The present study is dedicated to the study of historical time. One might go further — one might say, with whatever courage the occasion demands, that it is dedicated to the ontology of historical time: thereby implying that the named time possesses an existence of its own, as though the question of that existence were not itself among the most contested in the entire philosophical tradition, as though we were not, in the very act of naming our subject, already begging approximately half the questions we propose to answer. We are aware of this. We proceed regardless.
Our stakes are, in any case, somewhat higher than images of time, representations of time, cultural constructions of time, narratives of time — or any of the other formulations by which it has become customary to signal that one has grasped the epistemological situation and drawn from it the only conclusion apparently available: that nothing can be said about anything directly, and what cannot be said directly cannot, in good conscience, be said at all. Our stakes are also broader than the disciplinary delimitations assumed either by the history of philosophy or by the philosophy of history — two fields which have between them raised the question of historical time with considerable sophistication and answered it, on the whole, rarely.
We intend to answer it. This, we acknowledge, is an eccentric ambition. It may also be the only honest one.
— So, what was the question?
The FIRST DIVISION of the present inquiry is devoted to the reconstruction and critical analysis of the phenomenology of historical time — to the determination, that is, of the degree to which that phenomenology has succeeded, or found itself unable, in advancing to the depth the problems demand. This part of the inquiry may be considered historical in its own right — though historical in a non-concrete sense, which distinction it is necessary to mark with some firmness. The intellectual history of the phenomenological movement as such will not detain us; nor will the comparative analysis of texts and passages, nor intellectual biography — or rather: these interest us enormously, as they interest any honest reader, but they do not constitute the object of our reconstructive effort. The history of Weltgeist keeps its own accounts of achievements and its own reckoning of time, and the reality of an event in that history is not equivalent to the concrete memory of it — or to whatever was subsequently made of it. One might go so far as to say that Weltgeist suffers from a certain deficiency of attention: things are perpetually occurring to it, and it is perpetually forgetting them. — This is, I am aware, an uncharitable characterisation, yet I offer it without apology. What interests us, at any rate, is what happened — not what was done with it afterward. Perhaps nothing at all was done with it. Something happened nonetheless.
Our task is to establish how far the phenomenologists advanced in the analysis of time — even if they held at that frontier for only a few moments. Our path will continue from there.
Whether phenomenological analysis is to be regarded, in the final determination, as the most adequate mode of access to the questions here at issue: that judgment we leave, with what we trust is appropriate ceremony, to the Reader. Of our own position we remark only the following: that it was in phenomenology alone that we were able to discover a genuinely systematic resonance among certain central themes which had hitherto submitted themselves only to treatment within discrete and mutually isolated theoretical domains; and that only by phenomenological instruments could the connection — formerly given merely empirically or by way of intuition — that is, arguably, the highest empiricism — be described and grounded with any claim to rigour.
Among those themes:
[1] There is a question we kept returning to, instructive in its apparent circularity: what do we actually learn when we learn history? We learn a great deal, obviously — but what do we cognize? Not history as such, because history is fairly evidently the result of cognition rather than its object. If you set out to “cognize history,” nothing happens. What you actually cognize is the past — particular people, particular objects, particular events — and history is what you get as a result. But then there is a further movement: you accumulate this history as the material of your own past intellectual life, you look back and ask what it was, and you push one step beyond what you managed to obtain. What sediments on the walls? What accumulates at the borders? What floods the dam — as real, non-thematized knowledge, as the experience of cognition itself, distinguishable precisely in this sense from the immediate content of the histories? Our persistent claim has been that this deposit is the difference between people in history — the concrete distinction between one human being and another. The experience of human difference accumulates, sediments, floods. When we learn history, what we actually cognize is the variety of human beings. Now say that simply: the cognition of history is, at its non-thematized core, the cognition of human difference.
[2] The body — which is not yet a question. And how spirit takes possession of the body — which is already considerably closer to one.
Proposition: the individual body is the single terrain upon which, granted sufficient attention, the passage of spirit into matter may be observed in its actual operations.
