This essay unpacks the notion of Dasein and how it can be with others. We may think of Dasein as being-there as a direct translation from German; another conventional understanding of it, for Heidegger, is human-being, or a being for which Being is at issue. Heidegger’s prominent student, Karl Löwith, provokes and scrutinizes the term to see how it can be-with-others. To do so, Löwith observes Heidegger’s ‘turn,’ or his philosophy written after the Second World War, and how it changed from the 1920s and 1930s. For Löwith this turn constitutes a rejection of the worldliness of Being, or being-in-the-world, as Heidegger describes it in Being and Time (1927). This rejection, as Löwith sees it, has problematic consequences that form the basis of a criticism of the late thought of Heidegger, his former teacher. I analyze the arguments in Löwith’s essay “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time” to not only uncover what it means for Dasein to be with others but also how this criticism of Heidegger informs Löwith’s own philosophy. By explaining how Löwith understands Dasein as either remaining in existential isolation or as a vehicle for a common path to be-with-others, we gain an insight into Löwith’s own cosmological philosophy and its debt to Heidegger’s legacy.
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Before understanding where Löwith explicates Dasein by interpreting Heidegger, some background of the period and philosophical relationship between the two provides much context. Following World War I, Löwith set out for Freiburg to study under a phenomenologist by the name of Edmund Husserl. Instead, Löwith became attracted to the thought of Husserl’s assistant, Martin Heidegger, whom Löwith followed to Marburg in 1924. What Löwith ended up studying under Heidegger’s direction is the characterization of “the sphere of being-with-others.” This is called Mitsein, and, for Richard Wolin, in Heidegger’s 1927 work, being-with-others “seems a priori devalued. Thus, in Being and Time prospects for meaningful human intersubjectivity seemed to be either negligible or nonexistent…Löwith takes aim at all claims concerning the ontological primacy of transcendental subjectivity, Heidegger’s included.”1placeholder As Germany of the 1930s ushered in Nazi party ascendancy, Heidegger’s Jewish students tried to understand the nexus between Heidegger’s early philosophical thought and the regime he seemed to welcome with open arms. For Löwith witnessing the passing of 1933’s Law for the Reconstitution of the German Civil Service, it was the first time he felt himself to be Jewish, not fully assimilated, and he quickly emigrated to Japan upon winning a fellowship sponsored by Harvard University.2placeholder
The experience studying under Heidegger and subsequent emigration had profound influence on Löwith’s thought. Now as a mature scholar in 1951 Löwith publishes the essay “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time,” where he demonstrates an affinity and debt to Heidegger while expressing a necessary distance to it. This essay is peculiar because Löwith grapples with Heidegger and an anthropocentric view of nature. For Ronald Beiner, Löwith is concerned with the antimony of nature and history, where his conception of nature is cosmological, beyond certain human-centric conceptions: “There is a certain way of narrating the history of civilizations inspired by Löwith that prompts one to marvel at humankind’s arrogant preoccupation with itself. It is a story consisting of, and in fact ever-increasing, species-narcissism.”3placeholder Species-narcissism is a cosmological concept for understanding human hubris.
How did Löwith’s mature thought end up becoming a philosophy of the cosmos? In “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time,” Löwith’s analytical method is what he calls a critical middle path between the fascination for Heidegger’s existentialist thought following the First World War and the repulsion of Heidegger’s political commitment to Nazism in 1933. Löwith, in looking at two of Heidegger’s writings separated by twenty years, Being and Time (1927) and “A Letter on Humanism” (1947), says that both provide a path of criticism of common sense going back to Hegel’s philosophy of repulsion and fascination, science and art, disgust and wonder mediating each other, a mediation which Heidegger rejects at every opportunity. Heidegger deplores common sense for being intertwined with the Western metaphysical tradition, whereas Hegel believes that common sense is the immediate truth of philosophical speculation where the ready-at-hand and the philosophical agree.
