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History and Theory 43 (February 2004), 124-135

Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

KOSELLECKS 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 a long time to emerge: time has a history, and history its time.2 These are Kosellecks core notions. He is a practitioner of what in German is called Historikconventionally, methodology of history, but in his definition the study of the conditions of possible histories (Z:99). The transcendental argot is intentional. Koselleck distinguishes explicitly between theory of possible history and historical science and its methods (Z:339). His concern liesat least in the work here under considerationoverweeningly with the former. As the title of one of his most important essays states explicitly, Koselleck is convinced of 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 interpretation 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 substantive theories from the various social sciences that historians have borrowed to 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 historical inquiry. Koselleck believes history has gained much from the first sense, but it is the second that galvanizes his attention. The social sciences typically derive 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 translations 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) and Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, transl. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). References to Futures Past will be noted parenthetically in the text as FP:[p]. When translations of the material in Zeitschichten are provided in The Practice of Conceptual History, the parenthetical reference will include a reference to the translation in the form of: tr PCH:[p]. Essays in The Practice of Conceptual History not included 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.

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of the question for history. History embraces, potentially, every object (Z:301; tr PCH:4).4 What is the recourse, then? If we, as historians, want to develop a genuine theory which would distinguish itself from those of the general social sciences, then it must obviously be a theory that makes it possible to take into account a transformation in temporal experience (Z:324). That is, a theory of the possibility of history as a discipline depends upon a transcendental inquiry into the possibility of historical timeor rather, times. Historical times arise out of natural time but are not reducible to it (Z:10). For one thing, time in itself is not intuitable (anschaulich); we are forced always to reckon it via motion in space. Representations of time, as a result, prove inevitably metaphorical (Z:305; tr PCH:7). Kant, as Koselleck notes on several occasions, recognized this intractability in intuiting time in itself, though he kept trying 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 of history as a discipline, disavowed utterly the singularity of time, insisting that there were many timesas many as there were objects, for each constituted its own time (Z:20; FP:xxii; 247). Of course, naturally elapsed timea rotation of earth, a revolution about the sun, and so onremains necessary for Koselleck as a chronological measuring scale. But historical time has quite a different character. Each according to the chosen thematic, historians recognize, deposited in and about one another, different passages of time which reveal different tempos of change (Z:295). That is the purport of the concept Zeitschichten (layers of time): metaphorically it gestures, like its geological model, towards several levels of time [Zeitebenen] of differing duration and differentiable origin, which are nonetheless present and effectual at the same time (Z:9). The concept is synonymous, Koselleck notes, with the phrase Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen (the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous) (Z:9). There are different layers of the tempos of change that we must theoretically distinguish in order to be able to measure uniqueness and persistence with regard to each other (Z:207; tr PCH:135). Just this taking into account the multilayeredness of historical courses of time is what constitutes the theoretical possibility of historical accounts (Z:217; tr PCH:143). For Koselleck, such a formal construction always already presupposes and affirms a historical emergence: the theory of history recapitulates the practice of historiography. Historical knowledge always is simultaneously the history of historical science (FP:144). Koselleck insists that his transcendental inquiry must illuminate historians from Herodotus and Thucydides forward, and their practices must confirm his transcendental inquiry. Without this mutual constitution there can be no disciplinary coherence to history. Over more than thirty years, Koselleck has been distilling and redistilling this notion of historical times as his key to a theoretical grasp of the possibility of history. The volume Zeitschichten was conceived as the representative collection of his essays in that vein. For the reader who can access his work only in English,
4. History as a science has, as it is known, no epistemological object proper to itself; rather, it shares this object with all social and human sciences. History as a scientific discourse is specified only by its methods . . . [T]he question of temporal structures serves to theoretically open the genuine domain of our investigation (FP:93).

