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Occidental Eschatology
Occidental Eschatology , originally Jacob Taubes's doctoral thesis and the one book he published in his lifetime, seeks to renegotiate the historical synthesis and spiritual legacy of the West through the study of apocalypticism. Covering the origins of apocalypticism from Hebrew prophecy through antiquity and early Christianity to its medieval revival in Joachim of Fiore, Taubes reveals its later secularized forms in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. His aim is to show the lasting influence of revolutionary, messianic teleology on Western philosophy, history, and politics. Combining painstaking scholarship with an unmatched scope of reference, Taubes takes a comprehensive approach to the twin focuses of political theology and philosophy of history. He argues that acceptance of the idea that time will one day come to an end has profound implications for political thought. If natural time is experienced as an eternal cycle of events, "history" is the realm of time in which human actions can make decisions to alter the progression of events. This philosophy asks that individuals take responsibility for their own actions and resist authority that claims to act on their behalf. Whereas universal history is written by the victors, the messianic or apocalyptic event enters history and gives a voice to the oppressed.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
Jacob Taubes
17 books22 followersJacob Taubes (25 February 1923 – 21 March 1987) was a sociologist of religion, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism.
Taubes was born into an old rabbinical family. He was married to the writer Susan Taubes. He obtained his doctorate in 1947 for a thesis on "Occidental Eschatology" and initially taught religious studies and Jewish studies in the United States at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton University.
From 1965 he was professor of Jewish studies and hermeneutics at the Free University of Berlin. He has influenced many contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Susan Sontag, Avital Ronell, Marshall Berman, Babette Babich, Alaida and Jan Assman, Amos Funkenstein and Peter Sloterdijk.
Taubes was born into an old rabbinical family. He was married to the writer Susan Taubes. He obtained his doctorate in 1947 for a thesis on "Occidental Eschatology" and initially taught religious studies and Jewish studies in the United States at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton University.
From 1965 he was professor of Jewish studies and hermeneutics at the Free University of Berlin. He has influenced many contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Susan Sontag, Avital Ronell, Marshall Berman, Babette Babich, Alaida and Jan Assman, Amos Funkenstein and Peter Sloterdijk.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 3, 2024
This is a unique work by a singular genius - literally unique, in the sense that Jacob Taubes wrote no second book in the next forty years of his very active intellectual life. It is also unique in the sense that it clearly embodies the core of his thought, and, judging from articles and interviews that came decades later, that core would remain consistent for the rest of his life. I think it is likely that he wrote no second book because he put everything into this one.
Like the author, the book is difficult to classify. I would probably settle for calling it something like an existential analysis of eschatology from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, focusing on the temporal structure of historical consciousness as it relates to the anticipation of an end of time.
Taubes is famous for his untranslatable slogan (from a later interview) "Zeit heißt Frist," which you might render as "Time is limiting" or "delimiting." The core insight here is that the Occidental conception of time, and especially of historical time, is necessarily based on an eschatological structure, in which history stretches between a beginning and an end, and our actions have meaning or value only as conceived of within those terms. What we do, matters, because time is finite; time is limited. And, the structure of time as a limited span terminating in a final judgment is the underlying structure for our consciousness of time as a sphere in which we are indebted (verschuldet) to one another.
In Taubes's view, this structure holds true for European consciousness whether or not individuals are religious or believe in a literal or figurative end of time; either way, it is the implicit basis for core beliefs, such as the belief that we do not have infinite time to get things right.
The opening chapter of this book is a kind of free-from essay on the structure of eschatological consciousness that shows the influence of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Like those two authors, who deeply impressed the young author, Taubes is interested in understanding the structure of history and the larger meaning of its various moments.
The remainder of the book comprises a historical analysis of eschatology as it develops in European culture. He traces its evolution through watershed authors and works, including the prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible and the letters of Paul, the extracanonical gnostic apocalyptic literature of the late classical period, the works of Joachim of Fiore, and then on to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Even at its most conventional, the book is unusual for an academic work - you might think of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment as an adjacent points of reference, though the through line of Taubes's thought is easier to track.
Taubes was born into a family of rabbis, which moved from Austria to Zürich during World War II, where Taubes was himself ordained as a rabbi in 1943. This book was published as his dissertation in 1947 for his doctorate in philosophy. He traveled throughout western Europe and the United States and settled in Berlin, where he would remain, teaching at the Freie Univerität until his death in 1987. His outsized impact as a public intellectual threatens to dwarf his intellectual achievements - he knew and worked with several major figures, including Carl Schmitt, Gershom Scholem, and Jürgen habermas, with whom he long served as the editor of Suhrkamp's Theorie imprint.
