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Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 www.brill.nl/chco

Semantics of Time and Historical Experience:

Remarks on Koselleck’s Historik

Luca Scuccimarra
University of Macerata, Italy

Abstract
Moving from Koselleck’s most recent essays on Historik, the author explores the
role played by historiography in the constitution of historicity as a peculiar expe-
riential dimension of human existence. The essay focuses on the complex link
between difference and repetition which, according to Koselleck’s theory of expe-
rience, constitutes a “specific historical temporality” and its inner articulation.
Actually, it is by exploring the “formal temporal structures” which constitute the
horizon of historical intelligibility that Koselleck brings to light the decisive role
that the point of view of historiography has for the constitution of man as the
subject of historical knowledge and action. It is difficult to ignore the importance
of this theory of historical temporalization in an age in which the End of History
rhetoric tends to transform itself in a sort of media gospel.

Keywords
history, historicity, experience, time

1. Historiography and Historicity: A Quasi-Transcendental

Prospective
We owe to Reinhart Koselleck some of the most stimulating ideas on the
close relationship between the historiographical inquiry and the constitu-
tion of that complex experiential dimension that, with a rough approxima-
tion, may be defined as “historicity.” The existence of a connection based
on reciprocal conditioning between the historical dimension and histori-
ography represents, in fact, one of the basic assumptions of that quasi-
transcendental science regarding the “formal criteria concerning historical

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/187465608X363454

 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 161

(historisch) acting and suffering” that – with clear reference to the “tool-
box” of eighteenth-century Historismus – Koselleck chose to call “Histo-
rik.”1 As the “study of the conditions of possible histories (möglicher
Geschichten),” Historik does not only investigate the theoretical and system-
atic pre-cognitions that necessarily interpose between historians and the
subject of their research. On the contrary, it tries to connect the two differ-
ent meanings of the word “History” – denoting at the same time reality
and its representation – in order to reveal the “anthropologically given arc
linking and relating historical experience with the knowledge of such expe-
rience.”2 From this point of view, the explicit thematization of the ground-
ing categories used in the historical discourse (or preceding it) represents a
mere moment within a wider research enterprise whose chief aim is to define
the conditions of possibilities for history as both “space of consciousness”
and “space of action.” As a matter of fact, Koselleck’s Historik “researches
theoretically established elements that may be helpful in understanding
how histories (Geschichten) happen (ereignen), how they could take place
(vollziehen), and furthermore how and why they must be studied, represented,
or narrated.” It “aims at the bilateral nature of each history (Geschichte) –
meaning both the connections that link events and their representation.”3
According to Koselleck’s highly structured approach, studying “the con-
ditions of possible histories” means firstly exploring the complex temporal
frame according to which, in a more or less conscious way, historical
knowledge as a specific horizon of intelligibility is based.4 Working on this
subject in his essay “Geschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturen,”
published in 1973, Koselleck refers to three “modes of temporal experi-
ence” – the irreversibility of events, the repeatability of events, and the
“contemporaneity” of the non-contemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit der
Ungleichzeitigen) – from whose combination it is possible to deduce con-
ceptually all the infinite “differentiating conditions” which are used by his-
torical investigation in order to make a “concrete historical motion” visible.5
1)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002c), 99.
2)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985a), 92.
3)
Reinhart Koselleck (2000), 99.
4)
Reinhart Koselleck (1971), 17.
5)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985a), 95. As examples of these “differentiating conditions,” Kosel-
leck cites the couples progress/decadence, acceleration/delay, “not yet”/ “not any longer,”
“earlier”/ “later.”
162 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

