Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past

Thomas A. Kohut

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000044980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching History

Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology.

The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry.

Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary, the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek to know and understand human beings.

Chapter 1

Historical Excursus

Empathy in the Debates over Knowing in the Natural and in the Human Sciences

Although empathy’s role in historical knowledge has not been the focus of much recent attention, empathy—or what the term seeks to convey—was implicitly and frequently explicitly considered within the larger debate that dominated much of the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century about the relationship between knowing in the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and knowing in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Indeed, it was frequently asserted that empathy is at the very heart of the unique mode of “understanding” (Verstehen) that constitutes our knowledge of the human world.¹ Empathy as a way of knowing was the subject of considerable attention in two disciplines that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century to study the human world: first history, as the study of human beings and their societies in the past; and then sociology, as the study of human beings and their societies in the present.²

The Status of Empathy in the Emerging Discipline of History

The role played by empathy in knowing the human world generally and the human past in particular can be traced back at least as far as the early eighteenth-century philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico. Vico’s philosophy of history came in reaction to the view articulated by his younger contemporary, David Hume, that the aim of history, like any other science,

is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations … These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.³

In contrast to Hume, Vico denied that the human world could be known in the way we know the world of nature. In his famous verum factum maxim that the “true” (verum) and the “made” or “created” (factum) are interchangeable, Vico set forth both the distinction between the world of nature and the human world and the justification for our uniquely privileged access to the latter in a way that can readily be connected with empathy.⁴ The truth of the natural world can only be known by God, according to Vico, since it is His creation. We can only observe the physical world from without or through experiments where we in effect seek to imitate God’s creation of the natural world in the laboratory. By contrast, we can know the truth of the human world from within since we ourselves have made or created it, and “its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”⁵ According to Isaiah Berlin, Vico argued that because the human world is the creation of human beings like ourselves, whose thoughts and actions we can share, we are able to “re-experience the process” of creation “in our imagination” to achieve a “true” knowledge of the human past.⁶

In reacting against the Enlightenment rationalism of philosophers like David Hume, various nineteenth-century German philosophers, oft unawares, drew Vico’s distinction between knowledge in the natural sciences as a form of external knowing and knowledge in the human sciences as a form of internal knowing based on Verstehen or “understanding,” a process identical or at least closely related to what we would today call empathy. Indeed, Johann Gottfried Herder actually used the phrase sich hinein fühlen in claiming that to know human beings and their creations one needs to “feel oneself” into them. The connection between knowledge and feeling was not restricted to the human world for Herder but applied to knowledge of the world in general. Nevertheless, his claim that each culture has its own unique spirit and value, and that to know and appreciate the spirit and value of another culture one must feel one’s way inside it, made Einfühlung the means by which one comprehends the time, place, and history of a people.⁷

Following Herder, “sich hinein fühlen” played a central role in most subsequent attempts to define and articulate the form of knowledge unique to the human sciences, history par excellence.⁸ In the 1830s, Leopold von Ranke, generally thought of as the founder of modern source-based history, echoed Vico in arguing that the “essence” or “content” of every historical phenomenon is “spiritual,” and hence can only be known “through spiritual apperception.” Historical “apperception” of this spiritual essence was, according to Ranke, based upon the congruence between the operation of the “observing” spirit of the historian and that of the spirit emerging from the historical phenomenon itself.⁹ Although Ranke’s contemporary, the historian Gustav Droysen, criticized Ranke for going “little beyond collecting facts,” he followed his older colleague in seeing historical knowledge as “spiritual apperception.”¹⁰ Droysen regarded this way of knowing to be characteristic not merely of history, however, but of all the human sciences. Indeed, what distinguished the human from the natural sciences, for Droysen, was the fact that the latter explain (erklären) the physical world of nature, whereas the former understand (verstehen) the spiritual world of human beings. The natural sciences explain by constructing formal generalizations that take the form of universal laws about “repetitive causal chains”; history and the other human sciences understand “the unique inner world of spirit” through Einfühlung.¹¹ Like Vico, Droysen believed that our knowledge of the natural world is superficial, since those things which belong to it “have for us no individual, at least no personal, existence,” whereas traces left by the people of the past speak “to us and we can understand” them as a result of the “kinship of our nature with that of the utterances lying before us as historical material.”¹² In history we are able to relive the inner states of the people of the past through the expressions they have left behind because we ourselves are the product of history and what we seek to know is therefore already contained within us, “the result,” as Droysen put it, “of the entire mental content [of the past] that we have unconsciously collected within ourselves and transformed into our own subjective world.” In the end, for Droysen, it is our very historicity that makes it possible for us to know the past.¹³

