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Sketching Conceptual History’s ‘Janus Face’: Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith

While a student at Heidelberg University between 1947 and 1948, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) sketched a curious self-portrait. Drawn as part of his archaeology course, Koselleck sketched himself lying vertically, head down and feet up, under the surface of the earth, shovelling through layers of sediment in pursuit of artefacts with which to document a human past.1 A talented caricaturist, Koselleck’s self-portrait is not alone in his collection. Alongside this sit sketches of his teachers: a fringe coterie of philosophers, including Karl Löwith (1897–1973), who left an indelible imprint on Koselleck’s intellectual world as a student.

Self-portrait by Reinhardt Koselleck.
Reinhart Koselleck, Self-Portrait as an Archaeologist, reproduced from Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983), 4 . Reinhart Koselleck, Ende einer Moritat bei Professor Wahle, Selbstdarstellung als Frühhistoriker, 1947, 27.5 x 40.5 cm, ©Erbengemeinschaft Reinhart Koselleck.

Peculiarly, when interviewed by Christof Dipper in 1998, Koselleck cited his theoretical commitment to a panoply of figures at Heidelberg, including Otto Brunner and Carl Schmitt, but made no mention of Löwith.2 Nonetheless, the intellectual lineage is self-evident; their pedagogical relationship clear. As a student, Koselleck co-translated portions of Meaning in History; he wrote the foreword to Löwith’s autobiography; and in 1967, he published ‘Historia Magistra Vitae’, the draft for his lexicographical article ‘Geschichte/Historie’, in a Festschrift for Löwith.3 Critical scholarship on the Koselleck–Löwith connection has thus far placed a thematic focus on the premise of a secularized eschatology and a historiographical focus on Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise (1954).4 This blog post will demonstrate, however, that Löwith’s influence on Koselleck is not limited to Kritik und Krise , nor indeed the premise of a secularized eschatology, but rather underpins Koselleck’s principles of Begriffsgeschichte (‘conceptual history’), as formulated within the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (‘Basic Historical Concepts’).  

Koselleck’s Sattelzeit and Karl Löwith

The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, posited by Koselleck as the ‘methodological minimum requirement’ for conceptual history, was edited by the triumvirate of Koselleck, Otto Brunner, and Werner Conze, and published in seven volumes between 1972 and 1997.5 The lexicon became paradigmatic of Koselleckian conceptual history, geared towards the examination of a specifically modern self-reflection of language, revealing Koselleck’s simultaneous act of composing a history of concepts and a bona fide conceptualized history through his formulation of the Sattelzeit (‘saddle-time’).6 Hypothesizing that changing uses of words could be conceptualized as condensed linguistic responses to specific historical challenges, Koselleck qualitatively isolated the period 1750–1850 as the Sattelzeit, conjecturing a profound change in the meaning of classical topoi since the mid eighteenth–century.7 Koselleck’s Sattelzeit  unmistakably dialled into Löwith’s temporalization of history, by which Löwith postulated the prognostic structure of historical time. According to Koselleck, the history of a concept (Grundbegriff) consists in diachronic, selective analyses forming a linear narrative, while accounting for moments of synchronic change—‘innovative nodal points’ of concept formation, in which modern meanings establish themselves and older meanings fade, becoming incomprehensible.8 Within such moments lie ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’, where every prognosis implies a diagnostic correlation between past and future but also anticipates events in advance. Thus the terms retain their ‘Janus face’. Looking backwards, they refer to social and political facts that cannot be understood without critical commentary; looking forwards, they have acquired meanings that no longer require translation, such that ‘conceptuality and comprehensibility have since coincided’.9 Koselleck’s conceptualization of the Sattelzeit in this vein appeared in his German translation of Löwith’s Meaning in History, where Koselleck likened modernity’s roots in Christian teleology (‘enfernter Herr’) to the dependence of ‘a runaway slave on his distant master’.10) By way of metaphor, Koselleck gestured in Löwith’s Meaning in History to the indissoluble ties between two portraits of a temporalized history: that which is teleological, deterministic, and that which is resolutely contingency-conscious.

