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This whole situation is not particularly interesting. People either support or oppose Tusk depending on whether they perceive his actions to serve their interests - whether materially and politically within Poland itself, or polemically, elsewhere.
Either way, the strategy of the Right™ is once again to call out "liberal" or "leftist" hypocrisy. This is, of course, not a winning strategy. Even if hypocrisy and contradiction are at play - which they are - neither has ever prevented an idea or political movement from succeeding.
In any case, I think there is good reason to revisit Machiavelli. In Chapter VIII of The Prince, he draws a distinction between power and glory. Although the two may overlap, they are ultimately distinct ends. One can acquire power without glory, just as one can attain glory without seeking or acquiring power.
In Chapter XVIII, Machiavelli says that the prince must understand how to act against morality when necessity demands it, while retaining the appearance of virtue - and, by extension, glory. Cruelty is therefore a political instrument justified under particular conditions in pursuit of particular ends. What matters is not simply whether the prince acts virtuously, but whether he can maintain the appearance of virtue while doing what political necessity requires. There is ultimately a distinction between political self-preservation and political greatness. Power and security are indispensable, but glory is more difficult to attain. For Machiavelli, the prince's glory is ultimately connected to the common good, i.e., his ability to establish, preserve and strengthen the political order. The exercise of power, even when it entails cruelty, can therefore be justified in the name of the preservation of order and the advancement of the common good.
So, is there "liberal hypocrisy"? The problem with the Right™ is that it mistakes exposing contradictions in liberal theory and practice for acquiring political power. The Right™ thinks that exposing a discrepancy between someone's professed principles and actual conduct is, in itself, politically damaging. But this is to misunderstand the relationship between appearance and reality in politics. A contradiction does not have to undermine authority. It can be utilised, rationalised and even celebrated, as long as the political actor has the capacity to define the meaning of events and maintain the appearance of serving a legitimate purpose. The highest form of power is to make subjectivity appear as objectivity - to exercise control over the meaning of symbols, whether they take the form of actions or something else.
The question, then, is not whether Tusk or his opponents are being hypocritical, because they are. Nor is it whether the same actions would be celebrated or condemned if the Right were doing what Tusk is doing, because they obviously would be. The more interesting question is who has the political capacity to turn these actions into a source of legitimacy, consolidate their position and shape the institutional order.
Machiavelli's distinction between power and glory is relevant here, but it also raises another question: glory in whose eyes? Is it in the eyes of the prince, the establishment, the people or future generations? These are not the same audiences, nor do they necessarily define glory according to the same criteria. Power can be exercised without glory, just as glory can be claimed without the possession of power. But the most successful political actor is he who can bring the two together. To exercise power effectively while convincing others that the exercise of it serves something greater than the interests of the person(s) wielding it - this is the highest ambition of the prince.
Will Tusk fail? Time will tell.
"The typical tyrant dislikes proud and free-spirited people. He regards himself as the only person entitled to those qualities; and anyone who shows a rival pride and a spirit of freedom destroys the supremacy and master-like character of that tyranny. Thus the tyrant hates such people as destroyers of his rule. He is also inclined to cultivate the company of foreigners and eat with them rather than with citizens of his own state; for the latter he sees as potential enemies, the former as not making rival claims."
- Aristotle, The Politics (Book V, chapter xi)
“Habermas is of one and the same opinion as the Prophet Muhammad: ‘My community will never agree upon an error.’”
NOVEMBER 13: Join the CCCCT and co-organizers for the Columbia Memorial Workshop: The Legacy of Jürgen Habermas. In-person at Columbia University or remotely from Zoom. November 13 at 9:00 AM. For more information and to register, please visit: eventbrite.com/e/jurgen-habe…
Nietzsche saw in Luther an expression of a "Socratic-Platonic" impulse within the German spirit. There was a demand for logical consistency, a desire to eliminate contradiction, and the conviction that there must be some measure by which truth could be distinguished from falsehood. For Luther, truth was something that truly existed out there.