With an appeal to Hegel, Löwith’s point of departure invites the following criticism of his former mentor, which involves Heidegger’s starting point for philosophy: Dasein. Löwith asks Heidegger, why must you posit your own language of Existenz and not be convinced by Hegel’s dialectical unity? This question prompts Löwith to reply that in studying Heidegger the “special difficulty lies in following thinking that fundamentally disapproves of arguments and a logical development (in the sense of consistent progression) in such a way that we avoid dealing with the same theme in ever newer variations.”4placeholder The late thought of Heidegger has changing formulations, such as appeals to the German poet Hölderlin, a fascination with art as poiesis, a letting-be [Gelassenheit] from the world, a dissatisfaction with technological enframing [Ge-stell], and a narrow view of Western metaphysics, which is built upon the philosophy of Plato all the way to Descartes and Nietzsche. These assertions constitute what Löwith calls an “encircling of a lost middle” in Heidegger. The lost middle is experienced through Heidegger’s language, “a building of bridges between basic words,” as “more obligatory than the rigor of science is the play of thinking and of language.”5placeholder The play between thinking and language adopts a positioning for Dasein as untraditional, unconventional, and uncertain.
As Löwith frames it, Heideggerian language is a prospect, where it serves as a memory, a recollection (elsewhere Heidegger calls this thinking-as-thanking), of an originary pre-Platonic truth. In contrast, “essential thinking” of the arrival of Being is not in any way theory, wisdom, Absolute knowing, scientific research, nor the study of history. Essential thinking has not found a manifestation proper to a relation of Being, and what Heidegger leaves us with is “prospective thinking” to analyze Dasein, which is not forced to think within the bounds of traditional philosophy and scientific-technological enframing. “The fall of thinking into science and faith is the terrible destiny of Being,” as Löwith asserts, but “fortunately thanks to his extraordinary acquaintance with the entire philosophical tradition and his theological schooling, Heidegger is able to manage such a renunciation without having thereby to appeal to a mere ‘experience’ of Being.”6placeholder This lack of appeal to experience is the problem for Löwith. Humanity becomes overshadowed by the disclosure of Being.
This provides the reason for why Heidegger rejects Hegelian common sense, or a dialectical mediation, as Hegel intends to construct a project that enables philosophy to foretell of an end, of completion. Löwith claims what comes to an end in Hegel is a “Greek beginning” that Hegel did not come close to exhausting, as his “dialectical circles did not get back to the primordial centre.”7placeholder Similar in theoretical acuteness is an explanation for why Heidegger groups Nietzsche with Plato and Descartes as part and parcel of the history of the unfolding of metaphysics. Nietzsche’s thought, to Heidegger, is inessential, despite being prospective. What Heidegger gains from Nietzsche is an epochal and eschatological consciousness, of a twofold lack: “in the no-longer of the gods who have fled, and in the not-yet of the one to come.”8placeholder The remembering-thanking of Heidegger is reframed in an essay on technology from 1954 in the phrase “questioning is the piety of thought,” a nod to the gods that have fled and those to come.
Nonetheless, the middle path Löwith embarks to come to terms with his former mentor is, on the one hand, dealing with its outward consequences of the fascination with the majesty of existentialism in Being and Time and, on the other, with Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism. This path invites us to evaluate how Dasein is with, or absent from, others in Heidegger’s later thought. Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1947) is “a single protest against the misunderstandings of those contemporaries who have abandoned Being.”9placeholder In Löwith’s own thought, to the claims of species-narcissism of Beiner or the “Stoic response to Modern Nihilism” of Wolin, it must be noted that the conception of a cosmological nature has congruence with a critique of Heidegger’s existentialism rather than with his rejection of an anthropocentric view for human guidance. In other words, we must look at the critique that Löwith lodges against Heidegger’s lack of consistency on the suppositions of whether Being informs humanity. This is apparent in the break of thinking from Being and Time to “Letter on Humanism”.
