University of Groningen
Contested modernity
Griffioen, Sjoerd
DOI:
10.33612/diss.132902473
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Griffioen, S. (2020). Contested modernity: Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt and the German Secularization Debate. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.132902473
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Contested Modernity
Karl löwith, hans BluMenBerg and Carl sChMitt
and the gerMan seCularization deBate
Alle rechten voorbehouden. Niets uit deze opgave mag worden verveelvoudigd, opgeslagen in een geautomatiseerd gegevensbestand of openbaar worden gemaakt, in enige vorm of op enige wijze, zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de auteur.
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in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, included a complete or partial transcription, without the prior written permission of the au-thors, application for which should be addressed to author.
© 2020 by Sjoerd Griffioen ISBN: 978-94-034-2863-5
Also available as ebook ISBN: 978-94-034-2864-2
Graphic design and layout: Tariq Jakobsen
Cover illustration: Collage naar Willy Kessels by Roel Griffioen Printing: Haveka BV
Contested Modernity
Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt and the German Secularization Debate
Proefschrift
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
op gezag van de
rector magnificus prof. dr. C. Wijmenga en volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties.
De openbare verdediging zal plaatsvinden op donderdag 1 oktober 2020 om 16.15 uur
door
Sjoerd Laurens Victor Griffioen
geboren op 6 oktober 1987 te Loenen aan de Vecht
Promotor Prof. dr. L.W. Nauta Copromotor Dr. J.A. Vega Beoordelingscommissie Prof. dr. G. Vanheeswijck Prof. dr. M. Lenz Prof. dr. H.J. Paul
Table of Contents
InTroduCTIon
1
ParT I
9
Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg
Chapter 1
11
The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate: From Overlapping Aversions to Fundamental Differences
ParT II
51
The Polemics between Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg
Chapter 2
53
The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt: Secularization, Eschatology and Enmity
Chapter 3
79
The Löwith-Schmitt Debate on Nihilism and Faith: Critique, Post-War Diplomacy and Mutual Suspicion
Chapter 4
109
The Blumenberg-Schmitt Debate and the ‘Front Against Political Theology’
ParT III
143
Three Perspectives on the Broader Secularization Debate
Chapter 5
145
Historiography: The Secularization Debate as ‘Ideenpolitik’
Chapter 6
183
Theology: The Roots of Modernity and the Metaphorics of Secularization
Chapter 7
223
Politics: Between Heresy and Paganism, The Struggle over Political Theology between Jacob Taubes and Odo Marquard
ParT IV
285
Methodological Reflection
Chapter 8
287
Understanding the Secularization Debate: Geistesgeschichte and Essentially Contested Concepts
ConClusIon
333
BIBlIograPhy
339
samenVaTTIng
363
dankwoord
365
Promotor Prof. dr. L.W. Nauta Copromotor Dr. J.A. Vega Beoordelingscommissie Prof. dr. G. Vanheeswijck Prof. dr. M. Lenz Prof. dr. H.J. PaulIntroduction
‘a tale of two Churches’
Secularization is usually taken to indicate a general process of transformation from one worldview to another. However, ‘secularization’ carries multiple meanings and macro-histor-ical concepts also ‘occur’ as concrete micro-histories. As such, it not only pertains to grand developments such as the separation of church and state, but also to the transformation of towns, rural communities and the every-day lives of individuals, as for instance the Dutch historian Geert Mak has shown in Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd.1 Secularization, in other words,
is also a story of ‘how God disappeared’ from the small Frisian village of Jorwerd. The current
study is a philosophical investigation of secularization. More specifically, of the philosophical polemics between Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt within the broader con-text of the German secularization debate. Before introducing these authors and the debate, however, let us first take a very concrete image of secularization, namely an empty church, as point of departure, in order to illustrate two different conceptions of secularization relevant to this study.
A common way of thinking about secularization assumes that modernity and religion are essentially antagonistic concepts.2 According to this view, religion is assumed to be modernity’s
‘other’. It represents the past that we have irrevocably left behind. ‘Secularization’ is subse-quently regarded as a development that signifies the proportionate disappearance of religion and advance of modernity, or of its presumed auxiliaries: Enlightenment and/or science. The continued existence of religious ideas or practices in the present does not falsify this claim. Rather, it shows the stubborn persistence of a non-modern historical residue.3 To those who
adhere to this conception of modernity and secularization the question remains whether this ‘non-modern residue’ will inevitably give way to modern secular rationality or not; many hope that this is indeed the case. In the Dutch cultural context, secularization is commonly equated with ‘ontkerkelijking’: a decline in church attendance. The waning influence of the local church
on daily life in a village or town replicates on a more tangible level a general development: the advance of modernity implies the decline of religion. This understanding of ‘secularization’ presupposes that, like the emptying of churches, we are dealing with a mono-linear, unidirec-tional and irrevocable process of gradual disappearance, be it one that occurs on multiple levels:
God disappears from Jorwerd, people leave the local church, and religion exits society. Many, moreover, evaluate this process as an instance of progress, signifying the unproblematic
remov-al of an inessentiremov-al or detrimentremov-al element from society or daily life.4
The second understanding of secularization – one which will be more pertinent to this study – does not refer to the unproblematic disappearance of religion in modernity but to its ambivalent transformation. Rather than signifying the removal of religion from society, secularization is conceived in this view as a process in which a religious element or function is transposed to a secular context, or where religious ideas are translated to a secular language,
1 Mak (2002) cf. pp.113-143.
2 Perhaps it is worth noting that when I use the term ‘modernity’ I refer specifically to the Western variety. Hence my discussion of religion usually focusses on Christianity and, to a lesser extent, on Judaism. The ‘multiple modernities’ approach (cf. Taylor 2007, p.21) is significant, but falls beyond the scope of the current investigation.
3 Cf. Blumenberg (1966) pp.60-61. 4 Cf. Taylor (2007) p.22.
while retaining a built-in reference to the religious context in which they originate.5 Although
it acknowledges that the position of religion has become problematized in modernity, this alternative conception of secularization does cast doubt on whether modernity and religion are indeed as discontinuous as adherents of the first view suggest. Not only does the second view imply that the persistence of religious elements signifies something else than the per-sistence of the non-modern in modernity, it also suggests that secular, modern phenomena themselves may contain traces of religion. This perspective casts a different light on ontker-kelijking and the fate of the local church: while the first view of secularization can account
for a decline in church attendance, the second view is more attuned to the strange afterlife religion can have in secular society. It pertains, for example, to how some people, having left the church, seek new communities or new meaningful narratives, or how people replace church rituals with different, quasi-secular equivalents, or how they experience the absence of such rituals. Finally, it refers to how the emptied church building itself survives, fulfilling awkward new functions in ‘a secular age’, either as a monument to the past, or, repurposed, as a bookshop, apartment building or dance hall. In this second sense, the local church equally serves as an exemplar of ‘secularization’. However, rather than exemplifying the unproblemat-ic disappearance of religion it serves as a sign of its continued, ambivalent presence, directly, indirectly or even in absentia.
