An Overview of Time Studies in the Theory of History after the 2000s
Issues, Concepts, Trends, and Subtrends, with a Special Focus on the New Metaphysics of Historical Time
HÉLIO REBELLO CARDOSO JR. • FEBRUARY 2024
Abstract: This One More Thing . . . contribution uses a diagram displaying four subfields of inquiry in order to offer an overview of the current field of historical time studies. The four main subfields discussed in this essay are: (1) the metaphysics of natural time; (2) the metaphysics of historical time; (3) the regimes of historicity; and (4) the historiographical regimes. This essay then uses three guiding parameters to distinguish the classical metaphysics of historical time from the new metaphysics of historical time: (i) the relationship between historical and natural time; (ii) the relationship between past, present, and future; and (iii) temporal change. The essay also describes three main trends of the new metaphysics of historical time and analyzes sixteen main subtrends according to their philosophical roots. These three main trends are: (a) theories of historical presence (with eight subtrends); (b) multiple temporalities (with five subtrends); and (c) analytical historical time (with three subtrends). The essay then outlines the relationship between the metaphysics of historical time, the regimes of historicity, and the historiographical regimes. It concludes by assessing a recent theory of time—that is, “historical futures”—and compares that theory with the other current trends of historical time studies that are examined here.
Keywords: time studies, historical time, presence, multiple temporalities, analytical philosophy of history, historical futures, natural time, change
Cover image by Yelena Odintsova.
Cite this post: Hélio Rebello Cardoso Jr., “An Overview of Time Studies in the Theory of History after the 2000s: Issues, Concepts, Trends, and Subtrends, with a Special Focus on the New Metaphysics of Historical Time,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, February 2024, https://historyandtheory.org/omt/2024-cardoso.
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1. Drawing the Diagram of Time Studies in Relation to the Theory of History
A longstanding disciplinary consensus recognizes the primary role that time plays for practicing and thinking about history. However, time only began to draw significant academic attention from historians and historical theorists beginning in the 1990s.[1] Since 2008, scholars have claimed that the growing interest in historians’ “fundamental material”[2] has led to “a radical critique of the dominant concept of historical time and the metaphysical presuppositions and ontological commitments that accompany it.”[3] Most importantly, the focus on time introduced historians and theorists of history to the broad field of “time studies,” which involves a transdisciplinary (from the humanities to the arts) query concerning “our conceptions of time . . . in specific social contexts.”[4]
Among the disciplines that share the broad field of time studies, what could distinguish the theoretical study that history as a discipline dedicates to time?
In an attempt to answer such a question, this One More Thing . . . contribution begins by offering an overview of time studies in relation to the theory of history via a diagram displaying four subfields of inquiry:
Figure 1. Diagram of Time Studies in Relation to the Theory of History
In Figure 1, four parallel lines define the subjects of time studies in relation to the theory of history. These lines represent: (a) natural time; (b) historical time; (c) experience of historical time; and (d) historical time as it is managed by historiographical practices and represented in historical writing. Between lines a, b, c, and d are areas 1, 2, 3, and 4, which encompass the different subfields of historical time studies:
1) Metaphysics of natural time[5] is located above line a and looms as the ultimate, misty boundary upon which disciplinary history’s practices and theoretical efforts confront natural time.
2) Metaphysics of historical time[6] is located between lines a and b; it is bordered by natural time on the top and historical time on the bottom.
3) Regimes of historicity[7] is located between lines b and c; it involves the modes that the experience of time might employ. This area is bordered by historical time on the top and the representation of time in historiography and historical writing on the bottom.
4) Historiographical regimes[8] is located below line d; it stands not only for the handling of time by historiographical practices related to time (chronology, chronicles, timetables, periodization) but also for the representation of historical time in historical writing.
As this article focuses on layer b.2, I begin by defining three parameters to analyze the metaphysics of historical time: (i) the relationship between historical and natural time; (ii) the relationship between past, present, and future; and (iii) temporal change. Based on those parameters, I trace a generational distinction between the classical metaphysics of historical time and the new metaphysics of historical time. I then classify main trends and subtrends of the metaphysics of historical time. In the subsequent section, I outline, for further inspection, how the metaphysics of historical time (b.2) spreads its scope of action to include the metaphysics of natural time (a.1), regimes of historicity (c.3), and historiographical regimes (d.4), a maneuver that is informed by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s claim that “the distance between history writing and practice and their philosophical and theoretical analyses is relatively narrow.”[9] Finally, I discuss the latest subtrend of the metaphysics of historical time—that is, “historical futures,”[10] as it has been defined by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm—and assess what innovations this subtrend might have brought to the new metaphysics of historical time.
2. The Metaphysics of Natural Time and the Metaphysics of Historical Time
To begin with, what is the metaphysics of historical time (b.2)? And how does it differ from the metaphysics of natural time (a.1)?
Due to their diverse disciplinary roots, the metaphysics of historical time and the metaphysics of natural time approach time quite differently. In fact, some theorists of history have warned that experiencing time is not experiencing history at all, insofar as the latter entails some features that do not correspond with natural time: “If one assumes that historical time remains embedded within natural time without being entirely contained in it; or, to put it differently, that whereas chronological time may be relevant for political decisions, historical interrelations cannot be measured with a clock.”[11]
Moreover, historical time is mediated by culture, so it cannot be understood in terms of a universal time; rather, it must be understood in terms of human experience: “History is a specific way in which humans deal with the experience of temporal change. The way they realize it essentially depends upon pre-given or underlying ideas and concepts of time.”[12]
In contrast, the metaphysics of natural time is interested primarily in the “‘objective’ time of physicists.”[13] In fact, the experiences that natural time provides conform to a general linguistic structure, one according to which the truth about the past “consists of its being the case that someone suitably placed could have verified it.”[14] According to Carlo Rovelli, two features shape the order of natural time: either time discloses itself as the succession of events or it is mimed from the order of things in space. Regardless of what might materialize time (that is, either events or things), the perception of its order comes primarily from experiencing change, be it real or illusive.[15] Temporal change in turn becomes perceptible as one’s “present memories and present evidence” are distributed among past, present, and future.[16]
Despite the disciplinary boundaries, the metaphysics of historical time is not insensitive to natural time. According to Krzysztof Pomian, the order of historical time is framed by a structure that consists of “four ways of visualizing time”: “chronometry,” “chronology,” “chronography,” and “chronosophy.”[17] The first two categories cover calendrical time and chronological time, which ignore the separation between natural time and human time. Chronography, Pomian’s third category, refers to instances in which someone tells a history and, in so arranging events in their chronicle, manipulates the frame of natural time in order to accommodate historical time. Chronosophies, in turn, are interested only in natural time as a temporal threshold from which historical time detaches itself. The detachment determines the very core of the metaphysics of historical time (in contrast to the metaphysics of natural time).
The classificatory work of the metaphysics of historical time begins with an internal, generational quasi-gap between the classical (or substantive) philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) (to which historians such as Oswald A. G. Spengler [1880–1936] and Arnold Toynbee [1889–1975] attended) and the “new metaphysics of time”[18] (whose pivotal theorists, such as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Reinhart Koselleck [1923–2006], and Frank Ankersmit, emerged more recently).
When comparing the classical metaphyics of time and the new metaphysics of time, the following characteristics should be taken into account: (i) boundaries between the order of historical time and the order of natural, clock time; (ii) relationship among past, present, and future; and (iii) temporal change in history. Using these three parameters, the next two sections will examine the characteristics of the classical metaphysics of historical time and the new metaphysics of historical time.
3. The Classical Metaphysics of Historical Time: From the Order of Natural Time to the Sense of History
The classical metaphysics of time is interested in answering a substantive question about the sense of history: Should history lead societies to progressive betterment despite the apparent chaos in which the present drowns them?