In Meaning in History (1949), Löwith demonstrated that conceptualizations of historicity from the late eighteenth-century onward might be understood as resulting from the afterlife of defunct Judeo-Christian eschatologies in modernity. Although sublimated from religious meaning, Löwith posited that theological notions of finite temporality persisted in providing an implicit domain of meaning that tacitly informed modern historical consciousness. A vitalistic derivation of the Judeo-Christian religious orientation was thereby a prognostic concern with the future as the focus of history. While the premise of a secularized eschatology undoubtedly courses through Koselleck’s lexicon, Löwith’s means of temporalizing history lies at the taproot of Koselleck’s conceptual history in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. This blog will centre around Koselleck’s lexicographical contributions: including the programmatic introduction and the ‘Geschichte/Historie’ (‘History’) article, neither of which have been translated into English.11

Reinhart Koselleck, Portrait of Karl Löwith, reproduced from Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983), 63. Reinhart Koselleck, Karl Löwith, n.d., 15 x 21 cm, ©Erbengemeinschaft Reinhart Koselleck.

History in the Collective Singular

In an essay written at the Dresden Academy, Karl August Böttiger (1760–1835) describes how, in 1784, Frederick II of Prussia invited Johann Erich Biester (1749–1816) to speak. When Biester said that he had studied history (‘Geschichte’), ‘the king was taken aback and asked whether this meant the same as history (‘Historie’), because he was not familiar with the German word’.12 This anecdote appears in Koselleck’s ‘Geschichte/Historie’ article, as he reflects upon Frederick’s reaction in that ‘he will have known the word, but not the reflexive meaning contained in the new collective singular’.12 Within Koselleck’s schema, the onset of the eighteenth-century Sattelzeit marks the emergence of ‘history in the collective singular’: the concatenation of all particular histories into a single universal history, no longer an aggregate of paratactically related, individual histories—or ‘histories-in-multitude’. Löwith’s habilitation thesis (1928) formed the springboard from which Koselleck developed a conception of human existence extrapolated through tensions between plural and singular concepts of history.13 Löwith’s argument revolved around the purported trajectory of particular, contingent ideas across European history, broaching conceptual problems in that it concerned the semantic understanding of ‘history’ and ‘historicity’ tout court.14 This premise surfaces through Koselleck’s simultaneous thematizing and theorizing of a mode of historiography—history as a composition of pluralistic, co-existent, and non-converging histories—juxtaposed against his writing of meta-narratives shaped by emplotment, grounded in a generalizing interpretation of a single subject matter.15 As is the case with Koselleck’s historical epistemology, it was built up through tight interconnection with the development of Western historical writing. Reflecting upon Christoph Cellarius’ three-volume Historia Universalis (1685–1702), Koselleck contends that, since their emergence, the Holy Scriptures were excluded from probata testimonia  (proven attestations) due to doubtful transmission, such that Cellarius could be regarded as the first to use historia nova as a periodic term organizing a universal history. This history amounted to a near-substitution of the sequence of world events for the division of time into the tripartite periodization of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity as a historiographical organizing principle.16 Simultaneously, historia sacra received piecemeal integration into the sequence of general world history, thus bringing ‘the Göttingen School’ of historiography to conceptually ‘turn historia ecclesiastica into a history of ecclesiastical societies’.17 The subsequent coinage of die Geschichte, replacing historia/die Historie, was, Koselleck added, linked to the discovery of a distinctively historical world, involving a temporalization of history coupled with the denaturalization of historical time.18

