Remembering

1. Paul Rozin, “The Psychobiological Approach to Human Memory” in M. R. Rosenzweig and E. L. Bennett, eds., Neural Mechanisms of Learning and Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), p. 6. Rozin is summarizing the case of M. K. as originally reported in A. Starr and L. Phillips, “Verbal and Motor Memory in the Amnesic Syndrome,” Neuropsychologica 8 (1970):75–88.

2. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. L. Solotaroff (Chicago: Regnery, 1976), p. 11; his italics. The Dante example is reported on p. 45.

4. See R. N. Haber and R. B. Haber, “Eidetic Imagery: I. Frequency,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 19 (1964): 131–38.

5. On hypermnesia, see M. Erdelyi, “The Recovery of Unconscious (Inaccessible) Memories: Laboratory Studies of Hypermnesia” in G. Bower, ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1984).

6. Edward S. Casey Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

7. On this neologism, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 8, 9, 11, 15–16, 45.

8. For a related sense of the inadequacy of intentionality as a basis for understanding memory, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 243–44.

9. An important exception is Marcia K. Johnson’s essay, ‘The Origins of Memories,” Advances in Cognitive-Behavioral Research and Therapy 4 (1985): 1–27.

10. George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 134.

11. “Tantum scimus, quantum memoria tenemus”: cited as an epigram in Johann Grafen Mailath, Mnemonils oder Kunst, das Gedächtnis nach Regeln zu stärken (Vienna, 1842).

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 60–61.

2. On the survival of an oral epic tradition in certain regions of Yugoslavia, see Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), passim.

3. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” p. 62. I here follow the translation of A. Collins in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 7.

4. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. M. H. Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 5.

7. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” p. 61 (Hollingdale translation).

9. For an elaborate and ingenious effort to conceive memory on the model of a specific computer program, see J. Anderson and G. H. Bower, Human Associative Memory (Washington, D.C.: Winston, 1973). See also G. R. Loftus and E. F. Loftus, Human Memory: The Processing of Information (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976).

10. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 7:24; his italics. (Hereafter cited as Standard Edition.) Compare Neissers remark: “Until we know more about memory in the natural contexts where it develops and is normally used, theorizing is premature” (Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality [San Francisco: Freeman, 1976], p. 142). Here psychoanalyst and cognitive psychologist join hands in a common suspicion of artificial models of human memory.

11. I have drawn this list of words, itself only a partial sampling, from the Oxford English Dictionary, abbreviating the definitions given therein.

12. “Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word. In principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word” (J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Austin’s Philosophical Papers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961], p. 133; his italics).

13. On the significance of the transition from a primarily oral culture to one in which chirography and typography predominate, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 5–15, 93–103, and passim.

14. In American education, the main method of memorizing used to be that of rote repetition, which, since William James’s critique, has become recognized as the least efficient method. See William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), 1:663–68.

15. A recent report of the United States Office of Educational Research and Improvement states that memorizing such things as historical dates and passages of literature can “help students absorb and retain the factual information on which understanding and critical thought are based” (cited in New York Times, March 1, 1986, p. 12).

16. Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas, The Memory Book (New York: Ballantine, 1974).

17. William Stokes, Memory (London: Houlston & Wright, 1888), p. 37. Cited by Lucas & Lorayne, The Memory Book, pp. 3–4.

18. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 3; my italics. For a fascinating attempt to trace the fate of the ars memorativa tradition during its introduction to China in the sixteenth century by Matteo Ricci, see Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking, 1984).

19. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “ ‘Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience’, and Related Matters,” in The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 189–94, especially sections 1–3.

21. “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood; memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess” (Freud, “Screen Memories,” in Standard Edition, 3:322; his italics).

23. Ibid., 12:147–48: “The aim of [psychoanalytic] technique has remained the same. Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in the gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression.”

26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & C. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 21. The words in italics represent the title of the first section of the Introduction. The sentence that follows is the first statement in the section.

28. See Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 4, 11, 143, 146–47, 150–51, and 244. See also J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger on Remembering and Remembering Heidegger,” Man and World 10 (1977):62–78.

29. Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, trans. H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius (New York: Dover, 1964).

30. For a candid assessment of such self-enclosure and an admirable attempt to suggest how experimental psychology might reconnect with the concerns of everyday remembering, see Ulric Neisser, “Memory: What Are the Important Questions?” in Ulric Neisser, ed., Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), pp. 3–19.

31. Freud, Standard Edition, 12:153: “For [the psychoanalyst], remembering in the old manner—reproduction in the psychical field—is the aim to which he adheres.”

32. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn Solotaroff (Chicago: Regnery, 1976).

34. Plato, Phaedrus 275 a (Hackforth translation). “Recipe” translates pharmakon, drug or remedy. On writing as pharmakon, see J. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 95–116.

35. “In the ancient world, devoid of printing, without paper for note-taking or on which to type lectures, the trained memory was of vital importance. And the ancient memories were trained by an art . . . which could depend on faculties of intense visual memorization which we have lost. The word ‘mnemotechnics’, though not actually wrong as a description of the classical art of memory, makes this very mysterious subject seem simpler than it is” (Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 4.) On the oral aspects of early Greek memorizing, see the now-classical work of Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. A. Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. pp. 325–42; as well as Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 16–30, 57–67.

36. See the account by Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), 2:292 (as based on Tzetzes and Plutarch).

37. Jean Pierre Vernant, “Aspects Mythiques de la mémoire et du temps,” in Vernant’s Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965), p. 85. In what follows, I am indebted to Vernant’s account of the place of memory in ancient Greek culture.

38. Poets in particular were credited with the ability to intuit the past directly and without any mediation other than their own inspired words. These words not merely depict the past but transport us into it: they make us contemporaries of the events described, and their order is the order of these events. As Socrates says to Ion, the rhapsode:

When you chant these [verses of Homer], are you in your senses? Or are you carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy conceive herself to be engaged in the actions you relate, whether they are in Ithaca, or Troy, or wherever the story puts them? (Plato, Ion 535 b-c; my italics.)

40. See Karl Kerenyi, “Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne. On the Springs of ‘Memory’ and ‘Forgetting’” Spring, (1977): 120–30, esp. 129–30.

43. Ibid., 536b: “One poet is suspended from one Muse, another from another; we call it being ‘possessed’ but the fact is much the same, since he is held” (emphasis in the translation of Lape Cooper). Ong reminds us that “rhapsodize” derives from rhapsóidein, “to stitch songs together” (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 13).

45. Hesoid, Theogony, 32 and 38. Note that the Muses have such knowledge of past, present, and future too: see Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Prometheus Press, 1960), pp. 127–29.

46. Heidegger, What Is Called ThinkingP, p. 11. Heidegger adds that “this is why poesy is the water that at times flows backwards toward the source, toward thinking-back” (ibid.). (“Thinking-back” translates An-denken, commemorative thought.)

47. On this point, see Vernant, Mythe et Pensée, pp. 80–81. In further tribute to their perception of memory’s invaluable role in the lives of men, the Greeks accorded to Mnemosyne a critical position in the scheme of things. Mnemosyne is one of only twelve Titans, the offspring of Gaea (Earth) and Uranus (Heaven, Sky); along with their siblings, the 100-headed giants and the Cyclops, the Titans represent the tumultuous forces of Nature, headstrong beings who overthrew Uranus. Cronus, the castrator of Uranus, was the brother of Mnemosyne; the latter became in turn the lover of Zeus, Cronus’ youngest son and the chief of the Olympian gods. It was said that nine nights of love between Zeus and Mnemosyne led forthwith to the birth of the nine muses. Since at least three of these latter are directly, and three others indirectly, concerned with poetry, the close tie between memory and poetry is recognized and preserved in this mythical form—just as the liaison between Mnemosyne and Zeus ensures Mnemosyne’s intrinsic power: her capacity to seize poets, rhapsodes, and listeners alike with “the Bacchic transport.” (Plato, Ion 534a).

48. In Plato’s view, previous lives are presupposed as the basis for present recollection; but they are not themselves remembered, thanks to the forgetfulness induced by the river Ameles (i.e., “mindlessness”). See Plato, Republic 621a-d.

49. Thus the invocation of divine inspiration at the end of the Meno offers only a pseudo-solution, an aporetic conclusion, to an inquiry into the nature of virtue: see Plato, Meno 99 c–e.

51. See Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, trans. Richard Sorabji, in Aristotle On Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972).

56. See Plato, Meno 81 a (“searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection”) and Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, 453 a 15–16 (“recollection is a search in something bodily for an image”).

58. Cf. Plato, Theatetus 197d-199b; Freud, “Repeating, Remembering, and Working-Through,” in Standard Edition, 12:147–56.

59. “I have chosen to end my history with Leibniz . . . because it may be that here ends the influence of the art of memory as a factor in basic European developments” (Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 389).

60. Descartes, Meditations On First Philosophy, trans. L. J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), p. 23. Since this statement epitomizes modern skepticism toward memory—especially in contrast with Greek veneration toward the same power—I have used it as an epigraph to this Introduction.

61. See ibid., pp. 70, 71, 84—where it is simply assumed that memory is not altogether deceitful insofar as it is able to “join together present information with what is past” (p. 84).

62. Spinoza, The Ethics, bk. 2, prop. 18, note, in the translation of R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 2:100; my italics. Cf. the commentary of H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: Meridian, 1950), 2:80–90, where the rooting of Spinoza’s conception of memory in Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia is stressed. The close link between memory and imagination which all of these compound terms imply is forcefully expressed by Hobbes: “Imagination and Memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names” (Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson [London: Pelican, 1968], p. 89; his italics).

63. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 9. But see p. 85 for Hume’s own questioning of the criterion of order.

65. “When we remember any past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner” (ibid., p. 9). This is to be compared with what Hume calls the “gentle force” of imagination (p. 10).

67. I am thinking here of such figures as de Condillac and Taine in France and the two Mills in England: all continue to conceive of remembering as copying.

68. See Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), pp. 132–33, 143–44, 146, 165, 183. Wolfson demonstrates that the very distinction between “reproductive” and “productive” imagination has its origins in medieval Arabic and Hebrew texts that distinguished “retentive” from “compositive” imagination. See Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2:82.

