Between Kant and Gadamer: Classical metaphysics of time between an empty and an embodied temporality

Entre Kant e Gadamer: metafísica clássica do tempo entre uma temporalidade vazia e uma temporalidade incorporada

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the phenomenon of presence as it appears in the classical metaphysics of time by distinguishing between an empty and an embodied time. The terms “empty” and “embodied” are derived from various studies by Lucian Hölscher. According to him, an empty time offers a framework for knowledge without historiographical content, in which all kinds of historiography can find their place. An embodied time, he says, encompasses all histories ever written, making it impossible to view history as collectively singular, as German historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck would have it. Hölscher prefers an empty time, based on knowledge he derives from Newton and Kant. I think the terms “empty” and “embodied” have different connotations. In an embodied time, past, present, and future have presence; in an empty time, such a presence is absent. The embodied time as I use in this article was largely elaborated by Hans-Georg Gadamer. For him, “embodied” means that past, present, and future are present. This idea is based on an implicit premise about the relationship between reality (from the past) and the human mind. Empty time presupposes a gap between the two, with the mind largely constructing the reality of the past. Embodied time presupposes an intertwining of reality and mind, so that past, present, and future have their own presence, without being completely mutually exclusive. As such, all three have a degree of autonomy when it comes to describing them. An empty time, represented by Kant, and an embodied time, represented by Gadamer, can form the extremes of a scale whose interspace allows the classical metaphysics of time to find its way.

Keywords:
presence; empty time; embodied time; Kant; Gadamer

RESUMO

Este artigo discute o fenômeno da presença tal como aparece na metafísica clássica do tempo, distinguindo entre um tempo vazio e um tempo corporificado. Os termos “vazio” e “corporificado” derivam de vários estudos de Lucian Hölscher. Segundo ele, um tempo vazio oferece um quadro para um conhecimento sem conteúdo historiográfico, no qual todos os tipos de historiografia podem encontrar o seu lugar. Um tempo corporificado, diz ele, abrange todas as histórias já escritas, tornando impossível ver a história como coletivamente singular, como diria o teórico histórico alemão Reinhart Koselleck. Hölscher prefere um tempo vazio, baseado no conhecimento que deriva de Newton e Kant. Eu acredito que os termos “vazio” e “corporificado” têm conotações diferentes. Num tempo corporificado, o passado, o presente e o futuro estão presentes; num tempo vazio, tal presença está ausente. O tempo corporificado, tal como o utilizo neste artigo, foi amplamente elaborado por Hans-Georg Gadamer. Para ele, “corporificado” significa que passado, presente e futuro estão presentes. Essa ideia baseia-se numa premissa implícita sobre a relação entre a realidade (do passado) e a mente humana. O tempo vazio pressupõe uma lacuna entre os dois, com a mente construindo em grande parte a realidade do passado. O tempo corporificado pressupõe um entrelaçamento da realidade e da mente, de modo que passado, presente e futuro tenham presença própria, sem serem completamente mutuamente exclusivos. Como tal, todos os três têm um certo grau de autonomia quando se trata de descrevê-los. Um tempo vazio, representado por Kant, e um tempo corporificado, representado por Gadamer, podem formar os extremos de uma escala cujo interespaço permite à metafísica clássica do tempo encontrar o seu caminho.

Palavras-chave:
presença; tempo vazio; tempo corporificado; Kant; Gadamer

In their proposal statement Hélio Cardoso, Maria Mudrovcic, and Achim Landwehr distinguish between classical and new metaphysics of time.¹ Representatives of the first metaphysics are philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Ricœur and historians like Spengler, Toynbee, and Braudel. As for the new metaphysics, they do not cite names, but themes, such as: historical presence and its varieties; multiple temporalities, and the analytical philosophy’s approach to historical time.

In this essay I want to discuss the 19th century pre-history of the first problem. It is about the dichotomy between a perception of historical knowledge based on a time without presence and a time with presence. From this arises the central question of this essay: How do historicist historians and philosophers, as representatives of the classical metaphysics of the time, struggle between these two kinds of historical knowledge?

The problem with this question is that knowledge with presence is sought through all kinds of synonyms for presence, without being completely adequate. To this end, most of the authors discussed here also use its antonyms; for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer uses the antonym empty time for a time with presence. Eelco Runia contrasts the metonymic time with presence with a metaphorical time, which only offers meaning. In this essay, the reader will encounter several synonyms and antonyms for knowledge with presence.

I start in the first paragraph with knowledge without presence, because I think that’s the most common form of cognition. In the following paragraphs I hope to create more clarity by listing all kinds of synonyms and antonyms of knowledge, in which presence plays a role. The central question will ultimately be how knowledge with presence is prepared and finally formed in historicism, the period of the classical metaphysics of time.

Knowledge based on a time without presence

Knowledge without the presence of time seeks order and meaning in history, whereby the historian assumes the role of observer or spectator of historical reality.² He thus constructs a form of historiography as a clockmaker makes the wheels and dial of his timekeeper. The wheels of the historian are the sources, the dial a narrative with meaning. The thus created narrative time can be synchronous or diachronic. Synchronous time arises, for example, by using a metaphor to bring together divergent events in the same time frame. This results in images from the past such as Burckhardt’s “Renaissance” or Jonathan Israel’s “Radical Enlightenment”.³ These books generate a phased time consisting of a before and an after situation that led to periodization. The “Radical Enlightenment”, for instance, is situated by Jonathan Israel between 1680 and 1730, bordered by a period of religious quarrels before and a moderate Enlightenment after it. Therefore, periodization in general includes both continuous and discontinuous times: it creates continuity within the period and discontinuity at its borders. A diachronic historical narrative does not create periodization, but sketches a development in a continuous, linear or undulating, and homogeneous time. The historian himself determines its beginning and end, usually without considering a period before and after. Examples are The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, also written by the same Jonathan Israel, and Margaret Jacob’s The Origins of Freemasonry. Facts and Fictions.⁴

Both continuity and discontinuity aim to give meaning to a specific time frame. As master of his text, the historian creates his own past, present, and future. However, he does so within a contemporary collective of academics or (country)men, which implies presentism. The present of people and societies has what Achim Landwehr calls a “chronoferential” influence on the creation of past and future;⁵ for example, see how the fall of the Berlin wall changed the past and future of Germany and Europe.⁶

Presentism is not always appreciated. François Hartog says rather unkindly about it: “It is as though there were nothing but the present, like an immense stretch of water restlessly rippling”.⁷ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht shows how such a present works in his “breite Gegenwart”, as he calls it.⁸ He sees it featured by the computer and other social media, warehouses with a huge storage capacity (Speicherkraft) in which nothing can be lost.⁹ The result, according to Gumbrecht, is that the present becomes cluttered and thus loses its presence. In contrast to Gumbrecht’s “broad present” stands Koselleck’s “Gegenwartsschrumpfung”. This contraction of the present is the result of a flight forward, a marked characteristic of his “time of the modern”. The acceleration Koselleck observes in the way the space of experience is disappearing faster and faster and the horizon of expectation is getting closer and closer, barely gives the present time to be. Gumbrecht’s broad present and Koselleck’s contracted present have the same effect: the present has no presence and is only part of an empty time.¹⁰

Koselleck’s presentism with its strong future-orientation is related to modernization theories. Its dystopian forms become important nowadays in the light of the Anthropocene and climate change. This focus on the future has repercussions on current views regarding the past. It finds its precipitation in Koselleck’s “futures past” and the future scenarios Simon and Tamm investigate in their “Historical Futures”.¹¹ Koselleck’s “futures past” projects a future-oriented time into different pasts. Time without a complete past, also makes time empty. Historicism is based on the struggle against such a time. It is, therefore, not surprising that Koselleck cum suis are not friends of historicism. Koselleck deplores that “[t]he dismantling of the progressive future (by historicism H.J.) has not saved history from maintaining a linear past in which every situation, both its own (of the historian) and the “observed” (the past he studies), is blurred...”¹²Koselleck here identifies historicism with an interpretation that presupposes a gulf between mind and reality; in my perception this is a view that historicism wants to overcome.

Another empty time we can find in Lucian Hölscher’s Zeitgärten: Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit.¹³ He juxtaposes it with an embodied time, discovered through an inconsistency in Koselleck’s collective singular. What Koselleck means is that a historiography consisting of a big number of stories that refer to one and the same past. Hölscher notes that it implies two possibilities: the unity of history is a metaphysical presupposition and a regulating rule or the unity of history is made up of all the singular narratives and as such remains incomplete.¹⁴ He identifies the first with an empty time because it only forms an external relationship, creating a “Lebensraum…, in dem sich…Zeitkörper begegnen können”.¹⁵ The embodied time includes social formations such as nations or classes, ideas as freedom and figures of time like progress or eras.¹⁶ The latter makes the singularity of history impossible, so he prefers the former. According to Hölscher, empty time as a metaphysical assumption shows a universal openness to all kinds of structures, patterns, processes, and discontinuities.¹⁷ He sees it arising with Newton and Kant.¹⁸

An empty time and an embodied time are matters of Nietzsche as well. Referring to the logical time of the sequence of before, now and after, he considers them as segments of time about which he states: “All is empty, all is the same, all has been”.¹⁹ Unlike Hölscher, he prefers an embodied time because it produces knowledge based on presence.

