The modern experience of History today is a Presentist outlook, an unending now contrasted by the singular changed past.
Philosophy of History, Historicism, the view of History-itself came into being during the Enlightenment. Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis in Kritik und Krisis was, cuius regio eius religio had paved the way for absolute sovereign remit on morality, becoming a public matter, whereby the individual morality was left with a guarantee. In the thesis itself, this gives birth to the idea among the secretive masons about the future of a public morality. In good analyses of history, one understands that the Revolution and regicide of Louis XVI, for it’s drama is crystallised, singularised by later commentators as a seismic event. That the Capetian monarch was brought low shocked many, but a good historian knows that outside France, enlightened despotism had already produced the changes we ascribe to the Enlightenment. Voltaire operated under the nose of Louis XV and was under the patronage of Friedrich the Great after all. Figures like Beccaria and Rousseau also emerged prior to the Revolution, the former within the milieu of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
As Koselleck developed his philosophy, influenced by Gadamer, he continued to hone in on Conceptual History. It’s underlying premise was the achievement of an analysis of conditions of possible histories. The complementary pair of “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” The former is received knowledge of the world, the latter the foreseeable possibilities of history, mediated by familiar categories. The debt to Gadamer is obvious. The participation in existence by way of historically-mediated consciousness. It is precisely a mistake we make when we reduce events into “Historical Singularities”, Die Gesischte. The history prior to the culmination of particular histories, for example Thucydides or Livy’s accounts into collective singularities by German idealists began to give History a trajectory. Herodotus saw history as an investigation, an active concept of action. Histories of units of action were the norm. The singularisation came into being only when all activity of the world became analogous to God. The dynamics of time cannot be reduced to mere teleological ascription. All history, whether linear or circular has telos. The presentism of today is caused by ascriptions to temporality that includes embodied justice and existence as object and subject of scrutiny as History-itself. This provides the dynamic direction of advancement.
I liberally take from Zubiri here and call this process an “entification of history”. In precisely that the senses in his philosophy embody a constant experience of change, in a manner which corresponds to the true experience of existence via confrontation of reality. As with the shortcomings of Verificationism, by which our notes(Husserlian term) of the world are inexhaustible and impractical for all given circumstances, history cannot be everything. The issue with singularisations is the loss of referential comparisons and Koselleck is ultimately fighting for the recognition of recurrence. The future becomes all-knowing as the past is itself all-known. The threefold terms, “extralinguistic”, “prelinguistic” and “linguistic” all define the knowability of history to language. “Historical reality, between, before or after the articulation”. Language alone describes the actual in history, as it is point when oral culture melts and cultural memory by itself comes into being. Anthropological prelinguistics are determinative. Storehouses of experience are built into language which allow for structures of repetition. Language is the bedrock of recurrence, what we truly know can repeat itself at any time, though our faculties of ascertainment cannot discern novelty in our time.
One can link the notion of thinking poetry(denkende dichten) in Heidegger’s work. Language through poetry in a truly poietic sense involves the fashioning of a literary form. The proper manner in which thought unfolds, therefore casting a wider net at the language of possibility, is opposed to the manner in which naked fact unfolds as reality. The semantic convergence that is the historiographical turn, demonstrative of the popularisation of Absolutisation was the removal of experience in the criteria for historical reality. Entelechy is impossible from all participants in events because of the monopoly of interpretation.
Singularization prefers temporality and sequential chronological history in a way to interrogate history. Universal intuition, correlative perception require empirical validation. Due to Kant’s positing that metaphysical sensibilities are subjective forms, independent of empirical experience, Herder rightly saw a flaw in Kant that historical agents and their linguistic interactions take place within specific spatio-temporalities. Part of the interrogative-critical method is to analyse the transformation-itself. But palpable transformation, known to confrontational-reality experience is impulsive via technologization(technology-framed existence). But the imprinting of sequential temporality upon events forces a conforming absolute on history which disregard particular structural preconditions of the event.
