Threats to prevent me from posting or completing this work will not prevent me from at least trying to put this essay out there, on-line. I am sure that it may be helpful to persons struggling with memory issues or concerned about this area of scholarship. I am not surprised, nevertheless, that there are persons still seeking to censor my writings and to prevent you from reading them. I can only hope that, someday, this essay will be available on-line as it may help persons struggling to recover memories after great trauma. Attacks against my writings and efforts to prevent me from posting essays on-line continue to be part of my daily writing experience.
Introduction: Issues and Definitions.
Among the most difficult issues in the philosophy of psychology and metaphysics, is a problem with important epistemological implications. This is the problem of the status and reality of memories as well as of the past. Memory's paradoxes was one theme dramatized in Christopher Nolan's Inception. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" then "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
A useful discussion of this subject in philosophy should begin with a precise statement of the various difficulties lumped together under the most abstract philosophical issue:
When we remember the past what is it that we remember? Is the past distinct from our recollections of it? Is the past different from our so-called "objective" records of the past? Our records are always incomplete, after all, and in need of interpretation. Is it possible, for example, to compare our memories of the past with the past itself as distinct from the recollections of others who claim to have witnessed the same past? Is there, indeed, such an entity or object as the same past for any two people? Or is there a single past for the population of a nation with conflicting views of what "mattered" at any given moment in time? Does the past exist "objectively"? Or is it all "relative"? ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
If the past exists "objectively," then where is the past located, again, in order to compare our recollections of events with what, in fact, "happened"? Is determining what happened with respect to any specific event strictly an empirical matter? Is the determination concerning what happened, historically, an empirical question exclusively? If not, then what other sorts of criteria -- besides empirical considerations -- need to be weighed by investigators of the past and/or memories? Aesthetic criteria? Logical criteria?
Are human meanings (values) distinguishable from what "really" happened (facts) on any occasion? Are such meanings "static" or "dynamic" interpretive entities? Can the meaning of a past event be determined or revealed by other or additional events occurring subsequently, or after the original event in time (or is temporal ordering among the ingredients of meaning/causation) within a narrative structure or logic? ("Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" and "'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
The answers to these difficult philosophical/jurisprudential inquiries have vital real world implications. Persons are sent to prison and may even be executed based on the testimony of witnesses as to what they remember to have occurred. Much of the world's literature and cinema is concerned with examining the mystery of memory in human life. Indeed, this romance of memory is the subject of Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatzby. ("Erasing Painful Memories" and "Brian Greene and the Science of Memory" then "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
The various ways in which memories may make sense in terms of a narrative of a life's journey is also a central issue in phenomenological-hermeneutics: Merold Westfal, "Transcendence, Heteronomy, and the Birth of the Responsible Self," in William Beck Matusik & William L. McBride, eds., Calvin O. Shrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity (Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 2002), pp. 201-226 then Calvin O. Shrag, The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Indiana: Indiana U. Press, 1992), pp. 90-116 ("Narrative and the Claims of Reason") then Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2012), pp. 106-166. ("Conversation on a Train.")
The modern philosophical tradition views questions concerning the nature of memory as interpretive of the mind so as to be distinct from neurological-mechanical questions focusing on cerebral operations. George Santayana, "The Cognitive Claims of Memory," in Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 150-164 as contrasted with Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Idea of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983), entirety. Please see also A.J. Parkin, Memory and Amnesia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), entirety, and M. Spitzer, et als., Phenomenology, Language, and Schizophrenia (New York: Springer, 1993).
My concern in the present essay is with the philosophical issue and not the biological or mechanical questions surrounding remembering, except as they bear on the theoretical problem examined in the following discussion. Perhaps examples from literary works may make my focus clearer:
"His most sensible memories -- their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall -- were bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letter, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality."
Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 213 and Ian McEwan, "The God That Fails," in The New Republic, February 25, 2013, at p. 7. (Memory, translated into literature, "annotates 'the microscopic lattice work of consciousness, the small print of subjectivity.' ... I have a memory of myself as a child, caressing a detail in a novel.")
Next there is this famous passage:
"My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war time."
"These memories, which are my life -- for we possess nothing certainly except the past -- were always with me. Like the pidgeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks ... "
" ... These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime."
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York & Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1944), pp. 225-226. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Keeping these paragraphs in mind, I turn to a literary-philosophical definition of memory offered by existentialist novelist, Norman Mailer, fitting the assumptions (I believe) of both British authors, yet still within the phenomenological tradition that is undergoing a revolutionary transformation after the hermeneutic turn:
" ... You could even claim that memory like history is nothing but the record of all the oppositions in one's life -- war, peace, and love, hurrah. Memory is the mind's emodiment of form; therefore, memory, like the mind, is invariably more pure than the event. An event consists not only of forces which are opposed to one another but also to forces which have no relation to the event. Whereas memory has a tendency to retain the oppositions and the context."