Knowledge based on an embodied time

Knowledge based on embodied time wants to be “in touch with reality”, as Runia puts it.²⁰ Its past, present, and future are in the world around us, but also in us. It is an embodied time that opposes the dichotomy between mind and reality. Embodied time considers the past as “stored in places”, speaking to us in ineffable words, as a visit to Majdanek’s concentration camp spoke to me. It made the Shoah more real than any Second World War history book could. It is a past that can overwhelm us with acts or events that create traumatic or sublime historical experiences. The latter is the case with Huizinga, who is touched by the paintings of the Van Eyck brothers, which evoke in him a “historical sensation” of almost “being” in the Middle Ages. That sensation is generated by “[t]he contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, [being] more strongly marked than it is in our lives”.²¹ It is a sensation full of historical nostalgia, of which Achim Landwehr says: “In a certain presence we refer constantly to long gone pasts that no longer exist…”.²² This makes us aware that, the past, although irretrievably gone, still has presence within us or can overwhelm us with surprise from the outside by a sound, a smell, or a taste. This happens to Marcel, the protagonist in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Times, through so-called involuntary memories.²³

We can also find a similar presence in in the section “On the Vision and the Riddle” of Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra. It is a passage about the Augenblick worded in a poetic, yet difficult to understand, story. Using Heidegger’s interpretation, Hans Ruin clarifies its presence. Zarathustra speaks:

“Behold this gateway, dwarf!” […]. It has two faces. Two ways come together here: no one has yet followed either to its end. This long way stretches back for an eternity. And that long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these ways; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: “Moment”.²⁴

The Augenblick is the name of the gate where future and past challenge one another. Pointing at Heidegger’s interpretation, Ruin presents a human being “who does not remain a spectator, but who is himself the moment (Augenblick), performing actions directed toward the future and at the same time accepting and affirming the past [. . .]. To see the moment means to stand in it”.²⁵ This makes the moment part of an embodied time, where past and future change respectively into “it was” and “it will be”. Thus, they become forms of being that are still there;²⁶ this is what Heidegger calls “Dasein”. Robin Small points at a remark in Nietzsche’s notebook where he says: “die Vergangenheit ist nicht vergangen” (that is, the past has not passed away).²⁷ A second elucidation of Nietzsche’s time with presence comes again from Thus spoke Zarathustra:

Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? “It was-that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s consciousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.²⁸

At first sight, this statement gives the impression to be contradictory, because the past seems over. However, at second sight, it is a new argument about an embodied time. The past has such a strong impact on the present that it is impossible to change it by the will in the present. The inability and frustration of the will expresses itself in resentment: “That time does not run backward, that is its wrath”.²⁹ In this view, the past is the dominating aspect of time. Heidegger articulates Nietzsche’s temporality in that way.³⁰ According to him, Nietzsche observes the past as time’s overall character.³¹

Heidegger himself gives the present a presence of future through “Sorge”, implying expectation, commitment, and responsibility in the present. The present with presence gives us an irrevocable but still present and vivid past and a living future. Such an embodied time provides us with (the need for) knowledge through experience.

In contrast to the periodizing and meaning-giving metaphor, the trope of a time with presence is the metonymy. Runia points to three aspects of it: A metonymy is not an exclusively linguistic phenomenon; it replaces words with things, creating “leaks in time”. As a result, the past discharges into the present (Majdanek). This can be done through ruins, monuments, or places of memory. They are “Fremdkörper” in the present and provide a surprise. Abstract paintings give a second metonymical presence; they have no meaning, but ask for it. A third function of metonymy is the inventio, that gives names to persons or things that are absent, making them present. They can be historical actors, like Alexander the Great or Carolus Magnus. It can also concern places that remind us on significant events: Austerlitz, Stalingrad, or Auschwitz. Being reductionist, the metonymy creates more presence of the absent than a meaningful metaphor can do.³²

Yet, such a metonymic presence cannot be completely separated from knowledge. It even creates knowledge with more depth and focus than what we usually understand by it. Bevernage shows that with the presence of past injustices in the present. Runia goes even further, stating that metaphors and metonymy can interact, creating a historical text that “puts us in touch with historical reality”.³³ The above studies by Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Israel show that there are indeed imaginative texts that emerge from disruptive experiences, and thereby “thwart our expectations”, as Zoltán Simon puts it.³⁴ At the same time, they provide us with knowledge of certain parts of the past. Israel’s Radical Enlightenment shows us an advanced form of it; its protagonist is Spinoza, whose influence on history is rarely understood. For Israel, however, he is “the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority”.³⁵ Israel’s Spinoza offers a disruptive experience to his contemporaries, and as well as to Israel himself. He and his readers receive an experience from Spinoza and his followers that “thwarts” their expectations. This is how knowledge and experience come together; metonymy and metaphor, thus, embrace one another.

Knowledge as a result of construction of meaning-for example through metaphors-is one extreme, and surprising metonymic presence forms the other extreme of a binary scale within which historiography seeks its place. Such an embrace of completely divergent conceptions of time can also be found in historicism as it unfolds between Kant and Gadamer. They form the extremes of a continuum in which the representatives of historicism struggle with times that contribute to spectator knowledge or experiential knowledge. In historicism we find the main actors of the classical metaphysics of time. However, as we have seen above, historicism is not so popular.

An anti-historicist time

Two representatives of the new metaphysics of time, Tamm and Olivier say about their own book, Rethinking Historical Time. New Approaches to Presentism, about historicism: “This collective volume argues that the main challenge we face today in our efforts to develop a more complex and nuanced theory of temporality is the overcoming of the historicist or modern notion of time”.³⁶

To illustrate what they understand of a historicist time, they give a quote from Gumbrecht in which he reduces the historicist paradigm to five aspects.

1. Historicism leaves the past behind, blurring its orienting value and forcing us to work through the past to get an open future that we can shape.

2. It counts on the future as an open horizon of possibilities from which to choose.

3. In it, the present becomes an “imperceptibly short moment of transition”.

4. At the same moment, the present is the habitat and the precondition of human self-understanding as subject and agency.

5. Time appears to be an irresistible agent of change; no phenomenon can escape its own transformation.³⁷

The six representatives of historicism, which I will discuss below, fit into this ideal type. Gumbrecht, however, gives historicism a static structure. To put us on the right track, we should look at what Karl Mannheim says about it:

This does not mean that we should accept historicism as something given, as a fate which we cannot alter, as a higher and hostile power: historicism is indeed itself a Weltanschauung and hence is going through a dynamic process of development and systematization. It requires the philosophical labours of generations to help it mature and reach its final pattern.³⁸

Mannheim’s dynamic conception opposes Gumbrecht’s view. Moreover, the latter’s static ideal type results in a remarkable inconsistency between point three, where the present is a short moment of transition, and point four, where the present is a habitat. As we shall see, both characteristics may be correct, but then a dynamic approach to historicism is necessary. Historicism is a process within which the historians and philosophers to be discussed, move.

Between Kant and Gadamer. The struggle to create an embodied time in different guises

The classical metaphysics of time includes Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche as the principal philosophers, and Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt as the main historians. They are all historicist representatives of an embodied time, struggling to fill temporality with knowledge and experience. In this respect, Gadamer is the most outspoken; he calls embodied time a “full-filled time”, and contrasts it with an “empty time”, identifying the latter with a time that is available and measurable. Full-filled time, he says, is an experiential time of parting and beginning, which reminds us of Nietzsche’s “Augenblick”.³⁹ This is a broadening of the present, which differs from that of Gumbrecht’s “breite Geggenwart”. Experience is especially important to historicists because they see themselves as part and parcel of time. Still, Kantian knowledge remains significant to many historicists, which is why Dilthey utters: “…we are historical beings first before we are observers [Betrachter] of history. And only because we are the former do we become the latter…”⁴⁰

Dilthey’s explicit aim was to accomplish for the human sciences what Kant had done for the natural sciences. Ruin notes: “Whereas the knowledge of nature concerns the possibility of having a knowledge of what is external to the human mind, the study of humanity in its historical expressions must be understood as an inescapable self-reflexive enterprise, where ‘life knows life’”.⁴¹ Kant’s philosophy is a representative of the first form and Gadamer of the latter.

