In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

412 FRAMES
"learning" and "using" just be the wrong words, and could admitting
this perhaps enable historians to enjoy a gain in intellectual freedom and
imagination, rather than suffer a loss of income?
At any event, there is a long Western genealogy of increasingly complex
reactions to the fear (or the hope) that one cannot learn from history
even through ever more complicated intellectual techniques. What we
retrospectively call "learning from examples" was the conviction that
there existed a stable correlation between certain actions and their positive
or negative outcomes. Identifying such correlations, transposing
them to different contexts, and applying them like recipes in everyday
situations were the primary ways in which medieval societies used
knowledge about the past. 1 The practice of learning from examples
survived unquestioned for many centuries because the belief that time is
a natural and inevitable agent of change in the everyday world was not
institutionalized until the early modern era. This very belief became the
central element in a construction of time that we now term "historical
consciousness," and that we tend to misinterpret as an immutable condition
of human life. After 1500, the conception of time as a necessary
agent of change began to undermine the validity of historical "examples"
whose reputed applicability had depended on the (largely unstated)
premise that the implications, structures, and functions of human behavior
and actions were influenced only slightly, if at all, by their specific
contexts. 2
The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which spanned the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, has been canonized as the
intellectual event that ultimately invalidated the (to our mind "unhistorical")
medieval construction of history.3 For the first time, different
periods and different cultures were seen as incommensurable, and people
began asking whether it was possible to learn anything at all from
history. The answer to this question-the way out of the early modern
crisis of historical learning-was what we still refer to as the "philosophy
of history." It transformed the structures of knowledge about the past
from a collection of isolated histories (or "examples") into the totalizing
image of history as a movement which would continuously transform
the frame-conditions of human action. Learning from history could
therefore no longer be based on the sameness of these frame-conditions,
and could no longer consist in the transposition of patterns of behavior
from the past to the present. On the contrary, historical knowledge began