Löwith: Nature and the Present

What did Löwith try to show philosophically? To answer this, we must first consider Löwith’s way of philosophizing, which has been called by Hans-Georg Gadamer “the method of perspectives.”^{Footnote 17} This method leads Gadamer rightly to emphasize scepticism to explain Löwith’s thought: in letting different philosophers speak out of different contexts and against other philosophers, Löwith points to contradictory ideas that matter for an understanding of the world.^{Footnote 18} Scepticism for him is not a silent activity of negation but rather a multiplying of positions to appreciate the richness of the world, as well as the mind’s inability to grasp it completely in a dogmatic system. This is evident in his 1941 book, From Hegel to Nietzsche, where this method is used consciously throughout in an attempt to historically reconstruct in different lights those philosophical controversies beginning with Hegel and ending with Nietzsche that he saw as perpetuating and deepening European nihilism. But at the heart of this sceptical experience lies, as Gadamer puts it, Nature: “Löwith seeks to bring nature to bear as the constant of reality, the granite that bears all. According to content, what comes to words with the theme of nature and naturalness is the oldest motif of Western philosophy—physis—admittedly in polemical form and directed against the reflectiveness of philosophy and against the spirit of the technological thinking of the modern period.”^{Footnote 19} Thus, Löwith evaluates different philosophies concerning the extent to which they succeed in capturing Nature in its contradictory complexity. Furthermore, he criticizes those philosophers who failed to grasp it because of their isolation in their own epistemological systems.

The overriding issue in this sceptical appreciation of Nature is time, the primary being of Nature that gives rise to its contradictory existence. Time is the eternal affirmation of the present that exists only as the negation of past and future. Like time, Nature is at its core a contradictory existence that is constantly deployed by the emergence of beings that will soon pass to be replaced by other beings. Human beings are part of Nature’s self-contradictory continuation and cannot alter this constant contradictory movement of time. However, philosophies of history have tried erroneously, according to Löwith, to secularize ideas of theology to give time a precise telos that is, more or less, realized by human action.

His attacks on Hegel exemplify his views on this matter. Löwith understands the Hegelian conception of the eternal as an attempt to break from the eternal Nature:

Löwith here suggests that Hegel cannot maintain, as the Greeks did, that time is a natural recurrent cycle. To do so is to engage in the paradoxical effort of attempting to understand how Spirit, which progresses by negating itself, can find its eternal absoluteness in the future, when time itself is the eternal return of the same, the spurious infinite.^{Footnote 21} Thus, Löwith thinks that, for Hegel and other philosophers of history, there are two irreconcilable worlds, the world of Nature and the world of history; the world of history—the world modern humans feel they can control—has an unjustified precedence over Nature since it gives Nature—the world from which modern humans feel alienated—an equivocal rational meaning.^{Footnote 22} For Löwith, there is only one world: the world of Nature. Therefore, human actions are only more kindling for igniting the eternal fire, something that can be understood in an Heraclitean way: “The totality of things, is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things, in the way goods are an exchange for gold, and gold for goods.”^{Footnote 23} Trying to impose a telos on time, as philosophies of history have tried to do, is an error that a sceptic is sure to fault because time and Nature have precedence over humanity and reveal themselves only partially while they unfold infinitely. The ever living fire Heraclitus speaks of burns without human beings being able to predict what will be burnt to insure its combustion, and this fire will never provide the solid ground upon which human beings may build historical meaning.

