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Article

French

ID: <

10.4000/rgi.1662

>

·

DOI: <

10.4000/rgi.1662

>

Where these data come from
“Think history” after Löwith: Koselleck and Ricister

Abstract

This article aims to clarify convergences and divergences between Paul Ricœur’s “hermeneutics of historical time” and Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of historical temporalities by situating them against the background of Löwith’s radical critique of modern “historical thought”. The main theses are as follows : on one hand, Koselleck and Ricœur both make the the effort “to think about history and the time of history” in avoiding the claim of totality that Löwith denounces as the main vice of modern philosophies of history. They both pursue this goal by relying on Heidegger’s existential analysis of temporality and by radicalizing its “pluralizing vocation”. By pointing out this common orientation, the article establishes the proximity between Ricœur’s and Koselleck’s conceptions of the “temporalization of history”, in spite of Ricœur’s decision to fuse Koselleck’s categories “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” with Gadamer’s notion of “being-affected by the past”. On the other hand, Ricœur distances himself from Koselleck in his interpretation of the “meaning” of history. This depends ultimately on the ontological anchoring of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the historical condition in an interpretation of being as conatus or “desire of being”, which attributes to it a teleological-normative dimension ; such a dimension distinguishes it both form Gadamer’s universal hermeneutics – grounded in “the dialogue that we are” – and from Koselleck’s theory of history, founded on an assumption derived from Löwith : i.e., the assumption that the reference to any telos of history compromises the recognition of the irreducible plurality of histories.

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