History and Theory 43 (February 2004), 124-135 © Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

KOSELLECK’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORICAL TIME(S)AND THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY

ZEITSCHICHTEN: STUDIEN ZUR HISTORIK (MIT EINEM BEITRAG VON HANS-GEORG

GADAMER). By Reinhart Koselleck. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000. Pp. 399.1

I. INTRODUCTION

“It is a truism that history always has to do with time,” Reinhart Koselleck notes,but it is another matter entirely to theorize exactly what historical time means(Z:321). The very idea that historical time is not reducible to natural time took along time to emerge: time has a history, and history its time.2 These areKoselleck’s core notions. He is a practitioner of what in German is calledHistorik—conventionally, methodology of history, but in his definition the“study of the conditions of possible histories” (Z:99). The transcendental argot isintentional. Koselleck distinguishes explicitly between “theory of possible histo-ry” and “historical science and its methods” (Z:339). His concern lies—at leastin the work here under consideration—overweeningly with the former. As thetitle of one of his most important essays states explicitly, Koselleck is convincedof “the need for theory in the discipline of history” (Z:298; tr PCH:4). He writes:“only theory transforms our work into historical scholarship” (Z:304; tr PCH:6).That is, “The relationship between the circumstances, the selection, and the inter-pretation of the sources can only be clarified by a theory of possible history”(Z:311; tr PCH:12). This alone warrants the possibility of a discipline of history.

Yet there is ambiguity in the very term theory. It can refer to the many sub-stantive theories from the various social sciences that historians have borrowedto widen the scope of their inquiries, largely under the rubric “social history.”3

But it can also refer to the epistemological preconditions of any conceivable his-torical inquiry. Koselleck believes history has gained much from the first sense,but it is the second that galvanizes his attention. The social sciences typicallyderive their theories from their respective objects of study, but this is simply out

1. References will be noted parenthetically in the text as Z:[p]. As complements to and/or transla-tions of the essays in this volume, I will also consider extensively Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) andReinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, transl.Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). References to Futures Pastwill be noted parenthetically in the text as FP:[p]. When translations of the material in Zeitschichtenare provided in The Practice of Conceptual History, the parenthetical reference will include a refer-ence to the translation in the form of: tr PCH:[p]. Essays in The Practice of Conceptual History notincluded in Zeitschichten will be referred to in endnotes.

2. “Concepts of Historical Time and Social History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 118.3. Ibid., 115.

of the question for history. History embraces, potentially, every object (Z:301; trPCH:4).4 What is the recourse, then? “If we, as historians, want to develop a gen-uine theory which would distinguish itself from those of the general social sci-ences, then it must obviously be a theory that makes it possible to take intoaccount a transformation in temporal experience” (Z:324). That is, a theory of thepossibility of history as a discipline depends upon a transcendental inquiry intothe possibility of historical time—or rather, times.

Historical times arise out of natural time but are not reducible to it (Z:10). Forone thing, time in itself is not intuitable (anschaulich); we are forced always toreckon it via motion in space. Representations of time, as a result, proveinevitably metaphorical (Z:305; tr PCH:7). Kant, as Koselleck notes on severaloccasions, recognized this intractability in intuiting time in itself, though he kepttrying to render it by strict analogy to his science of space (geometry) (Z:20).Herder, in what serves Koselleck as one of the key emancipatory declarations ofhistory as a discipline, disavowed utterly the singularity of time, insisting thatthere were many times—as many as there were objects, for each constituted itsown time (Z:20; FP:xxii; 247). Of course, naturally elapsed time—a rotation ofearth, a revolution about the sun, and so on—remains necessary for Koselleck asa chronological measuring scale. But historical time has quite a different char-acter. “Each according to the chosen thematic, historians recognize, deposited inand about one another, different passages of time which reveal different temposof change” (Z:295). That is the purport of the concept Zeitschichten (layers oftime): metaphorically it “gestures, like its geological model, towards several lev-els of time [Zeitebenen] of differing duration and differentiable origin, which arenonetheless present and effectual at the same time” (Z:9). The concept is syn-onymous, Koselleck notes, with the phrase “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzei-tigen” (the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous) (Z:9). “There are different lay-ers of the tempos of change that we must theoretically distinguish in order to beable to measure uniqueness and persistence with regard to each other” (Z:207; trPCH:135). Just this “taking into account the multilayeredness of historical cours-es of time” is what constitutes the theoretical possibility of historical accounts(Z:217; tr PCH:143). For Koselleck, such a formal construction always alreadypresupposes and affirms a historical emergence: the theory of history recapitu-lates the practice of historiography. “Historical knowledge always is simultane-ously the history of historical science” (FP:144). Koselleck insists that his tran-scendental inquiry must illuminate historians from Herodotus and Thucydidesforward, and their practices must confirm his transcendental inquiry. Without thismutual constitution there can be no disciplinary coherence to history.

