Abstract
In 1896, Freud took the idea that the human past may be translated, deciphered, or otherwise understood to yield undreamed-of understanding, and distilled it into the pithy declaration: Saxa loquuntur! To hear those messages and to draw those lessons, historians, amongst others, have often relied on empathy, as a mode of observation, though the extent to which they have relied on empathy has been often overlooked. Thomas Kohut’s Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is framed to show us why such an oversight matters and how it may be redressed.
Kohut systematically approaches these issues. Chapter 1 offers an illuminating account of the essential role that empathy, as an observational vantage point, has played since the emergence of history as a discipline. The next two chapters focus on the concept’s broader (Chapter 2) and narrower (Chapter 3) definitions. Kohut argues that of the three available philosophical views (the “theory theory,” the “simulation theory,” and the “phenomenological theory”), the simulation view is to be preferred. According to this account, “empathy is an experience in the observer of the experience of the observed” (p. 40); it is also agreed that the cognitive dimensions play a more prominent role than do the affective ones (p. 36). Within such a framework, empathy functions as a mode of perspective-taking whereby the historian seeks understanding rather than merging, identifying, or simply sympathizing with those whom they study. Taken in this way, and drawing on his wealth of historical expertise, Kohut turns in Chapter 4 to demonstrate how empathy may be used to help us understand three examples: two from the history of modern Germany and the third drawn from the Holocaust.
Having demonstrated the theoretical underpinnings and practical feasibility of using the empathic mode of investigation to better understand people of the past, the remainder of the book sets itself the task of answering a set of important and pressing questions: what makes knowledge of the past possible (Chapter 5)? Is there an important distinction to be found in using empathy to understand people of the present and people of the past (Chapter 6)? Does the empathizing historian run into an authority problem? Otherwise put, how can historians’ reconstructions of the past have any force other than their own idiosyncratic preferences (Chapter 7)? Finally, if we can cogently interpret the historical past in just the ways Kohut lays out, what does that tell us about other interpretive, clinical efforts (Chapter 8)? I will return to address two of these issues below, namely the status of historical knowledge and the authority question. Though not exhaustive, my worries may be representative of a central concern that cuts through Kohut’s answers to most of these questions. But before doing so, I would like to note that the answers to that final question, given that Kohut makes use of both clinical experience and historical expertise, are particularly well taken.
Indeed, this is an admirable book. The pace is crisp, the writing is clear and precise, the evidence is scholarly and pointed, and one of the main messages—namely, that we adopt observational vantage points, even empathic ones at that, which often escape our awareness and that as historians, theorists, or analysts it is imperative that we become better acquainted with these presuppositions so that we may use them most effectively—is persuasively argued.
However, let me return to the questions, evidenced in the summary above, and Kohut’s answer that the empathic mode of historical investigation is authorized and warranted by an appeal to a universal human nature. Kohut writes: “I relied on two aspects of universal human nature to help me understand the behavior of young middle-class Germans during the Third Reich. . . a need to belong to a group” and the “capacity for empathy” (p. 91). If right, this, of course, could do the trick: the historian’s reconstructions of the past are guaranteed or otherwise underwritten by these universals. Otherwise put, it is the “unchanging core human nature that historians rely on in knowing the past” (p. 91).
But I worry that Kohut’s focus on the universal, here, may be deeply misleading. Part of the issue, it seems to me, is that in positing a universal human nature, one obscures some fundamental social and historical issues, which concern not only ourselves, as theorists or historians, but also our cultural inheritance. For example, why does a historian (or philosopher, or psychoanalyst), let’s say, need to believe in universal human nature? But more: why does such a belief in the idea of some core human nature arise with such force as a Western cultural phenomenon in the 18th and 19th centuries? There are stories to tell here and there are answers that empathy may help us to divine. To wit, and to retain our example, the individual historian may need to feel legitimate and making appeals to objectivity or universality, as is well known, may help to assuage some internal conflict or justified anxiety. Might such an explanation analogously then aid us in better understanding how rights-based liberalism became a sort of orthodoxy?
A paid-up empathizing historian will have to answer those questions. For my money, however, and here is the tension, addressing such queries by appealing to the universal capacity for empathy seems question-begging (after all, it appears to be the very tool that we are interested in justifying), whereas noting some need for group membership is, at best, tenuous. Is there a universal need to make sense of oneself in relation to others? Sure. Is there a universal need to understand oneself in relation to a cultural context? Perhaps. Even so, here too we can rightly worry. Does positing such a broad cultural framework foreclose other potential avenues of investigation? Might such a conceptual move prevent us from digging down very far into how cultural frameworks themselves shift and change over time to meet very different needs or why certain ideologies are captivating to some and not to others within a certain cultural framework at a particular historical moment?
Far from amounting to a full-throated critique, my concerns speak rather to the strength and quality of Thomas Kohut’s work. Can the core insight—that empathy as a mode of observation enables us to see much more of any particular situation—be defended without claims to a universal human nature? I think it can. But more, I think that such conversations are timely and necessary, and that Kohut’s Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past ought to enliven them across and between a wide range of fields—history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, to name but a few. Kohut’s well-argued and extremely stimulating book, then, should have equally broad appeal and will, I think, readily repay that warranted attention.