This “rigorously formalized” concept of “historical temporal categories” is

based, moreover, on the deeper level of a historical-anthropological theory
of “experience”: according to Koselleck, “directly or indirectly every his-
tory is concerned with experiences, one’s own or someone else’s. Therefore,
it can be assumed that the various ways of narrating histories or processing
them methodologically can be related to the ways in which experiences are
made, collected, or transformed.” So the aim of an inclusive theory of “the
conditions of possible histories” is “to grasp the threshold potential indi-
cated by every acquisition or change of experience in its temporal and
therefore historical dimension.”6
The results of this kind of approach become completely evident in the
historical-anthropological essay, Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel,
which was published by Koselleck at the end of the 1980s. Here, one finds
completely disclosed the complex link between difference and repetition
which, according to the author, constitutes the “specific historical tempo-
rality” and its inner articulation. In his reconstruction, the peculiar texture
of “historical” time is strictly connected with the perception – both indi-
vidual and collective – of those discontinuities in events which come to
upset the horizon of settled practices and shared expectations. This is why
Koselleck considers the experience of “surprise (Überraschung)” – that in
itself is “always as unique as unrepeatable” – as the “primal experience,”
without which “no biography or history is possible”:

We have an experience in the sense that we are bound to be surprised. These

experiences, once they happen or assert themselves, remain unique (einmalig).
Therefore, every experience contains its own history in nuce. Such a history is
contained within the acquisition of experience, which, prompted by a sur-
prise, resides in that minimal temporal difference between “before” and
“after,” or “too early” and “too late,” retrospectively constituting the history of
an experience.7

Once these experiences, even the most traumatic, have been lived through
in their original uniqueness, they become part of the framework of repeat-
ability that articulates all forms of human life, finding its peculiar expres-
sion in a specific “horizon of expectation.” What Koselleck describes in
this essay is a real “process of accumulation” that produces wider frames of

6)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 50.
7)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 51.
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 163

temporal reference, which are able to “structure, reorient, or stabilize”

human life in its individual and collective dimensions. These temporal
determinations have a character quite different from any kind of “astro-
nomically rationalized, long-term, natural chronology”: actually, they are
absolutely subjective, being tied to the irreducible uniqueness of a peculiar
“space of experience,” to specific “social and political units of action, to
particular acting and suffering human beings, and to their institutions and
organizations.”8 This perspective allows us to better understand what
Koselleck concretely means when he talks about the principle of contempo-
raneity of the non-contemporaneous as a “formal criterion” of historical
investigation, since in the presence of the same naturalistic chronology you
can find different classifications of historical sequences: “Within this tem-
poral refraction is contained a diversity of temporal strata which are of
varying duration, according to the agents of circumstances in question,
and which are to be measured against each other.”9
In its deeper dimension of a theory of historical experience, Koselleck’s
Historik may therefore be seen as a sharp and original reprise of the “tran-
scendental” issue which had been distinctive of nineteenth-century Histo-
rismus during its founding period.10 As for Gustav Droysen, “the most
thoughtful of the nineteenth-century historians,”11 in these pages the
reflection on the “time factor” overpasses the level of a simple theory of
historical knowledge to lead to a more ambitious analysis of the constitu-
tive presuppositions of the historical point of view on the world, assumed as
the key-moment of an appropriate reflexive understanding of historicity as
a peculiar dimension of human life.12 In Koselleck’s theory of historical
experience the “uniform and empty time” of triumphing Historismus has
nevertheless definitively given place to a composite and non-homogeneous

8)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002c), 110.
9)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985a), 94.
10)
Manfred Riedel (1978).
11)
Christian-Georg Schuppe (1998), 16.
12)
On this subject, see Johann Gustav Droysen (1868), §45: “In his everyday activity no
sensible person does history or plans to do it. Only a certain way to consider the events
afterwards ‘makes business history.’ To conceive the ethical world in its becoming and
growing, according to the sequence of its movement, means to conceive it historically.” This
approach is fully developed in the first paragraphs of the volume Historik. Vorlesung über
Enzyklopedie und Metodologie der Geschichte (1937), which collects the lectures about his-
torical methodology given by Droysen since 1857. For an effective discussion of Droysen’s
“transcendental” approach, see Jorn Rüsen (1993), 226.
164 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

