Historical Empathy

Historical Empathy

The Philosophy of “As If”

Truth is merely the most expedient form of error.
- Hans Vaihinger

We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we know (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be “useful” in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.
- Nietzsche


With respect to the social world of 1st century Palestine, we need to be clear that we know nothing about what tier in the social hierarchy Jesus occupied. We are similarly ignorant about his family and his immediate followers. If we treat the NT as essentially fictional, studded here and there with a few plausible pericopes (distinctive passages often liturgical in origin), we must reject all biographical information the NT provides as suspect.

What I will do in part is analyze some of the NT biographical and historical data about Jesus and his followers from the perspective of the “As If” philosophy of Hans Vaihinger as it applies to modern “personal construct” psychology. As Vaihinger wrote “…the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality - this would be an utterly impossible task - but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in the world." Vaihinger argued that human knowledge did not necessarily reflect objective reality. In his philosophical system, he maintained that all matters that humans confront are most constructively viewed as hypothetical. Thus we can analyze any subject or text “as if” it were true while keeping in mind that we are really offering tentative hypotheses subject to revision or outright dismissal at any time. The psychological theorist, George Kelly, also argued that we should adopt an "as if" position towards knowledge and exerted a powerful influence on the development of personal construct psychology as the basis of an influential psychotherapeutic method

All thought experiments presented in this book are predicated on “As If.”

Historical “Filters”

Avoiding Anachronism:
Important Differences Between the 1st and 21st Centuries

Bruce J. Malina has astutely summarized a number of significant differences between antiquity and modernity in modes of perception:

For example, there was no belief in some universal nature common to all human offspring. Criteria for human being [sic] were always social. All humans were perceived as belonging to distinctive peoples, to the extent that each people was a species rather different from other people, as distinct as lion and dog. Both lions and dogs are animals. But quite different and distinct animals. So too human beings. Aside from Roman views of the general (i.e., catholic) inhabited circum-Mediterranean (the oikoumene) as their world (the orbs terrarum), people had no universalistic political pretensions. There were no nation-states, only distinct peoples (ethnos) with origins rooted in distinctive territories. There was no international law. Roman statesmen dealt with other peoples in terms of good faith (fides) based on the analogy of interpersonal clientelism. Rome was patron, not holder of an empire [Italics mine]; Roman elites wanted persons to behave like clients. To behave otherwise was to be shameless and dishonourable, the characteristics of rebels and outlaws. No one in antiquity believed all human beings could be endowed with equal rights. Human beings, like their gods and stars, were tied to locales and ingroups. Since people in antiquity believed that people existed as various species (genos), allegiances always followed ingroup/outgroup patterns. Various peoples, males and females, free men and slaves, aristocrats and plebeians, formed various sub-species determined by the dispositions of nature and the counter position of the valued standing. Individuals are best known by the non-psychological, stereotypical qualities of their groups, and essentially represented their groups. They lived in collectivistic cultures, and their main concern was group integrity (never self-reliance or self-identity). There was no sense of history in the sense of a belief that things were once different and need not be the way they are. In fact human beings were always the same, even if their societies were in the process of devolution. Hence the value of knowing the past for the present. There was surely no social criticism. And there is no evidence of psychological empathy either. Economics was not the social institution. In sum, nearly all the modes of perception presently available to and in vogue among twenty-first-century Western Christians, whether liberal or conservative, simply did not exist in the first-century Mediterranean. [Italics mine]

Although I agree with most of Malina’s “historical filters,” I dispute two – no social criticism and no psychological empathy. The Cynics were profound and fundamental critics of all aspects of Greco-Roman society and, as we will see, there is good reason to associate Jesus with the Cynic school. As for psychological empathy, I argue that the entire Yahwist tradition, based in significant part on the Tanakh’s emphasis on social justice, represents an undeniable demonstration of psychological empathy. Jesus takes this one step further and exalts the destitute. Why would he have any followers at all, especially the wealthy women who supported his movement, if they were unable to empathize with the poorest of the poor? Why would Jesus’ followers have embraced the ideal of voluntary poverty as the “way” to Yahweh if they were incapable of empathetically appreciating its psychological and material significance? In the Pagan world, Plato especially but also Aristotle provided profound and complex phenomenological analyses of human emotions. Without possessing psychological empathy in full measure, they could not have done this.



