History and Theory 54 (February 2015), 106-115 Wesleyan University 2015 ISSN: 0018-2656DOI: 10.1111/hith.10744

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Zukunft der Geschichte: Geschichtsphilosophie und Zukunftsethik. By Johannes Rohbeck (Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie, Sonderband 31). Ber-lin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Pp. 202.

ABSTRACT

Philosophy of history has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional, which have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship, and Rohbecks book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history.

The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between his-tory and the future, the second analyzes the relationship between history and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. With regard to the first part, historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Rohbeck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this time gap into the future. As to the second, Rohbeck replaces teleology by ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one-sided development. Ethics allows many more options. Finally, who is the agent for historical ethics? Rohbeck proposes the generation as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment.

At the end of his work, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future.

Of course, many questions follow this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) What synthesizes the three dimensions of time into one and the same history? (2) Did we not learn from historicism that values in ethics have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. (3) Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of generations in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history.

Keywords: philosophy of history, historical ethics, historicity, temporality, time, respon-sibility, metahistory

What is philosophy of history? It is an answer to the simple question: what is history about? In a more elaborated way, it is a way of thinking about the basic principles that constitute history as a concept of interpreting the past. This interpretation serves as a means of understanding the present and projecting the

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 107future of human life. Such thinking has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional.

Material philosophy of history refers to the past and conceptualizes its under-standing by an idea of humankind in a temporalized form. History is understood as a temporal totality encompassing the past, present, and future of humankind with its different and changing forms of life. This totality is called History (with a capital H, in German: die Geschichtea concept that fundamentally dif-fers from premodern forms of historical thinking).1

It emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century as an intellectual reaction to a twofold experience: an accelerating change of the human world, and a growing knowledge about the diversity of forms of human life in space and time. Both experiences demanded a new framework for understanding human life, for orienting practical life in temporal change, and for organizing new knowledge of the variety of forms of human life. The discussion about this new framework of historical thinking has included a broad spectrum of Western intelligentsia for decades. In Germany, for instance, philosophers like Kant and Hegel, writers like Friedrich Schiller, historians like Schlzer, Gatterer, and Iselin, and theologians like Herder gave it a multifaceted profile. With the emergence of historical studies as an academic discipline, it lost its cognitive fascination. It never vanished, but it remained an issue in historical thinking alongside the discipline of history. Marxism is the most important example of material philosophy of history in later times.

With the emergence of the social sciences, philosophy of history took a new place in academia. Here it took the form of a theory of social or cultural evolu-tion. Karl Jasperss attempt to answer the challenge of the crisis of the Western world by a new, intercultural philosophy of history, for instance, became an issue of sociological research and debate. Up to the present time this material philoso-phy of history has remained a topic in the humanities and social sciences.2

Formal philosophy of history refers not to the past itself but to a way of think-ing about it. It characterizes the distinctive nature of historical thinking, mainly in comparison with the rationality of the natural sciences. It emerged during the nineteenth century as a reaction to two challenges: first, the rejection of material philosophy as incompatible with the cognitive advantages of academic methodi-cal historical research, and, second, as a rejection of a positivistic understanding of science as the only rational cognition. It emphasized a fundamental, logical difference between the humanities and the natural sciences. This difference was

1. Reinhart Koselleck, Historia magistra vitae: ber die Auflsung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte, in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 38-66 (in English: Historia Vitae Magistra, in Kosel-leck, Futures Past [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985], 21-38).

2. A recent example in sociology is the work of Gnter Dux, Die Zeit in der Geschichte: Ihre Ent-wicklungslogik von Mythos zur Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Historisch-genetische Theorie der Kultur: Instabile Welten. Zur prozessualen Logik im kulturellen Wandel (Weilerswist: Velbrck Wissenschaft, 2000) (Historico-genetic Theory of Culture: On the Processual Logic of Cultural Change [Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011]); Geistesgeschichte als Gattungsgeschichte, in Struk-turen des Denkens: Studien zur Geschichte des Geistes, ed. Gnter Dux and Jrn Rsen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 17-34.

jrn rsen108described as an epistemological and methodical juxtaposition between individu-alization versus generalization or ideographic versus nomothetic thinking. Its most prominent German proponents were Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel, and Max Weber. The latest form of this explication of the form of historical thinking is narrativism in metahistory as it is represented by the analytical philosophy of history of Arthur Danto3 and the poetics of historiography of Hayden White.4 It has become very influential in understanding the logic of historical thinking as narrativistic.

