Notes of Koselleck’s Futures Past (Part I&II)

（没写我觉得有点水的第4，11章，懒）

1

In ancient times the concept of the future was primarily monopolized by religious powers in the forms of eschatological doctrines, with its concomitant extensions of astrology, prophets, and myths that govern the foretelling of national fate. Under Christian eschatology, the elongation of time is profanely meaningless and therefore uncounted, not until the final moment of Judgement Day that soteriology announced when God trialed all good and evil of human deeds thereby determining salvation. Future is infinitely compressed into singularity heterogeneous from secularity.

However, due to the Reformation, churches were banished into their seclusion of religious affairs and could no longer intervene in the newly excavated realm of secular politics, peace between states, international relationships, etc. There separated the fate, e.g. the future, of divinity and secularity, the latter which demanded itself a new evaluation of the interweaving scale of time and events. Political issues demand political prognosis.

What came after the separation of church and state is the replacement of salvation history by earthly history and earthly view of the future in two legs: one the rational prognosis to the short-term development of a state, and the other the philosophy of history. The former which inherited the task to predict the future outcomes of political affairs, the latter which is granted the crown as summa of history, that shall yield a knowledge of patterns and intrinsic reason concluded from the past, and in general transcended the former who is trapped in temporal structure. In total the two expands a new prospect of the unknown, the indeterminate and the indefinite, controlled solely by human actions, whereas the past and the present, previously seemingly hopeless and never have been hopeful, now adds a dimension of temporality that replaced the all time eternity, giving meaning in analysis to any given period of time.

2

The ancient topos of history follow the idiom of Cicero,”historia magistra vitae”, that is present men should learn to distinguish patterns and lessons from past events as it instructs better actions at hand. The primitive ancient wisdom lasted ages without reflection, with history remains its immediate form.

However such concrete factuality of history gradually gets replaced by the fictionality of those like paradigms of representation, speculations of universal history rules, abstract forces, and spirits, not the least in German Idealism and literary movements. With a glimpse of terminology change in German from “Historie” to “Geschichte” this was better seen. “Geschichte” previously referred to outcomes of actions, displaced the meaning of “Histories”: a report or an account of events. The mutual displacement and distinguished separation indicated that “history (Geschichte) is instructive only to the degree that one does without its written representation (Historie)…the old Historie had to revoke its claim to be magistra vitae. Although it survived, it lost this claim to Geschichte.” Henceforth the dualism of history born the potential of a newly synthesized united concept, in which the poetic (fictive or creative) extrapolation could shed light on the loyally recorded materials of fact, as the immanent meaning of Geschichte. In other words, “the value of res factae shifted with respect to res fictae.” The collective singular Geschichte (the capitalized “History”) incorporated the spiritual products, the representation, reinterpretation, and critiques of histories. To a large degree history was denaturalized: history detached itself from natural laws and sciences (e.g. astrology), finding new frameworks in philosophy. However on the other hand the independence and uniqueness of (universal-secular) history made it “complementary concepts with philosophy which render impossible any attempt at a philosophization of history, this is an insight which was to be fundamentally lost in the nineteenth century” when historicism (primarily in Germany) flourished.

Thus it is not surprising that after the concept Geschichte permeated the works of German scholars there emerged rapidly and copiously theories of philosophy of history. However what was rather sacrificed was the original firm conviction that past events are exemplary for the future. The ubiquitously shared ground of factuality was brought from the acquiescence of all historians to the sun, inspected and questioned under the eyes of all philosophers. No doubt the antiquated natural belief of “historia magistra vitae” was shattered, yet one might ask, could there be another transcendental or universal basis intrinsically laid deep inside the roots of History, awaited theorists standing upon it to charge against nihilistic relativism?

To return to the topic, what the French Revolution added to the upheaval of History was a temporality peculiar to the processual nature of a modern history whose termination is unforeseeable. Enlighteners tolerated no allusion to the past. The present is forever exposed only to the future but not the past, and one must not seek refuge in the reactionary histophila. Rather the potential conditions to manipulate history remains only in the present, which is all what progressivists have to grasp. One not only practically could not, but also principally should not, learn anything from the past. This definitive refusal is the utmost antithesis to our aforementioned idiom. Revolutionists, though often researched much in history, focused still on the acceleration of historical temporality. In general History was radicalized.

