Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2015

Vol. 47, No. 3, 214–226, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.838661

A Moderate Hermeneutical Approach to

Empathy in History Education
TYSON RETZ
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne

Abstract

The concept of empathy in history education involves students in the attempt to think within
the context of historical agents’ particular predicaments. Tracing the concept’s philosophical
heritage to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history and ‘re-enactment doctrine’, this article
argues that our efforts in history classrooms to understand historical agents by their own stan-
dards are constrained by a tension that arises out of the need to disconnect ourselves from a
present that provides the very means for understanding the past. Though rather than serving
to undermine the concept, it is proposed that the moderate hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer,
through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal distance, transforms the
factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation into those that potentially enable it.
The article aspires to shed new light on what is at play when history students engage in the
intellectually demanding task of empathizing in history.

Keywords: history education, historical empathy, Collingwood, re-enactment,

hermeneutics, Gadamer, prejudice, tradition

Historical Empathy to Empathy-in-History

Since the 1970s, the term ‘historical empathy’ has symbolized the belief in history
education that historical explanation ought to proceed from a consideration of the
particular context within which people in the past understood their world and acted
thereof. Having such a concept occupy a role in forming young people’s historical
understandings seems reasonable when one considers how basic empathy is to under-
standing those around us in the everyday. Without some effort to see the world
through the eyes of others, our attempts to understand and explain their actions and
attitudes are bound to the first person perspective. The fluid and cross-functional nat-
ure of the empathic process——integrating cognitive, emotional, moral and social
structures——is the reason it remains definitionally and conceptually elusive. In
employing the concept, we are dealing with what Freud (1959, p. 40) suggested may

Ó 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 215

play ‘the largest part in our understandings of what is inherently foreign to our own
ego in other people’.
In the human and social sciences, empathy has denoted a method of explaining
human action and historical phenomena distinct from the positivist scientific methods
of explanation (Stueber, 2002). For history, an awareness of the need for intuitive
approaches to historical explanation emerged in the context of German historians’
eschewal of generalization and conceptualization in history which, they asserted, ‘emp-
ties the reality of history of its vital qualities’ (Iggers, 1983, p. 10). At the time of pro-
fessionalization in the early nineteenth century, they recognized that a degree of being
outside oneself, of immersion in the subject, was necessary for grasping the unique
meaning of human action in the past. For Ranke this process was Einfühlung (empa-
thy), for Dilthey Erlebnis (experience) and, for Weber, Verstehen, a highly rational pro-
cess of understanding reached through direct confrontation with the subject, free of
the limitations of conceptual thought (Iggers, 1997, pp. 37–39). Historical empathy
belongs to this historicist tradition of finding validity and objectivity in history through
the transcendence of contemporary normative constraints and orthodoxies.
Yet while the postulates of historicism have long been scrutinized, exponents of his-
torical empathy have been prone to conceptualize its components reductively, defining
what it is not and heeding little to the wider parameters in which it sits genealogically
and philosophically.1 What has gone largely unexplored is the seemingly fundamental
aporia concerning the hermeneutical tension between our own historicity and the need
to understand past agents by the standards of their own time, place and individual cir-
cumstances. In this respect, Blake (1998) shifts the focus where it ought to be if
empathy is to serve as a rigorous historical method that educators can employ to culti-
vate sophisticated understandings of past actions in their students. He argues that the
term ‘historical empathy’ is in fact a counterproductive one, for in such a notion, he
writes, ‘the historian is in danger both of being blind to the epistemic perils of how
we might “know others” and of assuming a distinctiveness of historical inquiry … the
issue of empathy presents common problems to all disciplines where it is germane,
and not to history alone’ (Blake, 1998, p. 26). The problems of trying to ‘know oth-
ers’ is a theme with a long philosophical pedigree, central to some of the major works
of thinkers such as Hume, Smith, Mill, the German Romanticists and philosophers in
the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions. Thus, Blake proposes that the
search for a specific category of historical empathy be abandoned and a more integra-
tive ‘empathy-in-history’ designation and orientation be adopted. ‘This would allow
us to work in an interdisciplinary fashion in establishing the parameters of empathy
and overcoming the many epistemological problems that confront us whenever
empathy is used’ (Blake, p. 26).
To be sure, writers such as Foster and those he cites (2001, p. 168) are right to
distinguish the way empathy operates in history from the way it operates in psychol-
ogy. Whereas historians are separated from their subjects by historical distance,
psychologists confer reciprocally with their subjects in the present. Following Blake,
however, I do not take this to imply that the category of a specific mode of
historical empathy is somehow immune to the problems that impinge upon empathy
generally. The purpose of this article is to confront one such problem, that of what
216 Tyson Retz