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it is highly fortunate that, via the earlier translation of his fundamental Futures Past, supplemented by the more recent translations in The Practice of Conceptual History, most of his key essays are directly accessible. What makes Zeitschichten distinctive as a volume is Kosellecks effort to bring thematic order to these essays spanning decades. A veritable literary hedgehog, Koselleck worries his big idea over and over again. The repetitiousness cries out for condensation, but the resulting kernel deserves something more: theoretical reflection. In what follows, I wish first to boil Kosellecks many essays down to a core argument. Then I wish to draw some theoretical implications.
II. KOSELLECKS THEORY OF HISTORICAL TIMES

In Futures Past Koselleck made the historical claim that the very idea of history underwent a decisive shift between 1750 and 1850, a period he dubbed the Sattelzeit.5 Semantically, in the Sattelzeit the word Geschichte swallowed up the word for a historical account, Historie. The one word now signified both reality and representation. In that same moment, philosophy of history emerged. So did the disciplinary practice of history (in Germany), led by such figures as Chladenius and Gatterer, out of which Historik, as the theoretical self-reflection of that discipline, took shape. Its centerpiece was the endeavor to constitute periodization out of immanent historical principles (Z:289; 322). At the core of the Sattelzeit was the encounter with a new time (neue Zeit; Neuzeit), modernity. Neuzeit is first understood as a neue Zeit from the time that expectations have distanced 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 historical times.6 The idea of time altered dramatically in the Sattelzeit, and the result transfigured the idea of history: Time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place; it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right (FP:246). Prior to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Europeans relied unhesitatingly upon the always-already guaranteed futurity of the past (FP:17). That was the meaning of the topos historia magistra vitae: Precisely because nothing fundamentally new would arise, it was quite possible to draw conclusions from the past for the future (FP:203). Then, in the Sattelzeit, the topos dissolved in the face of a new time. Literally, of course, time cannot be new, or, more precisely, it makes no sense to think of natural time as new (Z:238). But that is the point: something about the experience of time had altered, namely the emergence of a future that transcended 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 simili5. Much of the concrete practice of Begriffsgeschichte, with which his name is virtually synonymous, consists in documenting this massive shift. 6. He offers one exemplary bit of evidence from German lexical history: before 1750 there had emerged some 216 compound words involving time (Zeit). Between 1750 and 1850, some 342 new ones 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 unpredictability annulled the present utility of past experience. Historical experience descending from the past could no longer be directly extended to the future (FP:281). New time was experienced as acceleration: it abbreviated the space of experiences, robbed them of their constancy, and continually brought into play new, unknown factors (FP:17). This occasioned a crisis: the acceleration of history obstructed the historian in his profession (FP:150). Lorenz Stein observed: It is as if the 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 the future, [and] the mind of man wanders in obscurity (FP:27). The radicality of the future, experienced in the present as acceleration in time, sundered the present from its once-accessible past: It became a rule that all previous experience might not count against the possible otherness of the future (FP:280). The concept that ordered these new experiences was progress (Z:323). It privileged the unknown future over against the past, but at the same time it estranged the past in a radical way, rendering this sense of its inevitable otherness a core to the practice of disciplinary history. Once new experiences, supposedly never had by anyone until then, were registered in ones own history, it was also possible to conceive of the past in its fundamental otherness.7 Thus it was progress that engendered nineteenth-century Historismus, with its insistence on the uniqueness 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 tradition qualitatively separates the past from the future. . . . Since then it has been possible that the truth of history changes with time, or to be more exact, that historical truth can become outdated.8 Koselleck credits this insight to Chladenius and Gatterer as founders of disciplinary history in Germany: Gatterer, for instance, supposed that the truth of history was not everywhere the same. Historical time took on a quality creative of experience, and this showed how the past could retrospectively be seen anew (FP:249). That is, history was temporalized in the sense that, thanks to the passing of time, it altered according to a given present, and with growing distance the nature of the past also altered (FP:250). Neither progress nor historicism, however, fully resolved the problem of historical times; they did not register that acceleration betokened a present compounded 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 historical inquiry as multitemporal (Z:11). Braudels distinction between the short-term event, the mid-term trend, and structures of the longue dure prompted historical practice to attend to the temporal multilayeredness of historical experience (Z:214; tr PCH:141). Still, Braudel immediately applied his theory to practical historical construction. Koselleck wants to dwell a bit longer on the transcendental implications (Z:304; tr PCH:6). He self-consciously situates himself in a German tradition of Historik and Hermeneutik which stretches back to the
7. The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity, in The Practice of Conceptual History, 167. 8. Concepts of Historical Time and Social History, 120.