Löwith’s position here, which I have coupled with the Heraclitean, is reaffirmed in his Meaning in History. Löwith directly cites passages from Hegel’s Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History wherein he proposes that, at first glance, history seems to be monstrous, as in it everything is sacrificed and nothing seems to justify these sacrifices.^{Footnote 24} Löwith then asks the following question: “And why not stop here, instead of asking Hegel’s question: To what final purpose are these enormous sacrifices offered time and again?”^{Footnote 25} Why can we not accept the Heraclitean polemos insuring the eternal balancing of life and death, why can we not accept the fatum that is enforced by Dikè, and why do we have to resort to philosophies of history? Löwith answers: “Hegel thinks that this question [What is the telos of the historical sacrifices?] arises ‘necessarilyʼ in our thinking. The implication is, however, that it arises in our occidental thinking, which is not satisfied with the pagan acceptance of fate.”^{Footnote 26} Occidental thinking, signified mainly by Christianity, cannot be satisfied with Nature’s spurious infinite and must find a meaning that will break the cycle of time so that a linear time spreading from past to future can offer a progression towards salvation. Löwith leans on Goethe’s view of history to attack Hegel: history for Goethe “is a tremendous view of streams and rivers which, with natural necessity, rush together from many heights and valleys; at least they cause the overflowing of a great river and an inundation in which both perish, those who foresaw it and those who had no inkling of it. In this tremendous empirical process you see nothing but nature and nothing of what philosophers would so much like to call freedom.”^{Footnote 27} By using Goethe’s words, Löwith points to the necessity of an everlasting Nature that has precedence over human freedom. There is only necessity in the present, there is no necessity in the progress of time: “the empirical process, without principle, and therefore also without epochs, goes on infinitely, without beginning or end.”^{Footnote 28}

With this conception of time and (non-)history, Löwith was naturally drawn to Jacob Burckhardt because—and even if in a way Burckhardt “continued to contain his thinking within the circumference of Hegel’s view of history”^{Footnote 29}—Löwith sees him as the historian who “dismissed the theological, philosophical, and socialistic interpretations of history and thereby reduces the meaning of history to mere continuity, without beginning, progress or end.”^{Footnote 30} It is precisely from this link to Burckhardt, and to Nietzsche and his theory of the eternal return, that Jürgen Habermas is able to see Löwith not only as a Sceptic but also as a Stoic: “It is not by chance that Löwith links up with the Stoics, especially with the Stoic lament over the loss of a self-evident view of the cosmos,”^{Footnote 31} because the idea of the cosmos, the whole given in the here and now, is precisely what is lost when entering any philosophy of history that is grounded in seeing the past as origin and the future as advent. It is clear that, in order to speak of Löwith’s own view of the world, we must go back to ancient appellations (Stoic, Sceptic, Heraclitean) in order to point to an understanding of Nature that was not overwritten by Judeo-Christian categories. This is not to say that Löwith’s thought is emptied of any religious concepts, but that the religious will become Greek: a pagan respect for and acceptance of physis.

Habermas, however, also goes on to reveal a real and important problem in Löwith’s philosophy that we must now consider: because Löwith is always evaluating and comparing different philosophies of history, his own distinctiveness would be that “by means of the claim to have grasped history rationally, to disempower the claim of historical comprehension itself.”^{Footnote 32} But Habermas has “to admit that even Löwith has not been able to persuade me that the fundamentally historical character of the dialectical mediation of nature and the human world, however this dialectics is conceived, can be cogently disputed—least of all by way of a logic of the history of the ontological understanding of the world.”^{Footnote 33} Habermas suggests here that, in having explained rationally how Judeo-Christian categories had been historically interpreted and applied to history by different philosophers of history, Löwith still failed to show how the dialectical character of the relationship between Nature and human actions is not to be understood as historical. We are confronted here with a great difficulty: how can it be logical that, in order to break from the historical character of the dialectical mediation of Nature and the human world, we must first and foremost resort to history by reconstructing it, even backwards or in a different, sceptic, light? In the Preface of the first edition of From Hegel to Nietzsche,^{Footnote 34} Löwith clearly states, as a Young Hegelian would do, that he wants to stay on historical grounds to reconstruct the European understanding of the world. And yet, later, in Meaning in History, he attacks those philosophies of history that sought to give a rational meaning to time within history. Thus, there is a contradiction in Löwith’s thinking: is it possible to break from history and return to Nature’s unity by thinking historically?

Perhaps it is possible, in a sceptical way, to weaken philosophies of history by reconstructing history in so many ways that any attempt to give it clear meaning is doomed to failure. Or perhaps we could take Habermas’ critique seriously and ask ourselves if it is possible to criticize philosophies of history by staying on the same ground as them. Löwith’s work on its own does not seem to provide a clear answer here. Turning to Nishida will be of great use in order to find a different ground, one that is able to make way for a critique of philosophies of history while still expressing an appreciation for historical events. This is not to say that Löwith had always been Nishidian in his contradictory understanding of history without being conscious of it; rather I wish to show that Löwith and Nishida share a common ground from which Nishida could establish perhaps a more coherent meaning of history. Before we are able to come to that conclusion, however, I must first offer a presentation of Nishida’s philosophy.