to do with our own ways of thinking when trying to think like people from the past.
Acknowledging this problem, the history educationalist Sam Wineburg announces
the philosophical hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, stating, ‘We, no less than the
people we study, are historical beings. Trying to shed what we know in order to
glimpse the “real” past is like trying to examine microbes with the naked eye: The
instruments we abandon are the ones that enable us to see’ (Wineburg, 2001,
p. 10). The question for Wineburg, equally my focus here, is the extent to which
we need to temporarily bracket what we know in order to understand the thinking
of bygone peoples. After locating current thinking on empathy in history in the
‘re-enactment doctrine’ of R. G. Collingwood, I explore how Gadamer’s moderate
hermeneutics, through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal
distance, reconfigures the factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation
in history into those that potentially enable it.

A Basis in Re-enactment
‘Foreigners tell us that in education, as in all else, we have no care for method’
(Marten, 1901, p. 84). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marten perceived
that British educators were indifferent to method in history education vis-à-vis their
German counterparts, where the nationalist proclivities of the Romantic movement
had imbued history education with an ‘anthropological purpose’ to discover the
‘phenomenon of man’, heightening the need to reflect on pedagogy therewith
(Toebes, 1987, pp. 30–31). In Britain, it was not until the 1960s that historical theory
began to influence the way history was taught. William Burston, Head of the History
Department in the Institute of Education at the University of London, advanced that
the method of teaching any subject depended directly upon the logic of explanation
of that subject. In his own subject he found this logic predominantly in the works of
the philosophers of history R. G. Collingwood, William Dray, W. H. Walsh and
Michael Oakeshott (Burston, 1954). Collingwood’s idea of the ‘historical imagination’
featured particularly in Burston’s conception of what history teaching ought to
encompass, and his championing of the historiographical scholarship on the historical
imagination, as Hughes-Warrington (2003, p. 15) has observed, ‘virtually ensured
references to Collingwood in nearly all future educational writings on the subject’.
Educationalists’ interest in Collingwood combined well with broader currents of edu-
cational thought characterized en bloc by the emphasis they placed on the procedural
how of learning as opposed to the substantive what to learn.
Collingwood never employed the term ‘historical empathy’, but in his ‘re-enactment
doctrine’ provided the conceptual means for its coinage in history education.2 He pos-
ited that it is possible to re-enact the thoughts of other people because thoughts
proper, unlike the physiological processes in which they are instantiated, ‘are not pri-
vate items unique to the person that has them, but publicly rethinkable propositional
contents’ (D’Oro & Connelly, 2010, x 4.6, emphasis added). In The idea of history,
Collingwood refers to this concept as ‘thought in its meditation’ and articulates it
through a description of his reading of Plato:
 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 217

