Empathy and history: Historical understanding in re-enactment, hermeneutics and education

Tyson Retz’s Empathy and History is an ambitious and well-researched book, which sheds light on the complex origins and development of empathy in the discipline of history, history education and the philosophy of history. The author delivers a compelling exploration of the philosophical context, from which the concept of empathy emerged and argues for a return to metaphysics in philosophical reflection on empathy that focuses on the object of knowledge into which the empathetic inquirer investigates, as much as on the process of knowing itself.

The book has a two-fold focus on empathy’s educational and intellectual history. On the one hand, Retz aims to lay out the history of empathy as a central concept in historical teaching and learning. On the other hand, he provides an intellectual history of empathy in history and the philosophy of history. Collingwood’s approach to understanding past agents, central in Retz’s inquiry, seems to inform the approach towards the study of the intricate history of empathy’s philosophical origins. In his book, Retz aims to understand the context that made it possible for empathy to become conceptualised as central to a distinctive historical way of knowing and historical knowledge, both in the field of history education and the discipline of history. Or, put another way, he interprets the positions of a vast array of thinkers, who contributed to the debate, as answers to particular, historically-embedded questions of the era.

In Part I, Retz demonstrates how English educationalists, driven by the goal to preserve the status of history as a distinct form of knowledge, launched empathy as the key concept of a particularly historical way of knowing in the 1960s and 1970s. Paradoxically, these reforms in school history came about at the same time when the practice of history was becoming more interdisciplinary and open to theories and concepts imported from sociology, anthropology, economics and other disciplines. Retz traces the influence that the philosophy of history exerted on English educationalists keen to specify history’s conceptual structure and the role of empathy in historical teaching and learning.

Part II charts a similar desire to defend the status of the discipline of history against Enlightenment universalism, which drove the leading figures of nineteenth-century German historicism to adopt empathy as a core element of historical thinking and knowledge. Retz then continues to trace the history of empathy by engaging with the work of R. G. Collingwood, with whom he shares a critical attitude towards the individualising psychologism of the nineteenth-century German historicist conception of empathy. Retz presents a nuanced and thorough discussion of Collingwood’s theory of re-enactment, instrumental as it was to the rise of empathy as a central concept in history education, aiming to evaluate whether it can, in fact, be described as a theory of empathy. His answer is negative. Retz aims to defend Collingwood from criticisms directed at the theory of re-enactment, which is, according to him, mistakenly interpreted as proffering ‘a naïve theory of empathy concerned with recovering the pristine meaning of the past’ (p. 127). One could even argue that one of the main aims of the book is to show that Collingwood’s re-enactment ‘is not visceral and immediate, but critical, ratio-native and inferential’ (p. 128). To that end, Retz emphasises the links in Collingwood’s philosophy of history between his theory of re-enactment, the logic of question and answer and the theory of absolute presuppositions, which, when considered together, put into question the alignment of re-enactment with the empathy-dependent hermeneutics of reproducing past mental events. Part II concludes by showing connections between Collingwood’s philosophy of history and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, underlining how both thinkers stood against a psychologistic epistemology and its individual-to-individual view of empathy.

Finally, in Part III, Retz continues to unravel the development of the concept of empathy in the field of education. He primarily focuses on empathy’s role in the debates that coincided with the development of the national curriculum for England and Wales in the 1980s, as well as the development of the Canadian model for history education, in which empathy departed from its origins in the Collingwood’s re-enactment due to the influence of Jörn Rüsen’s (2005) theory of historical consciousness.

However, Retz’s aims in Empathy and History reach beyond tracing the fate of empathy in school history education and the discipline of history. His engagement with Collingwood’s ideas urge him to work out a stance on what constitutes empathetic understanding in history. If empathy in history implies understanding of historical context, Retz aims to specify ‘the nature of the historical context that empathetic understanding should attempt to uncover’ (p. 8). For him, it is the context ‘which gave rise to common forms of life in the past’ (p. 8), or ‘the context in which it was possible for past agents to hold their beliefs as true and to act upon them accordingly’ (p. 218). Weaving together Collingwood’s and Gadamer’s insights, Retz defends ‘the historicist principle that the meaning of an object resides in its past while allowing for the fact that the interpretation of this meaning always occurs against the backdrop of tradition and prior understanding’ (p. 11). He proposes that ‘[i]n attempting to identify and come to terms with the context in which people thought and acted, the opportunity also arises for us to reflect on what we share with them, which makes understanding them possible, as well as the ways in which we differ, which provides us with new content from which to learn’ (p. 69).

