History and Theory 53 (December 2014), 577-591 Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10732
Forum: Multiple Temporalities

5.

TIME GARDENS:
HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

LUCIAN HLSCHER

ABSTRACT

This article argues for the analysis of temporal concepts such as age, century, and
epoch, past, present, and future, formed during the Enlightenment, as an approach
to the study of the history of modern historiography. Starting from the basic distinction of
empty and embodied time in Leibnizs and Newtons dispute of 1715 about the philo-
sophical nature of time, it traces the episteme of the eighteenth century using the meta-
phor of a time garden for describing some basic features of enlightened historiography.
Finally, the paper discusses the consequences of the increasing employment of concepts
of embodied time for the future development of the historical sciences.

Keywords: temporality, conceptual history, historiography, Enlightenment, Leibniz,

Newton, geography

No historical narrative can do without temporal structures and concepts, which

predetermine the general outline of the story. Considering the fact that today
this is commonplace among historians,1 one may be surprised that only recently,
following the work of Reinhart Koselleck2 and others (some of them writing in
History and Theory3), efforts have been intensified to push forward the analysis
of historical temporality. Such an analysis may lead us to a kit of conceptual
tools and narrative strategies significant for certain types of historical narratives.
By doing so we may be able to design a history of historiography based on the
historical change of such concepts and strategies.
This paper may be taken as a contribution to such a broader project. It consid-
ers concepts of historical time that were born in eighteenth-century philosophical
discourse and used in historiographical works from that time onward. Starting
with a general feature of the eighteenth centurys episteme, for which I use the

1. Cf. Jrn Rsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999);
Theodor Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen [1919] (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1983);
Karl Lwith, Meaning in History: The Philosophical Implications of the Philosophy of History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
2. Reinhart Koselleck and a group of historians involved with the lexicon Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe analyzed some important historical concepts (progress, development, revolution, and
others), but Koselleck also introduced some useful analytical tools to the analysis of historical tem-
porality such as Erfahrungsraum (space of experiences), Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expecta-
tions), acceleration, repetition, and others.
3. See The New Metaphysics of Time, History and Theory Virtual Issue 1 (2012), especially the
introduction by Ethan Kleinberg. http://tinyurl.com/ndlxtco (accessed September 17, 2014).
578 lucian hlscher

metaphor of a time garden, I turn to the double nature of historical time estab-
lished by the controversy between Newton and Leibniz in 1715, culminating in
the conceptualization of empty and embodied time as a fundamental distinction
in writing modern history. This will lead me to the analysis of some important
historical concepts, which, established by eighteenth-century historiography,
were based on the distinction between age, century, and epoch and past, present,
and future. The paper will end with a general evaluation of the contribution of
eighteenth-century concepts to a general theory of historical temporality.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY

In the history of European historiography, the eighteenth century is a period of

special character: situated between the historiography of humanism, on the one
hand (culminating in historical examples that seemed to be useful for present and
future applications), and the romantic concepts of early historicism, on the other,
leading historians of the time strived for a systematic survey of certain segments
of universal history or even of universal history as a whole. They shared the idea
of a universal historical time and space as the most fundamental dimensions of
history.
This had important consequences for the modern concept of history. For
instance, when in the age of Enlightenment historians argued that only by being
fixed to a certain date and place could events be acknowledged as historical, they
broke with the older idea that important historical events would occur again and
again, as many historians of the Middle Ages had argued, taking the Old and
the New Testament as ages with a repetitive structure. In the eighteenth century,
structural repetition of events was replaced by singularity, material typologies by
the chronological contextualization of events.
In doing so historiography followed the example of geography. The analogies
of the disciplines in the episteme of the Enlightenment are striking: both aimed to
measure the empirical world by defining the exact place of a fact within the uni-
verse of time and space. Eighteenth-century historians often thought of history as
a kind of map, where the temporal and geographical position of any single event
is significant for its historical meaning. 4 Hence establishing a universal calendar
of homogeneous, universal, and infinite time and a system of geographical repre-
sentation of the earth were the most important contributions of eighteenth-century
historiography to the modern European idea of history.5
In Enlightenment scholarship, the establishment of the concept of universal
historical time ran parallel to the establishment of a universal geography.6 As the