Historical Empathy

Human behavioral ecology, sociology of knowledge, and the history of perception are fundamental to my attempt to reconstruct the past in which Jesus lived. Following these methods necessarily results in “historical empathy,” which implies more than just “re-visualizing” the past but “re-feeling” it as well.

It is not true that human emotions have remained everywhere and at all times the same. Did Jesus exhibit “anger” when he cleansed the Temple of the moneychangers? If so, what kind of anger? I suggest that his was an anger fueled by his love of God (Yahweh) and consequent detestation of Temple worship as an actual insult to God, which is an anger that we can only dimly imagine since we cannot now actually feel it. Not the way that Jesus did.

The same is true of Jesus’ experience of God’s presence and, for that matter, the disciples’ experience of Jesus. But, by placing ourselves in Jesus’ world as best we can, it is possible to catch distant glimpses and dim echoes of the feelings, longings, hopes, expectations, and desires of that vanished world.

“Historical empathy” does not mean agreeing with what people in the past thought, felt, or believed. It means attempting to understand their world as much as possible from their point of view.

Fortunately, scholars have developed tools that will assist us in our quest. These include new techniques in analyzing the history of the five senses, discerning the history of emotions, meme analysis, and human behavioral ecology techniques. Although never previously applied to the thought world of 1st century Palestine, these analytic tools will prove invaluable.

History of Perception

Psychological History as the History of Perception

Donald M. Lowe outlines a procedure for the history of perception:

"Phenomenology describes thought as prospective reality. . .The history of perception [italics Lowe’s] is the intermediary link between the content of thought and the structure of society. Its procedure is to
1. periodize a society, in terms of its multi-level structure;
2. within the context of the period, constitute the ongoing field of perception, in terms of its communications media, its hierarchy of sensing, and its epistemic order of discourse;
3. within that perceptual field, describe the lived experience of time, space, and bodily life."


It is precisely by illuminating epochal changes in human perception that psychological history can contribute to “defamiliarizing the past.”



Bruce J. Malina makes the startling claim that ancient people had no psychology, and he is correct in the sense that their interior life was doubtless far different from ours. How, then, can there be such an animal as psychological history? Malina clarifies his claim by pointing out:

"Jesus group members, like their fellow Mediterraneans were individual persons in collectivistic cultures. Their principal concern in life was family or group integrity. . Collectivistic persons are non-introspective; they are simply not psychologically minded. This means that all events we might ascribe to psychological, mental, or internal sources were generally ascribed to personified entities outside the person: angels, spirits, demons and the like."

But lacking in introspection does not mean lacking in subjectivity or perceptiveness. Moreover, as Michel Foucault argues, the Greco-Roman philosophical “cultivation of the self” arose simultaneously with the growth of “Christianity” during the early centuries C.E. It is true that the “self” of the ancients was not the modern “self” and that their self-contemplation is not identical to our introspection, but it is not an exaggeration to say that among “Christians” and “Pagans” alike, this era witnessed the “discovery of the self.”

Mentalités

The French call aspects of social-psychological history the study of mentalités, how different groupings of people – peasants, artisans, nobles, shopkeepers, and so on, have perceived their surroundings. Some historians call this process reconstructing a worldview. But I agree with Karen-Claire Voss in her excellent article on spiritual alchemy:

"In contemporary usage, the term “worldview” mostly performs a distancing function: it is used to refer to a set of beliefs, doctrines, or philosophical ideas. However, when we say that the alchemists had a particular worldview for which they claimed validity we cannot mean that they merely held a set of beliefs about the world, or that they merely accepted a set of ideas concerning the world on an intellectual level. . . . To have a worldview both implied and entailed, for the alchemists, a specific experience of the world. [Italics Voss] That experience of the world not only gave rise to beliefs, doctrines, or philosophical ideas, but also supported a praxis that was consistent, congruent, with the worldview. Theory and practice were inextricably woven together."