In the attempts of different thinkers to conceptualise empathy throughout its educational and intellectual history, it is this tension between similarity and difference, engagement and detachment that seems to be at the heart of the debate. In this context, the role of affective empathy and its role in historical understanding and knowledge of past lives appears to be particularly contentious. Retz himself seems to uphold the view, worth quoting at length, that:

This reflects a persistent and prevalent suspicion of emotions and feelings (with good reason) as a mode of engagement with past lives in historical understanding. Affective engagement with the experience of past agents, when unchecked by critical distance, poses the risk that we collapse temporalities, impose our present-day values and beliefs onto people who lived in the past and assume a transhistorical conception of human experience. However, the question remains whether we can avoid affective engagement with past agents, even when our historical inquiry into past lives restricts empathy to its strictly cognitive dimension. And if, in our attempts to understand the context in which it was possible for past agents to hold specific values, beliefs and ideas, we cannot completely eliminate the affective dimension from the process of understanding, how do we make sense of it? In what ways could affective engagement serve us to better understand past contexts and the similarities and differences between past and present lives? Interestingly, Retz, in the very last sentence of the book, alludes to the fact that ‘the person who sets about this study of past forms of life will soon discover that it generates a full range of emotions, feelings and curiosities that themselves fuel further inquiry’ (p. 218).

This brings to mind Dominick LaCapra’s (2004) reflections on the experiential turn in history and related disciplines. The burgeoning interest in experience, with a focus on experiences of marginalised groups, microhistory, oral history, testimony and experiential sources, highlights, for LaCapra, how the past as lived experience is not necessarily inaccessible and remote; it may carry on and be found in the present. Engagement with experiential sources, such as diaries and autobiographies and especially oral and video testimonies offer historians an emotionally charged and visceral, embodied ‘relation to experience or the way events are lived’ and are valuable to historians because of ‘the manner in which they enable one to hear the grain of the embodied voice in relation to facial expressions and bodily gestures, making ‘voice’ more than a metaphor’ (LaCapra, 2016, p. 382).

LaCapra’s attention to voice, facial expressions and bodily gestures echoes a plethora of recent studies that show visceral attunement in the case of observing facial expressions (e.g., Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta, & Lenzi, 2003; Leslie, Johnson-Frey, & Grafton, 2004; Pfeifer, Iacoboni, Mazziotta, & Dapretto, 2008) and movements (e.g., Kaplan & Iacoboni, 2006). Even without the visual observation, reading about actions and bodily movements has been shown to evoke a neural firing in the premotor and motor cortex as well as a motor potential in the limbs (Aziz-Zadeh, Wilson, Rizzolatti, & Iacoboni, 2006; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Speer, Zacks, Reynolds, & Hedden, 2005), while reading about affective states similarly leads to those feelings and emotions being felt in the body (Clay & Iacoboni, 2011; Miall, 2011; Oatley, 2002; Wojciechowski & Gallese, 2011). Coupled with critical detachment and interrogation of time- and place-bound contexts, this embodied engagement with lived experience requires an acceptance of a paradox and a cognitive capacity for metaphor (Modell 2003, p. 175), which involves a transitory, partial identification that maintains a simultaneous sense of similarity and difference. The otherness of past agents may be too great for such intersubjective attunement to take place and sources that could offer such a visceral glimpse into past lives may not be available. However, far from being necessarily inaccessible and enclosed, lived experience, in this visceral and affective mode, could be, in some cases, intersubjectively communicable. Combining intersubjective attunement with a critical and inferential approach might permit us to make sense of (1) how past contexts made it possible for past agents to hold specific values, beliefs and goals and also (2) how past agents’ process of affectively charged lived experience shaped their perception of the context as well as their behaviour.

Instead of limiting understanding of past peoples to the cognitive dimension, I would suggest that there is a need to reflect on and develop a comprehensive pedagogical concept of historical empathy that integrates cognitive and affective engagement with the past and which aids students in navigating the ever more complex terrain of competing narratives. This need is all the more urgent considering that the past is already being mediated in an increasing variety of immersive digital content that often (not always) aims to erase the traces of mediation, focuses heavily on emotional engagement and promises an unreflective empathetic experience of ‘what it feels like to be in other people’s shoes’. But if the aim of history education is not just to acknowledge the otherness, but likewise to recognise a shared humanity across difference, a degree of affective engagement and emotional intelligence is needed. As evidenced by research on empathy in the context of history museums (e.g., Smith, 2016), affective engagement is, in fact, necessary as a basis for openness to a different narrative of experience and for overcoming the ‘us’ and ‘them’ outlook that so often defines contested pasts and their contemporary legacies.