Jacob Taubes was clearly a genius, which is not a word I use lightly or often. But it should be noted that books written by geniuses are variable in quality. On the whole, I would say that this one is extraordinary, extraordinarily profound, and at times breathtaking in the clarity of thought and expression by which he can draw ideas together and extract the essential sense of complex arguments or entire historical movements in a few short paragraphs. He was deeply learned and demonstrates a fluent mastery over a vast range of material.
Taubes possessed a unique and extraordinary intellect, and while this book has influences, it has no predecessor or successor.
Like the author, the book is difficult to classify. I would probably settle for calling it something like an existential analysis of eschatology from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, focusing on the temporal structure of historical consciousness as it relates to the anticipation of an end of time.
Taubes is famous for his untranslatable slogan (from a later interview) "Zeit heißt Frist," which you might render as "Time is limiting" or "delimiting." The core insight here is that the Occidental conception of time, and especially of historical time, is necessarily based on an eschatological structure, in which history stretches between a beginning and an end, and our actions have meaning or value only as conceived of within those terms. What we do, matters, because time is finite; time is limited. And, the structure of time as a limited span terminating in a final judgment is the underlying structure for our consciousness of time as a sphere in which we are indebted (verschuldet) to one another.
In Taubes's view, this structure holds true for European consciousness whether or not individuals are religious or believe in a literal or figurative end of time; either way, it is the implicit basis for core beliefs, such as the belief that we do not have infinite time to get things right.
The opening chapter of this book is a kind of free-from essay on the structure of eschatological consciousness that shows the influence of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Like those two authors, who deeply impressed the young author, Taubes is interested in understanding the structure of history and the larger meaning of its various moments.
The remainder of the book comprises a historical analysis of eschatology as it develops in European culture. He traces its evolution through watershed authors and works, including the prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible and the letters of Paul, the extracanonical gnostic apocalyptic literature of the late classical period, the works of Joachim of Fiore, and then on to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Even at its most conventional, the book is unusual for an academic work - you might think of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment as an adjacent points of reference, though the through line of Taubes's thought is easier to track.
Taubes was born into a family of rabbis, which moved from Austria to Zürich during World War II, where Taubes was himself ordained as a rabbi in 1943. This book was published as his dissertation in 1947 for his doctorate in philosophy. He traveled throughout western Europe and the United States and settled in Berlin, where he would remain, teaching at the Freie Univerität until his death in 1987. His outsized impact as a public intellectual threatens to dwarf his intellectual achievements - he knew and worked with several major figures, including Carl Schmitt, Gershom Scholem, and Jürgen habermas, with whom he long served as the editor of Suhrkamp's Theorie imprint.
Jacob Taubes was clearly a genius, which is not a word I use lightly or often. But it should be noted that books written by geniuses are variable in quality. On the whole, I would say that this one is extraordinary, extraordinarily profound, and at times breathtaking in the clarity of thought and expression by which he can draw ideas together and extract the essential sense of complex arguments or entire historical movements in a few short paragraphs. He was deeply learned and demonstrates a fluent mastery over a vast range of material.
Taubes possessed a unique and extraordinary intellect, and while this book has influences, it has no predecessor or successor.
March 30, 2023
Taubes' book Occidental Eschatology is a fascinating account of apocalyptic eschatology beginning with Israel and Second Temple Judaism up through Jesus and early Christianity, through to Joachim, Muntzer, and German Idealism (primarily: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx). This book is really quite difficult to summarize- or to even articulate what exactly the argument might be beyond a basic Schmittian thesis that the political is theological. There are a number of diffuse aphoristic arguments of this sort, say that there is a correspondence between the work of Hegel and Joachim and their views of history, or that Marx's proletariat is really the messianic community of apocalypticism. But it would be difficult to really call these aphoristic claims, "arguments," in any sort of detailed manner. Jerry Muller recently wrote a biography of Taubes (Professor of Apocalypse) in which he writes that it is hard to say if Taubes was "a scholar or a seer." In some ways Taybes' career/writing, and this book in particular, is more akin to esoteric knowledge or gnosis than a structured/scholarly argument in the traditional sense. A fascinating book but I have some real reservations with the whole political theology project and found this book in particular to display some of the problems with the discipline and its methodology (Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin, Bloch, Agamben, etc.).