Postsecular Critiques of Progress and secularization
The second conception of secularization is often involved in attempts to shed a different, usually more critical light on the idea of ‘progress’ that is commonly espoused by the first view. The implication is that ‘progress’ itself contains a religious residue, even when it is employed to signify the overcoming of religion by modernity or of faith by reason. Enlightenment-inspired notions of the gradual improvement of the world, the rationalization of society or the emancipation of humanity from bondage and “self-incurred immaturity” are argued to be ‘secularized’ versions of religious conceptions of providence.6 Whether it is assumed that a
religious substance persists in a secular form or that a religious function is given new, secular content, in both cases it is claimed that something religious survives, often without the
knowl-edge of those who adhere to these ‘secularized’ phenomena. To be sure, this transitive use of
the term secularization – as in x is a secularized y – is not limited to the topic of progress.7
Examples abound of this transitive meaning, ranging from the banal and every-day to the incendiary and political. For instance, a journalist uses this meaning of ‘secularization’ to ex-plain his new love of hiking in the woods and his urge to introduce representations of the forest into his home, in the form of houseplants: “If the forest is the god of our age, then the houseplant is the Madonna icon.”8 On a more contentious note, a leader of a populist
political party uses it to cast doubt on the climate crisis: “It is a masochist heresy, this secular-ized diluvianism [zondvloedgeloof] that has captured the hearts … of our governors”.9 While the 5 The notion of ‘translation’, e.g. of something from an exclusive religious language to a more commonly
acces-sible secular language, is thematized by Habermas (2006b). 6 Cf. Taubes (2009); Löwith (1949).
7 On ‘transitive’ secularization, cf.: Zabel (1968) pp.15-39; De Vriese (2016) p.37.
8 Van Veelen (2018), my translation: “Als het bos de god van onze tijd is, dan is de kamerplant het Mariabeeldje.”
9 From a speech by Thierry Baudet, my translation: “Het is een masochistische ketterij, dit geseculariseerde zondvloedgeloof, dat zich in onze tijd heeft meester gemaakt van de harten … van onze bestuurders.” Cf. Tempelman (2019). For other examples of ‘transitive secularization’, see: Blumenberg (1983) pp.13-16.
transitive meaning of secularization has a wider range of application, critiques of progress as ‘secularized’ religion are especially poignant because they attempt to strike at what is assumed to be the core of the self-consciousness of modernity: that it is unproblematically a-religious, founded on “reason alone”, and that modernization is unequivocally a good thing.10 Paul
Kingsnorth, author of Savage Gods (2019), states in an interview that economic growth has
be-come an idolatrous religion that will ultimately destroy the planet: “Christianity is replaced by an unconditional faith in industrialization, progress and rationalism. We have killed God and placed Progress on his throne. Everything that is needed to halt the ecological crisis founders on the necessity of economic growth.”11 John Gray argues along similar lines that “the idea
of progress is a secular version of Christian eschatology” and that many secular thinkers ven-erate Reason or Humanity as “surrogates of the God they have cast aside. … The idea that the human species realizes common goals throughout history is a secular avatar of a religious idea of redemption.”12 Probably unbeknownst to them, Kingsnorth and Gray hereby reiterate
a claim that was made famous by Karl Löwith in his 1949 book Meaning in History, a work that
will form one of the primary focal points of this investigation.13
Löwith’s contention, shared by Kingsnorth and Gray, that the quintessentially modern notion of progress has religious roots, even though it is often framed as the victory of secular reason over religious faith, problematizes the clear-cut dichotomy between modernity and reli-gion that is presupposed by the first conception of secularization. Indeed, it can be added that the very notion of ‘secularization’ itself – which refers to the originally Christian distinction between saeculum and eternity – is inextricably tied to the concept of religion. This means that
even if purely as a reference point, or as a perceived absence, religion retains an ambivalent presence of some sort when its disappearance is discussed.14 In recent years, issues such as
these are addressed in the so-called ‘postsecularism debate’. This is a broad multidisciplinary discourse where the meaning of concepts such as ‘modernity’ and ‘secularization’ are put up for discussion and in which the ‘religion-secular binary’ is problematized and renegotiated. Prominent voices such as those of Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas and Gianni Vattimo call into question the mono-linear secularization narrative that describes religion’s unproblem-atic disappearance. They concur that Western modernity did not come into existence despite
Christianity but that it emerged out of it, and that – also because of its assumedly secular na-ture – it continues to carry traces of this past. Such issues are relevant because in the context of debates on globalization, ‘multiple modernities’, and multiculturalism it casts a critical light on the assumption that a Western variety of ‘secularization’ is universal, that it is an ahistorical occurrence in which faith and superstition automatically give way to reason and enlighten-ment.15 Postsecularism, in short, emphasizes the ambivalent presence and transformation of
religion in modernity.
However, the recent attunement to the possible shortcomings of the first conception of secularization, concomitant with an increased focus on what I have termed ‘the strange
10 On the notion of “reason alone”, cf.: Taylor (2011) pp.326-346.
11 Kingsnorth and Mulder (interview) (2019) p.11. My translation: “Het Christendom is vervangen door een onvoorwaardelijk geloof in industrialisatie, vooruitgang en rationalisme. We hebben God vermoord en Vooruitgang op de troon gezet. Alles wat nodig is om de ecologische crisis te keren, loopt stuk op de noodzaak van economische groei.”
12 Gray (2004) p.11; ibid. (2019) p.1.
13 As far as I know, Gray does not refer to Löwith in his claims that ‘progress is secularized eschatology’. The similarity between their claims is notable however, as Kroll (2010, pp.4-8) has already observed.
14 Cf. Adam (2001) p.149. 15 Cf. Habermas (2002) pp.155-156.
afterlife of religion in secular society’, raises a host of questions about which little agreement exists in the postsecularism debate. They all relate to the general issue of how Western mo-dernity should be evaluated over against its Christian past. Indeed, if the boundary between religion and modernity is more porous than previously thought, or if it is true that certain core ideas – even ‘secularization’ and ‘progress’ – can be related to religious origins, does this mean that modernity suffers from false self-consciousness or that it is somehow indebted to
Christianity? To return to the image used earlier, should we perceive modernity as an empty church from which all spiritual meaning has dissipated, as some pessimistic theologians might argue, or as a repurposed church, a structure with a new content that retains its old parameters?16
Or is it rather a new edifice that might have emerged from older structures but that possesses its own character and dignity? In short, does modernity possess its own legitimacy over against its Christian past or will it always remain beholden to it? Questions such as these inevitably come into play as soon as the self-evidence of the ‘secular-religion binary’ is disputed, as post-secularism has done. However, for the rather diffuse nature of postpost-secularism these questions are not discussed in a systematic manner, nor are they always explicitly addressed.