Tracking the development of the historia universalis across the course of the eighteenth century, Koselleck regards August Ludwig von Schlözer’s concern in Universal-Historie (1772/3) as hingeing on ‘a synchronistic arrangement of world history, according to the ages’, through which history became a term encompassing all history that existed in its historicity—or, the collective singular par excellence.19 Alongside Johann Christoph Gatterer’s Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie (1771), the ‘progressive interpretation of historical time’ as constitutive in modern conceptions of history was demonstrated through Koselleck’s recourse to the increasingly historical-philosophical discourse of the late eighteenth century, including Novalis’ epithet in Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799) that ‘progressive, ever-increasing evolutions are the stuff of history’.20 In tandem with the Löwithian ‘progress versus providence’ precept, Koselleck’s schema of temporal processes including ‘progression’ and ‘acceleration’, formative in the self-perception of modern societies, were systematized and integrated into a consistent whole.21 Koselleck’s assumption, developed through a Löwithian inheritance, that since the eighteenth century, the acceleration of endogenous change had led to a change in collective experiences of time and history, has since become foundational to historical social theory.22

The methodological deficits in Koselleck’s hypothesis of history in the collective singular have been more or less exhausted.23 Although Koselleck’s hypothesis within the lexicon might be empirically compromised, it is not epistemologically compromised. It proves fundamental to Koselleck’s temporalization of history in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, and to the linkages with Löwith. This can be extrapolated through consideration of Koselleck’s treatment of Johann Martin Chladenius’ Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft (1752).24 Chladenius’ historical epistemology was based on the Sehepunkt (point of view) from which the past is observed and systematized by the historian. Koselleck details how, for Chladenius, just as the same city observed from different angles appears different and multiplied in perspective, so the endless multiplicity of simple substances represents the perspectives on one universe according to the different viewpoints of each monad.25 In light of the perspectivism of the Sehepunkt, what emerges is the degree to which Chladenius’ theoretical matrix presupposes Koselleck’s premise of history-in-the-singular. Koselleck emphasizes that by ‘operationalizing’ the metaphor of the point of view, Chladenius integrated history-in-the-singular with the premise of a multiplicity of perspectives.26 For Koselleck, Chladenius’ Geschichtswissenschaft represented a general theory of the cognition (‘science’) of actual processes (‘histories’), thus tailing an older debate in which historia, based on the presentational potential associated with the Greek sense of the word, developed into a leading category of early modern epistemology and scientific systematics.27 As Chladenius ‘uncovered a time peculiar only to history’, this enabled ‘the temporal perspective to acquire methodological status’.28 While the hypothesis of the multiplicity of perspectives that form the sum of the whole is deployed differently by Koselleck and Löwith, in the abstract it is central to the historical thinking of both, as Löwith’s colleague Hans-Georg Gadamer had affirmed: ‘the method of perspectives’ emerges in Löwith’s corpus through his ‘consideration of the individual as the sum total of his perspectives’.29

A Perspective Grounded in Man

Koselleck’s belief in not only the temporal, but also the epistemological, openness of history parallels Karl Löwith’s.30 Koselleck posited that each Grundbegriff—a term for foundational historical concepts held as a ‘concentrate’ of multiple word meanings across processes of socio-political change—contains ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’, with diachronic and synchronic linguistics thus ‘interwoven in conceptual history’.31 Nonetheless, however, he deemed that the conditions contained therein might never exist side by side, simultaneously.32 Through this mutual exclusion, tensions of time arise, ‘in whose diachronic solution all units of action must engage’.33 Koselleck’s assertion exposes his belief in history’s temporal and epistemological openness. Like Karl Löwith, he sought a perspective grounded in the nature of man, where the new concept of history assigned to Geschichte unified dimensions of time with an open present reserved for human action. In his foreword to Löwith’s memoir, Koselleck noted the connection between the anthropological orientation of Löwith’s philosophy and his biography. Koselleck’s admiration of Löwith, noting that when faced with exile, ‘he does not utter a word of fear’, reflects a recognition of Löwith’s endurance of the vicissitudes of history.34 As Zachary Riebeling contends, Löwith’s insistence on the continuity of historical consciousness despite the multiple calamities of the twentieth century could be read as ‘the embodied practice of a cosmic view of history’, despite its twists and turns.35 Koselleck’s theory of history, critically, drew from the anthropological orientation he learned from Löwith. The lexicon drew its methodological critique from the caesura with Koselleck’s referents, practitioners of Geistesgeschichte (Dilthey) and Ideengeschichte (Meinecke and his school). Yet in a strange volte face, Wilhelm Dilthey, characterized as a conceptual antipode to Koselleck’s approach, shares an evinced intellectual genealogy with Koselleck through Löwith. Following Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), Lowith’s perception of the individual encountering ‘others’ entailed the a priori, constitutive elements of a primordial ‘togetherness’, termed the Mitwelt.36 Accordingly, essential to the Mitwelt are Mitmenschen, ‘fellow men’, who reveal themselves as beings mutually determined by their relationship to one another.36 In this vein, Koselleck regarded plurality—Löwith’s ‘being-with-one-another’ (Miteinandersein)—and the potential conflict between humans as essential to the conditions of possible histories.37

