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Chapter Two: The Exercise of Memory.
The shift in focus from the epistemological to the “pragmatic” aspect of memory is fundamental if one is to fully understand Ricoeur’s references to the Greek distinction between that which happens to a patient(pathos), and the active power or exercise of memory that forms a part of the actualising process which aims at actualising the potentialities among a hierarchy of cognitive “powers” or functions.
He refers to the Aristotelian distinction between “Mneme” and “Anamnesis”, clearly characterising the latter term as an active search by an agency of psuche. He called this active process “recollection”, and Freud was also clearly referring to this process when he talked about the “work of remembering”. For Aristotle the process was crowned by an act of “recognition” that was associated with “aletheia” (unconcealment). Freud’s patients obviously were unable to achieve this act of recognition associated with the work of remembering, and as a consequence they needed the assistance of an “interpretation” before any unconcealment occurred.
As far as Kant was concerned the recurrence of “mneme” in a psuche was a matter for Physical Anthropology to describe and explain, and such an “event” ” happened to” a patient, and was not connected to the active voluntary choices of that agent. This latter activity was best explained and justified by “Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”. For Kant, the investigation of this free voluntary activity, was far more important than any passive process involving the reproductive imagination (a process constituted of a stream of images that was probably produced by a non-conscious principle that had no cognitive relation to either the past or future but rather “happened in the space of present consciousness”). This aspect of the role of fantasy in the life of his patients was described by Freud as “timeless”.
Memories are of the past, and it is this relation to this a priori intuitive spect of Time that is an important component of the “work of remembering” that successfully results in the “recognition of recollection”. Further, recollection is the recollection of “something”, e.g. either of what happened or what one did in a voluntary medium of thought directed at an object which has its source in the past. Reason and rationality are not directly involved in the faithful memories that are unconcealed in the “work of remembering”. In this respect the power of memory is a very different power to the power of judgement which is connected to a “work of understanding”, involving the categories of the understanding and “correctness” rather than “faithfulness”. Judgement, according to Kant is the power of discovering something particular subsumed under a universal, e.g. Jack ought to pay the money he had promised to pay back to Jill. The power of judgement, then, is concerned with particular truths and particular actions which are in their turn related logically and conceptually to universal propositions of Reason, e.g. “Promises ought to be kept”. These universal propositions of reason are necessarily true and good in virtue of being intimately constituted by principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Their validity is also connected to the relation of the terms in these propositions and also partly a result of their relation to essence-specifying reasons which directly answer questions such as “Why should we keep promises we have unconditionally made?”
In comparison to Reason, the power of memory is obviously a very different kind of power of the sensible faculty of the mind in that it is temporally oriented toward the past(rather than the future of keeping a promise). The orientation of a mind concerned with the maxim/principle “Promises ought to be kept”, concerned as it is, with both the future and the past, is not, as such, related to intuitions, but rather to the categories of Action and Possibility/Necessity. Memories, for both Aristotle and Kant, help us to structure and organise experience by abstracting basic terms of Science. To that extent this power is largely a sensory-based classificatory power.
Memory is linked to truth partly via its systematic use in the Science of History. This use will result in a non-fictional narrative that is constructed from official documents located in physical archives, and referring to a particular period of time (and related to events/actions of a significant magnitude important to a city-state). The narrative can begin with the founding of a city-state but can probably never end with an act of destruction unless this involves the territory being uninhabitable as was probably the case with Atlantis and catastrophic natural disasters. In the middle of this continuum are events/actions of significant magnitude that contribute to the growth and development of a city construed in terms of the form of psuche( a living organism). There are also “Physical” historical traces, (e.g. ancient Temples and Cities) in the world, that we preserve as protected objects and living museums. They no longer serve what Heidegger would call a “ready-to-hand” or instrumental function, but rather serve as a sign of a former form of life, which because of the nature of what Heidegger calls our “historicality”, we are necessarily interested in. This kind of desire to preserve the existence of significant objects from the past is perhaps one of the signs that we are not a mere civilisation concerning ourselves only with the maintenance needs of the society but also acknowledge a temporal continuity which, the longer it stretches into the past, the more this awareness confirms an important cultural identity. The mere preservation of records in an archive, as we realised with the Nazi’s, who were meticulous record keepers, does not suffice for the exercise of what Heidegger called in his work “Being and Time” as “historicality”, an important dimension of our Dasein and Being-in-the-world. Perhaps it is this wider conception of the relation of Being and Time that should be the focus of an investigation into the exercise of memory.