To obtain a better understanding of poignant issues such as these, I propose that we turn to the German secularization debate: a wide-ranging polemic that centered on the work of Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt. In this debate these questions were discussed in depth. While it is commonly referred to as a polemic of great importance to philosophical reflection on modernity’s relation to religion – it is for instance regarded as the forerunner of the
post-secularist discourse – there have been few extensive or systematic studies of this secularization debate, let alone studies that focus on how Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt should actually be situated within it.17 The current investigation endeavors to address this lacuna. Moreover, it
will highlight meaningful connections between postsecularism on the one hand and the older German debate on the other, although this is not my primary focus. The main roles of this investigation are reserved for Löwith, who believed that modernity is defined by hubris and crypto-religious illusion, Blumenberg, who argued that while modernity’s origin should be un-derstood in relation to Christianity it does possesses its own independency and legitimacy, and,
finally, Carl Schmitt, who identified secularization as a detrimental processes of neutralization, understood as an increased meaninglessness and the stifling of the human will. Aside from these three philosophers, this study also reconstructs the broader discursive context in which they should be situated. This will involve analyses of the contributions of various authors – e.g., Hermann Lübbe, Odo Marquard and Jacob Taubes – who are less well-known in the contemporary postsecularism discourse but who can be seen to offer illuminating insights on the subject. In a nutshell, the current study seeks to answer a historical question, namely what the significance is of the polemic between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt in the develop-ment of the German secularization debate, but it also offers a philosophical reflection on the continued relevance of this debate with regard to any theorizing on the nature of modernity and its relation to religion.
16 Famous theological accounts of secularization along these lines are: Guardini (1998); Troeltsch (1911). 17 There are exceptions, namely: the early analysis of Zabel (1968), which however omits Schmitt’s role in the
debate, Ruh (1980), who however could not cover the further development of the debate on political theology in the 1980’s, and the more recently Kroll (2010). Kroll’s insightful analysis however focusses less on the role and reception of Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt within the broader secularization debate. In the course of this study it will become clear that my analysis partly builds on but also differs from Kroll’s in several respects.
a return to the german secularization debate
I will commence the investigation with an analysis of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate. Blumenberg is known for mounting a defense of the legitimacy of modernity in his seminal work
Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (1966).18 In this book he not only rejects the idea that modernity is
found-ed ahistorically ‘on reason alone’ but, more importantly, he also takes aim against widespread at-tempts to reduce the defining features of the Modern Age to religious precedents. Significantly, Blumenberg chose Löwith, who had argued that the quintessentially modern idea of progress is secularized eschatology, as the prime representative of this supposedly detrimental tenden-cy. Blumenberg identified this tendency as ‘the secularization theorem’. While their polemic forms a
standard point of reference in recent literature on secularization, we will also discover that the re-ception of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate is hampered by stubborn misunderstandings. Many commentators tend to perceive this polemic through the lens of Blumenberg’s critique, which implies that they assume that Löwith is indeed guilty of all the transgressions that Blumenberg pointed out and assumedly ‘decisively refuted’.19 Another misunderstanding dictates that Löwith
and Blumenberg were actually in agreement and that their dispute is merely a miscommunica-tion that hides a more fundamental similarity between their posimiscommunica-tions. I shall argue instead that upon reconstructing their polemic it becomes clear that Löwith’s and Blumenberg’s positions are fundamentally at odds with each other when it comes to their conceptions of modernity, pro-gress and Christianity. This disagreement stems from diverging philosophical anthropologies: whereas Blumenberg opts for an ‘anthropocentric humanism,’ Löwith eventually rejects anthro-pocentrism in favor of a ‘cosmocentric view’. I contend that both positions deserve to be taken seriously, also within the context of postsecularism, as they provide illuminating perspectives on the status of modernity vis-à-vis religion and on the question whether the human lifeworld should relate to something beyond itself, e.g., ‘the natural order’ or ‘the absolute’.
An observant reader of this book might receive the impression that it serves, at least in part, as a rehabilitation of Löwith’s position. After all, in comparison to Blumenberg and Schmitt, Löwith is the philosopher who appears to be the least well-known today, or who is deemed less relevant for contemporary discourses.20 Although rehabilitation was not my initial
intention, I cannot fully dispel such a reading either. That being said, I do not wish to simply invert the standard reading of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate by claiming that actually Löwith
and not Blumenberg has ‘won’ this discussion. I consider both positions to be more or less valid and my reconstruction indicates that their debate is more a meaningful exchange between two fundamentally incompatible viewpoints than a refutation of an inferior theory by a superior one. This too is a rehabilitation of some kind, because it reinstalls Löwith’s position on an equal footing to Blumenberg’s. We will find that Löwith’s perspective is simultaneously both unique and influential. It is unique because he represents an ‘ecological critique’ of modernity that would not be out of place in current discussions on the Anthropocene and the Post-Human Turn but that was more rare in his own time. He also exerted a considerable influence on the German secularization debate, because his formula ‘progress is secularized eschatology’ was widely adopted by others, be it in the service of purposes that differed from Löwith’s own.
The position of Carl Schmitt, the third primary subject of this investigation, will argua-bly seem less agreeable or sympathetic than those of Löwith and Blumenberg. This former
18 English translation of the revised edition: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983).
19 Brient (2002) p.29 fn.32; Jay (1985) p.192.
20 This has to do with the earlier Anglophone reception of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, which tends to por-tray Löwith’s position as having been rendered obsolete by Blumenberg’s critique. Cf.: Wallace (1981); Rorty (1983).
‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’ is, after all, well-known for his defense of Führertum and
his anti-liberalist emphasis on the essentially antagonistic nature of politics. However, it should be recognized that Schmitt has had a major influence on academic discourse, prob-ably more so than Löwith and Blumenberg, and that his evocative views on secularization are relevant to any investigation of this topic. Furthermore, Schmitt’s contribution to the German secularization debate deserves to be examined because he played a significant role in its development: he was an important source of influence for various interlocutors and, with the publication of his Politische Theologie II (1970), was co-responsible for a significant
political turn in the secularization debate.21 Last but not least, Schmitt engaged actively in
an extensive debate with Blumenberg, conducted through letters and multiple publications, while Löwith proved to be more reluctant in this respect. The fact that the interaction be-tween Blumenberg and Schmitt was more prolific has led several commentators to conclude that the Blumenberg-Schmitt debate is actually more significant than the Löwith-Blumenberg debate. Schmitt, for instance, is deemed to be the stronger opponent or Löwith’s position is considered to be nearly identical to Blumenberg’s, hereby being made redundant. My anal-ysis demonstrates instead that, first, it is also possible to reconstruct a meaningful polemic between Schmitt and Löwith and, second, that while there are different superficial points of overlap, all three positions are at bottom irreducible. By situating these three positions over against each other in different constellations we will obtain a richer and more complex un-derstanding of all three philosophies. Moreover, it will help illuminate the significant political implications of the theories of Löwith and Blumenberg, who are both commonly regarded as apolitical philosophers.
The next stage of my investigation involves the broader context of the German secular-ization discourse. Not only will we discover that Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt exerted a significant influence on the development of this wide-ranging debate, which included various disciplines and multiple ideological ‘camps’, but that their own contributions are also best understood when they are placed in this discursive context. My reconstruction suggests that they were at the forefront of a collective endeavor to grapple with the perceived challenges of the time. ‘Secularization’ was a hotly debated issue in German academia in the 1960’s because it became the supposed keyword with which to ‘unlock’ the challenge of how to relate to the
recent catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century in Germany in particular and Western
society in general.22 Do these catastrophes indicate that society should reconnect with the
religious traditions of the past or, rather, that it ought to leave the past behind and start anew, this time on more humane and strictly human as opposed to religious terms? Some authors claim, in line with Schmitt and more indirectly with Löwith, that the horrors of the 20th
centu-ry are indicative of the alienation from authentic religion. Totalitarianisms are thus described as idolatrous Ersatzreligionen just as all evils of modernity are explained in terms of apostasy.