In order to answer this question, the philosophies of history “aspire to understand once and for all [d’amblée] the entire course . . . of history, of becoming, or of time”[19] by knowing in advance what the “relationship [rapports] between the present, the past, and the future”[20] essentially means. To these ends, the classical metaphysics of historical time must consider the detachment of historical time from natural time. For the classical philosophers of history, the relationship between past, present, and future is historically specified according to the dominance of one dimension over the others. The sense of history, which displays itself in temporal change, in turn depends on a dominant dimension of time. In what follows, I will use Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophies of history as examples of the metaphysics of time that the classical philosophers of history sustained.
For Nietzsche, time arises as the activity of becoming (the sensory and material reality of change), and there must be no guiding principle for time, no Reason, and no Geist to plot the flow of time. Nietzsche’s conception of becoming has two basic aspects. First, it appears through the mutability of the natural world only because there is no essence in time to be unveiled. Therefore, according to Nietzsche, “the whole nature of reality [Wirklichkeit] lies simply in its acts [Wirken] and that for it there exists no other sort of being [Art Sein].”[21] Second, the natural becoming presents itself through “the conditions [die Bedingungen] which alone make any experience [die jede Erfahrung] of this world possible: time and space.”[22] There is no distance between the reality (Wirklichkeit) of becoming and its material sort of being, which is embodied in the activity (Wirkung) of the sensory, ever changeable world. Thus, time is the activity of becoming measured through the portions of becoming itself: the past, the present, and the future in time’s restless activity.
For Nietzsche, the mode of being of history cannot be less material than those of becoming and of natural time. This raises the question of whether or not it is possible to detach history from natural, sensory time.
The membrane that connects history and the becoming of natural time—that is, the unhistorical—is regulated by the retractable boundaries between remembering and forgetting: it depends “on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember at the right time; on the possession of a powerful instinct for sensing [herausfühlt] when it is necessary to feel [empfinden] historically and when unhistorically.”[23] Whenever the historical ambience shrinks, the forgetting zone increases and historical time gets closer to the endless flow of natural, unhistorical time. The contrary is also true: whenever the historical ambience increases, the remembering zone grows. People must breathe the fresh air of becoming; otherwise, they will get sick of history: “only by imposing limits [einschränkt] on this unhistorical element” and by “introducing into history that which has been done and is gone [aus dem Geschehenen wieder Geschichte zu machen] . . . did man become man [wird der Mensch zum Menschen]: but with an excess of history man again ceases to exist [hört der Mensch wieder auf], and without that envelope of the unhistorical he would never have begun or dared to begin.”[24]
The unstable boundaries between remembering and forgetting infuse the relationship between past, present, and future with a lively swell that natural time does not provide. Additionally, according to Nietzsche, the present is responsible for the retractable boundaries between remembering and forgetting in order to make temporal change historically felt. It is the presentness of the present, the instant (Augenblick) in which “a child . . . plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future,”[25] that regulates the balance between what is or is not possible to live historically. If the border between the historical and the unhistorical lies in the immediate present, past and future only acquire existence as they become present in the absolute present of the dimensionless coming-to-be or “moving Now.”[26]
In contrast, according to Heidegger, the past is not determined by the present. The past only recovers the strength of having been if the future activates it for the present to become significant. Therefore, in the horizon of Dasein, it is the future that temporalizes time as the authentic temporality: “Primordial and authentic [ursprüngliche und eigentliche] temporality [Zeitlichkeit] temporalizes itself [zeitigt sich] in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that, in having been futurally [zukünftig], it first of all awakens the present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.”[27] If time fails to temporalize in terms of the future, it falls into the inauthentic temporality of either living beings or inanimate beings, which demotes temporal change to the dimensionless flow of present-past-future. Human temporality, therefore, withdraws from the multifoliate horizon of Dasein to harmfully mime the unidimensional natural time. In contrast, the future-centered, authentic temporalization of time awakens human beings from the drowsiness that the present might create in them by concealing the temporal horizon of Dasein.
Furthermore, “historicality” depends on the temporalization of time: “This Being finds its meaning in temporality [Zeitlichkeit]. However, temporality is also the condition which makes historicality possible [die Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Geschichtlichkeit] as a temporal mode of Dasein itself.”[28] As a result, historical knowledge and disciplinary history depend on historicality, since the latter is “prior to what is called ‘history’ (world-historical historizing) [weltgeschichtliches Geschehen].”[29] Historiography becomes inauthentic if historicity is downgraded and eventually sinks into the inauthentic historicality, which lacks the lively forces of history. Hence, the historian’s view cannot attach to present time: “Even historiological disclosure [history as science] temporalizes itself in terms of the future [auch die historische Erschließung zeitigt sich aus der Zukunft].”[30]
4. The New Metaphysics of Historical Time
In 2011, Helge Jordheim argued that “the ‘theory of historical times’ . . . at present is both contested and simply overlooked.”[31] Just one year later, Ethan Kleinberg pointed to the rise of a “new metaphysics of time.”[32] For the sake of terminological accuracy, I claim that the expression “new metaphysics of historical time” is a more accurate way to refer to the group of recent theories of historical time. This is because, on the one hand, the adjective “historical” qualifies the metaphysics concerning the metaphysics of natural time that deals with natural time. On the other hand, the word “new” indicates that there is a division within the area of the metaphysics of historical time, a division that has produced a new metaphysics of historical time and an old (or classical) metaphysics of historical time, as discussed above.
Years of narrativism have made the new theorists of historical time cautious with regard to the speculative risks that the classical metaphysics of time took when conceiving the overall sense of history. Even so, they did not abandon some of the classical metaphysics of historical time’s issues, such as continuity/discontinuity of history, linear/nonlinear time, synchronous/asynchronous time, and temporal change. In fact, there is a connection that links the classical metaphysics of historical time and the new metaphysics of historical time: the narrativist contempt for speculative adventures. According to Simon, the new theories of historical time rehabilitate the philosophy of history by launching a “quasi-substantive philosophy of history.”[33] But, what does the quasi-substantive metaphysics of time provide that the classical, substantive philosophers of history could not?
The new enterprise is different from the classical philosophy of history in two main senses. First, the new metaphysics of historical time does not deal with the detachment of historical time from natural time as such (parameter i), as Nietzsche or Heidegger did, because, in general (but not absolutely, as I will show), the new metaphysics of historical time takes the singular existence of historical time for granted. In fact, the new metaphysics of historical time sets off against “a kind of thinking that overflows that of the knowable . . . within whose limits historians’ history confines itself.”[34] At best, it considers natural time perfunctorily as a distant boundary that runs unaware of human history. Second, the emphasis concerning the relationship between past, present, and future (parameter ii) changed. For the new metaphysicians of historical time, the meaning of the dimensional relationship of time lies in the different ways that the past reaches the present and the present opens the future so as to make changes across time. The new theorists of time do not seek to reveal the sense of history as the secret of historical change (parameter iii).
Furthermore, for the new metaphysicians of time, the temporal relations set the conditions under which past, present, and future become epistemologically apprehensible by theoretical tools and by historians’ practical tasks. This last characteristic requires connection between the metaphysics of historical time (b.2) and the lower layers of the diagram of time studies (Figure 1)—that is, the regimes of historicity (c.3) and the historiographical regimes (d.4).
Therefore, the rebranded, quasi-substantive tasks of the new metaphysics of historical time reunite an epistemological inquiry that depends on ontological commitments: (i) the detachment from natural time; (ii) the relationship between past, present, and future; and (iii) temporal change. The epistemontological patterns that the new metaphysics of historical time (b.2) assumes can be grouped into three trends: presence, multiple temporalities, and analytical historical time.[35] These three trends can be further divided into at least sixteen subtrends.
