The Concept of "Historical Time" and Its Limits

In the preface of Futures Past, Koselleck indicates that the aim of these essays is to deal with “the relation of a given past to a given future” through different times in history. This review will try to articulate Koselleck’s central idea of “historical time”, and to examine Koselleck’s understanding of temporality as such. Finally, by examining how Francis Hartog develops certain idea of Koselleck in Regimes of Historicity, further questions about Koselleck’s treatment of history will be raised.

For Koselleck, “historical time” is an entity rather than an empty definition. It is articulated in the essay “Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”. Koselleck distinguishes two levels of historical knowledge. The first level is what has already been articulated in language in its own time, and the second level is to be achieved with the assistance of hypotheses and methods by the historian who uses concepts to construct the historical knowledge. “Experience” and “expectation” are Koselleck’s concepts on the second level. They are a more sophisticated way of expressing what we normally call “past” and “future”, and the relation between them is asymmetrical, as indicated by the difference between the “space” of experience and the “horizon” of expectation.

According to Koselleck, knowledge of historical time is possible because those two concepts are somehow meta-historical, that we detect them as the fundamental lenses through which people in different times understand temporality. But on the other hand, although experience and expectation are “merely formal categories”, they also have a history themselves: this is why Koselleck thinks the “historical time” is an entity.

As meta-historical concepts, experience and expectation are treated by Koselleck as the universal mental structure that human beings understand temporality with. Experience is the present past, while expectations is future made present. They are irreducible to other temporal concepts or each other. Expectation cannot be experienced. “it is the tension between experience and expectation which, in ever-changing patterns, brings about new resolutions, and through this generates historical time.” (p. 275)

It is here that we find Koselleck’s understanding of the historical change of temporality: the tension between experience and expectation. As long as they no longer match, a new temporality will be called for to replace the dysfunctional one with a new relationship between experience and expectation. For example, “the eschatology could be reproduced to the extent that and as long as the space of experience on this world did not itself change fundamentally.” (p. 278), and the idea of “progress” makes our horizon of expectation far separated with the space of experience, driving historical time into a new mode of temporality.

The first two essays of Futures Past could be seen as the examples of such historical change of the understanding of temporality, through detecting different modes of relationship between experience and expectation. For example, when dealing with the emergence of a new consciousness of time in the shadows of absolutist politics, he both articulates the new temporality, which is a new relationship between past and future. Within such relationship “future transcends all the predictable, natural experience. He also explains how this relationship comes into being. It comes from the tension between the expectation of soteriology and the experience embedded in the absolute state that fails to match the expectation.

Now it is clear what Koselleck means by the “historical time”. It is the experience-expectation meta-historical structure of temporality that shifts through history, driven by the tension between experience and expectation. This framework is capable of explaining different temporalities and why they shift, but the explanatory tool “tension” is not meant to give any deeper historical explanation. In other words, Koselleck provides an archeology of temporality with a minor effort on justifying the shifting from one layer to another, but he does not aim to provide a theory on why the shifting of temporality as such happens. In this sense, he is far from Hegel and more intimate to Dilthey, as they both have the undertaking of establishing a somehow transcendental structure for “temporality” to be treated as such. Dilthey aims to prove the possibility of historical knowledge by examining the shared temporal structural of history and of life itself, while Koselleck intuitively takes experience and expectation as the basic structure for temporality and locates them in real histories, depicting different modes of temporality and its changes. In both cases, history itself is not interpreted. It is treated as something that allows temporality to happen and shift.

A potential tension within Koselleck’s framework of a meta-historical layer within a historical flux lies in the accountability of the a-historical structure of experience-expectation. Replacing the common concept set of “past-present-future” to “experience-expectation”, It could be detected that the temporality for Koselleck is a temporality of the present, looking back and forth. In other words, this structure is not merely formal, but it has an implicit content: temporality is temporality for the present. In what sense is this metahistorical structure metahistorical? Without a concrete argument on the fundamental structure, like Dilthey or Heidegger would provide, the experience-expectation structure of temporality itself might be in danger of losing its state as metahistorical. Hartog avoids such accusation in his Regimes of Historicity, where he radicalizes Koselleck’s project. The tool of “regimes of historicity” presupposes no a-historical structures of temporality like experience-expectation. The aim of research is simply to “explore ways of being in time” (p. 9), in order to examine the temporality for us: presentism. It might be interesting to think whether Koselleck’s implicit inclination is a form of presentism when he sets the structure of experience-expectation as the meta-historical, or such structure could be justified through other approaches as the universal temporality.