69. On “productive imagination” see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 142–43, 145, 165. Only productive imagination has a transcendental status. This is why Kant’s only direct discussion of memory (in his Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht [Könisberg: Nicolovius, 1798], sect. 34) treats it as a merely empirical faculty of human beings.

70. Norman Malcolm, Memory and Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

2. R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (1977):232.

3. Edward S. Casey, “Imagination and Phenomenological Method” in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, eds. F. Elliston and P. McCormick (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 70–83; Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 25–26.

4. Freud argues that this inalienable but puzzling presence of the self in one’s memories is a proof that they cannot be purely reproductive, for at the time we were not at all aware of ourselves as sheer spectators. See his early essay, “Screen Memories,” in Standard Edition, 3:321.

5. I refer to the moments in the film when the young protagonists are seen in a movie theater, and we are shown part of the movie which they are watching.

6. This experience thus puts into question Freud’s strict division between “word-presentations” and “thing-presentations” (Standard Edition, 14:202–4, 209–15). The presentation here, though manifesting itself explicitly as a word, is equally (though more implicitly) a presentation of the thing denoted by the word. Is this perhaps always true of memories of proper names? One is also struck by the fact that it is often proper names that return most suddenly in memory (and that, conversely, are just as suddenly lost, especially as we get older). Is this because phonological encoding occurs first and is most easily decoded as well as because encoding of proper names has a privileged position?

7. The word, however, was not only visible, but appeared to have an ambiguous status in my memory as visual and verbal at once and as a whole.

8. Contexts, even quite loose ones, always put constraints on what we experience, leading us to take the experienced item in one way or another, to disambiguate it in a certain fashion, etc. The more specific the context, however, the more delimiting and restrictive the constraints.

9. William James, Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950), 1:643–52.

10. See Robert Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976), chap. 6.

11. The nature of place memory is treated at considerable length in chapter 9 herein.

12. As Freud describes himself in The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition, 4:105).

1. Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia 453 a 15–16. Here and elsewhere in this book I employ Richard Sorabji’s translation in his Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972).

2. A variation on this circumstance is described by Freud: “Something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed—was never conscious” (Standard Edition, 13:149). Freud restricts this to “purely internal acts” (ibid.) such as fantasies and emotions, but there seems to be no reason for excluding sensory perceptions from this process.

4. At least apparently disconnected: on further reflection (e.g., in psychoanalysis) one may well discover initially unsuspected connections after all. Thus my claim must be restricted to ostensibly disconnected memories.

5. Yet what is expansion from one perspective is encapsulment from another: to remember the tea-tasting now, some time after it has occurred, is also to condense and encompass the original moment of the experience within the present moment. This holds even less ambiguously in the other examples, where entire stretches of previous experience are at once extended and encapsulated in the act of remembering them—thereby exhibiting the co-ordinate and even conterminous character of these two basic actions of remembering.

6. William James, Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950), 1:463.

7. Of course, we need not be explicitly reminded; much of our past experience persists in a more insidious and subtle manner, as in the largely unacknowledged role of memories of my former movie-goings in the Lincoln Theater: these memories persisted under the cloak of the consciously entertained memory of viewing Small Change at this theater a short time ago. I return to the phenomenon of reminding in chapter 5.

8. It should be underscored that the actualities we remember are for the most part datable even if not necessarily dated. Indeed, it is comparatively rare that we remember the date as such; “1492,” “1066,” one’s birthdate, our anniversary: such contents of memory are few in number. In many cases, an approximate indication of the date is given with the memory: “a few weeks ago” (example #2), “several summers ago” (example #6). In other cases, not even this much of an indication is given, and we must institute a search to specify the date, as in example #1. In the cases of remembering “902” and “Culligan,” however, we encounter a limit of datability itself. Although these memories no doubt derive from datable events, they are not datable as such. This is not to say that they are out of time or timeless; they are perfectly well in time, but in such a manner as to resist being dated.

9. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 75.

10. “We have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. . . such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.” (John Dewey, Art as Experience [New York: Capricorn Books, 1958], p. 35; his italics.) In what I have said just above I do not mean to deny that we can (and often do) have fragmentary memories. However incomplete such memories may be, they nonetheless count as memories— i.e., can be identified as memorial in status—only if they manifest sufficient determinateness (“finishedness”) to be considered as conveying, in whole or in part, what Dewey calls “an experience.”

11. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:650; my italics. See also p. 652, where “reality” corresponds to what I have been calling “actuality”: “The sense of a peculiar active relation in [an object] to ourselves is what gives to [this] object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in the absence of this peculiar feeling relation.”

12. Once more I must make exception of the “902” and “Culligan” memories. In such memories—which are generic rather than episodic in status—no significant sense of self-presence is operative. Put otherwise: no part of their manifest content includes myself-as-witness.

13. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 265–67, 330–39.

14. Even the hazy recollection of Aunt Leone can be construed as the unfocused ground for the name “Aunt Leone” as the focused figure. Such figure/ground analysis is applicable in all the other cases too.

15. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 18.

16. By this I mean that although the tasting itself is an episode and rememorable as such in recollection or “secondary memory,” I remembered it non-episodically as lingering in primary memory and thus as non-narratized.

17. This is not to deny that the description per se of any given experience of remembering is always implicitly narrative in form insofar as it makes mention of relevant antecedents, surroundings, and consequences of the experience. All of my written descriptions above would count as narrations in this broad sense. But the same cannot be claimed of the specific content of the experiences thus described.

18. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 279. The full statement is: “Being good at recalling is not being good at investigating, but being good at preserving. It is a narrative skill, if ‘narrative’ be allowed to cover non-prosaic as well as prosaic representations.” The issue of narration will be taken up again in chapter 6, where I shall also further explore the matter of self-recounting.

19. This is the Piagetian view. See Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, Memory and Intelligence, trans. A. J. Pomerans (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

21. From the essay “Screen Memories,” in Standard Edition, 3:317. Freud goes on to cite the quotation from Virgil given just above.

22. I want to stress that these events, qua remembered content, may be intrinsically unpleasurable (e.g., disgusting, despairing, etc.). But as remembered at the present remove of time, they can take on a bittersweet quality that represents a compromise between their inherent painfulness and the equally inherent pleasure of ruminescence. This is not to deny situations in which the painfulness is such as to overwhelm any subsequent recollective pleasure.

1. Importantly different is Freud’s use of “diphasic” as referring to sequential periods of development. See S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in Standard Edition, 7:66, 100.

2. For further discussion of the basic notions of act and object phases as component features of intentionality construed in a phenomenological sense, see Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 38ff.

3. The capacity to remember is our innate or acquired ability to do so; the disposition to remember is the tendency to do so on certain occasions. For further discussion of this distinction, see Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 1–2; and Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 131ff.

4. On short-term storage, see Robert G. Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976), chaps. 6, 7. On long-term storage, see ibid., chaps. 8–10.

5. For a discussion of these cases, see Brian Smith, Memory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 48: “There may be some memories which are constantly, as people say, at the back of their minds . . . in such cases we could equally well regard the memory as occurrent or as dispositional.” This is meant as a critique of Ryle’s original distinction between dispositional and occurrent senses of memory in The Concept of Mind, pp. 272–73.

6. Systematic amnesia such as is found in Korsakoff patients, for example, illuminates the distinction between short-term and long-term memory, both being aspects of memory capacity. See G. A. Talland, Disorders of Memory and Learning (New York: Penguin, 1968), esp. p. 126ff.

7. See inter alia C. B. Martin and Max Deutscher, “Remembering,” reprinted in R. M. Chisholm and R. J. Swartz, eds., Empirical Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 306.

9. William James was the first to distinguish primary from secondary memory. He did so in his Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950), I, pp. 606, 609–10, 613, 643–53. Bergson hints at primary memory in his notion of “a perception of the immediate past” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer [1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959], p. 130). Influenced by James, Husserl discussed primary memory in his 1904–1905 lectures: The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), esp. secs. 8–13 and app. I. For treatments of primary memory in experimental settings, see Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory, ch. 6.

10. Hence it is misleading to refer to primary remembering as involving an “echo box” phenomenon, even if this term is accepted or suggested by subjects who are questioned on the point. See N. C. Waugh and D. A. Norman, “Primary Memory,” Psychological Review 72(1965):89–104. Any effects of reverberation or resounding are better considered under the designation of “iconic” or “echoic” memory, a special form of transient storage of strictly sensory aspects of experiences. Since we are not aware of such memory—it arises and vanishes extremely rapidly—I do not consider it as essential to a phenomenological study of memory. The classical source here is G. Sperling, “The Information Available in Brief Visual Presentations,” Psychological Monographs, 1960, no. 11.

11. “Retention” and “sinking away” are Husserl’s terms for this process. See Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, secs. 8–13.

12. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:613. James also posits a “forward fringe” (ibid.)—as does Husserl in his notion of “pretention” (see Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, sec. 24).

13. James posited 12 seconds as the normal nucleus of primary memory. See Principles of Psychology, I: 611ff. On more recent estimates and measurements, see Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory, p. 146ff., esp. the conclusion on p. 173: “The stability of primary memory capacity across measurement techniques . . . argues that it is quite a fundamental structural feature of human information processing.”

15. On the specious present, see James, Principles of Psychology, l:609ff., 647. For Husserl’s discussion of the living present, see Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Nijhof, 1966). That the same phenomenon could be termed at once “living” and “specious” attests eloquently to its ephemeral and vanishing character. It also attests to its ready deconstructibility, as is brilliantly demonstrated by Jacques Derrida in Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 60ff. I leave Derrida’s efforts out of consideration here, however, since they bear on the metaphysical premises at play in Husserl’s descriptions of primary memory rather than on these descriptions themselves.

17. See Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory, chaps. 7–8; Henry C. Ellis, Fundamentals of Human Learning, Memory, and Cognition (Dubuque, IA: Brown, 1978), chaps. 4–5.

19. This phrase, originally from Shakespeare (Sonnet XXX, line 6), is used by James without quotation marks in Principles of Psychology, 1:662.