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Aufklrung but culminates in the idea of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) in Heidegger and Gadamer.9 Taking up that tradition he proposes to carry the existential analysis of Heidegger further in a direction that Heidegger himself did not have in mind, namely to conceive how to make histories possible, whereas Heidegger contented himself with the category of historicity (Z:110). Heidegger (and Gadamer) moved from histories to their ontological prerequisite, historicity. Koselleck moves in the converse direction. He proposes to extend Heideggers existential anthropology to establish the transcendental conditions of possibility for historical accounts. From an anthropological vantage, then, there exist enduring, long-term structures in which the conditions of the possibility of individual histories are contained and comprised (Z:66). The two crucial anthropological categories Koselleck employs are the space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont):
The compulsion to coordinate past and future so as to be able to live at all is inherent in every human being. Put more concretely, on the one hand, every human being and every human community has a space of experience out of which one acts, in which past things are present or can be remembered, and on the other, one always acts with reference to specific horizons of expectation.10

For Koselleck these categories help to give purchase on the paradoxes latent in the dimensions of timepresent, past, and futureas well as to underwrite interpretive fusion of horizons (Gadamer) with the radically alien.11 The present notoriously can collapse to a vanishing point between an onrushing past and an unending future, but just as plausibly it can stand as the only actuality, in which past and future are simply modes of possibility (Z:247). Koselleck explores the paradoxes of the dimensions of time in relation to the key term Zeitgeschichte (Z:247). Conventionally, it has meant contemporary history, history of the present. But such history has always been written. Thus the term itself raises the transcendental question of the relation of time, especially the present, to history. Koselleck believes his anthropological categories enable us to temporalize time itself, such that we can understand each of the three dimensions of time as having temporal structures within themfor example, a present past (Kosellecks 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 bring the aporetic complexities of temporality under empirical control.12 The space of experience 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 his teacher 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 Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 183-198. 12. These categories are appropriate for the treatment of historical time because of the way that they embody past and future [making them] suitable for detecting historical time in the domain of empirical research (FP:270).

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is the cutting edge of future possibilities for any given present. Each is always in play in every historical act or event; each is always invoked in the endeavor to account 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-changing patterns, brings about new resolutions and through this generates historical time (FP:275). Koselleck suggests that the space of experience and the horizon of expectation constitute not merely subjective contingencies but enduring, ubiquitous, historically accessible structures. These two categories are indicative of a general human condition (FP:270). They are metahistorical constructs as anthropological givens, the condition of possible histories, which we can project with robust methodological confidence to fuse horizons with the interpretive other (FP:271). There is no history which could be constructed independently of the experience and expectations of active human agents (FP:269). Thus, the categories experience and expectation claim a higher, or perhaps the highest, degree of generality, but they also claim an indispensable application. Here they resemble, as historical categories, those of time and space (FP:269). With these anthropological preconditions of possible experience, Koselleck sketches a theory of history. History, he observes, can only be a science of experience (Z:30; tr PCH:47).13 Hence he sets out from the conceptual history of the term Erfahrung, or experience. Jakob Grimm noted with disappointment in the Sattelzeit that the verb erfahren, which had long carried many of the same resonances as the Greek historein, was losing its active, interpretive dimension and coming more and more to signify passive reception. Thus, semantically, happenstance seemed to slip loose from its comprehension (Z:27-28; tr PCH:4646). Yet simultaneously Geschichte was coming to signify both. Moreover, Kant at that very moment was building his epistemology at the intersection of intuition and understanding and dubbing this alone experience (Z:29; tr PCH:47). Such evidence from conceptual history, in Kosellecks view, should elicit transcendental reflection. Experience and history both begin, he avers, with the event, for it occasions the two quintessentially historical questions: what happened? and how did it come to that? (Z:43). What constitutes an event subjectively is surprise at novelty. Surprising novelty provokes the initial question: what happened? Actual history, Koselleck writes, is always simultaneously more and lessand seen ex post facto, it is always otherthan what we are capable of imagining (Z:149; tr PCH:99). But the surprise betrays prior expectations, imagined projections into the future, calculated prognostications. Recurrence is the presupposition of novelty (Z:21). Experience is something each of us invariably gathers and sorts, precisely as a resource to forestall surprises. That is, we constantly sift events into patterns of recurrence and repetition to create a space of experience. Without repetition there can be no knowledge; knowledge is always only recognition. But novelty signals disappointed anticipation, anomaly.14 A pattern gets
13. He is playing on the ambiguity in the German: Erfahrungswissenschaft generally means empirical 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, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