Nishida: History and the Eternal Present

Löwith finds Nishida in Japan engaged (since around 1934) in a philosophy of history, after he grew dissatisfied with his logic of basho.^{Footnote 35} The logic of basho was brought forth by Nishida to ground judgements, conceived as acts of self-consciousness in ‘pure experience,’ a concept he first discovered reading William James. Pure experience is a state of consciousness that can be called ‘absolute nothingness,ʼ as there is nothing that can be determined in it; it is a state of pure duration, the true reality that we then divide for our own purpose in being conscious of different aspect of reality.^{Footnote 36} The basho (place, ground, field) of nothingness is that out of which the self can see itself as a self in its purest form, and out of which every act of the self emerges. But for these acts to emerge in the self itself, there are other bashos that exist that are self-forming and provide different grounds to these different acts of consciousness. The logic of basho is a system of concentric levels of fields out of which the self, from itself and in itself, is able to judge. A basho is said to be a predicate by Nishida—not a grammatical predicate, but a predicate set forth for the grammatical subject-predicate judgement to happen, so that the copulative function is placed somewhere.^{Footnote 37} Every basho is a relative universal nothingness, since it cannot be said to be what it is encompassing. For example, the basho of numbers, which self-forms in the self to make sense of numbers, is not a number in itself; it is nothing prior to its determination in different numbers. And yet, because every basho is universal and to exist must determine itself into individuals—an individual that a basho can never be—it can be said to be concrete as a contradictory self-identity.

However, Nishida was to abandon, as Robert Carter calls it, this “‘gothic architectonicʼ of the universals,”^{Footnote 38} grounded in Neo-Kantianism reflections, to bring into focus directly this idea of self-contradictory identity or, as he calls it himself, “the self-identity of absolute contradiction.”^{Footnote 39} And Nishida had come to the conclusion that this self-identity of absolute contradiction can be clearly seen in the world of historical reality and that a logic of basho, which had proved to be much too internalized and which had prevented the self from entering the real world, had now to be resituated in this newly discovered basho of historical reality. The dialectics needed in the understanding of this self-identity of absolute contradiction is the same that is found in the logic of basho, meaning that to understand something we must always think of it in its interconnection with its opposite, and this unity of opposites serves to establish a more universal identity in which the opposition is never to be resolved. However, this dialectics is now used to express how this one historical world is determined by the relationship between, horizontally, the individual’s creativity and relationship to the Thou, the Thou that is any real thing facing the I and seen by the I, and, vertically, the individual’s creativity and its species, the species that is, in the historical world, a nation or, more precisely, a culture.^{Footnote 40} This one and only historical world maintains its identity by letting individuals oppose each other horizontally in their creative process, while the individuals—who think they are autonomous in this horizontal oppositional creative process—are in fact vertically building cultures that constitute the identity of the world. The historical world is a self-identity of absolute contradiction because as a basho of historical events it exists through the unity of opposites that are, horizontally, subject and object, and vertically, individuality and universality. And the historical world as a whole—i.e., Being—takes place out of the basho of nothingness that circumscribes Being through the oppositional unity of time and space.^{Footnote 41} By explaining these contradictions in more detail while revealing how the historical world only exists through them, I will show what Nishida means by this one self-contradicting historical world.