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In Being and Time, Heidegger intentionally leaves unresolved how an individual is meant to comport oneself when faced with death and amidst the inauthentic herd of the common crowd [das Man]. In projecting our own death, we realize the nullity of existence. Similarly, death closes the capacity for Being, as when one faces death, the possibilities of existence are not manifold but reduced to one. This is one’s resolve or authentic existence, the realization that one is at any moment limited and not unlimited or eternal. Resolve also becomes closed due to the inauthentic “they,” and thus Dasein’s identity is bound to a particular people existing in a particular epoch, what Heidegger calls “historical Dasein.”
The problem inherent to Dasein for Löwith occurs when the resolve opens up from the particular to the potential of Being, rather than imposing, describing, or implementing how to be in the world. This authentic experience closes off when there is a focus on beings [Seiendes], not Being [Sein], and in so doing misses the purpose of existence, the authentic Being-a-self and not Being-anyone. Löwith says that the resolve of Being and Time is fundamentally tied to Dasein and its contextual situatedness.10placeholder According to Löwith,
“After Being and Time the freedom of the self is no longer defined as the freedom of a capacity-for-Being but rather is defined as that of a letting-Be, and resolute conduct is accordingly recast as a ‘not closing oneself off’. Now resolve is no longer supposed to be a decisive, resolute kind of conduct but rather the opening up of Dasein out of its predilection for beings and into the openness of Being. Resolve is now an ongoing opening-oneself-up-to the open, the unconcealed, that which is true in Being, in which all beings gain standing. It might be difficult to recognize anew in this receptivity to the dimension of Being the earlier resolve toward oneself.”11placeholder
From closing to opening, transitioning from early to late thought, Heidegger prioritizes a return to ‘things’. But how could he signal a return to things if he wishes to let-be and release from the world, and from things in the world, materially and phenomenally? By focusing on a return to ‘things’ Heidegger is attempting to access the primordial, where things are truly revealed. For example, he liberates basic words of Greek thought from centuries of translations, to receive them as they were originally.12placeholder To appropriate this originary thinking, one does not create limits by confronting death, as early Heidegger suggests. These limits, limitations on possibility, translate into the ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ created by centuries of philosophical thought. One must dissolve traditional concepts to question the primordiality of Dasein, Heidegger solicits. Ethics, culture, and humanity are not of serious concern for Heidegger’s late thought.13placeholder
To what degree then can Dasein be-with-another? Is Dasein simply an isolated existential concept somehow related to or influenced by the Being of beings, and thus not in any way common to a peoples? Or is a people that which is interconnected by illuminating a path to the source of existence, found in a common primal human experience for which Being grounds this humanness as beings related to Being? On these sobering questions, Löwith furthermore interrogates: “What experience justifies the ‘destruction’ of the history of Western philosophy, its dismantling to the point of exposing its foundations, and beyond this the undermining of metaphysics as such, which itself is supposed to have forgotten not just the beingness of beings but Being from Plato to Nietzsche?” As Löwith suggests, to answer the preceding questions, what must be examined more closely is Heidegger’s turn away from resoluteness, and towards letting-be thinking, by tracing the closing into opening, for such will help us reach the existential character of Dasein and its relation to others.
In Being and Time “thrownness-in-the-world” is a burdensome facticity.14placeholder But in “Letter on Humanism” “throwing-by-Being” abolishes the burden of facticity; we stand in awe of Being, as, being humans, being Dasein, we are so close in relation to it. There appears now in Heidegger’s thought from 1947 onwards a loss of heaviness where one now opens oneself up to stand in a distinct relationship to Being. But unclear here is whether this stands among and with others. The question that Heidegger pursues as a somewhat common theme throughout his writings—Why are there beings at all and not rather Nothing?—means that the existential merit of beings moving past lived existence into the being of non-beings, towards nothingness. This abysmal “strangeness” mediates between fact and the wonder of the totality of beings, where Being calls out of the Nothing for Dasein to hear. Therefore, Heidegger concludes that beings are, beings exist by hearing this disclosure. The late thought of Heidegger turns away from death mediating resolve and authenticity towards a contemplation of the premise of whether Being requires humans at all: “Whereas in Being and Time the Dasein which is always one’s own was assigned and given over to itself, the human essence is now defined by its being an obedient ‘listening’ to the claim of Being and by belonging to it.”15placeholder While listening is clear, how does the attuning to Being also necessitate belonging to it?
