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Review: [untitled]Author(s): David CarrSource: History and Theory, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 197-204Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505122 .Accessed: 05/08/2011 16:14

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REVIEW ESSAYS

FuTuREs PAST. On the Semantics of Historical Time. By Reinhart Koselleck. Trans- lated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1985. Pp. 330.

Translations from recent German social and intellectual history and theory of history have been slower in coming than translations from the French. Fortunately, MIT's Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy, is now closing the gap. In addition to authors already well known in the English-speaking world, such as Adorno, Habermas, and Gadamer, the series is making available the work of others who deserve to be much better known than they are. Certainly the most important and original of these are Hans Blumen- berg and Reinhart Koselleck.

When Koselleck's collection of essays was first published in 1979 under the title Vergangene Zukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Koselleck was best known in Germany as one of the editors (with the late Otto Brunner and Werner Conze) of Geschichtliche GrundbegriJffe: historisches Lexikon zur politischen-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. This immense project, whose first volume was published in 1972 and whose sixth and last has yet to appear, con- tains lengthy articles (20 to 60 pages) by historians and philosophers under such headings as Adel, Arbeiter, Demokratie, Politik, and Staat. Their purpose is to chart the development of the concepts associated with these terms from their classical origins through foreign influences to their emergence in modern German political and social usage. Koselleck, who wrote the general introduction, has always been more closely identified with this encyclopedia than his two older colleagues, and indeed Futures Past reveals how clearly the whole project bears the stamp of his guiding interests and ideas.

Koselleck's earlier work in modern German history had ranged from intellec- tual to social historyI but BegriJffsgeschichte is neither of these, as he is at pains to point out. Its focus is neither on the literary and philosophical products of high culture, as in Geistesgeschichte, nor political and social events, but the basic concepts that govern the discourse, action, and attitudes of all levels of society. Koselleck's work, both in organizing Geschichtliche Grundbegri~fe and in his own essays, is guided by the idea that the late eighteenth century is a Sattelzeit or watershed, above all in the sense that it is an age of great conceptual shifts.

1. Kritik and Krise, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1976) originally published in 1959; and Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Stuttgart, 1967).

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Not only do new concepts emerge, like "class" and "socialism." Concepts with ancient origins, like "democracy," "revolution," and "republic" acquire a Janus- like double-reference, backward to their origins and forward to our own time. It is the task of conceptual history to sort out these diverse meanings and under- stand the shifts that occurred. This task is importantly reflexive for modern his- tory, since contemporary historians use many of the terms and concepts current in the period of which they give an account.

Begriffsgeschichte thus bears some resemblance to the French histoire des men- talites, but behind Koselleck's work stands the unmistakable force of the German philosophical tradition, especially the thought of Kant and Heidegger. Kant taught that we conceptually organize our world, starting with a few basic concepts such as substance and causality; and he showed how these are in turn founded on the most basic organizing schemes of all, space and time. Heidegger agreed but, following Dilthey and Husserl, insisted that the conceptual structure of human time must be differentiated from that of nature, and must be analyzed in its own terms. We construe the sequence of natural events in causal terms, but we make sense of our own lives by projecting and giving structure to, not merely observing and predicting, the flow of events. For Heidegger human existence is a temporal self-projection in which past, present, and future are understood in terms of each other. This hermeneutical circle is not merely a matter of self-understanding and self-interpretation but also ultimately one of self-constitution: our selfhood is the temporal construction of our own lives. In the process the sense we make, not only of ourselves but also of our world and our relations with others, is de- rived more from our projected future than from the past. The past, too, is part of what we are, but even it is something we give structure to by means of our projects. Thus for Heidegger the prime dimension of human temporality is the future: possibility has priority over actuality.