July 12, 2021
Note that the name of this book is Occidental eschatology and not Christian eschatology. Jacob Taubes (25 February 1923 – 21 March 1987) was a Jewish scholar. The book is more about philosophy than about religion. The fourth section is about modern European philosophers like Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. Taube believes that Copernicus brought a big change in Europe.
“...the Copernican earth, over which no divine heaven any longer is spread. P.125”
He also believes Christian eschatology died in the enlightenment.
“Reimarus finally destroys the last remaining fragments of Christian, biblical eschatology when he uses textual criticism to turn the “miracle” of the resurrection into the disciples’ “ deception.” p.129”
“...the Copernican earth, over which no divine heaven any longer is spread. P.125”
He also believes Christian eschatology died in the enlightenment.
“Reimarus finally destroys the last remaining fragments of Christian, biblical eschatology when he uses textual criticism to turn the “miracle” of the resurrection into the disciples’ “ deception.” p.129”
May 14, 2025
A radical and leftist account of Christian eschatology from the 50's. Taubes should be read along figures such as Schmitt, Koselleck and Kojève. Very impressive.
December 13, 2025
Eschatology is the history of salvation type shit
June 16, 2025
Let me begin with a minor complaint - this book seems like it was extremely difficult to translate, and I was not convinced that the translator was up to the task. Eg. translating something which clearly meant “literature about the anti-Christ” as “anti-Christian” literature. It was commendable how much of the original German they added parenthetically when in doubt. This revealed their preference for translating key words in a variety of ways to show the range of their meaning, and understandable choice but not what I would have preferred, as it makes it that much harder to see the conceptual toolkit Taubes was trying to develop.
The first chapter was largely a conceptual exploration of the concepts of time/history/freedom/eschatology, which was interesting but too clearly influenced by its philosophical sources in Schelling/Heidegger/Berdyaev.
The second chapter centers around a Life of Jesus narrative which I found structurally interesting in the sources it relied upon and its developments compared to prior Christ-narratives, albeit frequently unconvincing in its details. Like Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he thinks that the life and message of Jesus was primarily eschatological. Unlike Schweitzer, he doesn't think that the Davidic Messiah and the apocalyptic Son of Man can be so cleanly separated. Like Troeltsch and contra Kautsky, he admits that Jesus does not appear to have been a primarily social revolutionary, but he tempers this with the fact that any enactment of the Kingdom of Heaven would surely be expected to implement the social demands of the prophets with regards to the treatment of the poor.
A surprising source here is Spengler's The Decline of the West, volume II, the chapters entitled “Problems of the Arabian Culture”. He uses Spengler's concept of the “pseudomorphosis” between Hellenic and Magian Culture (apparently also an inspiration for Hans Jonas' early work on Gnosis) to contextualize Hebrew apocalypticism and Christian gnosticism within a broader middle eastern cultural zone including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism and Mandaeism. This plays into both Taubes' explanation for John the Baptist's role in stirring up the Jewish rebellion against Rome in the 1st century AD as well as his understanding of the psychology of Jesus in terms of nomadic peoples. Both of these are intriguing and useful provocations, but not particularly convincing in the form Taubes gives them.
In general, I think Taubes is very good about not excising certain things like Gnosticism or Apocalypticism from the Christian tradition, not maligning them as heresies or Jewish holdovers alien to the Essence of Christianity as many Christian and German philosophers are wont to do. He does follow Spengler in locating these apocalyptics within a stereotypically “Oriental” cultural sphere, but doesn't seem to prefer the Hellenic sphere in the slightest and doesn't try to align Christianity with Hellenism. In fact, Plato and Aristotle are wholly absent from Taubes' book! I'd complain about the omission if it weren't such a useful overcorrection — it's pretty funny to write a book about “Occidental” eschatology that wholly ignores the stereotypical sources for Western culture, and I'm sure Taubes knew what he was doing. (I do think it ends up making it harder to see where Taubes' own eschatology comes from, though!)
In this chapter he also elaborates a model for the development of early Christianity in response to the constantly delayed Second Coming as a transition from an apocalyptic to a gnostic eschatology. This seemed like a useful framing, but doesn't deal well enough with the anti-gnostic polemics of the early Church Fathers or the merging of Christianity with the Roman Empire. He does discuss the latter, but it didn't make much of an impression on me, outside of noting that he relies on the work of the notorious Bruno Bauer to describe the people under Roman imperial rule as a heap of alienated individuals driven to seek a powerful leader to rule over them. (We can find the source of this image in Marx and Bauer's analyses of Napoleon.)