5. Trends and Subtrends of the New Metaphysics of Historical Time
5A. Presence
As a common ground, historical presence deals with the aporetical characteristic of the past, which is present in its remnants (things, documents, or memorials) and, at the same time, is irremediably absent. Beginning in the 2000s, scholars have developed various understandings of historical presence based on philosophical references. Some recognized theorists of historical presence are Gumbrecht, Ewa Domańska, Anton Froeyman, Berber Bevernage, Kleinberg, Ankersmit, and Eelco Runia.
Gumbrecht’s notion of historical presence is explicitly indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy,[36] as he emphasized the importance of space and things in the metaphysics of presence.[37] For Gumbrecht, presence is “the spatio-temporally located existence of physical objects and events.”[38] Objects and things in space make presence effective despite the absence of the temporal past that they bring back as the “presentification of the past.”[39] Moreover, the “presence effects”[40] that the absence of the past produces force senses to represent historical experience so that humans represent historical time by means of a reflex and an unlearned response to the stimulus of the absent past. Overall, the presence culture affirms a realistic account of the past despite the representationalist, meaning culture that narrativism promoted.
Domańska’s notion of historical presence stems from Gumbrecht’s understanding of the spatialization of the past and appeals to the “return to things” that Heidegger first promoted.[41] For her, “the material presence . . . signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is ‘real,’”[42] which “have ‘dematerialized’ things by comparing the thing to a text.”[43] The material presence involves the paradox between being present and absent, which Domańska solves by calling on Algirdas J. Greimas’s (1917–1992) semiotic square. In short, as opposite relations, absent and present logically apply for the past if their respective implications—non-absent and non-present—coexist in the past’s present representation.
Mateus H. F. Pereira and Valdei Araujo have reviewed the Heideggerian matrix that is foundational to the temporal scheme of presence. In so doing, they have sought to understand contemporary times according to Heidegger’s “improper temporalization” as a way to frame their gaps and provide a genealogy that is able to characterize “actualism.”[44] The concept of actualism specifies the characteristic of the contemporary presentism as the “temporal dimension that emerges in these societies imprisoned by the structures of infinite expansion”[45] so as to spoil presence culture.
According to Froeyman, the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) might supply the notion of historical presence with an instantiation of the relationship between past and present. From a Levinasian standpoint, Froeyman developed “a theory of the experience of the [Other] in history.”[46] For Froeyman, however, Levinas’s notion of presence is inaccurate with regard to historians’ practices because it overshadows historical time beneath the mists of the infinite time of the “Epiphany” of the Other.[47] Hence, Froeyman’s historical presence reshapes the Levinasian “otherness of the Other” as a force that makes the present represent the past as an earthly “presence effect” that evokes “the experience of a genuine encounter with a fellow human being from another time.”[48]
Bevernage and Kleinberg have employed Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) deconstructive approach to Heidegger’s metaphysics of presence in an effort to create a new notion of historical presence. According to Bevernage, presence holds a spectral reality that challenges the reality of the past to extricate itself from the representations that increasingly pile on top of it. Presence conveys a historical time according to which the past status of being absent is not weaker than the status of being present.[49] Likewise, Kleinberg’s notion of presence seeks to redeem historians and theorists from a misconception concerning the uses of deconstructionism for the practice of history.[50] The past haunts the present like a ghost (that is, without being determinable in any way whatsoever), so the ghostly presence of the past stands by and, with the present, displaces the presentness of the present toward the future. Kleinberg’s and Bevernage’s notions of historical presence ask for a Derridean approach to frame historical experience; in contrast, other presence lineages put “emphasis on space,” which “downplays the role of time”[51] by privileging presence over the absence of the past.
Ankersmit’s notion of historical presence follows former historicist tenets regarding the reality of the past in order to solve the challenge of the paradoxical status of the past. For Ankersmit, the past can only become present by means of representation—that is, as the past is gone, its representation implies its presence; therefore, representation includes “the notion of ‘presence.’”[52] Thus, the duality between the past and the present and, consequently, the distance between representation and temporal reality are false—that is, insofar as the past only exists in the present as a representation and representing the past is experiencing the past. However, the realism that conveys the past reality is not referential, and history is not an objective reality to be represented by true/false scientific values, since the past forces its presence upon its representation in the present “without there being any subjects of experience around.”[53] In short, Ankersmit has claimed that historical presence conveys an overwhelming experience whose “sublimity”[54] surpasses the subjects’ ordinary schemes of representation (including those of historians) and forces them to confront the contradictory sensation of being compulsorily attracted to what is undeniably absent. Ankersmit’s notion of sublime historical presence relies heavily on Johan Huizinga’s (1872–1945) The Waning of the Middle Ages, which, according to Ankersmit, offered “the best account of historical experience.”[55]
Runia’s notion of historical presence is not as directly or indirectly indebted to Heidegger as Gumbrecht’s, Domańska’s, Froeyman’s, Bevernage’s, and Kleinberg’s notions of historical presence are. It also distinct from Ankersmit’s sublime historical experience. To emphasize the here-and-now reality of the absent past in the present, Runia has recovered Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) philosophy of history and the work of other “wayward geniuses,”[56] such as W. G. Sebald (1944–2001). According to Runia, the realistic presence is “the unrepresented way the past is present in the present,”[57] as it brings back a “reality outside the text”[58] by “presenting absences.”[59] For him, the less a representational scheme succeeds in grasping the presence of the past, the better historians apprehend and tell history. The presence of the absent past is real in such a way that it “is incomparably more absent” than historical realism admits and “incomparably more present” than other presence subtrends are prone to accept.[60]
Despite their differences, the subtrends of presence described above are concerned with the temporal order of history in which the relationship between past and present, in terms of being ambiguously present and absent, explains temporal change as a central characteristic. In general, scholars working in these subtrends disregard natural time.
5B. Multiple Temporalities
Multiple temporalities, which is the second traceable trend in the new metaphysics of time, stems from Koselleck’s prolific theory of history. This trend encourages historians and theorists of history to recognize the existence of not only “one historical time, but rather . . . many forms of time superimposed one upon the other.”[61] The Koselleckian metaphysics of time is illustrated by a geological metaphor, one according to which the relationship between past, present, and future is conceptualized as “‘sediments or layers of time’ . . . that differ in age and depth and that changed and set themselves apart from each other at differing speeds over the course of the so-called history of the earth.”[62] Besides the temporal-change factor, the sediments of time comprise “temporal structures”[63] that are ultimately related to natural time. Hence, the natural temporal order historically appears as structures of repetition (for instance, as generational constraints, biological rhythms, and cycles of life and death and, furthermore, in terms of evolutionary, geographical, geological, and astrophysical time), all of which are “pregivens of possible histories that escape human control but not human use.”[64]
Although Koselleck’s metaphysics of time considers the line between history and nature, what happens in historical time is the most important, since “historical interrelations [geschcichtliche Zusammenhänge] cannot be measured with a clock.”[65] Therefore, the focus lies in the structures of historical time, which are “internal to and demonstrable in related events.”[66] There are multiple dimensions to this. First, the temporal structure reveals that the past and the present do not align as antecedent and subsequent in a timeline, since the diachronic distance between them simultaneously makes them contiguous and synchronous as layered times. Second, the order of historical time presents itself as the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous,”[67] as “any synchrony is eo ipso at the same time diachronic. In actu, all temporal dimensions are always intertwined”[68] according to their dissonant rhythms of temporal change. Third, Koselleck scrutinized historical time according to different structures of time that shape different senses of the experienced historical time, as the latter can be identified in periods according to two temporal marks: “The space of experience is the arrayed past for a given present, and the horizon of expectation is the cutting edge of future possibilities for any given present.”[69] As I will show, this last remark indicates that the Koselleckian metaphysics of historical time (b.2) migrates to the regimes of historicity (c.3).
