NATURAL HISTORIES FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

KOSELLECK’S THEORIES AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A HISTORY OF LIFETIMES

HELGE JORDHEIM

History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022)

In this article, I offer a rereading of Reinhart Koselleck that puts his work at the center of ongoing debates about how to write histories that can account for humanity's changed and changing relationship to our natural environment—or, in geological terms, to our planet. This involves engaging with the urgent realities of climate crisis and the geological agency of humans, which, in current discourse, are often designated by the concept of the Anthropocene. This article asks whether Koselleck's essays from the 1970s and after contain ideas, arguments, theories, and methods that may prove useful in collapsing “the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty's phrase. Indeed, the unlikeliness of providing a positive answer to this question is itself an important motivation for raising it. The other motivation is the supposition that the difficulties in bridging the gap between human and natural history fundamentally has to do with time and, more specifically, with the divergent temporal frameworks governing different historiographies, which are in part practiced in natural sciences such as geology, biology, and meteorology. The first part of this article discusses what one could call Koselleck's temporal anthropocentrism, which was handed down in German historicism and hermeneutics from the eighteenth century onward in the shape of what I call the Vitruvian Man of Time. In Koselleck's work, this superimposition of the human onto the multiple lifetimes of the planet is most clearly expressed in his claim about the “denaturalization” of history at the beginning of modernity. The second part of this article observes a shift in Koselleck's engagement with nature beginning in the 1980s; this shift is presented in terms of a “renaturalization.” The theoretical and methodological tool for this re-entanglement of the times of history and the times of nature is his theory of multiple times. Originally limited to the human, this theory rises to the task of including an increasing number of natural times that are no longer perceived as stable, static, and slow but as continuously accelerating due to “human use.” In conclusion, this article suggests that Koselleck's work offers the framework for a theory of “lifetimes” that can replace modernist history as platform for writing new natural histories for the future.

Photo by Anca Dorneanu.