The tension between the two forms enables a development characterized by different views on time, space, research, history, and, above all the various connections, between mind and (historical) reality. It’s all about knowledge, undergoing the transition from an empty, observing time into a participatory form of time. I will discuss the Kant’ paradigm first, after that, Gadamer’s alternative, and then see how Hegel, Ranke, Tocqueville, Marx, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche move from the former to the latter.

Kant

In Kant, the gap between the mind and reality leads to knowledge based on two forms of intuition: space and time. It must be bridged by conceptual activities, like those of quantity, quality, relationship, and modality. Space and time give us sensory access to reality, without it revealing itself completely. We do not have access to the so-called “thing in itself”, the “Ding an sich”.⁴² It underlines the enduring gap between mind and reality. Space and time give us what he calls only “a phenomenological reality”.⁴³ Time as an “Anschauungsform” lacks the historical experience and thus the presence, which the new metaphysics of time considers so important. This seems strange because, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses time as experience. ⁴⁴ However, Kant’s experience is a form of perception, which makes it fundamentally different from what we call life experience. Such an experience implies historical awareness that time as a “form of intuition” lacks.

Kant’s “Erfahrung” is a causal experience, which he borrows from Locke and Hume. David Carr, who follows Martin Jay, calls Kant’s experience “innocent”.⁴⁵ It is about an experience that gives us knowledge about the empirical world, which in this case means that reality is experienced as passive, and the mind as active.⁴⁶ The passive perception of reality makes it possible to investigate it through investigative tools and the rules that go with them; as such, it is an experience constructed through the forms of intuition. Experiences based on these Anschauungsformen are a prerequisite for knowledge; they are not part of knowledge itself. This contrasts with a form of knowledge that has been partly created by the past itself through our experience. The qualification “causal” of experience through forms of intuition implies that it consists of a succession of phenomena in the natural, physical world, as they have always been perceived in the same way.⁴⁷ It is our mind, with the category of relation, that makes of that repetition a causal explanation. Here, to explain means to connect two independent things.

Kant’s experience has nothing to do with the experience that emerges in Hegel.⁴⁸ The latter regards “Erfahrung” as something that develops within the dialectical relationship between mind and reality. It is the experience of a “Wirkung” or effect, by which a phenomenon A permeates and changes a phenomenon B. Such an impact acts through time, which is impossible for Kant’s Humean, and thus skeptical, causality. All this makes it important to know how Kant approaches time.⁴⁹ Time experience consists for him in a permanent now, a nunc stans.⁵⁰ This continuous experience of repetitive nows means that “different times are not simultaneous, but consecutive”.⁵¹ People live in a present “now”, have lived in a past “now”, and will live in a future “now”. This applies to everything, including time itself, as it is made up of past, present, and future.⁵² “Nunc stans” here means that, if there is a present, the past and the future are absent. As a result, past, present, and future are separate moments. Regarding the past, this means that it remains outside the present as a foreign country.⁵³ It exhibits an “otherness” that requires historical research.⁵⁴

From Kant’s point of view, history is something of the past, which has little to do with the present. The same goes for the future. So, as a form of intuition “… time does not alter, but only something that is within time”.⁵⁵

This a-temporal time seems strange, because Kant’s philosophy belongs to the Enlightenment, with all its forward-looking features and ideals. However, for Kant the future exists only as perspective, not as reality. The phenomenon of a not changing time has to do with the fact that Kant approaches change from a physical, not from a historical point of view. Just as water can show different phases in the form of solid, liquid, or gas, so too history has phases: primitive stages differ from civilized ones; these phases are discontinuous.

Kant’s philosophy of history is in line with his epistemological ideas. His historical philosophy is characterized by a special conception of progress in rationality. In his “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”, Kant claims that, at the beginning of history, “humans understand, ‘although only dimly’, that they ought to regard their fellow humans as ends”.⁵⁶ So, from the beginning of time men have a complete moral nature, but they do not yet understand all its implications. Morality shows no historical change, only its understanding is increasing. Kant’s history of human progress is a history of a better understanding its possibilities. Morality is like an acorn, which, according to Kant’s ideas, does not differ in principle from an oak tree. Acorn and oak are just different phases of the same thing. Here his empty time shows a similar a-temporality as his nunc stans.

As a result of this a-temporality, every generation is born with the same faculties for moral agency. However, better understanding of its moral potentialities would imply that later generations enter the world with better developed preconditions and thus with better-developed faculties to recognize and obey moral standards. However, this improvement runs counter to the a-temporal character of moral agency. The Dutch philosopher Pauline Kleingeld, therefore, argues that, according to Kant, “every generation (…) must again move through the entire distance which generations before had already been covered”.⁵⁷ The development of men’s rational faculties is a learning process, which starts again and again. Kleingeld says: “For Kant, unlike Hegel, it is not morality, which needs to go through a historical process, but our understanding of it”.⁵⁸ It underlines the idea that Kant presupposes, that men are rational but not historical beings, in the sense of historicism.

Regarding the Anschauungsform of space, Kant has similar ideas as about the time. He follows Newton, who views space as a universal category, independent of the empirical world and human experience. This is due to Newton’s observation of a universal gravitational force. On Earth it works the same way it does in the cosmos. Kant’s perception of space is also universal, but by no means independent of the empirical world and human experience. Space as a form of intuition originates in the human experience of a spatial reality. But that experience remains as passive and “innocent” as all human “Erfahrungen” with Kant.

Kant’s non-historicizing conceptions of space and time work together to create a “non-simultaneity of the simultaneous”. Koselleck and Hölscher see, therefore, the origin of this time figure in the 18th century.⁵⁹ In space, nations and cultures develop in the same way, but not in the same chronological time.⁶⁰ France, Great Britain, or Prussia are considered the most progressive countries in the 18th century. These countries see themselves as the benchmark for those who lag behind. It means that they are the future for backward regions. “‘Civilised’ societies in present day (then, the eighteenth century) Europe could be represented as the future of “primitive” societies elsewhere.”⁶¹ The phasing nature of history is similar for every country, nation, or culture, but the movement through it happens at different rhythms and speeds. Consistent with this is Helge Jordheim’s claim that “the regime of temporality identified as “modern”, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on”.⁶² Here we find the origin of a plurality of times, which simply coexist in the 18th century, but with Tocqueville and Marx in the following century taking on a form in which they show clashes and frictions.⁶³ In the 18th century, the phasing of history makes chronology important. Kant says: “so far history has conformed to chronology. Now it is about making chronology conform to history”.⁶⁴ It means that the existing different stories must be arranged chronologically so that one single history is created. Synchronization has been a conditio sine qua non for historiography since the 18th century.⁶⁵ Kant’s succession of repetitive and discontinuous nows and his articulation of chronology as the main aim of universal history implies again that time as a historical phenomenon is empty.⁶⁶

The gap between mind and reality makes Kant an “observer” of reality. As the most important philosopher of his time, his approach also seems exemplary for 18th-century dealings with the past.⁶⁷ Koselleck, like Assmann, considers the 18th century to be the founding Era of modern historiography. Although his ideas seem to be of lesser value to the practice of history, Kant still has an influence on historians.⁶⁸ His view of history as a universal process of progression is one of the presuppositions of most contemporary historians.

Gadamer

In contrast to Kant’s empty time, Gadamer defends an embodied time.⁶⁹ As a student of Heidegger, he adopted several of his teacher’s phenomenological notions.⁷⁰ Gadamer embraces, for instance, “Heidegger’s thesis … that being itself is time”.⁷¹ It enables him not to distinguish between time, being, and history, because history, as past time, is past being. It implies that being of the past can also be in the present, because all being is “Dasein”, which is a being there (Heidegger’s “Gewesenheit”). This statement refers to an embodied time. It exhibits a completely different view on past, present, and future than the one of Kant.

At first glance, this is not self-evident, because Heidegger’s time, like Kant’s, is also more future-oriented than focused on the past. This is reflected in Sorge (Care) as the central element of Dasein. Because of Care, Heidegger’s future lies in the present. As such, it is an example of embodied time, because it brings the future in the present. That clearly contrasts with Kant’s empty time, in which the future is disconnected from the present.