20. This is entailed in information-processing and computer simulation models of memory. See, for example, John R. Anderson, Language, Memory, and Thought (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976).

21. For Husserl’s use of Re-präsentation see Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, sec. 17.

23. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, p. 66; my italics, where “it” refers not only to the pristine present but to its retention in primary memory as well.

24. E.g., “World War II,” “the Guilford Green,” “my house,” “the Star-Spangled Banner,” etc.

25. Thus remembering simpliciter is to be distinguished from imaging, which is always sensuous. See Casey, Imagining, pp. 41–42.

26. In fact, a formula or group of words is more likely to be given a sensuous form in memory than to be designated by abstract symbols, presumably as an aidemémoire. Imagery allows for what psychologists call “parallel processing,” that is, the representation of a plurality of items simultaneously and together. Hence its value in recalling multi-element bits of information.

27. On the predicational crease, see Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 104–5.

28. Such is Norman Malcolm’s term for the entire class of such memories. Cf. his “Three Kinds of Memory” in Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 204ff. See also Endel Tulving, “Episodic and Semantic Memory” in E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, eds., Organization of Memory (New York: Academic Press, 1972), pp. 381–403.

29. I may remember seeing paintings or photographs of some of the facts mentioned, and these may well furnish pictorial details. But the details still do not pertain to situations at which I was present: I can remember that I saw such representations, I can import details from them into my remembering of the situations in question (e.g., as decoration or support), and I can even delude myself into believing that I was present by confusing the representations with the situations they depict. Yet I cannot non-delusively remember that these situations took place with the sensuous features provided by the representations: such situations, which have the status of learned but unwitnessed facts, are consigned to non-sensuousness as contents of my acts of remembering-that.

30. Martin and Deutscher restrict their otherwise illuminating discussion of nonsensuous remembering-that to this single kind. Neither of the two types of re-membering-that which they discuss adequately reflects the second kind of nonsensuous remembering which I am about to describe. See “Remembering,” in Empirical Knowledge, pp. 303–5.

33. As Bergson implies in contrasting all recollective, visualized memory with “habit” or “motor” memory—the former being regarded as a matter of “spontaneity,” the latter of “repetition.” See Matter and Memory, pp. 69–77. I discuss Bergson’s conception of habit memory in my essay “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” Man and World 17 (1984):279–82.

34. By “do” I mean not only practical actions but actions of feeling and thinking as well.

35. Of course, cues of various sorts are employed at later stages of any learning process such as this one: but if the learning has been thorough, they are not then consciously needed as they must be at the stage of habituation. It is of interest to note here that New York City taxi drivers report that one of their critical cues is the sense of rapidity with which they pass through a given part of the town: i.e., the rate at which buildings or other landmarks “whiz by”; such cues are strictly kinematic. (I am indebted to Ray McDermott for this observation.)

36. For a detailed discussion of habitual body memories, see chapter 8, secs. II and III herein; Casey, “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” p. 282ff.

37. In Heideggerian language, it is a matter of the structure of the “in-order-to” (um-zu) in human experience. This structure is in turn part of an “equipmental totality” which provides its essential context. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and C. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), sec. 15.

38. Richard Sorabji is an exception. See his list of kinds of remembering in his Aristotle on Memory, pp. 1, 8, 13. But he only mentions remembering-to in passing and without giving any further discussion.

39. This is an especially characteristic example, since many cases of remembering-to involve the performance of a duty or task.

40. A notable exception is remembering-how to do. This, too, may be directed toward the present or the future, but in unequal measure. Its primary nisus is toward the future, i.e., toward a time when our action or movement will have realized its aim. Only secondarily is it directed toward the present alone; but an exception occurs when I remember how to swim for the sake of the activity of swimming itself (not to become a better swimmer or to impress others, etc.). Another exception will be treated below under “Subsidiary Types of Remembering” (“Remembering the Future”).

41. As in Roy Schafer’s theory of human behavior: see his A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), esp. Part III.

42. My claim is not that this is always so—we do have distinct recollections on the occasions in question—but that there is a pronounced tendency in the direction of the amorphously recalled.

44. I say “happen” because we can also remember future events in which we are not personally engaged: e.g., in remembering an upcoming religious holiday that we do not ourselves observe.

46. James and Husserl belong together in their adherence to primary versus secondary memory, while Bergson allies himself with habitual versus recollective memory. M. I. Posner posits “verbal,” “imaginative,” and “enactive” remembering in his Cognition (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1973).

47. Bergson acknowledges recollective imagery to be of value in the very acquisition of habit memory: “We make use of the fugitive image [of habit memory] to construct a stable mechanism which takes its place” (Matter and Memory, p. 74).

3. So, too, are the act phase and the object phase themselves, which may not be distinguished in fact in many cases of remembering but which remain distinguishable upon reflection and by means of a nuanced description. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty’s objection to an “intentional analysis” of memory (namely, that “consciousness of” is an inadequate model for the recapture of a massive, “vertical” past) fails to be decisive. What counts in a descriptive analysis is not necessarily what one is immediately conscious of in an experience. (See M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968], pp. 243–44.) Later, however, when remembering will be considered as something other than mental in status, Merleau-Ponty’s critique will become apposite: see Parts two and three below, especially chapter 8.

5. I say “specifiable” and not “specified,” for the specific content of a given act of remembering may not yet be specified verbally. But it must always be possible to do so eventually. Thus I cannot agree with Sorabji’s critique that the passage just cited invokes only a contingent criterion of remembering. See Richard Sorabji, Aristotle On Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 9–10.

6. As James says, “Wherever, in fact, the recalled event does appear without a definite setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of fancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls associates which gradually become more definite, it grows more and more distinctly into a remembered thing” (Principles of Psychology, 1:657–58). I should make it clear that the case of oneiric memory is atypical insofar as the sense of a setting may occur independently of the dream-content itself—whereas in the other cases we shall be examining, the memory-frame forms part of the mnemonic presentation.

7. Even here exceptions occur. To remember a particular date may evoke an entire ambiance. This is especially true of anniversary dates and other commemorative occasions; this also holds for historical facts whose recollection evokes an entire life-world for us.

8. The ephemerality of these mini-worlds precludes their functioning as “fields” in any strict sense. See Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 50.

9. This term is Heidegger’s, although he intends it in a quite different way than that in which I am using it here. See Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), sec. 70.

10. I am using “place” and “locus” here in a purely descriptive or formal sense, not in the much richer sense which will be the focus of attention in chapter 9.

11. See James, Principles of Psychology, 1:650–51, 654–55, 657–58. James also refers to these as “concomitants” on p. 655.

12. It is not that they could not be thematized by a subtle shift of attention on our part. Think, for example, of the vaguely delineated but not wholly indefinite figures who surrounded me in the theater during the viewing of Small Change. Although I could not give anything like a full description of these figures, I could certainly say more than I did in my actual description of them. In particular, I could indicate the way in which they helped to situate me within the interior space of the theater by their manner of surrounding me. Nevertheless, precisely as unthematized, such surroundings contribute all the more powerfully to the worldhood of a given memory-frame.

14. As a result, self-presence is not discussed as a basic element in the imaginative presentation in Casey, Imagining, pp. 50–51. Indeed, the comparative infrequency of imagined self-presence is what led me to use the term “world-frame” for what I am here calling the “memory-frame” and to give to the former a somewhat more subordinate position within the imaginative presentation than I here assign to the latter within the mnemonic presentation.

15. See Bertrand Russell, Analysis of Mind (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 161.

16. It is true, however, that a sense of familiarity may cling to the remembered facts or skilled actions here in question. But such familiarity derives exclusively from their repetition (in mind or in practical action), not from self-presence as such. It is to be noticed that the subtypes of remembering-that and remembering-how cited here also normally lack any factor of worldhood in their respective memory-frames.

17. Birth-dates are an exception to this rule; but necessarily so, since it is expressly a question of the day of birth and this day needs to be specified as such in any explicit reference to it. In relation to ourselves, then, each of us is an historian faute de mieux.

18. This is ultimately due to the symbolic status of a date. Any symbol, whether logical, mathematical, or verbal, has the same dual property: “2” includes a considerable (and still to be specified) range of phenomena having to do uniquely with the number 2, while it excludes its neighbors “3” and “1” definitively and without need of further specification.

19. As James says, “If we wish to think of a particular past epoch, we must think of a name or other symbol, or else certain concrete events, associated therewithal. Both must be thought of, to think the past epoch adequately” (Principles of Psychology, 1:650; my italics). “Other symbol” here includes date.

21. James, from whom I borrow the term “contiguous associates,” uses it more broadly to apply to spatial or temporal adjacency. But this is to presume a perfect parallelism between remembered time and space—a parallelism which I do not think exists.

22. Note that the first two examples also exhibit sameness of place in addition to similarity of time. Such a dual classification has a strong reinforcing effect, increasing the meaningfulness and unity of the memories belonging to such a group. On the grouping of memories, see Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 155ff, 238.

23. The indefiniteness of these times themselves contributes further to their conjointly massing effects.

24. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 66.

25. Hence our feeling that such a place is somehow “haunted” by its past character; the place abides and as such solicits what formerly occupied it to return once more.

26. Except by distortion, imposition, or misconstrual. On this point, see my paper “Imagining and Remembering” Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977): esp. 200–204.

28. Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, trans. N. Metzel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 155–56.

30. Minkowski, Lived Time, p. 163. This phrase is applied to “the past as forgotten,” but it pertains as well to the aura of the remembered past.

33. On pure possibility, see Casey, Imagining, chap. 5. Strictly speaking, occurring in any particular spatial or temporal form is excluded from this notion. See especially ibid., pp. 117–19.

34. What I here call “atmosphere” is closely akin to what Walter Benjamin, commenting on Baudelaire, has called “aura” tout court. But Benjamin restricts aural phenomena to a special relationship between people and natural objects. See “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 189ff.

35. This involvement of the self in the atmosphere also distinguishes remembering from imagining: as actively projecting what we imagine, we are much less prone to be drawn into its atmospheric embrace.