Norman Mailer, "Interview," in Richard Poirier, ed., Norman Mailer (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 13 (emphasis added).
Mailer's notion of memory as form -- conveyed by images and/or text -- form that is only made meaningful as narrative, that is, chronicles (scientific and otherwise) of lives lived in time, time is defined by Mailer as "the river of becoming," is helpful to philosophers integrating developments in the sciences (brain science and physics as well as other areas of research) with theories of textual memory-analysis, notably in the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, but also Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan are useful in this project. See Jonathan Miller, "Dialogue With Jerome Fodor: Imagery and the Language of Thought," in States of Mind (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 84-98 and Jerry Fodor, "Syntax and Its Discontents," in The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 23-32 then Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), entirety.
Therapeutic appropriations of this scholarship have been common for some time. The contemporary literature of hermeneutics becomes intertextual or overlaps with the works of Carl Jung and the Jungians as well as humanistic-existentialist psychologists, such as R.D. Laing, Rollo May, and many others. Carl Jung, ed., "The Process of Individuation," in Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1964), pp. 157-255 and Joseph Campbell, "Introduction," in The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin, 1971), pp. vii-xxxii. It may be instructive to contrast Freud and Jung on these issues of self-narration or mythologizing history, Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp. 103-153 then Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 100-113 and Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 357-451 then B.A. Farrell's, The Standing of Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), a devastating analytical critique of psychoanalysis.
Before turning to recent efforts to develop what I have called a "hermeneutic theory of memory," it may be helpful to distinguish philosophical from psychoanalytic aspects of the scholarly literature concerning memory.
A. The Psychoanalytic Issue.
Psychoanalysts and psychologists tend to define memory in terms of three concepts: "1. The function involved in recalling past experience; 2. the totality of past experiences; 3. a specific past experience."
J.P. Chapin, Dictionary of Psychology (New York: Laurel, 1985), P. 275. ("Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers.")
The first and third senses of memory in psychology evolve from the empirical and realist traditions in philosophy. The second sense of memory, however, is an abstraction or synthetic a priori concept that grows out of the Kantian and all idealist and/or anti-realist traditions in philosophy. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" then "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism.")
Compare Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 199-231 with Christopher Norris, "Free-Will, Creativity and Structural Constraint: Linguistics as a Guide to Metaphysics," in Fiction, Philosophy and Literary Theory: Will the Real Saul Kripke Please Stand Up (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 202-261 then Kelly James Clark, "Fiction is a Kind of Philosophy," in William P. Alston, ed., Realism and Anti-Realism (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 2002), pp. 280-295. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review" also Mr. Nolan's "Memento.")
All psychology in our civilization is a product of the philosophical tradition. Foundational logical, epistemological, and metaphysical tensions between these aspects of memory -- as understood in psychology and neurology as against philosophy -- have not been sufficiently noticed or commented upon by persons working in the social sciences. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness" then "The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")
This strange silence among scholars is especially evident in America. A turn to the examination of the relation between philosophy and the human sciences has been obvious and prominent in recent European thought: Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), entirety, and Michel Foucault, "The History of Sexuality," in Colin Gordon, ed., Michel Foucault: Power, Knowledge -- Selected Interviews 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 180-199. Compare Ian Hacking, "Self-Improvement," in David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 235 and David Ingram, "Foucault and Habermas On the Subject of Reason," in Gary Cutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: cambridge U. Press, 1994), pp. 215-264 with Ian Hacking, "False Consciousness," in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton U. Press, 1995), pp. 258-267 and E.J. Lowe, "Time and Persistence," in The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity and Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 84-105. ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" and, again, "Conversation on a Train.")
At a conceptual level, the various aspects of memory incorporated into psychological definitions are bound to generate confusions and misunderstandings along with conflicts:
"The memory process is measured by recall, reproduction, [representation,] recognition and relearning; In recall the subject must demonstrate that he can remember what has been learned without the aid of stimulus clues. An essay examination measures recall. In reproduction he must show, by a drawing or by rearranging objects in their original order, that he can remember what was originally learned or perceived. In recognition the subject must demonstrate that he can remember which of several alternatives were originally learned when all are presented together. The multiple choice examination draws upon this type of memory. In relearning the amount of time or number of trials saved is measured for the relearning of a passage learned in the past."
Chaplin, pp. 274-275.
These aspects of memory are theoretical and distinct from the various understandings of amnesia or loss of memory which are usually anecdotal or context-dependent in the medical literature. This lack of theoretical foundations is an impoverishment of that literature. Owen Flanagan, "Multiple Identity, Character Transformation, and Self-Reclamation," in G. Graham & G. Lynn Stephen, eds., Philosophical Psychopathology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 135-163.