Demonstration: the beliefs and misbeliefs of others, their convictions and their judgments, have arrived to me as speech, as signs, as images; and these — by operations we have not yet described, over time, over considerable time — have structured my liver, my brain, and whatever is contained in the hollow round of my skull. From which it does not immediately follow, but follows nonetheless, that the customary distribution of persons is less grammatically stable than it appears. Who, precisely, is I? Who are they? Through which door do they enter?
I answer: through time. They are the past sedimented in my individual present; they are the present sedimented in presence; and there is no other medium of transmission, no other passage, no other door. The others arrive as time — which is to say they arrive as me.
Corollary: historical time is radically private. From this single proposition, adequately understood, stem numerous misunderstandings — which are themselves, it goes without saying, historically situated. — To this we will return. To most of it, in fact, we will return. Historical time is the same matter as transcendental intersubjectivity.
[3] A related set of questions concerned co-temporality. I once said to a friend: look — in my left hand there is the time of conscious states, and in my right hand there is the time of natural processes. In the left, time is synthetic; in the right, time is the number of movement. And I stand in the middle, and you stand in the middle, and we are time — but some other time. There is a time of the shared, inhabited world, and it is something different from the time of your consciousness and mine, different again from the time of a tree’s growth or the drift of stars. We do not yet know where it comes from, but it’s important I’m saying “we.” It occurred to me that this time might be connected to history, and to the cognition of history as the cognition of concrete human differences. We inhabit here; the people in the portraits at the Uffizi inhabit not-here. My knowledge of the concrete other in the concrete difference of his body differs from my knowledge of the many non-thematized others in the impermeability of their temporal corpuscle. — To this we will return.
Philosophers have hitherto explained, in various ways, what time is and what being is. The task is to recognise the supremacy of the copula.
— I pity myself for being postmodern.
— Which does not excuse clichés.
— Do you remember how it all began?
Dilthey needed the ganze Mensch. The whole man. The sciences of spirit had handed him a subject with no veins in it — or with no blood in those veins, and who could tell what’s worth. He attacked Cartesianism. Frontally. But it was Count Yorck standing directly before him. Yorck had the re-ontification thesis. Present, available, offered. Dilthey did not properly receive it. It happened again. Husserl confronting Fink. Fink also said: re-ontification. Husserl also did not properly receive it. The Weltgeist has an attention deficit. I have remarked on this elsewhere. Not that far away. We have traveled a very considerable distance. We are at the same door.
In the zenith of the Indestructible Summer of 2022 — summer in a sense which has nothing meteorological about it, though the heat was real enough — there seized me a fantasy of an evolutionary super-catalogue of human species. The proposal: take man as Bergson describes him at the apex of becoming — the point where the diverging tendencies of life briefly converge. Subject him to the same analytical splitting of concrete tendencies that Bergson applied to the divergence itself. Make “man” not a terminus but a field, a site of struggle among tendencies smaller than the great opposition of instinct vs. intellect. Investigate their concrete configurations and collisions as they appear in concrete material expression — in concrete historical human types. Evolution would not end at man. It would begin there, already tipped forward into the space of concrete history. — That summer, I did not understand re-ontification either, I did not quite make order of levels to see ontogonic becoming as a speculative horizon — “life” = creation of being => becoming is ontification, i.e. origination ==> genesis is the coming-about of temporal horizonality as such, by virtue of which all being is manifest temporally, i.e., appears. In other words, it is the moment of the genesis of the whole horizonal world-frame for the coming of being to appearance and experientiality, i.e., ontogony, and that’s what we would counter-pose to creative evolution at the turn of the Flickering Summer of 2026…
— You are not speaking, you are coughing; and your cough, I notice, follows the order of reading rather than the order of thought. — I should ask, while we are here: have you an independent thought to offer, or shall we continue on these terms indefinitely? — And can you distinguish, with any reliability, between the moments when you say I and the moments when you say we?
— You should only care that we remain sufficiently attentive to tell the difference among us.
— Would you continue?
