Introduction

This introductory chapter contains the views of three protagonists in terms of time: Koselleck, Ricoeur and Hartog. I discuss them because their approaches differ from mine. Koselleck represents a time of the modern, emerging from the Enlightenment and continuing so far. In my opinion, the future-oriented time of Koselleck is empty, while there are various filled or embodied alternatives. This becomes visible when we examine the times of the Counter-Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Historicism.

The temporality of Ricoeur, which he explains in his magnum opus Time and Narrative, is historicist in nature and takes the form of rise and fall. However, Ricoeur’s position contrasts with mine because of a different philosophical and methodological approach. He has a phenomenological and hermeneutic point of view and only observes a single temporality in historiography. My approach is based on the pragmatism of the American Robert Brandom and leads to four different temporalities. Methodologically, Ricoeur has a narrativist understanding of time, while I examine it through post-narrativist time regimes.

Hartog’s approach and mine agree on the investigation of time through time regimes. He distinguishes three of them, linked to three different periods: a past-oriented time before 1800, a future-oriented time between 1800 and 1989 and a time of the present after the last date. I assume a certain equivalence between past, present and future in every period, but I see differences in composition. Before 1780 there is the empty time of the Enlightenment. After that an embodied time arises, which becomes in the nineteenth century a time of rise and fall. This first historicist time is followed by a time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous and a kairotic time, pushed forward by Nietzsche.