The philosopher with whom the distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences is most often associated is Wilhelm Dilthey, and history was for him the paradigmatic discipline in the human sciences. In a voluminous series of works characterized by rich imagination and deep insight, along with shifting views and some lack of intellectual rigor, Dilthey sought, following Kant, to produce a “critique of historical reason” that would, in his words, lay the “epistemological foundation for the human sciences.”¹⁴ Whereas the Naturwissenschaften are concerned with the physical world of nature, the Geisteswissenschaften are concerned with the spiritual and/or mental world of human beings. While the physical world, for Dilthey (as for Vico and for Droysen), is “a mere shadow cast by a hidden reality,” in the human world “we possess reality as it really is” “in the form of the facts of consciousness given in inner experience.”¹⁵ For Dilthey, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften were distinguished less by their objects of study and more by how they know those objects, specifically by the perspective adopted by the observer.¹⁶ In the natural sciences, we can only know the physical world from without, through sense perception. In the human sciences, we can know the world of thought and feeling by experiencing it from within.¹⁷ Following Droysen, Dilthey asserted that the natural sciences only explain, for we are not able to “understand the processes of nature … It is different in the domain of the moral [human] world. Here I understand everything.”¹⁸ Knowledge in the human sciences for Dilthey, then, was rooted “in lived experience and understanding, both of which lead the human sciences to differ radically from the natural sciences and give the formation of the human sciences a character of its own.”¹⁹

Dilthey believed that objective knowledge was possible in the Geisteswissenschaften because the subject and the object of knowledge are the same.²⁰ In the case of history,

the primary condition for the possibility of historical science is contained in the fact that I am myself a historical being and that the one who investigates history is the same as the one who makes history … Lived experience contains the totality of our being. It is this that we re-create in understanding.²¹

That is to say, objective knowledge is possible in the human sciences generally and in history in particular, according to Dilthey, because the means and ends of knowledge are the same. Experience is at once what we seek to know and how we know it. Specifically, Dilthey saw historical understanding as coming through the historian’s re-experience of past experience. Although never using the word “Einfühlung,” Dilthey, in words and phrases including sich hineinversetzen, nacherleben, and nachbilden, suggested that we know the “inner experience,” “the facts of consciousness” that constitute the human world, “through a kind of transposition,” by putting ourselves in the place of the other to re-experience the other’s experience.²²

Scholars have generally distinguished between an early Dilthey, of the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), and a later Dilthey, of The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). The early Dilthey believed that objective knowledge in the human sciences was possible because we and the people we study are fundamentally similar psychologically. In history, we can know past experience because the historian and the people of the past “are not opposed to each other like two incomparable facts. Rather, both have been formed upon the substratum of a general human nature.” It is that shared human nature which makes human understanding in general and historical understanding in particular possible.²³ Past experiences are “intelligible to us from within” because “we can, up to a certain point, reproduce them in ourselves on the basis of the perception of our own states.”²⁴ In knowing the human world we engage in a process of experience, expression, and understanding (Erlebnis, Ausdruck, und Verstehen). Our empathic imagination, our common humanity, and our own lived experiences enable us to recreate past experience within our psyche.²⁵ Through introspection, we are then able to observe what we have re-experienced, to identify, articulate, understand, and interpret it.

The later Dilthey moved away from the idea that a universal human psychology enabled us to know past experience, adopting instead the more Hegelian notion that historical understanding was possible because the historian and the past both partake of some ill-defined “objective spirit,” which he called “life philosophy,” whereby “the past is continuously an enduring present for us.”...