Luther rebelled against a Church that had become worldly and institutional. It had become an expression of the will to power of those in charge of it. But his revolt did not negate that will. The North German princes who supported Luther pursued their own will to power, using the Reformation to advance their struggle for secular authority. The suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt and the persecution of the Anabaptists, among others, show that the Reformation was itself bound up with a this-worldly will to power. What began as a revolt against one established authority became a means of establishing another.
It is for these reasons that Reinhart Koselleck identifies the emergence of modern politics with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The settlement made peace a matter of political regulation, distinct from religious duty. Politics and power thus began to acquire a degree of autonomy from the religious commitments that had precipitated the conflict in the first place. But, as history shows, the gradual expulsion of religion from politics eventually saw it replaced by other things: morality, economic interests, ideology, etc.
Relativism, scepticism, and nihilism are not “postmodern” phenomena, but perennial features of the human condition. If we may speak in very general terms, the Northern, or specifically Germanic, tradition tends to look at nihilism as a historical force that undermines order and meaning and must, therefore, ultimately be overcome. This is true even of Schopenhauer. The Northern response is thus one of "crisis," and resolution is sought through negation, transcendence, or overcoming.
The Mediterranean response to nihilism is one of embodiment. Here nihilism is ironic and fatalistic precisely because there is no overcoming. In Leopardi, nihilism takes on a cosmic dimension, but his pessimism remains "lyrical." The recognition of the world’s indifference does not exhaust the possibilities of the sublime in nature or the creative powers of the imagination. We can still "dance" to the lyrical rhythms of life. Something similar can be found among the Greeks. Their pessimism was not centred on the gods, who were neither the creators of the world nor of humanity. Gods and mortals alike were subject to the higher power of fate. Existence was not a moral drama governed by a creator, but a condition to be endured and celebrated.
Where Northern man might turn inward in the face of meaninglessness, Southern man remained outwardly engaged. The Greek temperament, despite its awareness of life’s fragility and the limits imposed by fate, retained a kind of optimism. Life was still affirmed, and all its joys, pains, griefs, guilt, tears, and laughter could be embraced for what they were. The Greek could thus remain creative, sensuous, and sociable, seeking to make the most of each moment. Whereas Northern nihilism tended towards crisis and its eventual overcoming, Mediterranean nihilism sought instead to inhabit existence fully, without requiring its ultimate justification or resolution.
"Human beings are not simply what they are, but also what they set up for themselves as ideals, and even if they can never come up to those ideals, the mere will to do so defines something of their nature."
- Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization
Relativism, scepticism, and nihilism are not “postmodern” phenomena, but perennial features of the human condition. If we may speak in very general terms, the Northern, or specifically Germanic, tradition tends to look at nihilism as a historical force that undermines order and meaning and must, therefore, ultimately be overcome. This is true even of Schopenhauer. The Northern response is thus one of "crisis," and resolution is sought through negation, transcendence, or overcoming.
The Mediterranean response to nihilism is one of embodiment. Here nihilism is ironic and fatalistic precisely because there is no overcoming. In Leopardi, nihilism takes on a cosmic dimension, but his pessimism remains "lyrical." The recognition of the world’s indifference does not exhaust the possibilities of the sublime in nature or the creative powers of the imagination. We can still "dance" to the lyrical rhythms of life. Something similar can be found among the Greeks. Their pessimism was not centred on the gods, who were neither the creators of the world nor of humanity. Gods and mortals alike were subject to the higher power of fate. Existence was not a moral drama governed by a creator, but a condition to be endured and celebrated.
Where Northern man might turn inward in the face of meaninglessness, Southern man remained outwardly engaged. The Greek temperament, despite its awareness of life’s fragility and the limits imposed by fate, retained a kind of optimism. Life was still affirmed, and all its joys, pains, griefs, guilt, tears, and laughter could be embraced for what they were. The Greek could thus remain creative, sensuous, and sociable, seeking to make the most of each moment. Whereas Northern nihilism tended towards crisis and its eventual overcoming, Mediterranean nihilism sought instead to inhabit existence fully, without requiring its ultimate justification or resolution.
