  Since Yorck understands history as a connecting band of ideas and conditions passed on from one person to another, and indeed from one generation to another, his position must not be associated with historicism. For Yorck, there is one continuous and common line of historical life—a living syndesmos. Past generations and past persons are not “outside” a present horizon in a past world of their own. Rather, they live on, as it were, in their descendents. Moreover, because of this connecting band, one can go “backwards” by way of what Yorck calls “transposition” (CR, p. 61), transposing oneself into the lives of others and thus “re-enacting,” as Dilthey would say, the positions towards life that have been lived by one's predecessors. That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is  we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140). 