Over the past few years, several scholars have contributed to the exegesis of the Koselleckian theory of multiple and multilayered historical time. The next few paragraphs will discuss four concepts of historical time that stem from Koselleck’s metaphysics of multiple temporalities; these four concepts constitute subtrends related to the new metaphysics of historical time.
John Zammito has shown that the “artifices of language and theory in the construction of histories”[70] do not exhaust the historians’ practices. According to Zammito, Koselleck renewed the historical realism, since multiple temporalities require objective analysis in order for them to become disciplinarily useful, as the structure of time underlies “every historical act or event; each is always invoked in the endeavor to account for that event.”[71]
Similarly, Jordheim has shown that Koselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities overcomes the extralinguistic-intralinguistic dichotomy by developing a “general theory, a metatheory, of historical times.”[72] Unlike Zammito, Jordheim has argued that a realistic approach to the multilayeredness of historical time is not feasible. The diachronic movement of historical times makes historical change sensible through the interplay among past, present, and future. At the same time, it determines the linguistic representation that historiography brings about: “Koselleck would be the first to emphasize the futility of evoking the question of historical experience without at the same time evoking the question of language and linguistic representation.”[73] In short, the multiple temporalities that diachronicize the layers of historical time synchronize in the present so as to unfreeze the past in such a way that representation retrieves historical experience.[74]
Stefan Helgesson’s contribution to the Koselleckian metaphysics of time attempts to “radicaliz[e] . . . the notion of multiple temporalities” by promoting “heterochronic”[75] historical time and by encouraging a “necessary revision of Koselleck’s Eurocentric framework.”[76] The postcolonial debate about temporalities shows that a global synchronization forces local temporalities to succumb to the homogeneity of the processual and linear historical time. Therefore, for historians’ practices to avoid falling prey to “the homogenizing force of modernity,”[77] the noncontemporaneous times should prevail over the homogenizing contemporaneous one. Although it is plausible to accept one single, synchronic temporality, the very synchronicity of times accelerates at uneven paces, which means that “this acceleration changes the very meaning of change,”[78] challenging the consonant transformation that has been globally imposed by capitalism.
Likewise, Achim Landwehr has claimed that the Koselleckian synchronization of the plural characteristic of historical time ends up recovering the harmful “diachronic dissonance [diachrone Dissonanz]”[79] that is inherent in the triumphalist and Eurocentric paradigm of modernization, which imposes a harmful “chronocentrism [Chronozentrismus].”[80] Hence, the idea that non-simultaneous times share the same present replaces chronocentrism as a time model. Therefore, the simultaneity of the simultaneous must involve “simultaneities in the plural.”[81] Accordingly, Landwehr has used the concept of “chronoference [Chronoferenz]” to support a “science of simultaneity [Gleichzeitigkeitswissenschaft]” based on the thesis that the present is not the outcome of the past or the source of the future but the ground upon which lies the relationship to absent times, be they past or future. The present is unceasingly shaped and balanced by renewed “simultaneities [Gleichzeitigkeiten]” whereby new chronoferences unsettle the previous relationship with the past and the future.[82]
5C. Analytical Historical Time
Unlike the other trends of the new metaphysics of historical time, which draw on continental philosophy and therefore imply a general theory about the constitution of historical events (historical sense, historicity, metaphysics of presence, Other, structuralism, and deconstructionism), analytical philosophy of history directly tackles historians’ and ordinary people’s linguistic habits.
Arthur C. Danto’s (1924–2013) analytical philosophy of history is the main source of the analytical historical time that has become an important trend in the new metaphysics time. Crucially, Danto rejected the substantive philosophy of history in order to avoid the speculative and metaphysical risks that philosophers of history take as they “write the history of events before the events themselves have happened.”[83] At the same time, Danto’s analytical enterprise challenged the expectation that the sentences that historians write to describe historical facts could be summed up under a general scientific law, as Carl G. Hempel (1905–1997) claimed. Danto thus focused on the temporal references that any language requires for anyone to speak or think historically. If it were possible for anyone to think unhistorically, the “communication with them would be marginal, vast regions of our language being untranslatable into theirs.”[84]
Historians necessarily use “narrative sentences” to explain their empirical research, and as such, they cannot avoid using linguistic temporal markers when dealing with time. The narrative sentences they create deal with clock time, which means that the relationship between past, present, and future can be grasped as linguistic temporal references and that temporal change is the difference of perspective of earlier and later. In fact, according to Danto, “historians have the unique privilege of seeing actions in temporal perspective.”[85] They have the advantage of seeing what the contemporaries of a narrated event could not simply because the contemporaries were alive when the described events were occurring. For instance, only a historian living after the Thirty Years’ War could write the narrative sentence “The Thirty Years’ War began in 1618.” That war can only be proven to have lasted thirty years for us, not for the people who fought in it. Thus, a perspectival asymmetry governs the structure of the narrative sentences—that is, historians are in a later event regarding the earlier events that they describe: “The whole truth concerning an event can only be known after.”[86] Additionally, as the criteria for employing chronoreferences may change from historian to historian, “temporal structures are, of course, ad hoc in some degree.”[87]
Danto’s notion of narrative sentences diverges from Hayden White’s (1928–2018) notion of narrativism. White stated that the temporal arrangement of a narrative is made of culturally determined plot choices or tropos in which writers and historians are immersed; writers and historians therefore take these elements for granted when they tell stories. In contrast, for Danto, the chronoreferences in a sentence are irresponsive to the cultural context in which it is uttered.[88] Regardless of the differences between them, neither Danto’s nor White’s narrativist thesis addresses historical time, ontologically speaking. Furthermore, the temporal perspectivism that narratives entail tells us nothing about temporal change. In short, the use of the word “time” did not grasp the nature of historical time.[89] In effect, Danto’s narrativist thesis does not reflect on temporal change in order to establish a metaphysics of historical time because the relationship between the past, the present, and the future does not consider historical time acting upon the linguistic structures of time; in contrast, the presence and multiple temporalities subtrends did.
According to Danto, beginning in the mid-1960s,[90] Whitean narrativism began to overshadow the analytical philosophy of history and, as Paul A. Roth put it, “swept aside all discussions of explanatory or epistemic norms”[91] related to narrative sentences and other analytical issues such as the directionality of time and historical causation.
However, in 2016, Roth observed a revival of the analytical philosophy of history.[92] Nevertheless, this revival was not coincidentally contemporaneous to the new metaphysics of historical time.
Danto’s principle still stands—that is, historical explanation cannot transcend language. But for the restored analytical philosophy of history, there was the question of whether the sentences that historical explanation (analytical philosophy of history) or historical writings (Whitean narrativism) produce could be sensitive to historical change. The response to this theoretical dilemma splits into three epistemologies in the recent analytical philosophy of history to develop a metaphysics of historical time from the classical analytical tenets.
