Reinhart Koselleck and the Role of Conceptual History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 23 April 2024 is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Reinhart Koselleck (23 April 1923 to 03 February 2006), who was born in Görlitz, Germany on this date one hundred one years ago.
Koselleck was the major figure in the development of conceptual history. I mentioned Koselleck in my episode on J. G. A. Pocock because of the close similarity of conceptual history and history of discourses. Both in The Practice of Conceptual History and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time Koselleck compares and contrasts conceptual history, not to history of ideas, which I would have expected, or even to history of discourses, as with Pocock, but to social history. In Futures Past Koselleck wrote:
“Begriffsgeschichte is… initially a specialized method for source criticism, taking note as it does of the utilization of terminology relevant to social and political elements, and directing itself in particular to the analysis of central expressions having social or political content. It goes without saying that historical clarification of past conceptual usage must refer not only to the history of language but also to sociohistorical data, for every semantic has its link to nonlinguistic content. It is this that creates the precarious marginality of Begriffsgeschichte for the linguistic sciences, while being, at the same time, the origin of its great advantages for the historical sciences. The condensation effected by the work of conceptual explanation renders past statements precise, bringing more clearly into view contemporary intentional circumstance or relation in their linguistic make-up.”
And in the final paragraph of “Social History and Conceptual History” in The Practice of Conceptual History Koselleck writes:
“Social history and conceptual history have different speeds of transformation and are based in distinguishable structures of repetition. Therefore, the academic terminology of social history remains dependent on the history of concepts, so as to access linguistically stored experience. And equally, conceptual history remains dependent on the results of social history, so as to keep in view the difference between vanished reality and its linguistic evidence, which can never be bridged.”
With these fine-grained distinctions among overlapping disciplines within history it becomes increasingly difficult to keep traditions and methodologies distinct, even when they are intended to be kept distinct. Some kind of conceptual clarification is called for so that the distinctions stand out the more clearly. In several episodes I have discussed the mapping of the conceptual geography of history, and conceptual history represents a definite region of conceptual geography of history, and one way to keep conceptual history distinct is to map its relationship within the conceptual geography of history to other adjacent disciplines.
What do I mean by conceptual geography? Donald Davidson, in his Essays on Actions and Events, formulated the idea of conceptual geography as follows:
“…much of the interest in logical form comes from an interest in logical geography: to give the logical form of a sentence is to give its logical location in the totality of sentences, to describe it in a way that explicitly determines what sentences it entails and what sentences it is entailed by. The location must be given relative to a specific deductive theory; so logical form itself is relative to a theory. The relatively does not stop here, either, since even given a theory of deduction there may be more than one total scheme for interpreting the sentences we are interested in and that preserves the pattern of entailments. The logical form of a particular sentence is, then, relative both to a theory of deduction and to some prior determinations as to how to render sentences in the language of the theory.”
It is entirely possible that Davidson’s conception of logical geography is ultimately derived from Wittgenstein’s earlier conception of “logical space” that appears in the Tractatus, though Donaldson did not reference in Wittgenstein in this connection. I am assuming that with a little effort this conception of logical geography could be adapted to history, and that the various forms of history are regions within the logical space of history, and particular historical propositions are entailed by these particular regions of the logical geography of history.
The many conceptions of history I have so far considered in Today in Philosophy of History represent regions within the logical geography of history, some of them overlapping, some adjacent, and some separated. The idea of a separation in the logical geography of history is itself interesting, since the distance between any two given positions says something significant about both of the positions so separated, and the positions that intervene between them, if any, may constitute a kind of bridge between widely separated regions of the logical geography of history.
We can locate Koselleck’s work within the network of ideas of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century historiography, all of which are adjacent or overlapping within the conceptual space of history. We could call this a cluster within the conceptual map of history. There is not only the connection of conceptual history to social history, that Koselleck himself delineated, and the relationship to history of discourses that Pocock delineated, there is also a hint of a relationship to Frank Akersmit’s position. Koselleck wrote:
“To talk about history and time is difficult for a reason that has to do with more than ‘history.’ Time cannot be intuited (ist anschauungslos). If a historian brings past events back to mind through his language, then the listener or reader will perhaps associate an intuition with them as well. But does he thereby have an intuition of past time? Hardly so, or only in a metaphorical use of language, for instance, in the sense in which one speaks of the time of the French Revolution without thereby making visible anything specifically temporal.”
This is Ankersmit’s problem of historical representation, with the denial of the possibility of time being a denial of Ankersmit’s sublime historical experience, as also with the above quote on “vanished reality and its linguistic evidence, which can never be bridged.” The problem set of recent historiography drew Koselleck, Pocock, Ankersmit, and others to parallel reflections but to different conclusions, or, we could say, different entailments.