37. Indeed, the very activity of remembering often serves to induce emotions of the sort that specify the atmosphere pervading the mnemonic presentation. Perhaps the primary such emotion thereby induced is nostalgia, which as a mood is especially pervasive. As we have seen, nostalgia is an important ingredient in “ruminescence,” the most distinctive state of mind that occurs when we remember.

38. “Monogram” is Kant’s term for the pure image. See Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), A570-B598 (p. 487).

40. See ibid., p. 65 and sec. 20. For a treatment of the freedom of remembering, see chapter 12, herein.

41. Husserl attributes this non-contingent diminishing to the very constitution of the “absolute flux” that is the ultimate level of all time-consciousness. The “running-off” of this flux, its gradual fading in continua of retentions, is in his view an “a priori temporal law.” Cf. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, secs. 10–13, 21, 34–36.

42. On the notion of an unavoidable veiling in secondary memory, see ibid., p. 72.

43. A single memory may harbor within itself a number of different texturalities, held together by participating in a common aura. At the same time, the aura can possess its own felt texture.

44. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. xi.

45. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Point of View, trans. L. A. McAlister (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), pp. 78–91.

1. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), esp. chap. 1 (“Descartes’ Myth”); and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 1 (“The Invention of the Mind”) and Part two (“Mirroring”).

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 79.

1. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 95–121.

2. Notice that I can also be reminded of a non-action: e.g., “don’t plug in here!” Refraining from action is nevertheless a genuine action, as is any form of intentional inaction or non-action. On this point, see Roy Schafer, “Claimed and Disclaimed Action,” in A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 127–54.

3. Thus it is misleading to say that “a reminder is that which evokes memory” (Norman Malcolm, Memory and Mind [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], p. 105; my italics). Reminding, especially in the form of thinking of the past, does not simply evoke memories; it is itself a form of memory.

4. I often purchase postcards at museums to serve precisely as pictographic reminders of memorable experiences or objects.

6. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 1:270.

10. By “remindand proper” I designate that of which we are consciously or explicitly reminded—in contrast with the implicit content of remembering-that as discussed above. The latter is genuinely real; but it cannot count as the indicatum in Husserl’s sense of the “objective correlate” of an indicative sign (ibid., p. 170).

12. It is to be noted that “figure” translates (via the Latin figura) schēma. Moreover, the fig- root of “figure” is equally the origin of “feign” via fingere, which means to form, mould, conceive, or contrive and which is itself the etymon for “fiction” and “figment.”

13. In chapter 2 I detected a comparable schematical quality in many ordinary recollective memories. But where this quality is a secondary trait of these latter, it is a distinctly primary trait of reminders.

14. In Husserl’s terminology, the perceptually adumbrated constitutes a perceived object’s “internal and external horizons”; in Gurwitsch’s language, it makes up this object’s “perceptual implications.” (See E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 150ff.; and Aron Gurwitsch, “The Phenomenology of Perception: Perceptual Implications” in J. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology [Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965], pp. 17–29).

15. Thus I must disagree with Paul Weiss when he claims that “strictly speaking, adumbration occurs only in perception” (Modes of Being [Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1958], p. 521).

16. Moreover, such obliqueness points as well to the often quite tacit relation between reminder and remindand. The former conveys the mind to the latter not so much by expressly referring to it (though it may do this at the level of verbal discourse) but more typically by a spontaneous allusion in which we are aware of what is evoked rather than of the activity of allusion itself.

18. We here confront a situation in which memories become reminders, even though reminders themselves constitute a subset of remembering itself. It is as if Mnemosyne were devoured by one of her own muses: I shall return at the end of the next chapter to the issue of memory’s remarkable recursiveness.

19. A systematic and pre-established usage of images employed as reminders can also be completely conventional; say, the American flag as a reminder of certain specific patriotic virtues. Whether this usage is itself ultimately parasitic on verbal language is a question which we must leave open here.

20. Thus I would resist imposing on reminders Peirce’s trichotomy of signs: indices, icons, and (verbal) symbols. See Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2. Peirce himself seems to have regarded reminders as indexical signs: see ibid., vol. 2, 2.285, 2.288. Indeed, it appears that all memories are indicative in Peirce’s view: see ibid., vol. 1, 1.305.

22. Thus Plato speaks of the first moment of reminding as “the exercise of one’s senses upon sensible objects” (ibid., 75e).

24. Plato, Meno 85d; my italics. On this theme, see also Phaedo 75e; Theatetus 198c; and Philebus 346a.

1. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 9. In italics in the text.

2. Thus the first definition of “recount” in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “to relate or narrate; to tell in detail; to give a full or detailed account of (some fact, event, etc.).”

3. “Every good story must have a beginning that arouses interest, a succession of events that is orderly and complete, a climax that forms the story’s point, and an end that leaves the mind at rest” (E. P. St.-John, Stories and Story-Telling [New York: Pilgrim Press, 1910], p. 13).

4. A further difference between reminiscing and story-telling involves the factor of audience. It is a singular fact that one almost never tells a story to oneself. To tell a story without any audience, actual or potential, is for story-telling to lose all point and purpose. In this respect story-telling is even more thoroughly social than is reminiscing. As we shall observe in some detail below, one can reminisce to oneself quite effectively. Further, when others are present, they are typically present as themselves participating: as co-reminiscers. The role of others in story-telling is, in contrast, solely that of listening: taking the story in. Hence the focus on the storyteller himself or herself as an indispensable preserver and purveyor of the story itself.

5. E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 178: “Through associative linkage, the no longer living worlds of memory also get a kind of being, despite their no longer being actual.”

6. I say “per se,” for we normally do re-enter the affective ambiance of the reminisced-about world, that is, its pervasive mood, its “Gestimmtheit” as Heidegger might say. This ambiance remains distinguishable both from a particular past emotion and from the present emotion generated in the reminiscing itself.

7. C. B. Martin and Max Deutscher, “Remembering” in Empirical Knowledge, ed. R. M. Chisholm and R. J. Swartz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 306.

8. See Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 67ff.

10. But they can be regarded as constitutive of that which they serve to supplement. For this view, see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 89ff.

11. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Putnam’s, 1966), pp. 49–50. Nabokov is here writing of his mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov.

12. E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 66.

13. This statement is attributed to George Haines by Webster’s Third International Dictionary.

16. Virgil, Aeneid, I, 203. Even Virgil might have to admit limits: e.g., the memory of overwhelmingly traumatic events. I return to this issue in chapter 8.

17. I have treated this point in an unpublished essay “The World of Nostalgia.”

18. “Discourse is existentially equiprimodial with state-of-mind and understanding” (M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 208; the entire passage is in italics).

20. On this point, see Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 12ff.; and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 62ff.

21. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 204. He adds: “But word-things do not get supplied with significations” (ibid.).

22. “Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility” (ibid., pp. 203–4).

23. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 129.

25. It overlooks, for example, the blatant fact that we understand nonverbal works of art. On this point, consult especially Susanne Langer’s theory of art as a form of non-discursive symbolism: Feéling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953).

28. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68; Speech and Phenomena, pp. 129–30, 136–37.

29. This tendency may be pushed further by resorting to encrypted writing, as in the two notable cases of Leonardo da Vinci and Edmund Husserl.

30. Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaīs Nin—1914–1920 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), pp. 432–34 (entry of Jan. 28, 1920).

31. As in the case of Anaïs Nin herself. See also William Earle, Imaginary Memoirs (Evanston, IL: Great Expectations, 1986), Vols. I-III.

32. For details, see Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Foreword—esp. p. 14: “When after twenty years of absence I sailed back to Europe, I renewed ties. . . . At these family reunions, Speak, Memory was judged. Details of date and circumstance were checked and it was found that in many cases I had erred, or had not examined deeply enough an obscure but fathomable recollection. Certain matters were dismissed by my advisors as legends or rumors or, if genuine, were proven to be related to events or periods other than those to which frail memory had attached them.” We witness in such verifying activity yet another intersubjective aspect of reminiscence.

34. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Knoph, 1948), 1:3.

1. See E. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), secs. 24, 26. On the existential-hermeneutical-as-structure, see M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 201–203.

2. This is Heidegger’s term in “Time and Being” for a basic activity of Dasein’s spatiality. See On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 15ff.

3. See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 193ff. On the notion of the “determinable x,” see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1975), secs. 131–33.

4. On the role of imagination in seeing-as, see Edward S. Casey, Imagining (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) chap. 6, where I argue that imagining is involved in the experience of multiple-aspect seeing-as.

5. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 130.

6. William James, Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950), l:674n; his italics.

8. For a treatment of this point, see Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), vol. 1, secs. 1–10.

9. For penetrating remarks on the nudity of the face (le visage), see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 194–204.

10. On auto-iconicity, see my essay “Communication and Expression in Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (1971):197–207.

11. Husserl, Ideas, sec. 69, p. 181: “scharf erhellten Kreis der vollkommenen Gegebenheit.”

12. Ibid., p. 180; his italics. Compare the comment of William James: “It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention” (Principles of Psychology, 1:254).

13. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 220: “Say that the things are structures, frameworks, the stars of our life.”

14. For a highly literate—and quite entertaining—account of prosopagnosia, see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (New York: Summit Books, 1985), pp. 7–21.

15. As James says, “We make search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object. In both cases, we visit what seems to us the probable neighborhood of that which we miss” (Principles of Psychology, 1:654).

16. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhof, 1960), esp. secs. 50–54.

17. It will be noticed that this is also the case with déja vu experiences, with this difference only: that one simultaneously doubts the truthfulness of one’s conviction. In the déja vu situation one asks oneself, “but did it really take place before?”

18. I use the word “enactment” to indicate that the action in question need not be overt bodily action, but could be as well an act of thinking, feeling, calculating, or whatever.

19. By the same token, it is not a matter of perceptual illusion, in which we actually take, e.g., the abstract form in the painting, to be that of a leering face.

20. It is idealized to the extent that the mirror-image omits the inward travail and sense of gross awkwardness which accompany the infant’s first efforts to walk and to perform other skilled movements. See J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7.