3

Initially the word revolution referred to astronomical rotation back to its departure point. It was rather a “physics-political” concept still without its natural science context stripped off, indicating the repetition of history and political body. “All political positions remained preserved in a transhistorical concept of revolution. Instead, violent actions conducted by disaffected people against the ruling cliques were referred to merely as civil wars. Koselleck believed it to be customary in the Middle Ages when feudalism, monarchism, and estate-states (Ständestaat) were all across Europe. “Thus for the period to around 1700 we can conclude that the expressions “civil war” and “revolution” were not interchangeable, but were not at the same time mutually exclusive.” In the Enlighteners’s talk revolution’s implication was an optimistic, natural, and peaceful one, alluding to the Glorious Revolution in England of 1688. On the contrary, civil wars were regarded as unfavorable chaos, tumults, and cruelty, in short a pernicious one as opposed to the benign revolution.

The turning point was the French Revolution in 1789. The concept was fundamentally radicalized and reinvented. Resembling the transformation of History, discreet revolution thoughts have been condensed, independent revolution cases have been congealed, into a collective singular Revolution. Hence Revolution was elevated to a metahistorical level and attributed a properly theorized and concentrated transcendental significance. Concomitantly, the aforementioned temporality in historical time was infinitely emphasized: no moment is not changing its historical conditions and accelerating the revolution. We could sense a secularized eschatological anticipation of driving revolution to its success: that constituted a prognoses made since 1789. The entire state was swept into the grasp of “Revolution”.

The temporality of revolutionary history expanded a prospect of the future which in consequence changed the view of the past also, for instance the hitherto history could be shaped into a unitary progression with some events argued the fuse of revolution, thereby encapsulating the timeline into the paradigm of Evolution. Spreading the world in width the capitalized Revolution implied a world revolution with a certain goal to attain (resonating with the Trotskyists’ ideal).

What was noteworthy by Marx was that past revolutions ended in collapse should be the tutorial for nowadays revolutionaries; with every revolution learned from the past and being learned by the future, the relentless radical change of social reality would not and should not come to an end. “Within the declaration of the revolution’s permanence lies the deliberate and conscious anticipation of the future, as well as the implicit premise that this revolution will never be fulfilled.” As Revolution is both transpersonal and intrapersonal, entitled to both a universal and individual significance, there requires a plan for the revolutionaries, revolutions are not a coincidental spontaneous rise of the public, but guided by some whom a well-organized scheme entrusted. The final issue was the legitimacy of any revolution, that which mobilizes and sustains a revolutionary history in terms of prevailing prospects of the future. How was the revolution executed? What prospect could the movement it instigated grant? Who were the opponents that the revolutions considered reactionaries?

5

“Begriffsgeschichte (Begriff+Geschichte)” or Concept History concerns primarily the connotation of concepts with their development, variations, and break throughout the history. The methods of Begriffsgeschichte amalgamate those in four subjects: philosophical history of terminology, historical philology, semasiology, and onomatology.

In an exemplary work by Mark Brandenburg, Koselleck presents how a Begriffsgeschichte investigation should follow its instructions. The core issue is to place the concept back to its originally used contexts so that its meaning can be discoverable. Hence we conclude the first principle of Begriffsgeschichte: contextualism. One of the disciplines of Begriffsgeschichte orders to carry out a critique of careless appropriation of concepts from their past context-determined constitutional arguments, and to the idea contending that concepts remained universal and identical, regardless the age and location. Hence to concepts, we moved from a synchronic analysis of abstract explanation respectively to a diachronic retrospection, to appreciating their persistence and validity under various scenarios, the latter of which resides in the sphere of social history. Regarding their diachronic dynamics in history we could list out three categories: traditional concepts that persist, variable concepts that change, and novel concepts that are invented to depict some unprecedented circumstances.