Even as historiography has become more conceptually complex and itself approximates philosophy of history in its conceptual commitments, all of the thinkers within this recent cluster on the conceptual map of history are skeptical of philosophy of history. In an interview Koselleck said:
“…the difficulty presented by the philosophy of history lies in the fact that all the idealist systems posited or attempted to prove totalizing accounts of the entirety of history up to its supposed end point. This claim to totality is totalitarian when translated into the political realm and as such it has well-known consequences, in particular with Marxism, which was, after all, a result of these idealist philosophies of history. One can deploy the idea of a plurality of histories theoretically, in opposition to these philosophies, and this is justifiable to my mind, though certainly with an important caveat: that the multiplicity of single histories, which can always be aporetic and rule each other out, which do not permit a common interpretation and instead only breed contradictions, especially contradictions in interpretation — that beginning in the twentieth century, this plurality nonetheless also points to a single common history, but one whose terminology I want to circumvent, for it has been coated over by the philosophy of history.”
In this quote we can see that philosophy of history is the problem, and not the solution to any problem, historical or otherwise. But just as these thinkers have drawn from philosophy of history to formulate their denials of philosophy of history, so too we can draw from this sophisticated historiography to frame parallel positions in the philosophy of history.
For example, in several episodes I have mentioned the category of crisis as a touchstone to which many philosophies of history recur. Koselleck gives us a conceptual history of crisis in his essay “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of ‘Crisis’” which is included in The Practice of Conceptual History. Koselleck makes the following observations about the failure of history to formulate a conceptualization of crisis:
“It is certainly striking that no explicit theory of crisis was developed for the overall historical conceptualizations, as opposed to the economic system, of the nineteenth century. Jacob Burckhardt is the sole exception. And even Marx, who tried to connect his economic theory to a philosophy of history, became mired in developing a theory of crisis, something which Schumpeter — in reference to this concept — expressly renounced. Even in the twentieth century, theories of crisis are restricted to specialized scientific spheres like psychiatry or political science. Global theories of crisis, like those on which the philosophy of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was implicitly based, quickly come to be regarded as dubious nowadays because they cannot be sufficiently confirmed or empirically substantiated.”
All of this is certainly true, and today we can feel the want of a category of crisis suitable for a substantive philosophy of history, especially since the term became so frequently used, and often over-used, in the twentieth century. Koselleck adopts a couple of tripartite schematizations of crisis as tools of analysis:
“First, history can be interpreted as a permanent crisis. World history is the judgment of the world. It is, then, a question of a concept of trial (Prozeßbegrijf).
“Secondly, ‘crisis’ can characterize a singular, accelerating process in which many conflicts, bursting the system apart, accumulate so as to bring about a new situation after the crisis has passed. ‘Crisis,’ then, indicates the crossing of an epochal threshold, a process that can repeat itself mutatis mutandis. Even if history always remains unique in individual cases, this concept attests to the possibility that the thrusts of change can take place in analogous forms. Therefore, I will suggest characterizing it as an iterative periodizing concept.
“Thirdly, ‘crisis’ can mean purely and simply the final crisis of all history that precedes it, where proclamations of the Last Judgment are everywhere employed, but only metaphorically. When measured with respect to the prior course of our history, it can no longer be excluded that this model, necessarily characterized as utopian, has every chance of being realized in light of present-day means of self-destruction. In contrast to the others, this concept of crisis is a purely future-oriented one and aims at a final decision.”
All of these meanings of crisis are familiar to us today. Koselleck suggests a resolution that is also tripartite that consists of what he calls three exponential time curves. These exponential time curves are essential three scales of time within which crises can be resolved:
- A scale of billions of years, within which the Earth is formed.
- A scale of millions of years, within which humanity evolved.
- A scale of thousands of years, within which states formed.
Then Koselleck notes:
“The three exponential time curves might be dismissed as mere number play. However, a limit obviously begins to emerge that can no longer be overstepped by technological and scientific progress.”
And…
“The three exponential time curves can be read as an amplifier for acceleration, rendering it completely impossible to venture projections into the future. Perhaps the answer to crisis consists in looking out for stabilizers which can be derived from the long duration of prior human history.”
Not only is Koselleck on the right track here, these are insights we can employ in a substantive philosophy of historical crises. The foreshortening of the recent past, which seems to cluster crisis into a knot that adjoins the present, and which is, in a sense, inconceivable without the present, tempts us into an enterprise of extrapolating crisis into the future, but, as Koselleck observes, a limit begins to emerge. Also, when we look to what he calls the stabilizers of the deep past, our illusion of the crisis of the present is placed in a non-critical context. A Copernican philosophy of history would pay particular attention to this observation.
Koselleck’s historical thought is of a piece with late twentieth century historiography in its conceptual sophistication coupled with a suspicion of explicitly formulated philosophies of history, which latter cannot but appear to be folly in hindsight. But, in the light of Hayden White’s influence, which is pervasive in this historiographical milieu, can we not find a philosophy of history implicit even within skeptical historiography, as White found a philosophy of history implicit in all history?