In Being and Time Heidegger is able to draw from his theory an ironic conse- quence for the discipline of history. Because its subject-matter is persons and their lives and actions, it must treat what is ultimately constitutive of them as persons, their possibilities and their future. Thus the subject-matter of history is in an important sense not fact but possibility, not past but future; or, more precisely past possibilities and prospects, past conceptions of the future: futures past.2

Koselleck in his essays never appeals to Heidegger explicitly, nor does he borrow his terminology, but the influence of this conception of temporality is clear. He believes that what is ultimately constitutive not only of individuals but even of communities or societies is how they conceive of their own temporality and in particular their future. In thus moving from individual to social temporality Koselleck actually goes beyond Heidegger, since the latter remained concerned with the individual; even his concept of historicity dealt primarily with the role of the social past in the life of the individual. By looking at the manner in which

2. See Being and Time, transl. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York, 1962), section 76.

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groups conceive of their temporality, Koselleck is able to go beyond the question of individual human time to the question with which he opens the preface of Futures Past: "The question of what historical time might be" (xxi).

Koselleck, of course, addresses this question not as a philosopher but as an historian. If historical time generally is human temporality (a la Heidegger) projected onto the social plane, this is still a formal concept that can be filled in in different ways. Different societies take different views of the relations be- tween their own future and past. As an historian Koselleck's question is "How, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?" Or, to put it in other terms, how is the accumulated experience of a given society related to its expectations, hopes, and prognoses (xxiii)? There may be different and changing views of these relations, and Koselleck is interested in tracing these changes. Thus his project is metahistorical: he is writing a history of conceptions of historical time, not just those of historians or philosophers but those of whole societies and periods.

Specifically he wants to apply this notion to the emergence of modernity. In keeping with the Kantian-Heideggerian view that our conception of time is at the root of all our other concepts, Koselleck believes that the great conceptual shifts of the modern period are finally traceable to a shift in the conception of historical time. Among all the vast changes that have occurred, the most fun- damental thing that has changed in modern Europe, culminating in the late eight- eenth century, is the social conception of time itself and especially of the future.

As an historian of concepts Koselleck draws on diverse sources, from poets and theologians to politicians, proverbs, and dictionaries. Indeed, he does not limit himself to written documents. He begins the opening essay by discussing Albrecht Altdorfer's early sixteenth-century painting of the Battle of Isis, the dazzling centerpiece of Munich's Alte Pinakothek, which no visitor to that museum can ever forget. (One is reminded of the discussion of Velasquez' Las Meninas with which Foucault opens The Order of Things. But Koselleck wrote this essay before Foucault's book appeared.)

What strikes Koselleck about Altdorfer's painting is the manner in which it is both historical and contemporary. Altdorfer researched his painting well, at- tempting to establish and represent in detail the exact number of known comba- tants. Yet "from their feet to their turbans, most of the Persians resemble the Turks who, in the same year the picture was painted (1529) unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna" (4). Alexander and Maximilian, who was one of Altdorfer's pa- trons, "merge in exemplary manner." What we today may regard as the naively anachronistic and ahistorical feature of this sixteenth-century representation of the past, a feature shared by many contemporary and earlier paintings, Koselleck sees as the expression of a premodern view of history and time which survived well into the sixteenth century and beyond. It was shared even by figures who to us seem now clearly to point ahead to the modern world, such as Luther and Machiavelli. For all of them the future was still closed off by the apocalypse. Alexander's battle and Maximilian's battle were different versions of the battle between light and dark which led up to the final, cosmic struggle between Christ

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and Anti-Christ. Opinions differed, for example between Luther and the Pope, over who belonged on which side, and over when the day of judgment could be expected or whether humans should venture to predict its date at all. But all agreed it would come and that neither its time nor its outcome were for humans to decide.

