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perspective assimilates both the full force of the Left HegeEans' critical
works and the total shipwreck of their historical hopes. They had all
lived for "tomorrow," oriented toward a glorious future; he saw himself
as belonging to "the day after tomorrow," to a time when faith in time
was dead. Thus his terrible madness and his more terrible lucidity in–
carnates the catastrophe in the drama of the
Weltgeist's
undoing. At
first, with Goethe and Hegel, it was possible for Western man to feel
perfectly at home within the world; then the Left Hegelians insisted that
he could find his way home only by rejecting and transcending the
world; finally, since Nietzsche, Western man has been forced to accept
the fact that he can never go home again. The house of horror which
Europe became in the Spring of 1939 was built on this foundation.
In
Part Two)
Loewith explores the relation of the disintegrating
German and European
Geist
to the
W.eIt
into which it found itself
thrown, the "bourgeois-Christian world" of the industrial and technolo–
gical age. What, he wants to know, was ultimately responsible for the
catastrophe: was it the
Geist)
the
Welt
or some combination of the
two? The relation between them presented no problem for Hegel, who
regarded their destinies as identical; but it is a crucial problem for Loe–
with, who is himself a casualty of their tragic separation.
Part Two
shows Loewith at his most inspired, but also reveals a deep flaw in the
structure of his tragedy itself.
In a brilliant discussion of "the problem of bourgeois society,"
Loewith uses Marxian analysis to show how the Hegelian synthesis in
political thought was doomed from the start by the social reality of the
modern age. Hegel wanted to make the French Revolution permanent
by consolidating its "rights of man and citizen" in an organic complex
of institutions. He saw, however, that these institutions could not last
unless they were maintained by a "universal class," one that would
identify its own interests with those of society as a whole. But the most
eligible candidate, the newly emancipated
bourge·oisie-who
had emerged
as the real victors of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic struggles-under–
mined the universal faster than they could proclaim it. Both in thought
and in reality, as Marx said, they "lived a double life," split into an
antithesis of egoistic private "man" and altruistic public "citizen" which
no synthesis could mend. These new men were offended by their civic
conscience, and plucked it out: their very image of public virtue was
seen through the glass of their private vice. The public spirit in the
modern liberal state soon appeared only as a ghost, which might haunt
the body politic with remembrance of its past and visions of its potential
future, but which lacked the substance to change its present, private
life. The creative social thinkers of the age, from Rousseau and Hegel