Over more than thirty years, Koselleck has been distilling and redistilling thisnotion of “historical times” as his key to a theoretical grasp of the possibility ofhistory. The volume Zeitschichten was conceived as the representative collectionof his essays in that vein. For the reader who can access his work only in English,

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4. “History as a science has, as it is known, no epistemological object proper to itself; rather, itshares this object with all social and human sciences. History as a scientific discourse is specified onlyby its methods . . . [T]he question of temporal structures serves to theoretically open the genuinedomain of our investigation” (FP:93).

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it is highly fortunate that, via the earlier translation of his fundamental FuturesPast, supplemented by the more recent translations in The Practice ofConceptual History, most of his key essays are directly accessible. What makesZeitschichten distinctive as a volume is Koselleck’s effort to bring thematic orderto these essays spanning decades. A veritable literary “hedgehog,” Koselleckworries his big idea over and over again. The repetitiousness cries out for con-densation, but the resulting kernel deserves something more: theoretical reflec-tion. In what follows, I wish first to boil Koselleck’s many essays down to a coreargument. Then I wish to draw some theoretical implications.

II. KOSELLECK’S THEORY OF HISTORICAL TIMES

In Futures Past Koselleck made the historical claim that the very idea of historyunderwent a decisive shift between 1750 and 1850, a period he dubbed theSattelzeit.5 Semantically, in the Sattelzeit the word Geschichte swallowed up theword for a historical account, Historie. The one word now signified both realityand representation. In that same moment, philosophy of history emerged. So didthe disciplinary practice of history (in Germany), led by such figures asChladenius and Gatterer, out of which Historik, as the theoretical self-reflectionof that discipline, took shape. Its centerpiece was the endeavor to constitute peri-odization out of immanent historical principles (Z:289; 322). At the core of theSattelzeit was the encounter with a “new time” (neue Zeit; Neuzeit), modernity.“Neuzeit is first understood as a neue Zeit from the time that expectations havedistanced themselves ever more from all previous experience” (FP:276).

Koselleck insisted what took place was not only the inception of a new age,but a fundamental reorientation toward time, the invention/discovery of “histor-ical times.”6 The idea of time altered dramatically in the Sattelzeit, and the resulttransfigured the idea of history: “Time is no longer simply the medium in whichall histories take place; it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history nolonger occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical forcein its own right” (FP:246). Prior to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,Europeans relied unhesitatingly upon “the always-already guaranteed futurity ofthe past” (FP:17). That was the meaning of the topos historia magistra vitae:“Precisely because nothing fundamentally new would arise, it was quite possibleto draw conclusions from the past for the future” (FP:203). Then, in theSattelzeit, the topos dissolved in the face of a “new time.”

Literally, of course, time cannot be new, or, more precisely, it makes no senseto think of natural time as new (Z:238). But that is the point: something about theexperience of time had altered, namely the emergence of “a future that tran-scended the hitherto predictable,” introducing the possibility of a historical time(FP:17). “It is not the past but the future of historical time which renders simili-

5. Much of the concrete practice of Begriffsgeschichte, with which his name is virtually synony-mous, consists in documenting this massive shift.

6. He offers one exemplary bit of evidence from German lexical history: before 1750 there hademerged some 216 compound words involving time (Zeit). Between 1750 and 1850, some 342 newones emerged. After 1850, only 52 more came along (Z:256).