What animates human conduct? Thucydides thought it was fear, utility, and a sense of honour. In such a world, where there is no mask to hide behind, open attack, ridicule, and comedy become powerful weapons. Comedy takes on the role of both police and court, condemning enemies and demagogues alike.
How one responds to such attacks is, of course, a matter of personal strength and character. Aelian said that "Socrates, mocked in comedy, sat and laughed; but Poliagros hanged himself." The difference between Socrates and Poliagros lay not in their capacity to endure ridicule, but in the degree to which their sense of self depended upon the judgement of others.
When wielded as a weapon, humour can inflict pain while disguising itself as entertainment. The pleasure of the audience may depend upon the humiliation of its target, while the humourist or aggressor hides behind the role of the joker. One can tolerate being laughed at in private, but to have one's ambitions and life's aims ridiculed in public can drive a man to desperation and despair. The injury does not lie in merely being mocked, but in seeing what one holds dear diminished in the eyes of others.
But the power of ridicule depends, in part, on the authority one grants to those who wield it. To distinguish between the judgement of others and the judgement that deserves to be taken seriously is to recover some independence from public opinion. Socrates' sense of self was internally organised and self-sufficient; thus, he could laugh with the crowd without surrendering himself to its judgement. Poliagros', by contrast, was defined from the outside; his sense of self formless and unstable, leaving him at the mercy of a changing world and the whims of the masses.
Thucydides declares at the beginning of The History of the Peloponnesian War his commitment to remaining faithful to reality, which accounts for the lack of "romantic sentiment" in his account of events. His work is a history, but it is grounded in an anthropology - a conception of man as a natural and historical being striving for power - that finds echoes in the thought of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, Schmitt, and Kondylis. It is this unsentimental inquiry into human nature, resistant to consoling illusions and preconceived moral abstractions, that led Nietzsche to declare (polemically), in the second section of What I Owe to the Ancients:
"My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and not to see reason in reality - not in 'reason,' still less in 'morality.'
[...]
Greek philosophy as the decadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes. Courage in the face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in face of reality - consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control - consequently he retains control over things."
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"The greatness of an epoch or a cause depends on the proportion of those capable of sacrifice, on whatever side it may be. In this respect the Middle Ages pass muster rather well. Devotion! And not a guarantee of regular pay! Where does greatness begin? With devotion to a cause, whatever it may be, with complete extinction of personal vanity. Greatness is not dependent on mental superiority, for this can be paired with a wretched character. Greatness is the conjunction of a certain spirit with a certain will."
- Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History and Historians
"The ordinary value judgement of history is in the habit of demanding the immediate and complete victory of one element. It cannot stand variety. Clerics of all denominations, fanatics of all denominations and non-denominations, popular philosophers, dynasts, and radical politicians who in history cannot stand the sight of rival forces and their fights demands one thing, completely and immediately, too, although this would make the world dead and colourless until those concerned killed one another out of sheer boredom or produced a new conflict. For it is an illusion to expect lasting contentment with any victory, something for which man lacks the organ anyway."
- Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians
Koselleck discusses this at length, as does Kondylis in his interview with Marin Terpstra. Scipio Africanus the Younger wept at the destruction of Carthage, recognising that Rome, too, would one day fall. There is an important lesson here for all victors: one can meet victory with either humility or arrogance. Victory never marks the end of human striving. Even when it exhausts the energies of the victorious group, other groups, both within the social body and beyond it, retain their own vitality, interests, enmities, needs, and aspirations, all of which may eventually come into conflict with the new order established by the victor. All political victories are temporary; history never truly ends. Ideologies and articles of faith that mistake their own triumph for the inevitable culmination of human progress are therefore bound to encounter disappointment, if not despair.
