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Is memory to be defined as the struggle against forgetfulness? If this is true then such a claim would take us into the Kantian moral territory defined by the judgement “It is a duty to remember”. The “dispersion” of events discussed in part 8 of this review raises the possibilities of restoration and preservation of these events, thus enabling them to “endure” over time. If such preservation did not occur both individuals and institutional actors would be condemned to an unending cycle of repetition, compelling them to repeat the mistakes of the past, placing such agents in a similar position to the obsessive-compulsive patients that frequent the premises of analysts because of their tendency to, time and again call down upon their heads misfortune after misfortune. Such individuals must be trained to “gather” the dispersed events of their lives in the spirit of areté.
William James in his account of Memory, asked how it is that the aged brain not only “forgets”, but does so systematically, beginning with certain kinds of concrete memory content. James wishes to lift the “cause” of the brain into the centre of the discussion. This tendency is still with us, and we continue to witness attempts to reduce memory to the facilitation of neuronal pathways that have previously been innervated in the course of experience. Much of this kind of discussion, however, removes us from our everyday understanding of memory and how it relates to experience.
Phenomenology, Ricoeur argues, regards the knowledge we have of what is happening in the brain, as irrelevant to the explanation of conscious experience, or the explanation of psychological states and processes in general. Pathological behaviour, can however, often be ascribed to brain dysfunction, and such forms of explanation may well reveal the material and efficient causation involved in the structures of psychological functions such as colour perception. In such pathological conditions, the gradual loss of colour-saturation in ones visual field, reveals that colours are not stored in neural pathways as individual entities. Ricoeur also points out in the context of this discussion that neuroscience as such makes little contribution to the tasks of describing or explaining the phenomena of life(psuche). From a hylomorphic perspective, the knowledge we have of neural networks whose major characteristic is that they are either firing or not, will not be associated with the knowledge we have of the intentionality of memory, namely that it is “about the past”.
We can, Ricoeur insists, be curious about the causal relation of these neural-traces to memory functioning, e.g. especially short-term memory and long-term memory, which appears to be located in different regions of the brain. This receives some support from Freudian early theorising about systems of neurones, which either were modified in the process of facilitation(psi-neurones), or remained unmodified as a result of activity(Phi neurones). This “activity”, for Freud, was regulated by the Energy Regulation Principle(ERP), whose task it was to regulate and conserve the energy necessary for what Freud called “special actions”. The phenomenology of Heidegger, however, regards the neural “trace” as a present-at-hand entity whose explanation does not come from the arenas of ready-to-hand entities or Dasein(Being-there).
Ricoeur cooperated with a neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeaux and attempted to insert the above neural present-at-hand entity into a larger dialectic of presence-absence:
“A trace must therefore be conceived at once as a present effect and as the sign of its absent cause. Now, in the trace, there is no otherness, no absence. Everything is positivity and presence.”(What Makes Us Think?Trans DeVevouse, M., B., Princetown, Princetown University Press, 2000, 150)
The authors continue this reflection by suggesting that the neural trace is related to different forms or principles of organisation. Hylomorphism would, however, agree with the claim that a complete explanation of any phenomenon must include both its material and efficient cause ,and that, therefore, the physical conditions of memory and forgetting have a necessary place in a theoretical account.
Freud once remarked that if we have fully experienced something, we may never really “forget” this experience, i.e. it will always possess the potential for re-occurence in a contemporary conscious experience. On the material cause-level this means that the psi neurones obviously play a large role in forgetting. It appears, on this account, as if the phi neurone system play little or no role in either remembering or forgetting. Ricoeur’s account may place the trace in some kind of organisational structure but it does not appear to characterise this structure as related to the Principles of brain and mental functioning, namely the ERP, PPP, and RP. The epistemological principles involved in the dialectic of presence and absence cannot possibly explain the multi-layered phenomena of remembering and forgetting. The spectre of dualism haunts Ricoeur’s discussion, especially when he discusses the difference between the neural/cortical trace, and what he calls the “psychic” trace. Forgetting, it is admitted, can depend upon cortical damage, if that damage, for example, impacts organisational structure. The two kinds of traces are connected, it is claimed, to different heterogenous kinds of knowledge. This form of dualism was, of course, the target of both Aristotelian hylomorphism and Kantian critical philosophy, which somewhat surprisingly has succumbed to neo-materialist and neo-dualistic arguments that take no account of the arguments that have been presented by either Aristotle or Kant.
