Heidegger offered a solid argument
as to the distinction between historicity and temporality. Temporalized truth
as constituting a Seinsgeschichte was therefore supposed to act as its own foun-
dation. That is to say, if foundation was temporal and historical itself, Hei-
deggers argument simply became circular.
Historical time, as laid out by Lwiths Heidegger, was thus the most mea-
ger of times: a totally unified, yet entirely empty time. Indeed, what Lwiths
analysis seeks to show is that Heideggers pursuit of a foundation of historic-
ityfirst in Dasein, then in Beingwas a pursuit of unity. The exciting notion
of a cleft historicity, as always already divided against itself and therefore never
unified and singular, was only a transient by-product of this pursuit. Although
the future-orientation of Dasein was arguably given up in the post-Kehre works,
unity remained a common theme. Consequently, it was the stubborn assumption
of the unity of history that marked Heideggers adherence to secularized eschatol-
ogy. In this way, Lwiths Heidegger completed the catastrophe of modern his-
toricity. The unity of history had come to void any notion of history. Heideggers
concretization of Seinsgeschichte by means of the alleged trajectory of occidental
metaphysicsa continuing notion of European history in his work since the
1920sfurther illustrated this catastrophe. Meticulously, he complied with the
eschatological scheme. The original Platonic Fall from pre-Socratic Paradise was
followed by misery and constant decline until a prospective moment of redemp-
54. Ibid., 92.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
63
tion, with which Heidegger wished to see his own thought associated. This self-
aggrandizing self-historicization betrayed a pathological incapacity to look into
the mirror without seeing history itself, and an unthinking lack of distance from
history that informed Heideggers conduct in 1933.
IV. NATURES NATURE
Lwiths second line of attack was that of question [3] from the passage quoted
above, in which he wondered whether the experience of mortality was not rather
that of a connection to the natural world instead of a prefiguration of historical
consciousness. Lwith thus affirmed the ahistorical notion of death he claimed
Heidegger also employed in Sein und Zeit. This is one of the reasons for which
Lwiths attitude toward Heideggers 1927 magnum opus was on the whole more
ambiguous than toward the later works. Although critical of his master, his argu-
ments retained significant features from Sein und Zeit. Thus, Lwith upheld the
centrality of the question as to the possibility of plural historicity; and he, too,
suggested an answer that would draw on the ontology of history, and that was
not entirely dissimilar to the Sein und Zeit notion of historicity as always divided
against itself. Both philosophers appear to have held that historicity, if deter-
mined in terms of ontology and internally differentiated, was best understood
as constituted by the particular range of objects it covered; or negatively, by the
range of objects it excluded. This conception of plural and particular historicity
presupposed that history was not an ontologically empty form that would have
been applicable to everything and anything. Lwith might be read as arguing that
Heidegger kept lapsing from this position.
As question [3] suggests, Lwiths proposal of how to construct plural historic-
ity diverged from Heidegger regarding death. Instead of offering the existential
opportunity of Ganzseinknnen, for Lwith, death constituted a reconnection
with living nature. This entailed that throughout life, the connection was some-
how broken or at least suspended. The individual life, in its temporal unfolding,
was placed in an antagonism not with secondary historicity, but with the natural
cosmos. Only the cosmos could be whole; by contrast, finality did not offer
a foundation of the wholeness of Dasein. Hence, the primacy of Dasein was
canceled out. Death, the sovereignty of nature, was solely an indicator of the
passing divergence of the historical from the cosmos. More precisely, death was
a symptom of the unsustainability of all history, the tendency of the historical to
collapse and give way to the all-embracing ordered and unified whole of being.
Temporality, it seems, was meant to be a feature of this cosmic order. Historical
time then deviated from this temporal order. Yet the underlying model, suppos-
edly that of ancient Greece, made clear that this deviation could not assume the
totalizing form of eschatology. History could not be unified because it could not
encompass cosmic time. In this way, Lwith replaced the unity of history with
the unity of nature. History was reduced to the episodic and incoherent form that
is so famously censured in Aristotles Poetics. Yet, in this form, history could
be plural, departing perhaps, in the way of a world of manmade constructions,
from natural ontologyLwith remained unspecific in this respectbut always
HENNING TRPER
64
breaking off, or petering out, returning to the eternal order of nature. The problem
of pluralizing temporality was thus implicitly solved by inserting a multitude of
times into eternity.
One of the most prominent formulations of the problematic is the 1960 paper
Welt und Menschenwelt (World and Human World).