Functional philosophy of history refers to the role historical thinking plays in the practical orientation of human life. It analyzes the effect of history and asks about the presence of the past in present-day human life. It was inherent in clas-sical philosophy of history (mainly in Herders and Humboldts work) as a con-cept of Bildung. Historical cognition was seen as a necessary condition for the development of human subjectivity and its competence to participate in discourse about cultural orientation. As a special discourse in the humanities, it emerged rather late (in the twentieth century). It addressed memory and remembrance as factors effective in the temporal orientation of human agency outside academic specialization. It thematizes history in the public life of normal people under the rubric of lieux de mmoire,5 and today it is also conceptualized as a theory of historical culture.6

All three dimensions are systematically interrelated, but they have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship when attempting to understand what history is about. Rohbecks book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history. In his earlier works he rehabilitated material philosophy against its devaluation in metahistory.7 He referred to the Enlightenment tradition and pointed out that its legacy cant be denied if the temporal frame within which the process of global-ization takes place is to be understood.

Indeed, this process has empirically realized what philosophers of history in the eighteenth century had already theoretically conceptualized. For Rohbeck, the advances of technology, economics, and scientific knowledge represent by their close interrelationship what has traditionally been called progress. The

3. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History [1965] (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1968); in Germany, the philosopher Hans-Michael Baumgartner introduced Dantos phi-losophy of history as a breakthrough in understanding the logic of historical thinking. Hans Michael Baumgartner, Kontinuitt und Geschichte: Zur Kritik und Metakritik der historischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).

4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

5. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Representations 26 (Spring, 1989), 7-25

6. Most influential in the German-speaking world is Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedchtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in frhen Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992) (Cul-tural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011]).

7. Johannes Rohbeck, Technik Kultur Geschichte: Eine Rehabilitierung der Geschichtsphi-losophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Rohbeck, Geschichtsphilosophie zur Einfhrung (Hamburg: Junius, 2004).

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 109undeniably fundamental change of the conditions of human life needs a frame of significance within which it acquires the feature of a coherent historical development of universal character. Against the culture-critique of modernity (represented by Horkheimer and Adorno), against the postmodern dissolution of the unity of history into a plurality of histories, and against the thesis of the end of history, Rohbeck insists on the tradition of an enlightened material philosophy of history that may serve as such a framework. Indeed, without essential elements of this tradition, the emergence of the modern world cant be understood. Even the idea of progress finds rehabilitation. It simply means that human agency has achieved the status of a permanently growing field of human effectiveness, thereby opening up dimensions of reality for dynamic change, which hitherto had been seen as natural conditions of human life. Nobody can deny this fundamental and universal temporalization of the human world. It is the material of a philosophical reflection on its structure, and it finds relevance when orienting practical life in its ongoing development.

The philosophical insight into the fundamental changes that have led to moder-nity and globalization is not only relevant for a reasonable order of the events of the past but for the mode of historical thinking itself. It has its own reason, since it gives the temporalization of human forms of life a cognitive meaning, thus influencing the cultural strategies for setting aims and developing future perspectives for practical life.

This can easily be demonstrated by the idea of progress. It has an empirical and a normative function at the same time in dealing with the experience of the past. Empirically, it shapes a temporal order, which creates historical coher-ence out of the chronological events in the past. Normatively, it articulates the future perspective of further development in this temporal order as a direction of agency-guiding intentions. This synthesis of facts and norms is typical for historical thinking in general, and therefore for philosophy of history as well. In his contribution to this philosophy, Immanuel Kant called it its own Chiliasmus (chiliasm or millenarianism): We can see that philosophy may also have its expectation of a millennium, but this millennium would be one for the realization of which philosophical ideas themselves may be helpful although only from afar. Therefore this expectation is hardly utopian.8

Rohbeck doesnt go this far, because he is suspicious of any totality of history; he thinks of a modest universalism, based on universal tendencies of moderniza-tion and globalization. He emphasizes the ethical consequences of his philosophy of history in a much more detailed and pragmatic way. It is this ethics at which his new book is aiming. It does not add a hitherto unknown normative dimension to the material philosophy of history, since the future has always been a temporal dimension of modern historical thinking (even of historical thinking in general).