This world of historical reality is the true reality, according to Nishida, since every conscious standpoint on the world begins with historical human activity. Consciousness, the main concern of Nishida’s earlier philosophy, can still be a starting point of reality, but if consciousness is separated from objectivity, as it is in the rationalistic Cartesian philosophy, there is nothing but a dream. “Thus the real world is the world in which we are actively involved—the concrete world in which we are living in that active involvement.”^{Footnote 42} Descartes’ cogito presupposes the act of thinking,^{Footnote 43} and so Nishida thinks that “the noesis must always include the noema”^{Footnote 44} because the I is the acting self seeing the Thou and seeing itself in the Thou. As a social and historical self, the I is a creative body, which means that through the body, the I is poiesis and entails that “the real world is the world of production. It is a world in which we are made by making.”^{Footnote 45} The I as a creative body acts on the world by creating, while its creations make the I in return, so that “the world is a continuing creative process.”^{Footnote 46} Subjectivity and objectivity are constantly opposing each other, yet, they exist only in regard to their mutual determination or, as Nishida writes, their “productive transaction.”^{Footnote 47} The I always faces the Thou as the I creates the Thou and exists as such an activity, but the Thou in return creates the I, so that the I can “see itself in things” and can “act from the things seen.”^{Footnote 48} This ‘inter-expressive activity of the monads,ʼ this self-contradiction of the one and the many takes place in time—the linear impossibility of the repetition of the same moment that moves from the one to the many—but also in space—the circular simultaneous existence of things as a seeing of many in one. It is thus time and space that form the contradictory parameters of the historical reality through which subjectivity and objectivity, individuals and species, can coexist as contradictions. The world exists due to poiesis, and this poiesis is a contradictory process that affirms the world’s unity.

Humanity, as comprised of individual monads, is thus capable not only of intuition—as the early Nishida would have said—but also of what Nishida calls “active intuition”: “active intuition means to see things in the form of poiesis.”^{Footnote 49} Active intuition means that to see things is to already be acting on them and by acting on them to see them: “we are both passively determined by the environment [the seeing] and actively working upon it [the acting].”^{Footnote 50} As monads see things, they create according to them and they see themselves in things, but in return, monads are created and acted upon by what they see, and this whole process is the self-identity of the historical world as an absolute contradiction.^{Footnote 51} In other words, Being is active intuition since the historical world only exists through the oppositional activity of individual creative bodies.

Of importance here to us is that all of this takes place in the present as it is the knot of all contradictions: “Historical formations are the changes in the simultaneous space of history, as it were. The process of historical formation has no meaning apart from this ‘historical space.ʼ”^{Footnote 52} This historical space is something eternal and can be justly called “the absolute present in which past, present, and future interpenetrate.”^{Footnote 53} The eternal present is a circle, “as if a circle, wherein periphery and center are incompatible, continues moving endlessly in self contradiction. What I mean by the present is not something like a point on a linear line, moving from past to future, as in the instant. The present must rather be the world of acting-intuition.”^{Footnote 54} As the present is the world of acting intuition, this eternal now is a geographical space from which history, or a specific monadic I, exists and creates; furthermore, it is also the coexistence and co-presence of all active intuitions in the spatiality of time that takes history as a whole that is always lived in the present of creation. The world is comprised of the totality of the horizontal acting intuitions and this creates, vertically, the universal: “The world in which we live as acting selves is one which determines itself in the form of Platonic Ideas. To see the Ideas does not mean that we enter into a world of tranquil contemplation, but a world of true action, a world from which new action is born.”^{Footnote 55} A culture is a Platonic Idea, which is defined by Nishida as “the archetype of our rational moral practice,”^{Footnote 56} a universal and eternal value created by the activity of individuals constituting a nation.^{Footnote 57} The nation is the temporal-historical body of a culture, its individualization. History needs nations as its creative individuals, “just as a species of biological life, as a sphere of self-determining forms, proceeds to form itself from generation to generation;”^{Footnote 58} but as nations pass, culture, the affirmation of the nation’s individual creations, is eternal and never passes. Culture is an eternal value lived and incarnated through a nation that can coexist with other cultures in the absolute present of the historical space. This means that cultures, or epochs, do not have any distinct duration, because what matters is the Platonic Idea that is affirmed in the eternal present.^{Footnote 59} As a realization of Platonic Ideas, every culture is self-determining; in this sense, there is no relationship from one epoch to another: time, in its essence, is a “continuity of discontinuity,”^{Footnote 60} i.e., an eternal present that self-negates past and future but, as present shows a different possibility of history, forces past and future to coexist with this present, as past and present represent the infinite possibilities that form the present.^{Footnote 61} This means that there is no law underlying the temporal revelation of different cultures, and there is no real progression of history: “History does not have laws. The universal has no meaning in history. I think that history … is aesthetic rather than scientific.”^{Footnote 62} The universal is never to be found in the historical world, yet it is always created through active intuition and serves as an archetypal value that gives meaning to our own individual activity, just as art’s meaning is a creation of human activity and does not exist in the world but through its signification in return ceaselessly affects human activity.^{Footnote 63}