It may be that the Judeo-Christian story of creation and redemption represents a large-scale narrative with beginning, middle, and end rather than a cyclical view of cosmic time. But within the enclosure of the divine story repetition and regularity are the characteristic features of human events. Even as late as the eighteenth-century, Hume, another figure who to our eyes seems so forward- looking, could appeal to a common and unchanging human nature as the basis of all historical and moral knowledge. But the immense conceptual changes that were in progress make Hume look like a throwback. Koselleck does not try to explain these conceptual changes, except to point to the length, virulence, and indecisiveness of the wars of religion, which finally yielded to political com- promises. He simply draws the stark contrast between Altdorfer's century and the views of such figures as Diderot and Robespierre a mere 250 years later. For them the future was open and undetermined, and to that extent not capable of being known. This made their situation in one sense more precarious. On the other hand the future's course, rather than being determined by the divine hand, was now subject to human foresight, planning, and control. Prophecy is replaced by prognosis, the political sphere seeks its legitimation not in its reflecting a di- vine plan but in its capacity for deliberating, calculating, and thus producing its own future.

The first advances of science and technology are of course important for this change as well. The irony of this is that increased knowledge of nature and its regularities and repetitions opened up a distance between the time of nature and human time. Thanks to increased knowledge of nature, human beings are now freed from the natural repetitions of which they had previously been a part.

This new openness of the future had as one of its consequences a revised view of the past. Koselleck concludes his discussion of Altdorfer's painting by evoking Friedrich Schlegel's discovery of it 300 years after it was painted. Schlegel overflowed with admiration, calling the painting "the greatest feat of the age of chivalry" (4). Thus he distinguished it from his own time as well as from the time it represented. In qualitative terms, says Koselleck, more time is represented by the 300 years separating Schlegel from Altdorfer than by the 2000 years be- tween the battle of Isis and his painting of it (5).

What he means, of course, is that Schlegel saw the difference between the past and his own time, while Altdorfer and his contemporaries saw the sameness. The belief in the sameness or repetitiveness of human events entailed a whole con- ception of the value and purpose of knowing about the past, one which prevailed from antiquity well into the early modern period, but which slowly died out and gave way to the full-fledged modern conception of history. From ancient times the common-place "historia magistra vitae" expressed the view that we tell and

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pass on stories of the past in order to learn from them for the future. The term historia referred to the representation of events, not the events they related. In- deed, the idea of history as the actual process or unfolding of events was not known. In German die Geschichte was originally the plural form of das Geschichte or die Geschicht, which only gradually, in the course of the eighteenth century, came to be used as a collective singular and to denote the events rather than their representation. "If anyone had said before 1780 that he studied history, he would at once have been asked ... : Which history? History of what? Imperial history, or the history of theological doctrine, or perhaps the history of France?" (201). There were stories of different persons doing different sorts of things, but since they all represented the same human virtues and vices, and taught over and over again the same lessons, there was little sense that the events they depicted were involved in an overall qualitative change. The linguistic situation familiar to us today in most Western languages, in which "history" and its corresponding terms stand for the res gestae as well as the historia rerum gestarum, dates according to Koselleck from the late eighteenth century.

In the new situation, in which human events assumed a direction of their own which was their history, the idea of learningfrom the past began to lose currency and no longer served as the justification for learning about it. Again and again, Koselleck's sources express their wonder at the quality of change and their igno- rance of where the future could lead. The quantity of change impressed them too: history seemed to accelerate.

Of course, the idea of learning from the past never completely died out, nor is it altogether dead today. Indeed, it may seem contradictory to say that the future came within human calculation and control, and that lessons could no longer be learned from the past. How could the political realm be managed, ex- cept by relying on the constants of human nature? Yet as belief in progress be- came articulated in the full-scale philosophies of history, first in Kant and then in Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Hegel, and Marx, the point was precisely to remake human nature itself, not just to change external circumstances.

Koselleck believes that the appearance of the nineteenth century philosophies of history represents the third stage in the development he describes which is in a sense the synthesis of the first two. When the human future became subject to human planning and control, it was robbed of the divine eschaton and left open and indeterminate. The new philosophy of history pointed to completion, not in the world beyond but in a paradise on earth brought about by human hands. History regained its sense of wholeness but maintained its humanly con- trolled direction.

