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Chapter Title: Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History

Chapter Author(s): Elías Palti

Book Title: Philosophy of Globalization

Book Editor(s): Concha Roldán, Daniel Brauer and Johannes Rohbeck
Published by: De Gruyter

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Elías Palti
Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death
of Philosophy of History
Abstract: According to Reinhart Koselleck, the period he calls Sattelzeit, which
spans from 1730 through 1850, witnessed a crucial conceptual transformation.
It was associated with a new, ‘modern’ way of experiencing temporality, which
in turn gave rise to the emergence of the concept of History as a singular collec-
tive noun and, consequently, to the philosophies of history. Koselleck’s perspec-
tive converges, besides, with Michel Foucault’s view in The Order of Things, in
which Foucault also remarked on the great conceptual break that occurred
around 1800 and gave rise to the emergence of what he called the ‘Age of His-
tory’. However, our attempt at matching Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with Fou-
cault’s archaeological perspective will also reveal why the former is not yet suf-
ficiently attentive to the diversity of the modes of conceiving of temporality
during the four centuries that modernity spans. Lastly, it will allow us to better
understand what was the intellectual ground on which the philosophies of his-
tory were founded, and also how it eventually became undermined, along with
the concept of temporality that was at its basis.

I am always terrified when I hear in a few words a whole nation or a time, for what a great
multitude of differences does not comprehend the word nation, or the middle ages or an-
tiquity and the modern epoch!
(Johann Gottfried Herder)

Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of Sattelzeit has become an inevitable point of ref-

erence whenever one seeks to understand the origin of modernity from the per-
spective of intellectual history. It offers a highly suggestive view of the great con-
ceptual transformation produced between 1750 and 1850—the period he calls
Sattelzeit. According to Koselleck, this conceptual transformation was closely as-
sociated with a given way of experiencing temporality, which gave rise to the
emergence of the concept of History, as a singular collective noun. As he
shows, that concept would have been incomprehensible before 1750. To speak
of ‘History’ without further ado, as if it were a kind of macrosubject, would
have been simply unintelligible for a person of the fifteenth or even the seven-
teenth century. The emergence of the philosophies of history was the conse-
quence of this conceptual transformation, as the two were closely tied: as Hein-

Elías Palti, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina)

OpenAccess. © 2018 Elías Palti, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-030

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410 Elías Palti

rich Köster then said, “History means the same as historical theory or philosophy
of history or as the logic of history” (quoted in Koselleck 2006, p. 74). Historical
philosophy thus has a precise historical-conceptual basis, and becomes mean-
ingful only within that given intellectual configuration; it has no meaning out-
side of it. In short, what this reveals is the contingent nature of the foundations
of the philosophies of history, and of the concept of temporality that underlies
them.
Koselleck’s perspective converges with Michel Foucault’s view in The Order
of Things (Foucault 1970). In it, Foucault also remarked on the great conceptual
break that occurred around 1800 and gave rise to the emergence of what he
called the ‘Age of History’. Foucault associated it, in turn, with the appearance
of a certain concept of ‘Subject’. Both concepts (Subject and History) would be
closely linked. The latter would be no more than another translation of the for-
mer, and ultimately the two are the expression of the new way of experiencing
the temporality that both Foucault and Koselleck identify as distinctive of ‘mod-
ernity’.
However, our attempt at matching Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte with Fou-
cault’s archaeological perspective will also reveal why the former is not yet suf-
ficiently attentive to the diversity of the modes of conceiving of temporality dur-
ing the four centuries that modernity spans. Actually, it can discern only two
possible time-concepts, each of which will be separated by that great epochal
rupture that he calls Sattelzeit. This dichotomic perspective leads him to confuse
and place under the same category (that of ‘modernity’) many very different
modes of conceiving and experiencing temporality; and this confusion necessa-
rily has consequences in the historical-conceptual recreation he proposed. In
short, to perform the very goal of Koselleck’s project of a Begriffsgeschichte—of
preventing conceptual anachronisms and understanding the intellectual founda-
tions of the philosophies of history—a number of historical precisions are in
order.
Foucault was, besides, more emphatic in pointing out the contingent nature
of this ‘modern’ regime of knowledge, in the sense that, for him, it is not only
very recent, but also it will not last indefinitely. In fact, he believed we were
at the verge of its dissolution. That is what was implicit in his provocative an-
nouncement of the imminent ‘death of man’. In any case, as we will see in
this work, beyond the divergences of their contents, the convergence between Ko-
selleck’s conceptual history and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge regarding
the nature of the conceptual break produced around 1800 is deeply significant,
and the attempt at matching their perspectives will allow us to better understand
what was the intellectual ground on which the philosophies of history were