"Seeking reason in history certainly makes sense as a political postulate or a political program, for it would be absurd to claim that human beings enmeshed in histories and capable of killing each other are a priori irrational. The call to reason certainly belongs to the minimal claim of any sensible politics. The question, though, is whether reason emerges in history when different units of action, each with its own rational projections, yet not entirely capable of making itself understood, generate new conflicts. One conflict comes to an end only when a new one begins. Conflicts can never be completely resolved, but instead are simply replaced by conflicts with different structures. This is the experience that the entirety of history transmits to us; one can of course interpret this experience in a rational manner, but one cannot derive from it the idea that this series of conflicts bring about a more perfect reason. Undoubtedly, one can hope for it, intend it, work toward it politically, but not with an anthropology of history that posits a process of becoming rational as a foregone conclusion. The danger is that by positing the rationality of history, one is able to evade one’s own responsibility. In my doctoral thesis I attempted to show that this was the actual aporia of the Enlightenment."
- Reinhart Koselleck in his interview with Carsten Dutt, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories
"According to Burckhardt, man’s mind and soul were complete long ago. And continuity is more than mere going on, because it implies a conscious effort in remembering and renewing our heritage, instead of merely accepting the cake of custom. Conscious historical continuity constitutes tradition and frees us in relation to it. The only people who renounce this privilege of historical consciousness are primitive and civilised barbarians. Spiritual continuity as constituted by historical consciousness, is 'a prime concern of man’s existence,' because it is the only proof of the 'significance of the duration of our existence.' Hence we must urgently desire that the awareness of this continuity should remain alive in our minds. Whether such continuity exists outside our historical consciousness, in a divine mind concerned with human history, we can neither tell nor imagine."
- Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History
Kondylis thought that our century would see the collapse of the great illusions of optimism, humanism, and universalism. The normalisation of luxury and the universalisation of hedonistic aspirations would eventually exhaust the earth’s resources. A mode of economic and social organisation predicated on mass production, mass consumption, and the provision of a minimum level of hedonistic satisfaction for all would, if realised on a global scale, prove ecologically disastrous. As the reality of resource scarcity and the pressures of demographic expansion increasingly dawned on humanity, Kondylis predicted a “biologisation of the political”: a reversion to power politics and tribal affiliations, in which the struggle for survival and the defence of material interests would displace universalist ideals.
More than a century before Kondylis, Burckhardt was already thinking along similar lines. In his lectures on the early modern period, he argues that one labours under a great illusion if one imagines that Europeans were eagerly awaiting their liberation from the Middle Ages. Had Europeans been as zealous in exploiting the earth, driven by the mania for progress, as they would become in the 19th century, they might not have lived to see that century. Burckhardt then asks whether this would have been such a loss. The transformations of the period from 1450 to 1830 had brought humanity no greater happiness; nor had the optimism of 1830-1848, or the developments that followed, altered this fundamental condition. However many rights are enshrined in law and however much material production increases, human beings remain unsatisfied. As Burckhardt remarks in his lectures on antiquity:
"Are the three great ages of the world [antiquity, the Middle Ages, modernity] perhaps like the three times of day in the riddle of the Sphinx? They are, rather, a continual metempsychosis of acting and suffering man through countless incarnations. A genuine inquiry will want to recognise all these mutations and abandon any partiality for specific ages (it is all right to have a predilection, for that is a matter of taste), and it will do this all the sooner the livelier the feeling for human inadequacy in general is. Once it is understood that there never were, nor ever will be, any happy, golden ages in a fanciful sense, one will remain free from the foolish overvaluation of some past, from senseless despair of the present or fatuous hope for the future, but one will recognise in the contemplation of historical ages one of the noblest undertakings. It is the story of the life and suffering of mankind viewed as a whole."
What connects Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Löwith is that both thinkers rejected two of the dominant intellectual trends of their respective centuries. Burckhardt, the historian, rejected the entire enterprise of the philosophy of history; while Löwith, the philosopher of secular modernity, rejected the enterprise of political theology - even as he remained largely preoccupied with it.