Recognition is postulated as some kind of unifying general term linking presence and absence, and the imagination is called upon as the unifier of representations and also as a key element of recognition. Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic is not discussed, but obviously lies lurking in the background of this reflection. We recall that the dominating power of the master is tempered, during the course of the relation with the slave, and ends with the master recognising the value of the slave. Whether this results in the slaves freedom is not clear, however, on the account of many of those espousing the will-to-power solution to the problem of human relations. The moral/political question of the legitimacy of the masters power over the slave is also in doubt. The Ancient Greek ideas of diké and areté would question the legitimacy of the power of the master over the slave, as would the Kantian idea of people being free and ends-in-themselves. Indeed Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is probably the precursor to Nietzsche’s reflections on will to power and both are essentially the result of phenomenological investigations.
Ricoeur then appeals to Bergson’s distinction between habit-memory and recollection- memory and the claim is made that the former kind of memory is related to “acting out”: a voluntary non-conscious exercise of the motor system that is connected to recognition only when something does not go in accordance with the plan or the goal of the exercise. This distinction raises the issue of the distinction between conscious remembering, and the preconscious form of memory ,that is operating in any performance of instrumental habitual action. (There is a form of knowledge, namely techné, that is involved in this kind of activity). Ricoeur then discusses Bergson’s claim that the brain is not a “representing organ”, but rather an organ of action.(P.431).This discussion is then connected to recognition, and it is suggested that “recognition” is connected to what he calls a “mixture” of the two types of memory suggested by Bergson.Bergson also proposes an imaginative illustration of an inverted cone in which the base of the cone represents the totality of memories in our memory system, and the point of the cone represents the point of action where the lived body interacts with the world. The memories in the system, in some sense, are enduring entities that stand ready as a potential to be realised in appropriate circumstances.
The dualism of the world as will and the world as representation continues, however, to dog Ricoeurs reflections and many question marks hang in the air over the claims relating to “mixed memories”. Ricoeur’s interesting solution to the problem of the relation of memory to forgetting, is to suggest that Remembering is only possible on the condition of forgetting and not vice versa. He points to a reflection by Heidegger on the topic of forgetting where it was claimed that forgetting is related to repetition. Freud is also invoked:
“We recall Freud’s remark…the patient repeats instead of remembering….forgetting is itself termed a work to the extent that it is the work of a compulsion to repeat, which presents the traumatic event from becoming conscious. Here the first lesson of psychoanalysis is that the trauma remains even though it is inaccessible, unavailable. In its place arise phenomena of substitution, symptoms which mask the return of the repressed under various guises…”(P.445)
This Freudian reflection brings us back into the domain of Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy and simultaneously jettisons the pointless reflective oscillations between dualistic and materialistic poles of discourse. The preconscious/unconscious memories in our memory system are now placed in a dynamic psychic context in which the primary expression of energy is via the motor system. According to this model of explanation the world of images is a secondary world, supervening when the motor system for various reasons remains unactivated or deactivated(as in dreaming).
The reason why the work of mourning at the loss of a loved object is so painfu,l is related to the indestructibility of memory. The Reality Principle(RP), however , over time, in the work of mourning, does not destroy our memories, but rather converts traumatic presentations into representations of the past: in this process the images connected with the lost object will be defused of both wishful and anxious affections. The result of this defusion process, is a memory of an experience which becomes more accessible to consciousness, and this, in turn, means that these experiences can then be incorporated in a narrative which gives a realistic account of oneself and ones life. The past is no longer presented in compulsive repetitions which disguise the content of the experience, but is rather represented in a process of remembering which is authentically resolute.
The work of mourning, we have already noted can be a polis- phenomenon, a national response to a national traumatic experience, as was the case with the holocaust, which was just as traumatic for those Germans who were not in favour of either the Nazi party or their wars of choice they began, as it was for the victims of the Nazis. The trauma of the past causes repetitions again and again, until the work of mourning is done, and the less obsessive work of remembering can take its place and genuine memories formed.