temporality, full of “holes, recesses, and gradients.”13 So, it is not by acci-

dent that in the philosophical genealogy of this new kind of Historik the
main reference is not Kant – as in Droysen – but one of the sharpest critics
of Kantian transcendentalism, Johann Gottfried Herder. It seems right to
him, indeed, that we owe the first, early, theorization of an irreducible
plurality of historical time, developed in open disagreement with the level-
ling space-temporal conception of the Critique of Pure Reason: “in reality” –
notes Herder in his Metakritik – “every mutable thing has within itself the
measure of its time; this persists even in the absence of any other; 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 innumer-
ably many times.”14 As Koselleck reminds us, what we find here is a real
turning point in the theoretical evolution of modern historical conscience.
From this moment on, the main task of historiography has become “to
speak, not of one historical time, but rather of many forms of time super-
imposed onto one another.”15

2. Historiography and Historicity

It is by exploring the “formal temporal structures” that constitute the min-
imum tapestry necessary to construct a horizon of historical intelligibility
that Koselleck brings to light the decisive role that the adoption of a reflex-
ive and external point of view on the universe of happenings – the point of
view that is characteristic of historiography – assumes for the constitution
of man as the subject of historical knowledge and action. Although the
historical experience represents, for Koselleck, a primarily and eminently
individual dimension, within its functional dynamic it appears, in fact, to
be characterized by the presence of more than individual “conditions and
outcomes, which overlap with personal history but still refer to greater
spans which create a common space of experience.”16 This is the case of
those political and social generational unities (Generationseinheiten) “whose
commonalty consists in making, collecting and organizing unique or
13)
Antonio Negri (1997), 19.
14)
Johann Gottfried Herder (1799), 68. On this subject, see Reinhart Koselleck (1985d),
247.
15)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985e), xxii.
16)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 53.
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 165

repeated experiences, or, in undergoing common successions of experi-

ence.”17 But above all, it relates to those long-term temporal articulations
that allow human beings to “explain the character of the present or the
specific alterity of earlier history,” transforming their own individual and
group experience into a historical (historisch) experience in the strict sense
of the word. From an anthropological point of view, “in both cases we are
dealing with the incorporation of generation-spanning experiences of oth-
ers into the framework of one’s own experiences.” This is a process which
can take place only retrospectively through a methodologically framed recon-
struction of what has occurred. In this perspective, it could therefore be
said that we are in the presence of a reflexively mediated relationship with
events “that provides the backdrop to all primary experiences.”18
Indeed, it is at this level that the constitutive function of historiography
comes into play in all its relevance for human beings. What takes form in
this contest is a post-metaphysical version of the “practical” understanding
of historical knowledge, on which Droysen had already founded the cogni-
tive and didactical project of his Historismus.19 In Koselleck’s iter, too, this
dimension naturally tends to coincide with that highly formalized notion
of Geschichtswissenschaft that characterizes the horizon of European research
from at least the second half of the nineteenth century. It is sufficient to
recall the obsessive insistence with which he underlines the assumed cen-
trality of the methodological self-problematization of historiography in
the act of constituting historicity as a whole made up of “the conditions of

17)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 52: “This is why there exist, beyond personal involvement,
generation-specific spans and thresholds of experience which, once they are instituted or
surpassed, create a common history. They encompass all people who live together, be they
families, professional groups, inhabitants of a city, soldiers of an army, members of states or
social groups, believers or unbelievers within or outside of churches, members of political
formations of every sort, be they parties, sects, factions, camarillas, staffs, localities, juries,
communities. In short, every unit of action formed by way of life, chance, or organization
partakes in the stabilization of given experiences.”
18)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 54.
19)
On the function of “experience increase” which Droysen ascribes to historical knowl-
edge, see Historik, II, 1. In Droysen’s theory the constitutive role of historiography is nev-
ertheless deeply connected to a unitary and progressive conception of universal history,
based on theological foundations. On this subject, see Jorn Rüsen (1993), 253. On the
importance that a rediscovery of the “practical” function of historical knowledge may have
even in a post-metaphysical horizon of thought, see also Luca Scuccimarra (2004), 59.
166 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

possibility for histories (Geschichten) as such.”20 Koselleck, however, is

equally explicit in underlining that the developments of this reflexive
dynamic took place, in past centuries, within a theoretical area that went
beyond the confines of the “theory of history” in the strict sense of the
term.21 It is precisely in the name of this broadened notion of Historie that
in the essay “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel ” the analysis of the
reflexive constituting modalities of historical temporality can expand into
a discussion of the “lasting foundations” in which – along with several of
the founding fathers of the historical method – several protagonists of
Western theological, philosophical and political thought are remembered.

