What follows is the talk delivered at the workshop Clio in a Phrygian Cap: Historicist Epistemology and Democratic Political Thought in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe, held in Budapest on October 8–9, 2026. The talk was a somewhat presumptuous enterprise, though its occasion was well justified. My friend Cody J. Inglis had asked me to think with him — which is to say, to think about historicist epistemology and democracy, both of them rather fine subjects to think about. What follows, then, is an experiment, undertaken at his prompting, which has yielded findings that may be of interest notwithstanding what…
I have told my colleagues at the Institute that I am away on a pilgrimage. This is not exactly true — the more honest word would be Sterne’s, a sentimental journey, but that would have required explaining Sterne over coffee, and cost me the sympathy “pilgrimage” gets for free. The word already carries its own permission slip; nobody would think to ask for the itinerary of somebody else’s soul. So: a pilgrimage, to Freiburg, where I am, at its gate, about to do the least pilgrim-like thing imaginable — walk up a perfectly ordinary hill. The hill is called…
Every time I pass Fink on his lonely walks through the Lorettoberg parkland, he mutters something entirely unintelligible — a habit of his, and none of my business, except that yesterday the wind was strong enough, and the air damp enough, to carry the words to me regardless of whose business they were. The trinity, he said. The unity of the three I’s, he said. Now, one ought to be cautious when Neoplatonists start speaking of trinities — and so I was, enumerating, somewhat slowly, on my own account: there is the human I, standing in the natural attitude;…
The line of argument runs thus: from an analysis of how the concept of time is first introduced — ἀριθμεῖν vs. Zeitigung — through the observation that in both cases the activity of consciousness precedes time, or at least precedes any concept of it, to the temporalization of noemata. Before individual consciousness turns to the operations of active synthesis, it always already deals with the objects of the world — not, the sentence had meant to say, as isolated data before an empty gaze, but as something already sorted, already shaped by a hand not its own. The activity…
The very last thing I should wish to do — I put it first, because my purposes will shortly demand it — is to write yet another text. Another of those weakly neurotic productions in which the author reproaches himself, at length, for his incapacity for system, while remaining, throughout, wholly incapable of examining the values upon which system rests. I wished to note that. My reluctance, however, has a source other than any desire to conceal the fundamental kinship between my own person and the general run of persons around me. Of the nature of that kinship we…
Dilthey writes that man is, by his nature, historical; and the proposition is not without its attractions — though it is equally not without its want of precision. His insistence — shared, as these things tend to be, by a great many others — amounts to this: not merely that man cannot exist outside of history (a claim which, whatever its romantic piety, is rather a remark about evolution than about the distinctive character of man; it places him among the animals shaped by their conditions, and there it leaves him), but that history, for its part, cannot exist…