Burckhardt wrote the following on the utopian spectre haunting modern Europe, in a letter to Friedrich von Preen on July 2, 1871:
"The great harm was begun in the last century, mainly through Rousseau, with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. Out of this plebs and educated alike distilled the doctrine of the golden age that was to come quite infallibly, provided people were left alone. The result, as every child knows, was the complete disintegration of the idea of authority in the heads of mortals, whereupon, of course, we periodically fall victim to sheer power. In the meanwhile, the idea of the natural goodness of man had turned, among the intelligent strata of Europe, into the idea of progress, i.e., undisturbed money-making and modern comforts, with philanthropy as a sop to conscience. But the day before yesterday the victorious Prussians found it necessary to declare a state of siege in Königshütte."
The belief in progress unleashed by the Enlightenment is here rightly tied to an overly optimistic anthropology identified with Rousseau. If man is fundamentally good, then the legitimate basis for authority dissolves - for institutions and normative structures become not only unnecessary but actively suspect, even evil, insofar as they distort the natural goodness of man.
For Burckhardt, this belief was shared by both the bourgeoisie and the masses, though it took different forms in each. Millenarian expectation animated the latter, while the belief in progress governed the former; and Burckhardt held both in contempt for their naivety - while reserving particular contempt for the so-called "educated," who ought to have known better. What animated his contempt is precisely what is implied in the reference to Königshütte. All utopian, philosophical, or idealistic dreams - and here Burckhardt takes a jab at German unification and overzealous nationalism - tend toward terror, because concrete reality will never conform to human wishes, and that gap between vision and reality inevitably produces violence. It is precisely what Bernard de Jouvenel meant when he wrote: "Every utopia is pregnant with tyranny."
Kondylis thought that our century would see the collapse of the great illusions of optimism, humanism, and universalism. The normalisation of luxury and the universalisation of hedonistic aspirations would eventually exhaust the earth’s resources. A mode of economic and social organisation predicated on mass production, mass consumption, and the provision of a minimum level of hedonistic satisfaction for all would, if realised on a global scale, prove ecologically disastrous. As the reality of resource scarcity and the pressures of demographic expansion increasingly dawned on humanity, Kondylis predicted a “biologisation of the political”: a reversion to power politics and tribal affiliations, in which the struggle for survival and the defence of material interests would displace universalist ideals.
More than a century before Kondylis, Burckhardt was already thinking along similar lines. In his lectures on the early modern period, he argues that one labours under a great illusion if one imagines that Europeans were eagerly awaiting their liberation from the Middle Ages. Had Europeans been as zealous in exploiting the earth, driven by the mania for progress, as they would become in the 19th century, they might not have lived to see that century. Burckhardt then asks whether this would have been such a loss. The transformations of the period from 1450 to 1830 had brought humanity no greater happiness; nor had the optimism of 1830-1848, or the developments that followed, altered this fundamental condition. However many rights are enshrined in law and however much material production increases, human beings remain unsatisfied. As Burckhardt remarks in his lectures on antiquity:
"Are the three great ages of the world [antiquity, the Middle Ages, modernity] perhaps like the three times of day in the riddle of the Sphinx? They are, rather, a continual metempsychosis of acting and suffering man through countless incarnations. A genuine inquiry will want to recognise all these mutations and abandon any partiality for specific ages (it is all right to have a predilection, for that is a matter of taste), and it will do this all the sooner the livelier the feeling for human inadequacy in general is. Once it is understood that there never were, nor ever will be, any happy, golden ages in a fanciful sense, one will remain free from the foolish overvaluation of some past, from senseless despair of the present or fatuous hope for the future, but one will recognise in the contemplation of historical ages one of the noblest undertakings. It is the story of the life and suffering of mankind viewed as a whole."