Following a linguistic trace we nevertheless necessarily encountered a division between the realm of words and reality. Here we divide out three realms, a triad of linguistics: word (signification)-meaning(concept)-object. Noted there is a crucial distinction between words and concepts: “Each concept is associated with a word, but not every word is a social and political concept…In use a word can become unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order to be a concept.“ In other words, concepts are superfluous, elastic, and all-inclusive, they must contain “the entirety of meaning and experience within a sociopolitical context”, then condensed into one succinct word. “A concept can possess clarity, but must be ambiguous.”: we could delineate distinctively the precise definition of a concept, yet at the same time it must be entitled to multiple substantial meanings, at least remain exposed for social changes to create and affix new potential implications. No meaning could withhold the concept once and for all.

Hence concepts impart to us knowledge not accessible from empirical study (Sachanalyse). Language is the key medium between social substance and action of all kinds. Begriffsgeschichte is the discovery of the convergence of concept and history in a presupposed already-conceptualized background. However, there always remains a tension between language and material: Begriffsgeschichte must always keep in mind the substantial history not submerged in pure semasiology discourse; in another sense it is precisely the mismatch between concept and reality that keeps open the possibility of new meanings and concepts, allowing the unfixed signifier to slide freely among signifier chains. From the difference between the past meaning and the present ones, “the alternation of through the alternation of semasiological and onomasiological questions, Begriffsgeschichte aims ultimately at Sachgeschichte”, thereby we could take a glimpse back to the temporal transition that happened in sociopolitical history.

Lastly, Begriffsgeschichte goes beyond the “strict alternation of diachrony and synchrony and relates more to the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) that can be contained within a concept”. By examining the significance of historical conditions to the development of the meaning of the concept, structurally one is informed about how concrete environment influenced, if not determined, consciousness and knowledge, without unreflectively borrowing every terminology as something eternal or taken for granted. This pathway led to an end of turning back to how our contemporarily used concepts, and the status quo, mutually operate in each other.

6

In the discovery of history itself we required a proper epistemological premise, a preceding method to weave the experience of history in and for itself into language. In the case of modernity and the request for a historical science in our age, one should take into consideration the history in its widest sense, the “historia universalis”, subsequently select a basic unit for the dissection, inspection, and reinterpretation of it. The ambiguous distinction between “narration” and “description” is one major problem hindering our effort to formulate and clarify a “history pure and simple”.

Koselleck therefore begins with “interrogating the temporal structures which may be characteristic of both history in the singular and histories in the plural.”, one path he considered to be the most appropriate and lenient to tackle original historical experience. Only temporal structures made it possible to investigate historical phenomena with historical questions. In addition, though inevitably its use wasn’t limited to modern historians but theologians also, still its purely analytical and conceptual form is devoid of any mythological or theological references or allusions. Hopefully by observing how various temporal structures utter their content one could comprehend the development of the relationship between historical narration and description.

Koselleck recalled three modes of temporal experience:

“1. The irreversibility of events, before and after, in their various processual contexts.

2. The repeatability of events, whether in the form of an imputed identity of events, the return of constellations, or a figurative or typological ordering of events.

3. The contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen).”

Here the natural and the historical categories of time began to divide, or more precisely, the latter is born and alienated itself from the former along with the growth of the second nature of humans, e.g. those in technology, science, and politics. Hence oftentimes historical temporalities follow a sequence different from the temporal rhythms given in nature.

1. The first temporal processes within events were identified by the Greeks: specifically, the Greeks argued that many alterations and successions in the change of political constitutions are conformed to certain historical rules deduced from past experience, experiences and practices of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, an earthly source fundamentally different from prehistoric mythical epics and legends. The historical temporalities are subject to immanent material forces according to Aristotle, yet whose genuine structure enters into historical knowledge. For these political theorems, “the sequential course of the noncontemporaneous, which issued out of the diachronic approach, was thus demonstrable as the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).”
2. The Jews, situating their perspective as “the chosen people”, articulated their history in forms of struggle and war, with victories and defeats from their enemies’ sides recorded. Another notable transformation influenced by the theological experience and problematic was that by Augustine: since the heavenly history has no interest nor intervention in earthly ones, exactly because Augustine gained the freedom to interpret human deeds and sufferings with carefree, he “outlined a horizon for the ‘civitas terrena’”. Augustine stated that the failure of earthly harmony was due to conflict between each want of peace, an explanation of why in history orders tend to relapse into turbulence. Finally there was Bossuet, arguing that the only plausible method to examine the earthly effect of the plan of the Providence is by historians’ work. Hence although theological we assume the absolute beginning of divine providence, the actual result awaits checking by us.

