ABSTRACT
Löwith’s engagement with Søren Kierkegaard developed from the rich personal passion of a young philosophy student to a sustained historical and philosophical confrontation that would span Löwith’s entire career. He wrote numerous essays on Kierkegaard, devoted book chapters to him, and read and reviewed Kierkegaard literature with an eagerness and intensity scarcely matched among twentieth-century philosophers. To considerable controversy, Löwith maintained that Kierkegaard’s proper place in was not within the history of Christian thought, but alongside G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Karl Marx (18181883). He saw in Kierkegaard a wealth of discoveries that would require decades of phenomenological analysis to unpack, including a cogent and nearly prophetic diagnosis of problems only later made familiar with the terms “nihilism” and “capitalism,” and helped to make Kierkegaard part of a wide range of conversations on the problem of modernity.