In the 1980s, Ankersmit began to investigate the logical structure of the historical narrative. For him, a historical narrative is a construction of the past, not a photo: “in the narratio the past is described in terms of entities that do not refer to things in, or aspects of the past.”[93] What’s more, according to Ankersmit, these entities are “narrative substances”[94] whose content is determined by “all the sentences of a narratio together . . . , although some sentences are more determinative for the content of the narratio than others.”[95] Hence, the writing of history can only rely on narrative substances whose proposed truth is argumentatively more coherent than any other truth about the same subject matter.[96]
Later, partially arguing against his own narrativist thesis in Narrative Logic (1983), Ankersmit claimed that those who believe that narrative is the source of historical explanation found themselves at the same dead end.[97] Analytical (including Ankersmitian) “narrative idealism”[98] and Whitean narrativism must both cope with the referential authentication of narratives—that is, the historical time outside the text. For Ankersmit, a renewed historicism readdresses Danto’s classical narrativism to retrieve the historical experience. The realism of experience might awaken the analytical philosophy of history from the narrativist-formalist slumber.[99] Consequently, as I show, Ankersmit took a step toward the metaphysics of historical time by releasing a competitive concept of historical presence.
Relying on Danto and Louis O. Mink (1921–1983), Roth argued that the past is open to historians’ narratives insofar as historians practice a “dynamic nominalism”[100] that rebuilds the past. Nevertheless, if nominalism rejects the realistic solution, it does not trap historians’ practices because historians depend on the linguistic habits that historical explanation entails.[101] At the same time, provisional habits involve the epistemic categories of explanation in historical change. In fact, new categories that the community’s disciplinary framework uses in order to reconceptualize the past are “socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience.”[102] Furthermore, the negotiated categories that classify past events make the objects of classification come into being in the act of their very creation. In short, the historical categories are descriptions of the world that also changes in and with history,[103] as Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984), Thomas S. Kuhn’s (1922–1996), and Ian Hacking’s (1936–2023) “holistic (but still analytical) philosophy of science”[104] explained and practiced.[105] Theoretical categories, though changeable, address historical explanation as they involve “specifiable logical features of narratives,”[106] so “no principled distinction emerges between empirical knowledge generally and knowledge of the past.”[107] Overall, as long as Roth fights against realism and antirealism, he proposes an “irrealism” that equates the past and the future in terms of their indetermination.[108]
Lastly, Jonathan Gorman has made an intermediary case for the revival of the analytical philosophy of history. His proposal deals with the temporal arrangement of events, but it does not include temporal change as a central issue. In fact, he has argued that the completion of the partial temporal points of view over a historical object fix the relativity of historical explanations by underpinning their temporal structures to shared “absolute presuppositions”[109] at any given present. Therefore, to his understanding, historical change becomes perceptible only when a later absolute presupposition replaces an earlier one.
According to the proposition of a metaphysics of historical time, Ankersmit and Roth share the same perspective regarding the ontological way of dealing with the relationship between past, present, future, and temporal change. However, this does not mean that their concepts of historical time contribute equally to the renewal of the analytical philosophy of history. Ankersmit has claimed that Roth is unable to guide the analytical philosophy of history in new directions because he has only updated Danto’s and Mink’s “pre-Whitean narrativism”[110] by adding more recent philosophical credentials to it.
Kuukkanen and Chiel van den Akker, who have also contributed to the revival of the analytical philosophy of history, have not developed a metaphysics of time. For them, historical explanation is primarily based not on the temporal arrangement of events but on more general argumentative standings[111] or aesthetic characteristics of Danto’s art theory.[112]
6. Contrasting the Metaphysics of Historical Time (b.2) with Regimes of Historicity (c.3) and Historiographical Regimes (d.4)
Now that some main subtrends of the classical metaphysics of historical time and the new metaphysics of historical time have been summarized, it is important to discuss the different ways they treat the regimes of historicity and the historiographical regimes. As the diagram of time studies in the theory of history (Figure 1) shows, the metaphysics of historical time and the regimes of historicity belong to different areas—b.2 and c.3, respectively. However, no layer (a.1, b.2, c.3, or d.4) of time studies fits perfectly in one single area. Therefore, it is possible to track the subtrends of the metaphysics of historical time as they mingle among lines and areas of time studies in order to understand how historical time arises and departs from natural time in order to relate historical time to historical experience and understand how historical writing represents time.
The way the metaphysics of historical time (b.2) focuses on historical experience (c) to take into consideration the regimes of historicity (3) stems from Koselleck’s and François Hartog’s different positions concerning the relationship between the metaphysics of historical time (b.2) and the regimes of historicity (c.3).
According to Koselleck, the distance between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”[113] consequently changes the perception of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. What’s more, different experiences of time display themselves in “the linguistic organization of temporal experience,”[114] which shows evidence of a displacement beginning in 1780. Finally, “the technology-induced acceleration of temporal rhythms”[115] widens from a shorter distance between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation (which characterizes the past-dominant historia magistra vitae[116]) to a wider distance between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation (which characterizes the future-dominant historical experience of modernity, the Neuzeit[117]). In short, the pattern of historical experiences changes over time.
According to Jordheim, Koselleck’s works combine metaphysics of historical time and historical experience,[118] but he never clearly connected them.[119] On the one hand, he recognized historical time (b) as “historical time proper,” or historical time as such.[120] On the other hand, he showed that the experience of historical time (c) instantiates historical time, portraying “existential time”[121] as a temporal structure that changes historically and whose varieties the history of concepts reveals. Notwithstanding their different domains, from the Koselleckian perspective, the structure of historical time (b) and the experience of historical time (c) may overlap. The overlap depends on a temporal grid that establishes chronoreferences that qualify, all at once, the temporal structure and the historical experience.
The historical experience of premodern societies is arranged upon a temporal structure that uses either natural references or theological references in order to plot historical events. In contrast, due to the wider distance between the past and the future and to the acceleration of time, the modern experience of historical time allows historical time to find its references in historical events themselves, pushing natural and theological time away from history. At the same time, as history gains an endogenous temporal grid, the many histories dispersed along the diverse cosmological scales are reunited under a single guiding principle. The historically determined structures of time in which experience and expectation are increasingly distant from each other disclose the special case whereupon the historical experience itself determines historical time as a variety of historical experience. Eventually, the overlap between the modern historical experience of time (Neuzeit) and the temporal structure of history performs the “temporalization of history,”[122] departing from the historia magistra vitae’s naturalization of historical time.
Moreover, the overlap between the structure of historical time and the modern experience of historical time occasionally provides a heuristic tool for historians and theorists. It allows the disciplinary tasks to disengage from the biased point of view of our modern historical experience: “the question of temporal structure . . . discloses a means of adequately examining the whole domain of historical investigation, without being limited by the existence, since around 1780, of a history pure and simple that presents a semantic threshold for our experience.”[123]
Although Hartog avowedly started from the Koselleckian semantics of historical experience,[124] his enterprise does not involve a metaphysics of historical time. Koselleck defined historical time as the multilayered structure that reunites the past, the present, and the future and interweaves synchronic-diachronic sediments in which the noncontemporaneous becomes contemporaneous; in contrast, Hartog is not interested in the order of historical time, in historical time proper. Hartog would prefer to talk about regimes of historicity (3) rather than the Koselleckian “regimes of temporality” because the latter deal with historical time as such and have “the disadvantage of referring to an external standard of time . . . where the different durées are all measured against an ‘exogenous,’ mathematical, or astronomical time.”[125] In fact, Hartog has equated historical time and regime of historicity: “a regime of historicity has never been a universally applicable metaphysical entity sent from heaven. It expresses only a dominant order of time. . . . [I]t is ultimately a way of expressing and organizing experiences of time—that is, ways of articulating the past, the present, and the future—and investing them with sense.”[126]
Hence, historical time becomes demonstrable only in terms of temporal experiences.[127] Its varieties depend on “whether the category of the past, the future, or the present is dominant.”[128] Eventually, the different dominance of one temporal dimension over the others determines the historical experience “in its three modes of memory (the presence of the past), attention (the presence of the present), and expectation (the presence of the future).”[129] The three modes of historical experience can be dated according to the crisis that the confrontation between the earlier and the later experience of historical time exposes: the old past-dominant regime of historicity with the modern future-dominant regime that emerged around 1789, and the modern future-dominant regime that emerged around 1789 with presentism, the present-dominant regime of historicity that emerged around 1989.[130]
Notwithstanding the important heuristic role that the Hartogian regimes of historicity play for the historians’ practices, their overwhelming scope has presented some issues, as other scholars have pointed out.