Nishida sees in those two eternally present and simultaneous movements—the horizontal movement of the I and the Thou and the vertical movement of the individual and its species—a profound religious significance. Following Leopold von Ranke, who wrote that “Every epoch is immediate to God,”^{Footnote 64} Nishida says that “Every historical epoch is religious in its ground,”^{Footnote 65} since every epoch reveals the absolute in the form of its creations that create moral meaning. For Nishida, God “must be absolutely nothing” but, by being absolutely nothing, God “possesses absolute negation within itself. It is by negating its own nothingness that it is infinitely self-affirming, infinitely creative, and is historical reality itself.”^{Footnote 66} God is therefore Being and nothingness and neither of the two specifically because it “must be self-contradictory one—that is, an identity of absolute contradictions.”^{Footnote 67} This means that the historical world as a whole rests on nothingness and is the expression of nothingness. This is where the logic of basho again comes into play: as to talk about numbers, we had to reflect on the basho of numbers that is not a number in itself, so too to state that the world of history is a self-contradictory identity requires seeing it from another contradictory standpoint than that of the world itself, and this standpoint is nothingness. The historical world is thus the form of the formless, and the one God is this whole contradictory process between form and formlessness. There is nothing other than historical reality since historical reality reveals all the contradictions that form nothingness (the formless) as a basho of self-contradictory identity. Logic, as a science, must express the self-contradictory identity of the world,^{Footnote 68} meaning that logic must explain that Being, the actual world, a foreground, exists as the self-determination of nothingness, the background. This is why logic, for Nishida, serves to explain active intuition: the individual’s activity exists as he sees things that he or other individuals have created, but active intuition, as a creative process, is always a movement that emerges from nothingness. To understand active intuition in itself is to understand it from its own contradiction: “having the form of an absolutely contradictory identity of the one and the many, the world is bottomlessly self-contradictory. As individuals of such a world we are always bottomlessly self-contradictory, too.”^{Footnote 69} With the nothingness from which our own creative process arises, we can approach God in ourselves, but human beings cannot fully grasp rationally the immensity of God as a unity between the historical world and nothingness since “there is no path from man to God.”^{Footnote 70} Human beings, however, can understand that every historical epoch is an expression of God as a form created from their own active intuition: God creates itself through the individuals following the individual’s own free will. Nishida goes on to say that: “each of our actions is historical, and eschatologisch, as the self-determination of the absolute present.”^{Footnote 71} The problem then becomes how to explain what eschatology means here. Nishida specifies it by turning to kairos: “Truth is revelation. The truth is known as kairos: it is timely in the sense of being the determination of the absolute present.”^{Footnote 72} The absolute present is the end of time, but also and always at the same time the beginning of time; it is the only time that we know and live in, and every human action, as kairos, shapes the eternal present in creating a culture and expressing God, but without being able to read any moral progress in this creative process. Kairos is not to be understood as something in the past or in the future to which we compare our own epoch in order to understand where we stand in the line of history. Rather kairos is every monadic event in the present that freely creates aesthetic Platonic Ideas.