Others argue, in line with Blumenberg, that these totalitarianisms share with religion a dan-gerous absolutism. This implies that the way forward lies in rejecting any kind of absolute and grandiose hope for political salvation. I contend that the secularization debate – including the contributions of Löwith, Schmitt and Blumenberg – should in part be understood as a form of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’: a collective ‘coming to terms with the past’ that is
simulta-neously oriented towards the future.23 Rather than suggesting that the German secularization
debate only has local historical relevance, I argue that philosophical debates such as these are
21 English translation: Political Theology II (2014).
22 Lübbe (1965).
necessarily informed by the perceived needs of the present condition (similar to how post-secularism is informed by the perceived challenges of our time). In short, discussions such as
these center on attempts to offer a diagnosis of the present condition.24
We will find that the development of the secularization debate reflects broader intellec-tual political shifts. Löwith’s early contribution (1949) resonated with conservative attempts during the 1950’s and early 1960’s to come to terms with the recent past by reconnecting with a
more distant past. Blumenberg’s book (1966) was meant to undermine such conservatisms and
thereby provided a philosophical legitimation of a modest liberal progressivism. A few years later the secularization debate took a new turn, this time towards the overtly political. While this turn was in part represented by Schmitt’s intervention (1970), it did not move uniformly into his preferred political direction. Rather, Schmitt’s political theology was adopted by the generation of 1968, the ‘New Left’. This meant that Blumenberg’s progressivism was over-taken by the leftist radicalism of the new generation and became conservative by comparison. ‘Theology’ was no longer employed to advocate a return to a revered past but to promote radical change, to fulfill past promises of future redemption. Against this new background I will focus extensively on Jacob Taubes and Odo Marquard. Their contributions not only illustrate the transformation of the secularization debate into a debate on political theology during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, but they also explicitly draw on Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt, hereby petering out a number of political implications from these theories that had remained buried before.
The final step in this investigation will be to offer a methodological reflection on what is discussed in the preceding chapters. This will be done by means of an excursion into the field of historical theory or analytical philosophy of history. By then we will have encountered in previous chapters a host of different ‘narratives’ about the origin of modernity and the nature of secularization, most of which are profoundly at odds with each other, both on a descrip-tive and normadescrip-tive level. Hence, I first will reflect on what type of ‘narradescrip-tive’ we are dealing with here, e.g., whether it is proper historiography or ‘mere’ speculation. I will argue that it is a brand of philosophical historiography, that I will refer to as Geistesgeschichte, that has its own
legitimate function distinct from that of a Rankean variety of historiography.25 Second, I will
ascertain what can be seen to cause the wide divergence between these narratives. I will point out that such narratives are typically presentist and evaluative in nature and that, as such, they tend to stake particular claims on the meaning of “essentially contested concepts”.26 Third, I
will reflect on the limits and on the added value of this particular genre.
The methodological reflection that comprises the final chapter of this book can be re-garded, in part, as a justification of my own approach. That is to say that it has not been my intention to add one more particularist secularization narrative to a growing body of simi-lar stories. However, I deemed it unsatisfactory to simply reconstruct the various secusimi-lariza- seculariza-tion narratives from a quasi-neutral standpoint without any providing any sort of evaluaseculariza-tion. Hence, my methodological framework is meant to facilitate a debate about and between var-ious different Geistesgeschichten. I will reflect on the purposes of a debate such as the German
discourse on secularization and provide possible guidelines that could make such a debate more constructive and reasonable. I argue that Geistesgeschichte constitutes a legitimate form of
historical engagement and that there are ‘empirical’ and ‘practical’ (i.e., ethical) quality markers that can be identified and used to draw a debate between different grand narratives out of a
24 Cf. Foucault’s (1984, pp.49-50) notion of ‘ontology of the present’. 25 I borrow this particular definition of Geistesgeschichte from Rorty (1984).
sphere of mere partisanship. This section of the book is methodologically innovative, as far as I can tell, because it introduces insights from narrativist approaches or analytical philosophy of history in order to analyze a domain that is mostly neglected by it, namely the historio-graphical dimension of a common brand of continental philosophy.
Part i
Karl löwith and
hans Blumenberg
Chapter 1
The löwith-Blumenberg debate:
From overlapping aversions to Fundamental
differences
Introduction
The philosophical debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg has become a wide-ly-discussed topic, both in and outside of Germany, since its inception in the 1960’s.1 For
good reason: this debate can be regarded as a valuable conceptual repository for philosoph-ical thought on the subject of modernity, religion and secularization.2 The polemic between
Blumenberg and Löwith represents both a clash between fundamentally different philosophi-cal outlooks and between generational attitudes towards the problems of their age. Löwith, a member of the apolitical Bildungsbürgertum raised on Nietzsche and Burckhardt, was convinced
that most human endeavors are futile, and embraced a contemplative ideal of stoic imper-turbability. Blumenberg on the other hand can be held to represent the generation of West-Germany’s post-war restauration. This generation embraced a cautious optimism in human progress but it also recognized the fragility of both individual existence and of the human order that protects the individual from chaos and violence.3 These different attitudes – which
should be understood in relation to Löwith’s and Blumenberg’s personal experiences with the war and totalitarianism – translate into different philosophical outlooks on modernity: in
their respective philosophies this epoch either represents human hubris (Löwith) or a mod-est shelter against absolute violence (Blumenberg). ‘Secularization’ became a contmod-ested issue between them because this concept is inextricably linked with ‘modernity’. The concept of
1 A condensed version of the argument contained in the present chapter has been published in New German Critique, see: Griffioen (2019).
2 On the significance of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate in the German context, see: Zabel (1968); and Ruh (1980). The latter notes that it is no accident that Löwith was Blumenberg’s primary target (p.199): “Die besonders ausführliche Auseinandersetzung, die er [Blumenberg] verglichen mit anderen, mehr beiläufig angeführten Säkularisierungsbehauptungen mit Löwiths These über die Herkunft der Geschichtsphilosophie führt, ist nicht zufällig, sondern entspricht durchaus dem Stellenwert, der dieser These auch sonst in der Diskussion zum geistesgeschichtlichen Säkularisierungsbegriff zukommt.”
3 Cf. Marquard (1989) pp.3-18. For an intellectual biography that focusses on Blumenberg’s earlier years, see: Flasch, Hans Blumenberg. Philosoph in Deutschland: Die Jahre 1945 bis 1966 (2017).
secularization, in short, necessarily relates to the question whether, as Blumenberg argues, modernity possesses a certain independence vis-à-vis its religious past, or, as Löwith suggests, whether it instead remains indebted to it. The former perspective attests to the legitimacy of modernity whereas the latter serves as an indication of its fatal confusion.