Understanding of memory is connected to the concept of time assumed by investigators. These foundational concepts may be quite different for persons trained in science as distinct from humanistic scholars. See Peter Gallison, Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 294-329 and Errol E. Harris, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988), pp. 79-107. ("'In Time': A Movie Review.")
Much of the analytical philosophical scholarship focusing on memory has been rendered problematic by developments in post-quantum physics, perhaps, but much more by literary theory in the twentieth century which has taught us to regard recollection as an art form. For example, A.J. Ayer's now seemingly archaic -- or at least highly dated -- comments on memory come to mind: A.J. Ayer, "Memory," in The Problem of Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1956), pp. 134-176 and Ben Rodgers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (New York: Grove, 1999), pp. 191-205.
Psychoanalysts postulate a distinction between "repression" of memories of trauma as against "suppression" of events recalled subconsciously -- not consciously -- on the basis of "degrees of voluntariness." Repression is involuntary; suppression is "voluntary forgetting," or "erasure of painful memories," that is sometimes also called "deliberate forgetting." ("Can you lie to yourself?")
Psychoanalysis focuses on the mechanism of repression which was understood by Freud in a steam-engine or nineteenth-century physics sense as concerned with "releasing pent-up forces from the subconscious."
Repression of memories may be associational (or dissociational) through "connections" that are often subconscious also to a particular person or event, almost always these connections are incidental to trauma or, in the terminology of psychoanalysis, "occasions of unusual affect."
Proust's tea-soaked Madeleines, as the doorway to memory, point to the mind's ability to attach symbols or fragments of recollections to different images, linked in ways that may not be fully understood consciously, but which allow for the preservation of threatened or shattered memories. Nearly any important memory is divided and classified, creatively, in multiple ways by the mind seeking to protect them and itself.
Loss of memory may result from physical injury to the brain, described by neurologists as a "severe insult to the brain." More ambiguously, however, loss of memory may also result for exclusively emotional reasons without physical injury or pathology of any kind.
Repressed memories may be recovered without increased harm to functional capacity (where have they been "hidden" by the mental author of the self?) provided that there is "no additional burden imposed on the psychic system" from long-term stress -- including invasions by way of hypnosis over long periods of time -- which are always detrimental and sometimes lethal to the psychic system. Kathleen V. Wilkes, "Fugues, Hypnosis, and Multiple Personality," in Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, eds., Self and Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (New York: MacMillan, 1991), pp. 115-135 and S. Corkin, et als., "The Amnesia Patient H.M.: Clinical Observations and Test Performances 28 Years After Operations," Abstracts of the Society of Neuroscience, 80, pp. 12-35. See also Professor Wilkes' Real People (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1988) then the classic exposition of associational interpretations of the representational theory of memory: F.H. Bradley, "On Memory and Judgment," in Essays On Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 381-408. ("My mind is a leaping thing.")
It has been suggested that the subconscious is an excellent author-editor rearraging and protecting memories in terms of our life-narratives. Memory is the essential ingredient of identity. Hence, there are many narrative paths, unfolding in different time-orders, to arrive at our most important recollections. ("Hansel and Gretl" then "God is Texting Me!")
There can be no doubt, according to experts, of the great dangers to the mind resulting from interfering with the processes of memory and/as "narration." Perhaps this explains the efforts to prevent me from writing. Ian Hacking, "False Consciousness," in Rewriting the Soul, pp. 238-267 and Paul Ricoeur, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in David Wood, ed., Narrative and Interpretation (New York & London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 20-34 then, again, E.J. Lowe, "Time and Persistence," pp. 84-105. Please compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy," in J. Baynes, et als., eds., Philosophy: End Or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 325-339 with Paul Ricoeur, "On Interpretation," in Philosophy: End Or Transformation?, pp. 357-381. (Again: '''In Time': A Movie Review.")
B. The Philosophical Issue.
" ... the philosopher is particularly troubled by the representative power of memory. That is, if I summon up a memory of some event, how do I know to interpret it as representing the past, rather than being a pure exercise of imagination? Is there a specific feeling of pastness? But if so, might I not then have the feeling, but not know to interpret that [emotion] as a feeling of pastness? Indeed, is there always a present representation or might memory be a form of direct acquaintance with the past? This might at least give us a justification of the confidence we place in memory. But is the skeptical hypothesis proposed by Russell, that the earth might have sprung into existence five minutes ago, with a population that remembers a wholly unreal past, at least logically possible? ["Dark City"] But if it is logically possible, the question of how we know that is not what has happened is set to look intractable."
