One of the most quoted lines in philosophy is completely misused and misunderstood

We don’t learn from history because we can’t learn from history.

oxinoxi / Adobe Stock / Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Sarah Soryal

When I was 16 years old, I sat in a crowded assembly hall on a wobbly plastic chair, and I listened to Mr. Smith tell me why I should study history. All of the teachers had to do it. “Sell your subject,” the headmaster had said. “Make the kids want to pick it.”

Some teachers did so with the grudging monotone of the forced and underpaid employee. Some did it with the exhausting energy of a fanatic. Ms. Vasey, the physics teacher, even dressed up as the solar system. But Mr. Smith decided to win us over with the cold, lofty logic of an Oxford graduate.

“History is like a guidebook for how to live,” he began. “We can learn from people’s mistakes and can unpack where things went wrong. Almost all the greatest leaders in the world knew their history, and almost all of the biggest mistakes were because people didn’t study it enough. As the German philosopher Hegel put it, ‘We learn from history that we do not learn from history.’”

Mr. Smith’s point was that humans have this depressing tendency to repeat the same mistakes. We blunder onwards, ignoring all of the lessons of the billions of humans who have walked this planet before. “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

It’s a good point, and someone should have said it. But the problem is that Hegel actually meant the opposite.

Old wisdom for old times

Hegel’s famous quote appears in a section of his works where he is criticizing what he calls “pragmatical” history. Hegel noted that there was a certain kind of “Renaissance man” who would tend to quote Cicero or Seneca for advice about how to live now. “Avoid parties hosted by those outside philosophy,” Epictetus once wrote, and even I would find it hard to get invited to — let alone enjoy — a philosophers-only party these days.

Hegel thought this was laughable. He argued that history was largely unique to a particular time, place, and people. Cicero was talking about the 1st-century BC Roman world, Epictetus was talking about the Greek world of the 100s AD, and Confucius was talking about Zhou dynasty China. Any advice they could offer would be happenstance at best, and at worst, a misleading and fallacious appeal to tradition.

This isn’t to say Hegel thought history was pointless. He thought that the only things we can learn from history were broad, abstract, and general principles. But these principles would be so broad as to be useless for the “pragmatical” historian.

“What we learn from history is that we cannot learn from history” is what Hegel really meant.

The difference is the lesson

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the bestselling classicist Mary Beard and the author and journalist Charlotte Higgins about their new podcast, Instant Classics. The idea of the podcast is to show just how far we can apply the ancient world to today. So, would Hegel be shaking his beard in furious agitation? Can we actually learn from the past?

Well, Beard and Higgins are well aware of the Hegelian trap. In fact, they turn it on its head. This is how Higgins put it:

“I think it’s complicated, and I don’t think what we’re doing is making easy parallels between then and now, because I think that really that is incredibly limiting and often doesn’t really work. It’s not saying X is exactly like Y. In fact, it could just as well be saying X is completely different from Y, and perhaps making our own time look a bit weirder. There’s a lot of really weird stuff about the ancient world. Sometimes, by focusing on that, you can make your own time feel a little bit strange. And I think that’s really useful.”

Historical epoche

The Austrian philosopher Edmund Husserl used the word “epoche” to describe a particular frame of mind where we see our lives as if from outside. Look at things from the perspective of a cat. Imagine talking about your life with a Roman on the communal toilets in Pompeii. As you do so, this epoche will invite new wisdom and insight into how you live your life.

Higgins is advising a kind of historical epoche. When we look back at the ancient world and focus on all the differences, we can see ourselves differently. Here are two examples.

First, Beard talks about how (relatively) modern the ability to see ourselves all the time is. “The extraordinary thing is that [the ancients] don’t know what they look like. I mean, if you imagine what a world would be like where we didn’t know what we look like… what difference that would make to how you start to conceive of who you are.

“People often talk about the ancient world as being ‘pre-Freudian’ or whatever. Well, for sure, it was, but it’s also pre-identity in some very destabilizing ways.”

Second, Beard asks us to imagine a world where the supernatural was everywhere. Gods could walk in the city or appear as a sheep out in the meadows. You lived your life with the very real belief that something metaphysical and magical could happen at any moment.

“Hold your breath, because Athena is now appearing as this human being!” Higgins put it. “And that’s a challenge, an exciting challenge to understand. What is it to imagine a world with a superhuman world, which is nevertheless part of the world that we’re now experiencing? The goddess could be sitting down as close to me as Charlotte is, and how would you know? How would I know if she was a god? Well, I tell you one thing. She’d smell gorgeous. When you try to pick her up, you’d discover you could lift her with no trouble because she was very, very light. And she’s a little bit shiny. These stories that the Greeks and Romans tell us are about how you can recognize God.”

Hegel might have been right that we cannot use the past as a kind of almanac of ancient, ready-made rules. But Beard and Higgins, in their new podcast, show us how, if we tilt our perspective, history’s strangeness can make the present look strange. And looking at something with new, strange eyes can often be the first step to understanding, accepting, or rejecting it.

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

More Big Think content:
Big Think | Big Think Business | Starts With A Bang | Big Think Books