Wie man Geschichte wieder loswird, um Zeit zu gewinnen

Vorüberlegungen zu einer Theorie der historischen Zeiten

Abstract

The modern concept of history – its unity and universality – is an unquestioned and dominant social and cultural construction for understanding the past. At the same time, it seems to be an inevitable condition for the variety of all possible histories and therefore also for the unity of history as science. The following essay calls this into question, since the problem is actually the reverse: The predominant term of history obstructs the possible variety of time relations inside the historical reflections and negates time. Therefore the famous question »Why history?« has to be transformed into the heuristic question »How to get rid of history to gain time?«. However, this questioning of history does not lead to a postmodern discharge of history but to a temporal reflection of what time and historical times could mean. With an interpretation of Niklas Luhmann’s thoughts on the relation between a theory of time as movement or measurement and a theory of time as horizon, the essay emphasises the temporal category of the present as a key-word for the theory of history. It only makes historical sense to speak of the past (experience) and the future (expectation) as qualities of time if they are set in relation to a specific present with a particular horizon of time.