4. Zu jeder Begebenheit gehrt, ihrem Wesen nach, Zeit und Ort, wenn und wo sie geschehen
ist, in Johann Christoph Gatterer, Abriss der Geographie (Gttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich,
1775), 4.
5. Johann Christoph Gatterers Abriss der Chronologie (Gttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich,
1778) completed the preparatory works of Joseph Justus Scaliger (De emendatione temporum, 1583)
and Jean Ptau or Petavius (De doctrina temporum, 1627; tabulae chronologicae, 1628).
6. Cf. Isabel Surun, Le blanc de la carte, matrice de nouvelles rpresentations des espaces afri-
cains, in Combler les blancs de la carte: Modalits et enjeux de la construction des savoir gogra-
phiques (16.-20. sicle), ed. Isabelle Laboulais-Lesage (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires, 2004),
117-144; Martin Gierl, Geschichte als przisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und
 time gardens 579
globe was divided into mathematically equal segments by the system of latitude
and longitude having its point zero in some major capital of the time, like
Rome, Paris, and finally London (Greenwich),7 so history was divided into peri-
ods of time by the system of a universal calendar, starting from the point zero at
the time of Christs birth and running to the past and to the future in endless rep-
etition of years and centuries. And as the geographical system allowed drawing
the exact figure and contour of continents, the historical system of the calendar
allowed drawing the contour and figure of ages and centuries.8
Further, both systems were based on the conviction that fixing the exact posi-
tion of a given datum (event, place) or historical object would give all necessary
information about its meaning within the context of its (historical or geographi-
cal) environment. Hence concepts such as (spatial and temporal) neighborhood
(what happened before and after or nearby) and distance (how much time and
space lay between two events or places) became much more relevant in the con-
text of historical interpretation. Even empty periods of time could be interpreted
as meaningful, in analogy to the white spots in geography, which invited geog-
raphers to search for the profile of a so-far unknown area.9
Today, looking closer at the development of historiography in the last two
centuries, one would have to concede that the idea of a complete survey of world
history is but an illusion, a utopia: not every historical event is linked to all other
events in a meaningful way, and historical data are not completely defined by
their temporal and geographical context. Furthermore, historians are much less
concerned than one may think with dating historical events on the time scale of
historical chronology. Even a short glance at historical works reveals the fact that
historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made surprisingly little use of
dating events. Contextualizing events doesnt automatically imply that their exact
position in time and space is specified. To many historians, the literary context of
a factits position among and between other events and on the line of a historical
narrativeseems to be much more important.
Nevertheless, the idea that the temporal and geographical position of an event
is most important for its historical meaning seems to be valid even today: prob-
ably nobody would disagree that only things that have their proper place in time

die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang: (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann
Holzboog, 2012).
7. John Harrison invented a reliable clock for the calculation of longitude in the early 1760s, after
the British government had announced a prize for the first person to demonstrate a practical method
for determining the longitude of a ship at sea. Cf. Wikipedia contributors, Longitude, Wikipedia,
The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Longitude&oldid=623685328
(accessed September 17, 2014).
8. Wer die Lnge eines geographischen Gegenstandes nebst der Polhhe oder geographischen
Breite derselben wei, kann die Lage eines solchen Gegenstandes pnktlich angeben . . . (Gatterer,
Abriss der Geographie, 7). Besonders wichtig ist, nicht nur dem Geschichtskundigen, sondern
auch jedem Geschichtsliebhaber, die Kenntnis von den Graden der Lnge und Breite: aus deren
Vereinigung die Netze der Landkarten, das ist die Bestimmungslinien der Lagen bestehen. Johann
Christoph Gatterer, Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck,
1771), 12.
9. A famous example of such a map was that of Africa published by J.-B. dAnville in 1749. It
shows the river Niger, for instance, only in those parts that were attested by reliable travel reports.
Cf. Surun, Le blanc de la carte.
580 lucian hlscher

and space can be called real in a historical sense.10 A historical linkage can
be established only between things that can be placed in time and space. This
proves that the basic understanding of historical reality, which was established in
eighteenth-century historiographyan understanding of history that is based on
the universality and homogeneity of historical time and geographical spaceis
still at work. All historical facts are but an abbreviation of historical reality, but
they exist in time and space.
To conclude, history and geography, time and space are still very much linked
within the context of empirical reality. Thats why so many temporal concepts
concepts such as progress and decline, development and revolution,
past, present, and futurehave been taken from spatial metaphors. This
may justify the introduction of the new concept time garden, which may be
useful for demonstrating some characteristic features of modern historiography.

TIME GARDENS

The construction of universal history during the Enlightenment resembles the

construction of a baroque garden. Historians of the eighteenth century didnt
use the metaphor of a garden in order to demonstrate their concept of history;
however, the analogy is most striking and illuminating. The garden is a space of
peculiar character: it is defined by the fence surrounding the garden, the entrance
to it, the arrangement of various parts or cornerstones, and the point of view from
which we look at this arrangement. Moreover, in baroque gardens we find the
space of the garden divided into parts, symmetrically arranged and open to the
view of the visitor looking at it from a central point; in many cases this is the bel
tage of the castle.
Taking the garden as a metaphor for concepts of history, it is not difficult to
draw the analogy to pieces of contemporary historiography such as Bossuets
Discours sur lhistoire universelle of 1681. As in the baroque garden, space was
divided into different corners, so in Bossuets design universal history was divided
into seven ages and twelve epochs. We still find the same kind of periodization
into periods of equal length in August Ludwig Schlzers Universal-Historie
of 1772, where he argued for equal periods of 400, 800, 1600, and 2400 years:
1. creation to deluge: 1600 years; 2. deluge to Rome: 1600 years; 3. Rome to
Charlemagne: 1600 years; 4. Charlemagne to Reformation: 800 years; and so on.11
The analogy goes even further: as the baroque garden is enclosed by a wall,
so was history in Bossuets work by the fence of Gods divine plan for history as
limited to the borders of Christianity. To be clear: analogous to the fact that there
are always spaces outside the garden, there were times and spaces outside of what
Bossuet took for universal history, too: regions such as North and South America
or India, China, and Japan, which were already well known to Europeans of the
time. But Bossuet neglected these regions as being irrelevant for Gods project of