… as an actual experience of his own, Plato’s argument must undoubtedly

have grown up out of a discussion of some sort, though I do not know what
it was, and been closely connected with such a discussion. Yet if I not only
read his argument but understand it, follow it in my own mind by re-argu-
ing it with and for myself, the process of argument which I go through is
not a process resembling Plato’s, it actually is Plato’s, so far as I understand
him rightly. (Collingwood, 1994, p. 301)
It is easy to see the appeal of such a notion for historians and history educators,
who since Leopold von Ranke codified the disciplinary procedures of history in the
phrase ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘as things actually occurred’) had operated on the
principle that historical explanation be based strictly on the evidence left behind by
the past. As for interpreting that evidence, Ranke advocated the idea that we can
only understand the particular when we can perceive the whole, and understand
each part of it. ‘The earlier idea of timeless truths based on fixed human qualities
yielded to the historicist method of understanding each particular epoch in its own
terms’ (Macintyre, 2004, p. 132).
Collingwood is to be understood in the light of these historicist injunctions. By his
pen, our ability to go through the same argumentative processes or stages as our pre-
decessors allows us to understand the specific circumstances that connected past
agents’ thoughts and intentions to their actions. In other words, the universality of
thought allows the student of history to understand past agents by their own stan-
dards, thereby leading her away from judging the past with ‘one eye on the present’.
The re-enactment of past thought for Collingwood constitutes historical knowledge
itself. Past thoughts are encapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by virtue
of their incongruity, confine them to separate planes. ‘Thus while the immediacy of
past thought inextricably connects it to its own context, the mediacy of its rationality
allows it to be successfully re-thought by the historian in a completely different con-
text’ (McIntyre, 2008, p. 144).
While it is clear that Collingwood’s philosophy provided empathy with a conceptual
raison d’eˆtre in history education, it is unlikely that he would sanction any one of the so-
called empathizing historians (psyche-snatcher, necromancer, time-traveller) crafted in
his name by Shemilt (1984, pp. 41–43) and recently expounded by Lévesque (2008,
pp. 144–146). Although the portraits certainly distinguish sets of problems that teachers
and students encounter when working with the concept, they elide a principal tenet of
Collingwood’s thought: re-enactment is always a critical examination of the presupposi-
tions of others’ thoughts and, thus, always involves a strong element of self-reflection
upon one’s own thinking about the agent being studied.3 Nevertheless, Shemilt properly
identifies what would seem to be the primary obstacle to developing empathy in history:
‘although the empathising historian may be said to explain action “from the inside” …
he does so from the inside of our know-in-common world, not from that of our predeces-
sors’ (Shemilt, 1984, pp. 44–45, original emphasis). The extent to which this seemingly
permanent epistemic condition represents a problem for history educators can be
enhanced by turning our attention to the field of hermeneutics.
218 Tyson Retz

Conservative and Moderate Hermeneutics

The issue, then, is not that history students are unable to take perspectives of bygone
peoples, but in Levstik’s words, ‘has to do with the extent to which students could or
would consider perspectives as anything other than an extension of their own thinking
about the past’ (Levstik, 2008, p. 359, original emphasis). Put otherwise, history edu-
cators are faced with the problem that Gadamer calls the ‘problem of hermeneutics’,
expressed pithily by the statement: ‘Production and reproduction remain essentially
distinct operations’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 191); or, to use language prevalent in the lit-
erature on historical empathy, that enact and re-enact, construct and reconstruct,
think and rethink, live and relive, remain essentially distinct operations. What makes
them distinct from one another? Gadamer’s response invokes Schleiermacher’s para-
digmatic claim that the act of understanding involves the reconstruction of the pro-
duction, ‘to understand a writer better than he understood himself’ (pp. 191–193, original
emphasis), to advance the opposing argument that the prejudices or preconceptions
that we necessarily take into the act of interpretation preclude the possibility of the
interpreter claiming superior understanding of the object, a claim Gadamer rejects on
all accounts inasmuch as it wrongly supposes that the meaning of a text is the direct
manifestation of the author’s consciously held intentions.
According to conservative hermeneutical theorists such as Emilio Betti and E. D.
Hirsch, Gadamer is mistaken to understand meaning as something in flux. For them,
meaning is stable, determinate and objective; it is embedded in the text and in the
text’s relations to its own historical context because the text is the expression of its
author’s intention. The ‘problem of production and reproduction’ does not arise
because meaning exists outside the interplay between text and interpreter; the inter-
preter’s task is to reproduce that meaning through methodological disengagement or dis-
connection. This conservative principle of the autonomy of meaning and
methodological distance allows the interpreter to understand the text entirely from
‘within the terms and properties of the text’s own language and the shared realities
which that language embraces’ (Hirsch, 1967, p. 134). That we can interpret a text
by its own standards shares affinities with Collingwood’s account of re-enactment.
Just as past thoughts for Collingwood contain rethinkable propositional content, Betti
holds that the determinacy of meaning allows interpreters ‘to rethink or recapture the
intuition revealed to them [in the text]. It follows that understanding is here the rec-
ognition and re-construction of a meaning … that addresses a thinking mind conge-
nial with it on the basis of a shared humanity’ (in Gallagher, 1992, p. 208).
Yet a seemingly irresolvable dilemma sits at the heart of the doctrine of methodo-
logical disengagement or disconnection, and so at the heart of our ability to discern
original meaning or the ‘being of others’. While the interpreter must disconnect herself
from her own historical situation to judge the past disinterestedly (the putative aim of
empathy in history), a necessary condition for understanding the historical other is
that the interpreter connect herself to the historical life she shares with the other——a
life she can only conceive of by virtue of being situated in history (Gallagher, 1992,
p. 210). Gallagher (p. 210) expresses the dilemma shrewdly: ‘the interpreter must be
connected to his historical situation for understanding to be possible, but
 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 219