The third chapter explores the medieval apocalypticism of Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Münzer, productively comparing the latter's theology to Luther's. Taubes was clearly heavily indebted to Ernst Benz' Ecclesia Spiritualis for his information of Joachim and the Spiritual Franciscans and on Ernst Bloch's Thomas Münzer as a Theologian of the Revolution for that on Münzer. An odd pair of Ernsts - the former a Nazi, the latter a Communist. I wish these sources were translated into English, especially Benz', because the English language scholarship on Joachim seems to be dominated by the work of Marjorie Reeves, who seems to downplay the spiritual, anti-hierarchical vision of the Age of the Spirit that Joachim's spiritual descendants seem to have taken from him, which is precisely what Benz emphasizes.
I found Taubes' transition from the medieval period to the modern quite awkward. He relies on the work of Reisner to frame it entirely in terms of the Ptolemaic versus the Copernican models of the universe, with a smattering of comments about the alchemical & Rosicrucian influences on Leibniz. The emphasis on Copernicus fits well with Taubes' understanding of Kant's so-called “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, an understanding of Kant that became commonplace in the early 20th century, but I don't think Taubes' telling of Kant's revolution worked well either.
In the final chapter, Taubes discusses the philosophical eschatologies of the modern period. He's right to emphasize Lessing's “The Education of the Human Race”, and he's right to draw the connection between Origen's apokatastatis and Lessing's Leibnizian optimism. I don't think he appreciated the way that Lessing's idea of “progressive revelation” paves the way not only for the Christian philosophies of Kant and Hegel but also the post-Christian mysticism of the late Schelling and those who, like Heidegger, sought a new religion in the Germanic volk.
Taubes then gives an analysis of Kant and Hegel as parallel to the Old and the New Testaments, seeing Hegel's early theological writings as a sublation of law/duty by love. This seems largely right to me, and nicely captures some of Hegel's more romantic ways of understanding dialectical movement. However, it misses the way that Kant already thought of himself as overcoming the Old Testament in the move from externally imposed law to the freely self-imposed law of autonomous, rational individuals.
Finally, Taubes gives a very short exposition of a contrast between Kierkegaard and Marx that he takes as defining his present. The difference seems to be between a individualist leap into the ethos/religion of early Christianity versus a purely political and economic eschatology that wholly ignores the individual. This section didn't work for me, because I know both too little about Kierkegaard and too much about Marx to be happy with the over-reliance on Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. I also can't find a copy of the essay of Kierkegaards he relied upon, an “anticommunist manifesto” called “Das Eine, was nottut”.
The final paragraphs gestured back to Münzer as the last person who eschatology managed to overcome the divisions between individual/collective, political/religious. However, Taubes didn't seem to argue for a return to Münzer, but suggested that Occidental Eschatology might be fully played out, and that these reconciliations will be played out on new terms. In the End he makes the following prophecy:
“If, looking into the beauty of the night, man does not mistake it but sees the darkness for what it is; [...] When day dawns all measures will turn upside down. Man will then be brought home by God and will ex-ist [...] The veil enshrouding the world will lift, the mists will be dispersed, the arrogant measures of man will disintegrate, and those ordained by God will be revealed. The measure of God is the holy. [...] The holy is the terror that shakes the foundations of the world. The shock caused by the holy tears asunder the foundations of the world for salvation. It is the holy that passages judgment in the court of history. History exists only where it is separated from error, when truth is illuminated from mystery. History is elucidated from the mystery of error to the revelation of truth.”
Tell me now — what is the genealogy of this new eschatology?
The first chapter was largely a conceptual exploration of the concepts of time/history/freedom/eschatology, which was interesting but too clearly influenced by its philosophical sources in Schelling/Heidegger/Berdyaev.
The second chapter centers around a Life of Jesus narrative which I found structurally interesting in the sources it relied upon and its developments compared to prior Christ-narratives, albeit frequently unconvincing in its details. Like Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he thinks that the life and message of Jesus was primarily eschatological. Unlike Schweitzer, he doesn't think that the Davidic Messiah and the apocalyptic Son of Man can be so cleanly separated. Like Troeltsch and contra Kautsky, he admits that Jesus does not appear to have been a primarily social revolutionary, but he tempers this with the fact that any enactment of the Kingdom of Heaven would surely be expected to implement the social demands of the prophets with regards to the treatment of the poor.