10. Georg Simmel, Das Problem der historischen Zeit, in Das Individuum und die Freiheit:
Essays (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1957), 48-60.
11. August Ludwig Schlzer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Gttingen: Johann Christian
Dieterich, 1772), 59 ff.
 time gardens 581
salvation. Furthermore, just as the baroque garden had an entrance and an exit, in
Bossuets project as well, universal history had an entrance (the Creation) and an
exit (the Last Judgment). Even a prospect, that is, a point of view, from which to
look at the garden or at history can be found in both. In Bossuets work, it is the
perspective of Gods providential design of history. This may justify speaking of
historical works of the eighteenth century in terms of a time garden.
Time gardens of eighteenth-century historiography are not difficult to rep-
resent, since historiography and geography were seen as complementary disci-
plines in eighteenth-century scholarship working with analogue tools. Hence the
periodization of historical time played the same decisive role in understanding
universal history as did drawing the contours of continents and countries in global
geography.12 Speaking in terms of the paradigm garden, one may imagine the
periods of history as sectors of the baroque gardensectors that still were very
similar in their outlook and profile.
However, with the dawn of the age of historicism at the end of the eighteenth
century, this concept of history began to collapse for several reasons: one is that
the common fence of history, defined by Gods project of salvation, began to
break down. The field of world history became wider than 6000 years, which,
according to the Christian tradition, was the length of time between the Creation
and the Last Judgment. Also, universal history could not be defined anymore by
the Christian countries (completed by the regions of Christian mission outside
Europe) as in earlier Christian historiography. It is true that under the idea of
progress, all nations, Christian or not, could still be included in world history.
However, in early modern Christian historiography these nations played but a
marginal role in Gods divine plan of history, whereas by the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, it became evident that nations such as China obviously had
reached a high standard of culture long before Christian countries had reached
that level. Hence it was difficult to include them in a progressive history of Gods
salvation of the world.
Finally, the historical perspective lost its divine subject in God, since this posi-
tion was delegated to the observing subject of human beings, that is, individuals,
classes, and nations. Moreover, historians such as Martin Chladenius became
aware that the point of view in history was constantly shifting from place to place
and from individual to individual.13 For historians of the late eighteenth century
onward such as Friedrich Schiller, there was no longer any definite beginning
or end of history (both were located in an infinite distance of time), but only a
moving point of present perspective to the past and future of history. By all these
changes history began to lose its unity as a coherent and universal body of time.

12. It is more than a pure accident that scholars such as the Gttingen historian Johann Christoph
Gatterer (17271799) wrote an Abriss der Geographie in addition his Abriss der Universalhistorie
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1765).
13. Johann Martin Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft [1752], ed. Reinhart Koselleck
(Weimar: Bhlau, 1985); Reinhart Koselleck, Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur
historiographischen Erschlieung der geschichtlichen Welt, in Objektivitt und Parteilichkeit, ed.
Wolfgang Mommsen, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jrn Rsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag,
1977), 17-46.
582 lucian hlscher

The metaphor of time gardens may remind us of the construction of English

landscape gardens of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with
their open views and their changing prospects, depending on the position of the
observer. The difference from the baroque French garden is obvious: both are
limited; there is a world outside the garden. But in contrast to the baroque garden,
the English landscape garden produces the illusion of being endless, unlimited.
The same is true if we compare Bossuets baroque concept of universal history
with the romantic concept of historicism. All this leads us to the conclusion that
by the nineteenth century, the idea of mapping universal history in analogy to
the surface of the globe lost its power with the coming of the age of historicism.
By now, there was no longer any world history left outside the garden of his-
toriography. And the changing points of view from historical experiences made
it impossible to draw an objective picture of the past binding for all mankind.
The epochal change was reflected in the construction of historical time. As we
shall see in the following section, the concept of universal time, which suggested
that world history was a universal entity, was not the only one established by
eighteenth-century scholarship. As the century went on, another concept made
progress in historical writing, taking time not as a universal and empty dimension
of the empirical world, but as a relation among things that belong together, form-
ing a living body. The difference in conceptualizing time was of fundamental
importance. Thats why we have to look closer at the roots of these concepts in
the philosophical debates about time in the early eighteenth century.