Elias Paltí has stated that, after 1800, the heterogeneous character of historical time began to impose the creation of temporalities that cannot “be considered as equally ‘modern.’”[131] Rodrigo Turin[132] and María Inés Mudrovcic[133] have agreed that, due to their transhistorical character, the Hartogian regimes of historicity are unable to historiographically detail the current neoliberal regime of historicity known as presentism. Similarly, according to Fernando Nicolazzi, Hartogian presentism and the regimes of historicity are, in general, historiographically weak when it comes to specifying the multitemporal character of historical time because the temporal experience allows for “‘gaps’ that make plural and dynamic the regimes of historicity.”[134] In short, it is important that historians do not naturalize the representation of historical time that the present-centered regime of historicity promotes, according to Daniel Inclán and Aurelia Valero, in order to dismantle the homogenizing synchronicity of historical time that presentism imposes on historiographical regimes.[135]
Even though they belong to different layers (b.2 and c.3), can the metaphysics of historical time and the regimes of historicity be related? As seen, the answer is affirmative for Koselleck because he reunited the two strands.
Classical philosophies of history such as those of Nietzsche and Heidegger are related to the regimes of historicity insofar as they also deal with the dominance of one dimension of time over others. However, the idea of dominance takes a different form in each case. Nietzsche and Heidegger dealt with natural time and historical time, whereas the regimes of historicity deal with the historical experience of time. For instance, as seen, when Heidegger identified the future as dominant, he meant that the future is the ontological, authentic condition under which time is temporalized. In contrast, according to Hartog, the historical regime is a temporary arrangement of the experience of historical time, so “the order of time derived from it will obviously not be the same.”[136] Despite the differences, can, for instance, the Heideggerian historical time, which is authentically temporalized in terms of the future, involve a present-centered regime of historicity?
The answer is positive. As I have shown, Heidegger’s historicity is temporalized from the future, but the authentic temporalization of time would fall into a present-centered regime of historicity if historical time were to wither and become an ordinary successive time. In other words, Heidegger’s notion of historicity bridges the metaphysics of time and the experience of historical time insofar as the latter presupposes the former as its groundwork. Translated into Heideggerian jargon, Hartog’s regimes of historicity are epochal arrangements that the temporalized-from-the-future order of time might take.
As for the new metaphysics of historical time, differences and similarities with regard to the regimes of historicity also apply. For Gumbrecht, for instance, the “broad present,” which is the early twenty-first century “chronotrope,” “dictates the conditions under which human behavior finds its constitutive structures and experiences.”[137] Thus, the broad present (as a dated historical experience) exploits historical time so as to prevent the presence of the past from being conceptualized as the authentic historical.
The new metaphysicians of time go even deeper in the diagram to fathom the relationship between presence and the historiographical regimes (d.4). The historiographical regimes observe the conditional constraint that Hartog identified between the regimes of historicity and the writing of history, since the former set “the conditions of possibility of historical writing.”[138] Consequently, a historiographical regime understands that historiography, “as a social practice based on the representation of time, reflects the historical regime of which it is part.”[139] The main question that the historiographical regimes, as an analytical tool, ask is: Does narrative mime or dismantle the current regime of historicity?
For instance, historical writing, in line with the Koselleckian ancient or “Christian experience of history,”[140] facilitated the internal coherence ascribed to the “world history”[141] by the end of the eighteenth century. The historia magistra vitae, though a past-centered and exogenously referenced ancient historical experience, allowed historical writing to redirect the narrative from the exemplary past in order to engage historians with the anticipation of the future according to the next, endogenously referenced modern historical experience.[142]
An extended analysis of the diagram—that is, in terms of the outspread zones that interconnect and confront the metaphysics of historical time (b.2) with the regimes of historicity (c.3) and the historiographical regimes (d.4)—might show how the metaphysics of historical time becomes historiographically integrated.
7. “Historical Futures”
Should “historical futures” be considered a fourth trend of the metaphysics of time—that is, in addition to historical presence, multiple temporalities, and analytical historical time? Is it one regime of historicity that rivals presentism?
Simon and Tamm officially launched the “Historical Futures” project as a collective “long-term serial publishing experiment”[143] in the March 2021 issue of History and Theory. Their notion of “historical futures” stems from the Koselleckian view that technical progress produces an acceleration of time that acts on the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Nevertheless, Simon and Tamm have argued that “the notion of historical futures clearly departs from Koselleck’s framework.”[144] What does it add to Koselleckian multiple temporalities?
First of all, Simon and Tamm’s notion of “historical futures” departs from Koselleckian multiple temporalities because “historical futures” has a non-Koselleckian understanding of the future. The future-centered modern time promoted a temporalization of history through which the structure of time amalgamates with an epochal experience of historical time. “Historical futures,” however, detects the detachment of the modern experience of time from the structure of time as the horizon of expectation changes its intervening role concerning the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. In short, the future, in the crises of modernity, turns out to be disruptive instead of an acquiescent time regarding the past. Hence, “historical futures,” as a subtrend of multiple temporalities, seeks to track “the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures”[145] rather than the significance of the past to the present.
Second, for the “Historical Futures” project, the relationship between the natural and the historical changed. In the long run, as Koselleck observed, this relationship will range from a greater dependence on natural rhythms (historia magistra vitae) toward the “denaturalization of historical temporalities” (modern time).[146] In contrast, the “historical futures” subtrend assumes that technical progress thrusted historical time into natural time to the extent that it started a historicization of natural time, reversing the former modernist tendency facing the denaturalization of history. The natural time and the historical time intertwine territories because the reflections about future scenarios beyond the human era, especially those that discussions of posthumanism and the Anthropocene provide, announce “the definitive re-entry of the natural world into the time of human life.”[147] Therefore, the intertwined natural time and historical time includes the “changes in the entangled human/nonhuman world.”[148]
Third, “historical futures” add multiple temporalities with a new concept of historical change called “evental temporality.”[149] The latter articulates a “rebranded philosophy of history”[150] that rearranges the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. The emphasis on the past-future relationship—and particularly on the “imaginaries of unfathomable futures”[151] or on “unprecedented change,”[152] which dramatically dissociates historical sensibility from the past and accepts the failure of human control over the future—requires a different modality of multiple temporalities that fits the relationship between natural time and historical time. Prospects of future and transitional relations are related to the way historical time and natural time overlap and merge into each other to conceive anew the synchronicity of the multiple times in terms of an eventual, discontinuous temporality. Comparatively, the evental time regards the future as a multifoliate asynchronous temporality that runs at different speeds—much like how Helgesson and Landwehr regarded the present as a heterochronic historical time that beats under a diachronic dissonance.
On the one hand, biotechnologies, Earth engineering, and artificial intelligence promise the betterment of natural, material, and intellectual lives; on the other hand, they cast dark shadows over the future by introducing such possibilities as economic-social catastrophes inducing human extinction, human beings being materially and intellectually ruled by machines (at the risk of cultural and biological involution), and eugenicist dystopias. Furthermore, the eventual temporalities frustrate the outcome that the past and the present envisage as temporal continuity. In fact, poor prognosis discontinues the expectations because of the disruptive and unimaginable temporal horizons that the present discloses to the extent that “the future ceases to be made of the same matter as the past.”[153]
Moreover, because of the evental time, the “historical futures” subtrend understands, under a new light, its involvement with the lower boundary of historical experience (c) whereupon the order of historical time meets the “postwar historical sensibility.”[154] The subtrend thus takes a step back regarding the Koselleckian metaphysics of time. What’s more, as a dated structure of historical time, it departs from Hartog’s regimes of historicity (c.3), especially the present-centered one.