Having set up the two contrasting aspects of Heidegger, the limiting resolve of Being and Time, and the “letting-go” of oneself and worldly affairs in “Letter on Humanism,” Löwith is confronted with the question of whether Being dwells with humans at all. As the relation to Being is now a “withdrawal,” we are presented with a serious problem of Dasein in Heidegger’s thinking from the perspective of Being.16placeholder If Being gives or essences (used as a verb in the translation to English, from the German wesen), Dasein must be able to receive or to retrieve. But, as Heidegger maintains, Being conceals and recoils due to how we have approached the question of it, namely mainly through the logos and reason, generating metaphysics, from Plato to Nietzsche. During these two millennia, why has Being, asks Löwith, not been able to eventuate a relation to humans? Why have we not found this relation? If we have not, its possibility remains skeptical. Two thousand years of philosophy have, indeed, closed off Being from human positing essentially, yet the paradox remains that it is humanity that manifests the destiny of Being, or at least shepherds a relation, shown in the concept of “shepherd of Being” in “Letter on Humanism”.
By the same token, Being provides the disclosure for the determining of Western thinking, and therefore, Being determines Dasein. Thus, philosophy and metaphysics shape the disclosure of Being, but Dasein must also somehow be beyond this to receive its fundamental source of its own existence: what it means to be human. In Being and Time, this shaping by metaphysics prompts Heidegger to assert that Dasein uncovers and discloses, meaning humans are the relation to, or the site of, Being. Later, for Heidegger, all truth is relative to people in the world, historical Dasein, and therefore we must be in the world because it is true that Being has revealed to us our Dasein, our destiny, informing what and who we are. For example, late Heidegger says that suicide would be the elimination of truth.17placeholder
To the question, “What was there before there was humans?”, Löwith employs the Heideggerian answer that humans are the temporal ones.18placeholder Our relation to Being is that a human essence, a source of why we are what we are (denoted in the copula is of the verb to be related to a subject), belongs to Being because Being needs humans, and because the human, as a being, is Being. Being discloses to Dasein what it is. Or else, according to Heidegger, there is no ground for which the human knows or intuits what it is. What would happen if Dasein no longer existed? Would there still be Being? Heidegger at the beginning of Being and Time states that “the indefinability of being does not dispense with the question of its meaning but forces it upon us.”19placeholder Would being-there still be present, as a tangible thing in the world? Or does existence also cease without something that must question itself and its place within it? Heidegger’s answer is that the ontological character of Dasein is “pre-ontological,” meaning not defined by tradition, and Dasein is the Being for which it can relate to, which Heidegger calls existence [Existenz].20placeholder
What Löwith gives us, in a partial answer to the above, is that existing, the “is,” is what is analogous to humans. Without humanity, the “is” is not possible, a rejoinder to Heidegger’s Being as the fundamental component of the “is”. It is this supposition in Heidegger’s thought Löwith condemns, for he finds that the “is” is divorced in Heidegger’s “letting-be” thought from its own analogy, meaning it does not reflect its proper thing which makes it what it is.21placeholder Heidegger, in short, cannot forget about the human in his turn away from it in later thinking. As metaphysics for Heidegger is exhausted, the choices of Cristian theology and Greek cosmology are not longer sufficient for an inquiry into Being. But, as Löwith suggests, against Heidegger, they have not been expelled from philosophy because philosophy and its tradition of metaphysics also make us what we are and thus also make the Being of beings. Heidegger, undoubtedly, would respond that in order to make this assertion, we are enveloped within the metaphysical connotation of the verb in English “to make,” meaning a production derived from the logos. And this is simply what Heidegger in later thinking avoids: traditions of productive thinking represented in the Greek techne and logos have left us bereft in the age of technology. And yet, as Löwith ripostes, this does not hold up: as Dasein is finite and hence historical, humans find their meaning in finite time. This finitude is antithetical to Being, an eternal presencing that has persisted with us through two thousand years of trying to cover it up. Löwith, in his cosmological response to Heidegger, asks, what attracts Being towards humans for the site of its disclosure? It must be the cosmos—the eternal ordering of things that presences for humanity. Finite time and history are what determines a people, and therefore Being must also find its meaning in history and be determined in that unfolding of it.