Philosophical scholarship on the difficult relationship of modernity with religion con-firms the historical and philosophical significance of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate. A survey of the relevant literature indeed indicates that the Löwith-Blumenberg debate is a standard ref-erence point in contemporary discussions of religion and secularization.4 Moreover, it became
a significant focal point in its original discursive context, namely the broader academic and so-cietal secularization debate of 1950’s and 1960’s Germany. This wide-ranging discourse would eventually span several decades (roughly speaking: from the 1950’s to the 1970’s or 1980’s), and it involved a variety of academic disciplines (philosophy, theology, historiography, sociology of religion), different approaches and moral-political standpoints. In this debate, intellectuals of different backgrounds and creeds grappled with the question whether an areligious modernity can be self-sufficient or whether, in its claim to independence, it displays a detrimental ‘false self-consciousness’ in denying its religious ‘roots’. The various answers that were provided were meant to deal with a shared sense of crisis, that is, the intimation that the horrors of recent 20th
century history were a symptom of an underlying problem that somehow involves the nature of modernity itself.5 The question that divided opinions was whether modernity’s areligious
and individualist features were part of the problem or the solution. From this division emerged different ‘camps’ in the German secularization debate in which one can recognize the mark of Löwith and Blumenberg respectively. One camp, of culture-pessimists, critics of modernity and conservative theologians, derided secular modernity for its claim to autonomy and urged instead for a renewed sense of proportionality, either with regard to tradition, nature or the transcendent. The other, pro-modern camp, defended the Enlightenment-inspired claim to human self-sufficiency and self-assertion against (what was perceived as) the impositions of naturalistic, theological or historicist affirmations of heteronomy.
However, before we can study the broader discourse it is necessary to critically analyze the Löwith-Blumenberg debate itself – as is the purpose of the present chapter. In doing so I will correct what I take to be two entrenched misunderstandings about the debate. The first is that Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith is often taken at face value by commentators. It is assumed for instance that Blumenberg “provides a decisive refutation of Löwith’s thesis”, as Elizabeth Brient states, and that this implies a “death blow”, according to Martin Jay, to the “secularization theorem” that Löwith supposedly represents.6 In this context, the
“seculariza-tion theorem” is interpreted as a claim that something is illegitimate because it is secularized,
4 Harrington (2006) pp.42-44; ibid. (2008) 21–24; Latré (2013) pp.20-24; Bangstad (2009) p.189; Gordon and Skolnik (2005) p.6; De Vriese (2016) pp.37-42; Pecora (2006). Rather than providing an exhaustive list of the secondary literature on the Löwith-Blumenberg debate here, a few examples must suffice. Despite being well-known, this topic has not been the subject of many monographic studies, one exception being Joe-Paul Kroll’s (2010) A Human End to History? It has however been the subject of many papers: Robert Wallace,
the translator of Blumenberg’s major works, set the tone for the English-speaking world with his ‘Progress, Secularization and Modernity: the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate’ (1981) and his introduction to Legitimacy
(1983). Some other examples are: McKnight (1990); Talay (2011); Buch (2012); Latré (2013); Monod (2016). Zabel’s (1968) and Ruh’s (1980) studies analyze the broader German debate, but also focus extensively on the polemic between Löwith and Blumenberg.
5 Cf. Lübbe (1965) pp.105-133; Boterman (2013) pp.578-613.
6 Brient (2002) p.29 fn.32; Jay (1985) p.192. I suspect that many commentators have taken their cue from Wallace (1981; 1983) in his portrayals of the polemic along Blumenbergian lines.
with ‘secularization’ operating as a juridical category of guilt or debt (Schuld).7 My
reconstruc-tion will demonstrate that Blumenberg in fact attacks a straw man that bears little resemblance to Löwith’s actual argument. This moreover implies, as I will show, that the latter does not represent the ‘secularization theorem’ that forms the target of Blumenberg’s critique. The second view I wish to correct is an improvement in comparison to the first, because it does not take Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith at face value. This interpretation is more cognizant of the fact that the debate had in part been muddled by miscommunications and a failure on both sides to fully grasp what the other was actually trying to convey. It moreover points out several areas of agreement or overlap between the two philosophers that are overlooked by commentators who hold the first view. Milan Babík, for instance, asserts that Blumenberg’s own theory indeed “converges with Löwith’s secularization model” to a significant degree.8
Several scholars have noticed that Löwith and Blumenberg “agree a good deal” on certain shared aversions, such as toward ‘speculative philosophy of history’, which both reject as an unwarranted projection of eschatological hope onto immanent history.9 For Pini Ifergan,
“Blumenberg espoused a view … reminiscent of Löwith’s, whereby historical consciousness and eschatological belief are beyond reconciliation.”10 However, this recognition of a level
of miscommunications and points of agreement leads some who hold this second view to the erroneous conclusion that Löwith’s and Blumenberg’s positions are actually very similar if not identical, and that hence the Löwith-Blumenberg debate is essentially a farce. Odo Marquard provides the strongest version of this reading: “Die Säkularisierungskontroverse zwischen Blumenberg und Löwith ist … inszeniert zur bloßen Tarnung [of their] grundsätz-lichen Positionsidentität.”11 Most authors who are inclined to this reading suggest, in line with
Marquard, that Blumenberg’s theory forms a superior version of Löwith’s, rendering the latter more or less irrelevant.12
While drawing on earlier attempts at assessing and mitigating Blumenberg’s critique, my contribution in this chapter is twofold: first, most of the scholars who have noticed the shortcomings of Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith have offered their remarks only in passing, without elaborating on where and to what extent it falters and on how Löwith should be in-terpreted instead, whereas my reconstruction aims to be more comprehensive in this respect.13
Second, and more importantly, these commentators continue to ignore a significant aspect of Löwith’s account that was already overlooked by Blumenberg, which is that his normative claim against modernity and its idea of progress does not, in fact, fully derive from or depend on his account of ‘secularization’. Rather, it relies on an ideal-typical conception of ‘pure faith’ and ‘pure reason’, two idealized ahistorical norms of which modern thought falls short, ac-cording to Löwith. Thus Löwith is misrepresented as a ‘secularization theorist’ and is therefore not decisively refuted by Blumenberg. My reconstruction indicates that beneath a superficial
level of mutual misunderstandings and agreements lies a more fundamental level of
disagree-ment between the two philosophers, namely with regard to the meaning of Christianity, their conceptions of history and modernity, and ultimately on what the rightful place is of the
7 Buch (2012). 8 Babík (2006) p.393. 9 Pippin (1987) p.541. 10 Ifergan (2010) p.168.
11 Marquard (1983) p.79 (emphasis added). Cf. ibid. (1973) pp.14-17; Marquard in: Blumenberg (1971) p.530. 12 Buch (2012) pp.353-56; Kroll (2010) pp.151-158; Pippin (1987) p.541.
13 Liebsch (1995) pp.70-71; Wetz (1993) p.48. Kroll’s (2010) reconstruction, A Human End to History?, certainly
forms an exception with regard to this first point. With respect to my second point, however, he does - valua-ble insights notwithstanding - tend to downplay those aspects that separate Löwith from Blumenberg.
human individual in the universe. In short, in this chapter I first expound on Blumenberg’s straw man representation of Löwith. Then I will elaborate on the former’s critique and on his defense of the legitimacy of modernity. I subsequently reconstruct Löwith’s account, bringing to light the extent to which Blumenberg misrepresented him. Partly building on the sparse reservations offered by other scholars, I will then offer a rebuttal of Blumenberg’s critique and provide my own proposition for how this debate should be assessed, namely by elaborating on the deeper level of contestation between Löwith and Blumenberg.
