On the strange expectation that we should remain the same person for an entire lifetime

Norbert Blüm was certainly never a politician whose pronouncements I would habitually collect and hang above my bed. But there is one sentence of his that stayed with me.

When someone pointed out a contradiction between two things he had said, he is reported to have replied, in essence:

“Learning is allowed, isn’t it?”

That sentence made me think. Because, of course, he was right. Not necessarily in what he had said before. Not necessarily in what he was saying now. That would depend on the matter at hand.

But he was right about this.

Why should a contradiction between what someone said in the past and what they say today automatically count against them? That would only make sense if we assumed that at some point in our lives we reach a final state of knowledge and are thereafter obliged to remain exactly where we are.

A rather peculiar idea.

“But you used to say something completely different!”

People like to deliver that sentence as though it settled the matter. And of course, sometimes it does tell us something. People change their positions out of opportunism. Politicians tell one audience one thing in the morning and another audience the opposite in the evening. Contradictions may certainly be pointed out, and we are entitled to ask why they exist.

But a contradiction can mean something else as well:

Someone learned something.

Years may lie between two statements. New information. Different experiences. Conversations. Books. Encounters. Mistakes. Perhaps even the occasional bout of actual thinking.

We forget this particularly easily when dealing with people whose thoughts now reach us only through texts and recordings. Theodor W. Adorno wrote something at a particular point in time – and suddenly it becomes:

Adorno thought this. Full stop.

And the very thing that matters here disappears:

time.

A person may have thought something at one point, begun to doubt it ten years later, and reached a different conclusion ten years after that. Or perhaps they held two positions that only appear contradictory because they referred to different situations. In that case, we would have to ask: When did they say what? In what context? What did they mean? Did their view change?

As they put it so nicely in Back to the Future:

“Marty, you’re just not thinking fourth-dimensionally.”

Human beings have a timeline.

We might consider allowing them one.

And yet we very often treat one of the most sensible sentences a person can utter as though it were an admission of defeat:

“Perhaps I was wrong.”

Why?

Anyone who recognises a mistake has, at the very least, recognised something. Of course, one may instead take great pride in having held precisely the same opinion for forty years. It sounds like steadfastness, character and principle.

There is, however, the possibility that one has simply been talking the same nonsense for forty years.

A conviction should be firm enough not to collapse at the first sign of disagreement.

But it should have a door.

Otherwise it is no longer a conviction. It is dogma.

The fact that humanity has made it this far may have something to do with our ancestors occasionally applying this principle. Human history would probably have been rather brief without the ability to revise a conclusion.

Imagine one of our ancestors:

Fire hot.
Finger burned.
Fire bad.

That would have brought a considerable part of technological development to an early conclusion.

Instead, at some point, someone had to realise: fire really is dangerous. But it can keep you warm. You can cook food with it. It keeps animals away. It gives you light.

The original insight was not even wrong.

Fire is dangerous.

It was merely incomplete.

Much the same applies to trees. A tree may once have provided excellent shelter.

Tree good.

Eventually, people discovered other possibilities. Caves were useful. Huts were even more useful. Houses have certain undeniable advantages over the fork of a tree.

Of course, one could simply remain sitting on the branch and declare:

“I’ve always been pro-tree!”

That would be consistent.

It would merely be a somewhat peculiar understanding of consistency.

On the other hand, I can walk behind my house today, look at a tree and arrive once again at the conclusion:

Tree good.

Not because I intend to spend the night in it, but because it provides shade, cools its surroundings, offers a habitat for animals and because, quite simply, I like having it there.

The same sentence. An entirely different insight.

Learning does not necessarily mean replacing an earlier conclusion with its opposite. Sometimes we discard it. Sometimes we add to it. Sometimes we restrict it. And sometimes, equipped with considerably more knowledge, we arrive at the same place where somebody stood thousands of years ago:

Tree good.

The reasoning has simply become a little more elaborate.

