Koselleck and History: Experience, Expectation and the Acceleration of Modernity

Abstract: I give a basic rendition of Reinhart Koselleck’s modernism thesis, particularly looking at how modern “progress” relates to the split between “expectation” and “experience.”

We must dissect Koselleck’s modernism thesis, which might more broadly be named the acceleration of modern history. In this theory, Koselleck identifies a shift in the western conscience between the 16th century of Altdorfer and the modern era of Schlegel; he refers to this shift as the temporalization of history. Koselleck’s analysis locates the central role of the church in dominating the pre-modern worldview, in that it was the church’s teleological vision of eschatology, meditated by history-as-continuum, which disclosed a knowability of the future grounded on a unitary history of the world.[1] However, shifts began to occur as the apocalypse so defined is “progressively prorogued”[2]: the influence of astrology, linked with the “preservation of peace” becoming the business of “worldly” states, enervated eschatology and robbed it of functionality—with it, too, receded the Church’s claim to history-as-a continuum. To this end, the rise of the absolute state against eschatological power of the Christian empire denotes the advent of which political calculability, a future, though concealed and without connection to an “exemplary” past, may be measured through probabilities.[3] [Though it is beyond the scope of this short analysis, Kantorowicz’s work here is particularly relevant.]

As Koselleck claims, “The course of the seventeenth century is characterized by the destruction of interpretations of the future, however motivated.”[4] This spawned, in lieu of the traditional emplotment of theological dogma, a “futureless future” that replaced the religious resource of “prophecy” with the modernist concept of prognosis.[5] Within this modernist relation to history and futurity lay the novel promise of “progress”—the increasing speed and unknowability of the future, while depleting history of its status as “exemplar of its own potential iterability,” nevertheless discloses, in this irreducible naming of contingency, “a validity in structural statement, for processual occurrence.”[6] This is where the findings of science enable a kind-of mapping of the future, based solely on information: not so much a detailing of particular cases as the description of broad, large-scale trends.

Assumed in this self-acceleration of history, where in the wake of eschatology the space of “wordly invention” is thus opened, is simultaneously the breakdown of Utopia; if, characteristic of Moore’s Utopia of 1516 and every utopia thereafter is their theorized status as static state entities, what the advent of modernism proved most definitively was the ultimate changeability and particularity of individual historical events. Still, we must reconcile ourselves—and here is a potential question—to the resilience of eschatology as a telos; from Hegel declaring the end of history to Fukyama claiming that the fall of the berlin wall signaled the unquestioned domination of the neo-liberal state and the end of history 2.0, there is the persistence of the telos—of the myth of the eschatology—that even in our moment of acceleration persists. While Guicciardini and Montaigne, as early as the 16th century, had already come to the conclusion that the relation between cause and effect, politically for Guicciardini and historically for Montaigne, in no way indicated a systematic relation by which to ground technical finalities, what accounts for the persistence of this particular illusion?

In some sense or another, there is, for Koselleck, now as in Altdorfer’s time, the immanent injunction to explain the entirety of existence at any given moment. We might call this the necessity of total emplotment,[7] or the will-to-emplotment, and further define this as the duty that is the consequence of the “tension” between expectation/experience that Koselleck specially analyzes. Here we encounter Koselleck’s treatment of historia magistra vitae est.  Koselleck argues that the decline of a certain view of futurity also meant the decline of a certain conditional use of history; where previously the ancient/theological worldview, given its status as ultimate continuum, held history to be the essence of didactic knowability, the decline of the view of human experience as a continuum precipitated the eclipse of history as life’s teacher.[8] We thus move from a knowable history to a new history: contingency, central to this novel temporalization, becomes knowable unknowability, hence permitting a “futureless future” to emerge where once stood the eschatological crown of prophecy and revelation.[9]

With the destruction of the exemplary nature of past events and, in its place, the discovery of the uniqueness of historical processes, surfaced the possibility of “progress,” developed through Kant’s systematization of history[10]; hence the philosophy of history replaced History, and from the vision of the whole spewed a multitude of individual parts.[11] As Koselleck argues, “behind the singularization of history, its temporalization, unavoidable superiority, and producibility, can be registered an experiential transformation that permeates our modernity. In this process, history was shorn of the objective of directly relating to life.”[12] He points to Perthes, and we might add Burke and later Michael Oakeshott, to a list of authors we might call “against the book,” who take experience as the ultimate teacher and the otherness of others history impenetrable, save for fundamental limits of calculability. (Ironically, of course, all these authors use the book as their primary means of this denying its validity). We might say that, to borrow from Wittgenstein, the decline of one form of life, predicated as it was on an image of history-as-continuum and thus history-as-knowable, meant the decline of the certain use of history. This is all to still imply that history is always knowable, even if it lends nothing to the singularity of future cases—there are, rather, modes of knowability appropriate to even this type of self-conscience relation to contingency.

It is here that Koselleck develops his notion of experience vs. expectation.[13] He points to the symbiotic dependency the two terms share with one another, and further defines there interplay as fundamentally generative of the human condition.[14] For Koselleck, Neuzeit is a phase in which expectations and experience separate: this is what we may call his acceleration thesis, and itself parallels the same decline of a knowable past that undermined the historia magistra’s assumptions of exemplarity.[15] In sum, Kosseleck argues that this process of acceleration denotes a separation of past and future, sublimated through modernist discourse as the advent of true “Progress.”[16] It is the further enlargement of this separation, the further disentangling of expectation from experience, that seems to characterize this neu-zeit and animate a vision of the future that is in detail obscure but in theory at least definable.[17] [For another germane direction of thought, I ought to connect Koselleck’s notion of experience to Martin Jay’s historical treatment; Kuhn, Lakatos, Dewey and Latour’s variations on scientific constructivism also develop this gulf/relation between expectation and a more pragmatic form of “experience.”]

[1] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 13

[2] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 15

[3] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 21

[4] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 17

[5] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 18

[6] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 114

[7] A condition of the will to power? Here is the thread that might connect Aristotle to Nietzsche to Ricouer: on emplotment and domination.

[8] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 27

[9] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 31

[10] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 34-35

[11] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 37-38

[12] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 40

[13] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 257, 258: “The condition of possibility of real history are, at the same time, conditions of its cognition. Hope and memory, or expressed more generally, expectation and experience—for expectation comprehends more than hope, and experience goes deeper than memory—simultaneously constitute history and its cognition. They do so by demonstrating and producing the inner relation between past and future or yesterday, today, or tomorrow.”

[14] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 261

[15] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 263: “My thesis is that during Neuzeit the difference between experience and expectation ahs increasingly expanded; more precisely, that Neuzeit is first understood as a neue Zeit from the time that expectations have distanced themselves evermore form all previous experience.”

[16] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 268

[17] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 270