All our experience is spatially marked. Immanuel Kant had indicated this. But he had internalized space to the point that it could not be held as objective. Reinhart Koselleck teaches that the understanding of our experience of the past is spacial. It has a logic of geography. It is assembled within a bonded geography. Even time, events, persons are assigned place within this geography. Often these geographies determine our master histories / narratives ( Historia Magistra Vitae) and fracture and dislocate other histories and lives of other people who then become marginal or ahistorical.
Koselleck positions histories in the plural against history in the singular. History, therefore, was not one, singular, unified, progressive project. Such a project is a secularized eschatology which human beings direct towards a final aim. Koselleck interrogated ideas of history in the singular and in its place favored history in the plural. History in the singular is utopian and teleological.
Kosellecks thinks that history in the singular became main stream in the eighteenth century. It presented history as a totality and to a large extent produced totalitarian thinking. We can clearly find a rejection of this totalitarian thinking in Emmanuel Levinas, especially in his book, Totality and Infinity. The fact that we reject history in the singular, we necessarily slip into the relativism which then means all pasts are of equal status. History in the plural that we approach is more complex. The ethical approach of responsibility to the call of the other that we find in Levinas might enables us to seek, discern and bring to light those pasts that marginalized and silenced. This means history in the plural is ethical and non-relativistic stance.
History in the plural enables us to work towards a responsible way of conceptualization of history. Singular history unite historical persons, events, and successions and direct their ultimate meaning. This is why we do not follow a narrow logic of geometry that privileges space and assigns place to time, events, persons etc. Being under the regime of unity, clarity ( meaning) and progress, it orders all history under the regime of space. Such a singular and total history is a recipe for German Catastrophe.
As already we learn from the work of Carl Schmitt taught singular history leads us to politics of friend and enemy. If one, therefore, becomes a votary of history in the singular, one naturally gets trapped in the friend and the enemy politics. History in the singular lays the precondition for totalitarianisms. Scholars root the basis of history in the singular in the enlightenment in the West.
The history in the plural tries to listen to the silences and the silenced in the narrations of history in the singular. History in the plural as a philosophy of history that does not promise a coming of a new world. It is looking not even at the past and attempts to bring to fulfilment its lost promises. It looks at the present and attempts to listen to the silences and the silenced so that other narratives and histories can find their own voice. This effort to pluralize history is a morally-voiced history. It is far removed from the dominating agenda of history in the singular.
This approach does not present any past as criminal, illegitimate and inferior. Past remains past in this approach. But it looks at how the plural past is influencing the present of our people. To some extent history in the plural resonates with the Negative Dialectics of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. But these thinkers are backward looking thinkers in as much as they look back to identify fault lines in order to address issues of the present. History in the plural is forward looking and wishes to seek ways of being human in the living present.
There is no idealization of any past as Hindutva does. History in the plural puts the pasts of a society into moral calculus and without imposing a direction and a telos for the march of time, it only looks to provide ways of acting in the present without replicating violent tyrants. The real concern is to establish strong relations between morality and politics.
Unfortunately, history in the singular is proliferating everywhere. History in the plural remains to be written. History in the singular is a closed history. It has its destiny and marches towards it. Being closed it closes us too. This is why we need histories in the plural. Histories in the plural accepts that history is not transcendent to us. It is not triumphantly marching to a glory. We are thrown into history. This thrownness opens possibilities of being-in-the-world. This means we can have many ways of being-in-the-world. All these ways of being human are part of histories in the plural.
