ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century an embodied temporality emerges. This period is known as the Counter-Enlightenment. In particular Johann-Gottfried Herder believes that everything in reality has its own time. He argues about this with Kant, rejecting his idea of time as only an Anschauungsform. Like Herder, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel is a representative of the Counter-Enlightenment too. He wants to reduce Herder’s multitude of times to one single temporality of the Weltgeist, incarnated in Napoleon. Because this incarnation only concerns one person, his time must be further developed in the future. Herder and Hegel still believe in progress, however, along the way of an embodied time. Koselleck expresses an empty time with regard to history as a “collective singular”. It implies that his perception of history only moves at an epistemological level, without references to ontological developments. He takes Ranke the representative of such a “collective singular”, making him illustrative for creating histories only existing at an epistemological level. Koselleck cannot deny that Hegel also attributes an ontological aspect to history. As a result, he creates a break between Hegel and Ranke, which in my view does not exist. I see that both presume history existing at an epistemological as well as at an ontological level, because both are representatives of an embodied time.