THE DEBATE BETWEEN NEWTON AND LEIBNIZ

Up to the early twentieth century, European historians, asked for the origin of
their concept of historical time, usually would have pointed to the philosophical
doctrines of Newton and Kant: according to both of them, time and space had to be
taken as extra-historical, even extra-empirical dimensions of history and reason,
with no relation whatsoever to historical objects and historical change.14 But going
back to the roots of the classical concept of a coherent and homogeneous time of
history, we come across the correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(16461716) and Isaac Newton (16431727), the latter represented by his disciple
Samuel Clarke, who already in 1715 had quarreled about the nature of time and
space.15 In this debate time was represented in two very different waysa differ-
ence in conceptualizing time, which is of fundamental importance for the modern
understanding of history. Even today, on the one hand, we take historical time as
a purely quantitative concept measuring distances between historical events and
fixing events to certain dates in the calendar; but on the other hand, we also take

14. Cf. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik: Vorlesungen ber Enzyklopdie und Methodologie der
Geschichte, ed. Rudolf Hbner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 6. Only after
the First World War did a more phenomenological understanding of time, based on the philosophy
of Bergson and Husserl, make its way to the theory and historiographical practice of historians. See
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1985).
15. Samuel Clarke, A Collection of Papers, Which passed Between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz,
and Dr. Clarke, in the Years 1715 and 1716 (London: James Knapton, 1717).
 time gardens 583
historical time in all its forms as a qualitative concept when we write history in
terms of development, progress, era, and so on. How are these different
concepts compatible, what is the philosophical background for such different and
in some respects even contradictory concepts of historical time?
The answer to this question can be taken from the debate between Leibniz and
Newton. But before I go into it, it is important to stress their common ground:
both agreed that time and space had to be understood in the context of Gods
activity in the world. That is to say, both took time and space as divine principles
of animation, as tools of God to give life to His creatures. Later, this common
ground was often forgotten; the debate was taken as a purely philosophical, if not
scientific, question. But nevertheless, as we shall see, it is crucial for the under-
standing of time and space even today.
What did Leibniz and Newton/Clarke disagree about? According to Newton,
time was an absolute being in its own right, independent from all concrete objects
in the world. In mathematical terms he defined time as a pure instrument of
measurement, without relation to any object in it. According to Leibniz, time
was a concrete relation among concrete objects: Leibniz called space the order of
objects that exist at one and the same moment, time the order of objects that fol-
low one another. Time and space, he argued, wouldnt exist without the objects
to which they belonged; they were nothing but relational concepts, without any
existence of their own.
In the early eighteenth century, the dispute still had serious theological impli-
cations: If Leibniz was right, Newtons concept of time and space roused sus-
picion of heresy in leveling the difference between God and world. Were time
(and space) only organs of God, as Newton claimed, not different from him?
How was God present in all things, when time and space were his organs: as
their empirical extension or as something independent from them? Clarke, in
defending the position of his friend Newton, described Newtons understanding
of time and space in terms of property, as a consequence of Gods existence,
in order not to identify God, space, and time all together. But in doing so, he still
ascribed an absolute reality to time and space, making them eternal beings and
independent from all empirical objects.
Contradicting Newton, Leibniz, in declaring space and time to be only rela-
tional terms, had no problem distinguishing between God and the empirical
world. However, for him it turned out to be difficult to explain the world as an
empirical entity, that is, as part of Gods emanation. His hypothesis, that each
living entity (monad) would, in its internal structure, mirror the structure of the
universe (analogia entis) was rather artificial and for many not very convincing.
But for the empirical description of the world this was not really important, as
his disciple Christian Wolff demonstrated in his work, which had a tremendous
influence on eighteenth-century scholarship, especially in Germany.16
The debate between Leibniz and Clarke didnt end with the victory of one of
them: not only because Leibniz died in 1716 without having answered Clarkes
fifth letter, but also because both sides had good arguments that could not be
16. Cf. Christian Wolff, Vernnftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen
(Frankfurt and Leipzig; Johann Benjamin Andreae, 1733).
584 lucian hlscher

altogether brushed aside. At first glance one may argue that in the long run
Newtons theory became the basis of the natural sciences, Leibnizs theory the
basis of the historical understanding of the world. But this wouldnt do justice to
the modern concept of time in historiography, since the new concept of history,
emerging in the course of the eighteenth century, relied on both. In following
Newton, it employed time as an abstract medium of history, but in using time
as a relational concept for the inner cohesion and extension of historical objects,
it followed Leibniz, too. Hence for historical analysis we have to rely on both
concepts of time.