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disrupted, a prognosis goes awry. Such a change in experience cannot be redeemed 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 of possibility. To get to the question, how did this come to pass, tacitly we alwaysalready consider the question, how could this come to pass? (Z:44). We formulate hypotheses to account for the event, identifying structures within which such events generally arise. Now, every event produces more and at the same time less than is contained in its pregiven elements: hence its permanently surprising novelty (FP:110). Consider the relation of an utterance to a language, a case to a code of law (Z:21-22). Such is the necessary but insufficient relation of an event to the structures of its possibility. Still, what really changes is far less than the subjectively unique surprises of participants lead us to suspect (Z:66; tr PCH:75). We are compelled to adduce medium-range, long-term, or enduring causes 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 experienced as unique leads automatically to the difference between long-term reasons and situative 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 inquiry which 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 predictions that turn out to be true, it follows that history is never entirely new, that there are evidently longer-term conditions or even enduring conditions within which what is new appears (Z:207; tr PCH:135). These conditionsthe reasons why something happened in this and not some other wayhave first to be defined theoretically and metahistorically, then be practiced methodologically; however, they belong as much to real history as do the unique surprises giving rise to specific, concrete histories (Z:66; tr PCH:75). History contains numerous differentiable layers which each undergo change sometimes faster sometimes slower, but always with varying rates of change (Z:238). It only permits itself to be investigated if one keeps these different temporal dimensions distinct (Z:330). The profit of thinking in terms of layers of time is that it allows for an assessment of the relative velocities of the changes in these structures themselves (Z:22). But that is where the problems of historical method set in. When one thematizes long, average, and short periods of time, it is difficult to establish causal relationships between the temporal layers thus singled out (Z:308; tr PCH:9). Historical times consist of several layers that refer to each other reciprocally without being entirely dependent on one another (Z:20). Each necessitates a different methodological approach, and there is no complete interrelation between the levels of different temporal extensions (FP:105). It is perplexing, Koselleck comments, how effective forces come about and how they are reduced to subjects. He suggests we reinterpret them as durations rather than as perdurable substances, acknowledging that this leads to a temporalization 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 continually mutating according to their own internal rhythms. Moreover, even all metahistorical categories will change into historical statements, because the most enduring formal criteria are themselves historically conditioned (Z:301; tr PCH:3). In practice, disciplinary historians rapidly recognized they needed to create a pragmatic structure for the establishment of internal order out of accidental occurrences (FP:29-30). But as soon as the historian was required to construct his history on an artful, moral, and rational basis, he was thrown upon the means of fiction. This in turn rendered more pressing the question of how historical reality, 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 longer coincides with it. . . . Each retrospective interpretation feeds off the pastness of an occurrence and seeks to articulate it anew in the present (FP:216). Historical practice faces two mutually exclusive demands: to make true statements, while at 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 historical concept is always realized within social and personal perspectives which both contain and create meaning (FP:138). Koselleck recognizes in this perspectivism the specter of a bottomless relativism, but he suggests a more moderate implication. 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 the sources that provide evidence for this history (FP:153). Histories are always underdetermined.15 A plurality of points of view . . . necessarily belong[s] to historical knowledge (FP:139). This perspectivism is tolerable only if it is not stripped of its hypothetical and, 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 implicit in 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 hypothetically introduced premises (Z:312; tr PCH:13). Theory, by its explicit formulation as hypothetical, delimits but in so doing secures the claim to warrant: excluding certain questions under certain theoretical premises makes it possible to find answers that would otherwise not have come up (Z:309; tr PCH:10). Strictly speaking, the question of how it really was can only be answered if one assumes that one does not formulate res factae but res fictae, that is, I am forced to acknowledge the fictive character of past actualities so as to be able to theoreti15. The notion of the underdetermination of theories by data is a crucial feature of postpositivist epistemology sponsored by Willard van Orman Quine. See L. Laudan and J. Leplin, Empirical Equivalence 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 more one encounters the historicity of structure, the more tenuous even the determinate historical modes of inquiry grow when they reach out to the long-term structures beyond any living memory, the more it is theoretical self-consciousness that secures the venture. Koselleck believes that the explicitness of theory, with its overt acknowledgement of fallibility, renders the contingency and finitude of historical practice robust. The real danger lies rather in naivet: the propensity 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 histories, despite the way that history adheres to forms of language and rhetoric, it is 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 report what has actually taken place, those which report what could have happened, those which propose that something might have happened, and those which dispense with any form of reality-signal. The difficulty in distinguishing these consists only in the fact that the linguistic status of a historical narrative or representation does not itself unambiguously announce 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 at least the right of veto (Z:288; FP:155). Koselleck has no illusions about necessity or totality in historiography; he recognizes not only the inevitability of conflicts of interpretation, but their intransigence. What he dismisses, and aptly, is radical anxiety about historical truth or the suborning of the disciplinary integrity of history by the claims of rhetoric (Hayden White) or textual hermeneutics (Gadamer).17 A dual difference thus prevails: between a history in motion and its linguistic possibility and between a past history and its linguistic reproduction. The determination of these differences is itself a linguistic activity, and it is the 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 interprets it.18 Between linguistic usage and the social materialities upon which it encroaches or to which it targets itself, there can always be registered a certain hiatus (FP:85). Geschichte and Historie, reality and its conscious processing always point to one another, ultimately ground one another, without being completely derivable one from the other (Z:33). That hiatus, that incompleteness theorem, that epistemological aporia is for Koselleck at once the challenge and the sanction of disciplinary history.
III. THEORETICAL EXTRAPOLATIONS: HISTORICAL TIMES AND PERSPECTIVISM