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tude dissimilar” (FP:34). A future so radical in its openness and unpredictabilityannulled the present utility of past experience. “Historical experience descendingfrom the past could no longer be directly extended to the future” (FP:281). “Newtime” was experienced as acceleration: it “abbreviated the space of experiences,robbed them of their constancy, and continually brought into play new, unknownfactors” (FP:17). This occasioned a crisis: “the acceleration of history obstruct-ed the historian in his profession” (FP:150). Lorenz Stein observed: “It is as ifthe writing of history is no longer capable of keeping up with history” (FP:150).In the words of Tocqueville, “the past has ceased to throw its light upon thefuture, [and] the mind of man wanders in obscurity” (FP:27). The radicality ofthe future, experienced in the present as acceleration in time, sundered the pres-ent from its once-accessible past: “It became a rule that all previous experiencemight not count against the possible otherness of the future” (FP:280).

The concept that ordered these new experiences was progress (Z:323). It priv-ileged the unknown future over against the past, but at the same time it estrangedthe past in a radical way, rendering this sense of its inevitable otherness a core tothe practice of disciplinary history. “Once new experiences, supposedly neverhad by anyone until then, were registered in one’s own history, it was also pos-sible to conceive of the past in its fundamental otherness.”7 Thus it was progressthat engendered nineteenth-century Historismus, with its insistence on theuniqueness of each epoch, its irreducibility to the teleology of the present(FP:57). “History became a modern science at the point where the break in tra-dition qualitatively separates the past from the future. . . . Since then it has beenpossible that the truth of history changes with time, or to be more exact, that his-torical truth can become outdated.”8 Koselleck credits this insight to Chladeniusand Gatterer as founders of disciplinary history in Germany: “Gatterer, forinstance, supposed that the truth of history was not everywhere the same.Historical time took on a quality creative of experience, and this showed how thepast could retrospectively be seen anew” (FP:249). That is, “history was tempo-ralized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered according to agiven present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered”(FP:250). Neither progress nor historicism, however, fully resolved the problemof historical times; they did not register that acceleration betokened a presentcompounded of many layers of time, a simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.Theoretical clarity on that score came only in more recent times.

Koselleck praises Fernand Braudel as a pioneer in conceptualizing historicalinquiry as multitemporal (Z:11). Braudel’s distinction between the short-termevent, the mid-term trend, and structures of the longue durée prompted histori-cal practice to attend to the “temporal multilayeredness of historical experience”(Z:214; tr PCH:141). Still, Braudel immediately applied his theory to practicalhistorical construction. Koselleck wants to dwell a bit longer on the transcen-dental implications (Z:304; tr PCH:6). He self-consciously situates himself in aGerman tradition of Historik and Hermeneutik which stretches back to the

7. “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of ConceptualHistory, 167.

8. “Concepts of Historical Time and Social History,” 120.

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Aufklärung but culminates in the idea of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) inHeidegger and Gadamer.9 Taking up that tradition he proposes “to carry the exis-tential analysis of Heidegger further in a direction that Heidegger himself did nothave in mind, namely to conceive how to make histories possible, whereasHeidegger contented himself with the category of historicity” (Z:110). Heidegger(and Gadamer) moved from histories to their ontological prerequisite, historici-ty. Koselleck moves in the converse direction. He proposes to extendHeidegger’s existential anthropology to establish the transcendental conditionsof possibility for historical accounts. “From an anthropological vantage, then,there exist enduring, long-term structures in which the conditions of the possi-bility of individual histories are contained and comprised” (Z:66).

The two crucial anthropological categories Koselleck employs are the “spaceof experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and the “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungs-horizont):

The compulsion to coordinate past and future so as to be able to live at all is inherent inevery human being. Put more concretely, on the one hand, every human being and everyhuman community has a space of experience out of which one acts, in which past thingsare present or can be remembered, and on the other, one always acts with reference to spe-cific horizons of expectation.10

For Koselleck these categories help to give purchase on the paradoxes latent inthe dimensions of time—present, past, and future—as well as to underwriteinterpretive “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer) with the radically alien.11

The present notoriously can collapse to a vanishing point between an onrush-ing past and an unending future, but just as plausibly it can stand as the only actu-ality, in which past and future are simply modes of possibility (Z:247). Koselleckexplores the paradoxes of the dimensions of time in relation to the key termZeitgeschichte (Z:247). Conventionally, it has meant contemporary history, his-tory of the present. But such history has always been written. Thus the term itselfraises the transcendental question of the relation of time, especially the present,to history. Koselleck believes his anthropological categories enable us to “tem-poralize” time itself, such that we can understand each of the three dimensionsof time as having temporal structures within them—for example, a present past(Koselleck’s sense of duration) or a future present (one sense of the novelty[Einmaligkeit] of an event as the sudden intrusion of change) (Z:248-249).