As Koselleck noted, the separation between natural time and historical time is a dated assumption; this is because, until the eighteenth century, there was no concept to disentangle history from nature, so the notions and practices of history were included in the realm of natural time.[155] Later, as the modern concept of history arose, “natural time and its sequence [came to] belong to the conditions of historical temporalities, but the former never subsumes the latter.”[156] However, the modern concept of time deflated as nature withdrew from the contract and the evental temporalities came to the fore.
Likewise, evental temporalities claim that a renewed idea of historical change should not coincide with Hartog’s presentist regime. According to Simon and Tamm, “historical futures, unlike ‘regimes of historicity,’ is interested in exploring a plurality of historical futures not only diachronically but also synchronically.”[157] Presentism, in particular, extends the horizon of the present and adjourns the future indefinitely so as to convey a sense of unchangeability over time. From the standpoint of “historical futures,” Gumbrecht’s broad present and Hartog’s presentism[158] are on the same footing because they are, “actually, ahistorical” and entail a sense of changelessness “over time.”[159] In short, historical futures’ metaphysics of historical time (b.2) does not originally focus on the dimension of time (past, present, or future) that commands the other two in the diachronic Hartogian varieties.[160]
As the “historical futures” is the most recent lineage that can be tracked in the diagram presented at the beginning of this essay (see Figure 1), it fosters a reflection on the overarching accomplishments of the theories of historical time that have been developed since the beginning of the 2000s, a set of theories that are now known as the new metaphysics of historical time. This reflection can be expressed in terms of the three parameters described above: (i) the “historical futures” subtrend copes with natural time (a), while the others envisaged the latter as the subliminal, misty boundary of historical time; (ii) while the other subtrends dealt either with the past-present reality according to the presence paradigm or with the temporal asymmetries of narrative sentences proposed by the analytical historical time, “historical futures” begins by paying attention to the past-future relationship; and (iii) in contrast with multiple temporalities (the trend from which it derives), “historical futures” conceives the relationship between the past, the present, and the future based on an evental, discontinuous historical time, which adds a sense of unprecedented temporal change to the synchronous-diachronous Koselleckian historical time.
8. Final Remarks
This One More Thing . . . contribution offered an overview of historical time studies in relation to the recent theory of history (Figure 1) according to three parameters: (i) the relationship between historical time and natural time; (ii) the relationship between past, present, and future; and (iii) temporal change. The exposition of the metaphysics of historical time’s (b.2) sixteen subtrends helped to investigate these three parameters and elaborate on the ontological, quasi-substantive issues that historians’ disciplinary practices assume to create with regard to concepts of historical time. The three parameters also guided a sketch of the relationship between the metaphysics of historical time (b.2), the metaphysics of natural time (a.1), the regimes of historicity (c.3), and the historiographical regimes (d.4).
The development of the new metaphysics of historical time addresses the role that the theories of historical time play inside the broader field of the theory of history. In general, is it necessary for a theory of history to involve—or, at least, to imply—a theory of historical time in order to be called a theory of history? Specifically, are historical time and the more traditional concerns of the theory of history (such as explanation, causation, representation, narratives) on equal footing with regard to the reflexive work of disciplinary history?
NOTES
Section 1
[1] See, for instance, Berber Bevernage, Gisele Iecker de Almeida, Broos Delanote, Anton Froeyman, Patty Huijbers, and Kenan van de Mieroop, “Philosophy of History After 1945: A Bibliometric Study,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 420; Chris Lorenz, “‘The Times They Are a-Changin’: On Time, Space and Periodization in History,” in Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, ed. Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 109; and Jonathan Gorman, “The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions,” in Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future, ed. Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 156.
[2] Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 24. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
[3] Berber Bevernage, “Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice,” History and Theory 47, no. 2 (2008), 151.
[4] Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias, “Introduction: Time Studies Today,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 2.
[5] Natalja Deng, “Time, Metaphysics of,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, version 3 (London: Routledge, 2018), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-N123-3.
[6] Ethan Kleinberg, “Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Time,” History and Theory, Virtual Issue 1 (August 2012), 1–7. Kleinberg coined the phrase “new metaphysics of time,” which refers not to time in general but to historical time.
[7] François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, transl. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 106.
[8] María Inés Mudrovcic, “Regímenes de historicidad y regímenes historiográficos: Del pasado histórico al pasado presente,” Historiografías 5 (January–June 2013), 11–31.
[9] Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “A Conceptual Map for Twenty-First-Century Philosophy of History,” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 6.
[10] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, “Historical Futures,” History and Theory 60, no. 1 (2021), 3.
Section 2
[11] Reinhart Koselleck, “Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 304.
[12] Jörn Rüsen, introduction to Time and History: The Variety of Cultures, ed. Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 2.
[13] Jack Reynolds, “Time, Philosophy, and Chronopathologies,” Parrhesia 15 (2012), 66.
[14] Michael Dummett, “The Metaphysics of Time,” in Truth and the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 44.
[15] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, transl. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 64.
[16] Dummett, “The Metaphysics of Time,” 44.
[17] Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), ix.
[18] Kleinberg, “Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Time,” 1.
Section 3
[19] Pomian, L’ordre du temps, 5.
[20] Ibid., vi.
[21] Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, transl. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998), 53. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3, Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954), 369–70.
[22] Ibid., 52. See also Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, 3:369.
[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954), 213.
[24] Ibid., 64. See also Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” 214.
[25] Ibid., 61. See also Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” 211.
[26] Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 7.
[27] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften, 1914–1970 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), 436.
[28] Ibid., 19.
[29] Ibid., 20.
[30] Ibid., 395.
Section 4
[31] Helge Jordheim, “Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 2 (2011), 21.
[32] Kleinberg, “Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Time,” 1–2.
[33] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 39.
[34] Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, transl. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 155.
[35] These trends are almost the same as those presented by Kleinberg in “Introduction: The New Metaphysics of Time,” 2. However, this study will provide a fine-grained picture of them by defining their sixteen subtrends according to epistemontological characteristics.
Section 5
Section 5A
[36] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), xiv.
[37] Ibid., 66–67.
[38] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Presence Achieved in Language (With Special Attention Given to the Presence of the Past),” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 317.
[39] Ibid., 318.
[40] Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, xv.
[41] Ewa Domanska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 337.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid., 339.
[44] Mateus H. F. Pereira and Valdei Araujo, “Updatism: Gumbrecht’s Broad Present, Hartog’s Presentism and Beyond,” Diacronie 43 (2020), 2.
[45] Mateus Pereira and Valdei Araujo, Atualismo 1.0: Como a ideia de atualização mudou o século XXI (Vitória: Editora Milfontes, 2019), 18.
[46] Anton Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia: The Presence and the Otherness of the Past,” Rethinking History 16, no. 3 (2012), 411.
[47] Ibid., 399.
[48] Anton Froeyman, “Never the Twain Shall Meet? How Narrativism and Experience Can Be Reconciled by Dialogical Ethics,” History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015), 176.
[49] Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2011), 4.
[50] Ethan Kleinberg, “Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007), 113–14.
[51] Ethan Kleinberg, “Presence in Absentia,” in Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 22.
[52] F. R. Ankersmit, “‘Presence’ and Myth,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 328.
[53] Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 13.
[54] Ibid., 9.
[55] Ibid., 119.
[56] Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 10.
[57] Ibid., 1.
[58] Ibid., 20.
