Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education

Matilda Keynes (Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden)

History of Education Review

ISSN: 0819-8691

Article publication date: 30 November 2018

Issue publication date: 30 November 2018

284

Citation

Keynes, M. (2018), "Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education", History of Education Review, Vol. 47 No. 2, pp. 235-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-10-2018-063

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited


Rising right-wing populism, climate change policy paralysis, anti-immigration sentiment, terrorism, drone strikes on civilians, abysmal disaster relief efforts; do these circumstances signal a crisis of human empathy? “If empathy cannot motivate us to cross a street […]”, Tyson Retz asks in the opening of this book, “[…] how can it inspire us to journey into a past full of characters who take work to understand?”

Empathy and History, Retz’s first book, is a significant and timely contribution to the long-standing and divisive debate about the understanding and role of empathy in the human sciences. A much-maligned and elusive concept, empathy has been invoked in a multitude of diverse fields across myriad times and places, including in mid-twentieth century history education, eighteenth-century continental philosophy, nineteenth-century historical science and psychology, and, in contemporary education, all of which, and more, feature in Retz’s analysis. This has resulted in a conception so disputed as to render it near-meaningless in current debates. Retz manages to both complicate and clarify this muddied picture in what is a highly detailed and systematic dual treatment of the educational history of empathy, as well as an intellectual history of its place in the discipline of history. In this impressive and ambitious undertaking, Retz manages to rescue a conception of empathy that is both conceptually clear, and relevant for history education today. He does all of this while impressing an ethical mandate upon the reader urging attentiveness to the unique particularity of historical contexts which, he argues, are the key to genuinely learning from the past.

To achieve this dual goal, Retz begins in Part I by situating the concept of empathy as it arose in educational debates about UK history education in the 1970s. Here, the concept became central in the project of preserving the autonomy of the school subject of history from the influence of integrated, social science approaches. In this endeavour, “new history” researchers drew on philosophies of history which distilled the sui generis characteristics of the discipline, of which empathy was a central feature. Retz details how this was buttressed by ideas in educational psychology and philosophy, represented chiefly by Jerome Bruner and Paul Hirst, asserting the benefits of learning the “basic structure” and distinct “forms of knowledge” which constitute the traditional disciplines and their school equivalents.

In Part II, Retz turns exclusively to an intellectual history of empathy. In Chapters 4–6, he traces the emergence and development of empathy in nineteenth-century German historicism which, reactive to Enlightenment universalism, sought to establish the autonomy and veracity of the historical sciences. The next three chapters focus on Collingwood’s philosophy of history and theories of empathetic understanding, in dialogue with continental approaches (Chapter 6), Collingwood’s twin theories of question-and-answer and absolute presuppositions (Chapter 7) and finally, Gadamer’s hermeneutics (Chapter 8).

Finally, in Part III, Retz returns to the educational sphere, tracing the fate of empathy in recent educational debates from the 1980s to the present day. Two chapters here outline the development of empathy in the national curriculum for England and Wales in the 1980s (Chapter 9), and the influential Canadian “historical thinking” model for history education, which features prominently in educational research and curriculum design today.

What this book is not is an easy journey for the reader. Retz’s methodological choices (a dual intellectual and educational history of an idea) require the reader to follow him through complex and sometimes onerous explications of manifold intellectual contexts and ideas. However, the structure of the book, designated in three parts “Education, Origins and Consequences”, alleviates some of this concern by encouraging the reader to choose the sections most interesting and relevant to her. In this way, readers interested in the vexed place of empathy in educational history can focus on Part I, while those most concerned with the intellectual history of empathy can direct their attentions to Part II, or, if attracted to empathy’s contemporary relevance, readers can attend to Part III. This is not to dissuade interested readers from tackling the book in its entirety, as this too is a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. Although admittedly this might only suit readers most ardent and well-acquainted with the fields of intellectual history and history education, or perhaps, the most assiduous general reader.

In an era characterised by rising nationalism fuelled by an increasing intolerance for difference, Retz’s careful treatment of empathy and its crucial place in the human and historical sciences is a timely contribution, both in its centring of empathy as a crucial concept for human inquiry with and across difference, but also in his method, which itself demonstrates a meticulous care in the treatment of historical subject matter. Retz’s claim that cultivating empathy for subjects in the past by methodically reconstructing their historical contexts might represents a slow and difficult process, less appealing than the emotive appeal to others’ experiences, but Retz has convinced this reader at least, that this slower and more precise process is more necessary than ever.

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