Experience as horizon: Koselleck, expectation and historical time

Abstract

This article explores and develops the concept of the horizon as a figurative and analytical device used to negotiate the relations between experience, everyday life and historical time. Its central focus is Reinhart Koselleck’s application of the concept, though it also draws on the work of Karl Mannheim (through his distinction between conjunctive and communicative experience) and Raymond Williams (through his concept of structure of feeling) in order to add to and refine Koselleck’s use of the term in examining the temporal structures of experience and expectation. Our sense of historical time is generated through the tensions between experience and expectation, everyday life and social process. These are, of course, historically variable and contingent. During the course of modernity and late modernity, experience and expectation have become increasingly divergent. Their separation has profoundly affected how we think about historical time in relation to everyday life and the span of a generation and a lifetime. It also turns the conception of history as historia magistra vitae on its head, with modernity increasingly forced to fund itself ethically out of its own transient present. The article discusses the main aspects of these changes and how they have altered the balance between the space and horizon of experience and expectation. It attends both to the need to examine historical concepts in terms of their various meanings and implications, and to the ways in which the particular concept of the horizon can help illuminate the consequences of accelerating time in the conditions of modernity and late modernity. The diminution of historical understanding in relation to everyday life is seen as among the most serious of these consequences.