disconnected from his historical situation for understanding to be valid’. We note too
that our attempts at everyday empathy are similarly impeded by a confrontation
between the Cartesian self tied to the first person perspective and the self who must
perceive and absorb the specific content of other selves to navigate the social world.4
The conservative response to the dilemma is an appeal to transcendental subjectivity:
by disconnecting ourselves from our historical being, we can will ourselves to effect an
intuitive connection with historical and contemporary agents. This means that our
ability to overcome the dilemma and reproduce original meaning rests ultimately
upon an ‘ethics of interpretation’, essentially the interpreter choosing to affirm the
author’s intended meaning as the true meaning of the text, and we advance little from
Schleiermacher’s canon: ‘understanding must be willed and sought at every point’
(Gallagher, 1992, p. 211).
In contrast to the conservative claim of objectivity in interpretation, Gallagher (1992,
pp. 179–191) categorizes Gadamer’s hermeneutics as ‘moderate’ because it rejects
objectivity and subjectivity as the only two possibilities of interpretation. The moderate
view posits that no method can guarantee objective interpretation of an author’s work
because, as historically situated beings, we are conditioned by prejudices of our own
existence and world view. More than being situated in time and place, these prejudices
are embedded in language, which (1) defines the limits of our interpretive powers, and
(2) enables us to gain some access to textual meaning. Prejudices are enabling in
moderate hermeneutics because they serve as a guardrail to which interpreters cling in
the dialogical exchange with unfamiliar texts. In the act of interpretation this guardrail
provides interpreters the fore-structure that they initially apply to the reading of a text,
which allows the text to be apprehended in a preliminary fashion. This fore-structure
or prior understanding constitutes the interpreter’s ‘horizon’, the vantage point from
which we can see beyond the merely close-at-hand, but simultaneously sets the limit on
how far we can see. Interpretation for Gadamer consists of a ‘fusion of horizons’: ‘The
hermeneutic task consists not in covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimi-
lation of the two but in consciously bringing it out’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 305). When we
study history, that is, we project the historical horizon within which past agents thought
and acted, and while remaining in our present horizon, attempt to move within
theirs——‘as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously superseded’
(Gadamer, p. 305). Prejudices are revised as the dialogue proceeds.
Thus, whereas conservative theorists conceive interpretation as the reproduction of
original meaning, the fusion of horizons implies that every attempt at reproduction is
in fact a production of new meaning and, thus, strict reproduction is not possible
(Gallagher, 1992, p. 15). Interpretation involves the reformulation, transformation or
renewal of our own horizon by testing it through the encounter with other horizons,
especially those of the past. As Gadamer writes, ‘the horizon of the present is continu-
ally in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all of our
prejudices’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 305). In this way, moderate hermeneutics proposes a
somewhat optimistic view of interpretation for both the reader and author participate
in the construction of meaning. This sober optimism might be contrasted on the one
side with the overoptimism of conservative hermeneutics and, on the other side, with
what might appear to be the nihilism of those who espouse a ‘hermeneutics of
220 Tyson Retz

suspicion’. Finally, it is possible to see how this moderate view of interpretation, with
its emphasis on the dialogical relationship between reader and text, past and present,
might provide new perspectives for understanding Collingwood’s account of
re-enactment and, by extension, empathy in history education.