Simon Blackburn, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1994), p. 239 and Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1995), pp. 550-531 ("Images and Temporal Ordering in Memory"). (Those interested in scientific analogies, again, are directed to Gardner and Schacter.)
Philosophers wonder whether memory is a kind of code or "image-making" by the mind that is distinct from its objects of representation or what is captured in this code or image-making.
In aesthetic theory these concerns express themselves through the analysis of images and symbols as vessels containing deep memory-meanings or Jungian archetypes associated with individuals in public or private life. Hence, the evocative power of cinema -- cinema may be made to serve as a repository of threatened memories by a person or culture.
With regard to memory the object of representation is distinguished from the past event. There is, accordingly, nothing outside the text of memory. This is not to deny the objective reality of events in time, but it is to emphasize that memory serves unique psychic functions as well as "recording" what happens in our lives. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Among the areas of philosophical scholarship where these issues are central are not only the theory of psychology, but all philosophies of history, Marxism included. There is no fully objective historical record, yet there are real "events" that take place in the life of a nation. Compare David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. I, prt. 1, sec. iii with Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: 1921), lec. ix then A.J. Ayer, "Memory," in The Problem of Knowledge, pp. 134-175. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
The way memory has been understood by philosophers divides into various categories based on the epistemological and metaphysical systems to which the particular philosopher adheres.
Representational theories of memories understand memory as the opposite of an objective record of the past, but rather as the rememberer's "work of art" or creation -- something formulated in the present tense only in the act of recollection (Gardner) -- which may nevertheless be highly accurate to the events recalled "as they occurred, in fact," whatever that may mean.
Representational theories are usually associated with various forms of idealism, rationalism, phenomenology and hermeneutics in our time, in different ways, often in combination with mediated realist-scientific theories of memory. Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality," in 18 Critical Inquiry, pp.1-21 (1990) and "Symposium: Memory Transfer," Science, 153, 658-9 and discussion in "Edible Knowledge: The Chemical Transfer of Memory," in Harry Collins & Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1993), pp. 5-27. (Chemical "texts" of memory in a scientific hermeneutics.) Karl Pibram, Languages of the Brain (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1971). (The idea of cellular "communication" and "interpretation" has become a fruitful area of biological research. Please see my essay "The Entanglements Are Primary.")
Definitions of memory as form seek to fuse realist and anti-realist elements together in a single theory of memory. The arts are typically concerned with memory as representation and the ways by which genius may capture memory in "form" -- whether words, pigments on canvas, images in cinema, or even music -- all are ways of shaping memories into meaningful patterns. What are we losing when our culture abandons literature and the humanities in efforts to understand such phenomena as memory or the mind, history, politics, or the self? Mark Bauerlein, "POGLing Out," in First Things, February, 2013, at pp. 56-58. ("Whatever" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
Human needs are not only to remember, but also to understand (make meaningful) what is recollected through the creation of patterns. Accordingly, reconstruction of memory may take place with the creation of a narrative pattern into which lost recollections may be fitted because they are needed. Indeed, multiple threads of "emplotment" may well be created by the mind to "script" the narrative of a life's journey in order to allow for the maximum freedom of "evolution" for the self. Furthermore, this process of coding (and re-coding) memories is eternal in the psyche. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Why Write?," in What is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1988), pp. 48-69 and George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1997), p. 25 then Richard E. Palmer, ed., Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1969), pp. 256-293 and Kurt Mueller-Volmer, ed., The Hermeneutics Reader (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 158-275.
The relationship between story-telling and recall in the shaping of personal life-narratives is a central concern of Mr. McEwan's Atonement. William Shakespeare and Marcel Proust are classic writers fascinated by the power of memory to defeat time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, for example, seek to give verbal form to the beauty and passion associated with the poet's lover and loves, while Proust (more ambitiously) attempts in Remembrance of Things Past to recreate an entire society and manners destroyed by the First World War by drawing upon Bergson's phenomenological theory of memory as what is experienced "now" in Memory and Time (1911) as well as Flaubert's exacting demands of the French language:
"The principle thesis of [Proust's] novel is that a man's salvation consists in rescuing his past from the clutches of time."
Louis Auchincloss, The Style's the Man: Reflections On Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal and Others (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1994), p. 78. ("Images and Death" and "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")
Ian Hacking concludes his study of false memory with these words:
"We do have another vision of the soul and self-knowledge. What is its basis? It comes from deeply rooted convictions and sensibilities about what it is to be a fully developed human being. They are parts of the Western moral tradition -- that of Bernice, Goddard, and myself. First, there is an old sense of teleology, fostered by Aristotle, a sense of the ends for which a person exists: to grow into a complete and self-aware person. Second, there is nominalism, represented by John Locke, according to which memory is a criterion for personal identity, perhaps the essential one. Third, there is the idea of autonomy that we are responsible for constructing our own moral selves; that is perhaps the most enduring aspect of Kant's ethics. Fourth, memory-politics has recently taught us or called us to believe that a person, or in older language the soul, is constituted by memories and character. Any type of amnesia results in something being stolen from oneself; how much worse if it is replaced by deceptive memories, a nonself. ..."