What Koselleck likes about his anthropological categories is that they bringthe aporetic complexities of temporality under empirical control.12 The space ofexperience is the arrayed past for a given present, and the horizon of expectation

9. In an address entitled “Historik und Hermeutik” (Z:97-118) Koselleck paid homage to histeacher Gadamer on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday, and Gadamer honored him with a reply(the only text by another author printed in Zeitschichten).

10. “Time and History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 111. 11. One can think of this as his interpretive “principle of charity” along lines similar to those of

Donald Davidson. See Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truthand Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 183-198.

12. These categories are “appropriate for the treatment of historical time because of the way thatthey embody past and future [making them] suitable for detecting historical time in the domain ofempirical research” (FP:270).

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is the cutting edge of future possibilities for any given present. Each is always inplay in every historical act or event; each is always invoked in the endeavor toaccount for that event. And each changes with time and in relation to the other.“It is the tension between experience and expectation which, in ever-changingpatterns, brings about new resolutions and through this generates historical time”(FP:275). Koselleck suggests that the space of experience and the horizon ofexpectation constitute not merely subjective contingencies but enduring, ubiqui-tous, historically accessible structures. “These two categories are indicative of ageneral human condition” (FP:270). They are metahistorical constructs “asanthropological givens, the condition of possible histories,” which we can proj-ect with robust methodological confidence to fuse horizons with the interpretiveother (FP:271). “There is no history which could be constructed independentlyof the experience and expectations of active human agents” (FP:269). Thus, “thecategories ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ claim a higher, or perhaps the highest,degree of generality, but they also claim an indispensable application. Here theyresemble, as historical categories, those of time and space” (FP:269).

With these “anthropological preconditions of possible experience,” Kosellecksketches a theory of history. History, he observes, can only be a “science ofexperience” (Z:30; tr PCH:47).13 Hence he sets out from the conceptual historyof the term Erfahrung, or experience. Jakob Grimm noted with disappointmentin the Sattelzeit that the verb erfahren, which had long carried many of the sameresonances as the Greek historein, was losing its active, interpretive dimensionand coming more and more to signify passive reception. Thus, semantically,happenstance seemed to slip loose from its comprehension (Z:27-28; tr PCH:46-46). Yet simultaneously Geschichte was coming to signify both. Moreover, Kantat that very moment was building his epistemology at the intersection of intu-ition and understanding and dubbing this alone “experience” (Z:29; tr PCH:47).Such evidence from conceptual history, in Koselleck’s view, should elicit tran-scendental reflection.

Experience and history both begin, he avers, with the event, for it occasionsthe two quintessentially historical questions: what happened? and how did itcome to that? (Z:43). What constitutes an event subjectively is surprise at novel-ty. Surprising novelty provokes the initial question: what happened? “Actual his-tory,” Koselleck writes, “is always simultaneously more and less—and seen expost facto, it is always other—than what we are capable of imagining” (Z:149; trPCH:99). But the surprise betrays prior expectations, imagined projections intothe future, calculated prognostications. “Recurrence is the presupposition of nov-elty” (Z:21). Experience is something each of us invariably gathers and sorts,precisely as a resource to forestall surprises. That is, we constantly sift eventsinto patterns of recurrence and repetition to create a “space of experience.”Without repetition there can be no knowledge; knowledge is always only recog-nition. But novelty signals disappointed anticipation, anomaly.14 A pattern gets

13. He is playing on the ambiguity in the German: Erfahrungswissenschaft generally means empir-ical science, but literally it can be read as a “science of experience.”