Collingwood and Gadamer

That we approach the study of the past with preconceived notions about what is and
ought to be in the world appears to sit at odds with the historically contextualized
thinking that empathy in history demands. It was not Collingwood’s concern in his
account of re-enactment to elaborate a method by which past and present might
merge in the hermeneutical sense of ‘horizons’, but it is clear that Collingwood’s epis-
temological and ontological historicity in the search for meaning in history had some
influence on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, 2004, pp. 363–371;
cf. McIntyre, 2008; Vardoulakis, 2004).5 Just as prior involvement for Gadamer pro-
vides a ‘way in’ to the text, Collingwood expresses the hermeneutical significance of
the fore-structure of understanding when he argues that the process of making the
past explicit in re-enactment is governed by a set of assumptions, called ‘absolute
presuppositions’, which regulate the manner in which we perceive the appropriate
questions to ask of the objects whose thought it is our task to re-enact.6
Questions, here, is of fundamental importance. Collingwood believes that human
thoughts, beliefs, propositions and judgements are answers to questions that presuppose
other thoughts, beliefs, propositions and judgements. They are the ‘relative presuppo-
sitions’ that stand in a chain relative to prior and successive assumptions or rules.
Absolute presuppositions, on the other hand, stand at the beginning of the chain; they
are those that constitute the foundation of our practices and intellectual activities, and
thus determine the nature of all possible questions (Collingwood, 1998, pp. 29–33).
The method for re-enacting past agents’ absolute presuppositions (historian as
philosopher and philosopher as historian) operates through the ‘logic of question and
answer’: the history student regards a historical action as an answer (relative
presupposition) to a particular question (absolute presupposition), which provides the
conditions under which the connection between thought and action makes sense to
contemporary agents. Implied here is the belief that students can temporarily suspend
their own epistemic and motivational impulses while following the thought that guides
agents with radically different ideas.7
Like Collingwood, Gadamer believes that the response to the dilemma of human
historicity involves unveiling the manner in which historical propositions or statements
are answers to pre-given questions. ‘Thus a person who wants to understand must
question what lies behind what is said. He must understand it as an answer to a ques-
tion’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 363). Gadamer rejects the classical and romantic construc-
tion of the hermeneutic circle in terms of its whole and its parts, instead viewing the
circle as an interaction between the finite human being and the world (Vardoulakis,
2004, p. 4). For Collingwood and Gadamer the world is ‘presupposed’; since we are
historical beings whose significations are in the world, past thoughts and presupposi-
tions are viable objects of interpretation; they have a ‘thereness-of-being’, in the
 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 221

phenomenological sense. A consequence of this approach is that the possibilities of

understanding implied by our historicity take on greater hermeneutical importance
than the limits implied by the finitude of our place in it (hermeneutics of trust). But
while Collingwood expresses the conservative hermeneutical belief that contemporary
agents are able to understand the thoughts and intentionality of past agents in the lat-
ter’s own terms, Gadamer contends that the inferential methodology of re-enactment
suffers from the same epistemological fragility as do all forms of historicism, namely
that the condition of human finitude always privileges the subject over the object, the
present over the past, the self over the other. Vardoulakis articulates Gadamer’s
position vis-à-vis Collingwood:
The hermeneutical importance of history consists in the realization that an
experience is not the passive reception of sense-perceptions, but the involve-
ment of a ‘subject’ in a situation which is necessarily coloured by fore-under-
standing. Historicity then includes one’s ‘living tradition’, which produces a
‘texture of reciprocal effects’ in every situation. (Vardoulakis, 2004, p. 7)
According to Gadamer, the problem with Collingwood’s account of re-enactment is
that it forgets its own historicity. Although Collingwood recognizes that historical
thinking can never be disinterested, but is always self-reflective, the attempt to rethink
the world as the author perceived it nevertheless means that we have stopped trying to
reach agreement between our own historically conditioned expectations and those of
the object of our concern, whose historical conditioning appears unfamiliar. A richer
approach to historical thinking is one that takes account of its own historicity. In the
Gadamerian sense, the tension of attempting to treat the past by its own standards,
while being situated in history ourselves, is no longer considered a problem, but pro-
vides the means by which we can integrate the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Prejudice, Tradition and Temporal Distance

