From Hegel to Nietzsche [Paperback]

Karl Löwith (Author), Hans-Georg Gadamer (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231074999 | ISBN-13: 978-0231074995 | Publication Date: April 15, 1964 0

Beginning with an examination of the relationship between Hegel and Goethe, Löwith discusses how Hegel's students, particularly Marx and Kierkegaard, interpreted----or reinterpreted----their master's thought, and proceeds with an in-depth assessment of the other important philosophers, from Feuerbach, Stirner, and Schelling to Nietzsche.

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1964)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231074999
• ISBN-13: 978-0231074995
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clear but complex, May 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: From Hegel to Nietzsche (Paperback)

No one can claim that German intellectual history is an easy subject to wade through; this treatise is a good introduction to the important role that Hegel played in the formation of later 19th century German thought. While the translation is a bit balky at points (translating from German to English is no easy task in academic works!) it gives a good introduction to the basic ideas behind some of the more seminal thinkers of the German intellectual milleau through the late 19th century and is a fine basis for moving on to other books on the periods following. It is at times a bit unclear; this is not a book for beginners or the generalist but one for those who are already somewhat familiar with philosophy and the terms of debate. Still recommended reading to understand more fully the foundations of the later German state and history.

3 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of things I like, February 1, 2007

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (Hardcover)

I am not overly familiar with From Hegel to Nietzsche (1941) by Karl Löwith, translated into English by David E. Green for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. in 1964, but the style of philosophy which it contains is basically what I think Americans should be capable of learning from, for it is the work of a highly educated individual driven out of his own land by the political movements of his times, but writing like someone who has escaped a great danger. At times when Americans don't seem to know what they are doing in parts of the world that do not expect a global economnic expansion, or a big bubble of debt, depending on how you look at it, to be their own form of salvation, and polls which attempt to survey what people are thinking seem to be mainly a tool of wingnuts, I like to look in the direction of profound thoughts. When Karl Löwith wrote the Foreword to the First Edition (pp. v-vii) in Sendai (Japan) in Spring, 1939, the year that Walter Kaufmann came to the United States, and Erich Auerback, author of MIMESIS / THE REPRESENTATION OF REALTY IN WESTERN LITERATURE, was probably already in exile in Istanbul, Americans were about to assume major responsibilities for a world in which such individuals trying to gain historical understanding from ground which has shifted under their own feet, reflecting on culture with their own intuition instead of seeking to conform to the daily demands of the culture constantly surrounding them, would be capable of demonstrating to Americans how most thought on public policy merely perpetuates existing themes, whereas true criticism calls for somewhat more. As Edward W. Said wrote in the Introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the English translation of MIMESIS, "Auerbach explicitly rejects a rigid scheme, a relentless sequential movement, or fixed concepts as instruments of study."

Intellectually, as a rock fan heavily influenced by being a Freudian expert in the humor of the Vietnam war, and also strongly influenced by receiving a postcard on which Walter Kaufmann had checked "Give it your best shot" on July 22, 1980, it is easy for me to pick Heinrich Heine as an individual exile from Germany to Paris in the years covered by the book FROM HEGEL TO NIETZSCHE by Karl Löwith as a popular poet capable of expressing my kind of views. Löwith and I are certainly aware that Heine wrote a history of religion and philosophy to inform the French of the nature of German thinking in 1834. It would have been a great pleasure for me to quote some things by Heine to Walter Kaufmann in 1980, and perhaps I will return at the end of this review to a long quotation which Löwith provides on pages 43-45 of FROM HEGEL TO NIETZSCHE to show that those who read Hegel, while they may have been ignored or chased far away by the "good Germans" around them, did some incredible thinking.

Skipping to the beginning of the fourth part of the book, on page 175 it is not at all surprising to find:

The Philosophy of History Becomes the Desire for Eternity

IV Nietzsche as Philosopher of Our Age and of Eternity

"One never goes further than not knowing where one is going." Goethe (Maxims, 901)

Writing in Japan, Löwith did not have access to a vast library, so his notes on Nietzsche merely identify his source in a German collection, WERKE, 16 vols. This does not help me discover much about the original context of the ideas taken from Nietzsche, but the second pargragh of this part of the book helps picture what context Nietzsche placed himself in:

Nietzsche's historical place has usually been determined according to his relationship to Schopenhauer and Wagner, without regard for the disparity of their historical locus. . . . That portion of Schopenhauer's thought which gained a positive place in Nietzsche's philosophy derives from natural philosophy: the vision of an eternal recurrence of what is essentially the same in what is the apparent flux of the historical world. In contrast, Wagner's reformatory plans had their effect upon Nietzsche's temporal will to the future. Nietzsche is related to the revolutionary criticism of the left-wing Hegelians not only through Wagner's relationship to Feurbach, but also by his own literary attack upon D. F. Strauss, which reaches a logical conclusion with the ANTICHRIST. In his criticism of Christianity, he concurs with B. Bauer, whose criticism of religion developed out of Hegel's philosophy of religion. And so, historically considered, the coincidence that Stirner's book appeared in the year of Nietzsche's birth seems as necessary as the connection between Nietzsche's attempt at a new beginning and the Nothing which is reached in Stirner. Nietzsche learned of Kierkegaard through G. Brandes, but it was too late for them to become personally acquainted. Nietzsche seems never to have concerned himself with Marx. A comparison of the two is nevertheless justified, because Nietzsche is the only man, after Marx and Kierkegaard, who made the decline of the bourgeois-Christian world the theme of such a fundamental analysis. The antithesis between his theory of recurrence and Kierkegaard's "reiteratrion" of Christianity is immediately convincing; the historical connection between Nietzsche's criticism of civilization and Marx's criticism of capitalism is less obvious, because it is hidden at first by Nietzsche's own bourgeois status and his lack of concern for social and economic questions. Heine must be included among the Young Hegelians in the extended sense; Nietzsche thought him so significant a figure that he did not hesitate to name Heine in the same breathe as Hegel and himself. Whatever abyss separates Nietzsche's anti-Christian philosophy from Hegel's philosophical theology and his hammer from Hegel's "speculation" is bridged by Hegel's pupils through a consequent series of revolts against the Christian tradition and bourgeois culture. At the beginning and end of this bridge stand Hegel and Nietzsche; the question is whether--beyond Nietzsche--there is any practicable path at all.

Heine is my best example of an escapee from Germany who cansidered the Germans something that must be guarded against:

A few years after Hegel's death, Heine, at the conclusion of his Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1834), tried to open the eyes of the French to the very concrete revolution which might proceed from the Reformation and German philosophy: "It seems to me that a methodical nation like us had to begin with the Reformation, could only thereafter engage in philosophy, and only after the perfection of philosophy go on to political revolution. This order I find quite sensible. The heads which philosophy has used for reflection can be cut off later by the revolution for whatever purposes it likes. But philosophy would never have been able to use the heads cut off by the revolution if the latter had preceded it. But do not become anxious, you German Republicans; the German revolution will not take place any more pleasantly and gently for having been preceded by the Kantian critique, Fichtian transcendental idealism, or even natural philosophy. Through these theories revolutionary forces have built up which only await the day on which they may break loose, filling the world with horror and awe. Kantians will appear who want nothing to do with mercy even in the phenomenal world; they will plough up without pity the very soil . . ." (pp. 43-44).