Blumenberg’s account
the secularization theorem and Blumenberg’s straw Man
The cultural pessimism (Kulturpessimismus) that had dominated the intellectual discourse of the
Weimar Republic did not disappear after World War II. Rather, it became intertwined with ‘the question of guilt’, die Schuldfrage. Thus the war was interpreted as an indication of the
bank-ruptcy of the West or of modernity itself; it became regarded as a symptom of an underlying problem that involved the very nature of modern civilization.14 This meant that the concept
of Schuld – with its dual implication of guilt and debt – was elevated to the level of
philosoph-ical self-diagnosis, where it was used to question not only the recent catastrophe but also the entire epoch in which it took place. Underlying these philosophical expressions of pessimism was a sense, not always explicated, that modernity is somehow the product of ‘alienation’ from an original, authentic state, where humankind lived in a more truthful and genuine relation with nature, with transcendence, or with itself. This alienation is not simply a disconnection; on the contrary, what was deemed lost somehow remained present, in its absence, as a refer-ence point for a nostalgic yearning. In this sense, the present contains a continuing debt and guilt, suggesting an illegitimate continuity between past and present.15 Often these pessimistic
accounts were conveyed through the narrative form of Verfallsgeschichte – such as in the works
of Martin Heidegger, Eric Voegelin, and Theodor W. Adorno – in which the current situation is seen as the product of a long history of regression. The objective of such Verfallsgeschichten
is the unveiling of an underlying guilt/debt, a Schuld that unmasks the current situation as
‘illegitimate’.16
Blumenberg, who was younger than most of the prominent philosophical pessimists, perceived this tendency toward delegitimizing modernity with apprehension. He was especially disgruntled with those accounts that attacked the secular nature of modernity, which suggested
that the Modern Age’s illegitimacy lies in its distorted relation with transcendence or religion. Accusatory accounts of this type were popular among the German public, such as Alfred Müller-Armack’s Jahrhundert ohne Gott, Hans Sedlmayr’s Verlust der Mitte or Romano Guardini’s Das Ende der Neuzeit. Such pessimistic narratives of decline adopted the aforementioned topos
of ‘alienation’ but interpreted this process as ‘secularization’.17 This implies that modernity
is defined by its break with religion, on the one hand, but also remains bound to it, in its indebtedness, on the other. Hence it is assumed that there is a covert, illegitimate continuity between Christianity and modernity that renders the latter a deplorable “Christian heresy”.18 14 Boterman (2013) pp.578-613.
15 Blumenberg (1983) pp.117-118.
16 Blumenberg (1983) pp.113-125; ibid. (1964) p.242; (2010) pp.39-42; Kroll (2010) p.93; Flasch (2017) pp.471-476, 481-482.
17 Flasch (2017) pp.471-481; Kroll (2010) pp.24-30; Pannenberg (1973) pp.114-116; Lübbe (1965) pp.109-116. 18 Blumenberg (1964) p.265. E.g.: Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952).
It is this pattern of thought, the attempt at portraying modernity as an illegitimate derivative or “bastard child” of a more authentic Christian origin that Blumenberg would brand as “the secularization theorem”.19
This theorem formed the object of his critique, first in his 1962 lecture ‘Säkularisation: Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität’, held at a conference Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt at which Löwith was also present, and four years later in most well-known
book, Legitimität der Neuzeit, the first part of which he would revise in 1974 in response to its
critics.20 In this book, Blumenberg notes that the accounts he subsumed under the
seculari-zation theorem tend to assume that the authentic, religious “substance” remains hidden but is nonetheless present in its secular derivations, “implied” or “wrapped up” in it, as it were:
The genuine substance of that which was secularized is ‘wrapped up in’ [die Implikation des] what thus became worldly, and remains ‘wrapped up in’ it as what is
essential to it, as when, in the model instance developed by Heidegger for the herme-neutics of his school, ‘Dasein’s understanding of Being’ is essential to it and yet ‘in the first instance and for the most part’ hidden and withdrawn from it. I am almost inclined to say that that was what I was afraid of.21
Blumenberg intended to undermine the secularization theorem in general, but to do so, he needed to make one especially prolific account his primary target: Löwith’s Meaning in History
(1949).22 Blumenberg chose Löwith as his primary object of critique because his thesis was
especially well known and, as Robert M. Wallace suggests, because it was regarded as the most full-blown critique of modernity in terms of the secularization theorem. Also, since the central thesis of Meaning in History appeared to be easily apprehendable and in fact was quickly
appro-priated by others, it had acquired a “dogmatizing effect,” according to Blumenberg.23 Indeed,
the impression that Löwith’s thesis had had a dogmatizing effect is not far off the mark if one regards the air of self-evidence with which the formula was adopted by a wide variety of authors, such as Carl Schmitt, his students Reinhart Koselleck and Hanno Kesting, the politi-cal philosopher Eric Voegelin, and the physicist-philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.24
Löwith’s formula found also found a favorable reception in theology, for instance in Rudolf Bultmann’s History and Eschatology (1957). In this respect it has been noted that Blumenberg’s
critique applies more to the theological reception (or appropriation) of Löwith’s formula than to
Löwith’s theory itself.25 Yet there are examples of theological writers active in that time, such
as Friedrich Delekat, Arnold Müller-Armack, and Friedrich Gogarten, whose theories seem to meet Blumenberg’s description of the ‘secularization theory’ even better than the aforemen-tioned scholars, without displaying an explicit indebtedness to Löwith.26
19 Kroll (2010) p.153. In Koselleck’s German translation of Löwith’s Meaning in History another metaphor is
introduced, which is absent in the English original: modernity is like “ein entlaufener Sklave von seinem ent-fernten Herrn” (Löwith, 1953, p.83). Cf. Ruh (1980, p.247).
20 Blumenberg (1964) pp.240-265; ibid. Legitimität (1966); Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (1974). I will use the
1983 English translation, Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
21 Blumenberg (1983) p.17.
22 Other prominent examples of secularization theorists Blumenberg mentions are: Schmitt, Political Theology I
and II (2005; 2014. Originally: 1922; 1970); Delekat (1958); Bultmann (1957); Voegelin (1952).
23 Blumenberg (1983) p.27; Wallace (1981) p.68; ibid. (1983) p.xvi; Ruh (1980) pp.199, 238; Jaeschke (1967) pp.35-36, 43; Zabel (1968) p.196.
24 Schmitt (1950); Koselleck (1959); Kesting (1959); Voegelin (1952); Von Weizsäcker (1964). 25 Zabel (1968) pp.231, 243; Ruh (1980) pp. 236-237, 262–65; Timm (1967); Flasch (2017) p.549. 26 Delekat (1958); Gogarten (1966); Müller-Armack (1948).