. . . Be they the gods or a still higher fatum (Herodotus, Polybius); be it man’s

inborn desire for power (Thucydides, Machiavelli, Lord Acton); be it Fortune
(Polybius, Tacitus, Otto von Freising, Machiavelli, Voltaire); be it the God of
Christianity, to whom all the above-mentioned are subordinated for directing
man’s constantly self-reproducing morality toward eternity (Augustine, Beda,
Otto von Freising); be it forces, ideas or principles of long-term influence
(Herder, Humboldt, Ranke), or enduring powers (Jacob Burckhardt); be it
conditions of production, legal constants, economic or institutional determi-
nants, or supra-human cyclical movements (Ferguson, Smith, Marx); or be it
modern combinations and theoretical elaborations of experiential data that
have accumulated over time: in every case, the methodological problem con-
cerns correlating the primary experiences of unique surprises and novelties to
their long-term conditions of possibility.22

Certainly Koselleck is not unaware of the profound structural differences

that distinguish each of these single versions of the reflexive constitution of
historical temporality: in fact, each of these theories has its own specific
“order of time” in which the three constitutive dimensions of historical
temporality – past, present, and future – are linked so as to animate what,
with François Hartog, we might define a particular “regime of historic-

20)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002a), 3. Absolutely exemplary in this perspective is the texture
itself of the essay “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel” (1989) dominated as it is by
the research of “the anthropological conditions of possible experience and their methodo-
logical development.”
21)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 50.
22)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 60.
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 167

ity.”23 Nor does he fail to underline the absolutely sui generis position
assumed in this picture by the temporal order of modernity, which – thanks
to an accurate “temporalization of history” – makes it possible for the first
time to formalize in general terms the fundamental dimension of epochal
discontinuity.24 From a historical-anthropological perspective, this pro-
foundly innovative concept of historical time seems to be destined, how-
ever, to pass into the background with respect to the substantial permanence
of an experiential structure which is in some way inscribed in the constitu-
tion of historicity itself. Prominent among the reflexive reference points
that Historik offers to historiography is the meta-historical awareness that
“the pressure of experience under which human beings exist and act is
layered differently according to different time spans,” because the “short,
middle and long-term spans of experience” are all “co-originally” ( gleichür-
sprunglich) constituents of history as a space of knowledge and action.25
In a context of analysis dominated by the “circular” interaction between
historical experience and historical knowledge, it is thus not surprising
that such awareness ultimately exerts directive normative repercussions on
that very “discipline of history” (Geschichtswissenschaft) itself that Koselleck
considers an integral part of the horizon of historicity. As mentioned
before, among the tasks of Historik as a “theory of the conditions of any
possible history” is, in fact, the search of those “theoretically based” ele-
ments that may be of help in understanding how and why histories “must
be studied, represented or narrated.”26 And at this level the recognition of
the constituting temporal multidimensionality of the historical horizon
tends to translate into the adoption of an adequately constructed analysis
grid to illustrate the entire diversified range of temporal strata that form
the basis of individual and collective experience27 Koselleck’s historical
paradigm leads back, therefore, to the thesis that history can be studied
only if the different temporal dimensions that are seemingly inextricably
intertwined within its phenomena-linked dynamic are separated.28 Clarifi-
cation of the different temporal levels of the historical movement is the

23)
François Hartog (2003), 19.
24)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002b), 119-120.
25)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 56.
26)
Reinhart Koselleck (2000), 99.
27)
Examples can be found in Reinhart Koselleck (1985b), 105.
28)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002b), 123.
168 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

historian’s “preliminary methodological imperative.”29 But there is more.