It may be well argued that modern historical philosophy is a secularization of Augustinian doctrines of the two worlds. However to question the temporal structures inside each paradigm might be more productive. Surely, “the naturalistic attachment of historical process in the world of Greek cosmology or in the theological ordo temporum of the Judeo-Christian salvational doctrine involved historical knowledge which could be attained only by turning away from history as totality” hence making them separate individual history, nonetheless, they displayed a picture of how various temporal structures functioned before “history pure and simple” was been raised by modern historians.

7

Still from the last chapter the epistemological question concerning representation—description and narration—is left unresolved. Koselleck assumed that “events” can only be narrated, while “structures” can only be described.

1. Initially historical knowledge is transposed from a coherent event in the form of a natural, immediate chronological narration. Elements and nodal points are aligned sequentially, connected to assemble the entire incident by “before” and “after”. The consistency, however, is rooted in temporal sequence. One may call this narration a classical one. Immediate material took immediate formality. To improve this hollow framework of event alignment Kant demanded “chronology arranged according to history and not history according to chronology”. Hence the naturally indifferent chronology was added qualitatively different moments in respect of the amount of “tension” bear, each lasting a certain duration before switched over: inauguration, climax, peripeteia, crises, termination, etc. These components constitute a diachronic structure that makes parallel comparisons between the timelines of events possible and useful.
2. The structuralization of natural chronology allows abstract elongation and compression whilst the time sequence remains intact. In the compressed long term certain verifiable pre-givens entered into momentary events that affected the outcomes structurally according to their respective constitutional forms and modes of rule. Koselleck identified those determinants as “supra-individual and intersubjective”, that “transcend the chronologically ascertainable space of experience available to the specific subjects involved in an event”, in other words, they are apprehended only on a macrosociological scale, anytime and anywhere.
3. In this case, events and structures, description and narration, are inseparably interwoven yet still distinctively without merging. Their proportion and relative valency shift along with the problematic of the representation. An example of this phenomenon is the preservation of classical patterns or allusions: “Veni, vidi, vici” for instance presupposes specific forms of domination. The utilization of these preexisting structural conditions in historical writings augmented plain narrations. Yet conversely structures are comprehensible only with the aid of the actual events, that make them tangible while articulating. However the events and structures are interweaved there is ultimately an insoluble hiatus in between, for their temporal extensions cannot be forced into congruence. It is precisely in this crevice that the contingent novelty erupted among the pre-given elements. Therefore a question arises: to what extent does the anticipated fabric of events and structure leave out contingency? “If one relates methodically modes of representation to the temporal extension ascribed to them in history as a “domain of objects,” three consequences follow: first, however much they condition each other, the temporal levels do not merge; second, an event can, according to the shift of the investigated level, gain structural significance; and third, even duration can become an event.”
4. Structure doesn’t limit itself to diachronic logic; other analytical structures born from all paradigms of historical and social analysis proved fruitful for narration. The problem is that at the end of the day there lacks a final conclusion, or common factor, that dictates the temporal plane once and for all. What we can only assume is that the facticity retroactively assembled is never identical with the real circumstances, every event exists to some extent in fiction; the source never illuminates to us what might be said, yet it does negatively prescribe what might not be stated and what is factually false. Historians have an obligation to rule out false or improbable reconstruction of the past. On the other hand, the introduction of historical concepqts already negated the original uniqueness of the event: “Linguistically, the categories employed to recount the unique event cannot claim the same uniqueness as the event in question.” Every concept refers back to a universal realm with structural potentials, deals with contemporaneous in the noncontemporary, “that cannot be reduced to the pure temporal succession of history.”
5. Finally it is now possible to deduce and evaluate the changing valency of “Historia magistra vitae”. The formation of historical doctrines provides new principles and criteria into the pre-existing, transcendental structure base. Vice versa, history must also be accounted for the mutability, birth, and demise of all abbreviated structures, patterns, and laws. “In this fashion, the singularity of history could simply become an axiom of all historical knowledge.” In this view modern history has dethroned the older “Historia magistra vitae”: events are singular, unrepeatable, the forever refreshing historical conditions cancelled out all expected iterability. However, one could still possibly speculate the long-term structural transformation in theory: inherited from the past were long-lasting structure that are, to different extent, instructive to the present. Past experience condensed and crystallized into structural conclusions by historians that provided references for contemporaries. Therefore, individual history rather reaffirms the validity and the successive inheritance of in structural statements. Structural-historical analysis retain its prognostic potential.