55
Here, Lwith starts
out with the present, the burden of historical consciousness:
We all think today within the horizon of history and its fortunes; however, we no longer
live in the ambit of the natural world. Moreover, we know about a manifold of historical
worlds while our own, old-European one is falling apart. We lack the one world, which
is older and more abiding than man. . . . World and human world are not on a par. The
physical world is thinkable without any relation to man that would be essential to it; yet
no man is thinkable without world. We come into the world and we part from it; it does
not belong to us, we belong to it.
56

Lwith further remarks that the world is absolutely self-sufficient (absolut
selbstndig) and that his perspective is meant to be cosmological as opposed
to anthropological. The world is the greatest and the richest and at the same
time as empty as a frame without a picture, and not merely the sum of all things
known and unknown.
57
As far as this opening is concerned, Lwith is clearly
interested in finding a way of formulating a unified totality of being, which at
the same time is allowed to become empty. His cosmological world is not
determined by its particular ontology, thus by particular Seiendes, since it over-
rides all particular ontologies. Lwith thus retains a basic notion of ontology as
resulting from intentional access to, and practical sojourn in, the world. There is a
close kinship between this position and Heideggers in Sein und Zeit, yet an even
closer one with some aspects of the phenomenological undertaking from which
Heidegger sought to depart by shifting philosophical inquiry to ontology in his
sense. Lwiths cosmos, by contrast, was a world of natural life, a world to the
understanding of which the quest for a purported foundation of being did not
contribute anything.
In the historical process in which world-history was erroneously substituted
for world, it was teleology that served as an ordering principle. In the case of
the natural world Lwith suggests that such an ordering principle is supplied by
necessity as opposed to contingency. Since history is based on the assumption of
such contingency and excludes that which is necessary as ahistorical, the opposi-
tion between history and nature becomes insurmountable. History is the human
world; and in the process of a strange historical Verkehrung (perversion), it has
usurped the place of the world proper. This perversion apparently results from
the incongruence, the standing out of humanity from the world (Ek-sistenz,
with another Heideggerian term), a distinction from the world, given up only
with the last breath of life.
58
Lwith holds that the distance between humans and
the world may be conceptualized precisely by reference to the human ability to
55. Karl Lwith, Welt und Menschenwelt [1960], Smtliche Schriften I, 295-328 (translations
are mine).
56. Ibid., 295.
57. Ibid., 295f.
58. Ibid., 301.
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
65
regard, question, and explain matters of the world. However, this abilityin its
most basic form the pure contemplation of Greek theoriaforms part of human
nature.
59
Yet how human nature can be both part of nature as a whole and stand
out from it remains difficult to see, especially if one suspends usage of the spatial
metaphors Lwith favors.
Some further indications are contained in the 1957 piece Natur und Humanitt
des Menschen (The Nature and the Humanity of Man).
60
Here, Lwith
describes human nature in terms of an ability to distance oneself and transcend
what is naturally given (most prominently in language). Distance is bound up
with objectification (Vergegenstndlichung) and alienation (Entfremdung). The
latter opens the possibility of a reappropriation (Aneignung) of the object.
61

Human nature is thus characterized in terms of a departure and a return, as a
trajectory whose spatial metaphors do not point to concrete space so much as
to temporality. Lwith insists that humans do not actually transcend nature, but
rather speaks of a transgression (berschreiten) that nonetheless remains within
the ambit (Umkreis) of nature, in that the terminus a quo and the terminus ad
quem of human transgression would remain one and the same, nature itself.
62

Natures temporality is ahistorical, eternal (ewig).
63
It is a temporality for which
pertinence to a particular range of objects is not a relevant category. Emptiness
would then mean that objectscapable of functioning as a content of knowl-
edgeare only ever generated by the human departure from nature. Ontology
under the aspect of objectification is alien to nature. Ontology under the aspect of
the ahistorical temporality of nature itself is not marked by this condition. Lwith
reserves the latter aspect for theoria, that is to say, nonobjectifying, nonalienated
contemplation of physis, a term whose meaning he determineswith reference
to Aristotleas that which is born, grown, constant, thus-and-not-different. As
opposed to that which is intentionally made, constructed, and thus teleological,
physis is self-shaping, that is to say marked by entelechy.
64
Thus Lwith clearly
maintains that there is a primary and a secondary ontological condition. Indeed,
repeatedly, he uses the Hegelian notion of second nature to indicate human
departure from the first, the simply given nature.
