The relationship between being and nothingness has always constituted one of the classical problems of philosophy. In this contribution we intend to examine how Karl Löwith reconstructed this question in relation, on the one hand, to his analysis of the process of secularization, and, on the other, to the cosmological question, generally recognized as the pars construens of his philosophy. Following the thread of angst and wonder, attitudes representative, respectively, of the Christian-modern and classical conceptions of the relationship between man and the world, we will illustrate Löwith’s critique of existentialism – which he considered the general paradigm for understanding the whole of modernity – and of the theological roots of modern metaphysics.
In this way we will try to retrace the fundamental stages of the line leading from Thomist creationism to Heideggerian existentialism, using this historicaltheoretical contextualization to grasp in all its radicality and actuality Löwithian cosmological naturalism.