Rewriting the Soul, p. 264 (emphasis added).
Orwell's nightmare of a sinister state power used to define or replace memories of public events in the age of stage-managed news now appears quaint. "Big Brother" has become a television news director or fictional byline at The New York Times. ("Manohla Dragis Strikes Again!")
In what follows I will examine the various rival philosophical theories of memory, realist and constructivist, with the proviso that there are nuanced positions between these alternatives. ("Out of the Past" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")
Skeptics, like Bertrand Russell, continue to offer challenges to memory-based theories of identity. Human freedom today -- as anticipated by Orwell and even more by Aldous Huxley -- has become the "collectivizing of memory" and the subtle usurpation by the state and other "actors" of the power to define memories and their meaning(s) for persons. I turn, finally, to current social and political issues surrounding memory.
I. Personal Memory: Is the Past Real?
A. The Representational Theory of Memory.
The focus among philosophers in the modern tradition that is shaped by the Cartesian cogito is upon the individual knowing agent, or agent of recollection, or "personal memory."
Only with the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century and the shaping of mass psychology by the state under fascism have philosophers become especially interested in collective or social memory. Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940," in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1968), pp. 153-207.
In discussing, first, issues surrounding personal memory or individual recollection, I offer crucial distinctions between "time" and "memory" derived from phenomenology: memories of facts are opposed to experiences of recollection. This analysis leads to a clearer sense of what is meant by memory as representation.
Memories are inextricable from the human time-sense. It is also true, however, that contemporary understandings of memory transcend the limitations of linear conceptions of time dating from a pre-quantum age. Alterations in narrative possibilities that arrived with modernism are not unrelated to these richer understandings of memory.
"When" something happened in a person's life -- the arrival of an important person, for example -- is only on one level a matter of chronology. The more crucial "moment" of arrival may have to do with understanding that person's role in the drama that one is and being ready for that role to be played.
The reality of the past is present in our appreciation of who we are or what our lives are about. What or who we remember, how we remember persons -- whose emotions (like our own) color the "affective landscape" or geography of memory -- determines what we are able to remember.
Enrichments of narrative possibilities means that what may be closed to active recollection from one direction may become knowable or liberated from the dungeon of the subconscious through the choice of a "devious narrative path" or what Ricoeur describes as the "detour." For this important French philosopher, such a detour may lead to a "truncated ontology of the self." See my earlier essay on Ricoeur's hermeneutics, Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
A writer once advised a younger colleague to remember that, while every story has a beginning, middle, and end they are not necessarily going to appear in that order, either in life or good fiction. (Again: "'Inception': A Movie Review" and "Bernard Williams and Identity.")
We are lucky to live in an elegant universe where we may remember what will happen in the future by projecting ourselves into our past. We remember that we will die. We can also love someone today because of what we were, together, "once upon a time." What we have shared includes interpretations that we have constructed together that have shaped our identities with-others-in-the-world-towards-death:
"Memory of facts (what has been called 'factual memory') cannot be reduced to memory of events experienced or witnessed by the rememberer (what has been called 'personal memory'), and not all cases of factual memory are cases in which the remembered fact is a fact about a remembered event or action. ..."
Sydney Shoemaker, "Memory," in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 5 (New York: MacMillan, 1967), pp. 266-275, p. 266 (citing Norman Malcolm's Knowledge and Certainty.)
We "remember" that George Washington was the first president of the nation, but we have not experienced the event, as distinct from shared memories of actually experienced events, like the George W. Bush presidency. Significantly, Norman Malcolm and Elizabeth Anscombe -- leading analytical philosophers and close students of Ludwig Wittgenstein -- reacted against Russellian skepticism without accepting a positive concept of knowledge or memory:
"It is different if I think that the experience of memory is what gives me the idea of the past, and say that memory need be neither genuine nor true in order to contain this idea. Both a false and an apparent memory are of what seems to have happened. If I say this, I am holding that memory gives me the form of a representation of the past by supplying me with representations which have this form and that the distinction of apparent and genuine, and of false and true, are superior. For a sense occurs in a false representation no less than in a true. If, then, I regard my understanding of the meaning of the past time as got from my memory representation and regard these as the fundamental data for my understanding, then I regard the true and the false indifferently."