By sketching an image of Begriffsgeschichte as Janus-faced, simultaneously forward and backward-looking in the Sattelzeit, Koselleck opened up the space for a presentation of history as fragmentary, regarding the examination of the conditions of possible histories as the search for transcendental conditions. Koselleck’s means of temporalizing history—drawn through reference not only to the prognostic structure of historical time but also to history in the collective singular, and to history’s anthropological orientation—can be retraced to his teacher at Heidelberg University, Karl Löwith. Koselleck continuously sketched his encounters with the discursive fields of conceptual and historical language he entered. Just as Koselleck finely traced a portrait of Karl Löwith, with the outline of his face surfacing through the sediment of previous drawings, so is the layered, protean character of Koselleck’s early conceptual framework inherent to the Begriffsgeschichte he would hone later in his career.


Featured image: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972–97). Photo courtesy of the GHIL.

  1. Some of Koselleck’s drawings have been published in Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983). The drawings depict, among other things, teachers and friends from Heidelberg University, and scenes and impressions from German and international politics from 1947 until 1980. []
  2. Christof Dipper, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Christof Dipper’, Neue Politische Literatur, 43 (1998), 187–205, at 187. []
  3. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte’, in Hermann Braun and Manfred Riedel (eds.), Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1967), 196–219. []
  4. See for instance Hans Joas, ‘Die Kontingenz der Säkularisierung: Überlegungen zum Problem der Säkularisierung im Werk Reinhart Kosellecks’, in Hans Joas and Peter Vogt, Begriffene Geschichte: Beiträge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks (Berlin, 2011), 319–39. []
  5. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte’, in Peter Christian Ludz (ed.), Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte: Aspekte und Probleme (Cologne, 1973), 116–31, at 120. All translations are my own. []
  6. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7 vols. (Stuttgart, 1975), i. p. xxiii. Koselleck has retrospectively stated that the Sattelzeit premise was a ‘Schlagwort’ (catchword) coined to raise funds for the lexicon project, which fortuitously transpired to be useful in its own right as a term for describing the structural-historical and linguistic changes that occurred between 1750 and 1850. See Dipper, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte’. []
  7. Kathrin Kollmeier, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Historische Semantik’, in ZZF Potsdam (ed.), Docupedia-Zeitgschichte (Potsdam, 2011), 4–5. []
  8. Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p. vi. []
  9. Ibid. p. xv. []
  10. Karl Löwith,Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart, 1953), 82. The quotation is as follows: Das ganze moderne Mühen um immer neue Verbesserungen und Fortschritte wurzelt in dem einen christlichen Fortschritt zum Reiche Gottes, von dem das moderne Bewußtsein sich emanzipiert hat und von dem es doch abhängig blieb, wie ein entlaufener Sklave von seinem entfernten Herrn’. (Translation: ‘The whole modern effort for ever new improvements and progress is rooted in the one Christian progress towards the Kingdom of God, from which the modern consciousness has emancipated itself and on which it has nevertheless remained dependent, like a runaway slave from his distant master’. []
  11. The Koselleck-Löwith connection has attracted less attention from historians than Koselleck’s relationship with his other teachers, including Gadamer and Schmitt. While the historian Hans Joas has focused on the relationship between Koselleck and Löwith, this has been through examination of the secularization precept and its articulation in Kritik und Krise, with a narrower focus on Koselleck’s article of the same name in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe []
  12. Koselleck, ‘Geschichte/Historie’, in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ii. 657. [] []
  13. Niklas Olsen, ‘Reinhart Koselleck, Karl Löwith und der Geschichtsbegriff’, in Carsten Dutt and Reinhard Laube (eds.), Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte: Zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks (Göttingen, 2013), 236–54, at 242. []
  14. Henning Trüper, ‘Löwith, Löwith’s Heidegger, and the Unity of History’, History and Theory, 53/1 (2014), 45–68. []
  15. Olsen, ‘Reinhart Koselleck, Karl Löwith und der Geschichtsbegriff’, 250. []
  16. Koselleck, ‘Geschichte/Historie’, 678. []
  17. Ibid. 683. []
  18. Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae’, 207. []
  19. Ibid. 688. []
  20. Koselleck, ‘Fortschritt’, in Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ii. 371. []
  21. Karl Löwith, ‘Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie (1949/1953)’, in Karl Löwith, Sämtliche Schriften, 9 vols. (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2022), ii. 240–79. []
  22. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), ii. 997–1016; and Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte und Historische Soziologie’, in Jürgen Osterhammel, Dieter Langewiesche, and Paul Nolte, Wege der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Göttingen, 2006), 81–102, at 94. []
  23. Jan Marco Sawilla is one of the staunchest proponents of this view. Jan Marco Sawilla, ‘Geschichte und Geschichten zwischen Providenz und Machbarkeit: Überlegungen zu Reinhart Kosellecks Semantik historischer Zeiten’, in Joas and Vogt (eds.), Begriffene Geschichte, 387–422. []
  24. Koselleck, ‘Geschichte/Historie’, 647–58. []
  25. Ibid. 696–8. []
  26. Frank Ankersmith, ‘Koselleck on “Histories” Versus “History”’, History and Theory, 60/4 (2021), 36–58, at 50. []
  27. See Sawilla, ‘Geschichte und Geschichten zwischen Providenz und Machbarkeit’. []
  28. Koselleck, ‘Geschichte/Historie’, 698. []
  29. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Karl Löwith’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan(Cambridge, MA, 1985), 172. []
  30. See Karl Löwith, ‘Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Trologie’ (1930), in Karl Löwith, Aufsätze und Vorträge 1930–1970 (Stuttgart, 1971), 9–40. []
  31. Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p.xxii and p.xxi. []
  32. Helge Jordheim, ‘“Unzählbar viele Zeiten”: Die Sattelzeit im Spiegel der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’, in Joas and Vogt (eds.), Begriffene Geschichte, 449–80, at 473. []
  33. Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p. xvi. []
  34. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Vorwort’, in Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart, 2007), pp. ix-xiv, here p. xii. []
  35. Zachary Riebeling, ‘Trauma Delegitimized: Karl Löwith and the Cosmic View of History’, History and Theory , 60/1 (2021), 23–49, at 43. []
  36. Berthold Riesterer, Karl Löwith’s View of History: A Critical Appraisal of Historicism (The Hague, 1970), 16. [] []
  37. Stefan‐Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience’, History and Theory , 49/2 (2010), 222. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sophie Schmittzehe (February 3, 2025). Sketching Conceptual History’s ‘Janus Face’: Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved February 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1384n


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Sophie Schmittzehe

Sophie Schmittzehe studied History (BA) at Cambridge University (Sidney Sussex College), focusing on the intersection between conceptual history and visual culture. During her undergraduate degree, she also worked as a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University. Sophie has since completed a postgraduate degree in Intellectual History (MSt) at Oxford University (Jesus College).

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