The task of gnoseologically emancipated historiography is, for Koselleck,
to bring to the centre of the investigation the specific forms of temporal
experience that pass through the historical becoming and animate its
reflexive self-representation. It is precisely in this specific frame of analysis
that the Koselleckian reflection on “the conditions of each possible his-
tory” finds all its methodological originality, and becomes a real and true
theory of historical representation, developed in reference to the principal
operative options set forth by the historiographical debate after the Second
World War.

3. From Histories to History (and Back)

The concrete reconstructive results that Koselleck drew from this innova-
tive basic structure are well-known. In more than thirty years of field
research, the German historian did, in fact, widely test the possibilities of
application of a semantics of historical temporality, aiming at deciphering
those specific “historical experiences in time” which are imbedded in the
sources of a given epoch. What he arrived at, through this reconstructive
effort, was an original deconstruction of the temporal order of modernity
which serves as a case-study par excellence of the dynamics that constitute
historical experience. The results of this analysis appear efficiently con-
densed in the well-known thesis of the acceleration of temporal rhythms
articulated through the wise use of the innovative categorical pair space of
experience/horizon of expectation: “the burden of our historical thesis,” writes
Koselleck,

is that in Neuzeit (modernity) the difference between experience and expecta-

tion is increasingly enlarged; more precisely, that Neuzeit is only conceived as
Neue Zeit (new time) from the point at which eager expectations diverge and
remove themselves from all previous experience. This difference is (. . .) con-
ceptualized as “history in general,” a concept whose specifically modern qual-
ity is first conceptualized by “progress.”30

29)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985b), 112.
30)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985c), 276. Here, as may be evident, “historical experience” indi-
cates a conglomerate of forms of organization of happenings inherited from the past, and
not a general way of relating to the world. But on this point, see Paul Ricoeur (2000).
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 169

Rather than insist upon the concrete constructive articulations – and on

inner aporiae – of Begriffsgeschichte as a theory of modernity, I would like
to call attention to the more general meaning that Koselleck’s reflection
on the crucial field of the post-metaphysical concept of historicity has
assumed. Under close examination, in fact, what takes shape in his meta-
historical analysis is nothing more than an attempt to respond to the com-
plex problematical context that has been opened in modern thinking by the
crisis of historicism as a general interpretative paradigm for understanding
political and social becoming. From this point of view, everything in
Koselleck’s analyses seems to point to the radical historical conditionness –
and thus to the constituting contingence and transientness – of a horizon
of meaning based on the representation of historical process “as a funda-
mental determination of concrete reality.”31 Now, there can be no doubt
that of the two different possibilities in this basic paradigm – the “power-
ful” one, typical of universalistic philosophies, and the “weaker” one, elab-
orated by those who sustain the irreducible singularity of historical
phenomena – it is certainly the first that represents the privileged object of
the Koselleckian argument, as shown by his argument against the post-
Illuminist concept of “history in general” (Geschichte überhaupt) as an all-
inclusive process endowed with an intrinsic single design.32 To avoid
confusion, however, it must be emphasized that what is in question here
in its presumed unconditional validity is the concept itself – specifically
modern – of time “as a force, as an autonomously productive factor that is
of formative and ontological value,” to which even Historismus as an anti-
thetical effort to understand the individual inevitably seems to refer.33 If
it is true, as underlined, that in Koselleck’s theory historical temporality
still has a productive centrality as a “causal force” active in the determina-
tion of social reality and its transformations,34 it is also true that it always
comes into play as the expression of a certain conceptual constellation,
which is connected with the ever-changing texture of political and social
relationships.