I use the term “thought world” rather than “worldview” precisely because it implies more than just possessing a set of ideas. Our thoughts are us: our experiences, our emotions, and our beliefs. Attempting to reconstruct the thought worlds of past times is an extraordinary challenge requiring the historian to make the (inevitably unsuccessful) effort to suspend all judgments and preconceptions.

Memes vs. Ideas

In reconstructing Jesus’ thought world, we will attempt to navigate the perilous shadow world between memes and ideas. We think we know what ideas are, especially philosophical ideas, but most people, even highly educated people, do not think in strictly philosophical terms. A much closer approximation to how humans actually think, what runs through our minds is memetic, not philosophical. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." He goes on to say, “Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.” My argument here is that all transmitted knowledge is memetic. As Peter J. Vajk notes:

"It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. The meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme."

And Heith Michael Rezabek observes:

"My favorite example of a crucial meme would be "fire" or more importantly, "how to make a fire." This is a behavioral meme, mind you, one which didn't necessarily need a word attached to it to spring up and spread, merely a demonstration for another to follow. Once the meme was out there, it would have spread like wildfire, for obvious reasons... But when you start to think of memes like that -- behavioral memes -- then you can begin to see how language itself, the idea of language, was a meme. Writing was a meme. And within those areas, more specific memes emerged."

To put it another way, in exploring Jesus’ thought world we are dipping into his meme pool.

Psychological History

Psychological History

Far less well known than the sociology of knowledge is the field of psychological history by which I do not mean either the history of psychology (a fascinating field in itself) or so-called “psychohistory,” which is the application of a modern (and discredited) psychological theory (psychoanalysis) to the past.

“Psychological history,” which is also indebted to the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, requires that the historian recreate the social and individual psychology of an era from the standpoint of the evidence concerning its historical “actors.” That is to say that the evidence comes first, and the social and individual psychology of the era is then constructed from it, not the other way around in which a modern psychological “theory” (Freudianism, Jungianism, Adlerianism, etc.) is imposed on the evidence, which is then manipulated to fit the theory.

Unfortunately, “psychological history” has never caught on, perhaps because one of its founders, J.H. Van Den Berg, unfortunately decided to call it “metabletics.” For examples of “psychological history,” some better than others, see Van Den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to an Historical Psychology (1956), Things: Four Metabletic Reflections (1970), and Divided Existence and Complex Society: An Historical Approach (1974). Also see Donald M. Lowe, History Of Bourgeois Perception (1982) and The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (1995) and the numerous works of Michel Foucault.

It is my position that a combination of the sociology of knowledge and psychological history creates a unified methodology for the history of perception that is ideally suited to avoid the historical sins of anachronism and reductionism.

Success in reconstructing the intersubjective reality of past cultures can only be judged by the results. Here is an example from Lowe's Bourgeois Society:

"Newspapers had a different perceptual impact on the reader than the printed book. Unlike the linear development of a plot or an argument in the book, the concurrent reporting of news from different parts of the world made newspapers a mosaic of unrelated events. Newspapers contracted time to the instantaneous and the sensational, expanded space to include anything from everywhere. The present became much more diverse and complex, no longer containable within a single chronological framework. And the reader had to provide the connection between the different news items."

Another example from Vandenberg's Changing Nature, more relevant to the present inquiry:

"Anyone who believes that the miracle is a nonhuman, extrahuman, sacred affair has placed it such a distance that he need not worry about its untimely return – a return, moreover, which he would think highly unlawful. He has made the miracle an attribute of God – although it is obviously an attribute of man. God does not believe. To believe is our affair; we believe, and it is by our belief that the world becomes a creation, it is by our belief that God becomes present, present in the only place where we can rightly speak of His presence or His absence: in the world of substantial things, in our world. When these things give evidence of His presence, then a miracle is taking place.

"It will not happen at random. One can hardly imagine God, in a playful mood, to step on earth occasionally, to do a few things against the laws of nature, and then, just as unpredictably, return to his own domain (which cannot be anything but an as yet unexplored corner of the Universe). God’s absence or presence cannot be compared with the absence or presence of a meteor, which comes from an undefined infinity, becomes visible for a few moments, and disappears again into infinity. There must be sense in God’s becoming visible. His visibility is the nearness between man and man. There is no other nearness. When God is with us, He does not appear as a transparent ghost in the realm of the dead. He stands face to face with us as an acquaintance, a friend, a wife, a husband, or a child.