Blumenberg, however, chose Löwith as the principal representative of the secularization the-orem, and in doing so he constructed a straw man to attack the secularization theorem in general. According to Blumenberg’s portrayal, Löwith denounced modernity by arguing that the idea of progress, the Modern Age’s core principle, was nothing but secularized eschatol-ogy. This would render modernity itself disingenuous and illegitimate – or, to express it as a formula, modernity is illegitimate because it is secularized. The ‘secularization as alienation’
topos determines that Christian ‘eschatology’ is the authentic, original substance and that pro-gress is a mere derivation in which the original core remains implied.27 This derivation is most
apparent in grand, speculative philosophies of history – especially of the Hegelian, Marxist, or Comteian varieties – that tell sweeping tales about the secular salvation of humankind, culminating in worldly visions of paradise.28 Modern thought is defined by this idea of
pro-gress, the argument continues, because it conceives of itself as having ‘overcome’ Christianity. The exposure of modern progress as a derivation of what it explicitly rejects shows its “false self-consciousness” – in other words, the illegitimacy – that extends to the modern epoch in general.29 Blumenberg interprets Löwith as implying that “the autonomy of … historical
con-sciousness as an ultimate category is exposed as its self-deception as soon as it is recognized, in accordance with the secularization theorem, as existing ‘by the grace of ’ Christianity”.30
The thesis that the modern idea of progress is secularized eschatology exemplifies the overall picture that the secularization theorem conveys, which is that all significant modern phenom-ena are mere derivations of authentic Christian counterparts: “even a post-Christian atheism is actually an intra-Christian mode of expression of negative theology, and a materialism a continuation of the incarnation by other means.”31
The purported illegitimacy of modernity resides not only in its misguided self-conscious-ness but, more important, in an act of “expropriation”. That is, the status of the Modern Age is defined by the fact that it consists of expropriated substances, such as eschatology, that were originally – and thus properly – Christian. In short, Löwith is interpreted as arguing that moder-nity is illegitimate on no other grounds than because it is determined by Christianity. The implied Schuld should hence be read as ‘guilt’ rather than as a vague indebtedness; that is, it invokes a
juridical framework.32 So ‘secularization’ functions as a category of guilt, and saying that x is a
secularized form of y is enough to render x illegitimate.33 This would of course be a dubious
as-sumption (were it not that Löwith does not actually make it), which Blumenberg then criticizes.
Blumenberg’s Critique
For the sharpest version of Blumenberg’s critique, one must turn to his 1962 lecture on secu-larization. Legitimacy, written in 1966, can be seen as an elaboration of this initial criticism that
is supplemented by his own account of modernity’s relation to its religious past, whereas in the later edition of the book (1974) Blumenberg arguably downplays the sharpness of his original
27 Blumenberg (1983) pp.19, 27–35. 28 Blumenberg (1983) pp.32, 85–86.
29 Blumenberg (1983) pp.25, 117-118; Wallace (1981) p.67. 30 Blumenberg (1983) p.28.
31 Blumenberg (1983) p.115. This critique would be more applicable to Jacob Taubes (2009; 2010), as we will discover in Chapter 7.
32 This framework was invoked in Lübbe’s analysis (1965), on which Blumenberg explicitly draws to describe the secularization theorem, especially in the first edition (1966, pp.12-13, 16) of Legitimität der Neuzeit. Zabel (1968)
later criticized Blumenberg for his tendency to reduce any use of the concept of secularization to the juridical notion of expropriation.
polemic in response to various criticisms, while holding on to the gist of his initial argument.34
Blumenberg’s first concern with Löwith’s purported use of the concept of secularization is that it is wielded as an explanatory device rather than as something that needs prior explana-tion. Instead of first elucidating what happened in a process that can, descriptively, be called secularization afterward, this term is used as a ready-made and easily applicable explanation in itself. Such uses of secularization for instance explain (or delegitimize) the modern work ethic as “inner-worldly asceticism”, the varieties of modern utopianism as varieties of paradise, and the modern idea of individualism as the secularization of Christianity’s focus on the individual soul.35 Such a use of secularization as an explanatory device is intrinsically problematic, as
Blumenberg goes on to show.
Building on an early analysis of the secularization debate by Hermann Lübbe (Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitisches Begriffs, 1965), Blumenberg asserts that the
secu-larization theorem is based by analogy on the model of expropriation.36 This model originally
pertained to a situation during the Reformation in which tangible possessions that belonged to the church were estranged by a secular institution. Later on, ‘secularization’ was interpreted as the expropriation of ideas or concepts from the spiritual domain by the worldly sphere.37
Advocates of the secularization theorem use this model either implicitly or explicitly, but, according to Blumenberg, they should be able to demonstrate that such an expropriation actually occurred. To do so, they should be able to meet the following requirements that Blumenberg devised: they must demonstrate “a) die Identifizierbarkeit des enteigneten Gutes; b) die Legitimität des primären Eigentums; c) die Einseitigkeit des Entzuges”.38 He then shows
that the secularization theory cannot meet these requirements and is not even aware of this “methodischen Beweislast”.39
These unfulfillable criteria are meant to establish that the secularization theorem is based on a fallacious presupposition, namely, “substantialism”.40 This entails that the secularization
theory assumes the existence of fixed ‘substances’ (intellectual contents, e.g., ideas or cepts) that appear within history and remain constant throughout it. Tied to their initial con-text of origination, these authentic contents, through appropriation, become alienated but preserve their implicit connection to their origin. The notion of authenticity, which is central to the secularization theorem, presupposes that these substances contain a “dimension of hid-den meaning” – in other words, these origins remain present in their absence.41 Blumenberg
claims that the presupposition of substantialism is essential to the secularization theorem, because “[w]ithout such a substantial identity, no recoverable sense could be attached to the talk of conversion [Umbildung] and transformation.”42
34 Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (1974) is the revised version of the first part of Legitimacy. On the changes
made in the separate versions of Legitimacy, see: Dickey (1987); on its relation to the 1962 lecture, see Kroll
(2010) pp.131-158.
35 Blumenberg (1983) p.4; ibid. (1964) pp.240-241; Brient (2002) p.17. See for a critique of this reading of Weber’s famous thesis: Turner (1993) p.60.
36 Lübbe (1965); Blumenberg (1966) pp.12-16; ibid. (1983) p.4; (1964) pp.240-241; Brient (2002) p.17. 37 Blumenberg (1983) pp.18-19; ibid. (1964) pp.241-42. See also Lübbe (1965) pp.28-30.
38 Blumenberg (1964) p.241; ibid. (1983) pp.16-25, 64. 39 Blumenberg (1964) p.243.
40 Blumenberg (1983) pp.28-29, 48-49, 64-66, 88, 120, 466; ibid. (1964) p.263.
41 Blumenberg (1983) pp.17-19; (1964) p.263. The quote is a reference to Gadamer’s (1968, pp.201-202) review of Legitimacy.
42 Blumenberg (1983) p.16. “Ohne eine solche substantielle Identität ließe sich der Rede von Umbildung und Transformation kein nachvollziehbarer Sinn beilegen.” (1974, p.23) On the importance of substantialism for Blumenberg’s argument, see: Jaeschke (1976) pp.34-36.