There is also a difference between Gadamer and Heidegger: the former wants more presence of the past in the present. In this way, he wants to counterbalance Heidegger’s future-oriented thinking by adding components from the past. Besides Care, Gadamer also considers authorities, traditions, and the classics as authentic elements of the nature of Dasein.⁷² Because Dasein is all that exists, it is also part of an embodied time. Our knowledge, therefore, relates to the embodied time of the world. The same goes for us; to know ourselves we must explore our own past, present, and possible future. Gadamer, thereby, expresses the historicity of Dasein and refers in this context to Heidegger’s conversation with Count Yorck. Gadamer states:

In fact, however, the coordination of all knowing activity with what is known is not based on the fact that they have the same mode of being but draws its significance from the particular nature of the mode of being that is common to them. It consists in the fact that neither the knower nor the known is “present-at-hand” in an “ontic” way, but in a “historical” one-i.e., they both have the mode of being of historicity. Hence, as Yorck says, everything depends on “the generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” The fact that Yorck contrasts “homogeneity” with “belonging” reveals the problem that Heidegger was the first to unfold in its full radicality: that we study history only insofar as we are ourselves “historical” means that the historicity of human Dasein in its expectancy and its forgetting is the condition of our being able to re-present the past.⁷³

With Gadamer, the gulf between mind and reality is much smaller than with Kant. Ralf Elm, a German expert in Gadamer’s thinking, compares this phenomenological reality to the “chiasmic” structure of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Greek letter X (chi), from which “chiasm” derives, illustrates the intertwining of people and the lifeworld.⁷⁴ According to phenomenologists, the idea of a passive reality is no longer tenable. The view that theories, models, or stories should be applied to an inert reality is outdated for them. Men must deal with reality according to the rules and settings of the lifeworld, just as a player must behave according to the rules of a game.⁷⁵ Reality, thus, plays an active role in the process of understanding. Gadamer points to the consequences for historical knowledge. Following Heidegger, he says:

For Heidegger too historical knowledge is not a projection in the sense of a plan, the extrapolation of aims of the will, an ordering of things according to the wishes, prejudices, or promptings of the powerful; rather, it remains something adapted to the object, a mensuratio ad rem. Yet this thing is not a factum brutum, not something that is merely at hand, something that can simply be established and measured, but it itself ultimately has the same mode of being as Dasein.⁷⁶

Gadamer means by the expression that knowledge has “the same mode of being as Dasein” that the “lifeworld” is embedded in consciousness and vice versa. “Dasein” stands for every being that is aware of being there, in which “there” is its place in the lifeworld. This confirms that there is hardly a gap between reality and the mind, and that space is not something out there, in the cosmos, but relates to a specific place in the lifeworld. This is why some historicists consider this relationship “organic”.

An organic consciousness has consequences for our knowledge because it is the result of our dealing with and experiencing reality. It means that experience comes first. Knowledge is derived from it and is therefore subordinate to experience. This differs from Kant’s “innocent” short-term experience, as explained above. Gadamer’s long-lasting Erfahrung lives on in the present. Its three essential elements-the classics, authority, and tradition-make the experience, and the knowledge that flows from it, historical. They form the three pillars of Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte or effective history. They are not only passive conditions for understanding, but also the things that grasp and move us.⁷⁷ Elm, underlines, like Gadamer, that (past) reality gives us something (Elm’s “schenkung” = “donation”), the reason why it has an appeal on us.⁷⁸ This entanglement of man and world in embodied time becomes our mental and cultural property.

The intertwining of man and world influences the phenomenological view on space. Unlike Kant, it should be defined as a “place”, to which we belong together with others. Those others can be people with whom we form a community, in which we experience a special identity. Others who live in a community to which we do not belong, form a “they”. Think of communities like states, nations, cultures, etc. Communities such as family, religion or profession are usually not local, but can also have a community identity.⁷⁹ Here lies an important lesson to learn for our Anthropocene predicament: Philosophy of history should show that, now, “place” and “space” are the same thing. Maybe not for “robothumans”, envisioned by the disciples of AI, but certainly for all “earthlings”. By belonging to the earthly community, past, present, and especially the future also become a personal matter. The Anthropocene, the climate change, and the developments in AI concern us personally.

Our own historicity makes us part of a community and its history. We are embedded in the community in which we live, and, therefore, fully “objective” knowledge of it is impossible. It means that the investigation of the world and its history is subjective, because we ourselves are an essential part of it. As such, reality itself is constitutive of inquiry. That is why Gadamer speaks of a conversation between past and present in such matters.⁸⁰ Here Gadamer’s participative view of time contrasts radically with Kant’s “observer’s” time as an Anschauungsform. A tentative conclusion may be that Gadamer’s phenomenological perception of reality and history is primarily communicative and experiential. This raises the question of whether the big problem of today’s reality is not the severity of climate change, the capitalist Anthropocene, and questionable AI developments, but rather whether and how all people experience and internalize these problems.

The contrast between Kant and Gadamer can be summarized as follows (Chart 1):

Chart 1.
Contrast between Kant and Gadamer

An objectifying view 1. Originating in Kant. 2. An epistemological gap between mind and reality. 3. Cognitive tools for regulative research. 4. Priority to knowledge above experience. 5. Space is universal. 6. Research involves looking for causal explanations 7. Time is chronological and universal. 8. History is based on a closed past and is future oriented. 9. An observer’s point of view.

A subjectifying view 1. Ending in Gadamer. 2. No gap, because mind and reality are interactive and historical. 3. No need for cognitive tools. Reality itself is constitutive for research. 4. Priority to experience above knowledge. 5. Place instead of space. 6. Inquiry concerns “Wirkung” , resulting in understanding. 7. Time is embodied and experienced. 8. History is about the past in the present. 9. A participant’s point of view.

The changes in the classical metaphysics of time through some of its representatives

Gadamer subscribes to the view that we are historical beings, meaning that we are embedded in the reality of past, present, and future. Kant is on the side of the Betrachter’s approach, which implies a gap between the observer and reality. While the above philosophers (Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche) and historians (Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt) seek an embodied time, they cannot completely ignore the Kantian form of knowledge. They are, so to speak, in-between the two sides of the Kant-Gadamer scale. Now I want to examine in what ways they belong to the Kantian or to the Gadamerian side of it. The result is that, in the first phase, we observe a movement from a homogeneous, empty time (Kant) to a homogeneous, embodied time. Hegel and Ranke, as their representatives, see that time as the incarnation of ideas in reality, creating what is called das Real-Geistige. In the second phase, dominated by Tocqueville and Marx, we perceive a still embodied but heterogeneous time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous. In the final phase, with Nietzsche and Burckhardt as protagonists, time is a “moment” of deeply felt experience. These different approaches depend on whether one prefers the observer’s or the participant’s side of the spectrum.

Hegel and Ranke

The ideas of Hegel and Ranke about time are, on the one hand, a reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleon, and, on the other hand, a response to Kant’s rationalism. Through French developments, German society is falling apart, and Hegel and Ranke want to combat this social atomism through organicist ideas. This implies a fundamental difference between Kant and Hegel; Hegel creates an embodied time by stating:

When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. […] The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of spiritual culture; it is […] a whole which, after running its course and laying bare all its content, returns again to itself; it is the resultant abstract notion of the whole.⁸¹

For Hegel, it is not sufficient to explain the plural totality of the present by pointing to a single origin, namely reason (the acorn we referred to, when discussing Kant’s view of reason). Reality and reason interact in a complete, organic process, in which present and future are mainly determined by the past. Moreover, there is no straight line from past to future along which reason, progress, and freedom develop. Hegel sees that line as whimsical, with ups and downs, explicitly expressed in his Cunning of Reason.⁸² It thus shows that Reason as it works in historical reality is different from Kant’s reason in the human mind.

Hegel underscores this in his Phenomenology by taking a stand against Kant’s a-temporal character of moral improvement, in which each individual must relearn the lessons of the past anew. Hegel states:

This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In this respect culture or development of mind (Bildung), regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself.⁸³

Moral improvement is sharing in the overall civilization improvement (Geist). By participating in and learning from civilization, the individual makes his “inorganic nature” organic. The Spirit is thus historical (das Real-Geistige) and develops through time. Man has a duty to internalize the experiences of this general Spirit. In terms of temporality, this means that the living, historical time must become the living time of the individual. Here we have, in its incipient form, the chiasm of man and world, as Merleau-Ponty discovered in Gadamer’s Dasein. Hegel’s vision is incipient since the individual participates in the development of the not yet fully realized Idea. It must admitted, the Idea is still not yet the phenomenological lifeworld of Heidegger and Gadamer.⁸⁴ However, it allows for a participatory stance.

From an epistemological point of view, there is a difference between Hegel and Ranke, precisely regarding organicism. Hegel’s organicism is a constitutive principle, distinct from Kant’s, who considers it regulative.⁸⁵Constitutive here refers to a developing reality according to the rules of nature, which in this case means “organic growth”. Here lies the Hegelian foundation of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s lifeworld. It is a world as a continuously changing whole; in other words, a dynamic, embodied time. Regulative means that organic thinking is just a cognitive tool to better understand what is happening in reality.