G.E.M. Anscombe, "Memory and the Past," in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume II (Minn.: U. Minneapolis Press, 1987), pp. 106-107 (discussing Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" and Russell's "Analysis of Mind").
The representational theory of memory says that remembering is a present act of construction -- or re-construction through representation -- that consists of the agent's apprehending (perceiving, willing, being directly aware of, being acquainted with) something that is not past, not external to the agent, but something existing or occurring at the time at which the person/agent constructs or "has" the memory. In remembering it is always "now."
With traumatic memory, however, the injury that has been inflicted is always a present painful phenomenon, a frozen moment in time. Howard Gardner and others concerned with the neurochemistry of memory also suggest that all remembering is a present cerebral operation, not a retrieval of a filed memory of a past event.
All trauma is certainly a Kierkegaardian "repetition" -- through sometimes forced recollection -- of an eternal and painful "now."
Remembering is a perpetual rebuilding of the image-based code of our life's journeys or "meanings." It follows that, under this theory, the past exists nowhere except when or as it is remembered.
This representational theory dates from a pre-technological society, without computers or cinema, when most persons could be expected to "last" only as long as the living memory of those knowing them. Current technology has changed this reality, but may only have reinforced the theory of memory as mental representation or present neurological event.
B. The Realist Theory of Memory.
The most common assumption by unreflective or "pre-philosophical" persons is a form of realism or (sometimes) "naive realism" that is aligned with a version of classical empiricism and what is regarded, falsely, as "the scientific viewpoint":
"... What one is directly aware of in memory (what is before the mind) is the remembered event itself and not a mere representation of it." (Shoemaker, p. 270.)
Thomas Reid and other philosophers have objected that there are great difficulties in basing a claim about what occurred in the past on what is found in the mind in the present. There are, of course, equally compelling arguments that some memories imply the existence of real events and persons that could not otherwise be found in the mind.
To be told that one has fabricated a memory of a complex human being -- with all of her particularity and nuanced subjectivity -- is unlikely to be persuasive to the agent of recollection. Hence, what is found in the mind points to its source in the world.
Persons able to describe locations and individuals on the basis of their recollections reveal, at the very least, some knowledge of the relevant locations and individuals. Denials of memory are denials of one's self, one's experience, disconfirmations of the psyche that may result in the dissolution of the self.
Objections to realist theories of memories focus on issues of reliability or accuracy to the "objective" facts that presume a real existence of these facts independently of the individual memory.
The trouble is that "facts" are recalled differently by persons in a position to remember "facts" at all. No one can hold the fact of what occurred, in one hand, and the represented event found in the mind, in the other hand, in order to make the necessary comparison. The contrast between different witnesses or persons remembering an occurrence suggests that there are as many versions of reality or truth as there are persons doing the recollecting which brings us back to literature. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
C. Phenomenological or Hermeneutic Theories.
Phenomenological and hermeneutic theories focus on the logical plausibility of a person's memories. Many lawyers will be astonished to learn that they have been making use of such theories for years.
Plausibility is a matter of "narrative logic" or the way in which lawyers and police -- usually without knowing it -- are literary critics deciding on the believability of someone's "story." As a matter of fact, what juries often decide is which version of the truth, or "story" of what happened, is most plausible. These are judgments that we all must make every day. Common sense is often recommended to voters and jurors, rarely to politicians and judges deploying theories of the "law and facts."
The fundamental importance of what we remember to our life's journeys and goals -- to who we are or can become -- makes it clear that government denials of memory, or attempts at disconfirmation of recollections, amounts to the destruction of identity and/or history. It may be that this observation is more apt as regards social or collective rather than individual or personal memory.
We went into Iraq because we wish "to bring democracy to the Iraqui people," not because of "weapons of mass destruction." This new "script" by our government forced us to forget the months during which we were told that Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction that were about to be used against us. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
We sheepishly obey our leaders, often subconsciously substituting the favored version of history endorsed by our politicians, for the "objective" facts. Increasingly, this process becomes subconscious at a national level. We are not even aware, consciously, that our past is being reshaped for us by powerful forces in our societies for any number of reasons that are also not shared with us.
The media's role in this process goes largely unexamined. Not surprisingly, this post-Reagan era of media manipulation and Hollywood cotton candy for the mind has generated the phenomenon on a mass scale of "false-memory syndrome." A scholarly concern with "quasi-memory" as a tool of conditioning has also emerged, notably in the Marxist tradition and in opposition to postmodernist theory as in the work of Alex Callinicos. A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 127-172 then David L. Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (New Jersey: Princeton U. Press, 1976), pp. 158-275 ("memory" in self-realization).
