Schinkel on Koselleck’s ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’

Anders Schinkel’s article ‘Imagination as a category of history: and essay concerning Koselleck’s concepts Erfarungsraum and Erwartungshorisont’ (History and Theory 44 –Feb 2005) argues that Koselleck is not able to account for the relationship between the space of experience and horizon of expectation and that a concept/category of imagination is needed to explain this relationship.

Schinkel sees change and continuity as two of the main aspects of history and he links them to Koselleck’s thesis. Schinkel believes Koselleck to primarily be interested in continuity and the static, but that his tools of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ has forced him to emphasis the difference between the past and present; the change that constitute experience and expectation. Schinkel includes this new tool of the category imagination to be able to keep a position of the static.

While I insist on the essential connection between experience and expectation, and on the impossibility of their drifting apart, I do think that their relation many change. This change depends on that which forms the connection between experience and expectation, that is, the imagination. (p.43)

One problem Schinkel sees in Koselleck’s thesis is the shift in the relationship between experience and expectation in modernity. According to Koselleck, past experiences and the expectations based upon them becomes less and less able to help in interpreting new experiences from modernity onwards. Schinkel uses historical examples to show that it has always been rational to expect that some changes that one is unaware of will happen in the future:

The point is that expectations that on superficial examination seem to be far removed from experience and inexplicable on its basis, will in effect always have a clear base in it. (p.47)

I suppose Schinkel really says that the progress that happened in modernity was not really unexpected. Progress had happened before and people started to see that the progress became more and more rapid. Thus the expectation of rapid progress also developed from past experience. Schinkel concludes that there is no change in the relationship between experience and expectation with modernity. Schinkel argues instead that imagination is the category between experience and expectation. What happens in modernity is the development of more imagination which again makes a more creative expectation.

It seems as if Schinkel feels the need to give some support to Koselleck’s definition of modernity as a break after having removed Koselleck’s argument that this is due to experience and expectation to drift apart. Schinkel writes:

This is not to deny that there isn’t an important break between the premodern and the modern period. One might describe this break in terms of the difference between a backward-looking and a forward-looking consciousness. (p.50)

I have always found Koselleck’s concept of ‘experience’ difficult because I was not able to see if the concept represented personal experience or a society’s experience. Schinkel writes that both experience and expectation ‘is personal and interpersonal at the same time’ (p.44). I am not quite sure if I am able to see how that works, but it somehow makes sense in the way that Koselleck uses these concepts.

Schinkel also gives an interesting conceptual history of ‘imagination’. ‘To speak of imagination as a creative faculty is a fairly modern idiom.’ (p.50) He also writes about related concepts such as ‘genius’, ‘original’ (as an individual’s creative power) and ‘creativity’. These concepts seem to develop with in Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, even though Schinkel does not mention this. This seem to give even further proof of modernity as a new stage in history, and is thus more in accordance with Koselleck’s theories than Schinkel’s criticism of them.

The strength of change in modernity is further emphasised in Schinkel’s conclusion:

Thus, in the modern period the character of experience (it typically became more forward-looking), expectation (it typically diverged more from experience), and imagination (it typically became stronger, more creative and thus underwrote more active ways of being) all changed. In this way the modern period is both like earlier periods – as it, too, involves the interrelation of experience, imagination and expectation – and unlike them, in that the character of this interrelation changes markedly. (p.54)

Though the article it seems as if Schinkel is afraid he is destroying Koselleck’s theories of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. However, if I understand correctly, his theory is more of a supplement that supports Koselleck’s theories. The development of imagination seems to have been a neglected part of conceptual history and Schinkel has now with his contribution mended that.

Comments

[dayre]

can you guvethe references of schinkel's text. THANKS

[ksbrorson]

Full reference is:
Schinkel, Anders; 'Imagination as a category of history: an essay concerning Koselleck's concepts of Erfahrungsraum and erwartungshorizont in History and Theory 44 (February 2005), pp.42-54

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[ClubPenguin]

This seem to give even further proof of modernity as a new stage in history, and is thus more in accordance with Koselleck’s theories than Schinkel’s criticism of them.