The ‘positivity of prejudice’ is Gadamer’s attempt to retrieve a positive conception of
prejudice as pre-judgement that was lost during the Enlightenment. ‘And there is one
prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: the fundamental prejudice of
the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its
power’ (Gadamer, 2004, pp. 272–273). When we diminish the role of fore-structure
and study the past believing we have suspended our prejudices, privileging the
thoughts of those we meet over our own, that is, when we place a greater emphasis
on the historical horizon than our present horizon, we in effect increase the likelihood
of misunderstanding the text because the prejudices that determine our own under-
standing of it can go entirely unnoticed. If we have suspended our prejudices, Gad-
amer (p. 271) asks, ‘how can our misunderstandings of a text be perceived at all if
there is nothing to contradict them? How can a text be protected against misunder-
standings from the start?’ If historical empathy involves suspending our prejudices to
see the world through the eyes of the historical other, what frames of reference hold
us to one (potentially more valid) kind of interpretation over another? What holds us
from falling into an abyss of relativism?
222 Tyson Retz

These interrogations call for an exploration of Gadamer’s application of the herme-

neutic circle. Risser (1997, p. 67) explains that Gadamer’s emphasis on the pre-
understanding nature of all understanding means that there is no zero-point from
which the interpreter first encounters meaning, no external point of reference provid-
ing entry into the hermeneutic circle. The interpreter always projects a meaning for the
text in advance. The interpreter encounters the text, in other words, with particular
expectations or anticipations of meaning. These anticipations of meaning which ini-
tially direct the interpreter into the text give way when a meaning of the text as a
whole begins to emerge, such that the interpreter constantly revises meaning in light
of what the text comes to say. It is in this way that interpretation for Gadamer con-
sists of production rather than reproduction: understanding is produced anew when
the interpreter revises the fore-meanings that constitute her present horizon through
integration of a meaning contained within another horizon (Risser, 1997, p. 67).
That the interpreter’s fore-meanings are always being revised steers Gadamer clear
of a theory of conservatism. Although there is no interpretation ex nihilo, we are not
stuck in a particular way of seeing the world; our anticipations of meaning do not pre-
clude us from being sensitive to the newness of what a text has to tell us, so long as
we are aware that in attempting to understand a text we are always projecting some-
thing prior. Knowing this, ‘the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus
assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meaning’ (Gadamer, 2004, pp. 271–272).
Nor does Gadamer’s anti-foundationalism, at the other extreme, necessarily lead to
relativism. Much as he attempts to remedy the Enlightenment’s negative conception
of prejudice, so Gadamer attempts to defend tradition against the Enlightenment’s
portrayal of it as connected to the authority that asserts itself in dogmatic interpreta-
tion of scripture. The Enlightenment regards authority as a source of prejudice that
manifests itself in tradition. Kant’s formulation, ‘Have the courage to make use of
your own understanding’, demands that we do not accept authority without question
but decide everything before the court of our own reason (Gadamer, 2004, p. 274,
original emphasis). Gadamer objects to this view of tradition for he believes that the
authority that asserts itself in tradition is not bestowed to an object or agent arbi-
trarily, but is earned by the object or agent itself by virtue of its coming to be valued
as something worthy of preservation. ‘Authority in this sense, properly understood,
has nothing to do with blind obedience to commands. Indeed, authority has to do
not with obedience but rather with recognition’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 281). This is not
to say that recognizing tradition means yielding to the hegemony of established
traditions; tradition, rather, is recognized for the sake of openness to what is to be
understood.
It is here, in Gadamer’s attempt to rehabilitate tradition, that we come to see how
his hermeneutics signals a new way for understanding the nature and possibility of
treating the past by its own standards: it is within the voice of tradition that the voice
of the historical other is to be heard; heard not in terms of present demands of
subjectivity, but from its own freeing in the trust that the historical other has some-
thing worthy to tell us (Risser, 1997, p. 69). Rather than attempting to subvert and
militate against tradition by way of ‘critical’ approaches that on the Enlightenment
model suppose that we are able to free our reason to question authority——and
 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 223

