The Transformation of Historical Time

Abstract

The essay is forthcoming in the volume Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism, eds. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) The Question of Historical Time Today Philosophy of history is dead, so we are told. It died multiple deaths in the early postwar period, at the hands of both philosophers and historians. In a certain sense, it is hardly surprising that proclaiming the end, the death, the unfeasibility, the illegitimacy, the impossibility and even the practical perils of the enterprise had simply been one of the intellectual priorities of the era. After the horrors of the first half of the last century, being skeptical about the idea of a historical process leading to a better future seemed the most honest and reasonable thing to do. This of course does not mean that philosophy of history ruled the intellectual landscape without any criticism up until postwar times. Since its late Enlightenment invention, the practice of philosophizing about the course of human affairs gathered quite a few adversaries from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century historians seeking to professionalize and institutionalize their

On the need for (con) temporary utopias: Temporal reflections on the climate rhetoric of environmental youth movements

“…While the narrative of eschatology offers a way out—that is, it is not too late to act—the postapocalyptic perspective seems to imply that we have run out of options. As Simon (2019: 73) points out, if the future can no longer be thought of as different from the past and the present—which the postapocalyptic discourse seems to suggest—there is no historical time, only an end to historical time in the present; hence, “the current condition of Western societies is […] actually, ahistorical .” Thus, if the future completely transcends the horizon of expectation, it simultaneously disappears as a field of action.…”