Learning from the Past
Dorothea Debus (University of Konstanz)
I am pleased to have been invited to contribute to this new online forum for wider conversations about memory, and I have followed the various contributions to this new blog during the last couple of months with interest. I think it's a great idea to provide this space, giving us all a forum for sharing our ideas about issues in the Philosophy of Memory in a more informal, somewhat less academic context. So I'd like to start by saying a big thank you to Sarah Robins and Marta Caravà for building this lovely Memory Palace for us!
My own contribution today aims to talk about a topic that would seem both of general interest and of philosophical interest more narrowly construed, namely the question as to whether we can learn from the past, and if so, which roles memory and testimony might play in such contexts.
I first started to think that this set of questions might be of philosophical interest after reading a report about a press conference with the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the summer of 2018, during which Merkel suggested that Germans will only know whether they have really learnt anything from the past once all those people who have themselves witnessed and therefore can still personally remember World War II (such as my parents, who then were both young children) will have died. It seemed to me at the time that there was some intuitive truth to this suggestion, but then it was also immediately obvious that the suggestion itself depended on some substantial assumptions about personal memory.
What then, I wondered, was the role which
Merkel's suggestion did ascribe to personal memory?
Why might personal memory be especially important in a context in which someone might (or might not) be said to have learnt something from the past? And how might learning from the past be possible if we know about relevant events through the testimony of others, but not on the basis of personal memory? And what, in any case, might we be talking about when talking about someone's learning something from the past?
This was in the summer of 2018. In the meantime I have thought about these questions quite a bit, and in the following, I would like to tell you about some of my thoughts on the issue. In doing so, I directly draw on Debus (forthcoming), quoting from that text wherever useful throughout.
So then, what might it take for someone to be said to have learnt something from the past? When, in ordinary contexts, people talk about our 'learning from the past', they often seem to have cases in mind where mistakes were made in the past which we should try to avoid now and in future, that is, which we should make sure not to repeat. Thus, to say that we should try to 'learn from the past' often seems to be shorthand for saying that we should try not to make mistakes again that were made in the past. It seems plausible to hold that subjects might also learn from past achievements, but in order to keep things simple, I will here focus on cases in which a mistake was made in the past.
Now, learning from a past mistake seems a special form of learning, and sometimes a difficult one. But then, what exactly is it that makes it difficult to learn from a past mistake? That is: What are the conditions which are difficult to meet but which need to be met in order for someone to have learnt from a past mistake?
I suggest that we can answer this question as follows: In order for us to say of someone that they have learnt something from a particular past mistake, they must know about the relevant past event and know that it was a mistake; they must be ready to act in certain ways, namely in ways so as not to repeat the relevant type of mistake now and in future; and they must understand why the relevant past event should count as a mistake, and what it takes for the relevant mistake to be avoided now and in future, that is, they need to understand which features make the relevant past event a mistake, and which features of possible present or future events would make those events instances of the same type of mistake.
Having formulated these conditions, we should next ask which role personal memory might play in enabling a subject to meet these conditions - that is, we should ask how personal memory might help someone to have the relevant knowledge, to be prepared to act in relevant ways, and to have the relevant understanding - and thus to be able to learn from the past.
We can tackle this question by comparing cases in which someone has personal memories of a relevant past event with cases in which they have only been told about it by others (that is, in which they have only received testimony about it from others), but have no personal memories of the event. In comparing these two ways of knowing about the past, personal memory on the one hand and testimony on the other, we find that it is much easier to meet the above conditions, and thus to learn from the past, on the basis of personal memory than it is to do so on the basis of testimony only.
Indeed, on the basis of personal memory, we will know about the relevant past mistake in detail and quite directly because we remember it, we will be prepared to act differently because we have experienced the negative fall-out of the relevant past event and can remember all this again vividly now, and we will understand that and why the relevant past event was a mistake because our personal memory provides us with what we might call an experiential understanding of the relevant situation.
None of this seems possible when we know about a past mistake only because someone else has told us about it. In that case, we need to ask many questions and collect a lot of evidence (e.g. photos or films or other recordings, or further witness reports from others) in order to get to know about the relevant event in detail. We need to think about, or try to imagine, what we would do, or would have done, in a relevant situation in order to become ready to act in ways which will contribute to avoiding mistakes of the relevant type now and in future. And lacking any experiential understanding, we will have to think about things carefully in order to understand in a more theoretical way that and why the relevant past event was a mistake first of all.
Thus, for someone who has personal memories of a relevant past event it is much easier to learn from the past than it is for someone who knows about the relevant past event only because others have told them about it.
But then, this in turn also explains why it seems plausible to accept Angela Merkel's suggestion that Germans will only know whether they have really learnt anything from the past once all those people who have themselves witnessed and therefore can still personally remember World War II will have died - and it is here that philosophy meets real life.
We all have personal memories of mistakes that occurred in our own personal lives. But in order for humankind to learn from some of history's biggest mistakes, we often cannot rely on personal memories, because relevant events lie too far in the past in order for anybody alive today to have any personal memories of it any more, or they occur in places far away so that we here (wherever 'here' might be) cannot witness relevant events and therefore cannot personally remember relevant events either.
Being told about relevant events is better than not knowing about them at all - for having been told about relevant events does give us a chance to learn from relevant mistakes somehow - but as long as we don't have any personal memories of relevant events but instead have to rely on other people's testimony, we will have to work really hard in order to learn from relevant past mistakes at all. In order for us to learn anything from the past on the basis of testimony, it certainly won't be enough to have been told about a relevant event just once, or to have read a couple of sentences about it in passing. In order for us to be able to learn anything from the past on the basis of testimony, we will have to make great efforts, both individually and as a group, and this, I think, is an important truth to remember, and to act on as much as we can.
For more on this topic see: Debus, D. (forthcoming): 'On Memory, Testimony, and Our Ability to Learn from the Past', in: Goldberg, S. and Wright, S. (eds.): Testimony and Memory. Oxford: OUP.
Very interesting. It seems this line of thought could be extended in a opposite ways. For example, it is sometimes good to forget and forgetting is often easier when you know by testimony than when you know from personal experience. Similarly, the psychoanalytic idea of working through suggests that we sometimes benefit if we can "unlearn" patterns that developed, perhaps for good prudential or understandable "proto-rational" reasons, in the past, and it seems like people who have first hand experience and memory may have more working through to do than those who "learned" to act in sub-optimal ways as the result of accepting testimony. Interestingly though working through is often thought to involve recovering or re-activating memories in order to develop patterns to replace the ones that at first developed in response to the events remembered. Perhaps your your detailed discussion might be extended to shed light on and assess these initially plausible ideas.