The German Genius

and Karl Marx , describing the emergence of sociology. Throughout his works, Löwith argued that the twentieth-century disasters were originally shaped in the middle of the nineteenth century “as the educated elite decisively turned their backs on the classicism of Goethe and Hegel. Increasingly, they grew impatient with values that were ‘timeless’ or that transcended the finitude of human temporal existence. Nature and the heavens ceased to be the touchstone for value and meaning, instead, ‘man’ became the measure.” In Löwith’s view, Europe’s descent into nihilism culminated in there being “no constraints” upon the “sovereignty of the human will.” Nietzsche’s “will to power” was for Löwith “an amoral excess.” Instead of Marx or Nietzsche, he preferred Heidegger and his advocacy of Stoicism, “acquiescence to fate.” 56
    Löwith studied with Husserl before Heidegger, under whom he examined the role of intersubjectivity in the formation of the self. In his dissertation he argued that the “I” is primarily formed and shaped by a world of human intimacy, what he called “the co-world.” According to Löwith, interpreting Heidegger, “Human beings are not ‘rational animals’ but instead ecstatic ‘shepherds of being.’” Scientific thinking, seeking to control the world, is a decline from this original feeling of ecstasy. 57
    The career—and thought—of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was very different from that of the rest of Heidegger’s children. Born in Marburg and the son of a pharmacology professor, Gadamer studied at Breslau before returning to Marburg after World War I. There his early teachers were Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, but it was Heidegger who exerted the most influence and, for a time, Gadamer worked as Heidegger’s assistant. 58 “I always had the damned feeling that Heidegger was looking over my shoulder,” he said later. 59
    During the 1930s and 1940s, Gadamer accommodated himself, first to National Socialism and then, briefly, to Communism. He was never a member of the NSDAP, and he seems to have kept his head down, though he was later criticized for being “too acquiescent.” At the end of the war he received an appointment at Leipzig and, having been found untainted by Nazism by the American occupation forces, was made rector of the university. But Communist East Germany was not to his liking and he left, eventually succeeding Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. To an extent, while there he tried to aid the rehabilitation of Heidegger. In 1953, with Helmut Kuhn, he founded Philosophische Rundschau , a highly influential journal, though Gadamer did not become known outside his own professional circle until the publication in 1960 of Wahrheit und Methode ( Truth and Method ). This established him in the eyes of many as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. 60
    One of his starting points in Truth and Method was a series of lectures Heidegger gave in 1936 (not published until 1950), titled “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (The Origin of the Work of Art). Here Heidegger introduced his concept of the “event” of truth, the “unconcealment” of truth, an idea that contrasts with the notion of truth as “correctness,” usually taken to mean some sort of correspondence between a statement and the world. Works of art have a coherence and within that coherence “a” truth is revealed, stemming from disclosure, but it is disclosure that is an interpretation, which can never be total or truly objective. We play a part in whatever we choose to understand as a truth. The influence of Kant is clear.
    Gadamer took these ideas much further in Truth and Method . He said that our involvement in the event of truth is always based on our prejudices, “anticipatory structures” that we have within us and that allow, or determine, that our understanding of any truth event will be grasped in a certain way, together with “the anticipation of completeness,” another neo-Kantian notion that involves the presupposition “that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.” 61 At the same time, history also plays a part in our understanding, says Gadamer. We are “embedded” in our particular history and cannot escape its effects. Understanding also needs another to be certain it is not mere subjectivism; new