8. Man sieht: die Philosophie knne auch ihren Chiliasmus haben; aber einen solchen, zu dessen Herbeifhrung ihre Idee, obgleich nur sehr von weitem, selbst befrderlich werden kann, der also nichts weniger als schwrmerisch ist. Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in welt-brgerlicher Absicht [1784], in Immanuel Kant, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pdagogik, erster Teil (Werke in 10 Bnden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 9) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), eighth sentence, 45 (A 404), 33; transl. T. M. Greene and H. Hudson. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=929350 (accessed April 2, 2014).

jrn rsen110This is true for historicism9 as well as for Marxism and more recent versions of historical studies. In Rohbecks argument, however, a new discourse on the future of history is opened up when he illuminates the future of history in the light of ethics. This ethics gets its specific form by its systematic relationship to the past as history. It is placed in the intersection of past and future, which constitutes the most basic component of the temporality of human life.

Rohbecks book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between history and the future; the second analyzes the relationship between his-tory and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. It addresses generations and legacy as a concrete connection between the past and the future by means of present-day activities.

With regard to the first part, every human activity is guided by an intention reaching into the future. This is the starting point of Rohbecks argument. Human actions take place in the present, are directed into the future, and shape its direc-tion according to the conditions and circumstances given by the past. Historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Roh-beck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this gap of time into the future. The future has its own otherness, but by the intentionality of actions it is tied to the present. The bridge between present and future has to be reintegrated into the time perspective that has been opened up by classical, modern philosophy of his-tory. This is Rohbecks main thesis, which he consequently elaborates in his book.

He starts with the issue of utopia. Utopian thinking holds a radical otherness of the vision of the human world, which articulates the fundamental human desire for a better world. Rohbeck assigns this otherness a temporal meaning by relating this vision to the mental structure of human activity, in which the desire for a bet-ter world transcends the horizon of the given world within which human agency takes place. This otherness is not the only one in modern thinking; its contrary, the otherness of a catastrophe, is also efficacious in modern culture, mainly in recent times as a reaction to growing environmental destruction and climate change. It is this otherness in the interrelationship between present and future that is at stake: Rohbeck presents it as a challenge and a chance for human agency. In order to meet this challenge and to use this chance, human agency itself must be put into a temporal dimension that bridges this time difference without leveling it. Here comes philosophy of history into the game: its time perspective includes (mainly implicitly) a future-relatedness, and it is this future-relatedness that may serve as such a time perspective, if it is explicated and differentiated.

History in such a perspective becomes closely, even systematically, related to human agency and acquires a pragmatic character. Accordingly, the futurethough perceived in full awareness in its othernessis endowed with the experi-ence of past human agency. In this process experience gains a new ontological

9. I would like to make plausible this unusual view about historicism by quoting the following by Leopold von Ranke: In attracting different nations and individuals to the idea of humankind and culture progress is unconditional. (In der Herbeiziehung der verschiedenen Nationen und der Individuen zur Idee der Menschheit und der Kultur ist der Fortschritt ein unbedingter. Leopold von Ranke, ber die Epochen der neueren Geschichte, ed. T. Schieder and H. Berding [Aus Werk und Nachla, vol. 2] [Munich: Oldenbourg, 1971], 80).

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 111and epistemological status: it turns into articulated chances for present agency. Rohbeck presents these chances in a very complex argument, the representation of which would exceed the framework of this review essay. He comes to the conclusion that the future remains open and yet is integrated into the reference to experience (of the past), which always gives human agency a standpoint in time.

This insight into a close relationship between past and future is, of course, not new. Tradition as a powerful element of historical culture is a well-known case of such a relationship; it binds both dimensions of time together into an idea of an unbroken continuity or an eternal validity of basic elements of human life. The exemplary mode of historical thinking allows predictions on the basis of the elementary sameness of the conditions of human life. But Rohbecks analysis takes place in the realm of modern historical thinking, which is characterized by a fundamental asymmetry of past and future. This asymmetry leads to many dif-ferent ideas about this relationship. Rohbeck presents this variety by analyzing utopian thinking, presenting narratives dealing with the future and concepts of historical time. In doing so he presents a variety of time structures that can easily be brought into a typological order.

Human agency takes place vis--vis this variety of futures. Traditionally, historical thinking projects the future in the form of a teleological direction of historical development. In order to overcome the narrowness of this perspective and to realize the openness of the future, Rohbeck replaces teleology with ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one-sided development. Ethics allows many more options. They are not arbitrary, of course, but are conditioned by historical experience and its interpretation by philosophy of history. In its asymmetrical relationship to the past, the future gains a new openness. It receives a new power in shaping present forms of human life. It challenges human agency like an undertow into an unknown or at least insecure world. This creates a dimension of human responsibility. The future itself has now become a realm of human agency, different from the present where the actors live. Ethics always directs human agency to the future, but now it does it in a new way: laden with the responsibility for a time that lies beyond the lifetime of the actors.