EMPTY AND EMBODIED TIME

To make the two concepts easier to grasp and to distinguish them from each
other, I call Newtons concept empty or mathematical time, and Leibnizs
concept embodied or organic time.17 From the eighteenth century to the pres-
ent day, historians have made use of both: of the concept of empty time when
they argue on the basis of a universal calendar, but of the concept of embodied
time when they construct historical organisms such as the biographies of single
human beings, of nations, classes, and other social groups, or extensive descrip-
tions of historical ages.
What makes the difference? The idea of history as a time garden may help us
understand what is at stake: mathematical, empty time, like mathematical, empty
space, is an instrument for measuring distances between objectsin history as
much as in the open field of a garden. It allows defining the distance between
two objects, the length of a period of time, as much as the distance between dif-
ferent parts of the garden. Measuring time in this way is possible without accom-
modating the nature of these objects, because time in the mathematical sense of
a calendar exists almost without any historical informationleaving aside the
assumption of a point zero, which in older calendars was bound to a concrete
historical event such as the birth of Jesus Christ or the Hijra, the migration of
Mohammed to Medina in 622, but in modern times has faded away to an arbitrary
convention. Time in this sense consists of nothing but the eternal repetition of a
circular movement such as the earth turning around the sun in one year or around
itself in one day. Empty time is a homogeneous, ever-lasting continuation of one
and the same movement.
But for doing history, measuring time in this way is not enough, as it is not
only in the description of a garden that we measure the distances between various
objects in it. Each of these objects has its own shape and nature, which again are
defined by time and space. It is a time and a space inherent in these objects, and
they are very different from mathematical time and space. The inherent time of a
historical body is bound to the inner coherence of a living creature. Like flowers
and plants in a garden, embodied time has an individual character of its own: for

17. Ernst Schulin speaks of gefllte Zeit in much the same sense. Cf. Ernst Schulin, Der
Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtsschreibung der Aufklrung und des deutschen Historismus, in
Geschichtsdiskurs, 2: Anfnge modernen historischen Denkens, ed. Wolfgang Kttler, Jrn Rsen,
and Ernst Schulin (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994), 334.
 time gardens 585
instance, the sequence of youth, adulthood, and old age (as in nations or imperia);
an inner tension among the different parts of that body, between its beginning
and its end (as in distinguishing between early and late Renaissance); and
sometimes it is no extension at all, as we shall see later. The concept of embodied
time is well exemplified in the construction of historical ages, such as the Iron
Age or the Bronze Age: sometimes historians do not know exactly at which place
in the calendar such an age should be put. But, knowing the sequence of these
ages, it makes sense to use such terms for marking a stage in a longer evolution
of mankind.
Hence it is clear that in historical research we rely on both concepts: on embod-
ied time for constructing historical subjects, but on empty time for comparing
these objects in respect to their point on the calendar. History is like a garden:
we find objects like eras and cultures with specific outlooks in them, which are
situated in history like beets in a garden; and we find individuals and events in
it, which, similar to plants and flowers, have their inner life and complexion.
But history (as much as a garden) is more than a pure collection of such objects,
because these objects also relate to one another, forming bigger entities of a spe-
cific shape and performance. This is why we call history a time garden, embrac-
ing concepts of empty time such as calendars and concepts of embodied time
such as cultures and eras, nations, and individual human beings.
All history is about how we combine these two kinds of concepts. Without
using the concepts of embodied time, we would not be able to describe complex
historical unities such as the trajectory of a war, the inner construction of an age,
or the temporal procedure of an institution. But without the concept of empty
time, we wouldnt know how to relate all these independent objects in history
to one another. Also, we would be unable to construct bigger historical entities,
such as the history of nation-states, institutions, or ages of mankind. It is true that
almost no historian would subscribe to Leibnizs vision, that all parts of the his-
torical universe are related to one another in perfect harmony and strict analogy.
But we are also convinced that history is more than a pure collection of inde-
pendent data, which we as historians may put together in a purely arbitrary way.

DURATION, SIMULTANEITY, AND SEQUENCE

What follows from this basic distinction in historical time? Looking closer at the
temporal construction of modern historical narratives, we find that they work
with concepts, which, according to this distinction, are highly ambiguous when
used in histories. Let us take concepts such as simultaneity and sequence for
instance, the meaning of which differs according to the differentiation of empty
and embodied time. In eighteenth-century historiography, the one allowed paving
the way for diachronic, the other for synchronic historiography. For the Gttingen
historical school of Gatterer and Schlzer, distinguishing between synchronic and
diachronic historiography was basic for all historiography. Schlzer even argued
that one couldnt do both synchronic and diachronic historiography at one and the
same time, but both were of equal relevance for the discipline.18