A surprising source here is Spengler's The Decline of the West, volume II, the chapters entitled “Problems of the Arabian Culture”. He uses Spengler's concept of the “pseudomorphosis” between Hellenic and Magian Culture (apparently also an inspiration for Hans Jonas' early work on Gnosis) to contextualize Hebrew apocalypticism and Christian gnosticism within a broader middle eastern cultural zone including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism and Mandaeism. This plays into both Taubes' explanation for John the Baptist's role in stirring up the Jewish rebellion against Rome in the 1st century AD as well as his understanding of the psychology of Jesus in terms of nomadic peoples. Both of these are intriguing and useful provocations, but not particularly convincing in the form Taubes gives them.
In general, I think Taubes is very good about not excising certain things like Gnosticism or Apocalypticism from the Christian tradition, not maligning them as heresies or Jewish holdovers alien to the Essence of Christianity as many Christian and German philosophers are wont to do. He does follow Spengler in locating these apocalyptics within a stereotypically “Oriental” cultural sphere, but doesn't seem to prefer the Hellenic sphere in the slightest and doesn't try to align Christianity with Hellenism. In fact, Plato and Aristotle are wholly absent from Taubes' book! I'd complain about the omission if it weren't such a useful overcorrection — it's pretty funny to write a book about “Occidental” eschatology that wholly ignores the stereotypical sources for Western culture, and I'm sure Taubes knew what he was doing. (I do think it ends up making it harder to see where Taubes' own eschatology comes from, though!)
In this chapter he also elaborates a model for the development of early Christianity in response to the constantly delayed Second Coming as a transition from an apocalyptic to a gnostic eschatology. This seemed like a useful framing, but doesn't deal well enough with the anti-gnostic polemics of the early Church Fathers or the merging of Christianity with the Roman Empire. He does discuss the latter, but it didn't make much of an impression on me, outside of noting that he relies on the work of the notorious Bruno Bauer to describe the people under Roman imperial rule as a heap of alienated individuals driven to seek a powerful leader to rule over them. (We can find the source of this image in Marx and Bauer's analyses of Napoleon.)
The third chapter explores the medieval apocalypticism of Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Münzer, productively comparing the latter's theology to Luther's. Taubes was clearly heavily indebted to Ernst Benz' Ecclesia Spiritualis for his information of Joachim and the Spiritual Franciscans and on Ernst Bloch's Thomas Münzer as a Theologian of the Revolution for that on Münzer. An odd pair of Ernsts - the former a Nazi, the latter a Communist. I wish these sources were translated into English, especially Benz', because the English language scholarship on Joachim seems to be dominated by the work of Marjorie Reeves, who seems to downplay the spiritual, anti-hierarchical vision of the Age of the Spirit that Joachim's spiritual descendants seem to have taken from him, which is precisely what Benz emphasizes.
I found Taubes' transition from the medieval period to the modern quite awkward. He relies on the work of Reisner to frame it entirely in terms of the Ptolemaic versus the Copernican models of the universe, with a smattering of comments about the alchemical & Rosicrucian influences on Leibniz. The emphasis on Copernicus fits well with Taubes' understanding of Kant's so-called “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, an understanding of Kant that became commonplace in the early 20th century, but I don't think Taubes' telling of Kant's revolution worked well either.
In the final chapter, Taubes discusses the philosophical eschatologies of the modern period. He's right to emphasize Lessing's “The Education of the Human Race”, and he's right to draw the connection between Origen's apokatastatis and Lessing's Leibnizian optimism. I don't think he appreciated the way that Lessing's idea of “progressive revelation” paves the way not only for the Christian philosophies of Kant and Hegel but also the post-Christian mysticism of the late Schelling and those who, like Heidegger, sought a new religion in the Germanic volk.
Taubes then gives an analysis of Kant and Hegel as parallel to the Old and the New Testaments, seeing Hegel's early theological writings as a sublation of law/duty by love. This seems largely right to me, and nicely captures some of Hegel's more romantic ways of understanding dialectical movement. However, it misses the way that Kant already thought of himself as overcoming the Old Testament in the move from externally imposed law to the freely self-imposed law of autonomous, rational individuals.