8

Strictly speaking, chance is a pure category of the present, in other words, the ongoing yet undetermined; chance exists neither in the past, for the outcome of events were determined and fixed, nor in the future, because in the short-run prognosis is a mere prophecy of individual events in which chance does not signify itself among all the unpredictable factors.

In the Christian world, the concept of chance was unwelcome, despised, and even ridiculed, for God’s plan does not tolerate unknown and undetermined factors, that evaded God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Yet sometimes in place, Fortuna was introduced, in the discussion of the earthly world, caused by the unilateral barrier from the secular to the divine, the transpersonal and transcendental becoming that was impossible to grasp by human reason, sometimes “employed as a symbol of the incommensurable for the justification of God”.

In the realm of history, Fortuna was rendered as the sole incomprehensible, external, and indissoluble contingency that cleared up all rational accounts. Precisely due to its purity historical discourse was now able to draw reasonable, arguments to account for miracles. On the other hand, chance was also rendered a problem by historically immanent reason, for instance, psychological or pragmatic causae, awaited compressing it down to the bare minimum: “chance becomes an immanent cause from which significant consequences can be drawn. Precisely the inconsequentiality and superficiality of the chance element suited it as a causa.”

During the nineteenth century, any category concerning the accidental, contingent, unpredictable, was deserted by the Historical School. Novalis saw a writer of history must necessarily also be a poet in the sense that historians must create imaginatively a meaningful unity anterior to all events and extract from them a more intrinsic, more fundamental power of necessity that propelled the becoming of them. Historians should presuppose it as their aim. In this case there left no space for unintelligible contingency to thrive: instead all must be reasonably explained and incorporated into a meta-historical system that provides all the causes for all the ends.

9

Koselleck identifies two mutually exclusive demands in contemporary historical science: one is the loyalty to truth, the other the attitude to admit and take account of the relativity of statements. The constant stalemate between objectivism and subjectivism, truism, and relativism was a prominent theme throughout the development of historical interpretation.

The classical attitude to historical writings elicited by Lucian or Cicero was centered on loyalty to present the unreflected reality: one may not lie and should tell the complete truth. Thus firstly one should surpass their passion and ardor to become nonpartisan or suprapartisan in order to speak. Secondly, one should the truth of a history to “speak for itself”, to present the interior of its body free from external interventions or distortions. Authors should leave their traces undiscernible as if history speaks spontaneously through language. Lastly, a topos stemming from antiquity leads us to the heart of our problematic: whether one should or should not alienate oneself from one’s historical writings. Lucian described the identity and position of authors of history as “in his work a stranger, having no country, autonomous, the subject of no ruler”, in short, a vagrant. Such naive realism was based on the methodological confidence of first-hand eyewitnesses instead of second-hand transmittable eyewitnesses. Historical experiences are been preserved in the memories of eyewitnesses as a present.

Opponents of such realism are some that turned to nominalistic history due to their inspection of individual consciousness and will. Chladenius developed the domain of objects of “Historie” in terms of the contemporary “Geschichten” of living generation, in other words, separated events from representations, and laid the foundation of the division between future Geschichten and ancient ones.