re-enact the thoughts of past agents by giving priority to the historical horizon of
which they are part——recognizing past tradition serves to distinguish the historical
horizon that is the object of our study from that of our own horizon. Whereas the re-
enactment model of historical empathy is predicated on the attempt to dissolve the
temporal boundaries that separate us from the historical agents we study, a fusion of
horizons between past and present for Gadamer occurs only by virtue of the temporal
distance that separates us from the past. Since we belong to tradition, we cannot sep-
arate in advance the prejudices that enable understanding from those that obstruct
understanding. This separation can only take place within the movement or experi-
ence of understanding——‘the true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between’ (Gadamer,
2004, p. 295, original emphasis). Gadamer regards the continuity of custom and tra-
dition that fills time as the supportive ground in which the present is rooted and
everything handed down presents itself to us:
Everyone is familiar with the curious impotence of our judgement where
temporal distance has not given us sure criteria … Obviously we approach
such creations [that we attempt to judge in the present] with unverifiable
prejudices, presuppositions that have too great an influence over us for us
to know about them … Only when all their relations to the present time
have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of
what is said in them claim to be authoritative and universal. (Gadamer,
2004, p. 297)
In this sense, the hermeneutically trained mind will consider temporal distance as a
‘filtering process’ that undergoes constant revision in the dialogical movement of
understanding. The conversation between a distanciated past and self-aware present
‘will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the
text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own’ (Gadamer, 2004,
p. 298). This goal of valuing the text on its own——or empathizing with historical
agents——should not be taken to mean that Gadamer supports an objective, unilateral
view of understanding whereby the interpreter seeks full intellectual control of the
object such that it cannot ‘talk back’ (Taylor, 2002). Quite the opposite. The encoun-
ter with a distanciated historical text, one that we approach with an ‘anticipation of
completeness’, can provide the provocation needed to ‘stir up’ and make ourselves
aware of the prejudices that tacitly direct our judgement. When a prejudice becomes
questionable in light of what a text comes to say to us, we do not simply set it aside
and accept that of the other as valid in its place. Instead, coming to an understanding
with a text requires that we put our prejudices at risk by giving them full play in the
dialogical exchange. This is what Gadamer (p. 299) means when he states that ‘Real
historical thinking must take account of its own historicity’. Only when our prejudices
are given full play are we able to experience the other’s truth claims——perhaps the
closest we will come to seeing the world through the other’s eyes——while also learn-
ing to view the other as a counterpart to our own way of thinking, thus allowing us to
understand both.
224 Tyson Retz