Ricoeur argues that what can be legitimately be used, can also be abused, and in this contexts refers to those acts of memorisation which, at the dawn of our oral-based culture were the bearer of cultural values. This oral tradition limited itself to the evocation of significant events or facts. Remembering is not necessarily the same as this form of memorisation:
“With remembering, the emphasis is placed on the return to awakened consciousness of an event recognised as having occurred before the moment when consciousness declares having experienced, perceived, learned it. The temporal mark of the before thus constitutes the distinctive feature of remembering under the double form of simple evocation and of recognition that concludes the process of recall.” (P.58)
Memorisation, on the other hand, is more related to passive experiences of habit in a psychological economics that belongs to the lower faculty of sensibility, a region of the mind regulated by the energy regulation and pleasure pain principles. Energy regulation is more of a biological than a pure psychological concern, and would fall into the realm of what Kant called “Physical Anthropology”, the realm of “what events happen to man” rather than what actions man performs. The pleasure-pain principle, on the other hand, is one focus of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view. Habits are largely pleasurable ready-to-hand pursuits, in that it is only when they are disrupted that consciousness emerges to solve the problem present-at-hand. The recitation of things learned by heart, is one example of the use of memory. At the dawn of civilisation, when cities and civilisations were being created, the oral transmission of significant experience was one of the means used to keep in touch with the past. Memorisation of authoritative texts was the preferred use of this form of memorisation, enabling significant thought to be transmitted across generations. This is, at best, a civilising function of memory, and whilst this use of memory is a necessary condition of civilisation it is not a broad enough cognitive power for the necessary and sufficient conditions (constitution) of a Culture which Kant defined in terms of epistemé (the work of knowing) rather than techné(memorisation). Kant also claimed that happiness(the principle of self-love in disguise) is not quite the same concept as eudaimonia(the good-spirited flourishing life) because, in a culture, man dares to use his freedom and reason to make something of himself, using his theoretical and practical reason and his Judgement(Aesthetic and Teleological). Using the principles of reason is a form of recollection of what we know in order to produce new knowledge, and it is this, rather than memorisation that is going to be the most important characteristic of the cultural soul. This, we ought to point out, has been a subject of debate in the Philosophy of Education of the 1970’s in which R S Peters made the same point as Kant: principles of reasoning trumps habits (in which one attempts to memorise facts). Given that reason is a form of recollection of what we know, it must, therefore, also require a good memory as a necessary condition: a good memory in the sense of the ability to understand and work with principles, concepts and propositions toward systematic ends. On this argument, the power of reasoning is a related kind of power to the power of memory in which it is ideas rather than (verbal)images which are “ordered” temporally in accordance with an architectonic method regulated by principles(noncontradiction, sufficient reason). This latter power of reason is not directly steered by the ordering of “traces” of former activity which sometimes gave rise to the accusation that the ancient bards were “possessed” by these traces, i.e. it seemed as if this activity happened to them, rather than being spontaneously and self-consciously produced by a free will.
Ricouer, in the context of this discussion, takes up the importance of the notion of “enlightened forgetting” which is operating, and helps to prevent the prevalence of memorisation in our present steam of consciousness. Memorisation relies on memory-mechanisms such as association and causality, both of which operate at the level of sensibility in general, and the imagination in particular. The use of memorisation can also be “abusive” when it is used to manipulate audiences. Indeed much of our modern propaganda uses the “mechanism” of association and repetition rather than principles of understanding and logical reasoning to establish relations of the elements being ordered in the discourse. In such exercises of the reproductive imagination there is also no use of the categories of the understanding, and the intention of telling the truth, which involves saying something about something. Here we can see that one of the key defining issues involved in this analysis of memorisation is the instrumental thinking of techné versus the categorical thinking of epistemé.