21. Perhaps this offers a clue as to why the only area of our lives in which self-recognition remains problematic is to be found is dreaming, that incessant activity of the nighttime self. In contrast with states of strict unconsciousness, for which self-recognition becomes an issue only after the termination of the state itself, we are confronted in dreams with a problem of self-recognition in medias res. During dreaming we may ask ourselves implicitly or explicitly: is this really me dreaming this? Am I really here? The identity of the dream-ego is a complex matter which cannot be fully addressed here; suffice it to say that one basis for the complexity is precisely the confusing character of self-recognition in relation to any such ego. Does this ego in recognizing itself recognize the dreamer’s actual self, or only a disguised version of the latter? And yet, despite such complications, self-recognition of some sort appears essential to dreaming as an analogue of daytime self-recognition; without it, it would be difficult to speak of one’s own dreams, much less to analyze and interpret them as meaningful self-expressions. For a discerning discussion of the dream-ego in its various roles, see James Hillman. The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 94–97, 107f., 156–58.

22. James even speaks of the “mysterious emotional power” of recognizing and of its “psychosis” (. Principles of Psychology, 1:252).

23. Tempting as this reduction is, it does no more than rename the mystery, since “recognizable” simply entails “familiar.” As James remarks: “Strong and characteristic as [recognizing] is . . . the only name we have for all its shadings is ‘sense of familiarity’ ” (ibid., 1:252).

24. As is evident in the otherwise excellent collection of essays entitled Recall and Recognition, ed. J. Brown (New York: Wiley, 1976).

25. Between recognition and evocative memory comes “reconstruction.” See Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, trans. H. Weaver (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 80–84. On recognition memory in children, see also Robert Kail, The Development of Memory in Children (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979), pp. 61–80.

26. Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, Memory and Intelligence, trans. A. J. Pomerans (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 4–5. The premise of the “presence of the object” is actively at work in “signal detection” theories of recognition; see W. P. Banks, “Signal Detection Theory and Human Memory,” Psychological Bulletin 74 (1970):81–99.

27. S. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in Standard Edition, 12:153.

29. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 45, 108, 239–40, 248, 308, 316. There is a corresponding “physical pole” as well.

30. On this notion, see Piaget and Inhelder, Memory and Intelligence, p. 11, where such indices are said to be “the most elementary signifiers.”

1. On this notion, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp. 244–49. Sartre is here drawing upon Heidegger’s idea of an “equipmental totality” in Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 109–13.

1. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 91–95.

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. xviii, 418, 426, 429.

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 102–5.

2. I am referring to the case of “H. M.” as first reported by W. B. Scoville and B. Milner in “Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesion,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 20 (1957):11–21.

3. Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses” in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward A Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 135–56.

4. On habit memory as treated by Bergson, see his Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer (1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 67–78.

5. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. 142–47.

7. This is not to deny that such recollections can be sufficient. Pertinent recollections of learning or relearning may sometimes be employed in the service of habitual body memory. In the vocabulary adopted earlier in this book, remembering-that can be placed in the service of remembering-how, yet need not be.

8. But it may serve as a reminder of such remembering, and precisely in the sense discussed in chapter 5, namely as adumbrating in function. For a devastating critique of the mentalistic interpretation of habitual bodily actions as an “intellectualist legend,” see Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), pp. 25–40.

10. “Though we control the beginning of our states of character the gradual progress is not obvious, any more than it is in illness; because it was in our power, however, to act in this way or not in this way [to start with], therefore the states are voluntary” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1114b-1115a; W. D. Ross translation). See also ibid. 1103b: “states of character arise out of like activities.”

12. On the primacy effect in free recall experiments, see Robert G. Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976), pp. 136, 140–41, 146–50, 452–56.

13. Hēxis itself derives from ekhein, to have or to be conditioned in a certain way. See C. T. Onions, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), article on “habit.”

14. “Habitude” has the dictionary meanings of: customary manner of acting; mental constitution or disposition; bodily condition or constitution. (These are the only non-obsolete definitions given in The Oxford English Dictionary.)

15. The oldest meaning of “habitual,” now obsolete, is “belonging to the inward disposition [of something]” (The Oxford English Dictionary).

16. On this question, see “The History of the Human Body,” in The Dallas Institute Newsletter (Summer, 1985) with contributions by Illich, Sardello, Jager, Thomas et al.

17. On tradition and effective-history, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), esp. pp. 267–74. Moreover, habitual body memories intersect with cultural traditions and are sometimes deeply influenced by such traditions in a complex dialectical interplay.

18. John Russell, “How Art Makes Us Feel At Home in the World,” New York Times, April 12, 1981.

20. The example is Merleau-Ponty’s; see ibid., pp. 145–46: the organist “settles into the organ as one settles into a house” and comes to “create a space of expressiveness.”

21. In this particular respect—i.e., its all-at-once character—the revival of habitual body memories is to be compared to many cases of recognition. Both forms of memory are also typically involuntary, arising more as circumstance suggests than as sought for. When we “search our memory,” on the other hand, we are usually searching among our recollections—not among our habitual body memories or resources of recognition.

22. Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 68.

23. See Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965) A189 B233 ff. (Second Analogy). Such succession structures all causal sequence.

24. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” in Écrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7.

25. In fact, the body memory of the trauma leads not only into the past in which the trauma was situated but also into the future when one fears action will be inhibited or lost. This phenomenon is closely related to the anticipatory aspect of signal anxiety.

26. Still another form of taming occurs when we transform genuine childhood memories into screen memories by substituting for the representation of a traumatic event a more idyllic scene, mistakenly taking this latter to have been the true state of affairs. In this case we play a ruse upon ourselves for the sake of transforming the memory of a painful event into the memory of a pleasant one. On screen memories, see Freud, “Screen Memories,” in Standard Edition, 3:303–22.

27. Thus Freud speaks of a memory of sexual assault as “a repetition [of the original trauma] in a mitigated form” (Standard Edition, 20:166).

28. On this notion, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 133–35, 137–38, 143.

29. Cf. Bergson’s similar stress on the future-orientedness of “habit memories”: such memories are “always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer [1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959], p. 70).

31. “The ownmost possibility, which is non-relational, not to be outstripped, and certain, is indefinite as regards its certainty” (ibid., p. 310; his italics). Heidegger is here speaking of death as anticipated by an individual human existent. On repeatable possibilities, see ibid., p. 438ff.

32. “Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural, and in such a way that the anticipation itself is possible only insofar as Dasein, as being, is always coming toward itself” (ibid., p. 373; his italics).

33. Any such division between recent and remote memories is notably lacking in the case of habitual body memories, for which the very distinction between recent and remote in origin is normally meaningless. As I have emphasized in the foregoing, it rarely matters at all to us exactly when we first learned a given habit or picked up a certain propensity. What matters is only that we now have the habit or propensity and can employ it in pursuing some particular project: it is the service-ability that counts here, not the comparative distance of the origin from the present moment. This distance does, however, count in the instance of traumatic memories—since the phenomenon of “after-glow” inheres in long-term samples only, while recent such memories are all too vivid and need no such assistance.

34. Recent research by A. Baddeley indicates that primary memory may itself be largely bodily in character. Such memory is analyzable into an “executive system” and several sensory-specific “slave systems” which “recruit” particular bodily organs or parts. The result is a quasi-autonomous operation; the functioning of primary or “working” memory goes on automatic pilot unless it is interfered with by an activity that competes directly with the slave system. See A. Baddeley, “Domains of Recollection,” Psychological Review (1981); and D. Riesberg, I. Rappaport, and M. O’Shaughnessy, “The Limits of Working Memory: The Digit Digit-span,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (1984).

35. Most notably in Alzheimer’s disease. For a detailed descriptive account, see Marion Roach, Another Name for Madness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 419 and p. 147 respectively.

37. For Dewey’s view, see Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 14–88, esp. 42, 66, 172–80.

38. Such marginalizing may be usefully contrasted with Breuer and Freud’s notion of “abreacting” memories, i.e., re-engaging them so as to allow the affect strangulated beneath them to re-emerge. As a technique for “filling in the gaps in memory,” psychoanalysis tries to reverse our natural propensity for making the most painful memories marginal. It is not accidental that it began with an effort to abreact traumatic memories—as Breuer and Freud make clear in their “Preliminary Communication” of 1893. (See Standard Edition, 2:3–17.) To this beginning should be added the later notion of “undoing the defenses,” including the very denial, isolation, projecting, etc. which are so massively involved in keeping traumatic body memories at bay. We witness here, incidentally, the surprisingly parallel courses of psychical and physical traumatic memories: indeed, the very difficulty of drawing a hard and fast line between the two. (In the same “Preliminary Communication,” the authors move unhesitatingly from one to the other.)

39. On erotic desire as insatiable—as a form of “fury mocking the abyss”—see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 154–55, 301–2.

40. A characteristic statement of Berkeley’s is that “Looking at an object, I perceive a certain visible figure and color . . . which from what I have formerly observed, determine me to think that if I [were to] advance forward so many paces or miles, I shall be affected with such and such ideas of touch.” (George Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision [London: Dent, 1934], pp. 32–33.)

41. Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses, trans. J. Needleman (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963), p. 384.

43. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 70ff. On the metaphor of the past-as-pyramid, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 393: “We are, as Proust declared, perched on a pyramid of past life.”

46. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), I, 5.

51. Bergson makes “place” and “date” the two distinguishing marks of recollection. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 68–72. It is also striking that Bergson calls recollection “picture memory” (ibid.): pictures are eminently datable and placeable.

53. The case of dream memory, which I have almost completely neglected in this book, is highly ambiguous. Is the “dream ego” (itself often quite marginal in a given dream) embodied and, if so, in which specific forms (e.g., as solely visual, or auditory, etc., in its mode of apprehension)?

54. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 142.

56. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 35.

57. “The immediate present has to conform to what the past is for it [i.e., through objectification], and the mere lapse of time is an abstraction from the more concrete relatedness of ‘conformation’ ” (ibid., p. 36). The basic action of conformation to the past does not preclude the capacity of the present to compose something new.

63. Nevertheless, repetition is crucial; it is precisely what Hume overlooks. On memory as repetition, see Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 135–37; as reproduction, ibid., pp. 237–39.