65

In this way, Lwiths notion of nature is cleft by an internal antagonism, as is
Heideggers historicity. Temporary cycles of departure from, and return to, first
nature are natural. Historicity cannot be unified, in either temporal or in ontologi-
cal terms, because there is always a pre-history and a post-history, a terminus a
quo regarding departure, and a terminus ad quem, regarding return. Historical
59. For the philosophical development of Lwiths thought on the matter of the contemplation of
life since the time of his dissertation on Nietzsche, see the instructive discussion in Enrico Donag-
gio, Zwischen Nietzsche und Heidegger: Karl Lwiths anthropologische Philosophie des faktischen
Lebens, Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie 48 (2000), 37-48.
60. Karl Lwith, Natur und Humanitt des Menschen [1957], Smtliche Schriften I, 259-294.
61. Ibid., 285.
62. Ibid., 291.
63. Ibid., 266, a passage in which Lwith underlines the unchanging character of nature in spite of
such historical intrusions of humans into nature as symbolized in the formula of the Atomic Age.
64. Ibid., 267.
65. For example, ibid., 281; similarly in Lwith, Welt und Menschenwelt, 301; and in Karl
Lwith, Zur Frage einer philosophischen Anthropologie [1975], Smtliche Schriften I, 335.
HENNING TRPER
66
time is possible as constituted by ontology under the aspect of objectification, yet
is never sustainable. Nature is not made; it is not creation, and it cannot be
redeemed since it is not subject to agency. The basic categories of eschatology are
thus inapplicable. Historicity remains, among other things, a quality applicable to
elements of something that is unified, by dint of a beginning and an end, and thus
not by necessity endlessly fragmented. Yet there have to be many such unified
histories in order for historicity to be a meaningful category at all.
However, Lwiths distinction of first and second nature was imbalanced in a
fashion arguably alien to the conception of historicity in Sein und Zeit. Especially
in his later writings, Lwith often came close to marginalizing history to an extent
that it almost vanished as a philosophical problem. In this way, positing a very
far-reaching connection between history and second nature almost became
implausible. In the ancient Greek world of thought he continuously evoked, his-
tory figured not as a necessary field of the activity of human reason, but almost
as a mere accessory, a luxury, and a whim. Repeatedly, especially in the papers
inspired by his years of exile in Japan, he also equated the cosmic perspective
of the Greek logos with that of oriental wisdom.
66
In this way, he postulated a
common pagan way of thought. Accordingly, the appearance of Christianity,
with its tremendous spread of eschatological thought, acquired the status of a
decisive historical departure. The interpretation of some human affairs in terms
of history lost its merely accessory character. Only through this historical event
did history become so thoroughly entwined with second nature as to warrant
Lwiths theoretical argument. Since this argument requires a body of concrete
historical knowledge, in itself it cannot be understood outside the historical
context that made this knowledge possible. The nature of nature, in Lwiths
work, remained that of an inseparable union, and an inescapable aporia, of his-
torical and theoretical reasoning. As already seen in the discussion of the debate
between Blumenberg and Lwith, the philosophy of history, even in its suppos-
edly terminal stage of withering self-critique, remained bound to the contingent
regime of historicity that co-constituted the very notion the philosophy of history
had of its object.
V. EPILOGUE: THE HABITAT OF THE CENTAUR
The concrete regime of historicity in place in Lwiths writings is a remarkable
one. Its conflation of the ancient Greek and the oriental thought-world of Japan
points to a specific, highly intricate context: the history of the uses of antiquity
in nineteenth-century German-language Geisteswissenschaften and the surround-
ing domains of discourse.
67
Traditionallyor at least in the form of an invented
66. Most prominently in his occasional writings on Japan: Karl Lwith, Japans Westernization
and Moral Foundation [194243], Smtliche Schriften II, 541-555; Karl Lwith, The Japanese
Mind: A Picture of the Mentality that We Must Understand if We Are to Conquer [1943], ibid.,
556-570; and Karl Lwith, Bemerkungen zum Unterschied von Orient und Okzident [1960], ibid.,
571-601. All three papers share a common stock of anecdotal observations.
67. See for this Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Ger-
many, 17501970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Suzanne Marchand, German
Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
LWITH, LWITHS HEIDEGGER, AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY
67
traditionthe Greco-Roman and the Hebrew canons of ancient texts had defined
separate epochs of reference neither of which could be entirely dismissed. From
the eighteenth century onward, the traditional patterns of staging this dualism had
eroded.
68
The historical-critical reading of the Bible, almost exclusively target-
ing the Old Testament, fed from a theological project of disparaging the Hebrew
heritage of (initially mainly Protestant) Christianity. The disparagement of the
normative character of Hebrew antiquity also pertained to contemporary Judaism.