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 411

founded, and also how it eventually became undermined, along with the con-
cept of temporality that was at its basis.

The idea of Sattelzeit

and the new consciousness of temporality
According to Koselleck, the emergence of the philosophies of the history is indi-
cative of a fundamental break with respect to the premodern modes of historical
figuration articulated within the frameworks of the Ciceronian concept of historia
magistrate vitae. He points out the two premises upon which that pedagogical
ideal of history was based. The first of these is the idea of the iterability of his-
tory; that is, that the same basic situations are repeated at different times, since
only that assumption permits us to draw general laws applicable to every histor-
ical epoch. That assumption of the iterability of events made it impossible to
conceptualize the idea of ‘History’ in the singular. What existed, in the context
of that perspective, were ‘histories’, in the plural; that is, a series of situations,
events and phenomena, which are eventually repeated in different times, places
and circumstances, but which preserve their basic structures and meanings.
The second premise highlighted by Koselleck is that the era of exploration
(which opened the horizon of Europeans to the diversity of cultures on the plan-
et) and technological progress finally triggered the crisis of the pedagogical con-
cept of history. Both phenomena combined provide the historical basis for the
emergence of the modern idea of ’progress’. Time would then have a direction-
ality, which would make the iterability of history impossible. The future would
no longer be readable in the experiences of the past. A gap now divided the
‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’. But the fundamental
fact that marked the definitive breakdown of the concept of historia magistrate
vitae was the outbreak of the French Revolution, insofar as it affirmed, for Kosel-
leck, the idea of the constructability of history; that is, it engendered a new
awareness of the subject’s agency. Temporality thus became an immanent di-
mension—something that subjects unleash with their own action.¹ As Koselleck
points out: “There always occurs in history more or less than that contained in
the given conditions. Behind that ‘more or less’ are to be found men” (Koselleck
1985, p. 212). The modern concept of history would thus arise from the combina-
tion of the ideas of progress of the Enlightenment with that of the constructed
character of it determined by the revolutionary event.

 See Hayden White’s “Introduction” in Koselleck 2002, ix-xiv.

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412 Elías Palti

In turn, the temporalization of history would allow us to place in sequential

order the cultural diversity that the overseas expansion had revealed; that is, to
place diachronically that which appears synchronously. The notion of progress
would provide the objective parameter for establishing a ‘before’ and an
‘after’, situating each phenomenon as a particular moment in the immanent
logic of the development of History. It thus gave rise to the idea of the coexis-
tence of infinite temporalities at each single moment, the simultaneity of the
non-contemporary (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen). As Herder said in his
Metakritik of Kant (a text that Koselleck repeatedly cites as the best synthesis
of the ‘modern’ idea of historical temporality):

In actuality, every changing thing has the measure of its own time within itself…. No two
worldly things have the same measure of time. There are therefore (one can state it properly
and boldly) at any one time in the universe innumerably many times.²