64. Whitehead, Symbolism, p. 18. More completely: “Our most immediate environment is constituted by the various organs of our own bodies, our more remote environment is the physical world in the neighborhood” (ibid., pp. 17–18).

66. Thus “our primitive perception is that of ‘conformation’ vaguely, and of the yet vaguer relata ‘oneself’ and ‘another’ in the undiscriminated background” (ibid., p. 43). Thus we can say that “our bodily efficacy is primarily an experience of the dependence of presentational immediacy upon causal efficacy” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 176).

68. See ibid., p. 119: “The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is inheritance. What is inherited is feeling-tone with evidence of its origin.” This is not to deny the importance of “conceptual feelings” or of the “mental pole” generally: cf. pp. 239–40. But it remains the case that physical feelings are “the basis for conceptual origination” and that “the intellectual feelings must all be initially supplied with the content of the conformal physical feelings” (Nancy Frankenberry, “The Power of the Past,” Process Studies, vol. 13, no. 2 [1983], p. 135; her italics.)

69. “From this point of view, the body, or its organ of sensation, becomes the objective datum of a component feeling [i.e., bodily efficacy]; and this feeling has its own subjective form” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 312). In other words, the body is itself the objective datum for the very feeling of bodily efficacy by which we come to conform to the world beyond the body.

70. Ibid., p. 119. See also: “The body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world. Just as Descartes said, ‘this body is mine’; so he should have said, ‘this actual world is mine’ ” (ibid., p. 81). Nor does Whitehead’s stress on the “withness” of the perceiving body alleviate the paradoxically of a two-tiered feeling situation. It is one thing to say that “we see the contemporary chair, but we see it with our eyes; and we touch the contemporary chair, but we touch it with our hands” (ibid., p. 62; his italics). “With” suggests transmission, means of conveyance—a suitable description for bodily organs in general. But it is quite another thing to claim that this withness is itself directly felt as causally efficacious: “we find here our direct knowledge of ‘causal efficacy’ ” (ibid., p. 81).

71. On the “withness” of the body, see ibid., p. 62. On “objective datum,” cf. ibid., pp. 164, 237, 240.

72. In the formula of a recent commentator, each actual occasion is “other-caused, self-caused, and other-causing” (Jorge Luis Nobo, “Transition in Whitehead: A Creative Process Distinct from Consciousness,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 19 [1979]:273).

73. “Our immediate past is constituted by that occasion, or that group of fused occasions, which enters into experience devoid of any perceptible medium intervening between it and the present immediate fact. Roughly speaking, it is that portion of our past lying between a tenth of a second and half a second ago” (Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas [New York: Mentor, 1955], p. 181).

75. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam’s, 1934), pp. 35–57.

78. Whitehead, Symbolism, p. 20. Cf. also Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 317: “mental and physical operations are incurably intertwined.”

80. Just such precedence seems to be unequivocally endorsed in the following passage: “The direct relevence of this remote past [i.e., remote in comparison with the immediate past], relevant by reason of its direct objectification in the immediate subject, is practically negligible, so far as concerns prehensions of a strictly physical type” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 63). I take “direct objectification in the immediate subject” to be an act of recollection, a term which Whitehead rarely uses in Process and Reality and then mainly in reference to Hume (cf. ibid., pp. 242, 249, 271). Insofar as the relevance of the immediate past in instances of causal efficacy is direct, indeed massive, the importance of the body memory associated with it is commensurately intensified in comparison with any form of memory lacking such a relevance and such a basis.

88. For this view, see Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 107, and esp. p. 217: my living body is “given to me originally and meaningfully as ‘organ’ and as articulated into particular organs.”

90. Ibid., p. 265. For difficulties with Merleau-Ponty’s own conception of direct access to the past, however, see my essay “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” pp. 292–95.

92. On the notion of “subdued being” as this derives from Bachelard, see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 267.

93. “In,” “from,” and “through” can be regarded as the three primary modes of Whitehead’s “withness” of the body.

94. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 107. Husserl goes on to say that the meaning in question is precisely that “indicated by the word ‘organ’ (here used in its most primitive sense)” (ibid.).

96. On this point, see Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 106: “Clearly the aspect-exhibitions of whatever body is appearing in perception, and the kinestheses, are not processes [simply running] alongside each other; rather, they work together in such a way that the aspects have the ontic meaning of, or the validity of, aspects of the body only through the fact that they are those aspects continually required by the kinestheses.”

100. We can go still further and claim with Bergson that the body is itself already like mind or consciousness: “Concrete movement, capable, like consciousness, of prolonging its past into its present, capable, by repeating itself, of engendering sensible qualities, already possesses something akin to consciousness” (ibid., p. 243).

2. E. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 72. See also p. 47: “As the temporal object moves into the past, it is drawn together on itself and thereby also becomes obscure (dunkel).”

3. Aristotle, Physics 221b 2. I am indebted to Peter Manchester for this translation.

4. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), secs. 81–82.

5. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 6.

8. “Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci” (Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 8).

9. Cited by Reiner Schürmann in his essay, “Situating René Char: Hölderlin, Heidegger, Char and the ‘there is,’ ” in Heidegger and the Question of Literature, ed. W. V. Spanos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 173.

10. “Das denkende Dichten ist in der Wahrheit die Topologie des Seyns” (Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens [Pfullingen: Neske, 1965], p. 23). See also O. Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Topology of Being” in On Heidegger and Language, ed. J. Kockelmans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 107–33.

11. A much more complete treatment is set forth in a monograph (tentatively entitled “Placing: Getting and Being Placed”) I am in the process of writing on the nature of place in human experience.

12. Cited by Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, as quoted in Max Jammer, “The Concept of Space in Antiquity” in J. J. C. Smart, ed. Problems of Space and Time (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 28.

16. “In nature each [place] is distinct” (ibid., 208 b 18; Hardie & Gaye translation).

17. Ibid., 212 a 20–1; translators’ italics. Hussey translates: “The first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.”

20. Réné Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, sec. V, trans. G. E. Anscombe and P. Geach in Descartes’ Philosophical Writings (Edinburgh & London: Nelson, 1959).

22. Aristotle, Physics 208 b 23–5 (Hardie & Gaye translation). Unless specified otherwise, I shall cite this translation of the Physics from here on.

23. Husserl posits these as existing at the lowest level of sensory perception: See E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill & K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), sec. 17.

24. William James, Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950), l:654ff.

25. In devising this term, I am drawing on connotations of “preservation,” “reservation,” “holding in reserve,” “being reserved,” etc.

26. With the notable exception of Marcia K. Johnson, who has begun a systematic exploration of place parameters in her recent research on a “reality monitoring” model of memory. See her “A Multiple-Entry, Modular Memory System,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 17 (1983):81–123.

28. I adapt this term from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 264.

29. For an examination of this two-fold dependency, see my essay “Getting Placed: Soul in Space,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology (1982): 17–19.

30. In my unpublished manuscript, “Placing: Getting and Being Placed,” chaps. 4 and 5.

31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 139; his italics.

34. Ibid., 212 a 28–9. Note that a vessel is the sort of container that is separable from what it contains and that the inner surface of a vessel is exactly coincident with the outer limit of what is contained within it.

36. For a fascinating study of snugly fitting containers, see William C. Ketchum, Jr., Boxes (Washington: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1982).

39. I here allude to familiar Heideggerian themes. On the In-Sein of In-der-Welt-Sein, see Being and Time, sec. 12. On dwelling, see “Building Dwelling Thinking,” trans. A. Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 143–62.

41. See Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses, trans. J. Needleman (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963), pp. 388–90, for a treatment of indifferent space in contrast with attuned space. On landscape versus geography, see ibid., pp. 318–23.

42. Even a good a geometer as Pascal could nonetheless say that “ces espaces infinis m’effrayent” (Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma [Paris: Delmas, 1960], p. 114).

44. Ibid., p. 146. Merleau-Ponty alerts us in the very next sentence that he is not thinking of “customary” in the sense of “long-established custom,” which implies a passivity foreign to any basic bodily action.

45. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), I, 8–9; my italics. I have analyzed this same passage at greater length in “The Memorability of Inhabited Place” (forthcoming).

48. Both citations are from ibid., p. 6. Cf. also ibid.: “My mind struggles in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was.”

49. On this contribution, see Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), and Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).

50. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (1896; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 69. It is distressing that Bergson consigns place entirely to recollection, which “leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date” (ibid.).

51. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 83: “This past, which remains our true present, does not leave us but remains constantly hidden behind our gaze instead of being displayed before it [i.e., as in recollection].”

52. John Russell, “How Art Makes Us Feel at Home in the World,” New York Times, April 12, 1981. I have cited part of this same passage early in the last chapter.

55. The aim, however, need not be entirely explicit: “Every animate movement demands direction and goal. Whether the goal be a well-defined place lying before us, or a vaguely indeterminate ‘somewhere,’ it is still a goal and thus an Other, and thus a There toward which we are directed” (ibid., p. 391).

60. Landscape painters once more bear witness to this: as in Constable’s rural scenes, where an entire countryside acts as such a field factor.

62. Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel (New York: Dutton, 1969), p. 157.

63. On the idea of sympathetic (versus indifferent) space, see Straus, The Primary World of Senses, pp. 317ff, 388ff.

66. Johannes Hofer, “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia,” trans. C. K. Anspach in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2 (1934):382.

68. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht (Könisberg: Nicolovius, 1798), sec. 32. Kant finds the source of nostalgia in an afflicted imagination, not in memory.

70. For a detailed account, see my forthcoming essay “The World of Nostalgia.”

71. “ ‘Motion’ in its most general and primary sense is change of place, which we call ‘locomotion’ ” (Aristotle, Physics, 208a 31–32).

72. The distinction between “common” and “special” places is found in the Physics: cf. 209a 32–209b 6.

73. Martin Heidegger, “On Time and Being” in Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) p. 15ff.

75. This distinction is made by Husserl in Experience and Judgment, sec. 33. I have elaborated on it in Imagining (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 153–64.

78. See Straus, The Primary World of Senses, p. 320: “As a rule, our journeys are planned and an itinerary mapped out.” Straus prefers to speak of “geographic space” where I talk of “sited space”; there is no fundamental difference between the two terms, which also resemble Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “spatialized space” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 244).