But learning is not only about correcting what we once believed. It is also about truly making new ideas our own. To me, understanding an idea means more than being able to repeat it. I need to be able to move it around: put it differently, apply it in another context, or explain it to someone who has not read the book.

Humour can be a surprisingly useful educational tool in that respect. To make a good joke about an idea, you generally have to understand what you are joking about first. Anyone merely reciting a sentence they have memorised might want to postpone the joke for a little while.

There is another translation exercise I find particularly useful. It requires neither a seminar room nor a textbook.

In my native Hessian, the question is:

„Wie würd ich des dahaam erzähle?“

Roughly: How would I put this in the way we talk back home?

Suddenly, the idea has to leave its linguistic packaging. I can read an academic text in Standard German, close the book and say:

„Was hat mir der Schreiber dann dademit saache wolle und warum sacht der das dann ned einfach?“

Or, in English:

“So what the hell was the writer trying to tell me, and why didn’t he just say so?”

The idea does not become any less precise in the process. If anything, I may only then have truly made it my own.

Dialect can be a remarkable tool in this respect. When I was studying German language and literature, I once watched an entire study group reach for their dictionaries to look up the Middle High German word “bees.”

The word did not seem strange to me. I had known “bös” since childhood – not in the Standard German sense of böse, “evil” or “angry”, but in the Hessian sense of “very”, “much” or “strongly”.

All I had to do was read the word and hear it in my head.

Context did the rest.

There was nothing particularly scholarly about this achievement. I simply happened to have an extra key in my pocket.

Anyone who grew up around dialects in Hesse will know this sort of thing. Sometimes, as a child, all you had to do was cycle a few kilometres and people already spoke a little differently. You learned quite naturally that a word does not have to sound exactly the same everywhere in order to be the same word.

You listen. You compare. You try a slightly different sound in your head. You add the context.

And you understand.

Perhaps that is one reason why I find it comparatively easy to read Middle High German, understand Amish Pennsylvania Dutch, or even make my way through a book in Dutch. Not because Hessian is some secret master key to every Germanic language. That would certainly be convenient, although I suspect it would lead to a certain amount of disappointment somewhere around Iceland.

Rather, you learn early on that language is movable.

And that also applies to the language in which science and scholarship are conducted. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn was perfectly capable of expressing highly complex ideas in education and philosophy without checking his northern German colouring at the university cloakroom. Nor did Rudi Dutschke sound as though he had been hired specifically to record the audio edition of a pronunciation dictionary.

And here in Giessen?

I have serious doubts that Justus Liebig or Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen spent their evenings strolling through town, chatting to one another in perfectly region-neutral Standard German.

Science does not appear to have suffered lasting damage.

An idea does not become more correct merely because the person expressing it has removed every regional trace from their pronunciation. Someone who can formulate an idea in academic terminology, explain it to a student afterwards, and later say at the kitchen table,

„Also pass uff, im Grunde hawwe die damit folgendes gemeint …“

— “Right, listen — basically, what they meant was this …” —

does not possess less linguistic competence.

They possess an additional one.

They can move the idea.

And that brings us back to learning. Because thought and language have something in common:

Both must be allowed to move.

A language that never adopts new words, never changes meanings, never absorbs outside influences and never develops regional variations might conceivably be very pure.

It would have only one small problem:

Probably nobody would speak it anymore.

Living languages have dirty shoes.

They get around.

They bring words home with them, alter their pronunciation, eventually forget where they came from, and carry on using them anyway.

People do something similar with ideas. We pick them up, examine them, discard them, pass them on, translate them into our own language. Sometimes we understand something in a new way. Sometimes we discover that we were wrong. And sometimes, after a long detour, we arrive at an old conclusion again – only for different reasons.

That is not a failure of thought.

That is thought.

Perhaps, then, Norbert Blüm expressed a larger idea in that little question than it first appeared:

“Learning is allowed, isn’t it?”

I would go further. Learning is not merely allowed. It would be decidedly unfortunate if, at some point, we stopped doing it.

Because sometimes new knowledge takes us further.

And sometimes it takes us back to the tree – only for better reasons.

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