In this, Ranke differs from Hegel. The former remains a Kantian, who “could not accept Hegel’s system of universal history, because it made a constitutive principle out of a merely regulative idea whose sole purpose was to guide enquiry”.⁸⁶ Ranke clearly opts for an aspect of Kantian epistemology in which knowledge and research are in the foreground, and in which ideas are instruments to bridge the gap between mind and reality. For Hegel, the organicist idea, especially the idea of freedom, does incarnate in reality.

Ranke considers history as an autonomous science embodied in a form of inquiry that emphasizes an inductive and empirical approach. Ideas are research tools for him, whether its incarnation has the effect he supposes must be scientifically proven. Even then, its realization is not certain, for, Ranke thinks, only God fully knows reality. Ranke’s desire for knowledge must be realized through scientific inquiry and a craving for objectivity. The latter finds its most radical form in the statement: “I wanted, as it were, to extinguish myself, and to let the facts speak for themselves”.⁸⁷

Related to Heidegger and Gadamer, Ranke’s craving for objectivity appears to be a form of Kantian rationalism. However, Beiser (2011) points also at the experiential side of this objectivity through a quote of Ranke itself: “He (the historian HJ) may not apply a theory to the historical event; he must instead quietly allow the object to work upon him. But he should go even further. He must intellectually reproduce the object and rebuild it before his eyes”.⁸⁸

Beiser likens these words to a reenactment theory of historical understanding. He continues to see Ranke as a representative of historicism. The idea is for Ranke-as for Hegel-that which transcends reality and gives it movement and becoming. Becoming implies continuity, but also makes it clear that there are still problems in the present that stem from past mistakes. Therefore, present and future will not be perfect either. This places Ranke in the opposite camp of Hegel’s optimism. In the history of mankind, he sees no growing freedom and rationality.

Nevertheless, both Hegel and Ranke represent a comparable embodied time to that of Heidegger and Gadamer. For the latter two, the being of the past is part of the present, because the past is not over. The past is being as well as its present and future. Hegel and Ranke see embodied time as an organic whole of becoming, in which the present is only a moment of transition. Heidegger and Gadamer, following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, see the “Augenblick” as a tipping point in which a whole world tilts. This is the difference between a nascent (Hegel and Ranke) and a more mature embodied time (Heidegger and Gadamer). Here we see that the classical metaphysics of embodied time is still imperfect, yet dynamic. This can be further explained in the next two paragraphs.

Tocqueville and Marx

Around 1830, a new embodied temporality emerges in response to the experiences of the industrial revolution and the ideas of Hegel. No longer is a time of rise and fall put forward, but a synchronicity of the non-synchronous. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville and the German philosopher Karl Marx are the representatives of this new form of classical time. Marx expresses its onerous character as follows: “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth: he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living”.⁸⁹

Marx stands here in the tradition of an embodied time, which he sees as an emancipation struggle of the industrial proletariat. To realize a better future, he certainly approaches reality from a scientific point of view. He has a box full of research instruments such as productive forces, modes of production and relations of production.⁹⁰ Like Ranke, Marx remains a Kantian in his research activities.⁹¹ This is evident from his physical approach to reality-see the atomism he defends in his thesis.⁹² The causal relationship between productive forces and modes of production and a similar relationship between modes of production and social classes also point in this direction. From an ontic point of view, however, Marx does not endorse Kant’s “Ding an sich”. While the mind-reality gap can be analyzed and bridged through cognitive tools, it can be done even better, according to Marx, through volitional (proletarian) practice. This underscores his view of time as embodied.

Tocqueville also sees a growing desire for equality in the past and wants to know what its significance is for the future. Traveling through the United States with his friend Beaumont, he discovers democracy as the embodied future of Europe. Tocqueville underlines the importance of that future: “I confess that in America I saw more than America. I sought there an image of democracy itself…”⁹³

Tocqueville’s future orientation seems more embodied than Hegel’s because the French historian’s future is embedded in a tangible reality, namely the “état democratique”, as incarnated in the history of the United States of America. As Hartog says about Tocqueville, the lesson to be learned comes from the future.⁹⁴

His epistemology, however, like Marx’s, is also predominantly Kantian. As a result, he needs cognitive tools too, to research the European reality. His research instruments are the état social aristocratique and the état social démocratique.⁹⁵ Measuring reality by this yardstick, allows Tocqueville to discover the progress and setbacks in France before and after the Revolution. In the same way, he can track how Europe is lagging behind the US.

The time of Hegel and Ranke shows a succession of past, present, and future, creating a continuous time. Although it consists of rise and fall, time remains linear, like the chronological time of 18th century historians. Everything happens in the European world and develops from a classical past into a modern future. This contrasts with Tocqueville and Marx’s synchronicity of the nonsynchronous, which makes their embodied time heterogeneous. Marx sees a past in the present in the form of old crafts, which continue to exist alongside factories as modern means of production. Tocqueville experiences the 1848 revolution as something that happens in a heterogeneous temporality. On the one hand, the February days refer positively to the future: a France without a Monarchy. On the other hand, he sees the social revolution in June as an attack on a past that must be preserved. It concerns the participation of the qualified bourgeoisie in the common good, which refers to old republican traditions.⁹⁶ As a result, Marx and Tocqueville produce an embodied time, in which past, present, and future coexist.

There is an important difference between Ranke, on the one hand, and Tocqueville and Marx, on the other, in terms of the relationship between time and space. Like Hegel, Ranke studies states, nations, regions, etc. These are so-called “continuing entities”, consisting” of “places” with a history and based on feelings of “us” and “them”. Tocqueville and Marx maintain Kant’s approach to time and space, with their abstract and universal character. Hegel and Ranke regard reality primarily as political, and Tocqueville and Marx primarily as social and/or economical. Hegel and Ranke want to know how ideas change reality, Tocqueville and Marx look for an answer to the question why reality is so unruly and why changes are so difficult to achieve. Marx says: “It goes further, but slowly: the different [losing] levels and interests are never completely overcome, they drag on continuously next to the winning ones, even for centuries”.⁹⁷

Old and new coexist and exhibit an abrasive effect. For Tocqueville, the United States is already in the future, while Western Europe lags behind. For the latter, it creates the need to do something about it. Marx not only shows that Western Europe is ahead of British India, but also that it harms Indian society.⁹⁸ The German philosopher sees production methods primarily in terms of global space and replaces the place-bound “continuing entities” by “societal formations”. They have a corresponding capitalist structure everywhere.⁹⁹

We said above that in the 18th century synchronicity of the non-synchronous was formulated as “civilized” societies in Europe “... can be imagined as the future of “primitive” societies elsewhere”.¹⁰⁰ This is a non-synchronicity of the synchronous, because the different time streams do not touch each other.¹⁰¹ They take place in different countries, regions, or cultures. In the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, old and new take place in social formations, that transcend all kinds of boundaries. This allows them to collide and antagonize each other. Old and new show a dialectical relation. In this way, the past is not to let go, but to enters a “confrontation” with the future in the present. This confrontation refers both to a historical content and to an experience and must, therefore, be seen as a characteristic of an embodied time.

Nietzsche and Burckhardt

In Human, All too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche states: “Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing [Fortströmen]”.¹⁰²

The significance of this passage is that Nietzsche, though often regarded as an anti-historicist, recognizes the importance of an embodied time. He explains how there is a constant stream going on within us, consisting of a long cultural history of creating supermen or herd animals. Nietzsche, thus, also belongs to the classical metaphysics of time. He does so in an almost Gadamerian fashion. Gadamer himself notes that Nietzsche rejects the Kantian approach: “Nietzsche’s view that historical study is deleterious to life is not, in fact, directed against historical consciousness as such, but against the self-alienation it undergoes when it regards the method of modern historical science as its own true nature”.¹⁰³

Nietzsche and Burckhardt want to experience past, present, and future as part of their own being. Neither place nor space is at issue here. For both, the approach to reality is experiential and participatory. Aesthetics play an important role in this. Nietzsche shows this by exchanging an Apollonian-constructive-aesthetic for a Dionysian one. In the first case, the artist creates something beautiful in his material; in the second case, reality is the co-creator of the sublime.

What that means, Ankersmit investigates in his Sublime Historical Experience. He does this by observing how we lose our experience of reality the moment we process it in language. In that experience, we sense a moment of “sublime indeterminacy in the relationship between language and reality”, and he adds to it: “at that very moment the past makes its entrance in our minds”.¹⁰⁴ It is a moment of historical experience, which then “transcends … time from a Kantian Anschauungsform, into a new relationship to the past”.¹⁰⁵ As we saw above, an example of this new way experiencing time can be found in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. It shows how embodied temporalities unexpectedly invades our mind. Also consider Runia’s “leaks in time”. Here experience seems to have completely taken over Kantian knowledge.

In Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche displays another synchronicity of the non-synchronous than Tocqueville and Marx. The gateway symbolizes the “now” in which past, present, and future are interacting forces. It is not an encounter between the backward trajectory of the past and the forward trajectory of the future. It is a clash between an urge for the future (hope?) and a power that wants to stay (fear?). Nietzsche, thus, combats time as a burden. The past is a burden that enslaves people to religion, ideology, and science. In the present, they must take their destiny into their own hands, leave the herd, and become superhumans. Superhumans are not the constructs of artificial intelligence, but people with courage to face the problems of human existence. It is about the courage we need now to bring the dangerous effects of the Anthropocene and climate change under control.

Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s Swiss teacher, also opposes Ranke’s scientific histories. Although initially a Rankean historian, he eventually comes to dislike his objectivist approach. Ankersmit links this aversion to Burchkhardt’s deeply felt bond between life and history, which he transfers to Nietzsche.¹⁰⁶ Ankersmit concludes that the Swiss greatly admires Eichendorff’s novella Das Marmorbild, which he regards “as the most subtle expression of experience of the Italian past”.¹⁰⁷ Burckhardt himself describes a chance visit to Florence’s Santa Croce as a truly historical experience.¹⁰⁸

For Burckhardt, as for Nietzsche, the experience of the past is more important than the knowledge of it. His longing for the specific past he studies is linked to the need to relate “…sympathetically and mysteriously to the author’s inmost being”.¹⁰⁹ Peter Burke explains Burckhardt’s affinity for the urban culture of the Renaissance with his descent from a patrician family in Basel, which continues to rule that city until the 1830s. For that reason, the city-states of Renaissance Italy would greatly appeal to him. There is “an elective affinity between Burckhardt and his subject […] stained by nostalgia for the world of his childhood…”.¹¹⁰ Thus, for Burckhardt, the past is also in the present.

He opposes to a diachronic history, articulated in terms of evolution and development.¹¹¹ Burke summarizes Burckhardt’s anti-Rankean, historicist approach to history by the assertion: “Where others want to tell a story, Burckhardt’s aim was to paint the portrait of an age”.¹¹² The Swiss historian prefers a history of Querschnitte, of synchronous times, about which Ankersmit states: “Such a cross-sectional approach becomes a work of art, that has “a presence, an authenticity, a self-centeredness, a power to resist each effort to dissolve it into its historical and cultural context...”¹¹³

Here we see a similar attempt to move away from a process-based form of history-writing towards a discontinuous and heterogeneous temporality as in Tocqueville and Marx. However, this embodied time does not only occur in the spatial world, but inside people, especially in their experiences and feelings.

Like Nietzsche, Burckhardt brings the past into the present because “Our topic is a past which is clearly connected with the present and with the future … Actually, one ought to stress especially those historical realities from which threads run to our own period and culture”.¹¹⁴

Here, too, synchronicity of the non-synchronous is present, in experience as well as in reality. Burckhardt and Nietzsche are representatives of a kairotic time. Unlike Chronos-the God of clocks and chronology-Kairos calls people to look to the past, to use the knowledge of it in the present to face their future. A kairotic time is a time of sublimity, that “permits us to place … a creative interaction between narrative and experience on the theorist’s agenda”.¹¹⁵ As in all classical metaphysics of time, Burckhardt and Nietzsche also discover that, in the present, the past is not yet over. The past persists in people’s soul through sublime and traumatic experiences.

So far, the conclusion can be that, on the one hand, Tocqueville, Marx, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt are a step closer to Gadamer comprehensive time than Hegel and Ranke, having given up their homogeneous time of continuous entities in exchange for a heterogeneous synchronicity of the non-synchronous. On the other hand, Hegel and Ranke, in their perception of an organic world, are closer to the all-encompassing, phenomenological world of Gadamer than Tocqueville and Marx. After all, in that organic world everything is connected with everything, whether by Reason (Hegel) or by God (Ranke).

Nevertheless, all six are representatives of the classical embodied time. Such a time has a fairly balanced and uncompartmentalized view of past, present, and future. It has its origins in the Counter-Enlightenment, of which Herder also plays an important role in addition to Hegel.¹¹⁶ Besides knowledge, this classical form of time also seeks more room for experience. This means that even the future must also be “experienced” in a certain way. In Hegel, this happens as an extrapolation of the already embodied freedom and rationality. For Marx, the proletariat is the bearer of the future, while Tocqueville sees democracy in the United States of America as the future of Europe. For Burckhardt, the Renaissance is a future-oriented experience, and Nietzsche’s kairotic time challenges people to have the courage to become supermen.

The end of this story is a return to the beginning

In his Sublime Historical Experience, Ankersmit wants a creative interaction between narrative (i.e. knowledge with meaning) and experience.¹¹⁷ Aleida Assmann argues for the same when she talks about “Gedächtnisskultur”. She defends a present in which there is room for knowledge and experience of the past, as it is established through memory and historiography.¹¹⁸ Such a “broad now”, which differs fundamentally from Gumbrecht’s “breite Gegenwart”, makes it possible to connect past, present, and future.¹¹⁹ In my eyes, this is what embodied time is all about.¹²⁰

Dipesh Chakrabarty also champions an embodied time. However, he is skeptical of European historicism, mainly because it denies synchronicity. In doing so, he opposes the idea that countries outside Europe are not in sync with the West, because they lag in modernity. This idea results in a “not yet”, which the European powers in the Colonial (and in the Post-Colonial) Era use to deny the (former) colonies self-government. Regarding colonial societies, Chakrabarty notes that even Marx is embedded in the language of “remnants” and “survivors”. He argues persuasively that Marxism too is a form of historicism, which places colonies in “the waiting room of history”.¹²¹ Nevertheless, Chakrabarty accepts the universals of the Enlightenment and western bureaucracy. On this basis, he criticizes the “dead wood of the past”, like the caste-system, girl-marriage or widow-burning. However, this forward-looking time is embodied in the present. Chakrabarty here refers to Heidegger when he states that we “have a fore-conception of the fact that we live amid “futures” that already are and which cut across the future, which is cast in the mold of a “will be”.¹²² This is reminiscent of Nietzsche and of Tocqueville’s embodied future.

At the same time, he is convinced that the past does not have to disappear; he even loathes Marx’s idea of a past that must be overcome. He fully accepts a traditional past that is contemporaneous with the modern world of capitalism. He sees it applied and epitomized in his so-called subaltern, Bengal studies. Bengal is embedded in the global, forward-looking history of capitalism on the one hand and in its own history on the other. Regarding this, he refers to the Indian physicist and Nobel laureate C.V. Raman, who as early as the 1930s embodies the simultaneity of past and future in the present. During an eclipse, he hurries home from his laboratory to take a ritual bath. When questioned about this, the physicist is reported to have simply stated: “the Nobel Prize”? That was science, a solar eclipse is personal”.¹²³ Consequently, there is no need to deny the existence of superhuman agents (in this case the gods of Hinduism), as this would be incompatible with modern science. Chakrabarty affirms that Raman and others are serious scientists: “Yet they did not need to totalize through the outlook of science all the different life-practices within which they found themselves and to which they felt called”.¹²⁴ Here we see Chakrabarty’s paradox: on the one hand, he rejects Marx’s past as a drag on the future, and, on the other, he returns to his synchronicity of the non-synchronous. With this, and with his reference to Heidegger’s heterogeneous temporality, Chakrabarty has a firm foothold in a historicist embodied temporality.¹²⁵

So, there must be an interplay between past, present, and future, which means that, within the present, we must examine the past with a visionary eye and face the future with knowledge and experiences from the past. Chakrabarty has stated in the same vein: “The writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself”.¹²⁶ This is what I call an embodied time. It consists not only of interaction between past, present, and future, but also of interaction between knowledge and experience. The classical metaphysics of time is based on this.

