[metaquestion] My history professor at university has told us multiple times that you cannot learn from history because it has to be understood on their own premises, what exactly does he mean by this? Is he right or wrong?

by TheRealNemesis
restricteddata

I'll just say: historians can disagree on this topic rather crucially. I have a running dispute with a beloved colleague on this very topic. In fact, we each go talk to the freshmen on separate weeks — first he gives his "you can't learn from the past" jive and I go back a week or so later and give a "actually you can, but it's a specific type of learning" reply. My colleague sees himself as a historian's historian (a pure academic who takes pride in the fact that his work is not read by anyone and is not "useful"), whereas I'm a historian who spends a lot of time thinking about the ways in which history can inform the present and the future (including policy). So we come at this from different ends, even if we both have equally illustrious and serious history of science degrees.

Let's consider your professor's view. A basic premise of historical study is that the role of the historian is to understand the past on its own terms. When we want to understand, say, why Darwin didn't publish his work for 20 years, we don't say, "well, if I were doing it today, I'd be worried about Internet trolls and doxxing, so that might have been what he was worrying about." That would be obviously anachronistic and ahistorical but there are more subtle versions of this error (injecting modern circumstances/thoughts into the minds of our historical actors or circumstances). To understand Darwin's choice you have to get very deep into Darwin's world, and try to understand it on its own premises.

Fair enough. So what your professor is saying is, because the past can only really be understand as the past, what good can it be for the future? To put it another way, does Darwin's reluctance to publish in the 1850s have any implication for the 2010s? Your professor would say, no. The 2010s are not the 1850s by any means, and so any "lesson" you might try to take away from Darwin's experience is just not going to work. To each context its own.

There are a couple possible areas of disagreement here. One is another premise of historical study, historicism, which basically says that every moment in time is a product of the moments that led up to it. Which is to say, everything is dependent on its history. The world of today is determined by the world of yesterday. And so on. This is pretty uncontroversial amongst historians though it has some interesting implications for how you should understand the present, for example. OK, so at what point does the 1850s not matter for the 2010s? I think your professor would acknowledge that you can't understand the 1860s without looking at the 1850s, and you can't understand the 1870s without looking at the 1860s... and so on. Do we invoke an arbitrary "rule" for when history stops mattering? (As we do on this subreddit, to discourage overly recent debates.) Or do we approach this on a case by case basis? Or what? Obviously there's an arbitrariness here — your professor I imagine would not dispute that the present is built up from the past (that you cannot understand the present without understanding the past). So how can you not learn something from the past, if we are really just part of a continuum of time? (We are some future period's past, after all.) Which is a rather philosophical objection.

But let's look at a rather practical objection, of the sort that the late Ernest May might have put forward. May was a historian who worked in a policy school, and wanted to understand how history could be used to inform policy decisions. Now May would be the first to admit that people often use history in terrible ways — they invoke asinine "lessons" that are just tailored to whatever they wanted to believe in the first place. May, unlike your professor, didn't think that history couldn't tell you something about the now or the future. But he didn't think the lessons were straightforward. Rather, the kinds of lessons a historian can take from the past are of a rather structural and careful character. So, to go back to Darwin, we can say something like: "sometimes in the history of science, despite the apparent benefits of publishing, scientists will sit on really important ideas for a variety of reasons. These might include, for example, ..." and so on.

That's not a "X follows Y" sort of statement, it is a statement that tries to give some possible bounds on outcomes and tries to generalize a bit, but not in a totalizing way. Now in the case of Darwin nobody is probably that interested in the answer, but if the historical case study you are looking at is something like, "can we win a war without putting 'boots on the ground'?" then you can imagine history giving some interesting insights. It can't give you the final answer — it can't predict the future. (Sorry, Isaac Asimov!) But it can give insights — one of the other tenets of historians is that not much is "new under the sun," and if that's the case, then the patterns of the past (Hume's problem of induction be damned) are necessarily going to look a bit like whatever is yet to come.

Searocksandtrees

Hi, you may find a few previous threads of interest

edit: and a couple more ... Monday Methods: Comparison as a method in history, and Monday Methods: The past is a foreign country

Coast2CoastTo

Can you give some context for how your professor says it or when? I'm guessing he has said it when covering certain historic events. Can you give examples?