18. Schlzer, Universal-Historie, 57f.

586 lucian hlscher

The distinction between empty and embodied time is relevant for both con-
cepts: speaking of sequence in the sense of empty time means to refer to noth-
ing but the pure temporal one-after-the-other; in the sense of embodied time,
however, it means to refer to the causal relation between two events, that is, to
a temporal relation that is meaningful because it links two elements within a
composed object. The same can be said of simultaneity. In calling two events
simultaneous, historians may refer to the fact that they happened at the same
moment in time, nothing more: this is the empty concept of sequence. The
embodied concept of sequence implies more: that these events have some-
thing in common, for instance, sharing a common spirit (Zeitgeist). Such a spirit
of time may be defined as a common feature and link between events that have
no direct effect on one another.
The idea of a common spirit in events that happen at the same time goes
back to Leibniz. It is implicit in his understanding of space and time as ani-
mate beings. Following the neo-Platonic doctrine of Henry More (16141687),
Leibniz assumed the existence of a world soul (anima mundi) that embraces all
things, a spirit that has the quality of extension in time and space.19 Christian
Wolff, Leibnizs disciple, who agreed with this concept,20 widely spread the
idea of a contemporary spirit through eighteenth-century scholarship. Schlzer
employed the concept of a time connection (Zeitzusammenhang). This concept
held that even events that had no causal effect on one another would have some-
thing in common, just because they happened to exist at one and the same time:
A higher spirit, he was convinced, who would acknowledge the chain between
all things on earth, in fact would find the real connection sooner or later among
all of them.21
Another example of the distinctive impact of empty and embodied time on
historical concepts is the concept of duration. Taken as an expression of empty
time, it refers to nothing but the temporal length elapsed between two points of
time on the calendar. But taken as an expression of embodied time, it refers to
the quality of that time, that is, the qualitative identity of a historical object (for
instance, the reign of a king or the status of a war) between its beginning and its
end. To give an example of the difference: we may assert that the period between
the beginning of the First and the end of the Second World War (19141945)
lasted approximately thirty years. In doing so, we are not concerned with what
happened in this period of time; it is an empty time. However, taking both wars
together in the concept of a new Thirty Years War, we imply an inner tension, a
process between the beginning and the end of that period. Each event in the time
between is seen as a stage on the way from the outbreak of the First to the end of

19. Cf. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Betrachtungen ber die Lehre von einem einzigen allumfas-
senden Geist, in Fnf Schriften zur Metaphysik, ed. Herbert Herring (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 51ff.
20. What time and space connect, is one object altogether (Was der Zeit und dem Raume
nach mit einander verknpft ist, machet zusammen eines aus). Christian von Wolff, Vernnftige
Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1733), 549.
21. Ein hherer Geist, der die Verkettung aller Dinge unsers Erdbodens durchschaut, wrde
allerdings auch unter ihnen eine entweder sptere oder frhere Realverbindung finden. Schlzer,
Universal-Historie, 49.
 time gardens 587
the Second World War. In such a concept of embodied time, duration is qualified
as the inner extension of a complex historical unity.

AGE, CENTURY, AND EPOCH

Distinguishing between two concepts of historical time, empty and embodied

time, is necessary for going deeper into our time garden. To this point we have
discussed only the structure of the garden of history in general, but now we are
able to turn to its smaller segments, where beets and flowers catch the eye of
the visitor. To begin with some beets: the concepts of age, century, and
epoch. Although some of these concepts are of much older origin, they acquired
their modern sense as historical concepts only by the time of the Enlightenment.
Due to a new understanding of time as duration, the meaning of the term
epoch changed from indicating a turning point of history (as it had been used
in ancient Greek philosophy) to that of a period of time.22 Parallel to this change,
century/sicle/Jahrhundert changed from indicating an abstract period of
time to that of a certain character,23 and age24/Zeitalter,25 adopted the mean-
ing of a historical period, too. As an example, the preface to Voltaires famous
book Le Sicle de Louis XIV makes clear what the author wanted to cover by the
concepts sicle and age: not the actions of a single outstanding personality
like Louis XIV, but the spirit of the people living under the dominion of such a
person at a certain period of time: Ce nest pas seulement la vie de Louis XIV
quon pretend crire; on se propose un plus grand objet. On veut essayer de
peindre la posterit, non les actions dun seul homme, mais lesprit des hommes
dans le sicle le plus clair qui fut jamais.26
Voltaire in his work highlighted four eminent sicles, that is, periods of his-
torythe classical period of ancient Greece, the sicle of the Roman emperor
Augustus, the sicle of the Medici in Florence, and the sicle of Louis XIVby
pointing to some common features: Ces quatre ges heureux sont ceux o les

22. Cf. This consideration of duration, as set out by certain periods, and marked by certain mea-
sures or epochs, is that which most properly we call time. Locke, in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of
the English Language (London: W. Straham, 1755), 2061; Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft
im Humanismus und in der Aufklrung (Munich: Beck, 1991), 150ff; Historisches Wrterbuch der
Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, 2nd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1972), 597f.
23. Arndt Brendecke, Die Jahrhundertwenden: Eine Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung und Wirkung
(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 169ff.
24. An early citation for age in this sense may be found in Johnson, A Dictionary of the
English Language, 60: Kings and princes, in the earlier ages of the world, laboured in arts and
occupations. . . (Pope, Odyssey).
25. Zeitalter: ein betrchtlicher Theil der Dauer der Welt von unbestimmter Lnge; eine von den
Altern des menschlichen Lebens entlehnte Figur. In allen Zeitaltern und Geschlechtsfolgen. Das gol-
dene, silberne u. s. f. Zeitalter, in Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wrterbuch
der hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1801), IV, 1676. First citation in Lessing (aus dem
galanten Zeitalter Christian Weisens), in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wrterbuch 31
(1984), 550.
26. Voltaire, Le sicle de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres compltes de Voltaire, ed. Louis E. Moland,
vols. 14-15 (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 155.
588 lucian hlscher