Chakrabarty’s defense of an embodied time also means resistance to an antinomic or dualist form of temporality, in which past, present, and future are separate entities to which we can attribute good or bad. This is an outgrowth of Kant’s isolated past, present, and future. Berber Bevernage, therefore, argues that “philosophers of history should break with the idea of the fully contemporaneous present and instead embrace that of radical noncontemporaneity or noncoevalness”.¹²⁷ This means a continuation of the past in the present, especially when it comes to past injustices, which must be faced in the present. Reactionaries such as Chateaubriand, tend to project good into the past and evil into the present and future.¹²⁸ Thus, they ignore the evils of the past and absolve themselves in advance of guilt for all the future mistakes. Progressives do the opposite: the past is bad and the good will come. Berber Bevernage sees the same exculpatory mechanisms because they seek evil in the past and create too bright of a future. In the present, therefore, one is never responsible for the evil in the world.¹²⁹ As such, the present is robbed of its presence, because it loses its own, unique interplay between past and future. Bevernage argues “that philosophers of history should break away from the wholly contemporary present and instead embrace that radical non-contemporary or non-simultaneity.”¹³⁰ What he calls a Manichaeism of time is based on a compartmentalized time, which has to be eradicated by Frederic Jameson’s adage: “Always historicize”.¹³¹ In his own way, Bevernage makes the case for an embodied time, “eine temporale Ontologie”, as Assmann defines it.¹³² Chakrabarty, Assmann, and Bevernage confirm what this entire article advocates: an ontology in terms of a present that is connected to both its past and its future. This can be underlined, oddly enough, by paraphrasing Kant, in saying that a present without an experienced past is empty and without concern for its future is blind.¹³³

References

• ANKERSMIT, Frank. Sublime historical experience Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
• ANKERSMIT, Frank. Tocqueville and Flaubert on 1848. The Sublimity of Revolution. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, v. 37, n. 2, p. 253-271, 2016.
• ASSMANN, Aleida. Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013.
• BEISER, Frederick C. The German Historicist Tradition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• BEVERNAGE, Berber. The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism. History and Theory, v. 54, n. 3, p. 333-352, 2015.
• BURCKHARDT, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy London, New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
• BURKE, Peter. Introduction. In: BURCKHARDT, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [S. l.]: Dover Publications, 2010. p. 1-14.
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• CHAKRABARTY, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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NOTES

