ABSTRACT
According to Cicero's famous saying, “Historia est testis temporum, lux veri-tatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis”; to Hegel's philosophema that wisdom—namely, philosophy—always comes retrospectively (i.e., “Minerva's owl takes off at sundown”); and finally to the so-called common-sense belief (δοξα = doxa) that the older and more experienced we are the more we know (and so on and so forth), we all should be much more clever, and smart, and wise … afterwards. 1 In other words, as Hegel puts it, “when reality accomplishes its development and comes to an end.” 2 But, is it so? The answer is, it is not so any more! Because what we ultimately can learn from both general and our own individual (life) histories nowadays, in a world of radical compression of time and space on the one hand, and congruent to that, of an incredible acceleration of (historical) time on the other, and in a world the main attributes of which are contingency, uncertainty, insecurity, ambivalence, and risk…, is almost nothing! Or, formulated in a more succinct manner, not all generations at earlier stages of human history could have learned from their general and their individual pasts.