14. I am deliberately drawing out parallels to the thought of Thomas Kuhn here. See Kuhn, TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

disrupted, a prognosis goes awry. Such a change in experience cannot beredeemed without more methodical reflection. The second question asserts itself:how did this come to pass? We move from simply identifying what took place(the event), in a narrative of before and after, to inquiring into its conditions ofpossibility. To get to the question, how did this come to pass, tacitly we always-already consider the question, how could this come to pass? (Z:44). We formu-late hypotheses to account for the event, identifying structures within which suchevents generally arise. Now, “every event produces more and at the same timeless than is contained in its pregiven elements: hence its permanently surprisingnovelty” (FP:110). Consider the relation of an utterance to a language, a case toa code of law (Z:21-22). Such is the necessary but insufficient relation of anevent to the structures of its possibility. Still, “what really changes is far less thanthe subjectively unique surprises of participants lead us to suspect” (Z:66; trPCH:75). We are “compelled to adduce medium-range, long-term, or enduringcauses for the explanation of unique experiences” (Z:45; tr PCH:59). That is,“the question of the conditions of the possibility for a reality that is experiencedas unique leads automatically to the difference between long-term reasons andsituative causes allowing for the explanation of the event” (Z:44; tr PCH:58).“Here is the basis of a minimal commonality of all historical paths of inquirywhich permits us to speak of the unity of history [as a discipline]” (Z:47).“History is always new and replete with surprises. Nevertheless, if there are pre-dictions that turn out to be true, it follows that history is never entirely new, thatthere are evidently longer-term conditions or even enduring conditions withinwhich what is new appears” (Z:207; tr PCH:135). “These conditions—the rea-sons why something happened in this and not some other way—have first to bedefined theoretically and metahistorically, then be practiced methodologically;however, they belong as much to real history as do the unique surprises givingrise to specific, concrete histories” (Z:66; tr PCH:75).

“History contains numerous differentiable layers which each undergo changesometimes faster sometimes slower, but always with varying rates of change”(Z:238). It “only permits itself to be investigated if one keeps these different tem-poral dimensions distinct” (Z:330). The profit of thinking in terms of layers oftime is that it allows for an assessment of the “relative velocities” of the changesin these structures themselves (Z:22). But that is where the problems of histori-cal method set in. “When one thematizes long, average, and short periods oftime, it is difficult to establish causal relationships between the temporal layersthus singled out” (Z:308; tr PCH:9). “Historical times consist of several layersthat refer to each other reciprocally without being entirely dependent on oneanother” (Z:20). Each “necessitates a different methodological approach,” and“there is no complete interrelation between the levels of different temporal exten-sions” (FP:105).

It is “perplexing,” Koselleck comments, “how ‘effective forces’ come aboutand how they are reduced to subjects.” He suggests we reinterpret them as dura-tions rather than as perdurable substances, acknowledging that this “leads to atemporalization of their meaning” (Z:307; tr PCH:9). Not only are middle-range

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trends theoretical constructs, they must be acknowledged to be multiple and con-tinually mutating according to their own internal rhythms. Moreover, even “allmetahistorical categories will change into historical statements,” because themost “enduring formal criteria are themselves historically conditioned” (Z:301;tr PCH:3).

In practice, disciplinary historians rapidly recognized they needed to “create apragmatic structure for the establishment of internal order out of accidentaloccurrences” (FP:29-30). But “as soon as the historian was required to constructhis history on an artful, moral, and rational basis, he was thrown upon the meansof fiction. This in turn rendered more pressing the question of how historicalreality, to which one had to relate, might be recognized scientifically” (FP:214).“What ‘really’ happened already lies in the past, and what is reported no longercoincides with it. . . . Each retrospective interpretation feeds off the pastness ofan occurrence and seeks to articulate it anew in the present” (FP:216). Historicalpractice faces “two mutually exclusive demands: to make true statements, whileat the same time to admit and take account of the relativity of these statements”(FP:130-131).

