How is history possible? Georg Simmel on empathy and realism

Abstract

Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay, along with related works, proposes that history is largely a reflection of how well the historian can penetrate the mind of his or her subject. He rejects realism, but if scholars do not know events as they essentially were, they cannot know how much of their empathy-based knowledge is warped by their own perspective and how much is authentic. Given George Herbert Mead’s analytical account of reflexive interaction and the recently discovered neural basis of empathy and its dependence on context, the present study shows Simmel’s work to be far more plausible than it seemed over the past century. This essay not only demonstrates where Simmel’s empathy-based argument succeeds and fails but also clarifies his view on the nature of historical reality and how the historian’s perspective clarifies as well as distorts his sources. In the process, Simmel’s philosophy of history is placed in a lineage ranging from Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber to R. S. Collingswood, Robert Darnton, and other contemporary cultural historians.