Lastly, the dissolution of the old ideal of historia magistrate vitae forces historical
thought to its self-reclusion. To the extent that the temporalization of historical
structures prevents generalizations and extrapolations between different epochs,
regarding their contents, the idea of historical law can only now refer to the
empty forms of temporality; to the transhistorical conditions of change. It is
here that Koselleck introduces what he calls the fundamental meta-categories
that define the basic forms of historical temporality: ‘space of experience’ and
‘horizon of expectation’. The progressive distance between ‘space of experience’
and ‘horizon of expectation’ determines the acceleration of historical time, which
is the hallmark of modernity. This allows him to establish a fundamental histor-
ical law: the ‘law of acceleration’, which states that change “occurs at increasing-
ly shorter intervals of time” (Koselleck 1985, p. 314).
In this way, Koselleck reframed intellectual history, insofar as he made it
possible to establish a link between conceptual changes and concrete historical
experience. However, at this point some of his interpretations demand a number
of clarifications and precisions. The question arises of what led him to situate
that rupture at a so late moment, which in turn led him to leave out of modernity
the whole array of philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. From this perspective, the line of thought that goes from Descartes
to Leibniz, through Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Smith, etc. should be considered
as ‘premodern’, since they are all placed before the Sattelzeit; that is, they
would be grouped together under the same category as the philosophies of St.

 Herder, J. G. (1955): Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 68; quoted in Koselleck 1985,
p. 247.

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 413

Augustine or St. Thomas, which is clearly untenable. Furthermore, it contradicts

what Koselleck himself remarked in his doctoral thesis (written in 1954 and pub-
lished in 1959), Critique and Crisis (Kosellek 1988). Lastly, that chronological in-
congruity makes manifest much deeper problems of a conceptual order.
These conceptual problems send us back to the issue of historical temporal-
ity. Koselleck actually confuses two completely different concepts of it: the one
implicit in the Enlightenment’s notion of ‘progress’; and the idea of ’evolution’,
arising only later, during the nineteenth century. It is only along with this latter
that time became conceived as irreversible. On the contrary, the most character-
istic and determining achievement of the scientific revolution and of the Enlight-
enment, that many plainly associate with the coming of the so-called ‘Modern
Age’ (although Foucault prefers calling it the ‘Classical Age’, to distinguish it
from the ‘Modern Age’ whose origins he places, in coincidence with Koselleck’s
Sattelzeit, around 1800) was precisely the development of the notion of temporal
reversibility. This notion was perfectly formulated by Ferdinand Laplace (the
leading astronomer of the late eighteenth century, who completed the Newtonian
system) and symbolized in his idea of the ‘little demon’. He stated that one who
was able to know the whole universe in its present state “would have the entire
past and the entire future before his eyes.”³ With this idea, Laplace only led the
Newtonian astronomical concept to its ultimate logical consequences. According
to it, temporality is not a constituent element of the physical universe. If we
could know the exact current position of all planets and stars, we could perfectly
know where they were a thousand years ago and where they will be a thousand
years from now. The asymmetry between past and future here appears as merely
a subjective illusion resulting from the limitations of our cognitive capacities.
The kind of idealization that allowed seventeenth and eighteenth century
minds to conceive of the world as lacking a temporality of its own was the cul-
mination of a sustained and prolonged intellectual effort. Irreversibility was, in
fact, the most characteristic feature of the medieval-Christian notion of secular
time (a notion that did not rule out the possibility of the mutation of living spe-
cies or the spontaneous generation of new ones). Since every change in the
world required providential intervention that marked a radical difference be-
tween present and past, the idea of a homogeneous temporal flow was still in-
conceivable.
The Enlightenment’s idea of historical progress as an accumulation of
knowledge entailed, instead, continuity; that is, the assumption of a homogene-
ous human nature providing a unitary substrate for this process. The idea of rad-

 On Laplace’s idea of ‘little demon’, see: Cassirer 1956, pp. 3 – 25.

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414 Elías Palti

ical mutation, both in animal species and in cultural processes, was completely
foreign to Enlightenment thought. The breakdown of this linear and homogene-
ous conception of time leads us, in fact, beyond the horizon of the Enlighten-
ment. Foucault’s analysis of The Order of Things is revealing in this regard,
and allows us to introduce a number of precisions into Koselleck’s perspective
of the Sattelzeit.