artes ont t perfectionns, et qui, servant dpoque la grandeur de lesprit

humain, sont lexample de la posterit.27
As gardens had a common character by the arrangement of flowers planted
in them, so epochs, ages, and centuriesin German, Zeitalterwere
defined by a common spirit. It was not the space as such covered by plants (or
individuals and events) that gave the garden (or the age) its character, nor was it
the epochal (or spatial) cornerstones that enclosed a certain period of time, as did
the paths in the garden. Rather, it was historians new ambition to underline the
common features of this period, as did gardeners in their gardens.
Within eras or epochs a strange phenomenon can be observed: despite
the continuity of chronological time, historians often take such periods as pure
historical moments without any temporal extension. By ascribing events to the
same period of time, they declare them to be simultaneous, even if they follow
one another in (chronological) order. Within such a period the flow of time has
stopped, historical change is suspended, even if the period lasts for a century or
more. This is one of the most astonishing features of temporalization in the age of
Enlightenment: at certain moments the chronological flow of time was suspended
in favor of a timeless conception of historical events.28
Historiography from the eighteenth century onward was planted with a grow-
ing number of such complex historical entities: ages such as Renaissance,
humanism, Enlightenment, or Hellenism, all invented in the course of the
nineteenth century. 29 Not only periods of time, but also historical agents such as
nations, classes, or ideas were taken as historical bodies, each exposing its
own temporal character: sometimes they behaved like human individuals passing
from birth to death through several stages of their collective life, sometimes
like spirits with an unchangeable nature. Already by the late eighteenth century
they had begun to populate history like flowers in the garden. They all followed
Leibnizs concept of organic or embodied time pushing back the utopia of a
universal history, in which every thing, every event was linked to every other in
uncountable and arbitrary relations.

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

In this section I shall discuss another collection of historical concepts that are just
as vital for our modern concept of history. But few are aware of the fact that, born
in the mid-eighteenth century, they are children of the same time and offspring
of the same concept of embodied time as age, epoch, and century: the con-
cepts of past, present, and future. The recent debate on how these segments
of historical time relate to one another reminds us that our understanding of them

27. Cf. also: In this history we shall confine ourselves only to what is deserving of the attention
of all ages, what paints the genius and manners of mankind, contributes to instruction, and prompts to
the love of virtue, of the arts, and of our country. Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, ed. R. Griffith (London:
Fielding and Walker, 1880), 11.
28. Cf. Simmel, Das Problem der historischen Zeit.
29. The history of these concepts mirrors the career of these objects in historical narratives. They
can easily be found in modern encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
 time gardens 589
is less self-evident than it seemed to be for a long time.30 Thats why old ques-
tions become relevant again, questions such as: When and how do present things
become past? How can things be called future when they are already present?
What do the words past, present, and future mean to us?31 Looking closer
at the history of these temporal concepts, we find that even the period of time
when, and the circumstances under which, they were introduced to the historical
narrative are obscure.
As far as their linguistic origin is concerned, it is obvious that the terms past,
present, and future are taken from Latin. In ancient as in medieval times they
were used in various meanings and combinations, but in a temporal sense only as
adjectives, not as nouns. That is, people spoke of past, present, and future
things, even of past, present, and future times, but never of the past,
the present, or the future in the modern sense of periods of time. Only by the
middle of the eighteenth century were the terms introduced as nouns, taking up
some new philosophical ideas, which only after a period of transition led to the
modern concepts.
It is not easy to demonstrate this semantic transition, especially not in English
and French, where the words past, present, and future can be used as both
adjectives and nouns, leaving it open whether they refer to a single event or to
the period of time called the past, the present, and the future. The German
language is clearer in distinguishing between the past, present, and future as
singular events and as periods of time, because there are different terms for both,
making it possible to speak of die Vergangenheit (period of time) in contrast to
das Vergangene (single event), of die Gegenwart (period of time) instead of
das Gegenwrtige (single event), and of die Zukunft (period of time) instead
of das Zuknftige (single event).
However, in Germany as much as in England and France the new nouns were
invented at more or less the same time, that is, in the decades between the 1730s
and the 1760s. But once invented, the German terms at first did not indicate
periods of time, but referred either to the grammatical tenses or to the quality of
things being past, present, or future. That is to say, first they were used in the
sense of Gegenwrtigkeit and Zuknftigkeit, an understanding that is still
preserved in Vergangenheit. Only step by step, moving from the language of
poetry to the language of historiography, did they adopt the meaning of periods
of time, Vergangenheit as only the latest by the turn to the nineteenth century.
What does this mean for the concept of history? In historical analysis, past and
future events are strongly linked to present findings: No past event can be remem-
bered, no future event be expected without some source in the present. But taking
them as elements of the past or the future implies that they are elements of
some coherent historical entity. The concepts indicated the new idea that they
were linked with one another in the same way as present events were linked in
the present. By describing the past like a painting, historiography was conceived
more as an art than as a science. Relying once more on the metaphor of a time

30. Cf. Eelco Runia, Presence, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1-29.
31. Cf. Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future, ed. Chris
Lorenz and Berber Bevernage (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), introduction.
590 lucian hlscher

garden, the concepts imagined the past and the future as being landscapes with a
continuous extension, like a garden with a structure of its own. Belonging to the
past or to the future was like belonging to another landscape, which was different
from the present, but coherent in itself.