In the second part of his book, Rohbeck designs an outline of such an ethics of the future, which entails consequences, especially for historical thinking: its basic concepts, which address the temporal change of human life, now infiltrate ethics. And at the same time, these concepts gain an ethical implication with the potential of tuning up academic historys noble detachment from the disturbing complexity of the present into an engaged involvement in its struggles for the future. Rohbecks approach to a future-directed ethics of historical thinking is, of course, inspired by the present-day experience of hitherto unknown ecological problems, mainly the climate catastrophe. Therefore, one of his dominant ethical principles is that of sustainability. But he enlarges the scope of this principle by two more, closely related subjects: responsibility and justice. All are systemati-cally interrelated and form together a normative network, which opens up a long-lasting future perspective of historical development demanding a commitment from the people of today.

jrn rsen112Ethical subjectivity means that people are responsible for what they have done.

They cant be held responsible for events or misdeeds before their lifespan, of course, yet they have to bear them, at least. There has always been an intergenera-tional connection with a normative concern beyond the lifespan of people. This is a powerful element in historical identity. People were proud or ashamed of what their forefathers did. And they feel committed to this normatively positive or negative importance of past events in their own lives. A well-known example is the role of the Holocaust in the intergenerational chain of the perpetrators.10

Rohbecks ethics of history applies this temporality of human subjectivity to the future perspective of modern historical thinking. By doing so he temporal-izes ethics according to the temporality of history in historicism.11 But he is not interested in a historicization of his three basic norms of historical ethics. Histo-ricization according to historicism addresses the change of norms in the course of time. Instead, his issue is the applicability of these norms to future developments.

Rohbeck discusses the first basic normsustainabilityin a rather short analysis of different grades or intentions. Its essential ethical implications and consequences are treated as the two other issues of historical ethics: responsibility and justice. The issue of responsibility is explicated as a basis for historical ethics by concretizing its time dimension. This is done by an analysis of different time limits (Fristen), within which events of the past and present demand concern for the future. Thus Rohbeck endows responsibility with an internal time struc-ture. In the framework of this structure, the open future of (modern) history receives the feature of action-guiding perspectives. The openness of the future now appears as a complex network of time spans for present-day activities. This doesnt mean that openness will not prevail or that the future will lose its tempo-ral otherness; instead, it gains concretized features like challenges, demands, and chances for human activity (and failures).

The same is true for the principle of justice. Rohbeck gives it a historical dimension within which activities and misdeeds of the past and their results turn into expectations and projects of the future, mediated by present-day human activity. This transformation implies a spatial and temporal universalization of the idea of justice. Vis--vis the power of globalization, such a universalization appears as an unavoidable, necessary step. It demands a rehabilitation of world (or even universal) history in the meaning of classical philosophy of history (99). Justice is taken as a constitutive element of world history, at least with respect to its future. The variety of different developments in the past resulting in a variety of different conditions of life has to be integrated into an ethical framework for understanding the present. Justice becomes the leading idea of coherence and continuity in future-directed historical thinking.

10. See Jrn Rsen, HolocaustMemory and German Identity, in Rsen, History: NarrationInterpretationOrientation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 189-204. See also Jenny Tillmanns, Was heit historische Verantwortung? Historisches Unrecht und seine Folgen fr die Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012).

11. As a consequence of this argument it is easy to show that historicism, correctly understood, doesnt lead to relativism.

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 113With regard to the third part of Rohbecks book, ethics demands that some-

body be committed to its principles. In the context of philosophy of history this subject of ethical commitment must be a subject with an inbuilt temporality. This temporality has to reach back into the past and forward into the future beyond the limits of one personal life. It must socially cover the whole realm of historical experience and expectation. Thus it must be universal, too, but at the same time be able to become concretized as an agent for activities. Rohbeck does not follow the tradition of modern material philosophy, which presented human-kind as this agent for historical ethics (120, 135). In this tradition, humankind (more precisely: the human spirit [Geist]) was the universal agent of historical change. It became concretized as an actor effecting a concrete event by individu-alization of this spirit.12 For Rohbeck this idea is too abstract. Instead, he follows Karl Mannheim and the topical discourse on the generation in historical studies. Therefore he proposes the generation as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment. Its link with the past and the future at the same time is its legacy from the past as a condition for its future perspective. Indeed, generations fill the chronology of history with concrete actors and their specific historical situations. This term combines past, present, and future as a highly effective interrelationship of concrete people in space and time. And it realizes a factual and, at the same time, normative relationship of different time dimensions in the social structure of every form of human life. Generations have a specific standing (Lage) in the course of time. One can use the traditional language of philosophy of history and characterize this situation as always specifically historical or individualistic (in reference not to a single person, but to a defined group). No generation simply repeats the actions of its predecessor or completely determines its successor, since they have to adjust to the specific (and changing) circumstances of their respective times.