Equally effective is denial of valid memories -- persuading persons not to remember -- through socially-generated pressures to recall things in a particular way. This mechanism is most effective when it can be aligned with tribal hatreds or racism of some kind. America seems to lead the world in the sophistication of these techniques of social manipulation or control of collective memory. Perhaps this phenomenon explains the popularity of the FOX News channel.
II. Time and Narrative: Memory as Form Again.
To return to the discussion of memory as form:
"Having said that 'form is the physical equivalent of memory,' [Mailer] goes on to make a distinction between memory and an event: 'an event consists not only of forces that are opposed to one another but also of forces that have no relation to the event. Whereas memory has a tendency to retain only the opposition and the context. Under this dispensation, there is no obligation to the past except as one chooses to reconstruct it. The past is the part of the self that one recognizes in the present as belonging to a dimension of time other than the future." (Poirier, pp. 51-52.)
This move elides the distinction between external and internal views of memory. Much depends on what societal concerns are associated with a particular event.
As I write this essay an Olympic athlete is accused of killing his girlfriend. He remembers shooting an "intruder." Issues of plausibility arise, immediately, as well as tensions between so-called "objective and subjective definitions of memory."
Responsibility, free will, and other difficulties emerge as conflicts arise between what an agent "recalls" and what society -- for corrupt reasons sometimes -- determines "really happened" that the actor "must have been aware of."
All such determinations can only be "conflicts of interpretation" or "narratives" offered for different purposes by different role-players in society. There may be any number of narratives. In terms of a person's life-story, however, what matters is exclusively that individual's recollection and the meanings that he or she attaches to them. In the absence of a legitimate public interest, a life's values and relationships are simply not society's business. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Where society has no interest, in terms of self-regarding events or emotional recollections not affecting the inner-lives of others, in other words, as regards a life's narrative, that is the "exclusive property" -- as Republicans say -- of the rememberer. Ian Hacking concludes his study of the sciences of memory with these words:
"Does it matter whether what we seem to remember really happened? ... What about seeming memories of long ago? They matter when our beliefs affect other people. That is the point of the false memory [and hypnosis] polemics. If someone cuts off all contact with her family because she wrongly has come to believe that her father has abused her and her mother knew but kept silent, then incalculable harm has been done to the family. In that case, the false beliefs" -- all males are evil, for example -- "which seem to be memories, have terrible effects ..." (Hacking, p. 258.)
The point to much of Hacking's work and a great deal of hermeneutic theory in psychology and philosophy is that the meaning of our memories and self-understandings, is only for us to determine through narrative intelligence and plausibility that are analogous to the ways in which we evaluate works of literature.
Each person is -- and must be -- the novelist of his/her inner-story. No one can be permitted to take our memories from us or to supply us with convenient (for them) "fictions" of what has happened to us. If we permit others to define public as well as private history for us, we allow them to reduce us to the status of objects or "things" used for their purporses. (Again: "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
To deny the power of our personal stories or purposes is to deny ourselves the status of protagonists in our own lives. This amounts to a kind of slavery resulting from substituting prepackaged stories or meanings ("The War on Terror") on the precious and fleeting moments of our lives. It is to allow others to tell us what our lives are about or what happened to us and why things happened.
We are easily made to live out the narratives of powerful others who do not wish us to see the ways in which we are exploited, along with most of the people on the planet, for purposes that are not our own. (See the forthcoming film, "Elysium.")
We are made "safe," turned into "docile bodies," manipulated to behave in a controlled manner that is useful for government and corporations, but dangerous to our freedoms. This awareness of the increasing prevalence of power not only in society, but within our psyches, is Foucault's animating insight.
The reality of the past that we remember is difficult enough, but the accuracy of our memories and their authenticity is equally in question. The state has invaded so much of what was private by making it public (no area seems to be beyond legal regulation) that our inner lives are in danger of being taken from us in order to serve collective purposes. Government wishes to define our histories for us, to abolish certain narratives of our past, in order to persuade us that, say, "we are good and they are evil." (George W. Bush)
We must be taught that we live in the best of all possible societies. Accordingly, massive global hatred directed against us in the world can only be proof of the irrationality of "inferior" peoples and civilizations as opposed to a very ugly history of oppressions that billions of persons in the world "remember" very differently than we do. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
I can relate to this since my recollection of what is "unethical" or why something occurred may differ from Stuart Rabner's or Bob Menendez's views of the matter. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
We are often asked "not to remember" what we thought happened or believed motivated public actions. I can recall when the invasion of Iraq was transformed -- approximately, over 48 hours -- from a mission to seize weapons of mass destruction to an effort to bring democracy to the Iraqui people. Who won the presidential debates? ("Presidential Debates" and "Republicans Unplugged.")