Ricoeur recalls the amnesty granted to the Thirty tyrants from Ancient Greece. The aim of the amnesty was reconciliation in the spirit of forgiveness, and to this end the past was not to be recalled: recollection was forbidden, presumably out of respect for all who were traumatised. This spirit of forgiveness is one of the key ideas of Christianity, and perhaps of Religion generally(e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, etc). The poles of the work of remembering, and the work of forgiveness, appear at first sight to be a humanistic interpretation of the religiously inspired polarity of the works of sin and the work of forgiveness. The Myth of the Garden of Eden contains revelations of the religious view of man and his flawed existence: his hubris in the face of God or Being. The myth, however, would have been better formulated perhaps, if it did not emphasise the attraction of knowledge as the problematic component or sinful milestone on the journey toward Judgement day. It may well be true, as Heidegger suggests, that we have been forgetful of Being qua Being, but this could still be the case, and the Garden of Eden myth could be interpreted, in the light of this interpretation, as instead celebrating the importance of knowledge in achieving the potential of the rational animal capable of discourse. Judgement day, on this view, would be the success or failure of man to create a kingdom of ends here on earth: a kingdom based on the knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Instead in the religious form of the above myth, man stands accused of refusing to obey the commands of God, the father, who then paradoxically, becomes angry and frustrated with the hubris of his creation . Had the myth not referred to the fruit of the tree of knowledge(epistemé), but rather to the fruit of the tree of “techné”, the moral of the myth may have been more palatable for followers of Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger.
There is an ethical dualism in the Myth between the forces of Good and Evil, but not an epistemic dualism: i.e. the mere act of representing the eating of the apple is not as such sanctioned. In the garden, it is the act that is the problem, and not the representation or the desire. The myth, then, is an ethical myth about what it is right or wrong to do. The Knowledge of the Good as presented in Plato and Aristotle integrates areté and epistemé in an unproblematic way, which allows easy application to the political and religious arenas of discourse. For Kant, it is clear that his three fundamental philosophical questions: “What can we know?” “What ought we to do?” and “What can we hope for?”, are also seamlessly integrated with the domains of political and religious reflection. In this unity it is not the relation of representation to action that is the cause for concern, but rather the broader question of the knowledge of the truth. It is, for example, the belief in false idols related to active worship that will be the ruin of the hopes and desires of mankind.
Ricoeur suggests in an essay entitled “The Demythization of Accusation(Conflict of Interpretations, Trans Ihde, D., Evanston, Northern University Press, 1974), that as long as religion is characterised in terms of the accusation of man for being flawed, the idea of evil will remain problematic. Demystifying the idea of evil cannot be done, Ricoeur argues, “by means of the resources of Psychology”(P.348). For Kant, evil is an ethical issue demanding reflection on the will insofar as it is engaged in the project of bringing about the worthiness associated with the kingdom of ends. For Kant, myths and judgement days, and accusations belong in the sphere of the imagination of origins rather than reasoning about ends.
Ricoeur points out, for example, that insofar as judging consciousness is concerned there is a hidden power of resentment(anger, frustration) that is eventually revealed, and such an image tests to the limit, faith in an agency believed to be universally good. This raises the issue of forgiveness in catastrophic scenarios such as the holocaust . The trial of Eichmann, covered by Hannah Arendt, raised this issue globally and demanded a global “working through” or attempted sublimation of the trauma. The consequence of Arendt’s philosophical reflections on Evil, and Eichmanns deeds, was a furious controversy that raged over her claim that the “fault” of Eichmann amounted to an “inability to think”(which of course for her was a major criticism). For many of those who had been traumatised by this mans actions, the imagination had created a non-human monster, and Arendt’s abstract portrayal seemed not just an inaccurate understatement, but deeply offensive. There are, of course, crimes of magnitude which appear to the victims to be impossible to forgive, and the holocaust certainly fell into this category of historical event. Forgiveness, however, from psychoanalytical, hylomorphic, and critical perspectives is directed at the phenomenon of trauma and the compulsion to repeat unless the trauma is sublimated by knowledge of the truth which is not the same as an endless obsessive repetition. Perhaps Arendt’s cool criticism was an attempt to provide such a philosophical-historical account.
Eichmann was sentenced to death and Arendt agreed with this sentence, as would have Kant(and Jesus for that matter). For these Philosophers and prophets, it is simply the case that some crimes are so terrible that the perpetrators ought to have a stone placed around their necks and cast into the depths of the sea. The act. for example, of keeping Eichmann in prison would merely have activated repetitions of the trauma over and over again, it might be argued. This paradoxically is not an argument in favour of the death sentence for a particular category of crime because we all know how inadequate and ultimately irrational some legal processes can be. Knowing this and sentencing innocent humans to death is itself a great crime, and should be avoided. It is important to understand that we rational animals capable of discourse have not yet been able to create institutions that can do divine work.