On an eastward trajectory toward europe: Karl löwith's exiles

In his inaugural speech at the Academy of the Sciences in Heidelberg in 1959, where, thanks to his friend Hans-Georg Gadamer, he had returned in 1952 after eighteen years of exile in Italy, Japan, and then the United States (a speech that has been republished in a revised form under the title "Curriculum Vitae (1959)" in My Life in Germany Before and After 1933) Karl Löwith recalls how in 1919, after some deliberation on whether to study biology or philosophy, he finally decided for the latter, and subsequently enrolled in Freiburg in Husserl's seminars. In the beginning Lö- with enjoyed Husserl's strict phenomenological thought, but only until he began to attend the seminars offered by Heidegger, "who [as he states] lured us away from Husserl's nai{dotless}̈ve faith in a conclusive philosophical method."1 Apart from his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche under the guidance of Martin Heidegger, Löwith habilitated himself in Marburg in 1928 (where he had followed his teacher) with a thesis on The Individual the Role of Fellow Human Being (Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen). Although at the time Löwith characterized his own starting point as anthropological - in other words, in clear distinction from the ontologism of Heidegger's analytic of Dasein - the problematic of this work still unfolds within a conception of world predicated primarily on the human being and its relations to objects, and other human beings. Löwith writes.