The archaeology of knowledge and the

emergence of philosophy of history
Although Foucault does not make it explicit, it is clear that the aim of The Order
of Things was to rebuke the standard view of the link between modernity and
subjectivity that was best synthesized by Heidegger in “The Age of the World Pic-
ture”, and to introduce into it a fundamental historical precision. Unlike Heideg-
ger, for Foucault the idea of ‘subject’ that Heidegger believes he finds in Des-
cartes is in fact a later conceptual construction—one that would emerge in the
nineteenth century, when the ‘Modern Age’ (or the ‘Age of History’, as he calls
it) actually began. Foucault’s perspective thus converges with Koselleck’s in lo-
cating the origin of modernity two centuries later than Heidegger does. However,
unlike Koselleck’s perspective, Foucault’s does not ignore the presence of a con-
ceptual break produced around 1600, as Heidegger affirmed, though Foucault
disagrees with the latter regarding its content and meaning. He thus introduces
a distinction between the two.
In short, Foucault’s archaeological perspective is more attentive than Kosel-
leck’s to the occurrence of a conceptual break before the Sattelzeit, but, unlike
Heidegger, instead of projecting this break back in time, he remarks on the pro-
found difference between the two systems of knowledge to which they respec-
tively gave rise. In this way, Koselleck compels us to revise the dichotomous
schemes—the either/or that articulates the entire tradition of the history of
ideas and permeates also the perspectives of both Koselleck and Heidegger (ei-
ther premodern or modern)—leading to the unification of very different forms of
thinking under a common label. Yet, as we shall see, we also meet here the fun-
damental shortcoming in Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. If it is more per-
ceptive of the conceptual transformations produced before the Sattelzeit, it miss-
es other, no less radical, transformations that took place after it. That is, that not
all forms of thought and historical views that emerged after 1800 can be consid-
ered as equally ‘modern’—a lack of acknowledgment of which also leads him to
confuse and unify under a common category very different concepts of historical

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 415

temporality. Yet, in order to observe this problem, we must first to go back and
see Foucault’s archaeological project and, in particular, his criticism of Heideg-
ger’s view that associates modernity with the emergence of the concept of ‘sub-
ject’.
In “The Age of the World Picture”, Heidegger elaborated on the etymological
roots of the term subjectum. As he says, it is the Latin translation of the Greek
term hypokeimenon, to which Aristotle referred in his Physics and Metaphysics.
It indicates the substrate of the predication; that which underlies and holds to-
gether all its predicates. In principle, all that (either a thing or a living being) of
which something could be said is a ‘subject’. The identification of the ‘subject’
with the ‘I’, initiated by Descartes, is precisely, for Heidegger, what marks the
emergence of the modern world.⁴ With modernity, man becomes the premise
for the intelligibility of the world, which is then reduced to the condition of mere-
ly a material for its action.
This entailed, for Heidegger, a fundamental conceptual rupture. Man then
separates from the world and becomes the one who represents it and provides
a meaning to it. In the Middle Ages, man and world were only different phases
in the plan of Creation; the two participated in the order of correspondences of
what is, which always referred back to their ultimate Cause (God). In antiquity,
the world was not something to which the subject represented, but something
that presented itself, which was shown to the subject and, ultimately, it was in
the act of disclosing itself that it was constituted as such. Man and world thus
co-belonged in the repraesentatio (etymologically, to become present) of what ex-
ists.
In The Order of Things, Foucault both discusses and takes on this concept,
introducing to it a fundamental distinction. What he calls the ‘classical’ episteme
(of whose emergence Don Quixote serves as a symbol and expression) was born,
in effect, out of the break of the order of correspondences. In the regime of
knowledge that dominated until the sixteenth century, all that existed (the
chain of being), including language, was conceived as the visible mark of that
hidden force that constituted them and rendered them visible. The space of sim-
ilarities would form a system of ‘signatures’ for the unveiling of the hidden plan
of Creation. As Heidegger said, in this system of knowledge the world shows it-
self, and “all that remains is to decipher it” (Foucault 1970, p. 27).

