Forms of empathy with history are among the most important aspects of conscious human existence. In fact, philosophy and human thought in general have always sought to determine man’s abode.
Where should man live? Antique thinkers gave us the notion of cosmos as man’s abode. Cosmos as a harmonious part of the surrounding world, having features of a work of art. A part which is ultimate (not eternal), in other words, existing pro rata human capacities. Aristotle said that infinity is where one cannot exist. One can exist only in an ultimate place akin to the Greek polis. And so cosmos was discovered for the first time as man’s abode. As scientific progress showed that we live in an infinite world, the Universe turned out a place that could not be proclaimed the human race’s abode. Then man started seeking it in Heaven inhabited by a human deity — e.g., Jesus Christ. Further scientific development, taking a course of endless discoveries, small and big, showed that man’s abode can be found only in history. Man was created not by nature but by History, so History is man’s abode. The idea was first completely perceived by Hegel and eventually adopted by Marxist philosophy and 20th century philosophic anthropology.
Therefore, forms of empathy with history come first when dealing with the forms of man’s social development and his, so to say, existential capacities. Putting it paradoxically, man has no nature, he has history. In other words, nature manifests itself in man through history.
In antiquity, the Greek theater — Greek tragedy, to be precise — was a form of empathy with history. In the Middle Ages, it was mystery and liturgy. Nowadays, it is science, the so-called positive knowledge, scientific cognition of the world. Mankind mastered historical experience through science and relived its history. In fact, Marxism was also one of the manifestations of empathy with history through science, in that it proclaimed itself the only correct scientific understanding of history.
In the 20th century, politics became a form of empathy with history. Hermann Hesse said that the 20th century is an epoch of lampoons — i.e., an epoch of visualizing the world through newspaper articles, reviews, and political struggle. Practically the entire 20th century tragic experience (and that century was tragic) is linked to the actualization of politics as the main sphere of human existence.