On the basis of this analysis of the underlying concepts of future, past, time in general, and historical time in particular, Koselleck goes on to trace changes in other terms and concepts obviously derived from these. One is modernity itself- Neuzeit in German -an expression remarkable for the fact that in it time itself becomes a qualitative dimension. The present age is not just distinguished from

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the past but distinguished by its newness or novelty. Another is the concept of revolution, which loses its original, quasi-natural cyclical sense. Previously it could easily be associated with changes in form's of government, but only in the sense of the classical cycle from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy and back, via their degenerate forms. After 1789, of course, it signaled a radical break with the past leading to an unknown future. Like Geschichte, revolution also became a kind of collective singular, the revolution of which all particular revolutions are instances. Chance, fate, and progress are other time-related and future-oriented concepts to which Koselleck turns his attention in these essays.

I have made reference to a change in the value and purpose of knowledge about the past. It could no longer justify itself pragmatically and was now sought for its own sake. The ethos of disinterest and neutrality, of "scientific" rather than anecdotal history was born. It was in contrast to the didactic and heuristic writing of history, and not, as it is often read, as an exaggerated claim to certainty or objectivity, that Ranke uttered his aspiration merely to record the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (31). Not only the conception of why, but also that of how and how much we can know about the past, changed. As "history" came to stand for the res gestae as well as the historia rerum gestarum, the close link between the past's being and its being known was remarked on by historians and philosophers. One might think that this closeness would reinforce Vico's notion that, as we make history, we can also perfectly know it, unlike nature which is made by God. But in fact Koselleck is able to trace, especially among nineteenth- century German historians, the growth of certain forms of epistemological sophistication and skepticism. The differentness of the past means that recur- ring patterns cannot be counted on. The naive realism of a mirroring idea of knowledge, and with this the paradigm of the eyewitness, are seriously called into question. The spatial metaphor of perspective, of seeing things from a cer- tain point of view, first raises questions about eyewitness reports. Then the meta- phor is temporalized and applied to the historian himself. But the positive side of this is also recognized, the advantage of hindsight. Goethe expressed the view that history has from time to time to be rewritten, not because new facts are dis- covered but because the changing present opens new perspectives on the past. The sense of accelerating change in the present leads some historians to discourage any attempt at a history of one's own time. We can be eyewitnesses to the present, but we cannot have a truly historical understanding of what goes on until after a decent interval has passed.

Another basic concept which Koselleck subjects to historical-semantical anal- ysis is the distinction between us and them. Though not itself temporal, this bipolar concept is basic to social reality and is always mapped onto some kind of tem- poral conceptual grid. In a methodological essay on the relation between social history and the history of concepts, Koselleck points to the general importance of this concept for any notion of group identity, noting that it is always manifested concretely in relation to some term such as "nation," "class," or "church," and must be studied accordingly (83). Then, in a separate essay (159ff.), Koselleck examines three important and striking exemplifications of the us-them distinc-

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tion: between Hellene and Barbarian, between Christian and Heathen, and be- tween the human and the sub- or nonhuman. These classifications have many similarities: each is universal, in other words it applies to all people; in each case it is disparaging and asymmetrical or nonrecipA ocal, those classed as "them" by "us" would not accept being classed as they are. Each of these pairs has under- gone internal changes throughout its own history; each has had violent histor- ical consequences; each involves groups in close social and political contact with each other over wide geographical areas. The three divisions have also overlapped and interpenetrated in interesting ways. Christianity was born in a world of Hellenic culture. The distinction between the human and subhuman, which has been used to justify most forms of repression and enslavement, has at times merged with both of the other two classifications. At the same time this distinction tends to be biological or racist and thus absolute, whereas the other two have permitted crossovers from one class to the other. The distinction between Hellenes and Bar- barians, which was originally based on tribal ties and mother tongue, gradually changed into a matter of culture and linguistic capacity, which outsiders could acquire. The heathen, of course, could and should be converted, and could be treated inhumanly only if they refused this opportunity. The question of who the true Christians were was continually complicated by rifts within the church. Koselleck discovers in some versions of the Hellene-Barbarian distinction a precursor of the modern distinction between "civilized" and "primitive" people, that is the notion that contemporary peoples are leftover from an earlier stage of humanity which even we once passed through. This is another case of gener- ously permitting crossovers, this time whole peoples: if the primitives ever catch up, they will become fully human just like us.