[59] Eelco Runia, “Spots of Time,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006), 309.
[60] Ibid., 306.
Section 5B
[61] Reinhart Koselleck, “Author’s Preface,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.
[62] Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, transl. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3.
[63] Reinhart Koselleck, “Does History Accelerate?,” in Sediments of Time, 94.
[64] Reinhart Koselleck, “Space and History,” in Sediments of Time, 29.
[65] Koselleck, “Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft,” 304.
[66] Reinhart Koselleck, “History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures,” in Futures Past, 94.
[67] Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Futures Past, 90.
[68] Reinhart Koselleck, “Social History and Conceptual History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, transl. Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 30.
[69] John Zammito, “Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History,” History and Theory 43, no. 1 (2004), 128–29.
[70] Ibid., 132.
[71] Ibid., 129.
[72] Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012), 152.
[73] Ibid., 163.
[74] Ibid., 159.
[75] Stefan Helgesson, “Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time,” History and Theory 53, no. 4 (2014), 547.
[76] Ibid., 556n44.
[77] Ibid., 548.
[78] Ibid., 556.
[79] Achim Landwehr, “Von der ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,’” Historische Zeitschrift 295, no. 1 (2012), 20.
[80] Ibid., 22.
[81] Ibid., 26.
[82] Achim Landwehr, Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit: Essay zur Geschichtstheorie (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2016), 28.
Section 5C
[83] Arthur C. Danto, “Substantive and Analytical Philosophy of History,” in Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 14.
[84] Arthur C. Danto, preface to Narration and Knowledge, xv.
[85] Arthur C. Danto, “Future—and Past—Contingencies,” in Narration and Knowledge, 183.
[86] Arthur C. Danto, “Narrative Sentences,” in Narration and Knowledge, 151.
[87] Ibid., 167. See also ibid., 178.
[88] Ibid., 155, 166–67.
[89] Gorman, “The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions,” 156.
[90] Arthur C. Danto, “The Decline and Fall of the Analytical Philosophy of History,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 72.
[91] Paul A. Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), xii.
[92] Paul A. Roth, “Analytic Philosophy of History: Origins, Eclipse, and Revival,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37, no. 2 (2016), 1–2, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312955928_Analytic_Philosophy_of_History_Origins_Eclipse_and_Revival. See also Krzysztof Brzechczyn, introduction to Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History: Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical Sciences, ed. Krzysztof Brzechczyn (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2018), 1–8.
[93] F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), 7.
[94] Ibid., 19–20.
[95] Ibid., 61.
[96] Jonathan Menezes, Frank Ankersmit: A metamorfose do historicismo (Londrina: Engenho das Letras, 2021), 68–69.
[97] Frank Ankersmit, “The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 25, no. 4 (1986), 1. For more on White’s contempt concerning the analytical philosophy of history, see Herman Paul, “Why Did Analytical Philosophy of History Disappear? Three Narratives of Decline,” in Brzechczyn, Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History, 30–32.
[98] Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 87–88.
[99] Jonathan Menezes, “Aftermaths of the Dawn of Experience: On the Impact of Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience,” Rethinking History 22, no. 1 (2018), 56.
[100] Paul A. Roth, “Ways of Pastmaking,” History of the Human Sciences 15, no. 4 (2002), 128–29; Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, 39.
[101] Paul A. Roth, “The Pasts,” History and Theory 51, no. 3 (2012), 319; Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, 57–59.
[102] Roth, “The Pasts,” 313. See also Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, 102–4, 108–10.
[103] Roth, “Ways of Pastmaking,” 134–35; Roth, “The Pasts,” 338–39.
[104] Roth, “Analytic Philosophy of History,” 11.
[105] Roth, “The Pasts,” 333; Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, 42–46.
[106] Roth, “Analytic Philosophy of History,” 20.
[107] Roth, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, 61.
[108] Ibid., 48–49.
[109] Gorman, “The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions,” 174.
[110] Frank R. Ankersmit, “A Narrativist Revival?,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 15, no. 2 (2021), 215.
[111] Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 7–8.
[112] Chiel van den Akker, The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 127–28.
Section 6
[113] Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past, 263.
[114] Koselleck, “Author’s Preface,” 4.
[115] Alexander Blake Ewing, “Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott,” History of European Ideas 42, no. 3 (2016), 420. See also Koselleck, “Time and History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 113–14.
[116] Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in Futures Past, 28.
[117] Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation,’” 225, 263.
[118] Jordheim, “Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?,” 22–23.
[119] Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 230–31.
[120] Alexandre Escudier, “‘Temporalization’ and Political Modernity: A Tentative Systematization of the Work of Reinhart Koselleck,” in Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History, ed. Javier Fernández Sebastián (Santander: Cantabria University Press, 2011), 137.
[121] Ibid.
[122] Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” 37. See also Reinhart Koselleck, “Neuzeit: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of Movement,” in Futures Past, 245–46.
[123] Koselleck, “History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures,” 94.
[124] Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 9, 17.
[125] Ibid., xvi.
[126] Ibid., 106.
[127] Ibid., 38.
[128] Ibid., xvi.
[129] Ibid.
[130] Ibid., 98, 104.
[131] Elías Palti, “Koselleck—Foucault: The Birth and Death of Philosophy of History,” in Philosophy of Globalization, ed. Concha Roldán, Daniel Brauer, and Johannes Rohbeck (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 414.
[132] Rodrigo Turin, “Presentismo, neoliberalismo e os fins da história,” in A História (in)Disciplinada: Teoria, ensino e difusão de conhecimento histórico, ed. Arthur Lima de Avila, Fernando Nicolazzi, and Rodrigo Turin (Vitória: Editora Milfontes, 2019), 245–71.
[133] María Inés Mudrovcic, “Experimentar el Tiempo, Escribir la Historia,” in Representación histórica y nueva experiencia del tiempo, ed. Pablo Aravena (Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento, 2019), 23–35.
[134] Fernando Nicolazzi, “A história entre tempos: François Hartog e a conjuntura historiográfica contemporânea,” História 53, no. 2 (2010), 255.
[135] Daniel Inclán and Aurelia Valero, “Reporte del tiempo: Presente e historia,” Desacatos 55 (2017), 60–73.
[136] Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xvi.
[137] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 73.
[138] Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 17.
[139] Mudrovcic, “Regímenes de historicidad y regímenes historiográficos,” 11.
[140] Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” 28–29; Koselleck “Neuzeit,” 229–30.
[141] Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” 35; Koselleck “Neuzeit,” 230–31.
[142] Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” 40–41; Koselleck “Neuzeit,” 234–36.
Section 7
[143] Simon and Tamm, “Historical Futures,” 3.
[144] Ibid., 11.
[145] Ibid., 3.
[146] Koselleck, “History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures,” 96. See also Koselleck, “Time and History,” 104, 113.
[147] Alfredo Ricardo Silva Lopes and Mário Martins Viana Junior, “O Antropoceno como Regime de Historicidade,” Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais 12, no. 23 (2020), 22.
[148] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “The Transformation of Historical Time: Processual and Evental Temporalities,” in Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism, ed. Marek Tamm and Laurent Oliver (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 80.
[149] Ibid., 75.
[150] Ibid., 71–84, 74–75. See also Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change, 2–3.
[151] Simon and Tamm, “Historical Futures,” 11.
[152] Simon, “The Transformation of Historical Time,” 78.
[153] Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, transl. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 26.
[154] Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change, 1.
[155] Koselleck, “History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures,” 95.
[156] Ibid., 96.
[157] Simon and Tamm, “Historical Futures,” 12.
[158] Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change, 1, 4–5.
[159] Simon, “The Transformation of Historical Time,” 73.
[160] Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change, 2. See also Simon and Tamm, “Historical Futures,” 13.