![]() in the words Dionysius of Heraclea attributed to Thucydides), history is philosophy teaching by example. ![]() Remembering the past through the study of history, then, is much more than mere remembering – it is also analysis and understanding, from which wisdom can eventually be drawn, with time and experience. And it isn’t enough merely to reflect the lessons of past social experience past experience must be seen in the full light of contingency, so that it is understood that one and the same action may have diametrically distinct outcomes depending upon the contingent circumstances within which any action is undertaken, which Santayana would have called So too a society acts upon social imperatives that appear as immediate and as obvious as individual instincts, and, like instincts, acting upon manifest social imperatives sometimes goes well and sometimes goes very badly, if not catastrophically. The “escape” from the blind impulsion of instinct is to learn from past consequences of acting upon instinct and to apply the lessons learned to future circumstances based on understanding rather than upon spontaneous impulse. A people without a history is a people who will fail to learn from their past successes and failures, and who will thus repeat all of these successes and failures in equal measure.Īn individual acts upon instincts that are the bequest of an evolutionary psychology far older than humanity, yet of which humanity is largely unaware, and so that individual will act upon the same instincts time and again, even when these instincts are maladaptive and lead to catastrophe. ![]() History is the social memory of a people. Knowledgeable of a past more comprehensive than the individual, and Individual recalls of their own personal experience, but rather means being Remembering the past is not memory in the narrow sense of what an This is true, but the full meaning of the idea becomes clear only in its application to social wholes of which the individual is a part. We need to think through Santayana’s insight afresh in order to recover its significance.Ī narrow interpretation, conceived in terms of the concrete examples that Santayana provides (all framed in terms of the individual, and individual experience), restricts the scope of the idea to individual memory, such that each and every individual is condemned to repeat the past unless they have remembered past actions and have learned from both successes and failures. It has, unfortunately, degenerated into an instinctive reaction and is This quote from Santayana has achieved the status of becoming a truism hence it is thoughtlessly repeated by those who do not understand what it means. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.” The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. In his multi-volume work The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, The famous quote from George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” can be found embedded in the following long paragraph from Chapter XII, “Flux and Constancy in Human Nature,” “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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