Political theology and the philosophy of history

It has been suggested by some of the most important scholars and philosophers of our time (Löwith 1991, 1957; Taubes 2009; Schmitt 2005) that the philosophical discourse of modernity is theological in its origin and that the epochal project of modernity can be understood as the secularisation of the theological notion of history. This secularising project of modernity, best expressed as what we come to call ‘philosophy of history’, ‘begins only in modern times’ (Löwith 1957: 2), and is unique to the philosophical discourse of modernity. From Karl Löwith we know that the term ‘philosophy of history’ was first used by Voltaire. ‘This philosophy of history’, writes Löwith, ‘originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfilment and … ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern’ (2). In contrast to the Greek conception of history, whose fundamental principle is ‘verification of prognostications concerning historiconatural events’ (9), the philosophy of history opens up ‘the temporal horizon for a final goal’, ‘an eschatological future’ which ‘exists for us only by expectation and hope’ (6).

However, the secularising project of modernity has not left its eschatological origin intact. On one hand, the philosophical discourse of modernity legitimises its condition by an appeal to the eschatological opening up of the future as the pre-eminent temporal horizon out of which our historical condition, at any instance, is to derive its meaning; on the other hand, the historical Reason of modernity, by relegating the eschaton to an indefinite goal, takes away the eschatological sting of the Judeo-Christian thought. The result is an immanent-pantheistic metaphysics in the form of a philosophy of history which maintains the insistence on futurity while at the same time liquidating its urgency and imminence. Hegel's speculative-dialectical philosophy of history, with its immanent movement presupposing no transcendental foundation, is the utmost realisation of the secularising project of modernity. According to Carl Schmitt, it is in Hegel's organic theory of the state that such a pantheistic-immanent metaphysics finds its utmost systematic expression.