This essay is one of the few in which Koselleck ranges beyond his focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only does he discuss antiquity and early Christianity; he also cannot avoid, in connection with the distinction be- tween Menschen and Unter-menschen, some discussion of the racist policies of the National Socialist regime. Another essay takes up the published accounts of the dreams of victims of the Nazi regime, and uses them as an occasion for a methodological reflection on the value of fiction and fantasy in revealing to the historian the reality of the past. The book also includes other useful methodo- logical discussions. In addition to general remarks on Begrijfsgeschichte, it con- tains valuable insights on the relation between narrative and description as representations of event and structure respectively.

But these methodological themes take second place to the more important sub- stantive contribution to Begriffsgeschichte, which is the notion of changing con- ceptions of historical time: Koselleck is an historian of brilliant insights and a rare synthetic vision who is able to draw together, under a well-chosen, compre- hensive theme, a wide variety of phenomena. His reflections on the origin and nature of modernity are comparable in importance to those of his contemporaries Blumenberg and Habermas, who have taken up the problem inherited from Max Weber and the Frankfurt School. None of these German thinkers has found the key to what characterizes the modern, but each makes a valuable contribution

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to our understanding. Though he is not given, as is Habermas, to making proposals for the present or pronouncements on the fate of the idea of modernity, Koselleck does let fall a few general remarks. These, together with a generally skeptical attitude toward some of the Enlightenment views he analyzes, suggest that Koselleck is closer to the pessimism of Adorno and Horkheimer, and of the French postmodernists influenced by Nietzsche and the late Heidegger, than he is to Habermas's attempt to salvage what is good in the Enlightenment. But this is only conjecture. Though he is inspired by the philosophical tradition and brings considerable philosophical sophistication to his work, Koselleck writes as an historian and leaves it to others to address the philosophical questions raised by his work. Whether the modern sense of time and the future, which Koselleck helps us to recognize in our recent past, is one that is still with us or should be still with us, is perhaps the most pressing of these questions.

DAVID CARR

University of Ottawa

THsE PROPHETS OF EXTREMITY: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. By Allan Megill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. xxiii, 399.

It is reported that Merleau-Ponty would often interrupt discussions in his classes by provocatively and forcefully posing the questions, Where are we? and What time is it? Pressed insistently and critically, those questions forced his students to re-examine and to re-articulate the most basic terms by which they could sit- uate their thinking, the terms by which they posed what was at issue, and the account or story they gave of how that issue came to be.

Like Merleau-Ponty's students, most people, including most scholars and in- tellectuals, are most of the time busily engaged in getting on with their ordinary activities. It is only when the sense-making continuity of ordinary activities is interrupted that we are provoked to ask, Where are we? and What time is it? When such interruptions do occur, then we bring out of the taken-for-granted background of everyday activity the master story or stories which provide the basic terms by which we understand and explain what is going on in the world. A master story, or sometimes a complex of master stories, provides a set of basic situations, a range of plots, and an ordering of significant actions which allow us to identify what is happening around us in terms of typical patterns whose meanings are familiar and intelligible.

There have been two major kinds of interruptions to the unquestioned flow of ordinary sense-making activities in the twentieth century. In the order of events there have been wars, economic imbalances, shortages and pollutions of natural resources, the Holocaust, the ambiguity of genetic engineering, and the threat