31)
Walter Schulz (1972).
32)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985a), 92 ff. But on this issue, also see the considerations con-
tained in Reinhart Koselleck (1959).
33)
Nicola Auciello (1990), 42.
34)
Hayden White (2002), xii.
170 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

From this point of view, it should come as no surprise, that among the
declared goals of “meta-historical” Koselleckian reflection one finds the
attempt to translate the high level of self-problematization found in con-
temporary thought into a categorical architecture that can lead to a unity
of the different horizons of historical experience that have characterized
the evolution of Western society in its passage from the Classical to our
Modern era. That is, a unity that brings together both the horizon of the
“infinite histories that were once recounted” and the horizon, truly hetero-
geneous with respect to the former, of “history in general,” which arises at
the end of the eighteenth century as a new subject-object of historical
change.35 For Koselleck himself this objective coincides with the elabora-
tion of broader analytical categories that serve to disentangle “the temporal
basic structure of every possible story” from any pre-defined order in time:
absolutely formal categories, that is, those which, without posing as com-
plete or systematic, are adequate for investigating “mobility instead of
movement and changeability instead of change in a concrete sense.”36
With matters standing thus, it is difficult not to see in Koselleck’s Histo-
rik an attempt to rethink outside the box of the modern “time order,” the
point of view of historicity that within the post-Illuminist philosophical dis-
course appeared twice-linked to the development of a more or less explicit
metaphysics of historical processuality. From this point of view, there can
be no doubt that he shares, at least in part, with some key authors of the
twentieth century – such as Heidegger and Gadamer – a “phenomeno-
logical-existential” view that serves as an antidote to the unsolvable aporiae
of historicism.37 In respect to these authors, Koselleck underlines the seri-
ous risks of debasing the value of experience brought about by the adher-
ence to a philosophically transvalued concept of Man’s historical condition:
“the times of history” – he writes – “are not identical to the existential
modalities originating from man considered as Dasein and neither totally
derivable from them.” On the contrary, they “are constituted from the
beginning by relationships between men (zwischenmenschlich); we always

35)
Reinhart Koselleck (1985a), 93.
36)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002a), 2 and (2000), 101.
37)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002a), 2: “Recent discussions of historicity face the theoretical
challenges that have resulted from the crisis of historicism. The concept of historicity is
used to halt the permanent process of relativization for which historicism was reproached.
Historicity absolutizes relativity, as it were, if I may use this nonconcept (Unbegriff ).”
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 171

have to deal with the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, with

differential determinations which contain (enthalten) their own finitude
and are not reducible to a unifying concept such as ‘existence ’.”38 Thus, he
rejects the ontological-existential notion of historicity made famous by
Heidegger in the pages of Sein und Zeit. Against this, he proposes investi-
gating those fundamental ways of being-with-others, which “allow to
mediate the existential Faktizität of human finitude with the mobility of
history.”39 It is only thus, in fact, that it becomes possible to withdraw from
the “vortex of absolute historization” produced by Historismus without fall-
ing into the trap of a “transhistorical ontology of history,” locked a priori
into the real experiential richness of historical acting and suffering.
In the light of Koselleck’s reflections, the notion of historicity loses its
traditional reference to the horizon of an “all-encompassing dynamic pro-
cess” to which each individual would indissolubly be linked in all its
concrete intellectual and material determinations, to assume the quasi-
transcendental meaning of an individual and collective way of experienc-
ing the world founded on several “fundamental determinations” of human
life.40 With this term – in itself profoundly ambiguous – allusion is made
to the ultimate conditions that constitute a space for awareness and action
founded on temporalized connections of sense, “within whose horizon
open up tensions, conflicts, ruptures and inconsistencies that are situation-
ally (situativ) irresolvable but in whose diachronic solution all unities of
action must be involved and take part in order to continue to live or disap-
pear with them”.41 In his well-known – and quite surprising – Laudatio for
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koselleck recalled these “fundamental determina-
tions” through five meta-historical categories that he considered to be
“suitable, as antithetical couples, to thematize the fundamental temporal
structure of each possible history.”42 In his further theorization on this

