From the very beginning of the eighteenth century, the "Enlightenment" became the center of European reflections. Reactions to the Enlightenment have varied. In the first half of the twentieth century in Germany, anti-Enlightenment discourse through thinkers such as H
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From the very beginning of the eighteenth century, the "Enlightenment" became the center of European reflections. Reactions to the Enlightenment have varied. In the first half of the twentieth century in Germany, anti-Enlightenment discourse through thinkers such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Adorno, Horkheimer and Karl Löwith, raised radical criticisms of the Enlightenment in various philosophical, political, and historical fields. In this essay, based on Skinner's approach, we interpret Karl Löwith's idea about the historical-political thought of the Enlightenment. The question of this article is "in what context was Karl Löwith's idea about the theological implications of the Enlightenment historical-political thought formed and what is the author's intention?" It can be said that Löwith's idea originated in the German anti-Enlightenment tradition in the first half of the twentieth century. He sees modern philosophy of history and the concept of progress as a secularized form of the theology of history and the concept of providence. With this claim, Löwith tries to introduce the Enlightenment as illegitimate by proposing theological roots for it. It seems that the consequences of accepting Löwith's idea could challenge the assumptions of modern thought, especially about the concept of "progress", as a secularized theological concept. In the sense that modern thought cannot be considered an independent thought. In contrast, Santo Mazzarino, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Blumenberg have fundamentally criticized Löwith's theoretical-methodological foundations and challenged him.
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