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MARSHALL BERMAN
any study of the period, primary because
From Hegel to Nietzsche
be·
longs to a genre which has developed inseparably from those ideas whose
outcome Loewith is trying to show: a genre known untranslatably
as
Geistesgeschichte,
which exploits the history of ideas as a medium of
personal vision and testament.
Loewith's tragedy is the story of a nihilistic "revolution in nine·
teenth-century thought"; it is only fitting that it should begin with a
beautiful evocation of the sweetness of thought before the revolution. '
ACT
ONE
opens with a vision of the German spirit at the moment of its
greatest power and glory-in the syntheses of Goethe and Hegel. Loewith
has what can only be called a genius for textual exposition. With a few
bold strokes he unfolds the magnificent structure of thought and feel·
ing Goethe and Hegel shared. Both men aimed to "stand in the mid·
dIe," to mediate and transcend the dualisms in the thought of their
day: subject and object, spirit and nature, modem and ancient, free·
dom and fate, the rational and the real. Both sympathized with the
tendencies of the Enlightenment and modern life in general
to
unchain
subjectivity, yet both recoiled from the escapist fantasies of romantic
subjectivism; they agreed that the individual could fulfill himself only
by throwing himself into the concrete world, by making the totality of
objective experience his own. The world appeared to both as an essen·
tially beneficent place in which man was "at home," providentially
guided toward self-realization by the invisible hand of a cunning Reason
or Nature, needing only the strength and resolution
to
follow where
it led.
But the tragic reversal is not long in coming. Hegel died in 1831, at
the height of his fame, Goethe a year later. In mourning them, intel·
lectual Germany mourned itself. Their center could not hold: within a
decade the life of the spirit in Germany had shattered into a galaxy of
brilliant fragments. With great empathy Loewith puts these fragments
together, and thus performs the heroic task of rescuing the Left Hegel–
ians from Marx, Engels and oblivion. H e brings Feuerbach, Stimer,
Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer vividly to life as writers of great insight
and power, and ensures forever that they will be read; at the same time
he provides us with a conceptual framework within which we can
grasp both Marx and Kierkegaard, as opposite ends of the Left Hegelian
spectrum.
The Left Hegelians of the eighteen forties were all revolutionaries,
but never nihilists: each pointed, in his different direction, toward some
constructive synthesis ahead.
It
is only a generation later, with Nietzsche,
that the spirit finds itself in the void. Loewith argues, convincingly, that
Nietzsche could not have belonged to the earlier generation: for his
