Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History

Abstract

According to Reinhart Koselleck, the period he calls Sattelzeit, which spans from 1730 through 1850, witnessed a crucial conceptual transformation. It was associated with a new, ‘modern’ way of experiencing temporality, which in turn gave rise to the emergence of the concept of History as a singular collective noun and, consequently, to the philosophies of history. Koselleck’s perspective converges, besides, with Michel Foucault’s view in The Order of Things, in which Foucault also remarked on the great conceptual break that occurred around 1800 and gave rise to the emergence of what he called the ‘Age of History’. However, our attempt at matching Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with Foucault’s archaeological perspective will also reveal why the former is not yet sufficiently attentive to the diversity of the modes of conceiving of temporality during the four centuries that modernity spans. Lastly, it will allow us to better understand what was the intellectual ground on which the philosophies of history were founded, and also how it eventually became undermined, along with the concept of temporality that was at its basis. I am always terrified when I hear in a few words a whole nation or a time, for what a great multitude of differences does not comprehend the word nation, or the middle ages or antiquity and the modern epoch! (Johann Gottfried Herder) Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of Sattelzeit has become an inevitable point of reference whenever one seeks to understand the origin of modernity from the perspective of intellectual history. It offers a highly suggestive view of the great conceptual transformation produced between 1750 and 1850—the period he calls Sattelzeit. According to Koselleck, this conceptual transformation was closely associated with a given way of experiencing temporality, which gave rise to the emergence of the concept of History, as a singular collective noun. As he shows, that concept would have been incomprehensible before 1750. To speak of ‘History’ without further ado, as if it were a kind of macrosubject, would have been simply unintelligible for a person of the fifteenth or even the seventeenth century. The emergence of the philosophies of history was the consequence of this conceptual transformation, as the two were closely tied: as HeinElías Palti, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina) OpenAccess. © 2018 Elías Palti, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-030 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 4:04 PM rich Köster then said, “History means the same as historical theory or philosophy of history or as the logic of history” (quoted in Koselleck 2006, p. 74). Historical philosophy thus has a precise historical-conceptual basis, and becomes meaningful only within that given intellectual configuration; it has no meaning outside of it. In short, what this reveals is the contingent nature of the foundations of the philosophies of history, and of the concept of temporality that underlies them. Koselleck’s perspective converges with Michel Foucault’s view in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970). In it, Foucault also remarked on the great conceptual break that occurred around 1800 and gave rise to the emergence of what he called the ‘Age of History’. Foucault associated it, in turn, with the appearance of a certain concept of ‘Subject’. Both concepts (Subject and History) would be closely linked. The latter would be no more than another translation of the former, and ultimately the two are the expression of the new way of experiencing the temporality that both Foucault and Koselleck identify as distinctive of ‘modernity’. However, our attempt at matching Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with Foucault’s archaeological perspective will also reveal why the former is not yet sufficiently attentive to the diversity of the modes of conceiving of temporality during the four centuries that modernity spans. Actually, it can discern only two possible time-concepts, each of which will be separated by that great epochal rupture that he calls Sattelzeit. This dichotomic perspective leads him to confuse and place under the same category (that of ‘modernity’) many very different modes of conceiving and experiencing temporality; and this confusion necessarily has consequences in the historical-conceptual recreation he proposed. In short, to perform the very goal of Koselleck’s project of a Begriffsgeschichte—of preventing conceptual anachronisms and understanding the intellectual foundations of the philosophies of history—a number of historical precisions are in order. Foucault was, besides, more emphatic in pointing out the contingent nature of this ‘modern’ regime of knowledge, in the sense that, for him, it is not only very recent, but also it will not last indefinitely. In fact, he believed we were at the verge of its dissolution. That is what was implicit in his provocative announcement of the imminent ‘death of man’. In any case, as we will see in this work, beyond the divergences of their contents, the convergence between Koselleck’s conceptual history and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge regarding the nature of the conceptual break produced around 1800 is deeply significant, and the attempt at matching their perspectives will allow us to better understand what was the intellectual ground on which the philosophies of history were 410 Elías Palti Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 4:04 PM founded, and also how it eventually became undermined, along with the concept of temporality that was at its basis. The idea of Sattelzeit and the new consciousness of temporality According to Koselleck, the emergence of the philosophies of the history is indicative of a fundamental break with respect to the premodern modes of historical figuration articulated within the frameworks of the Ciceronian concept of historia magistrate vitae. He points out the two premises upon which that pedagogical ideal of history was based. The first of these is the idea of the iterability of history; that is, that the same basic situations are repeated at different times, since only that assumption permits us to draw general laws applicable to every historical epoch. That assumption of the iterability of events made it impossible to conceptualize the idea of ‘History’ in the singular. What existed, in the context of that perspective, were ‘histories’, in the plural; that is, a series of situations, events and phenomena, which are eventually repeated in different times, places and circumstances, but which preserve their basic structures and meanings. The second premise highlighted by Koselleck is that the era of exploration (which opened the horizon of Europeans to the diversity of cultures on the planet) and technological progress finally triggered the crisis of the pedagogical concept of history. Both phenomena combined provide the historical basis for the emergence of the modern idea of ’progress’. Time would then have a directionality, which would make the iterability of history impossible. The future would no longer be readable in the experiences of the past. A gap now divided the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’. But the fundamental fact that marked the definitive breakdown of the concept of historia magistrate vitae was the outbreak of the French Revolution, insofar as it affirmed, for Koselleck, the idea of the constructability of history; that is, it engendered a new awareness of the subject’s agency. Temporality thus became an immanent dimension—something that subjects unleash with their own action.1 As Koselleck points out: “There always occurs in history more or less than that contained in the given conditions. Behind that ‘more or less’ are to be found men” (Koselleck 1985, p. 212). The modern concept of history would thus arise from the combination of the ideas of progress of the Enlightenment with that of the constructed character of it determined by the revolutionary event.  See Hayden White’s “Introduction” in Koselleck 2002, ix-xiv. Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 411 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 4:04 PM In turn, the temporalization of history would allow us to place in sequential order the cultural diversity that the overseas expansion had revealed; that is, to place diachronically that which appears synchronously. The notion of progress would provide the objective parameter for establishing a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, situating each phenomenon as a particular moment in the immanent logic of the development of History. It thus gave rise to the idea of the coexistence of infinite temporalities at each single moment, the simultaneity of the non-contemporary (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen). As Herder said in his Metakritik of Kant (a text that Koselleck repeatedly cites as the best synthesis of the ‘modern’ idea of historical temporality): In actuality, every changing thing has the measure of its own time within itself.... No two worldly things have the same measure of time. There are therefore (one can state it properly and boldly) at any one time in the universe innumerably many times.2 Lastly, the dissolution of the old ideal of historia magistrate vitae forces historical thought to its self-reclusion. To the extent that the temporalization of historical structures prevents generalizations and extrapolations between different epochs, regarding their contents, the idea of historical law can only now refer to the empty forms of temporality; to the transhistorical conditions of change. It is here that Koselleck introduces what he calls the fundamental meta-categories that define the basic forms of historical temporality: ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’. The progressive distance between ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ determines the acceleration of historical time,which