The result is, of course, a radical historicization of the historical interpreter.“One cannot escape this subjectivity to the extent that ‘history’ (die Geschichte)constantly passes both the historian and the writing of history (die Historie) by”(Z:300; tr PCH: 3). Inevitably, “every historian remains rooted in his situation . . .observations are framed by his perspective” (Z:310; tr PCH:11). Any historicalconcept “is always realized within social and personal perspectives which bothcontain and create meaning” (FP:138). Koselleck recognizes in this perspectivismthe specter of a bottomless relativism, but he suggests a more moderate implica-tion. “This does not mean, however, that a historical event can be arbitrarily set up.The sources provide control over what might not be stated. They do not, however,prescribe what may be said” (FP:82). In short, “history is never identical with thesources that provide evidence for this history” (FP:153). Histories are alwaysunderdetermined.15 “A plurality of points of view . . . necessarily belong[s] to his-torical knowledge” (FP:139).

This perspectivism is “tolerable only if it is not stripped of its hypotheticaland, therefore, revisable character” (Z:311; tr PCH:12). This, Koselleck argues,is why “we need a theory: a theory of possible history. Such a theory is implicitin all works of historiography; it is only a matter of making it explicit” (FP:154).“Cogent reasons can be devised only within the framework of hypotheticallyintroduced premises” (Z:312; tr PCH:13). Theory, by its explicit formulation ashypothetical, delimits but in so doing secures the claim to warrant: “excludingcertain questions under certain theoretical premises makes it possible to findanswers that would otherwise not have come up” (Z:309; tr PCH:10). “Strictlyspeaking, the question of ‘how it really was’ can only be answered if one assumesthat one does not formulate res factae but res fictae,” that is, “I am forced toacknowledge the fictive character of past actualities so as to be able to theoreti-

15. The notion of the underdetermination of theories by data is a crucial feature of postpositivistepistemology sponsored by Willard van Orman Quine. See L. Laudan and J. Leplin, “EmpiricalEquivalence and Underdetermination,” Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 449-472.

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cally safeguard my historical statements” (Z:315-316; tr PCH:15-16). The moreone encounters the historicity of structure, the more tenuous even the “determi-nate historical modes of inquiry” grow when they reach out to the long-termstructures beyond any living memory, the more it is theoretical self-conscious-ness that secures the venture. Koselleck believes that the explicitness of theory,with its overt acknowledgement of fallibility, renders the contingency and fini-tude of historical practice robust. The real danger lies rather in naiveté: thepropensity of historians to claim, impossibly, either necessity or totality (Z:312,320).16

Despite recourse to artifices of language and theory in the construction of his-tories, despite the way that history adheres to forms of language and rhetoric, itis not exhausted by them. History cannot be indiscernible from fiction (Z:287).

It is not possible to deny the difference that must prevail among accounts which reportwhat has actually taken place, those which report what could have happened, those whichpropose that something might have happened, and those which dispense with any form ofreality-signal. The difficulty in distinguishing these consists only in the fact that the lin-guistic status of a historical narrative or representation does not itself unambiguouslyannounce whether it is rendering a reality or presenting mere fiction. (FP:215)

There must be some actual evidence of the period recounted; history demands“rational controls” regarding the past it constitutes: the sources do exercise atleast the right of veto (Z:288; FP:155). Koselleck has no illusions about necessi-ty or totality in historiography; he recognizes not only the inevitability of con-flicts of interpretation, but their intransigence. What he dismisses, and aptly, isradical anxiety about historical truth or the suborning of the disciplinary integri-ty of history by the claims of rhetoric (Hayden White) or textual hermeneutics(Gadamer).17 “A dual difference thus prevails: between a history in motion andits linguistic possibility and between a past history and its linguistic reproduc-tion. The determination of these differences is itself a linguistic activity, and it isthe burden of historians” (FP:232). Yet, “what actually takes place is, obviously,more than the linguistic articulation that has led to the event or that interpretsit.”18 “Between linguistic usage and the social materialities upon which itencroaches or to which it targets itself, there can always be registered a certainhiatus” (FP:85). “Geschichte and Historie, reality and its conscious processingalways point to one another, ultimately ground one another, without being com-pletely derivable one from the other” (Z:33). That hiatus, that incompletenesstheorem, that “epistemological aporia” is for Koselleck at once the challenge andthe sanction of disciplinary history.