• 1
  Call for papers for special issue proposal Revista História (São Paulo), scheduled for vol. 41, Jul-Dec 2023.
• 2
  I will use the terms “observer” and “spectator” besides one another. The term “spectator” is derived from Hans Ruin, “Revolutionary Presence Historicsm and the Temporal Politics of the Moment”, in: Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier Rethinking Historical Time. New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 87-99, especially 96.
• 3
  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London, New York, Penguin Books 1990); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: University Press, 2001).
• 4
  Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998²) Margaret Jacob, The Origins of Masonry. Facts and Fictions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
• 5
  Achim Landwehr, “Nostalgia and the Turbulance of Times”, History and Theory 57, 2 (2018), 251-268, especially 266 and idem, “Die vielen, anwesenden und abwesenden Zeiten”, in: Fernando Esposito, (ed.), Zeitenwandel,Transformationen geschichlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2017), 227-253, especially 242.
• 6
  Achim Landwehr, “Die vielen, anwesenden und abwesenden Zeiten”, 245.
• 7
  François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017³), 18.
• 8
  Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart, (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 67.
• 9
  Aleida Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013), 255.
• 10
  Acceleration has since become an important topic in Koselleckian time thinking. See: Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae. The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perpective of a Modernized Historical Process”, in: idem, Futures Past, 6-42, esp. 40-41; idem, “Time and History”, in: idem,The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing, History, Spacing Concepts, Transl. Todd Samuel a.o. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002), 112-113 and idem, “Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?” in: idem, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt 2000), 150-176. See also: Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung. Die Veränderiung der Zeitstruktur der Moderne (Frankfurt a. M.2005); Alexander Geppert/Till Kössler (Hg), Obsession der Gegenwart. Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert (Vansenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 7-36, esp. 26-31; Alexandre Escudier (2008), “Das Gefühl der Beschleunigung der Moderne Geschichte: Bausteine für eine Geschichte”, Esprit (Juni 2008), 165-191 Chris Lorenz, “Der letzte Fetisch des Stamms der Historiker. Zeit, Raum und Periodisierung in der Geschichtswissenschaft” in: Fernando Esposito (2017), Zeitenwandel, 63-92, especially, 68-75 and Lucian Hölscher, “Von leeren und gefüllten Zeiten, 2015. Zum Wandel historische Zeitkonzepte seit dem 18. Jahrhundert”, in: Geppert/ Kössler, Obsession der Gegenwart, 37-70, esp. 63-64.
• 11
  Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, Chichester: Columbia Univdersity Press, 2004); Zoltàn Boldizsår Simon, and Marek Tamm, “Historical Futures,” in: History and Theory 60, 1 (2021), 3-22.
• 12
  Reinhart Koselleck-Carl Schmitt: Der Briefwechsel 1953-1983; ed. by Jan Eike Dunkhase (Berlin: 2019), 10 ff.
• 13
  Lucian Hölscher, Zeitgärten. Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit (Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2020), 250.
• 14
  Hölscher, Zeitgärten, 280-281.
• 15
  Ibid. 282.
• 16
  Ibid.
• 17
  Ibid., 281-282.
• 18
  Ibid., 34.
• 19
  Robin Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 100.
• 20
  Eelco Runia, “Presence”, History and Theory 45, 1 (2006), 1-29, especially 5.
• 21
  Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications 1999), 2.
• 22
  Achim Landwehr, “Nostalgia and the Turbulance of Times”, 266.
• 23
  Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, transl. By Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1999).
• 24
  F. Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra, Dritter Teil. Vom Gesicht und Rätsel”, Werke II (ed. Schlechta, Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Wien: Ullstein Verlag 1976), 682. English from Robin Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, 95.
• 25
  Quoted from Ruin, “Revolutionary Presence”, 96.
• 26
  Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s thought, 98-100.
• 27
  Ibid., 100.
• 28
  F. Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra. Zweiter Teil: Von der Erlösung” Werke II (ed. Schlechta) 668. English from: Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s thought, 99.
• 29
  F. Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra. Zweiter Teil: “Von der Erlösung” 668. English from Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s thought,106.
• 30
  See for the relation between Nietzsche, Heidegger and kairotic time: Felix O. Murchadha, The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (London: Bloomsburry Press, 2013). Murchadha speaks of kairological time, instead of kairotic time.
• 31
  Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s thought, 100-101.
• 32
  Runia, “Presence”, 14-22.
• 33
  Runia, “Presence”, 28.
• 34
  Zoltán, Boldiszár Simon, “The Expression of Historical Experience”, History and Theory 54, 2 (2015), 178-194, especially 188 and 191.
• 35
  Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157. See also: Harry Jansen, “Research, Narrative and Representation. A Postnarrative Approach”, History and Theory 58, 1 (2019) 67-88, especially 78 and 86.
• 36
  Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time, 4.
• 37
  Ibid.
• 38
  K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (ed. P. Kecskemeti; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 83-88. My italics.
• 39
  H.-G. Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Full-filled Time” (1973) (Transl. R. P. O’Hara). In: E. G. Ballard & C. E. Scott (Eds.), Martin Heidegger in Europe and America (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 71-86.
• 40
  Quoted from: David Carr, Experience and History. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71.
• 41
  Hans Ruin, “Revolutionary Presence”, 89.
• 42
  Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Gyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),178-183; A 31-32, B 47-56. (A is the first edition of 1781, B the second one of 1787).
• 43
  Take care: “phenomenological” concerns here only the sensory world. The term “phenomenology”, used in relation to Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, regards all the world that has a meaning for us.
• 44
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 390-394; A 306-309, B 362-366 esp. 391, (A 307). There also seems to be another Kant. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of view [1789], he discusses nostalgia “as the homesick of the Swiss”. Landwehr calls Kant’s form of nostalgia the “unpresent” indicating that the past remains a space distinct from the present. It is not nostalgia as a personal experience of the past in the present. As a result, Kant’s, nostalgia maintains the gap between mind and reality. See: Landwehr, “Nostalgia and the Turbulance of Times”, 257-265.
• 45
  Carr, Experience and History, 18.
• 46
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 177-178; A 28-30, B 44-45. See also 179; B 47 and 189; B 67-68.
• 47
  Ibid., 212; A 10, B 106 and 223; A 92, B 124.
• 48
  Carr, Experience and History, 18.
• 49
  Harry Jansen, Hidden in Historicism. Time Regimes since 1700 (London, New York: Routledge, 2020), 34-36.
• 50
  There are several interpretations of nunc stans. See for instance: 1) Christianity in which it means “eternal existence” as an attribute of God; 2) With Nietzsche in his Also sprach Zarathustra, it has the connotation of a now in which past, present and future meet one another. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra”, Dritter Teil. Vom Gesicht und Rätsel”, Werke II (ed. Schlechta), 682. See also: Robin Small,Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London, New York: Continuum, 2010), 109, 139 and 159. In the context of Kant and the Enlightenment it is nothing else than a continuously repeating “now”.
• 51
  Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 162 and 179; B 47
• 52
  Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 184; A 41, B 58.
• 53
  Only with Friedrich Schiller after 1789 rises the idea of an intermingling of present, past and future. See: Hölscher, Zeitgärten, 46-47.
• 54
  Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity”, in: idem, The Practice of Conceptual History, 154-169, esp. 165-169.
• 55
  Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 184; A 41, B 58. Koselleck’s empty time differs from Kant’s in one respect. The sequence of “nows” of the latter implies a staccato of time, while for Koselleck time “is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place; it gains a historical quality”. History thus no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right.” (Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 236. Idem, The Practice of Conceptual History, 165.) Yet his time remains empty because this forward moving time has no substance in the form of the pasts of historical individuals (like states, nations, religions etcetera), historical ages or changing ideas. For these pasts see note 14 till 19 above.
• 56
  Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant, History and the Idea of Moral Development”, History of Philosophy Quaterly 16, 1 (1999), 63.
• 57
  Ibid., 66.
• 58
  Ibid., 69. See for Hegel, the applicable section below.
• 59
  Koselleck, “History, Histories and Formal Time Structures” in, idem, Futures Past, 93-104, esp. 95-96; See also: “Geschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturen”, in: idem, Vergangene Zukunft, Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989) 130-143, esp. 132-133; Hölscher, “Mysteries of Historical Order”, in: Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking up Time, 134- 154, esp. 142-144. Also: Hölscher, “Von leeren und gefüllten Zeiten”, 66-67, 2013.
• 60
  Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage, Breaking up time. Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (Göttingen, Bristol USA: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 32 and 142-144.
• 61
  Lorenz, Bevernage, “Introduction”, in: Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking up Time, 32 and 142-144; See also: Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, 3.
• 62
  Helge Jordheim, “Introduction. Multiple Time and the Work of Synchronization”, History and Theory 53,4 (2014), 502. With Helge Jordheim, I subscribe to the phenomenon of pluri-temporality. See also: Landwehr, “Die vielen, anwesenden und abwesenden Zeiten”, 237 and 241-243.
• 63
  In the eighteenth century there is non-simultaneity of the simultaneous, in the nineteenth century synchronicity of the non-synchronous. The latter has a much more dialectical character. See below.
• 64
  R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 321-322; Jordheim, “Introduction”., 498-518, especially 510.
• 65
  Ibid., 515.
• 66
  See above: Hölscher’s comment on Koselleck’s history as a collective singular (Hölscher, Zeitgärten, 280-281) See also: Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, chapt. 2.
• 67
  Ibid., 39-42.
• 68
  Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity”, in: idem, The Practice of Conceptual History, 154-169, esp. 165-169.
• 69
  Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, 51ff.
• 70
  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Transl. John Macquerrie and Edward Robinson; Oxford and Cambridge [Mass]: Blackwell, 2001), par. 77. Phenomenological here means something different from Kant. Gadamer's phenomenology is about a “lifeworld” that gives meaning to everything there is. Kant's phenomenology concerns a world whose underlying reality is unattainable.
• 71
  Gadamer,Truth and Method), 248.
• 72
  Ibid., 252.
• 73
  Ibid.
• 74
  Ralf Elm, “Schenkung, Entzug, und die Kunst schöpferischen Fragens. Zum Phänomen der Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens in Gadamers ‘Analyse des wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewustseins’”, in: Günter Figal, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Wahrheit und Methode, 151-176, esp. 153, 2007. Elm defines this intertwining in German as “das fleischlich-leiblich Verflochtensein der “Teile der Welt’”.
• 75
  Gadamer, Truth and Method, 105.
• 76
  Ibid., 251-252.
• 77
  Elm, “Schenkung, Entzug, und die Kunst schöpferischen Fragens”, 154.
• 78
  Ibid., 155.
• 79
  Carr, Experience and History, 51. Identity brings us to the controversy between so-called communitarians and cosmopolitans. According to Carr “The former (people like Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and other) proclaim the value for the individual and for social order of the individual’s rootedness in the community and warn us against the rootlessness of modern society; the latter (e.g. Habermas and more recently Anthony Appia) defend the values of individuality, “post-conventional identity”, and cosmopolitism against what they see as the closedness and conservatism of the communitarian approach.” This controversy is closely related to the onto-epistemological polarity. which I discuss here with the ideal types of Kant and Gadamer. Kant then is more the representative of the cosmopolitan pole and Gadamer of the community one.
• 80
  See Donatella Di Cesare, “Das unendliche Gespräch. Sprache als Medium der hermeneutische Erfahrung”, in: Figal, Hans-Georg Gadamer, 2007, 177-218.
• 81
  Georg, W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, transl. J. B. Baillie [1910] (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2001), 6.
• 82
  “Das is die List der Vernunft zu nennen, dass sie die Leidenschaften für sich wirken lässt…” Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 49.
• 83
  Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 11-12.
• 84
  Gadamer, Truth and Method, 242-243.
• 85
  Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, 70.
• 86
  Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 265.
• 87
  L. Von Ranke, “Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert”, in: idem, Sämtliche Werke 6 Bd. 19 (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1871), 103. “Ich möchte mein Selbst gleichsam auslöschen und nur die Dinge reden, die mächtigen Kräfte erscheinen lassen”.
• 88
  Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 277.
• 89
  K. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, in: Freedman (ed.), Marxist Social Thought, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 188-211, especially 188.
• 90
  Jansen Hidden in Historicism, 132-134.
• 91
  Ibid., 136.
• 92
  Karl Marx, “Doktorsdissertation: Differenz der demokritischen und epikurischen Naturphilosphie nebst einem Anhange”, in: Marx, Engels, Werke. Ergänzungsband I, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 257-373.
• 93
  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (transl. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 14-15.
• 94
  Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 95.
• 95
  Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, 108-109.
• 96
  Frank Ankersmit, “Tocqueville and Flaubert on 1848: the sublimity of revolution”, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37, 2 (2016), 253-271, esp. 256 and 271. I would like to thank the author for sending it to me.
• 97
  Karl Marx, “Deutsche Ideologie I. Feuerbach”, Marx Engels Werke 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969), 72.
• 98
  K. Marx, “The future results of the British Rule in India”, in: The New-York Daily Tribune (August 8, 1853). Quoted from: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, without year) 83-90.
• 99
  For Tocqueville see: Hidden in Historicism, 109-111 and for Marx, ibid. 128.
• 100
  Lorenz, Bevernage, Breaking up time, 32.
• 101
  Koselleck uses the term ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ and the ‘non-simultaneity of the simultaneous’ side by side and interchangeably. See: Koselleck, ‘On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History’, 8 and idem, Vergangene Zukunft, 324; “…in der Erkenntnis des Ungleichzeitigen das zu chronologisch gleicher Zeit geschieht.” So he doesn’t make the distinction, that I make here.
• 102
  Nietzsche, “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister”, in: Idem, Werke I (Schlechta ed.), Zweiter Band, I. “Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche”, Abt.: 223, 823. English from: Richardson, “Nietzsche’s Problem of the Past”, 87-112 in: Manuel Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Time and History (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 91.
• 103
  Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304.
• 104
  Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005), 177.
• 105
  Ibid.
• 106
  Ibid., 171.
• 107
  Ibid., 161.
• 108
  Ibid., 161-162.
• 109
  Peter Burke, “Introduction”, in: Burckhardt, The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1-14, esp. 6, 2010.
• 110
  Ibid., 9.
• 111
  Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 168-169.
• 112
  Burke, “Introduction”, 5.
• 113
  Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 167.
• 114
  Quoted from Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 165.
• 115
  Ibid., 174.
• 116
  It was beyond the reach of this article to elaborate on his embodied temporality. See Jansen, Hidden in Historicism, chapter 3.
• 117
  Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 174-175.
• 118
  Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (München: Carl Hanser verlag, 2013), 272-277. She calls Hartog’s and Gumbrecht’s present without presence “a kind of Vorhölle”, 274.
• 119
  Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen?, 279.
• 120
  Ibid., 280.
• 121
  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, (2008²), 8. See also: Lorenz, “Der letzte Fetisch des Stamms der Historiker”, 84.
• 122
  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 252.
• 123
  Ibid., 254.
• 124
  Ibid.
• 125
  Ibid., 253.
• 126
  Ibid., 109.
• 127
  Berber Bevernage, “The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: on Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism”, History and Theory 54, 3 (2015), 333-352, especially 351.
• 128
  Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 65-89.
• 129
  Bevernage, “The Past is evil/Evil is Past”, 333-352.
• 130
  Ibid., 351.
• 131
  Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9. See also: Bevernage, “The Past is Evil”, 352.
• 132
  Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen?, 303.
• 133
  Kant utters: Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind (A51/B75)”. See: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1827072-immanuel-kant-experience-without-theory-is-blind-but-theory-wit/ The Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos made of it: ““Philosophy of Science without History of Science is empty; History of Science without Philosophy of science is blind”. Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions”, in: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (1971), 91.

Edited by

Editores:

Karina Anhezini e Eduardo Romero de Oliveira

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  11 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  03 May 2023
• Accepted
  28 Aug 2023