"One cannot think too 'naturally' about miracles. . . . And one cannot think too humanly about [them] either. When Jesus Christ came to Nazareth, He 'could there do no mighty work.' Jesus was not surprised by His lack of power, which, like a modern landscape, left Him no opening for his supernatural interference; but “He marveled because of their unbelief.” Our belief is the condition of the miracle. Without our belief, apparently no miracle can happen; the miracle is present in our belief, it is the habitual state of things."

Is Human Nature Unchanging?

Is Human Nature Unchanging?

Human Behavioral Ecology Vs. Evolutionary Psychology

Modern psychology is largely premised on belief in a universal and unchanging human nature. Regardless of varying surface behavior human beings are and have always been the same. But is this true?

“My genes made me do it,” say evolutionary psychologists. We share the 50,000-year-old genes of our Cro-Magnon ancestors whom evolution rewarded for traits such as male promiscuity, propensity to rape, and valor in battle. Men are naturally jealous, insisting on sexual fidelity in their mates. Women are far less concerned with infidelity, focusing instead on men’s abilities to supply much needed protein through hunting and fishing. This may sound unpleasantly sexist, but the fundamental question is whether evolutionary psychology’s conclusions are supported by good science.

Human behavioral ecologists don’t think so. For one thing, our genes do not necessarily go back 50,000 years. Recent research suggests that the human genome is significantly composed of genes 10,000 years old or less. Hundreds of behavioral ecology studies have led to the conclusion that “social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people’s fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors – and different human ‘natures.’”

“Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with ‘it depends’ – that is the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As David Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system.”

In other words, human beings have no “nature” but history.

We Are What We Speak

In 1956 the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the intriguing question: How does language determine the way we experience the world? A leading researcher of Hopi culture, Whorf observed:

I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. [italics mine] In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future.

Whorf’s insight has been experimentally confirmed by a new generation of cognitive psychologists, whose most articulate exponent is Stanford’s Lera Boriditsky, leader of an international research group rather cleverly called “Cognation.”:

We've looked at the influence of language on the patterns of early vocabulary acquisition in English and Navajo, on thinking about time in English, Greek, Spanish and Mandarin, on color memory and color perception in English and Russian, on people's thoughts about the gender of toasters (and other inanimate objects) in Spanish and German, and on people's representations of actions and events in Indonesian, Mandarin, Turkish, and Russian.

Sharon Begley writes, “In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, [Boroditsky] is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that ‘the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, ‘but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception.” For example, “To English speakers, time is horizontal and the future lies ahead. In Mandarin, however, time is vertical, springing up like oil from a well. . . . Bilingual people report that news seems much more dynamic, full of energy and violent when written in a language like English that has descriptive verbs.”

Although to my knowledge no one has yet pointed out the implications of “Cognation’s” findings for historical research, they are stunningly obvious and strongly supportive of the implications of the behavioral ecology thesis that man has no nature but history.

Language, whether written, spoken, or both, is the chief constituent of human culture. The Biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, were not the same languages in 1st century Palestine or 4th century Rome with the same subtle connotations and layers of meaning as modern scholars understand Hebrew and Greek. And we have an even poorer understanding of 1st century spoken Aramaic. To reconstruct Aramaic words that appear in the New Testament, scholars must rely on 4th century texts that employ a written form of Syrian Aramaic.

The Social Construction of Reality

To begin to grasp anything at all about the historical Jesus, we must first place ourselves in his world. Not that we can see that world precisely as Jesus saw it. Given the absence of trustworthy evidence, that is literally impossible. But we unless we try to do a better job of reconstructing his world and his thoughts, our sense of Jesus and his mission will necessarily be superficial and misleading.

First, I take it as given that there are really only two metadisciplines: philosophy and history; e.g., both a philosophy of history and a history of philosophy are possible. Indeed, many scholars have achieved each with varying degrees of success.