III. THEORETICAL EXTRAPOLATIONS: HISTORICAL TIMES AND PERSPECTIVISM

What should practicing historians make of Koselleck’s idea of historical times?He suggests that the crucial experiential/empirical indicators of historical times

16. See also “Concepts of Historical Time and Social History,” 117.17. See his cogent review of Hayden White in The Practice of Conceptual History, 38-44, and his

lecture in honor of Gadamer, “Historik und Hermeneutik” (Z:97-118).18. “Social History and Conceptual History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 24.

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are to be found in acceleration and retardation, in the “simultaneity of the nonsi-multaneous.” “We encounter ruptures in our experience with a rapidity that wasnot registered by earlier centuries in the same manner. Therewith, historians facethe task posed by modernity to recognize the total otherness of the past (völligeAndersartigkeit der Vergangenheit)” (Z:297). It is pretty clear that we do experi-ence acceleration and its attendant incongruities.19 But what Koselleck’s theoryof historical times in fact should mean is that there is no “total otherness of thepast,” nothing like total incommensurability, but instead stratum upon stratum ofthe past flows in and through the present at varying velocities, and it is precise-ly the historical craft to “drill down” to reach back.

Koselleck offers a striking example. He refers to three “exponential curves” ofhistorical time (Z:90-96). The one stretches back millions of years into theearth’s geological history, but only in the last segment is there a sudden prolifer-ation of life forms. Within the evolution of these life forms Koselleck finds hissecond exponential curve: the millions of years of life before man suddenlyexplodes upon the scene. And there Koselleck locates his third curve: after mil-lions of years of homo sapiens there suddenly proliferate, in the last three thou-sand years, all the historical civilizations. If natural time is the independent vari-able of these exponential curves, what exactly are we to term the dependent vari-able? The acceleration in the curve betokens an intensity of experiential change,a density of emergent forms that transfigures the chronological regularity of nat-ural time: this is the marrow of Koselleck’s notion of historical time.

The discipline of history permits us to disaggregate the simultaneity of thenonsimultaneous into its temporal stratification, into the distinct tempos accord-ing to which each sedimentation structures a given moment. It may require dif-ferent theories to register and to interpret each of these, and these methodologi-cal as well as substantive differences will certainly preclude any “total history,”any complete accounting. Still, we are empowered to make better accounts ofwhat happens, to extract more meaning from contingency. With concepts like“conjuncture” and “crisis,” we can orchestrate the temporal layers of a momentof time to grasp more fully the synchrony of systemic change with short-termhappenstance. What Koselleck theorizes, what Braudel constructed, allows amore sophisticated historical accounting. For example, Peter Galison, in thedomain of history of science, has disputed the “central metaphor” of autonomousparadigms (or epistemes) divided by total ruptures, as Kuhn (or Foucault) had it,arguing instead that we need to register the varying flows of historical change (intheories, in experimental regimens, in instrumentation) as we might think of theintercalated rows of bricks that make up a wall and give it the strength not tocrack all the way down at one juncture.20 That strikes me as a powerful exampleof the concrete relevance of Koselleck’s notion of historical times for currentpractice.

19. Koselleck is persuasive when he observes, “there is every reason to believe that more andmore experiences had actually accumulated in shorter and shorter amounts of time” (“The EighteenthCentury as the Beginning of Modernity,” 164).

20. Peter Galison, “History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor,” Science in Context 2 (1988),197-212.

Most appealing for practicing historians is the measure to which Koselleck’sformal theory of historical time points ultimately to periodization as the funda-mental theoretical domain for historical practice. “I assume that metahistoricaland historical categories will be forced to converge in the question of periodiza-tion” (Z:302; tr PCH:4). The immediate source and the ultimate application ofKoselleck’s formal theory of historical time, his notion of “layers of time” is ulti-mately “the determination of epochs and doctrines of specific eras which precip-itate and overlap in quite different ways, according to the particular areas underconsideration” (FP:xxiii). While, as I will note in conclusion, Koselleck hassomething important to say about the epistemological aporias of historicalinquiry, he also has something very useful to contribute to the practice of con-structing historical accounts. He places theory within the discipline of history,demonstrating again and again how from the very beginning it has been thisstruggle to articulate historical time that has constituted our discipline.