Traumatic memories are blocked from emerging into consciousness in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle which, as such, tends to disrupt present streams of consciousness with high levels of anxiety and suffering, but also with phantisy-laden wish-fulfillment. Resistances to the work of remembering are, on Freudian theory, mechanistically installed in the psuche, and require a certain amount of energy to maintain and regulate. When such traumatic memories do emerge ,because resistances become weakened, the result of such a state of affairs in the short term is not a cognitive act, but rather a pure behavioural “reflex”, which mechanistically “acts out” the traumatic content(compulsively).This causal mechanism needs to be connected to a “work of remembering” in a transference process in order for the analyst to catch a glimpse of what is troubling the patient. In this “working through” process, these traumatic repetitions are associated with the power of language which will assist in “converting” these repetitions into genuine memories as part of the work of remembering. If the trauma is embedded in a mourning process( a more natural form of “working through”) which, because it contains elements that diminish the patients self-regard (to such an extent that the patient begins to suffer from the depression involved with melancholia), results in the patient converting his own critical responses to the lost object, into substantial and destructive criticisms of his own personality. This actualisation of melancholia is a pathological phenomenon that is described by Freud in terms of a weak ego, which manifests the characteristic of narcissism in the attempt of this ego to deal with the demands of the id, superego, and external world. In this pathological condition, there is a retreat into the world of phantasy and imagination, and a consequent attenuation of concern for the real past and the real future. This pathological condition involves repetition of of traces of experiences that are essentially iconic phantasies obeying energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. Such a “complex” lacks the appropriate temporal structure which it is the task of language and the categories to organise. There can therefore be no “form of reality” in these representations, even if certain images must bear reality content.
The trace of experience of the traumatically lost object involved in the work of mourning, involves a reorganisation of energy and pleasure/pain which itself is anxiety-filled and painful. If this work of mourning can be attached to the work of remembering via the medium of language, the suffering dissipates, but if, on the other hand, this work is demanded of a weak narcissistic ego, there is a risk of the evocation of self-destructive fantasies(suicidal ideation) which in certain specific circumstances may result in the reflexive behaviour of “acting out” ( attempted suicide). Ricoeur correctly points out that in Ancient Greece, melancholia was associated with mood disorder. The poetic/cosmological connection of moods to the diminishing of energy/life during the season of autumn is intimately linked to the idea of psuche and the growth and development of our particularly human form of life(Eros-Thanatos). Here we are dealing with temperament rather than character: biological rather than fully fledged psychological conditions, physical anthropology rather than anthropology from a pragmatic point of view.Melancholics, Aristotle claimed, with Empedocles, Socrates and Plato in mind, are troubled in spirit. As we move toward the era of the Renaissance and characters such as Michelangelo, the melancholic character becomes romantically associated with genius. This train of thought was then interrupted interestingly by Freud, who de-romanticised the idea of a melancholic in both a hylomorphic and critical spirit, and traced the fateful state instead to mechanisms of self destruction(Thanatos). Freud also managed to transpose or transfigure this pathological state onto the soul writ large, i.e. at the level of civilisation where the aggression behind the activity of war was described and analysed in largely Kantian terms. Here, Freud argues, we encounter phenomena more reminiscent of “acting out” than “remembering”( the constitutional work of historical processes). The sovereignty of the state-principle that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia, ran counter to the Kantian Enlightenment Spirit of Cosmopolitanism: a spirit guided by rational principles applied to political realities on the world stage. Ricoeur postulates the notion of the “happy memory” as a possible outcome of the work of remembering.
Cosmopolitanism, for Kant, was not an obsessive vision or a form of “acting out”, but rather a result of Duty and the Moral Law, both of which embodied logical principles applied to life and events on the world stage, in contexts of explanation/justification. Freud, we know was a follower of Kantian Philosophy, and undoubtedly would have regarded Kant’s view of bringing about a better and brighter future as part of the reality principle and its regulation of the work of the superego. He might, however, have been more sceptical of Kant’s argument, when it extends to the soul writ large, namely the city-state. He was well aware of the role of ought-premises in Kant’s arguments and might not have shared the conviction that rational principles would in the long term future triumph over the historical processes he saw actualising during 1929, the time of the writing of “Civilisation and its Discontents”. It was very clear to Freud that Discontentment was the theme of his Age and the light of the Enlightenment was waning. The idea that Freud, perhaps did not fully appreciate, was the practical idea of freedom which Kant saw to be operating in historical processes. Perhaps one hundred thousand years of the operation of narcissistic historical processes could never in the eagle eye gaze of Freud ever lead to the “happy memory”?