What should practicing historians make of Kosellecks 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 nonsimultaneous. We encounter ruptures in our experience with a rapidity that was not registered by earlier centuries in the same manner. Therewith, historians face the task posed by modernity to recognize the total otherness of the past (vllige Andersartigkeit der Vergangenheit) (Z:297). It is pretty clear that we do experience acceleration and its attendant incongruities.19 But what Kosellecks theory of historical times in fact should mean is that there is no total otherness of the past, nothing like total incommensurability, but instead stratum upon stratum of the past flows in and through the present at varying velocities, and it is precisely the historical craft to drill down to reach back. Koselleck offers a striking example. He refers to three exponential curves of historical time (Z:90-96). The one stretches back millions of years into the earths geological history, but only in the last segment is there a sudden proliferation of life forms. Within the evolution of these life forms Koselleck finds his second exponential curve: the millions of years of life before man suddenly explodes upon the scene. And there Koselleck locates his third curve: after millions of years of homo sapiens there suddenly proliferate, in the last three thousand years, all the historical civilizations. If natural time is the independent variable of these exponential curves, what exactly are we to term the dependent variable? The acceleration in the curve betokens an intensity of experiential change, a density of emergent forms that transfigures the chronological regularity of natural time: this is the marrow of Kosellecks notion of historical time. The discipline of history permits us to disaggregate the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous into its temporal stratification, into the distinct tempos according to which each sedimentation structures a given moment. It may require different theories to register and to interpret each of these, and these methodological as well as substantive differences will certainly preclude any total history, any complete accounting. Still, we are empowered to make better accounts of what happens, to extract more meaning from contingency. With concepts like conjuncture and crisis, we can orchestrate the temporal layers of a moment of time to grasp more fully the synchrony of systemic change with short-term happenstance. What Koselleck theorizes, what Braudel constructed, allows a more sophisticated historical accounting. For example, Peter Galison, in the domain of history of science, has disputed the central metaphor of autonomous paradigms (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 (in theories, in experimental regimens, in instrumentation) as we might think of the intercalated rows of bricks that make up a wall and give it the strength not to crack all the way down at one juncture.20 That strikes me as a powerful example of the concrete relevance of Kosellecks notion of historical times for current practice.
19. Koselleck is persuasive when he observes, there is every reason to believe that more and more experiences had actually accumulated in shorter and shorter amounts of time (The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity, 164). 20. Peter Galison, History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor, Science in Context 2 (1988), 197-212.