The interrelationship of generations is factual and normative at the same time. Historical ethics is incorporated in this synthesis in the form of the legacy of one generation to the next one. Legacy means the unity of factual conditions and normative demands. It puts the acting people of the present into their specific historical situation and shapes their ethics as (positive or negative) commitment. This commitment results from the burden and the chances the former generation has put on the shoulders of the later one.

With his concept of the generation, Rohbeck not only brings the future back into the understanding of the past, but he convincingly shows how moral commit-ment has become a factor of temporal change in the human affairs we call history. He differentiates this relationship between past and future in order to address its

12. Paradigmatic for this concept of history is Wilhelm von Humboldt. See Wilhelm von Hum-boldt, Betrachtungen ber die bewegenden Ursachen der Weltgeschichte, in von Humboldt, Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, vol. 1: Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960), 578-584; ber den Geist der Menschheit, in ibid., 506-518; ber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers, in ibid., 585-606; ber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers, in ibid., 585-606 (On the Historians Task, History and Theory 6, no. 1 [1967], 57-71. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, transl. with an introduction by Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963).

jrn rsen114variety in human life. So in respect to the (factual) determination of the present by the past Erbe, Kapital, Gabe (legacy, capital, gift), and in respect to the (nor-mative) determination of the future by the present Dialog, Vertrag, Frsorge (dialogue, contract, care) (161), history meets a qualitative amendment.

At the end of his book, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has achieved a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of the ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future (which elementarily constitutes the phenomenon of history). He presents frames of significance by which the events of the past obtain meaning for the present and its future perspec-tive. He revitalizes the idea of progress, criticizes the idea of cyclical time, and gives the Kantian idea of Geschichtszeichen (icon of history) a new meaning in understanding the historical place of our century.

Rohbeck provides his readers with many important arguments that render material philosophy of history relevant against its numerous detractors in most of the metahistorical discourses since the establishment of historical studies as an academic discipline. This philosophy is not very much interested in the formal understanding of history (without ignoring it). Since there is no form without content, and since no form can fill itself up as content, Rohbeck restores to phi-losophy of history its content. This content appears laden with normativity, if the fundamental relationship of the past to the future in historical thinking is not ignored. On the contrary, with regard to attempts to master the future by prolong-ing the past into it in the form of an objective relationship (like a law of devel-opment), it is ethics that gives the future its specific temporality. Functional aspects in philosophy of history become visible and cant be ignored any longer.

Of course, many questions arise from this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) The most fundamental one is the ontological question of what keeps history together, if this new emphasis on normativity and future-directedness is realized. What synthesizes the three time dimensions into one and the same history? (2) The second refers to the legacy of historicism. Rohbecks idea of historical commitment to basic values effec-tive in the ethical mediation of past and future is convincing. But what about the historicity of these values? Did we not learn from historicism that these values themselves have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. It pursues the dynamics of history within which the temporality of ethical norms will be realized by their change into an unforeseeable future. Rohbeck thinks of mastering contingency (100). But does not every attempt at this mastering cre-ate new contingencies? Ethical activities used to end in outcomes different from the intentions of the actors. History can ontologically be understood as a perma-nent chain of this difference between intention and outcome. How can this differ-ence become integrated into the projection of the future by ethical imperatives?

In a reversed perspective the ethical principles of today have to prove their historical character. This speaks to their role in the universal idea of temporal change in the human world. Do they not demand a historical legitimation by a theory of moral, cultural, or social evolution? The possibility and probability of

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 115their change in the future demand a footing in the past in order to stabilize their present-day form and historicity.

This brings me to my last question: Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of genera-tions in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history. Its potential is still not exhausted but needs a new and intercultural interpretation.13

Jrn rsen

Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, Germany

13. See Approaching Humankind: Towards an Intercultural Humanism, ed. Jrn Rsen (Gttingen V+R unipress/ Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2013).