One of the root causes underlying the optimist view is a social outlook animated by a philosophy of history. In the case of the pessimists, their view is shaped by an anthropology grounded in historical and social reflection - one that reveals strife, war, and folly as omnipresent features of human affairs. This, in turn, leads to a focus on political order rather than on society as such.
Let us take Machiavelli and Marx as examples. Machiavelli is a pessimist precisely because he begins with men, whereas Marx is an optimist because he begins with the evolution of social formations. Machiavelli sees the struggle among men as irreducible, for it permeates history regardless of the social formation, religion, regime, or ideology that happens to govern a particular age - and, all of these are integral to the rationalisation of the power struggle. Marx, too, regards struggle as constitutive of history. Yet for Marx, struggle is continually sublated into new social orders, in which there is a progressive democratisation of the relations of production. It is precisely this historical development that allows him to envisage an end to struggle.
Marx’s philosophy of history therefore presupposes a long-term historical process, whereas Machiavelli’s political theory identifies the recurrence of cyclical movements throughout history. For Marx, the march of history carries along the men who make it, often independently of their intentions or consciousness. For Machiavelli, by contrast, each man and each group bears a responsibility before history, yet neither can ever fully realise that responsibility in an ideal or ethical manner. The same applies to political regimes. For Machiavelli, the republic remains the political ideal because it balances and moderates competing powers, even though it too remains vulnerable to implosion - because man remains man.
As long as there are friends and enemies, competing interests, wishes, and desires among men and within society, there will always be points of tension. Marx believes that these tensions can ultimately be suspended through the total victory of the proletariat. Machiavelli, by contrast, recognises that the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, consists of men - and that both are subject to the same fundamental human condition.
"Also in the future, the application of 'Machiavellianism' as a political and ideological weapon will depend on the characteristics and the outcome of social and ethnic conflicts. Theoretically, one can show three options: First, 'Machiavellianism' will disappear with the abolition of the separation of politics and morality in a humane society; second, it will persist into eternity because the separation of politics and morality is immanent, and it will not only persist practically, but it will also agonizingly split the consciousness of humans; third, the separation of politics and morality is not abolished in practice, but it prevails to such an extent that the moral side dwindles and falls into oblivion – in a historical phase in which barbarism, however technologically transfigured, becomes a matter-of-course and carefree lifestyle for brainwashed people who treat and solve every problem only technically; then the performance principle will take the place of morality, of the humanistic ideal. But that these three options were formulated here does not mean that we have all three before us and can choose by weighing each one from the outside; we are already in the middle of the path to one of these three options, whereby the impetus on this path is determined by great and famous events as well as by our daily doing and whereby the heterogeneity of goals is always virulent. This historical impetus, which arises and which changes gradually in the chaos of individual events, forces us, if not to pessimism, then certainly to skepticism."
- Panajotis Kondylis, Machiavelli
"Men are made unequal by nature, where inequality is in its element, and in civil society the right of particularity is so far from annulling this natural inequality that it produces it out of spirit and raises it to an inequality of skill and resources, and even to one of moral and intellectual attainment. To oppose to this right a demand for equality is a folly of the Understanding which takes as real and rational its abstract equality and its 'ought-to-be.'"
- Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §200
"In order to make histories possible, we must supplement Heidegger’s central determination of running toward death with the category of being able to kill. It is characteristic of histories of human beings that they have not only made survival the primary aim of their efforts within the horizon of their impending death. From hunter-gatherer hordes to highly armed modern superpowers, the struggle for survival has always threatened the death of others, or, perhaps more commonly, death at the hand of others. It is also well known that this threat can limit the use of violence. The actual risk of survival brings with it the chance that various organised groups of people may kill each other and that they believe they need to kill each other to survive."