TOWARD A CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL TEMPORALITY

Taking all these observations together, we may come to the conclusion that his-
tory in the sense of a historical universe had already dissolved into a series of
historical entities by the end of the eighteenth century, each of them forming a
time capsule of its own, comparable to the monads of Leibniz. The idea of a
historical universe was left a metaphysical construction beyond empirical history.
Chronological time was not a medium of universal life any more, as the classi-
cal vision of historians like Gatterer and Schlzer had postulated; the calendar
was nothing but an abstract parameter useful only for transforming single living
beings into historical data.
In the age of historicism, world history had dissolved into the histories of
epochs and nations, which were only superficially linked by the idea of progress.
Chronological time had become a neutral matrix for relating historical entities in
certain aspects and at certain points of time, but by now it had lost its character
of a living organism as conceptualized by Newton around 1700. Since the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, a revolution of historical time has been under way.
Georg Simmel in his 1917 essay The Problem of Historical Time still could
assume historical time to be an endless, unique, and homogeneous dimension of
history. But after World War I, time began step by step to become a relativistic
concept for certain fields of empirical research, not only in historiography, but
in many natural and social sciences, too: for example, the Einsteinian concept
of astronomical time, the time of childhood explored by Piaget, or the time of
economic cycles explored by Kondratjew and others.
In the humanities, by the late 1950s Fernand Braudel had tried to reintegrate
all these concepts in his famous model of three time layers.32 Assuming that each
form of life, human bodies as much as social groups, political systems, and even
landscapes and languages, had its own temporality, Braudel proposed taking time
as the common platform, the hidden agenda in all social sciences. His famous
concept of longue dure was especially influential in the following decades.
So, following Braudels idea, Reinhart Koselleck in 1970 called for a theory
of historical times, which, as he proclaimed in his speech at the Historikertag
in Cologne, revealed the temporal structures, which are adequate to the various
historical modes of movement.33
According to Koselleck, asking for a theory of historical times implied that
there was not one historical time only, but several historical times. And indeed,

32. Fernand Braudel, Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue dure, Annales: Histoire, Sciences
Sociales 13, no. 4 (1958), 725-753.
33. Daher kommt es darauf an, Temporalstrukturen freizulegen, die den mannigfachen geschicht-
lichen Bewegungsweisen angemessen sind. Reinhart Koselleck, Wozu noch Historie?, in idem,
Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 49.
 time gardens 591
since Koselleck paved the way for such a theory, modern theory of history is
much concerned with exploring the modes and structures of historical time. My
own analysis of temporal concepts in history may add to this endeavor. The
vision to build up a kit of temporal concepts for understanding how historians
write histories is worth accomplishing.
However, the debate initiated in recent decades about layers of time threat-
ens to lose all contours. Braudel and Koselleck had tried to meet the diversity
of modes of temporality by introducing formal criteria: Braudel by distinguish-
ing between the length of historical amplitudes (short, middle, longue dure),
Koselleck by concepts such as acceleration and repetition, synchrony and dia-
chrony. His theory of historical times still clings to Braudels hope to establish
a meta-theory of history, based not on different amplitudes of historical change,
but on temporal layers (Zeitschichten).34 But one may ask: what holds all these
modes of temporality together? Is there still a time garden with a fence sur-
rounding all the temporal layers that have grown on the ground of history and
the social sciences?
In concentrating on the wide variety of temporal layers, one may observe
additional deficits of the concept of relational time defended by Leibniz and
the historians who followed him: What do we not yet know about things that
are real anyway? Is there still a space for our not-knowledge, for the white
spots in history? The Enlightened concept of empty time provided historians of
the eighteenth century with a system of historical knowledge that was open for
new events. One could ask: what happened between point A and point B? What
was the relevance of the temporal distance between two events? Time mattered.
Today it rather seems a question of how to combine historical data that makes
a story. History has become an arbitrary business, which can be done in various
ways, with different interests and outcomes.
Hence I should say, it is time to revitalize the concept of empty time. Empty
time has to be taken in a sense that implies more than a mathematical method to
bring an abstract order to given data. Time has to be taken as a potential bond of
life, history as a garden with a common concept of life, real life. This is the only
way to provide a common ground for historical narratives, for keeping history
as a universal reality together. We may produce all kinds of historical concepts
and historical temporality, but we do not escape the necessity to hold fast to the
concept of empty time as the open field on which histories may arise, keeping in
touch with one another.

Ruhr-Universitt Bochum

34. Helge Jordheim is right when he argues against the reduction of Kosellecks theory of histori-
cal times to a theory of periodization, See Helge Jordheim, Against Periodization: Kosellecks
Theory of Multiple Temporalities, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012), 151-171.