In the context of the above discussion Ricoeur points to what he calls the “heritage of founding violence”(P.82), i.e. that record of real and symbolic wounds stored in the collective archives of states. Attempts to repress the truth or meaning of these records testifies to the tension the Greeks and all like minded great-souled thinkers after them, experienced in the recorded failures of the historical process, to result in the just exercise of political power. Power and Justice remain, even today, as a nexus or a knot that needs to be disentangled if the thread of history is to reach the Cosmopolitan future promised and hoped for by Kant.
It was John Locke that specifically connected memory to personal identity, thus transforming the essentially Greek question “What is a human being?” to the more modern “Who is the human being?”. Aristotle’s answer to the former question, as we know, was “rational animal capable of discourse”. He gives this answer in a context of a declaration that man can be both the best and the worst of animals. Transposing or transfiguring Aristotle’s question into the Lockean question of the identity of the human being was an epistemological strategy to avoid metaphysical discussion of the aporetic issues involved in this debate. Philosophical Psychology was thus colonised by the empirical theorists and perhaps created difficulties for integrating the result of such an essentially epistemological discussion with wider ethical and historical/political contexts. Focus turned from the faculty of reason to the faculty of sensibility, and the work of imagination/memory. We can of course see the importance of imagination in the earlier mythical narratives of Achilles, Agamemnon, etc presented by Homer. But these ancient “heroes” were very different kinds of men to the more complex heroes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle , who no longer merely lived passionate “spirited” lives but were also seeking to live “good spirited lives in which reason ruled. The works of these latter “great-souled men” testify to their character and are far more important than any narrative containing facts and events belonging to their “histories”. These works contain a commitment to rational imperatives such as “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”, and reference is not made to great events, but rather to great theories, great arguments and great principles (such as the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason) embedded in a tribunal constituting a context of explanation/justification.
Epistemology prizes facts and contexts of discovery/exploration, over arguments and contexts of explanation/justification, and this creates real problems in applying the results of epistemological investigations to the wider contexts of ethics and politics which require knowledge of values and knowledge of how to reason about these values. In this context Ricoeur quotes Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Éditions Arlea, 1995):
“The work of the historian, like every work on the past, never consists solely in establishing the facts but also in choosing certain among them as being more salient and more significant than others, then placing in relation to one another; now this work of selecting and combining is necessarily guided by the search, not for the truth but for the good.”(P.50)
What is obscure in the above position is, however, the question of how to account for those complex attempts to characterise arguments containing truths about the good, e.g. in Aristotelian and Kantian argumentation in ethical and political contexts. What is interesting about the above essentially modern attempt to widen the scope of the “epistemological reductions”, suggested by the English empiricists, is that it is reminiscent of the Platonic notion of prioritising the good over the true. In this endeavour we can see a vague intention to return to a rational form of argumentation, even if difficulties are then going to occur over the characterisation of what is meant by the fact-value distinction or the fact-normative distinction. Ricoeur does not engage with this debate in this work, but he does disengage himself from empirical views of History by maintaining that memory has a duty. We know that propositions about duties are best expressed in terms of ought-premises, e.g. “Wars ought not to occur”(even if they do). It is important in the context of such debates not to fall into the dualistic trap of romanticising peace and demonising war. Rather we need to reason about the event or the threat of the event in terms of universal moral laws(categorical imperatives). Such reasoning begins with “Wars ought not to occur” and ends with particular “truths” such as “The second World War ought to have been avoided” via of course the premise of “Wars can be avoided”. Other Kantian premises relating to the consequential destruction of resources that could be otherwise used, e.g. for education, could also occur in this tribunal-like reasoning process.
One is reminded here of Arendt’s categorisation of the twentieth century as “This terrible century”. This is what empiricists and some analytical philosophers would call a value-judgement and this is a harmless enough classification, unless it is claimed that because it is a value-judgement, it cannot be true, and is thereby not an objective judgement. The rationalist viewpoint of history and the work of the historian, is that this work must be partly conducted in the spirit of a judge, and partly in the spirit of a scientist searching for the truth of the documents that are assembled in the archives of the city-state. The historian must therefore to some extent be concerned with the restoration of archaic “objects” in the name of what Ricoeur calls “the happy memory”. This of course is not the memory of an individual but rather of a state striving for the virtue of justice. This, as Ricoeur points out, is something that goes far beyond the limits of phenomenology or epistemology. What perhaps is needed is perhaps a return not just to rationalism of the kind practiced by Plato, but a more refined form of rationalism that can be found in Critical and Hylomorphic Philosophy.