4 - The Identity of Nature and History

Summary

In a text from 1961 titled ‘The Quest for the Meaning of History’, which appeared as an appendix to his major work Welgeschichte un Heilgeschehen (Meaning and History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History), Karl Löwith interrogates the modern dislocation of the ‘unitary and total world split into two different worlds’: on the one side the world of nature and on the other the historical world, an ontological separation which is doubled in an epistemological separation between ‘the world of modern science and a historical human world, the world of the humanities’. As might be expected, Löwith repeats the claim that the role of the founder of the first world is Descartes, while, for the second world, he repeats the claim that its founder is Vico, adding that, ‘at the end of this split between nature and history, there stands the assertion of Hegel's pupil, Marx, that “history is the true natural history of man”’. In the commentary he offers on this famous formula from the 1844 Manuscripts, Löwith explains that Marx's thesis is that the world of human beings is not the natural world, that the natural world for humanity is the world of history, that the world is not found by humanity as a natural given, but is produced by humanity and engendered in its work. If that is what Marx had wanted to say, then, on the one hand, we can understand how Löwith makes it the culmination of the modern dissociation of nature and history, and on the other, why it is then possible to cite Dilthey after Marx, making them part of the same trajectory: in substance, Marx would not have said anything different from the idealist philosophy of history that preceded him (the Hegelian philosophy of history), nor from the idealist philosophy of the historical life that succeeded him, namely Dilthey's philosophy of the historical science of spirit. From Hegel to Dilthey, passing through Marx, it would then be the same break of nature and history that is accomplished and radicalised. We hope to demonstrate here that this vision of things dissolves the originality of Marx's thought.