In this critique of the secularization theorem Blumenberg zooms in on Löwith’s thesis on progress and eschatology. First, he argues that ‘progress’ cannot be a secularized form of ‘eschatology’, because there can be no substantive continuity, and hence no identifiability, of one substance throughout the process, due to the differences between the phenomena. There is a structural or formal difference between progress and eschatology, Blumenberg argues: whereas “an eschatology speaks of an event breaking into history, an event that transcends and is heterogeneous to it, … the idea of progress extrapolates from a structure present in every moment to a future that is immanent in history”.43 Then there is a genetic or historical
distinction between the two, in that these phenomena have different historical origins. In Blumenberg’s theory this implies that they answer two separate questions. Whereas eschatolo-gy was meant to address the transcendent meaning and goal of history in its totality, the idea of progress originated to conceptualize the more modest and more specific idea of scientific and artistic progression.44
The second requirement, that ‘legitimate ownership’ of the original possession should be proven, is equally indicting of Löwith’s theory, Blumenberg suggests. This because the former has to presuppose a questionable concept of an ‘authentic’ version of eschatology that is ac-tually anachronistic. Blumenberg notes that Christian eschatology is a historically problematic phenomenon that had – insofar as it actually existed in an unadulterated sense – a very short life span. The early Christian form of eschatology, the radical, immediate expectation of the
eschaton (Naherwartung), quickly caused disappointment, given the apparent delay of the Second
Coming. Therefore it became transformed and diluted in medieval eschatological thought. Blumenberg makes two observations in this respect. First, the transformation of eschatology during the Middle Ages meant that the eschaton became a thing to be feared instead of hoped
for, which implies that modern progress cannot be a secularization of Christian hopefulness, as Löwith purportedly claims.45 Second, and this also refutes the attainability of the third
requirement, Blumenberg argues that through this medieval transformation of eschatology it in fact ‘secularized itself ’. By suppressing the immediateness of expectation, this self-secular-ization opened more room for human activity and thus created a more affirmative appraisal of worldly history.46 Hence it cannot be claimed that ‘the world’ expropriated something from
‘the spiritual realm’.47
After this specific critique of Löwith’s account, Blumenberg drives his point home by con-necting it to a more fundamental critique of the secularization theorem in general. He argues that the theorem’s implicit substantialism, which allows it to presuppose a fixed ‘substance’ that can be alienated by ‘the world’, in fact reveals it to be a kind of crypto-theology. Its no-tion of authenticity not only betrays a Romanticist substantialism in which the phenomenon always remains bounded to its original context of origin but it also requires a transcendent source.
The secularization theorem must presuppose such a source, even when this point of origin is concealed. This is because the secularization theorem situates concepts that are authentically conceived exclusively in the past, in ‘pure’ Christianity, and ignores their historical contingency. Therefore the secularization theorem enters into the realm of “theologischen Selbstdeutung und Selbstbehauptung”. If it does not replace theology’s Christian-Platonic notion of own-ership – which presupposes a divine origin and implies the derivative nature of subsequent
43 Blumenberg (1983) p.30; ibid. (1964) p.243. Cf. Zabel (1968) p.236. 44 Blumenberg (1964) p.243.
45 Blumenberg (1964) p.246.; ibid. (1983) pp.44-46. On the role of Naherwartung in Blumenberg’s theory, cf.: Ruh
(1980) pp.98-107.
46 Blumenberg (1964) p.247; ibid. (1983) pp.44-47. 47 Blumenberg (1983) p.47; ibid. (1964) p.248.
‘copies’ – then it is nothing more than a form of crypto-theology, Blumenberg suggests.48 This
also explains the incriminating indebtedness of modernity, because as a derivation of theology the theorem also adopts theology’s rancor toward the Modern Age as the purported ‘usurper’ of Christianity.49 In short, the secularization theorem functions as the “letzten Theologumenon”; a
final, if veiled protest of theology against its obsolescence in modernity.50
Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization theorem and his concomitant portrayal of Löwith as a secularization theorist became widely accepted, especially (but not exclusively) in English-language scholarship. To give but a few examples, Laurence Dickey writes that “by all accounts, Blumenberg was most successful” in refuting the secularization theorem.51 And
William J. Bouwsma found Legitimacy, as “an extended refutation of Karl Löwith’s … Meaning in History,” to be “wholly convincing”.52 This also means that many scholars have
adopt-ed Blumenberg’s straw man as a truthful representation of Löwith’s account, implying that
Meaning in History consists solely of an attempt to demonstrate modernity’s illegitimacy on the
basis of the expropriation model and its concomitant substantialism.53 Benjamin Lazier, for
in-stance, writes that Löwith’s thesis “identifies a substance proper to medieval Christianity, which in its modern guise appears to have undergone transformation into a secularized form but in fact has not dislodged itself from its originally Christian framework.”54 And Robert B. Pippin
concurs that Löwith, in trying to show modernity’s indebtedness, “does often breezily assume that pointing out this necessary Christian ‘horizon’ is enough to delegitimate, expose as self-de-ceived, the claim that the modern belief in progress is wholly modern and therewith rational.”55
Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization theorem appears to be justified in itself. Indeed, one might contend that if one seeks to demonstrate the illegitimacy of modernity with this model of expropriation, one at least has to be able to delineate this ‘substance’, assert the legitimacy of the original ownership, and reveal how the expropriation took place. This is impossible simply because whereas one could postulate a notion of substantive continuity as a heuristic instrument, one cannot, when investigating the historical development of ideas, actu-ally find them as objects can be found in nature.56 The question I address later in this chapter
however is not whether Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization theorem is justified but whether he justifiably portrayed Löwith as a secularization theorist.57
48 Blumenberg (1964) pp.244, 254; ibid. (1983) p.10.
49 Blumenberg (1964) p.242; ibid. (1983) p.119; Ruh (1980) pp.120-121; Jaeschke (1976) pp.329-331. 50 Blumenberg (1964) p.265. Cf. Buch (2012) p.243.
51 Dickey (1987) pp.153-154. Cf. Rorty (1983). 52 Bouwsma (1984) p.698.
53 Wallace (1981); Henning (2014) pp.377-378; Trierweiler (1998) p.155; Lindahl (1997) p.10; Ingram (1990) p.5; Palti (1997) p.504; Yack (1987) p.253; Bouwsma (1984) p.698.
54 Lazier (2003) p.628.
55 Pippin (1987) p.541. Cf. Flasch (2017, p.477) for a similar argument. Habermas (2019, p.57) notes: “Die his-torische Nachweis der Ähnlichkeit von Denkfiguren einer Tradition mit denen einer anderen Tradition ist kein Beleg für die Abhängigkeit moderner Fortschrittskonzeptionen von der Gültigkeit religiöser Überlieferungen,
von deren Denkfiguren sie zehrt.”
56 In his review of Legitimacy, Löwith (1968, p.454) indeed criticized Blumenberg for establishing criteria that, by
the latter’s own account, are unfulfillable.
57 I have suggested earlier that Blumenberg’s description of the secularization theorem in fact approximates some scholars, such as Müller-Armack and Delekat, better than others. I would also suggest that one can find the two characteristics of the secularization theorem – substantialism and expropriation – most clearly in Delekat, Über den Begriff Säkularisation (1958). Still, one might also wonder, as Ruh (1980, p.267) does, whether the ill-fitting nature of “the secularization theorem” as an ideal-type should not lead one to question if it has any merit in the first place.
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