Löwith's view of the origins and development of contemporary thought is determined by the conviction that Hegel's philosophy constituted a genuine culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition; with Hegel, he says, "the destiny of pure philosophy itself was decided." After Hegel, philosophy could no longer exist as pure spiritual conceptualizing but only as "philosophical historical anthropology," i.e., as an investigation of the "here and now of actual human life." Thus Hegel's death inaugurated "our own true "intellectual' history" since the common point of departure of most of the post-Hegelian thinkers, and the "young" or "left" Hegelians in particular, was "no longer a pure "consciousness' or a pure "reason' or an absolute "spirit,' but rather man as such in his naked existence." ¹