And Nishida believes that his epoch, the Japanese kairos, is one that is able to see and to unite co-present cultures without losing their contradictions, while also ceasing to focus unilaterally on nations, in order to begin a global self-awakening. Every nation has “its own world mission, [however] we must be able to construct a single world-historical world, that is, a ‘world-of-worldsʼ world.”^{Footnote 73} This “‘world-of-worldsʼ world” is the emergence of a culture in which the Platonic Ideas can coexist or, in more specific terms, the emergence of a culture in which every culture is appreciated for itself and appreciated with its distinction and contradiction in comparison to other cultures. Nishida feels that the Japanese nation is well suited to initiate this global self-awakening since Japanese culture “lies in its own form of contradictory identity of immanence and transcendence.”^{Footnote 74} Japanese culture is thus able to see the universal in the individual and the individual in the universal, so that “the essence of morality itself can truly be clarified.”^{Footnote 75}

It is clear from what I have shown earlier that Löwith did not think that the Japanese culture was capable of being the site of a global-awakening, as he thought that it lacked any true principle and only sought to validate its own nationalism. However, there is something very interesting in the fact that Löwith used history to show that no definite meaning can be ascribed to it, and that Nishida insisted on the historical world to show that there is no historical progression, as every historical action is of equal value as a form of the formless. It is from here that a common ground emerges.

Finding Common Ground

In order to render his dialectical understanding of the world as a self-contradictory identity, Nishida turns explicitly to Heraclitus, the thinker who understood that the world is one through the many (time) and many through one (space).^{Footnote 76} Heraclitusʼ logos bears the meaning of the spatialization of time and temporalization of space,^{Footnote 77} for space synchronically holds together a totality of beings and species that live in contradiction with each other, just as time permits the passing of beings that act on each other and reveal the contradictory determinations of the world. To spatialize time is to fixate the flux of becoming in the absolute present and, in doing so, to insist on the intuitive side of acting intuition, while to temporalize space is to fluidify the present so that it can perpetuate itself eternally as a self-contradiction and, in doing so, to insist on the acting side of acting intuition. Neither the spatialization of time nor the temporalization of space, moreover, may ever be erased by one another and are not to be sublated in a third affirmative term. Without mentioning Heraclitus, this is what Löwith expressed when trying to sum up Nishida’s historical thinking in the following comment from 1943: “The whole movement of history is like the motionless movement of a waterfall, which has the clear-cut shape of a ribbon and yet is totally shapeless, changing at every moment and yet always the same.”^{Footnote 78} It was precisely this description of history, understood in terms of Nature’s temporality, that Löwith was then to recognize in what Goethe described as history and what Löwith followed in attacking Hegel in Meaning in History. It thus seems that Nishida’s thinking, and Japanese philosophy as a whole, acted upon him in his later philosophy.^{Footnote 79} It is necessary to recognize this in order to say that Löwith and Nishida share common ground in what we could call a Heraclitean contradictory understanding of time and space. Heraclitus appears here to be a philosopher who bears true interculturality. But we must note that Nishida and Löwith came to this same ground in seemingly reverse paths. In first putting much emphasis on history, Löwith was unable to depart completely from the positivity of the philosophies of history and thus ultimately resorted to Goethe and the Heraclitean standpoint to better point to the historical reasons of European nihilism that he perceived as something going ‘towards nothingnessʼ—that is moving from the ruining of the linear and rationally determined understanding of time towards the eternal return of the same.^{Footnote 80} Conversely, in putting so much emphasis on the nothingness of consciousness, Nishida realized that he had forgotten the real and incarnated world and thereby came to his philosophy of history as a self-contradiction through Heraclitus’ logos, something as moving ‘from nothingnessʼ—that is moving from the pure duration of consciousness towards the nothingness of the world itself. This Heraclitean understanding of time and space is thus the expression of nothingness for both thinkers, but it expresses, for Löwith, the natural counterpart of the European nihilistic rationalization of time, and, for Nishida, the contradictory form of the formless.