Ancient history begins at the point where no eyewitnesses exist and directly mediating ear witnesses are the only unquestionable sources. With the demise of earwitnesses, there is no longer a given temporal order of material of history, instead one must excavate history in silent archives through epistemological effort. Contemporary histories are essentially epistemological, not given for granted. Thus history is inevitably mediated, structured, and transformed by the methodology of its author, in which Chladenius deduced two characteristics: first the relativity of all intuitive judgments and experience, second the inevitable modification in narrating the “archetype of history”, and readers must correspondingly learn to identify and evaluate those “rejuvenated images” reproduced in historical writings.

Concerning the temporal dimension triad—past, present, and future—modes of perception were also invariably endowed with temporal coefficients of change. Previously “perspective”, “standpoint” and “position” denoted spatial relativity of all statements, e.g. between the East and the West. It had not occurred to Chladenius that the course of time could also alter the quality of a history ex post: temporal distance determined every retrospection to the past at different times to be seen anew and unique. Hence after Chladenius “the past was henceforth no longer to be preserved in memory by an oral or a written tradition, but rather was to be reconstructed through the process of criticism.” Historical criticism, keeping spacial and temporal relativity in mind, has allowed and made useful polemical partiality of earlier contemporaries; history was more of a realm of discourse rather than of every isolated narration. History was not only a representation of past experience but also a re-representation and evaluation of previous representation. It made itself subjected to assessment. Consequently, “the thesis of the possible repetition of events is discarded. If the whole of history is now unique, then to be consistent, the past must be distinct from the present and the present from the future.” Relativized history and historicized history rendered every becoming from history unequivocally new and unique. A widely acknowledged significance of critique encouraged a model of progress in history epistemology, that aimed to correct errors, revise interpretation, and progress our historical knowledge to truth, yet only “in the medium of a genuine historical temporality.” Representative advocates were Bengel, Hegel, and Semler.

Since now truth and relativity were no longer separable, one could see how historical interpretations were unavoidably partisan in one way or another, and how the past, present, and future differed in terms of temporal variances.

The adjective partisan gained another layer of meaning during the French Revolution. During the radicalization of revolutionaries there emerged a scale of identification and evaluation: whether one stands progressively or conservatively in the course of a developing history. The formation of parties with their respective standpoint (perhaps also their backing ideologies in a Marxist sense) provided a prospect of the discourse of history, in which no one could detach from one’s partisanship but have to accept it as a constitutive, if not essential, component, as Schlegel demanded a methodological principle that “views and opinions, without which no history can be written, at least no descriptive history.” History is propelled and colored, rather than hindered, by discrepancies between interpretations, conflicts between arguments, and disputes between parties. The totalization of all partisan judgments was mostly eminently displayed by Hegel in his historical philosophy through clashes between antithesis, and sublation of bigoted standpoints, to incorporate all particular perspectives into a spatial-temporal plane of historical universality and historical impartiality.

While in modern history past facts and contemporary judgments are terminological poles that correspond to objectivity and partiality in epistemology, the two in dualism are not without interdependence. To presuppose the existence of a pure establishment of the facts involves a universal requirement of verifiability for the sake of an intelligible, rational, and commutable discourse of history.

“Every source—more exactly, every remnant that we transform into a source through our questions—refers us to a history which is either more, less, or in any case something other than the remnant itself…Historical science is, however, required from the first to interrogate sources in order to encounter patterns of events that lie beyond these sources.” One must examine the validity of sources and the legitimacy of methods since they are neither identical nor dispensable to the other.

The immanent exegesis of sources, beyond the credibility of them, discloses something that transcends the merely apparent reality: the implicit long-term process and structures. The interior of empirical sources being expanded is far larger than and flows beyond the limited exterior scope of events: it releases not what has but what could have happened, the surplus potentials of sources. Therefore Koselleck demanded a theory of possible history, such a theory is implicit in all the works of historiography. A source analyzed in different methods and under different paradigms speaks out things that vary widely.