The SECOND DIVISION makes a programmatic demand: we are persuaded that answers to certain questions can be won only empirically. And although it is possible, as we now deem, to establish the mode of Zeitigung of historical time as such from within constructive phenomenology, we nonetheless hold that only the accumulated weight of concrete analyses of discrete historical times will prove capable of disclosing the fundamental structures and operations that foreground this Zeitigung. Our programmatic horizon, in brief, would be a method of pre-historical analysis, but we shall only much later return to the justification of this “pre-”.
This is to say: however astonishing and convincing our speculations may prove, they will deposit us, in the end, at the threshold of transcendental constitution — and there leave us. They are constitutively incapable of furnishing the precision of description or the instruments of explanation that the inquiry demands. Without speculation we are blind; without method we are immobile. — The Reader will observe the Kantian cadence, and I should not wish to pretend I am unaware of it. I am aware of it. We press on. If we prefer a less Kantian formulation: good speculation stands in relation to the inhabited world as creditor to debtor — and it is the world that must eventually settle the account. This, I am told, approximates to something like samurai wisdom; rendered in the present formulation, it reads rather more like the private correspondence of a Prussian industrialist; and in either case, what I mean to say is — in other words — which is to say —
— Do you remember when we first were here?
The first thing that came was not a concept but something that arrived before one could stop it: the vision of the end.
Only in history does time truly end. This was the intuition, and it took some time before we understood what it meant. Individual consciousness does not end — it recedes, flows into retention, is taken up into the anonymous life of the living present. Natural time does not end — it continues its indifferent procession regardless of what is said about it. But intermonadic time — the time of the shared, inhabited world, constituted in the community of monads each of which carries the others as horizons of co-presence — this time ends. When the last of those who shared a particular temporal world ceases to be, something ends that was not merely a sum of individual consciousnesses: a texture, a quality of time. And then they are gone, these times — dispersed as a spider’s lacework disperses in the wind, traceable in outline, nowhere as substance.
There is a time which is the primary matter of history, and this time has quality to it. Not the measurable time of clocks and calendars — time as the number of movement — and not the synthetic time of individual consciousness with its retentions and protentions flowing one into another. Something intermediate and more elusive: the qualitative texture of a co-inhabited present, the specific density of a shared temporal world. This was the intuition when we first came here, and we did not dare to say that it was not a vision but something more rigorous — a piercing anticipation of what historical cognition might actually be.
Modern scholarship has a characteristic response to such moments: it reaches for a safer concept, something already sanctioned, and moves on. What it cannot do — what the protocols of the discipline seem almost constitutively to prevent — is to recognise the conceptual potency of a vision at the moment of encountering it. But the vision comes first; the concept, if it comes at all, comes afterward, as clarification rather than replacement.
There is, moreover, a second stream of consciousness that precedes the unconscious — this seems important to say, though it is rarely said. The unconscious, as we have received it, is mediated: it arrives through symptoms, through slips, through the pressure it exerts on articulate speech. But prior to this there is another stream of the consciousness, which we ordinarily call attention — a stream faster than the verbal, one that has quicker access to experience precisely because it does not wait for language to form. It is the register in which the historian’s knowledge most honestly lives. When we first arrived here it was not with a vision — not exactly — but with something that moved faster than a vision and left the vision as its wake.
I am not an accomplished historian. But when Michelet said — j’ai trop bu du sang noir des morts — something in me collapsed in recognition. I knew the taste.
And yet: you care too much about death, I said. Your entire dramatic imaginary rests on it, so get a grip. The problem is not the dead. The problem is the difference — the pure qualitative difference of other temporal worlds encountered in their irreducibility, which you can barely sustain. What the genuinely capable historian does — and it is a kind of existential violence, this, a violence turned inward — is to bracket her own totalizing, generative consciousness; to hold it in suspension long enough to recognise its merely relative status with respect to the others, whose temporal worlds are neither prior to hers nor derivative of it, but simply other. The silver web belongs to no one. It is total for everyone.
We are close, here, to something that might be called the epoché of historical experience. But not yet.
— Is that a story of sacrifice?
— That’s a story of a besieged city, you coward. Of many cities we shall besiege.