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.