Sphinx

“Knowledge without understanding is useless.” Duh. It’s exactly the sort of banal truism that excites my paranoia; the idea isn’t important, but rather what someone making such a statement then wants to do about it. You could deploy it in opposition to rote learning, and the idea that there’s a list of Essential Facts and Dates that every child ought to know by heart, to argue for a focus on analysis and interpretation. But you could also – and this comes to mind with the publication this week of a new report on post-18 education in the UK, with implications for the health of the whole university system – deploy it in an attack on high-falutin’ book learning in general, or on studies that aren’t directly engaged with the Real World – it depends on whether you imagine that understanding comes through the acquisition of knowledge, or derives from a separate source (practical experience, ideology, religion…) which is independent of actually knowing things.

How much difference does it make if the quote is attributed to Thucydides, as has happened in contexts as varied as the Grauniad tech blog (back in 2009) discussing webpage front ends, editorials on recent developments in dairy research, and the usual plethora of motivational posters and tweets? Probably not a lot; vague maxim just needs any old authority to back it up. It may be significant that, at least on posters and quote sites, it isn’t attributed to anyone else, but none of my searching has found a more credible, potentially original attribution. The problem is that the line is SO bloody vague and trite that Googling the phrase without mentioning Thucydides gets nowhere; it’s used in any number of homilies and meditations (cf. Luke 18: 31-4; Colossians 1.9), reflections on Eastern Wisdom, discussions of education, mental health, leadership and entrepreneurship, personal development… When I asked about this on the Twitter last year, Eric Glover (@dolichon) noted a resemblance to a fragment of Heraclitus (Diels-Kranz 40, from Diogenes Laertius IX.1): “Much learning does not teach understanding; else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”

Could it actually be Thucydides? Again, it’s so vague… I do plan to skim the Funeral Oration again to see if any phrase resembles it, but it could come from other speeches as well – it simply lacks any specific reference or associations. It is a phrase that I can imagine a commentator on Thucydides using, specifically on 1.21 and the idea that his history will be useful and a possession for ever, not just a compilation of information for its own sake. But as far as what Thucydides himself actually says, the emphasis is far more on the knowledge and the need for accuracy – understanding is to be acquired by having a true knowledge of events, rather than something to be set up in opposition to that knowledge. So my best guess, given the relatively persistent attribution (and, more importantly, the lack of other attributions), is that this comes from someone’s account of Thucydides, transferred to the man himself – but the chances of actually tracking down the original seem quite slim.