 “However, when man becomes the primary and only real subjectum, that means: Man be-
comes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and
its Truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such” (Heidegger 1977, p. 128).

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416 Elías Palti

By the end of the sixteenth century, that natural link—by which the visible
immediately refers back to its last, hidden source—is broken, and words are dis-
tanced from things. Language becomes an artifice to articulate the whole out of
the fragments deployed on the surface of the visible forms. The subject now has
the task of reconstructing the logic of their dispersion of forms in the play of their
similarities and differences. Things, then, no longer speak of anything beyond
them, but refer to each other, tied as they are to the ground of Order that distrib-
utes them in the world and connects them with each other.
However, within the framework of this episteme, Foucault points out, there
was still no place for any idea of ’subject’ nor, ultimately, for the notion of tem-
poral irreversibility (nor, therefore, of History in the singular). Foucault refers
here to the expression with which Hegel opens his Phenomenology of Mind: “ev-
erything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Sub-
stance but as Subject as well” (Hegel 2003, p. 9). The ‘subject’ referred to here
—which is no longer merely substance, as it was in classical times—is a reflexive
concept; an in-itself and for-itself.
Only in light of this could we properly speak of a modern Subject (and, ul-
timately, a modern episteme), at least in the sense attributed by Foucault: that
type of Being whose interiority gives rise to History, constituting a dimension in-
herent in it. It is, more precisely, the premise for the conceptual transformation
analyzed by Koselleck under the rubric of Sattelzeit. The Subject, unlike the Sub-
stance, is no longer merely the substrate of predication (that which remains im-
mutable below the changes of form imposed upon it) but a dynamic force; what
defines it as such is the fact of containing within itself the principle of its own
transformations. This conceptual redefinition is closely linked, in turn, to the
emergence of the idea of the living organism as associated with the capacity
for self-generation and self-development, which marks the transition from the
‘natural history’ of the classical age to modern ‘biology’. The point here is that
the emergence of this concept marks a rupture no less crucial than that which
occurred two centuries earlier with the break of the system of correspondences.
Heidegger thus confused two conceptions of subjectivity (and temporality) very
different from each other, placing both under the common label of ‘modern sub-
ject’. Lastly, he would project back towards the sixteenth century a concept that
would only emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. The passage from the
‘natural history’ of the Enlightenment to ‘biology’ illustrates how this later con-
ceptual transformation occurred.
The idea of the subject in the classical era was forged in a fixist-preforma-
tionist matrix of thinking, which was at the basis of the ‘natural history’ of the
Enlightenment. The preformationist concept of the organism, which emerged
in the sixteenth century and dominated the natural thought of the seventeenth

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 417

and eighteenth centuries, asserted that the forms of adult individuals were pre-
formed in the embryo. The gestation process was only the growing up of traits
and forms already discoverable in the origin of that process. The fact is that
only that hypothesis made possible the idea of an immanent, self-generated de-
velopment. Only the developments produced in the early nineteenth century in
the field of embryology provided a new model of ‘organic’ evolution. Karl Ernst
von Baer (the ‘founding father’ of modern embryology) is the key figure in this
process of conceptual redefinition. According to the theory formulated in his His-
tory of the evolution of animals (1828 and 1837), what would be preformed in the
embryo would no longer be a set of visible traits, but the principle for the forma-
tion of them; that is, a certain logical order of coordinated transformations ori-
ented towards the realization of an immanent purpose (something similar to
what we call a ‘genetic program’). Time, then, would no longer be a circumstance
external to beings but a dimension intrinsic to them. The ‘subject’ would then
come to designate this compound, that which displays a temporality by itself,
placing itself beyond the plane of visible forms as its hidden formative force.
And this explains one of the phenomena that Koselleck points out in relation
to the modern philosophies of history: the idea of the coexistence of plurality
of temporalities. It is here also where Koselleck’s confusion between progress
and evolution becomes more manifest, which leads him to misinterpret Herder’s
expression.
For Koselleck, the idea of the simultaneity of the non-contemporary that he
(erroneously) attributes to Herder arises from the possibility of ordering the va-
riety of realities existing in space in a linear sequence of development. As he af-
firms, the idea of historical progress allows us to identify what comes ‘before’
and what ‘after’. This, in fact, is the premise that lies at the base of the Enlight-
enment notion of the coexistence of pluralities of temporalities—but not of evo-
lutionary thought. When Herder said that “In actuality, every changing thing has
the measure of its own time within itself… [and that therefore] no two worldly
things have the same measure of time”⁵, he was precisely denying the possibility
of establishing any absolute temporal criterion—an objective parameter that al-
lowed distinguishing the former from the later. The plurality of temporalities de-
rived from the fact that, for him, there was not an empty becoming; a purely ob-
jective temporality, independent of something (a subject) that evolves. Time
becomes a dimension intrinsic to the subject; it is something that ‘comes to be-
ings from within’, to put it in Foucault’s words—a function of the differential evo-

 Herder, J. G. (1955): Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 68; quoted in Koselleck 1985,
p. 247.

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418 Elías Palti

lutionary process of organisms. In short, there is not a single (objective) tempo-

rality, but as many temporalities as existing beings. We find here the nucleus of
the historicist concept. History thus becomes a reflexive concept; an in- and for-
itself; that is, a ‘Subject’ (which is no longer ‘Substance’, according to Hegel).
As we can see, within the period that Koselleck designates as Sattlezeit, two
very different views of time coexist. Yet, there is a third concept of it that be-
comes collapsed under the brand of ‘modern time’. The definition of the idea
of the ’constructability’ of history that then arises has a very different meaning
from that which Koselleck believes to find there. This leads us to introduce a sec-
ond historical precision. His view of the relativity of time actually emerged later,
and corresponds to a subsequent moment in intellectual history. Here too, Kosel-
leck’s dichotomous interpretative scheme pays its price, since it again leads him
to confuse another very different concept of historical temporality, besides the
two mentioned above, grouping all three of them under the common category
of ‘modernity’. Actually, within his perspective, we cannot think of the possible
existence of conceptual changes in the modes of experiencing historical tempo-
rality, except in terms of the antinomy premodern/modern. In fact, the funda-
mental law which, for him, governs the whole conceptual history of the modern
age—the ‘law of acceleration of time’—allows us to perceive only quantitative dif-
ferences; it would be only a matter of degree: what changed between the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries would be the measure of the interval of time in
which change occurs, and the same between the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, and so on. However, unlike the previous historical precision (between the
ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution’), Foucault no longer serves as a guide to un-
derstand how this new break occurred at the end of the nineteenth century.

The end of the ‘Age of History’

and the ‘Death of the Subject’
In the concept of History that arose in the nineteenth century (which is the one
that Koselleck analyzes), change and permanence are combined in a particular
way. Although for nineteenth-century evolutionary thought every fact was abso-
lutely singular (that is, unlike historia magistrate vitae, history now never repeats
itself), it did not mean that the future was not somehow contained in germ form
in the present as an immanent telos. It was thought that, in the same way as the
present is born out of the past, the future must also be somehow already con-
tained in it as one of its potential alternatives of development. This imposed
strict limits to the ‘constructability’ of history. That the subject ‘constructs’ His-

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 419

tory does not mean that its action does not obey, in turn, a more general evolu-
tionary logic that encompasses it. This is precisely what paved the way in the
nineteenth century to the thinking of History as a system (and led Hegel to
speak of ‘the work of history’). It would be even more appropriate to say that,
within this concept, it is History that makes man, rather than the other way
around. A ‘stronger’ view of temporality founded on the assumption of subjec-
tive agency involved the absolute contingency of historical development; that
is, the radical constructivism of history. This view only emerged at the end of
the nineteenth century, with the break of the evolutionary pattern that dominat-
ed the preceding century. The emergence of this new view of time marked a con-
ceptual rupture no less profound than that produced in the period that Koselleck
called Sattelzeit.
Ultimately, Koselleck incurs a conceptual anachronism: just as Heidegger
projects onto the sixteenth century a concept of the subject that only emerges
in the nineteenth century, Koselleck projects onto the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury a concept of historical temporality that actually emerged later, in the twen-
tieth century. Koselleck’s idea of historical thinking as referring to an empty
structure of temporality is the result of the break of the evolutionary concept
of history. The idea of the radical contingency of evolutionary processes then per-
meates the entirety of Western thinking, crossing through the ‘great divide’ be-
tween natural and social sciences. We see here the horizon of thought from
which Koselleck’s very historical perspective emerged—and that he projects
back in time to the nineteenth century.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the view of systems as containing with-
in them an immanent purpose—the unity between system and end—had broken,
and only thus the idea of the radical indeterminacy of history was born, and its
cognate concept of the agency of the subject along with it. The conceptual crisis
produced at the end of the nineteenth century thus offers the ultimate frame-
work for understanding the meaning of the intellectual project around which Ko-
selleck’s own work unfolds. Here too, the reference to a series of developments
produced in the field of natural sciences reveals the emergence of that new para-
digm of temporality.
A then-newly emerged discipline, electrodynamics, is indicative of the trans-
formations occurred in the modes of thinking the historicity of physical, and, by
extension, social systems. In the theory developed by Maxwell and Faraday,
magnetic fields are no longer mere aggregates of elements, but sets of relations
that form integrated systems of interacting forces. These systems appear as con-
stellations of elements whose composition and recomposition are spontaneous
and sudden, without obeying any genetic pattern of progressive formation. The
notion of totality (structure) was then detached from that of purpose (function),

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420 Elías Palti

thus dissociating diachrony from synchrony, the evolutionary processes from the
inherent dynamics of systems, which would be oriented solely towards their self-
reproduction, the perpetuation of their own internal balance or homeostasis.
A convergent path was followed by different disciplines, like biology. In
1900, Hugo de Vries gave the final blow to the nineteenth-century holistic-func-
tionalist conceptions of evolution, paving the way to the formulation of the theo-
ry of the ‘Great Synthesis’. For de Vries, evolutionary phenomena at the phylo-
genetic level result from sudden transformations or random global mutations.
In this way, mutations (change) are reduced to unpredictable, internally generat-
ed occurrences, but with no perceivable goal or purpose: even though they serve
an adaptive process of the species to their environment, selection occurs only a
posteriori, without any immediate impact on genetic processes themselves.
These developments, as mentioned, contributed the rise of a new paradigm
of time. Non-teleologically ordered processes, insofar as they involve the occur-
rence of the sudden recombination of elements, break the linearity of the devel-
opments of matter. Each discreet moment in the sequence of the transformations
operated in a system introduces a real novelty; that is, it entails the total recon-
figuration, according to a new and peculiar arrangement, of its constituent ele-
ments. Only then does the problem of the agential character of the historical sub-
ject emerge.
From the moment that systems lose any inner teleological impulse, any prin-
ciple to their self-transformation, change, or contingency could only come from
an instance transcendent to them; it would be the emanation of a Being that pre-
exists them, and allegedly institutes them. We thus get Koselleck’s claim that:
“there always occurs in history more or less than that contained in the given con-
ditions. Behind that ‘more or less’ are to be found men” (Koselleck 1985, p. 212).
The subject’s action, which until then had served as the guaranteed for the ra-
tionality of the sequential order of historical transformations, now appeared,
on the contrary, as introducing an element of ‘irrationality’ that breaks the lin-
earity of properly ‘historical’ processes—a concept that now, but only now, be-
came associated with the idea of radical contingency. The ambiguous relation-
ship between Koselleck’s idea of modernity and that of his master, Heidegger,
is particularly significant in this respect.
The claim that behind all historical change lies intentional action would be,
in principle, taking on the Heideggerian notion of modernity as the era in which
man becomes the subjectum. However, if we look closely at Koselleck’s claim, the
‘modern’ subject to whom he refers no longer has anything in common with the
one of which Heidegger spoke. It rather meant its complete reversal. The self is
no longer a subjectum, the unitary substrate that underlies the changes of form
that are imposed upon it, but, on the contrary, the origin and source of contin-

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 Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History 421

gency in history. In short, within the new episteme that was born at the end of
the nineteenth century, in whose framework there emerged the concept of sub-
jectivity that Koselleck retrospectively attributes to modernity as a whole, the
transcendental subject (intentional action) is no longer a guarantee of order,
and becomes the one that destroys all identity in history, which breaks the lin-
earity of evolutionary processes and makes the radically new to emerge—that
which cannot be thought from the present ‘space of experience’. In sum, it
gave rise to that which was unthinkable not only within the frameworks of the
Enlightenment’s idea of ‘progress’, but also of nineteenth-century’s evolutionary
concept: the radical contingency of historical developments.⁶
As we see, Koselleck’s account fails to avoid relapsing into the kind of
anachronisms that he attempted to prevent. This inevitably has consequences
in his historical recreation of the origins of modernity. On the one hand, it
leads, as we have observed, to establishing a too drastic distance between the
first modern philosophies of history and the Ciceronian pedagogical ideal of
it; and, on the other hand, it confuses very divergent social and historical imag-
inaries, placing them all under one common category (that of modernity). In
fact, as I have already pointed out, its fundamental law for understanding mod-
ern temporality—that of ‘acceleration of time’—makes inconceivable the possible
emergence of other ways of experiencing temporality that are qualitatively differ-
ent to that which is at the basis of the concept of History that emerged in the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.
However, it is clear that these historical-conceptual precisions are only pos-
sible within the horizon opened by Koselleck’s own historical-conceptual proj-
ect. Ultimately, the point toward which the history of concepts and the archeol-
ogy of knowledge converge (and of which that requirement of conceptual rigor is
only a by-product) consists in the fact that they introduce a displacement of the
locus of reflection. They cease to be philosophies of history, different to the rest
but placed on their very same terrain, and become meta-philosophies of history;
their emergence represents a turn to a second-order level of historical conscious-
ness, which no longer seeks to discover a meaning in history, but rather to under-
stand what were the precise historical-epistemological conditions that led to
imagining such a project—the historical-conceptual conditions for the inception
of the very philosophies of history; in short, to recreate the underlying substrate
of thinking upon which they were historically based, and how the particular con-
cept of temporality implicit in them eventually became undermined.

 On the difference between the concepts of time in the philosophies of history of Romanticism
and Neokantianism, see: Palti 1977.

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422 Elías Palti

These theories can no longer be considered as philosophies of history, and

indeed render it no longer possible to think of them. From the moment in which
they seek to disclose the fact that philosophies of history are situated within a
particular regime of knowledge, and therefore lack meaning if they are detached
from it, they move reflection to a plane already completely alien to that which
was proper to them. In short, they mark a turning point that renders impossible
a regression to the kind of idealizations on the basis of which philosophies of
history rested, and which currently have lost their symbolic ground. Doing so
today would entail a kind of historical naivety, or, more precisely, a certain his-
torical-conceptual blindness to the epistemic conditions on which the historical-
philosophical discourse itself is founded; the contingent nature of the regime of
knowledge within—and only within—which they became meaningful. Once it
has become undermined, they lose any substantive sense, in historical-concep-
tual terms.

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