The social and behavioral sciences have much weaker claims to metadisciplinarity. There is a kind of sociology of history and a psychology of philosophy and, I suppose, an economics of history but these are all clearly derivative of history and philosophy and could not exist without them. How much easier it is to speak of economic history or the philosophy of psychology than the reverse.

The Sociology of Knowledge

Amidst the semi-scientific claptrap, ahistoricism, and anachronism of that species of the higher nonsense known as the social sciences, the sociology of knowledge represents an enclave of humanist scholarship, especially as exemplified by Peter L. Berger, the author, along with Thomas Luckmann of the classic The Social Construction of Reality, which has lost neither relevance nor freshness since its first publication in 1966.

Indebted to the methodology of the phenomenologist philosopher Alfred A. Schutz (Luckmann was a student of Schutz and co-authored a book with him) Berger and Luckmann argue that the primary reality we experience is “intersubjective,” socially and culturally constructed. Throughout history we have grown accustomed to thinking of reality as an absolute. It is not merely that human beings have generally agreed that, indeed, “something exists out there,” but if they consider themselves as belonging to a particular culture, they experience almost universal agreement as to what it is, exactly that exists within that culture.

In this important sense, reality consists of those perceptions that are universally shared by individuals within a specific culture. This is the reality of everyday life. To a 21st century American it is the reality of car payments and credit card transactions, of TV, pornography, and potato chips. Those aspects of reality that all people in a culture share are “intersubjective.” The social construction of reality is the dialectic between so-called “objective reality” and “subjective reality:” As Berger and Luckmann demonstrate, arriving at an understanding of a society, either present or past, involves ridding oneself of preconceptions and looking at the interaction between the two realities as do (or did) the members of that society. “The sociology of knowledge understands human reality as socially constructed reality.”

For unknown reasons this model, ideal for historical research, has rarely been employed by historians. Among contemporary New Testament scholars, only Gerd Theissen uses the methodology of the “social construction of reality” in his research. As a result, his insights into Jesus’ miracles, healings, exorcisms, the nature of illness in 1st century Palestine, and many other New Testament subjects, are often insightful. Theissen, who is German, is not nearly well enough known in the United States, except among other Jesus scholars. Regrettably his “historical novel,” The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (2007), now available in a new English translation, is filled with anachronisms. Jesus is a “security risk,” the brigands are “terrorists” and so on. In short, Theissen is a terrible novelist, although a competent historian, despite his Lutheran theological bias. Burton L. Mack and Jonathan Z. Smith utilize analytic methods quite similar to mine that derive from cultural anthropology. Their principal objective, however, is to create a new theory of religion untainted by theological presuppositions. A worthy goal, to be sure, but not mine.

Jesus and the Buddha

Jesus and the Buddha

A tale about Sariputta, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, relates that he once encountered a skeptic who said, “I recognize you. You’re one of the followers of this fellow who calls himself ‘the Buddha,’ the ‘Enlightened One.’ Now how do you know he is enlightened? I suppose he told you so himself. If so, why would you believe him? After all, he could be lying.”

Sariputta replied, “The Buddha has never claimed that he is the ‘Enlightened One.’”

“Then why do you believe that he is?”

Sariputta smiled. “Have you ever met the Buddha?”

As with the Buddha, it was not just what Jesus said, although that was profoundly important, but Who He Was.

Who Jesus Was has been fiercely disputed from the very beginning of the Jesus movements. Was he all divine (as the Docetists argued) or all human (as some Christian so-called Gnostics maintained)? Or was he both entirely divine and entirely human (as what came to be Christian orthodoxy asserted)? Was he a mere magician as many Pagans and Rabbinic Jews claimed? Or was he the Son of God as Trinitarian Christianity triumphantly maintained?

To provide a new answer of Who Jesus Was requires a thorough re-evaluation of all the common presuppositions among scholars and lay people alike of the “thought world” of earliest Christianity. I have therefore divided my analysis into two parts. Part I: “A Critique of Jesus Scholarship” provides the evidence and arguments that support Part II: “Towards a Psychological History of Jesus” explores the perceptual world of 1st century Palestine using a methodology derived from the history of perception, not previously applied to early Christian history.