It further fueled contemporary customs of embracing ancient Greek philosophy,
and of constructing a historical travesty of intellectual ancestry in which German
intellectuals celebrated their imagined proximity to Athens (as opposed to
Jerusalem). At the same time, however, antiquities multiplied as various bodies
of scholarship on ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, and China grew rapidly. With
the imagined historical community of the Aryans, novel, and often racist, dual-
isms emerged.
69
Hebrew antiquity was increasingly relegated to the margins of a
wider context of heavily pluralizing Middle Eastern antiquity. Yet ultimately, the
multiplication of antiquities also challenged the normative status of Greece; the
intellectual philhellenism of the nineteenth century mutated into a defensive
reaction to ensure the normative status of at least one of the traditional antiquities.
Lwith, by radically removing the thought of ancient Greece from that of
modern Europe, as shaped by Jewish and Christian eschatology, opted for a
specific position in which the Greeks were orientalized and the Hebrews
occidentalized.
70
The traditional confrontation of Athens and Jerusalem
thus persisted, but all modern Europe was on the latter side. Although his fer-
vent attacks on eschatology were genealogically related to the disparagement of
Hebrew antiquity, Lwith clearly wished to brush aside the anti-Semitic con-
notations this line of argument had acquired over the course of the nineteenth
century.
71
Hence the attraction of making eschatology the great historical water-
shed from which Christianity and Judaism flowed in the same direction. Implic-
itly, Lwith rejected the distinctions between Jewish Messianism and Christian
Apocalypticism that Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, among others, had
sought to establish. Lwiths unreserved embrace of Greek thought entailed a
negation of all European history. In this, he was uncompromising. It is important
to note that Meaning in History was dedicated to the memory of his mother who,
having emigrated no further than her native Vienna, had committed suicide in
68. See Joachim Dyck, Athen und Jerusalem: Bibel und Poesie in der Tradition ihrer Verknpfung
im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1977).
69. Poignantly analyzed in Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and
Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
70. The model for this choice may well have been supplied by Nietzsche, who in his attacks on
Christianity also emphasized the unbridgeable distance between the ancient Greek and the modern
worlds of thought respectively.
71. James I. Porter, Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology, Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn
2008), 115-147, has argued that Auerbachs famous discussion of narrative time in Homer and the
Old Testament, in the initial chapter of Mimesis, was a structurally similar reaction to the anti-Semitic
connotations of Athens vs. Jerusalem. Auerbach stressed the foundational character of the Old
Testament for all later European literature. Evidently, the values with which this European descent
from Judaism was then charged were diametrically opposed to the ones with which Lwith, almost at
the same time, saddled eschatology.
HENNING TRPER
68
1942 upon receipt of her deportation order.
72
The Holocaustor perhaps, as far
as Lwith is concerned, the World Wars more generallyprovided the vanishing
point at which all lines of occidental historical development converged.
Yet it is also undeniable that Lwith hardly cared to make this connection
explicit. This may be precisely because it required a blending of a historical
travestythe competition of Athens vs. Jerusalem and all the faux genealo-
gies and ludicrous dichotomies it entailedwith the most catastrophic aspects of
the historical present. In its plain refusal to talk about concrete, detailed, politi-
cally charged, complicated, and convoluted contemporary history, Lwiths late
work conceded the explanatory poverty of the atrophic histories that figured in
philosophies of historyincluding his own. And more precisely, his late work
conceded a specific regime of historicity as established in the specific patterns
of philosophical discourse. The monotonous parcours from classical antiquity
to modernity, the stringing together of great thinkers in a sort of transhistorical
sacra conversazione, simply did not constitute a history in which the atrocities of
the twentieth century could claim a legitimate place. Ultimately, this philosophi-
cal tradition presupposed a historical ontology of its own, and thus the plurality
of history. The discussion to which Lwith contributed required the regime of
historicity it employed; and this regime had to have limited scope if it was to
protect philosophy from the mess of other histories. The position on historicity
Lwith developed in his late work, while participating in the travesty, nonethe-
less displays in its silences the traces of an awareness of the implausibility it had
acquired in Lwiths lifetime. Possibly, though, this implausibility appeared less
harmful when one accepted that history was not unified and that there could not
be a single regime of historicity in the first place. In the end, the plurality of his-
tory may have derived its urgency from the hope of salvaging the legitimacy of a
specific tradition of philosophical thought, of salvaging the habitat of the centaur
threatened by a history it could not contain.
Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science
Princeton, New Jersey
72. Donaggio, Sobria Inquietudine, 113.