It is only from this Heraclitean understanding of time that Löwith can criticize the false hopefulness that philosophies of history imposed on the world through some kind of secularized theodicy. It is of course a problem to compare Löwith and Nishida on that matter since Nishida still holds that a culture is a realization of a Platonic Idea or, stated bluntly, a realization of God.^{Footnote 81} But the God Nishida speaks of is not a Christian one: “It is discovered in the direction, not of the objectively transcendent, but of what I have called the immanently transcendent.”^{Footnote 82} This entails that the absolute cannot be understood in a dualistic manner with the created since the created, the individual, creates the absolute in a self-contradictory manner. The absolute is always already there as the historical world, while the world, in turn, is being created by poesis in the eternal present, as the absolute is always in a self-negating position to itself. In other words, God is not more or less nothingness in the forms of his formlessness; God, in this self-contradictory, non-substantial metaphysics, is nothingness and Being, and, at the same time, is neither nothingness nor Being. This means that there cannot be here any traces of a progressive Christian salvation applied to world events of the kind that Löwith tried to track down in philosophies of history: good and evil are only relative to this nothingness^{Footnote 83} and what we find to be good is only from our own individualistic positions, just as Hegel, according to Nietzsche,^{Footnote 84} forgot to separate his own Berliner existence from the end of the universal process of history. Nishida writes: “God as the true absolute must be Satan too. Only then can God be said to be truly omniscient and omnipotent.”^{Footnote 85} Good and evil are never to be sublated,^{Footnote 86} meaning that the individual’s activity never prepares the way for a greater good to be savoured by the next generation. “The ultimate victory of moral good over moral evil would involve the negation of morality itself,”^{Footnote 87} and the negation of morality would involve the negation of the historical world as a world of the self-contradictory realization of Platonic Ideas. Therefore, Nishida’s “theology of the absolute present is neither theistic nor deistic—a theology neither of mere spirit nor of mere nature. It is the theology of the existential matrix of history itself.”^{Footnote 88} This matrix of history can be seen in Löwith’s respect for physis since Nature does not seem to exist without human activity, but human activity has no precedence over Nature; human activity only insures the eternal return of the present without ascribing to Nature a direction towards salvation.

This is because history, for Nishida, and thought out of the eternal present of the creative process of the individual, is emptied of archè and telos: Nishida’s non-substantial metaphysics “replaces the hegemony of one center with the democracy of an infinity of centers. … In the end, a non-substantial a/theology that locates history in the present ruptures the assumed linearity of history which deceives us into believing in an archè and which promises us a telos.”^{Footnote 89} It is uncertain whether we can say of Löwith’s view of history that it is non-substantial, as physis seems to be a persisting metaphysical entity, but Löwith surely shares with Nishida this insistence on the present that reveals an infinity of possibility, an “infinity of centers” that fuels the existence of the now, and that prevents any eschatological thinking outside of this eternal present, because the world only moves from present to present—it moves and does not move. For Löwith, ‘historiesʼ are those centres that insure the everlasting present: “The world is too wide, and life is too rich to be compartmentalized into a ‘beforeʼ and ‘afterʼ anything. Only history knows such turning points, but all histories survive beyond them, and the only thing that remains constant is that which knows neither a before nor after, because it is always like this, as it has been and will be in the future.”^{Footnote 90} Histories, as kairoi, are turning points, or events, of history that carry the present to the present, in this cyclic returning of the now, insuring the eternal presence of physis as a self-evident cosmos: “only at those moments in which eternity appears as the truth of being are we able to prove the temporal schema of progress and decline to be a historical illusion.”^{Footnote 91} Nishida, in a text Löwith never read, said that a true philosopher must be a prophet and that “it is said that the word prophet may originally have had the sense of ‘one who speaksʼ rather than one who predicts the future. … The philosopher must be one who speaks the mission of history.”^{Footnote 92} This mission of history is nothing more than the continuity of the discontinuity of the present world in its self-contradictory identity realized through acting intuition, which is already given in a general form in the Heraclitean logos. This metaphysical standpoint explains why we can be interested in history but also why it is impossible to be optimistic about it and to ascribe a definite meaning to it, as some philosophies of history have tried to do, since there is never anything more than this self-contradictory creative process situated in the present. There is thus no coincidence that the ‘weeping philosopherʼ^{Footnote 93} would offer a correct rendering of the historical world since “What is creative is what is self-contradictory. This is why pessimistic philosophers think of life as suffering.”^{Footnote 94} Philosophies of history have tried to erase this suffering by giving humanity a false sense of hopefulness that history could carry an eschatological meaning through a secularized theodicy; instead, Nishida and Löwith would agree that such philosophers of history are “fabricators of falsehoods”^{Footnote 95} whom Dikè would necessarily catch up with, meaning that they would not resist their own burning and passing for the sake of the eternal present.