38)
Reinhart Koselleck (2000), 101.
39)
Kari Palonen (2004), 296.
40)
As emphasized by Paul Ricoeur (2000), for Koselleck, the historical experience repre-
sents something more than an “epistemological territory;” it is “an authentic relationship
with the world, comparable to that which underlies physical experience.”
41)
Reinhart Koselleck (2000), 110. The “minimum transcendental conditions” of histori-
cal acting and suffering coincide, from this point of view, with those fundamental “struc-
tures of finitude which, mutually exclusive, evoke the necessary temporal tensions between
and within unities of action.”
42)
Reinhart Koselleck (2000), 101. It concerns the couples to be put to death /to be able to
172 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175

subject he has made this reconstructive framework even more essential,

engaging in this enterprise some of the leading figures of twentieth-cen-
tury philosophical anthropology, from Heidegger to Hannah Arendt to
Carl Schmitt. From this point of view, Koselleck’s ultimate outcome on
the level of anthropologische Historik seems to be his conception of “quasi-
natural conditions of human history,” “natural givens . . . that mankind has
in common with the animals but that also make history possible”: the span
of time between birth and death, the difference between inner and outer,
the opposition between “above” and “below.”43
According to Koselleck, it is precisely this fundamental anthropological
frame which unleashes the basic temporal infrastructure that makes man
constitutively capable of historical experience. It is from these “metahis-
torical conditions of all possible histories” that the three basic “kinds of
experience” (Erfahrbarkeit) – the surprise at the unpredictably new, the
realization of the repetition of what has already been well-known, the
reflexive awareness of directly unperceptible changes, which for him con-
stitute the true motivating nucleus of history as a space for knowledge and
action44 – take form. Each specific experiential dynamic – according to
Koselleck – calls into play the entire range of temporal strata that make
up the horizon of historical experience, with modalities that are indissolu-
bly anchored in the specificity of a particular situation. This is why the
horizon described by Koselleck is far removed from the homogeneous,
linear global processuality of modern philosophical discourse. This hori-
zon is a representative, in fact, of the typical late-modern awareness of the
radical complexity of time, of its structural stratification which renders it
constitutionally incapable of being reduced to the generalities of a com-
mon unit of measure.
It is not surprising, in such a context, that, for Koselleck, beyond the
disappearance of “history in and for itself ” (Geschichte an und für sich), a
new space for histories opens up, thus turning that previous conception
of history into nothing more than one form – in itself contingent and

kill, friend/foe and inside/outside, with its specification secret/public, the category of genera-
tivity, with its specification generation continuity/generation gap, and the category of hierar-
chical relationship, with the different antithetical couples in which time by time it finds
expression (master/servant, strong/weak and so on).
43)
Reinhart Koselleck (1989), 649-650.
44)
Reinhart Koselleck (2002d), 50 ff.
 L. Scuccimarra / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 160-175 173

transient – of reflexive articulation. However, the modern-order-of-time

crisis does not implicate a decline in human historicity as a condition that
makes historical knowledge and action possible. On the contrary, once
the screen of “great historicist foundations” is eliminated, the heightened
historical knowledge of post-Illuminist culture can at last understand the
centrality of a modality of experience inscribed in the fundamental deter-
minations of the shape of human life.
Of course, it is difficult to ignore the element of inner contradiction
that this line of “quasi-transcendental” thinking introduces into the theo-
retical context of Begriffsgeschichte, a methodological approach dominated
from its most remote beginnings by the recognition of the insuperable
epochal content of every concept.45 Nor can we underestimate the decid-
edly privileged relationship that, through the condition of historicity itself,
this perspective continues to have with the Neuzeit and its own peculiar
horizon of meaning.46 In an age in which the rhetoric of the end of History
increasingly tends to transform itself into a media gospel, there remains,
nonetheless, the profound relevance of a cognitive gesture dominated by
the need to go beyond the great emancipating narrations of modernity
without leading to a renunciation of the productive power of historical
temporalization. This itself is, for Koselleck, the task of a Historik con-
ceived as a theory of the conditions that constitute each and every possible
history. It is at this level, then, that historiography is called upon to offer
its reflexive contribution to the definition of a horizon that is aware of
historical experience, free at last of all metaphysical constraints.

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