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It appears that either Being essences independently of Dasein or Being is fundamentally dependent on humans, necessitated by history. What Löwith makes clear is the fact that nature and history cannot both be present as determining forces in Heidegger’s thought. Where Heidegger claims to have solved both riddles, nature and history, with Being, for Löwith, two thousand years of metaphysical thought has only made the riddle of the Sphinx more perplexing:
“Hence, one must conclude, Heidegger erred regarding what is decisive in the ontic-ontological difference, by maintaining that Being is distinguished from beings inasmuch as beings are of course always dependent on Being even though Being cannot essence without beings. But how was he able, in the presentation of such a fundamental thesis, to be on such dubious woodpaths?”22placeholder
Heidegger moves on the shaky woodpaths from the “methodological priority” of Dasein to the later thought of privileging an independent Being. To rescue Being from logos and rational correlates, Heidegger wishes for Being to be free from all subjectivity for it to be objectively true. This must be true for one’s own Dasein, irrespective of the other.23placeholder
At the end of “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time,” Löwith demonstrates that Heidegger leaves his readers with a demanding ambiguity. How Löwith attempts in his own philosophy to try and solve this conundrum requires further investigation, but some pathmarks have been travelled here to show Löwith’s formulation of the cosmos as a rejoinder to Heidegger’s late thought of leaving the human behind. But, the ontic-ontological distinction remains unclarified for Löwith as “remarkably undecided,” implying Heidegger could not even himself think through his own problem. He left it there for us, to let it fester and swell there, as a problem.24placeholder Yet it is also the case that this complication defines who we are, when attempting to describe it stylistically in our language, when reaching for it theoretically, when delineating a grasp of it practically. This is the problem of what it means to be: an indiscernibility must make sense [logos] to human ears which we must communicate to others with speech.
Aristotle, viewing this complication, labelled humans and our ability for speech to rationalize about just and unjust things as what is most natural. He called this being-with-others politics. Heidegger says this beneficial or injurious labelling covers over what is most real. It seems Löwith’s brilliance in his critique of Heidegger is that we must wrestle with the complications of Dasein’s nature and history and whether the two become irreconcilably conflated when Dasein is cut-off from the philosophy of “letting-be”. By standing in quietist repose, we forget the human. We must ask: why? Why forgo acting in the name of thinking? Löwith suggests that in turning to Heidegger we can find all the baggage that accompanies an attempt to understand what it means “to be”.
Works Cited
Beiner, Ronald. “Karl Löwith: In Awe of the Cosmos” in Political Philosophy: What it is and Why it Matters. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambough. New York: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Second Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 2008.
Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. New York: Holt, Reinhart, Winston, 1964.
Löwith, Karl. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. Edited by Richard Wolin. Trans. by Gary Steiner. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Löwith, Karl. “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” New German Critique 45. Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger (Autumn, 1988), 117-134.
Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 80-81.
Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83.
Ronald Beiner, “Karl Lowith: In Awe of the Cosmos” in Political Philosophy and Why it Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 66.
Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. Ed. Richard Wolin. Trans. Gary Steiner (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1995) 36.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 37.
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Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 39.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 39.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 42.
It is for this reason why Heidegger disapproves of the Scholastics and the Latin language in general: it covers up or conceals more than it liberates. Aquinas reinterpreted Greek into Latin only to infuse what always was into a new form instead of breaking free from constraints and being anew.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 43.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 53.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 52.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 54.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 58.
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), 3.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 11.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 58.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 66.
Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, 67.
On this point, many commentators point to the unfinished portion of Being and Time.