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The ‘Theological Nihilism’ of Friedrich Gogarten. On a Context in Karl Löwith’s Critique of Carl Schmitt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Hjalmar Falk
Hjalmar Falk*
Affiliation:
Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 200, SE 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. E-mail: hjalmar.falk@lir.gu.se
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Abstract

This essay discusses the philosopher Karl Löwith’s critique of the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Friedrich Gogarten. My aim is twofold: first, I want to reconstruct Löwith’s thesis in his 1935 article on Schmitt’s ‘occasional decisionism’ (updated to include a critique of Gogarten in 1960), together with a reading of some central texts by Schmitt and Gogarten; second, I want to raise some critical points regarding Löwith’s claims through these readings. While I agree with Löwith that aspects of Schmitt’s and Gogarten’s thought helped hastening the nihilistic tendencies they themselves claimed to counter, I believe that his diagnosis of their decisionism as nihilism misses important nuances in their work, nuances crucial to the problematization, historicization and philosophical analysis of nihilism. Ultimately, I find that the main point of contestation between Löwith and Schmitt/Gogarten is not whether the latter two affirm modern meaninglessness, but rather whether history can and should be invested with meaning in the first place.

Type
Focus: Nihilism
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 217 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

References and Notes

1.For a conceptualization of nihilism taking account of these tendencies, see Slocombe, W. (2006) Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern. The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from Romanticism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge), especially chapter 1. For a contemporary rereading of nihilism and an appropriation of its assumed effects of the crisis of meaning in an affirmation of non-vitalist science and ‘eliminative materialism’, see R. Brassier (2007) Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).Google Scholar
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6.Here read as published in Löwith, K. (1984, 1935/1960) Der okkasionelle Dezisionismus von C. Schmitt. In Sämtliche Schriften Bd. 8. Heidegger – Denker in dürftiger Zeit. Zur Stellung der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung), If uncommented, quotes are from the English translation by G. Steiner as ‘The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt’, In: R. Wolin (ed.) (1995) Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 137–169. The original article, published in 1935, only discussed Schmitt. The final version with the reflections on Gogarten in the Sämtliche Schriften-edition was originally published in the anthology Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Zur Kritik der geschichtlichen Existenz (Stuttgart: W. Kolhammer Verlag) in 1960.Google Scholar
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