The entire 18-months-long discussion of the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, the "iron-clad" intelligence data, the presentation before the UN based on satellite photos that may have been altered -- all of this was dropped, instantly, and suddenly became a non-subject with the enthusiastic cooperation of the "free and independent media" that promptly turned to a discussion of human rights under Sadam Hussein.
Curiously, this human rights record did not trouble us when Mr. Hussein's Iraq was America's ally against Iran. Similarly, world condemnation of events in Gaza is being lost to a sudden fascination with Iran's nuclear program.
We are instructed -- and accept -- that we are not to pay too much attention to such details. America's years of friendship with Mr. Hussein, including sales of arms used in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, were conveniently forgotten by a well-trained population. A bell rings and we salivate. ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
"Most people want to be told what to believe!" I was told by a torturer. This applies even to individuals taught to regard only some events in our lives as significant and others as not so important, made to pretend that some things that have happened have not happened, unless the state decides that they did happen after all. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
" ...the command of the totalitarians was 'Thou Shalt.' Our command is Thou Art. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed -- Jones, Aronson, and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -- and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were clean."
George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt Brace-New American Library, 1949), pp. 210-211. ("Legal Ethics Today.")
Memory has become one more field of operation for the C.I.A. and other intelligence or government agencies that are actively engaged in the process of "constructing reality" for us. The past is remembered "for us" to match current slogans of national objectives. (Again: "'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
We are made to "love Big Brother" not in the form of any Chief Executive, but in terms of particular versions of reality in which current platitudes and slogans are vindicated. Hence, we may consume all the oil that we like because climate warming is a "myth." Or the resources of the planet are sufficient for all, so that overconsumption by First World societies is not "our problem" but merely a problem for poorly-administered Third World states. The solution to global warming, according to Mr. Romney, is to "burn clean coal." It comes as a shock to many Americans that Iraq and Afghanistan are seen by the world as colossal disasters. It also shocks Americans to learn that Wall Street is detested everywhere and blamed for much of the world's current economic troubles.
Conclusion: Collective Memory -- Are our lives real?
Perhaps the most ominous example of the socializing of memory through cultural or other use of power may be found in the development of American psychological torture techniques.
These techniques are a means to control human beings in the vast Gulag Archipelago of America's prison system(s), where inmates who are seen as "subhuman" are stored, drugged against their will (often through secret insertions of narcotics into food), subjected to isolation for obscenely long periods of time, and otherwise made to accept official versions of their past and of reality in which what is done to them is "for their own good." ("Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")
This set of practices and the coopting of memory is also visible in the death of the independent media in America and, again, in the use of cultural power to provide images of the past and reality to a largely comatose population.
This leads to the idea of memory as a postmodern locus of revolutionary struggle (or battlefield) in the effort to "construct" personal and social identity against the power of the state. This idea is already a favorite of science fiction film-makers and popular writers using the weapons of the powerful against the powerful. Memory and reality then become whatever the "winners" say they are.
I wish to return to Ian Hacking's crucial concluding observations by way of closing the hermeneutic circle in this essay:
"We do have another vision of the soul and self-knowledge. What is its basis? It comes from deeply rooted convictions and sensibilities about what it is to be a fully developed human being. They are parts of the Western moral tradition -- that of Bernice, Goddard, and myself. First, there is the old sense of teleology, fostered by Aristotle, a sense of the ends for which a person exists: to grow into a complete and self-aware person. Second, there is nominalism, represented by John Locke, according to which memory is a criterion for personal identity, perhaps the essential one. Third, there is the idea of autonomy, that we are responsible for constructing our own moral selves; that is perhaps the most enduring aspect of Kant's ethics. Fourth, memory-politics has recently taught us or caused us to believe that a person, or in an older language, the soul, is constituted by memory and character. Any type of amnesia results in something being stolen from us; how much worse if it is replaced by deceptive memories, a nonself." (Hacking, pp. 264-265.)
To be denied memories of any important event or person in our lives through manipulations is deeply wounding to the victim.
Political correctness or ideology -- even the interest of the state -- must not be grounds for violating the autonomy of a person's inner-life. Emotional meanings based on truthful recollections of a past that can belong to us only in memory must inhere in each of us, as persons, and should never become the property of the state. (Again: "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Memories are the only ingredients from which we can fashion the narratives of our lives -- OUR lives -- to make sense of what has happened to us. To be deprived of our memories, or to be told what they mean, or to have them replaced by a narrative created in Washington, D.C., or Hollywood, or Madison Avenue (or some combination of all three), is to be deprived of the meanings of our lives. It is to be made into objects, subhumans, slaves. We must always resist such a fate. ("Ape and Essence" and "Primates and Personhood.")
