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to the South to get away from it all.
It
is one of Loewith's own deepest
impulses precisely t.o get away from it all, to cash in his ticket to the
twentieth century and retreat to a philosophical S.outh .of timeless,
stateless essences.
The sun in Loewith's South, where he has fled to contemplative sere–
nity, is Goethe.
In
a l.ong essay on "Time and History" at the end .of
Part
One-an
essay that is not so much a stage in his argument as a sustained
cry .of pain-he invokes Goethe's essentialist light against a historicist
darkness represented alternately by Hegel and by Nietzsche. Simply by
taking history seriously, Loewith seems to say, Hegel sold his soul t.o the
bitch-goddess Success. To judge things in historical terms necessarily
means to accept the standards of whoever is on top of history now, so
that "the success of s.omething proves its superior right over that which
is unsuccessful." This leads to an "idolization of whatever force happens
to be successful" at any given time; and from here it is only one step
to fascism, which is simply "activistic Historicism" in action. But any–
one who has read a little Hegel-or, for that matter, a little Loewith,
who earlier .on has given an excellent account of the
Philosophy of His–
tory--knows
that this is caricature. Hegel's standard for judging events
and men was not success-indeed, he despised most of what was suc–
cessful in his day-but rather "progress in the consciousness of freedom."
This attack on Hegel is extraordinarily sloppy; it is almost empty .of
textual citation, about which Loewith is usually overscrupulous; for a
moment one toys with the idea that some joker at the printer's might
have lifted the original and slipped in a chapter of Karl Popper instead.
But the slip is no j.oke, for Loewith's portrait of Goethe is just as dis–
torted, if in the opposite direction. For just as Hegel was not uncritically
open to the developments of m.odem history, so Goethe was not blindly
closed to them. Although the Saint-Simonians may have alarmed him,
we need only read
Faust II
to see how deeply he identified himself
with that revolutionary Saint-Simonian figure, the technocrat. With
Eckermann, he occasionally grew priggish about modem art, and con–
demned the French Romantic "satanists" as a "pack of the depraved";
but one of the m.ost striking things these conversations as a whole reveal
is how receptive Goethe was in his old age to everything new and
avant-garde, especially from Paris--even to the most extreme satanism,
which he felt would ultimately enrich art by expanding its frontiers. And
no amount of explanation can explain away Goethe's comment on the
victory of the French revolutionary army over the Prussians at Valmy
in 1792: "A new epoch in world history begins at this place today;
and you can say that you were there." Like all melodrama, this chapter
gets its dramatic effects by substituting stereotypes for life.