The flip-side of these ongoing pasts in the present is the ontic absence of thepast in itself, and the consequence that history is cast necessarily upon the arti-fices of its theorization to retrieve what the past meant. The past—those mid-leveltrends and long-term structures which alone allow us purchase on the happen-stance of a novel event—is accessible to us, as Koselleck would have it, not pri-marily in its “traces,” in the various “sources” we can tangibly access, but ratherin our theories. “A systemic change transcending persons and generations . . . canonly be captured retrospectively through historical reflection, . . . can only begrasped through specific techniques of historical questioning . . . Long-termchange is not at all perceptible without historical methods.” Indeed, one mightsay “historical science plays a constitutive role in integrating the long-term trans-formations of experience into individual experience” (Z:39-40; tr PCH:54-55).

Koselleck is a distinctly modern philosopher of history in accentuating the his-toricization of the historical interpreter, not simply the otherness of the object ofhistorical study. His starting point is the dismissal of the longstanding but hope-less ambition of historians, at least through Ranke, to “let the facts speak forthemselves,” to efface the active intervention of interpretation (FP:132-133).That naiveté is lost to us, but it is not the only sense of Ranke’s classic phrase,wie es eigentlich gewesen. This historical mandate is not annulled, but onlynuanced. There are, we now recognize, always several ways it might have been,several coherent interpretations, each consistent with the evidence and the cur-rently available arsenal of methods. And since new evidence and above all newmethods constantly turn up, seemingly with the mere passage of time, and cer-tainly with the mutation of interest, interpretations inevitably proliferate. Henceunderdetermination; hence perspectivism. But it is equally important to registerthat there are many ways the past cannot have been, and even among the possi-ble ways that remain, not all are equally plausible. The proliferation of evidenceand above all of methodological constraints in fact bears ever more rigorously onpractice, and the disciplinary community of historians can use this very effec-tively, if never definitively, to discriminate more from less compelling interpre-tations. If history began with participant testimony recounting a surprising and

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monumental event (Aufschreiben), it attained disciplinary rigor only in thecourse of its theoretically and temporally motivated revisionism (Umschreiben).Yet such revisionism, however rampant, can never simply annul the interpretivestructures hitherto accumulated as history (Fortschreiben), but only bracket someto enable the critical reconsideration of others (Z:41-66; tr PCH:56-75).21 “Noteverything can be ‘revised’ [at least at the same time]. But wherever any revi-sionism takes place, new methods must be on offer” (Z:53). Understanding his-tory as theoretical construction both affirms the continuity and coherence of thedisciplinary practice and allows for its internal contestations.

In short, robust historicism need not be crippled by a hyperbolic skepticism:total incommensurability is preposterous, and local incommensurability is sur-mountable.22 “Fusion of horizons,” to invoke Gadamer’s hermeneutic terminol-ogy, is methodically achieved on a regular basis, especially when we consider thedisciplinary community and not individual scholarship. Koselleck’s emphaticstress on the situatedness of the interpreter, with all its contingency and fallibili-ty, can be reinterpreted as an inevitable and serviceable starting point for a theo-ry of knowledge as learning, building from the concrete and immediate tenta-tively onward, displacing a theory of knowledge that had us, after Plato, chasingvainly after some sun of timeless truth. A moderate (Deweyan) Hegelianism,dialectically probing the parameters of our situated knowledge-claims, encoun-tering and “fusing” with what lies beyond that horizon to form wider and widercircles of integration: such a model of a non-foundationalist, naturalist histori-cism seems far more fitting a theory for the discipline of history.23

JOHN ZAMMITO

Rice University

21. It is useful here to think of Quine’s “web of belief” and his perennial invocation of “Neurath’sboat” (see W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. [New York: Random House, 1978]).I propose Koselleck’s historicism can be aligned with this epistemological naturalism.

22. See Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” 23. For an elaboration of this Deweyan Hegelianism, see Thomas Nickles, “Good Science as Bad

History,” in The Social Dimension of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre DameUniversity Press, 1992), 85-129. For an extended study of the emergence of such a moderate (natu-ralist) historicism within the history and philosophy of science, see my forthcoming study, A NiceDerangement of Epistemes: Postpositivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2003).