Finally, Taubes gives a very short exposition of a contrast between Kierkegaard and Marx that he takes as defining his present. The difference seems to be between a individualist leap into the ethos/religion of early Christianity versus a purely political and economic eschatology that wholly ignores the individual. This section didn't work for me, because I know both too little about Kierkegaard and too much about Marx to be happy with the over-reliance on Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. I also can't find a copy of the essay of Kierkegaards he relied upon, an “anticommunist manifesto” called “Das Eine, was nottut”.
The final paragraphs gestured back to Münzer as the last person who eschatology managed to overcome the divisions between individual/collective, political/religious. However, Taubes didn't seem to argue for a return to Münzer, but suggested that Occidental Eschatology might be fully played out, and that these reconciliations will be played out on new terms. In the End he makes the following prophecy:
“If, looking into the beauty of the night, man does not mistake it but sees the darkness for what it is; [...] When day dawns all measures will turn upside down. Man will then be brought home by God and will ex-ist [...] The veil enshrouding the world will lift, the mists will be dispersed, the arrogant measures of man will disintegrate, and those ordained by God will be revealed. The measure of God is the holy. [...] The holy is the terror that shakes the foundations of the world. The shock caused by the holy tears asunder the foundations of the world for salvation. It is the holy that passages judgment in the court of history. History exists only where it is separated from error, when truth is illuminated from mystery. History is elucidated from the mystery of error to the revelation of truth.”
Tell me now — what is the genealogy of this new eschatology?
January 23, 2024
Esta obra es compleja de reseñar o condensar en pocas palabras. Taubes es uno de los pocos escritores que tiene una prosa que fluctua entre diferentes generos literarios: tratado filosofico,esoterico, hermeneutica, teología política, análisis historico y antropológico, del espirítu de las diferentes eras que reflejaron o desarrollaron un sentido escatologico de la historia.
Taubes elaboró un texto esotérico que podría definirse como el último texto genuinamemte escatológico.
La escatología es un fenomeno político que se expresa bajo la forma de una concepción sagrada de la historia. Ahora bien, el debate está en sí este legado judeo-cristiano, durante la modernidad se ha reflejado de forma positiva, como una carga o que se ha superado dejando tras de sí huellas en diferentes instituciones, movimientos/corrientes políticas y/o filosoficas.
Taubes al igual que su contraparte cristiana Karl Löwith, intenta responder como el escaton configura, empuja y moldea la historia, desde el Antiguo Israel hasta Marx y Kierkegaard.
Citando al prólogo del libro: " Para Taubes la única vía que tiene la política occidental es reconducirse enteramente sobre una apocalíptica cuya realización solo puede tener lugar en un mundo transformado desde abajo".
Para Taubes el análisis escatológico de la historia busca constantemente la sacralización de la historia política.
Recomiendo el libro para todo aquel interesado en el concepto de escatología y la influencia que ha tenido en el desarrollo de la historia, la politica, la religión, la filosofía y en general en el espiritu humano.
Taubes elaboró un texto esotérico que podría definirse como el último texto genuinamemte escatológico.
La escatología es un fenomeno político que se expresa bajo la forma de una concepción sagrada de la historia. Ahora bien, el debate está en sí este legado judeo-cristiano, durante la modernidad se ha reflejado de forma positiva, como una carga o que se ha superado dejando tras de sí huellas en diferentes instituciones, movimientos/corrientes políticas y/o filosoficas.
Taubes al igual que su contraparte cristiana Karl Löwith, intenta responder como el escaton configura, empuja y moldea la historia, desde el Antiguo Israel hasta Marx y Kierkegaard.
Citando al prólogo del libro: " Para Taubes la única vía que tiene la política occidental es reconducirse enteramente sobre una apocalíptica cuya realización solo puede tener lugar en un mundo transformado desde abajo".
Para Taubes el análisis escatológico de la historia busca constantemente la sacralización de la historia política.
Recomiendo el libro para todo aquel interesado en el concepto de escatología y la influencia que ha tenido en el desarrollo de la historia, la politica, la religión, la filosofía y en general en el espiritu humano.
February 16, 2023
Great book, but it had some weak aspects that kept me from giving it a 5. I'm aware that the correlative analysis of Kierkegaard and Marx originates in Löwith's thought, but I'm not really sold on the substantiality of this comparison. It also included some at least debatable stances on Hegel. That being said, the historiography is irreproachable.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews