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History and Theory 44 (February 2005), 42-54 Wesleyan University 2005 ISSN: 0018-2656

IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY: AN ESSAY

CONCERNING KOSELLECKS CONCEPTS OF
ERFAHRUNGSRAUM AND ERWARTUNGSHORIZONT

ANDERS SCHINKEL

ABSTRACT

Reinhart Koselleck is an important thinker in part for his attempt to interpret the cultural
changes resulting in our modern cultural outlook in terms of the (meta)historical cate-
gories of experience and expectation. In so doing he tried to pay equal attention to the stat-
ic and the changing in history. This article argues that Kosellecks use of experience and
expectation confuses their metahistorical and historical meaning, with the result that his
account fails to do justice to the static, to continuity in history, and mischaracterizes what
is distinctive of the modern era. As well as reconfiguring the categories of experience and
expectation, this essay also introduces a third category, namely, imagination, in between
experience and expectation. This is done to render intelligible what is obscure in
Kosellecks account, and as a stimulus to a study of history that divides its attention equal-
ly between the static and the changing. In fact, it is argued that the category of imagina-
tion is pre-eminently the category of history, on the concrete historical as well as the
metahistorical level.

I. INTRODUCTION

Much historical writing is about change, and understandably so, because it

would not make sense to speak of history if there were no change; it would not
even make sense to speak of time, as time does not exist independently of events,
things happeningchange. Yet we are aware of continuity in many ways. Some
things (economic structures, climate) change very slowly, perhaps even so slow-
ly that they can hardly be perceived by one individual in his or her own lifetime.
Indeed, some changes presuppose something enduring that undergoes these
changes. Where it makes sense to speak of history, it makes sense (and it may
even be necessary) to speak of these things as well as of change.
Reinhart Koselleck is especially noteworthy among philosophers of history for
the way that he has drawn attention to both these aspects of history: the chang-
ing and the static. He has drawn attention to the relatively stable and static
prelinguistic conditions of human history, and the static nature of concepts in
comparison to the reality they are supposed to conceptualize.1 He has also given
a highly interesting interpretation of the difference between the period before and

1. Reinhart Koselleck, Linguistic Change and the History of Events, Journal of Modern History
61 (December 1989), 649-666.
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 43

that after the Sattelzeit (saddle time; 17501850), in terms of a changed concep-
tion of time, indicated by the use of Bewegungsbegriffe (concepts of movement)
like progress and emancipation, but also republicanism, socialism, and
other -isms.2 Two key terms in Kosellecks work, both with regard to the static
and to the changing, are Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungs-
horizont (horizon of expectation). With the help of these categories, the cate-
gories of experience and expectation as Koselleck also simply calls them, he is
able to interpret the change occurring in the Sattelzeit.
Experience and expectation are both transcendental categories of history (or
metahistorical categories) and historical categories, of use on a more empirical
level of historical research. They are metahistorical categories because they offer
the historian a pair of tools with which to thematize historical time, and
because they form the anthropological substratum for more concrete categories
like war and peace or work and leisure.3 They are historical categories
because they provide a key to the concrete course of history: the difference in
character between historical periods can be elucidated in terms of a difference in
the relation between experience and expectation. Moreover, experience(s) and
expectation(s) are concrete elements in history.
My concern in this article lies with (the space of) experience and (the horizon
of) expectation as historical categories. More specifically, it lies with Kosellecks
thesis that, from the Sattelzeit on, the difference between experience and expec-
tation has become increasingly bigger: genauer, da sich die Neuzeit erst als
eine neue Zeit begreifen lt, seitdem sich die Erwartungen immer mehr von
allen bis dahin gemachten Erfahrungen entfernt haben.4 In my view, Koselleck
makes an important mistake here. Experience and expectation did not drift apart
at all, because they cannot drift apart. Despite his efforts to the contrary,
Koselleck here turns into an advocate of change and modernityof which there
already are so many. Instead of gaining true insight into how we have become
what we are, he turns (involuntarily and unconsciously, perhaps) to explaining
once again that and how and why we are so different from our ancestors of two
centuries ago.
While I insist on the essential connection between experience and expectation,
and on the impossibility of their drifting apart, I do think that their relation may
change. This change depends on that which forms the connection between expe-
rience and expectation, that is, the imagination. So not only will I argue against
Kosellecks thesis of the drifting apart of experience and expectation, I will also
complement this pair of categories with a third, which is the middle category of
imagination. Adding this third category will allow me to reinterpret the changes

2. See Reinhart Koselleck, Neuzeit: Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe, in Koselleck,

Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik Geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1979), 300-348.
3. Koselleck, Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizontzwei historische Kategorien, in Ko-
selleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 352-353.
4. Ibid., 359: more precisely, that the modern period lets itself be understood as a modern peri-
od, only since expectations have drifted further and further apart from all experiences gained until
then. (All translations are my own.)
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44 ANDERS SCHINKEL

Koselleck tried to interpret using only the categories of experience and expecta-
tion; I hope that in doing so a deeper understanding of them is gained.

II. ERFAHRUNGSRAUM AND ERWARTUNGSHORIZONT

Koselleck defines Erfahrung (experience) as gegenwrtige Vergangenheit, deren

Ereignisse einverleibt worden sind und erinnert werden knnen.5 Erwartung
(expectation), like experience, is personal and interpersonal at the same time, and
occurs in the present, while aiming at the future, at what is not yet. It is verge-
genwrtigte Zukunft (future made presentpresented future).6 Koselleck
speaks of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, not the other
way around, because in our experience the past is gathered together and made into
a whole. Expectation is associated with a horizon, as this is the line behind which
lies a new space of experience, as yet unseen.
Koselleck emphasizes that experience and expectation are unlike conceptual
pairs like war and peace or inside and outside, in that they are not opposites; they
do not exclude each other. Experience is not an alternative to expectation as war
is an alternative to peace. Indeed, there is no expectation without experience, and
no experience without expectation. Although in a sense this goes for war and
peace toowar and peace are defined in opposition to the other, and therefore
conceptually need each otherthey do exclude each other in practice.
Experience and expectation are also not a symmetrical pair of concepts, the
one completing the other, experience showing us the past on one side of the pres-
ent, and expectation presenting the future on the other side. Experience and
expectation, according to Koselleck, have different Seinsweisen (modes of
being).7 Experience relates to the actual or, in the case of remembered experi-
ence, to accomplished fact. Expectation relates to the possible, which means that
though expectation is a kind of experience, it never has the fullness of experience
of (past or present) actuality.
Though it is clear that experience and expectation are of a different character,
I doubt whether these different modes of being can remain separated when we
speak of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. With the term
Erfahrungsraum, Koselleck refers to what has been actually experienced so far,
gathered together as a whole, but also, I believe, to what it is possible for some-
one in a certain day and age to experiencethat is, to a persons frame of refer-
ence. A medieval Christian frame of reference had no room for progress in the
modern sense, which means that nothing would or could be recognized as such.
A premature invention of the loom led to the destruction of invention and inven-
tor alike, not to a recognition of a step forward in the field of clothing produc-
tion. So the space of experience is also (and if Koselleck did not intend it this
way, I will include this meaning myself) the space within which experiences may
occur; it sets the limits of possible experience.

5. Koselleck, Neuzeit, 354: Experience is present past, the events of which have been incor-
porated and can be remembered.
6. Ibid., 355.
7. Idem.
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 45

This is not the same as setting the limits of possible expectation. According to
Koselleck, Erfahrungsraum did determine Erwartungshorizont in premodern
times. Part of the space of experience in the Middle Ages consisted of Christian
doctrine and biblical revelation, and these helped to determine what people
expected of the future. At the same time, these eschatological expectations
helped to determine which events were experienced. Koselleck states that every
time the apocalypse was expected but did not come, the expectation of the apoc-
alypse was strengthened. Non-fulfillment of a prophecy led to greater certainty
with regard to future fulfillment. Experience and expectation never collided. No
experience could ever shake peoples expectations, colored as the experiences
were by expectations that were themselves determined by a space of experience,
a frame of reference constituted by revelation and church doctrine.
Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont mutually influenced each other; their
respective modes of being interpenetrated.
Kosellecks thesis is that this mutual determination of Erfahrungsraum and
Erwartungshorizont ended in modernity, in the Sattelzeit. It is da sich in der
Neuzeit die Differenz zwischen Erfahrung und Erwartung zunehmend ver-
grert.8 He states that je geringer die Erfahrung, desto grer die Erwartung
is a formula for the temporal structure of modernity.9 Past experiences and the
expectations based on them are less and less fit as a help in interpreting new
experiences. Expectations have risen so high that they have removed themselves
more and more from any experiences people have had so far. That, at least, is
what Koselleck maintains; it is this thesis I will challenge in the next section.

III. THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTION OF EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATION

In opposition to Koselleck, I would like to argue that in modern times, as in pre-

modern times, expectation is firmly grounded in experience. In that respect noth-
ing has changed.
I imagine a typical example of the premodern situation as Koselleck views it
would be that of the farmer whose father and grandfather were farmers and
whose sons expect to be farmers as well. Nothing in the past suggests that the
future will be different, and the farmer does not expect it to be so. Clearly, it is
much harder to find such a farmer in Western society today, and if there still are
any they will be completely outnumbered by people whose lives are very differ-
ent from their parents lives, and whose childrens lives will be very different
from their own. Even though today utopian political visions are not widely
shared, there are probably still many people who expect the future to be very dif-
ferent from the present and from what they have experienced so far. All of this
seems unarguably true and to fit with Kosellecks account; so where does
Koselleck go wrong?
A quotation from Ludwig Bchner in Kosellecks own text provides the clue.
In 1884 Bchner, as Koselleck himself explains, was not at all surprised any-

8. Ibid., 359. that in the modern period the difference between experience and expectation
becomes increasingly larger. See also the introduction and note 4.
9. Ibid., 374: the smaller the (amount of) experience, the bigger the expectation.
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46 ANDERS SCHINKEL

more, wenn heutzutage der Fortschritt eines Jahrhunderts dem von

Jahrtausenden in frherer Zeit gleichkommt, denn gegenwrtig bringe fast jeder
Tag neues hervor.10 Bchner was not surprised about progress, about all the new
things that came into existence, because he expected such progress. And he
expected such progress, because progress was what he experienced all the time.11
His expectation that the future would bring new things was based on his previ-
ous experience that it did so. He lived in a time of rapid development, of techni-
cal inventions swiftly superseding one another. He could not but expect the same
to occur in the future. The connection between experience and expectation was
not lost, but was as strong as ever!
An old postcard I bought some time ago will also illustrate the point. It shows
a statue symbolizing peacethe card was issued on the occasion of the First
International Peace Conference in The Hague, 1899, the result of an initiative of
the Russian Czar. The card itself is interesting enough, but the reason I bought it
was that the woman who sent it wrote on the front, underneath the picture: Het
Beeld der Toekomst, meaning the image/vision of the future.12 Now it might
be argued that here, just as Koselleck would claim, the authors expectations
were removed from any experience she might have had. Europe (and not just
Europe) had been in turmoil during the whole century. The FrenchGerman war
lay not twenty years behind, and European countries were arming themselves.
The knowledge that two World Wars were yet to come completes the picture with
a bitter touch of irony. Yet, although the comment written on the card may have
been somewhat naive, it is certainly not the example of expectations on the loose
that it appears to be to those with hindsight. The womans hope was grounded in
certain experiences related to the Conference. She may have been rather selec-
tive in her focus, ignoring perhaps the pragmatic background of the Czars
appeal, with Russia being unable to keep up with other European countries in the
arms race. Yet she witnessed 108 delegates from twenty-six countries gathering
in The Hague, peace societies urging hesitant governments on, hundreds of thou-
sands of signatures being gathered from the Low Countries alone. In the years
before the Conference, government leaders met and spoke about general peace
and disarmament. In a private conversation with the Russian ambassador in
1894, the English prime minister Rosebery stated (and not for the first time) that
he considered Czar Alexander III to be the most powerful guaranty of general
peacefulness.13 Though many delegates themselves did not really believe in it
at first, their skepticism diminished during the Conference. A peace conference
on this scale was a very new development. All in all, it does not seem strange to

10. Ibid., 368. Koselleck cites Ludwig Bchner, Der Fortschritt in Natur und Geschichte im
Lichte der Darwinschen Theorie (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart, 1884), 34: when today the progress
of a century equals that of a millennium in former days, because at present almost every day brings
forth something new.
11. Progress is used in a very general sense here, without any evaluation intended.
12. Beeld may also mean statueso there was some wordplay in the phrase as well.
13. Thomas K. Ford, The Genesis of the First Hague Peace Conference, Political Science
Quarterly 51 (September 1936), 355. Czar Alexander died in 1894, and was succeeded by Nicholas
II. Fords article focuses on the question of who was/were behind the Russian appeal for a peace con-
ference presented in 1898.
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 47

me that these experiences gave rise to an apparently somewhat utopian hope or
expectation. The point is that expectations that on superficial examination seem
to be far removed from experience and inexplicable on its basis, will in effect
always have a clear basis in it (except in cases of severe mental illness, in which
it is not clear that we can meaningfully speak of expectations).
But, someone might object, is not the expectation of change, based on the
experience of change, very different in kind from the expectation of the farmer
that his son will be a farmer too? Clearly it is. In the latter case, the concrete con-
tent of the expectation reflects the concrete content of experience, whereas in the
former case it does not. But this does not mean that in the former case expecta-
tion and experience have become separated; it just means that in the former case,
the similarity between experience and expectation lies on a more abstract level.
To think that in the modern age expectation has become disconnected from expe-
rience means that a confusion has occurred between the levels of the concrete
and the abstracta confusion, I must add, that lies with Koselleck. In an inter-
view with Wolf-Dieter Narr and Kari Palonen, Koselleck says: Ich glaube, da
die Kategorien Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft,bzw. Erfahrungsraum
und Erwartungshorizont als der Vergangenheit oder der Zukunft zuzuordnen
inhaltsleer zu definieren sind. Was jeweils in der Gegenwart und der Zukunft
oder in der Vergangenheit der Fall war oder sein wird, lt sich aus den
Strukturen der Zeit nicht ableiten.14 When one compares this to his remarks
about experience and expectation that I quoted in section II, it seems that
Koselleck switches back and forth between a use of the terms experience and
expectation as formal categories (without content), and an everyday filled
use of these terms that allows for plural experiences and expectations. His
thesis would be correct if he claimed that the content of experiences and the con-
tent of expectations diverged in the modern period, but this does not mean that
thereby expectation and experience are now disconnected. On a more abstract
level, expectations still reflect experiences. (Indeed, as categories they cannot
diverge.) Koselleck does not clearly distinguish between the two, and it is clear
that he speaks of categories when he says that die Grenzen des
Erfahrungsraumes und der Horizont der Erwartung traten auseinander.15
But what I have said so far is merely that experience and expectation are
always connected, not how they are. Nor is it yet clear how their relation can
change. The next two sections are meant to deal with these questions. I will intro-
duce imagination as a third category of history, a category that lies between
experience and expectation. Expectations are necessarily grounded in experi-
ence, yet they may diverge for some people to some extent, depending on the
strength of their imagination. Though with most people in modern times experi-

14. Zeit, Geschichte und Politik. (Time, History and Politics). Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von
Reinhart Koselleck, ed. Jussi Kurunmki and Kari Palonen (Jyvskyl: University of Jyvskyl,
2003), 17: I believe that the categories present, past, and futurespace of experience and horizon
of expectation respectively to be assigned to the past or the futurecan be defined contentless.What
was or will be the state of affairs at a given time in the present and the future or in the past, cannot
be deduced from the structures of time.
15. Koselleck, Neuzeit, 364: the limits of the space of experience and the horizon of expecta-
tion diverged.
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48 ANDERS SCHINKEL

ence and expectation have been related as they were for Ludwig Bchner in the
example above, the modern period does distinguish itself from the premodern by
the number of creative thinkers it producedor, one could say, that creative
thinkers produced the modern period, instead of the other way around; this is just
as sensible. Yet it is doubtful whether it makes sense to speak of expectation in
their case; when they combine their experience of the past with a creative imag-
ination, they do not simply expect the future to be different, they make it differ-
ent. But before discussing the distinctive nature and role of imagination in the
modern period it is necessary to outline the function of imagination as an inter-
mediary between expectation and experience in history.

IV. IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATION

In a sense, it is rather obvious that experience and expectation are related. What,
other than experience, could provide the rough material for ones expectations?16
I have argued that the connection between the two is essential, that it does not
make sense to say that in some period peoples expectations are so far removed
from their past experiences that the latter provide no clues for understanding the
former. It is imagination that nestles itself between experience and expectation. It
may be a small nest or it may be a large one, but experience always shapes expec-
tation through the mediation of imagination. It takes imagination to have expec-
tations at allto be able to distinguish the future from the past, and to have some
sense of what this future might be and to have an attitude toward it. This imagi-
nation can be stronger or weaker, and it can be more or less creative. In the pre-
modern period imagination, with respect to the shaping of expectations, is rela-
tively weak and relatively uncreative: the expectations of its members diverged
only minimally from their experience. The modern period, on the other hand, is
characterized by a stronger, more creative imagination in this respect. It takes
such an imagination to think that, although my father and my fathers father and
his father were all farmers, I could be something elsethat is, if such a change
is virtually without precedent. Similarly, when this is without precedent, it takes
an active imagination to picture ones childrens lives as very different from ones
own. But even when it has become normal for people to choose their own careers,
irrespective of the profession of their forefathers, the modern period will require
a more active imagination. Although a modern persons social environment will
suggest certain careers rather than others, thereby limiting the choice this person
has, he or she will still be required to imagine his life after opting for either of the
alternatives presented to him. The fact that people imagine how their life might
be and how it might be different from that of the previous generation may have
become normal, but this does not diminish the imaginative effort in itself.
Even in cases of very strong and creative imagination there will always be a
connection to some experience that makes highly divergent expectations com-

16. With regard to this section, compare Koselleck, Neuzeit, 357-358: Wer seine Erwartung
zur Gnze aus seiner Erfahrung ableiten zu knnen glaubt, der irrt. . . . Wer aber seine Erwartung
nicht auf Erfahrung grndet, der irrt ebenfalls. (Who believes he is able to deduce the whole of his
expectation from his experience, is mistaken. . . . But who does not ground his expectation in expe-
rience, is mistaken as well.)
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 49

prehensible. Imagination deals with possibilities, but not every abstract possibil-
ity is a possibility now, in this concrete situation. Also, an infinite number of
states of affairs is possible, but it is unlikely that anyone will think of them if they
do not bear any connection to actuality17. With any original thinker of the past
that history credits for having invented something new and important, it is pos-
sible to point out precursors, influences, inspirers. Imagination does not operate
in a vacuum any more than expectations arise in one; experience, imagination,
and expectation are always and everywhere linkedthough the character of
these links differs from age to age. Some peoples imagination is so strong and
so creative that they may be characterized as creative geniuses. When Karl Marx
envisioned a classless society, he used his imagination in a particularly creative
way. There was no historical precedent: heretofore, all history was the history of
class struggle. It is easy to laugh at his seemingly naive vision of a proletarian
paradise on earth. Alan Brown calls Marx a romantic about human desire,
because Marx thought that in a communist system there would be no greed as
there is in the capitalist system.18 No doubt he was a romantic in many respects.
A highly creative imagination is very much a romantic thing. And yet a connec-
tion between Marxs expectation and experience remains. If we put under the
heading of experience, as Koselleck does, everything people have been taught
and everything they have read, as well as their more concrete life experiences,
then in Marxs case we must recognize that he lived under the influence of
Romanticism as well as the Enlightenment. He was influenced by Hegel and by
the work of Rousseau. He lived in a time of revolutions, turmoil, industrializa-
tion, of change in every aspect of society. These things take us some way towards
an understanding of where Marxs expectations came from. And then there is the
factwhich I touched upon beforethat we are not just dealing with the expec-
tation of change, but also with bringing it about. Marxs adage that heretofore
the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it, is famous enough.
Most people are not as creatively imaginative as Karl Marx was, or Sir Isaac
Newton, or James Watt, to name a few others. The creative imagination occupies
a relatively large space between experience and expectation in the case of these
illustrious thinkers (but never so great a space that the connection between expe-
rience and expectation is broken or rendered unintelligible); it plays a much more
modest role with John and Jane Doe. A period in history may be characterized by
the especially creative character of (some of) its members imaginations, or the
number of creative geniuses it produces, or the level of encouragement and
recognition it gives to creative geniuses, but that does not make everyone living
in that period a creative genius. Marxs followers were not all visionaries, people

17. Daniel Dennetts example of a bare opportunity goes some way toward illustrating this: If I
walk by a row of trash cans, and one of them happens to contain a purse full of diamonds, then I pass
up a bare opportunity to become wealthy. It makes no difference that I had no reason to suspect there
were any jewels there for the taking, or that my normal behavior has never included checking out
trash cans for valuables. (Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room [Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1996], 116-117.)
18. Alan Brown, Modern Political Philosophy: Theories of the Just Society (Harmondsworth,
Eng.: Penguin Books, 1990), 115.
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50 ANDERS SCHINKEL

of great imagination, and if they expected things to change it was mainly because
change is what they experienced. If they expected things to be better in the future,
it is because this is what they were taught and they wanted to believe it.
Koselleck quotes an Englishman from the middle of the nineteenth century:
The world moves faster and faster; and the difference will probably be consid-
erably greater. The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise.19 It
may be that the temper of each new generation is a surprise, or in other words
that the content of the future is a surprise, but it will not at all be surprising to
this man that this will be so, for it is what he experiences already. He merely
extends the line of contemporary development into the future, including the
increasing acceleration. So again, as in Bchners case, expectation arises out of
experience. This mans imagination is not strikingly activeit would have been,
had he predicted that in the near future all change would come to a halt and
things would start moving at a much slower pace. But this man merely assumed
relative continuity between past, present, and future.
This is not to deny that there isnt an important break between the premodern
and the modern period. One might describe this break in terms of the difference
between a backward-looking and a forward-looking consciousness. The back-
ward-looking consciousness is dominated by past experiences, meaning that it is
not bent on forming expectations of a future that will be very different from the
past. The forward-looking consciousness does not ignore past experiencesit
cannot shape expectations out of thin airbut it uses its experience in order to
transform it. To accomplish this, it uses imagination creatively. In general,
modernity is a more forward-looking period, and our collective experience does
not determine our expectations in the same way as five or more centuries ago.
The appearance of particular concepts of imagination and the increasing use of
these concepts is indicative of this change. Let us look at these changes before
trying to characterize the modern period.

V. CONCEPTS OF IMAGINATION

Analogously to Kosellecks exposition of Bewegungsbegriffe (concepts of move-

ment), I would like to point out a number of concepts of imagination
(Einbildungsbegriffe, to put it in German for the sake of analogy) that are indi-
cators of the change from the premodern to the modern. The English word
imagination itself, in the sense of a creative faculty in its highest aspect, was
used from around 1500 onwards. Originally, the term referred to the act of pre-
senting to ones mind images of things not actually present at that time and place
in the external world. To speak of imagination as a creative faculty is a fairly
modern idiom. A second concept of imagination, invention, was not used in its
modern sense until around 1600. Ars inveniendi (the art of invention) is a term
coined by Cicero, but applied to a certain part of rhetoric. Only from around 1600
onwards was the term applied to all fields of science.20 Another related term is
19. Koselleck, Neuzeit, 369. He quotes J. A. Froude, from Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement
(London: Longmans, Green, 1959), 3.
20. See C. A. Van Peursen, Ars Inveniendi: Filosofie van de inventiviteit van Francis Bacon tot
Immanul Kant (Kampen: Kok Agora, 1993).
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 51

genius. Originally, the Latin word genius referred to the tutelary god or
attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and
determine his character, and finally to conduct him out of the world.21 The term
could also be applied to places or institutions, to refer to the spirit connected with
that place. It may have been used especially in connection with more talented
persons, but as a word referring to a persons natural abilities and capacities it
was not used until the seventeenth century. The sense of a native intellectual
power of an exalted type, an instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imagi-
native creation, original thought, invention, or discovery is even more recent;
according to the OED it appears to have been developed in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Original, in the sense in which it is used above, is itself an eighteenth-
century term. We still speak of an original in the sense that it is not a copy, and
we say things like: the original plan was . . . but something came up, referring
to the plan formed at the beginning; but these are old uses of the term original.
To speak of a book or a piece of music as highly original is a completely dif-
ferent thing. It refers to an individuals creative power, to someones ability to
create something altogether new and unprecedented. Creativity, to continue
with the next concept of imagination, is a nineteenth-century noun; creative a
seventeenth-century adverb; creativeness is again from the nineteenth century.
Terms like discovery, design, devise, and device are all, in the sense in
which we use them most now, (early) modern creations. The term phantasy, to
conclude with a notion that is rather intimately related in meaning to imagina-
tion, also has an interesting history. Originally, a phantasy (Gr. )
was an illusory appearance, something a person was haunted by, a hallucination.
Its active sense of someones phantasy, a persons creative power, has its roots
in early modern times.22 The word changed in meaning from passive to active, or
at least the passive sense got company of an active one.
These briefly sketched examples are evidence of a vocabulary of concepts of
imagination that is indicative of modernity. They are dynamic notions, active,
individualized and interiorized. Whereas genius was once something external
accompanying each person in life, the modern genius is the creative inventor her
or himself. The modern phantasy is not an illusory image troubling a persons
mind, but a spring of novelty and creativity within the mind. Only in modern
times did humans dare apply the label creative to themselves. In general, a
change occurred from passive notions to active ones, from things happening (to
you) to making things happen. This is not a new insight of course, but by
demonstrating it in this way, pointing out the etymological evidence for this shift
in consciousness, I merely wish to show that (linguistic) history can provide
some support for introducing imagination as a category of history besides (or in
fact, between) experience and expectation.

21. This etymology and those following are all from the Oxford English Dictionary.
22. The OED notes that in modern use fantasy and phantasy . . . tend to be apprehended as sep-
arate words, the predominant sense of the former being caprice, whim, fanciful invention, while
that of the latter is imagination, visionary notion.
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52 ANDERS SCHINKEL

VI. MODERNITYS HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

We might say (a bit pompously) that modernity began when imagination took
flight. Exaggerated as this may sound, there is good reason for assigning such a
central place to the changing character of imagination embodied in its changing
semantics that I have described. Historians are correct in assigning to Romanti-
cism an important role in the development of historical consciousness and of his-
tory as a science; the way philosophers of history have distinguished history
from nature, and the appearance of (the modern senses of) terms like imagina-
tion and creativity in the Romantic Era, capture crucial developments in the mod-
ern period. Two of the most influential modern philosophers of history, R. G.
Collingwood and W. Dilthey, saw events of history as distinct from events of
nature in that the former not merely had an outside, but also an inside.23 The
meaning of a historical event could not be explained or understood in terms of
causality, but had to do with the experience of those typically historical creatures:
human beings. As Collingwood put it succinctly: all history is the history of
thought. To locate the difference between historical and unhistorical creatures
in the formers mental powers is merely a modern way of putting the difference
between freedom and causality. Humans are (to a certain extent) free, thanks to
their mental powers that make it possible for them to escape the bonds of mere-
ly natural causality. In this quality lies the major condition of the possibility of
history (of the possibility not only that the future will differ from the past and the
present, but that its agents will make this difference occur on the basis of their
imagination). The freedom of humans lies in their ability to evaluate the possible
as well as the real, and to realize these possibilities by bringing novelty into the
world.24 Modern historical consciousness is a self-conscious expression of the
awareness of these capacities and an instantiation of this awareness in a particu-
lar form of being. The Romantic concepts of imagination, creativity, and genius
are the linguistic expression of and evidence for this. In the modern period imag-
ination assumes a more creative and active role in its linking of experience and
expectation, rendering the consciousness of its members more forward-looking,
and their behavior more active in seeking to make the future different from the
present.

VII. CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is not easy to give equal attention to the static and to the changing in history.
Living in a time when change, a particular kind of change at least, seems to dom-
inate, and stability appears to be something from the past, one tends to slide into
a certain discourse on history: a discourse that centers around statements that,
and explanations why, we are so different from people a few centuries ago. This
discourse of explaining modernity is itself a modern phenomenon and in a sense
23. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History [1946] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
and W. Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften [1910] (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981).
24. This is not an exclusively human quality (non-human nature produces novelty as well), but it
is rather pronounced in our species.
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IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY 53

makes itself true. Postmodern philosophy of history tends to bring the modern
discourse to its extreme, completely separating the present from the past, waving
away all possible explanations of how we became what we are, insisting on dif-
ference and discontinuity: if the present generation needs anything at all,
Hayden White writes, it is a willingness to confront heroically the dynamic and
disruptive forces in contemporary life. The historian serves no one well by con-
structing a specious continuity between the present world and that which pre-
ceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinu-
ity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot.25
Koselleck set out to try to understand the difference between the modern and
the premodern mentality, using as tools the categories of experience and expec-
tation. The fact that he used these tools is evidence of his concern with the pre-
conditions of historythat is: with the static. However, the thesis he formulated
to state the difference between the modern and the premodern mentality (that in
the modern period expectation is severed from experience) failed to do justice to
the static, to the fact that in all periods expectation and experience are always
linked, and are so by imagination. Koselleck unwillingly ended up siding with
those philosophers of history who overemphasize the difference between the
present and the past. Indeed, in the end, Kosellecks thesis renders the connec-
tion between past and present unintelligible.
If we want to understand how we came to be what we are, even how we came
to think of ourselves as so very different from the past, we have to divide our
attention equally between the static and the changing. Insofar as we focus on
change, it really has to be to change, which implies continuity and development,
not just to difference, that we direct our attention. The focal points of the static
and the changing are not mutually exclusive: though only one at a time can be in
focus, one can switch back and forth between the two, the static forming the
background of change, and vice-versa. They are complementary aspects of real-
ity. It seems to me that in this respect, the modern outlook is unjustly all too often
opposed to the classical outlook: the modern one being characterized by a linear
conception of time and history and by the idea of progress; the classical by a
cyclical conception of history as illustrating a recurring pattern. These perspec-
tives are not really in opposition; the one does not have to replace the other. It is
a difficult question how deeply ingrained in our being are the changes that have
occurred in our culture. To what extent does the modern, linear conception of
time influence the way individuals reflect on their own life-span? Though we live
in a computerized era, does it really feel radically different to live a normal
life now than it did a millennium ago? There is always normality, though its

25. Hayden White, The Burden of History, in White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 50 (originally published in History and
Theory 5 [1966], 111-134). It is unclear to me how White is able to compare past and present, as this
presupposes an understanding of the past that is (in Whites own view) unattainable due to the sup-
posed radical difference between past and present itself. White stated elsewhere that the only possi-
ble way of choosing between different historical interpretations is to do this on moral or aesthetic
grounds, not on the ground of greater plausibility or closer approximation of truth. See Hayden
White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973).
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54 ANDERS SCHINKEL

shape differs. And even more basic than this culturally determined normality is
a biological normality: the kind of animal species we are. White was not wrong
to insist on the importance of language in shaping our (perspective on) reality,
but Koselleck was certainly right in pointing out some prelinguistic conditions of
human history, conditions that humans share with other animals: Man, as a lin-
guistic being, simply cannot avoid transforming the metahistorical givens lin-
guistically in order to regulate and direct them, so far as he can. Nevertheless,
these elementary, natural givens remain, however much language may seek to
efface them.26 In the case at issue in this essay, this means that experience,
expectation, and imagination are transcendental categories that pick out certain
universal features of human life, and that necessarily figure in historical studies
of it. But it also means that the content of these categories can and will vary from
one historical epoch to another. Thus, in the modern period the character of expe-
rience (it typically became more forward-looking), expectation (it typically
diverged more from experience), and imagination (it typically became stronger,
more creative, and underwrote more active ways of being) all changed. In this
way the modern period is both like earlier periodsas it, too, involves the inter-
relation of experience, imagination, and expectationand unlike them, in that
the character of this interrelation changes markedly.27

Free University of Amsterdam

The Netherlands

26. Koselleck, Linguistic Change and the History of Events, 652.

27. I would like to thank the editor, Brian Fay for his work on this paper, as well as the anony-
mous referees for their valuable suggestions. Thanks are also due to Willem Schinkel for his useful
comments on an earlier version of this article.