Application?
On Collingwood’s account of re-enactment, history students can penetrate the inter-
nal past because thought is a universal phenomenon that makes historical agents intel-
ligible to the contemporary self. While re-enactment justifiably calls on the student to
place an action within the wider context of the historical agent’s specific situation
and, through the logic of question and answer, endeavour to unveil the presupposi-
tions under which the agent thought and acted, the idea that past thoughts are encap-
sulated in present thoughts obviates hermeneutical concerns about the nature of the
dialogue between past and present. The end result is that re-enactment’s emphasis on
past thoughts, and not our own, provides few resources for negotiating the epistemic
confrontations fought out between past and present in the history classroom. Nor
does the conservative hermeneutical appeal to will ourselves to intuit connections with
historical agents seem sufficient. Historical thinking must take account of its own
historicity.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics sets us in the right direction by re-conceiving our prior
involvement in the world as the very factor that enables us to understand the histori-
cal other. If we are to follow Aristotle’s advice (in MacIntyre, 2002, p. 168) that theo-
retical knowledge of the good will be of use in the same way to that in which
knowledge of the target is useful to the archer——it gives her something to aim
at——then the application of Gadamer’s idea will be seen as occupying a structural
role in historical practice: it will remind the history educator that empathizing in his-
tory does not require the banishment of our own ways of thinking. It requires an
appreciation that the projection of our own ways of thinking on to a historical text
provides the means for a conversation with the text and the possibility of arriving at
new forms of understanding of the text and of ourselves in the dialogical exchange.
More perceptibly, the application of Gadamer’s hermeneutics manifests in the prac-
tical nature of understanding. For inasmuch as our present concerns and interests
provide the backdrop against which we engage in dialogue with the past, our under-
standings are shaped by the practical context out of which they arise. Whereas peda-
gogical approaches that treat temporal distance as something merely to be overcome
are ill-equipped to account for the present context out of which we formulate the edu-
cational aims of re-enacting past agents’ thoughts, the recognition of tradition trans-
forms temporal distance into a field of energy that, as Ricœur (2002) describes, gives
a space for past agents’ thoughts to be contextualized and, in so doing, makes a space
for history students to come to terms with their own historicity. When students
accommodate a degree of openness to a common belief or action performed by past
and present agents alike, the opportunity for expanding the common base of under-
standing between past and present is created, allowing students to discover new ways
of acting and, perhaps, new ways of being in the world.
All this should not suggest that empathy in history, in the Gadamerian sense, is
more concerned with inquiring into the present than into the past. But it should
suggest that our understanding of people in the past will only acquire meaning in our
lives when our questioning of them occurs hand-in-hand with a questioning of
ourselves.
 History, Empathy and Hermeneutics 225

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Stuart Macintyre, Dianne Mulcahy and John Whitehouse, all of the University of
Melbourne, for their advice at various stages in the drafting of this article.

Notes
1. Stuart Foster (2001), for instance, endorses a central role for historical empathy in explain-
ing human action in the past, but states unequivocally that it does not involve imagination,
identification or sympathy. His intention in grounding the concept firmly within the disci-
pline of history is to countervail any assumption that students are being asked to share in
the feelings of people from the past, stressing instead the concept’s cognitive credentials
against claims that it engenders soft-headed and relativistic understandings of the past, and
against solipsistic claims that it is an exercise in wishful thinking given the inaccessibility of
other minds. For a thorough review of the educational literature, see Brooks (2009).
2. The history educationalist David Sylvester introduced the term ‘historical empathy’ during
a period of school history revitalization in the UK in the early 1970s. In a recent interview
he stated: ‘I got a lot of my ideas from reading Collingwood the philosopher, where he said
history is rethinking the thoughts of the past. Actively you rethink them and it evokes
empathy. A word I brought into history teaching which caused me a lot of trouble’
(Sheldon & Sylvester, 2009, p. 10).
3. This is not to suggest that Shemilt and Lévesque are unaware of this aspect of Collingwood’s
work. The point is that the portraits themselves exhibit little that adheres faithfully to it.
4. Indeed, the distinction between empathizing in contemporary situations and in historical
situations may not be a particularly cogent one, since bridging the space between past and
present is of a nature not dissimilar to bridging cultural and linguistic spaces in our
everyday lives.
5. The past 20 years have witnessed a significant growth in scholarship on Collingwood occa-
sioned by the publication of revised editions of his works. In Truth and method, Gadamer
(2004, pp. 363–371) praises the logic of question and answer but criticizes re-enactment,
and in an endnote to this section, states that it was on his suggestion that Collingwood’s
Autobiography be published in German, for which he wrote the foreword (Gadamer,
p. 381).
6. See Collingwood (1998, particularly pp. 21–33), for an explanation of the relation between
the logic of question and answer, absolute presuppositions and relative presuppositions.
7. In Gadamer’s words, ‘the dimension of hermeneutical mediation which is passed through
in every act of understanding still escapes him [Collingwood]’ (2004, p. 516).

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