Famous quotes are usually taken out of context. In most cases, this doesn’t pose a problem, since the fact that they can stand by themselves has much to do with why they become famous. But sometimes the removal of context can be misleading.

Such has been the case with the one-liner that has kept the name of the philosopher George Santayana alive in the public consciousness: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Even people who have never read anything else by Santayana — which probably means, unfortunately, most people — are familiar with this vatic pronouncement. It is commonly cited by politicians and pundits as the clincher to reminding us that if we do not remember the lessons of history, we set ourselves up to make the same mistakes our predecessors made. A sound proposition, to be sure, but not what Santayana was getting at.

He wasn’t talking about history. His statement makes no mention of it. He was talking about the past. And while history certainly has to do with the past, it is not identical with it. History is the part of the past that has been recorded.

What Santayana was talking about was progress. His quote comes from Reason in Common Sense, the first installment of his monumental five-volume work, The Life of Reason. Here is what he said in context: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. 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. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Revolutions go nowhere because a revolution is a 360-degree turn, putting you right back where you started. Complete change would be a 180-degree turn, but if you keep doing that you’ll just be going back and forth. Progress, as Santayana makes plain, does not involve abandoning the past but upon retaining as much of it as possible and building on it.

I once saw a film of an experiment in which a subject was hypnotized and given post-hypnotic suggestions that would allow him to experience psychotic symptoms relating to the perception of time. The suggestion that he would have a sense of the present and the past, but no sense of the future, caused him to feel profoundly depressed. The suggestion that he could sense only the present and the future turned him into a manic wise guy. But the suggestion that he would experience only the present, with no sense of past or future, caused him to withdraw totally into himself. He could barely mutter a response. Afterwards, when asked to describe what that felt like, he said it was simply awful, that he had felt imprisoned and paralyzed in the moment.

Of course, Santayana wasn’t referring to social or political progress, but to the progress of the mind toward maturity. “In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted,” he notes. But old age, he reminds us, “is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible … its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.” In what he calls “the plane of manhood and true progress,” we are “plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction.”

For Santayana, the past is no mere prologue. It is the warp upon which our identity is woven. I mentioned in a recent column that I thought the two most important years of my life were when I was 4 and when I was 15. I think that when I was 4 I began to emerge from the frivolity and distraction of earliest childhood and by 15 was beginning to take some confident steps in the direction of maturity. With any luck, I can indefinitely postpone the degeneration into a bird-chirping dotage.

It will be noticed that there is in what Santayana says a certain inescapable melancholy, and perhaps the best gloss on it has been provided by Wallace Stevens, who was a student of Santayana’s at Harvard and much influenced by him. One of his finest poems, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” is addressed to his former teacher, and one could even argue that Stevens’s poetry is in large measure a versification of Santayana’s philosophy.

The effect of the ignorance of the past Santayana warned of would be to leave us locked into a static present, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. Such ignorance might seem blissful at first, but, as Stevens posited in “Sunday Morning,” would prove ultimately insipid:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Far from being a political platitude, Santayana’s aphorism is perhaps best seen as inviting us to contemplation. Maybe the best way to avoid that chirping is to look upon one’s past with what Krishnamurti called “choiceless awareness,” free of both nostalgia and regret.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

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