those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it

When we seek absolutely change, he warns, we know longer know what to improve and by what standard. Santayana emphasizes retentiveness over change, arguing that progress can only be judged by individuals who retain awareness, knowledge, and memory of their past.

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. It is a personal pleasure to rectify this misunderstanding of Santayana’s quotation, which is particularly timely given our society’s growing, and violent affinity for historical resentment and the preferred method of iconoclastic rituals to not only forget the past, but erase it. It is not the case that if only we are so wise as to remember the past, history will never repeat itself and mankind will grow and improve in unlimited potential-not at all. His phrase intends to do quite the contrary. In other words, Santayana did not write “hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” to be inspirational or to suggest a sense of historical superiority on behalf of us, enlightened modern men. He did not write his book in 1905-1906 because he believed reason was a realm conquered by mankind, after all so must we assume that our century has not quite accomplished this task. Santayana would emphatically reject the notion that mere chronological recency grants us any more knowledge than someone who lived 200 years ago, more so if we demonstrate by our social actions that we are truly no longer interested in dedicating ourselves to a life of reason.

Our self-alleged privileged point in time (which we can only judge from our own vantage point) does not allow us to believe that we are wiser, kinder, and more virtuous than those who came before us.

Nothing is as insincere to this spirit of learning as to believe that we have a hold on history and all its winding passages-that we know better than our predecessors.

The sheer volume of Santayana’s writings on the topic of reason demonstrate that understanding ourselves and our world is a life-long endeavor. The five volumes are subdivided into elements from which we can derive reason: Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science. He dedicated five volumes to outline this endeavor, which he called The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. He believed that only through proper training of the mind and what he calls the “psyche,” human nature could become reasonable. Now, Santayana is (by today’s standards, certainly not his own) a conservative-leaning thinker who adopted a realistic view of human nature that was aware of its violent tendencies. Standing alone, we might assume that Santayana is stating that it is important to “remember the past”-that is, the total of our historical crimes, problems, struggles, wars, etc.-to learn from it and prevent the repetition of our mistakes. It seems ironic to quote Santayana, albeit unknowingly, when invoking his famous quotation since his point is not so simplistic, and often the way in which the quotation is used is opposite to what Santayana wanted to convey.

Few know that the phrase was written by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana even fewer people know the context of the quotation and what Santayana actually means by his reflection. It has been paraphrased countless times and is visible most notably in my mind as the quotation on the wall of one of the ghetto buildings in Auschwitz. This line will most likely sound familiar to every reader.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it