Karl Lowith Quotes on Time

Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949) gave twentieth-century philosophy of history its most influential analysis of the relationship between Christian eschatology and the modern philosophies of historical progress. The central thesis is that the modern progressive philosophies of history — from Hegel and Marx through Comte and the broader nineteenth-century framework — are secularized versions of the Judeo-Christian theology of providential history, retaining its formal structure of meaningful linear time directed toward a final consummation while emptying it of the theological content from which the structure originally derived. The framework, developed during Löwith’s exile from Nazi Germany in Japan and the United States, shaped Hans Blumenberg’s contrary defense of the legitimacy of the modern age and the broader twentieth-century debate over secularization.