- Reinhart Koselleck, "Historik and Hermeneutics" in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories
In this connection, Koselleck supplements Heidegger’s Being-toward-death with the category of “being able to kill,” insofar as the existential analytic of Dasein, taken on its own, is insufficient as an account of historical experience. The analytic can disclose the formal structures of existence and relatedness, but it cannot, by itself, account for the specific relations through which histories become plural and conflictual: the mutual threat of killing, the distinctions between friend and enemy, inner and outer, above and below, before and after, generational succession, and so on.
Koselleck’s conceptual pairs, historical constants, or metahistorical categories function as conditions for the possibility of histories and are therefore quasi-transcendental. Heidegger’s existentials likewise articulate supra-empirical conditions of possibility, disclosing the structures of human existence and, with them, the horizon of historical intelligibility. The two thus have analogous functions but differ in kind. Heidegger’s existentials articulate the constitutive structures of Dasein and are unified in Sorge (care), whereas Koselleck’s categories are antithetical and relational, conditioning the possibilities of human interaction and, by extension, of historical conflict.
With the emergence of "History" as a collective singular at the end of the 18th century, History came to be understood as a subject with aims of its own. It became a judge, invoked to condemn and discipline the plurality of actual histories unfolding in the concrete world. Modernity collapsed the distance between experience and expectation into a single, directional process oriented towards declared ends: Freedom, the End of History, Communism. But the emergence of this conception of History was not in itself destructive. It made possible a distinct historical consciousness, as well as the very idea of historical change as such. The problem arose when History ceased to function as a conceptual framework for understanding change and was instead hypostatised into a subject endowed with its own telos. Once History was viewed as an agent pursuing its own ends, the plurality of actual histories could be subordinated to the demands of a supposedly necessary historical process, with all the terrors, cruelties, and absurdities this view entailed. History should therefore be understood as a singular category of reflection, not as an agent pursuing its own goals.
Given the accelerated temporality of modernity and its largely progressive-optimistic horizon, any reaction against this temporalisation must necessarily begin from within it. Any analysis of "modern time" must acknowledge the significant changes in how time is experienced, understood, and organised, while resisting the assumption that these transformations represent a "fundamental rupture" with the actual conditions of human existence. What Koselleck called the Sattelzeit transformed the semantics of time and reconfigured the horizon of expectations. It did not, however, abolish the fundamental conditions of human existence. People still suffer, fail, and ultimately die - often at the hands of others who justify their actions in the name of (historical) necessity, moral imperatives, or doctrines of faith, whether secular or theological. The presumed "inevitability" of History in modernity has never exhausted the possibility of other histories emerging.
With the emergence of "History" as a collective singular at the end of the 18th century, History came to be understood as a subject with aims of its own. It became a judge, invoked to condemn and discipline the plurality of actual histories unfolding in the concrete world. Modernity collapsed the distance between experience and expectation into a single, directional process oriented towards declared ends: Freedom, the End of History, Communism. But the emergence of this conception of History was not in itself destructive. It made possible a distinct historical consciousness, as well as the very idea of historical change as such. The problem arose when History ceased to function as a conceptual framework for understanding change and was instead hypostatised into a subject endowed with its own telos. Once History was viewed as an agent pursuing its own ends, the plurality of actual histories could be subordinated to the demands of a supposedly necessary historical process, with all the terrors, cruelties, and absurdities this view entailed. History should therefore be understood as a singular category of reflection, not as an agent pursuing its own goals.
Given the accelerated temporality of modernity and its largely progressive-optimistic horizon, any reaction against this temporalisation must necessarily begin from within it. Any analysis of "modern time" must acknowledge the significant changes in how time is experienced, understood, and organised, while resisting the assumption that these transformations represent a "fundamental rupture" with the actual conditions of human existence. What Koselleck called the Sattelzeit transformed the semantics of time and reconfigured the horizon of expectations. It did not, however, abolish the fundamental conditions of human existence. People still suffer, fail, and ultimately die - often at the hands of others who justify their actions in the name of (historical) necessity, moral imperatives, or doctrines of faith, whether secular or theological. The presumed "inevitability" of History in modernity has never exhausted the possibility of other histories emerging.