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Most appealing for practicing historians is the measure to which Kosellecks formal theory of historical time points ultimately to periodization as the fundamental theoretical domain for historical practice. I assume that metahistorical and historical categories will be forced to converge in the question of periodization (Z:302; tr PCH:4). The immediate source and the ultimate application of Kosellecks formal theory of historical time, his notion of layers of time is ultimately the determination of epochs and doctrines of specific eras which precipitate and overlap in quite different ways, according to the particular areas under consideration (FP:xxiii). While, as I will note in conclusion, Koselleck has something important to say about the epistemological aporias of historical inquiry, he also has something very useful to contribute to the practice of constructing historical accounts. He places theory within the discipline of history, demonstrating again and again how from the very beginning it has been this struggle to articulate historical time that has constituted our discipline. The flip-side of these ongoing pasts in the present is the ontic absence of the past in itself, and the consequence that history is cast necessarily upon the artifices of its theorization to retrieve what the past meant. The pastthose mid-level trends and long-term structures which alone allow us purchase on the happenstance of a novel eventis accessible to us, as Koselleck would have it, not primarily in its traces, in the various sources we can tangibly access, but rather in our theories. A systemic change transcending persons and generations . . . can only be captured retrospectively through historical reflection, . . . can only be grasped through specific techniques of historical questioning . . . Long-term change is not at all perceptible without historical methods. Indeed, one might say historical science plays a constitutive role in integrating the long-term transformations of experience into individual experience (Z:39-40; tr PCH:54-55). Koselleck is a distinctly modern philosopher of history in accentuating the historicization of the historical interpreter, not simply the otherness of the object of historical study. His starting point is the dismissal of the longstanding but hopeless ambition of historians, at least through Ranke, to let the facts speak for themselves, to efface the active intervention of interpretation (FP:132-133). That naivet is lost to us, but it is not the only sense of Rankes classic phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen. This historical mandate is not annulled, but only nuanced. There are, we now recognize, always several ways it might have been, several coherent interpretations, each consistent with the evidence and the currently available arsenal of methods. And since new evidence and above all new methods constantly turn up, seemingly with the mere passage of time, and certainly with the mutation of interest, interpretations inevitably proliferate. Hence underdetermination; hence perspectivism. But it is equally important to register that there are many ways the past cannot have been, and even among the possible ways that remain, not all are equally plausible. The proliferation of evidence and above all of methodological constraints in fact bears ever more rigorously on practice, and the disciplinary community of historians can use this very effectively, if never definitively, to discriminate more from less compelling interpretations. If history began with participant testimony recounting a surprising and

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monumental event (Aufschreiben), it attained disciplinary rigor only in the course of its theoretically and temporally motivated revisionism (Umschreiben). Yet such revisionism, however rampant, can never simply annul the interpretive structures hitherto accumulated as history (Fortschreiben), but only bracket some to enable the critical reconsideration of others (Z:41-66; tr PCH:56-75).21 Not everything can be revised [at least at the same time]. But wherever any revisionism takes place, new methods must be on offer (Z:53). Understanding history as theoretical construction both affirms the continuity and coherence of the disciplinary 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 surmountable.22 Fusion of horizons, to invoke Gadamers hermeneutic terminology, is methodically achieved on a regular basis, especially when we consider the disciplinary community and not individual scholarship. Kosellecks emphatic stress on the situatedness of the interpreter, with all its contingency and fallibility, can be reinterpreted as an inevitable and serviceable starting point for a theory of knowledge as learning, building from the concrete and immediate tentatively onward, displacing a theory of knowledge that had us, after Plato, chasing vainly after some sun of timeless truth. A moderate (Deweyan) Hegelianism, dialectically probing the parameters of our situated knowledge-claims, encountering and fusing with what lies beyond that horizon to form wider and wider circles of integration: such a model of a non-foundationalist, naturalist historicism seems far more fitting a theory for the discipline of history.23 JOHN ZAMMITO Rice University

21. It is useful here to think of Quines web of belief and his perennial invocation of Neuraths boat (see W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. [New York: Random House, 1978]). I propose Kosellecks 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 Dame University Press, 1992), 85-129. For an extended study of the emergence of such a moderate (naturalist) historicism within the history and philosophy of science, see my forthcoming study, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Postpositivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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