79. On the intricacies of association in memory, see John P. Anderson and Gordon Bower, Human Associative Memory (Washington, D.C.: Winston, 1973).

80. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, chap. 8 (Pine-Coffin translation). For St. Augustine, memory is precisely place-like in its capacity—as is attested by an entire metaphorics of “cave,” “den,” “cavern,” “treasurehouse,” etc. In this view, memory is a super-place of storage.

81. Aristotle, Physics, 209 a 28–9. Recall as well Proust’s description of his narrators experience: “Everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years . . .” Remembrance of Things Past, I, 6; my italics.

83. See A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. L. Solotaroff (Chicago: Reginery, 1968), esp. p. 41ff.

84. In the classical form, several such memory-houses are clustered together on a single street: see the reproduction in R. Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972), p. viii.

85. On the disposition of images in the art of memory, see Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 9–12.

86. Edwin T. Morris, The Gardens of China: History, Art, and Meanings (New York: Scribner’s, 1983), p. xi.

92. On the concept of borrowing, see ibid., p. 75f. Lakes were especially effective in this role.

94. Ibid., p. 91. By the same token, we can say that “all nature [is] a garden” (ibid., p. 55). It is important to realize, however, that this is not a matter of any simple, straightforward resemblance. If shan-shui, the Chinese word for landscape, means literally “mountains and water,” the plants, rocks, and ponds of a Chinese garden allude to a more encompassing landscape only as mediated by painting and poetry. At work here is a subtle blend of nature and culture. For example, a configuration of three stones in a garden may refer at one and the same time to the artificial “lion” peaks in the Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou; to the painting by Dao Ji entided “Three Peaks of the Heavenly Realm”; and to the calligraphic sign for mountain, shan, which is the schematic representation of just such an arrangement of mountain peaks. In this case, therefore, the rememberata include another garden, a particular painting, and a written character—but no actual mountains. (On the relation between memory and literature, see Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986].)

96. The use of the covered arcade also aided in this process of sustenance: here in the specific form of protection from the elements.

98. “Staggered perspectives also helped create distinct divisions. . . . One terrace rising above another tended to carry the imagination away into the empyrean; one roof visible in the distance beyond another suggested that the space went on ad infinitum” (ibid., p. 78). Once more, what Morris claims for imagination is valid for memory as well.

99. See Alfreda Murck & Wen Fong, A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: n.d.), p. 29.

100. Ibid. p. 42. Thus, if one looks through the Moon Gate at the Astor Court Garden, the outside wall is seen to give way to the inner wall of the vestibule, which opens further onto the perforated wall of the Ming Room—which in turn displays grilled windows giving onto a plant-and-rock grouping enclosed within yet another wall. See the photography of the Moon Gate at ibid., p. 31.

101. In larger gardens similar effects are achieved with water; a pond or lake establishes “a horizontal plane that contrasts with [the vertical space] of rock mountains and pavilions: (Morris, The Gardens of China, p. 87). One particular way of achieving depth or horizon was to bring about the impression that the water that disappeared under a bridge or a bank continued on indefinitely in unperceived parts. On the role of water, see Murck and Fong, A Chinese Garden Court, p. 13.

105. I should say “largely confined,” for there have been efforts to construct physical models of the method of loci, most notably that undertaken by Guilio Camillo in the sixteenth century. On this model, see Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 129–72.

106. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 49.

109. The same point holds for time: if “there is nothing in the present fact which inherently refers either to the past or to the future” (ibid., p. 51), there can be no meaningful remembering.

110. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter of Nov. 13, 1925, reprinted in R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and S. Spender (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 128. His italics.

113. See Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” pp. 152–61 (on the bridge), and “The Thing,” pp. 167–77, trans. A. Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, and Thought.

114. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. 8.

116. Frank Lloyd Wright sought to reverse this tendency: “I fought for outswinging windows . . . [which] gave free openings outward” (F. L. Wright, The Natural House [New York: Horizon, 1954], p. 38).

118. Wright, The Natural House, p. 40; Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 7.

119. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 9. On intimate immensity, see ibid., chap. 8.

121. On this question, see my unpublished essay, “The Memorability of Inhabited Place,” and especially, Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture, passim.

123. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 3.

127. Ibid., p. 9. A corollary is that “space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory.”

131. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (The Four Quartets), stanza II; his italics. (From T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963], p. 177.)

1. See the entry under “commemorate” in C. T. Onions, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 194.

2. I draw here on the Oxford English Dictionary, entry under “commemoration.”

3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 181.

4. On the “in-order-to,” see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), secs. 14, 17.

5. Indeed, commemorating combines readily with every form of remembering. Even a momentary recollection can cue in an experience of commemoration, or highlight it while in mid-course. The same is true of recognition, which may play an important supportive role. Reminiscing can serve an expressly commemorative function, e.g., when it forms part of a eulogy. Notice that in none of these instances can we reduce commemorating itself to the memorial activity with which it is conjoined. Whether as cuing, subserving, expressing, etc., the conjoined activity remains distinguishable from commemorating proper. In the case of body and place memories, we shall see that there is a still more intimate association with commemoration; each is even indispensable to complete commemorating, whose ritualistic aspect almost always requires bodily action in a particular place. Nevertheless, commemoration is not to be understood as a form of body memory or place memory: it remains unreducible to either.

7. The addition of my student’s words on the opposite side of the postcard—“The origins of Western thought are indeed difficult to find in this extraordinary world of rubble and stone”—still do not suffice to convert the situation into a commemorative occasion. Such comments, however appropriate, lack certain features of commemorative texts which will be explored in sec. IV.

8. On this aspect of writing, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 145, 351f.

9. On the ritualistic aspects of menus, see Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus (Winter 1972):61–81. On cockfights, see Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” ibid., pp. 1–37.

10. On the notion of li, see Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979), chaps. 1, 2; and Herbert Fingarette, Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), chaps. 3, 4.

11. Included in this category are what Foucault calls the “micropractices” of technique and utilization which have been taken over unthinkingly from the particular cultural tradition in which we find ourselves embedded. On these micropractices and their hermeneutic significance as modes of Heideggerian “fore-having,” see Hubert Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (September 1980):6–23.

12. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 19.

13. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 41–42.

15. For further consideration of these and related aspects of ritual, see my essay, “Reflections on Ritual,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology (1985), pp. 102–9.

16. Oxford English Dictionary. This is the second definition of commemoration. Webster’s Third International says only “to mark by some ceremony or observation.”

18. If I have denied repetition in remembering as a strict re-living of the past, ritualistic repetition—which does not pretend to anything like precise nachleben—is not subject to the same severe exclusion.

19. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1959), p. 69.

20. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 29.

21. See S. Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in Standard Edition, 9:117–27.

22. Turner, The Forest of Symbols, p. 45. See also p. 20: “Performances of ritual [are] distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups become adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment.”

23. On the relation between repetition and formality, see my essay “Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment,” Yale French Studies 52 (1975), pp. 249–67.

24. “Evidences of human passion and frailty are just not spoken about when the occasion is given up to public commemoration and reanimation of norms and values in their abstract purity” (Turner, The Forest of Symbols, p. 38).

28. Typically, either eternity is made more timelike (as in Aquinas’s view of it as a “nunc stans”) or time is allowed to rise to the level of eternity as in those rare “moments of vision” (Augenblicken) on which Kierkegaard and Heidegger are so insistent. The following pages draw on material from my essay “Commemoration and Perdurance in The Analects, Books I, II,” Philosophy East and West 34 (1984):389–99. On the three temporal modes contrasted above, see A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1953), pp. 86–87.

29. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. J. Yolton (New York: Dutton, 1965), Bk. II, chap. 14, par. 3; my italics.

32. Heidegger, “Time and Being” in On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 12.

33. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “perdurance” curtly as: “permanence, duration.”

34. But this latter occurs only gradually: “withstanding wear or decay” (Oxford English Dictionary) is indispensable to perdurance.

35. “ ‘How is it possible to take [a] middleway?’ The Master said: ‘by means of the li, the li. Yes, it is by the li that one may hold to the mean’ ” (Li Chi, trans. J. Legge, in The Sacred Books of the East [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885], vol. 27, chap. 28).

36. Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), bk. II, chap. 2 p. 63.

37. On swerving and its relation to poetic creativity, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 44–45.

38. Indeed, the Li Chi maintains the position that “the fundamental principles of the li remain unchanged, but their outward concrete manifestations in ‘the number of things and observances’ ever change with the times” (Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952], I, 340).

39. “Unless a man has the spirit of the rites, in being respectful he will wear himself out, in being careful he will become timid” (Confucius, The Analects, bk. 8, chap. 2 p. 92).

40. “Observe what a man has to do when his father is living, and then observe what he does when his father is dead” (ibid., bk. 1, chap. 11, p. 60–61; my italics).

41. See Allan Ludwig, Graven Images (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1966) and Dickran and Ann Tashjian, Memorials for Children of Change (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974). “Memento Mori” means literally “remember that you have to die.”

47. On the latter notion of supplementing, see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 88–104.

49. The same is true for many nonverbal works of art that are commemorative in their effects: say, the “1812 Overture,” Cézanne’s paintings of Mt. St. Victoire, Monet’s studies of Rouen Cathedral. The addition of labels and titles to these works is not helpful beyond providing bare identification.

53. I have treated this entire situation in more detail in “Commemoration and Perdurance in The Analects, Books I and II.” Since the role of ancestor worship in the Analects is well known, I have ignored it in the text above; but a brief consideration of it is given in section VIII below.

54. The same effect of mutual reinforcement is found in the case of image-cum-text; e.g., in gravestones with human faces, skeletons, angels, or animals sculpted on them, in addition to proper names and dates. The Civil War monument referred to earlier for the sake of its eloquent text is crowned by a Union soldier gazing southward with his rifle at rest. Depicted figures often accompany inscriptions on Egyptian and Greek stelae. In all such cases, we witness a complementarity of image and word as conjoined in a single material commemorabilium. One factor helps to make up for what the other lacks: simultaneous spatial display on the one hand and verbally encoded information on the other. As in the parallel case of the ars memorativa, image and sign empower each other.

55. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

60. In short, there is a suspension of “all attributes that distinguish categories and groups in the social order” (ibid., p. 103).

61. This community is “the repository of the whole gamut of the culture’s values, norms, attitudes, sentiments, and relationships. Its representatives in the specific rites—and these may vary from ritual to ritual—represent the generic authority of tradition” (ibid.).

62. “The neophyte m liminality must be a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which is inscribed the knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status” (ibid.).

65. Ibid., p. 101. Turner comments: “Even when a man has become a chief, he must still be a member of the whole community of persons (antu), and show this by ‘laughing with them,’ respecting their rights, ‘welcoming everyone,’ and sharing food with them” (ibid., pp. 104–5).

67. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” is the title of the essay from which Turner’s developed reflections in The Ritual Process take their origin. See The Forest of Symbols, pp. 93–111.

68. On this point, see Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), esp. chaps. 2, 3.

70. See ibid., pp. 150–51. On the idea of the surrogate victim, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 197ff.

72. This formulation is from Freud, The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition, 20:29.

73. Hans W. Loewald, “On Internalization,” in his Papers On Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 83.

74. Roy Schafer, Aspects of Internalization (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), p. 112.

77. Such an identification is “the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (Freud, Standard Edition, 18:105).

81. “By giving permanent expression to the influence of the parents it perpetuates the existence of the factors to which it owes its original” (ibid., p. 35).

82. Other factors are at work as well of course: desexualization of libidinal ties with one’s parents, a sublimation of the resultant saving in energy, and an infusion of aggression from the id. The latter factor is increasingly stressed by Freud in the years 1920–1930.

87. It could also be shown that, within the vicissitudes of Freud’s own writings, there is much the same inversion of interests: as the importance of recollection wanes, the fortunes of non-recollective forms of remembering rise. For a more complete account of these vicissitudes, see my essay “The Changing Fate of Memory in Freud’s Work: Commemoration and Memorialization” (forthcoming).

88. On the immortality of the internalized object, see Schafer, Aspects of Internalization, pp. 220–36.

90. As Louis Dupré says, “The self can only be remembered” (Transcendent Selfhood [New York: Seabury, 1976], p. 76).

91. On identification via mirror images, see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative Function of the I” in Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7.

94. On the body as mediator between sacred and profane, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), II, 228.

95. The body of the memorialized person may itself be depicted—as occurs in many stelae and in the case of the Civil War Memorial discussed above.

97. See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28, 40, 43, 86.

98. I develop the distinction between “horizontal” and “vertical” communities in my paper, “Commemoration in the Eucharist,” in God: Experience or Origin?, ed. A. de Nicolas and E. Moutsopoulos (New York: Paragon, 1985), pp. 214–34.

99. Quoted in Jean Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, trans. Peter Riviere (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 44.

103. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. Peter Riviere (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 17.

105. See ibid., p. 60: “There is an identity of substance established between a man and what he eats; he becomes, he is what he eats and assimilates.”

110. This duality-unity may itself be regarded as a version of the corpse-and-ghost paradigm mentioned above.

112. This phrase is taken from the first recorded use (1569) of “sempiternali” in the English language, as given by the Oxford English Dictionary (and as used in the epigram to this chapter).

118. Moreover, just as we are the memories we possess in Locke’s view, so we are also defined by the private property we own: pieces of property thus being the exact analogues of memorial representations and both being the basis for a radical individualism.

119. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), I, 50.

123. It could be argued further that the literal bi-presence of Marcel and Léonie in this scene symbolizes, by its very juxtaposition of representatives from two generations, the bi-presence of past and present themselves. The same could be ventured for the ceremonial bi-presence of priest and communicant in the Eucharist. It will be noted that I am using “bi-presence” here in a temporal sense, whereas Lévy-Bruhl originally proposed the idea in referring to a spatial setting (e.g., the case of Grubb and the Indian). But the term easily, and legitimately, invites generalization.

127. On this interpretation, see J. N. Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1974). Cf. also the following passage from Whitehead: “The potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity” (in Process and Reality, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne [New York: Free Press, 1978], p. 23).

128. I say “proto-experiences” to underline the fact that for Plato one does not recollect personal experiences per se. One recollects only the kinds of experience that are necessary to the prior attainment of knowledge, which is itself the primary content recollected.

130. That knowing is indeed commemorative is an explicit theme in the writings of Telesio, the Italian Renaissance philosopher: “[the mind] is able to discern the hidden conditions of those things of which but a single one is observed. . . . This power is commonly called understanding (intelligere), but is rather to be named judgment (existimari) or better commemorating (commemorari).” This passage is cited in J. H. Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 205. Randall translates commemorari as “remembering together” and comments: “knowing is a remembering together (commemorari) the other qualities of an object associated with the one you observe” (ibid.). This statement overlooks the Platonic roots of Telesio’s thought.

131. Heidegger’s celebrated commemoration of the Greek origins of philosophy could be construed as a commemoration of an equally decisive ending. In his view metaphysics has had a quite determinate beginning—precisely in the Platonic doctrine of Forms—and a very definite ending: in Nietzsche’s doctrines of the will to power and eternal recurrence. There is something dramatic, peremptory, and decisive about such an ending—as is conveyed so eloquently in Nietzsche’s life and work, which Heidegger commemorates in his four volumes of lectures on this prophetic figure who first saw clearly that “philosophy is ending in the present age” (Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” in On Time and Being, p. 58).

133. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 103.

134. For a remarkable study of evanescing, see William Earle, Evanescence (Chicago: Regnery, 1984).

136. Nietzsche treats “the will’s revulsion against time and its It was’ ” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingde (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), Part II, “Of Redemption,” pp. 159–63. Heidegger discusses the same point in What Is Called Thinking?, pp. 92–96.

137. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 29. See also p. 82: “the creature perishes and is immortal” (his italics).

138. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, p. 13. See also ibid., p. 15: “Futural approaching brings about what has been.” The priority of the future is already affirmed in Being and Time, sec. 68.

139. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 47.

1. M. Heidegger has pointed to the profound affinities between Gedächtnis (“memory”) and Gemüt (“heart”) in What Is Called Thinking trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 139–41, 144, 148, 150.

3. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 63; his italics.

1. Among “major forms” I am including the three mnemonic modes of Part Two, the three forms just discussed in Part Three, as well as the following from Part One: primary and secondary remembering, remembering simpliciter, remembering-that, remembering-how, and remembering-to.

3. See Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), Part I, esp. pp. 58–60.

4. Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 312. This statement forms the epigram on the title page of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

5. For a treatment of various senses of autonomy, see Casey, Imagining, pp. 177–88.

6. On Klärung, see E. Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1962), secs. 67–70.

7. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. M. H. Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 5.

8. Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia 451 a 15–16 (Sorabji translation).

9. Bertrand Russell, “On Propositions” in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), p. 315 and p. 309, respectively.

10. See, for example, C. B. Martin and M. Deutscher, “Remembering” in R. M. Chisholm and R. J. Swartz, eds., Empirical Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 302–31.

11. On the verticalizing movement of imagination, see Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes (Paris: Corti, 1943).

12. This is not to deny the possibility of hybrid combinations between imagination and memory in which the role of the image is genuinely “possibilizing.” This can occur in the midst of recollection itself, as when we employ an actively constructed mental image to remember better “what it might have looked like.” Such use of hypothetical imagining still falls short, however, of the fullest form of autonomy of which imagining is capable. On this point, see Casey, Imagining, pp. 114–16.

13. See J. Piaget & B. Inhelder, Memory and Intelligence, trans. A. J. Pomerans (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

15. Nevertheless, this is precisely what Minkowski claims: “Memory creates our experiences”; “it seems equally justified to affirm that memory produces the past as to say that it reproduces it” (Lived Time, trans. N. Metzel [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970], p. 149 and p. 151 respectively).

16. E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill & K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 108.

17. To be more precise, the Indo-European root is now considered to be mer- or smer-, “to be anxious, to grieve,” with the variants mar-and smar- along with mor-, mur-, and smur-. If this is so, the origin of “mourning” would be even more ancient than that of “remembering.” See Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 396. See also C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 593. Unless otherwise specified, I shall be drawing on Partridge’s book in discussions below.

18. Com-, from cum, means “with”; but it may also act to intensify the verb onto which it is prefixed.

20. The link is through the mer- stem, a variant of the same mar-etymon which we have seen to underlie smárati, “he remembers.” See footnote 18 above. Note also the closely related Welsh marth, “sorrow,” “anxiety”; the Cornish moreth, “grief,” “regret”; the Gaelic smùr, “sadness”; and the Armenian mormok, “regret,” “sorrow.”

22. The Greek adjective mermeros is yet another cognate of “memory.” The duplication of the mer- stem in mer/meros is striking; another intensification, a specifically semantic thickening, is here at work. If we were to indulge in what Derrida calls “semantic mirage,” we would divide mermeros into merm/eros and notice once more the rooting of memory in love. (On semantic mirage, see J. Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 46.)

23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 173.

24. This becomes especially evident when we consider memory beyond mind; for celerity is an endemic mental virtue: “thought is quick” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson [Baltimore: Penguin, 1968], p. 95).

25. Sigmund Freud, Letter of December 6, 1896 (Standard Edition, 1:233; his italics).

26. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 287. See also Bloom’s A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), chap. 4, pp. 63–82.

27. The strongest statement of this circumstance occurs in Freud’s “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1896): “Thanks to the change due to puberty, the memory will display a power which was completely lacking from the [original] event itself” (Standard Edition, 3:154).

28. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 20ff, 37ff.

29. Stanley A. Leavy, The Psychoanalytic Dialogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 94. See also pp. 97, 110–111.

30. Pierre Janet, L’evolution de la mémoire et de la notion du temps (Paris: Chahine, 1928), I, p. 87ff.

31. “Etymon” itself means, in its own Greek root (i.e., etumon) the true sense of a word (etumos is “true”). By a revealing reduction, etymon now means a word’s strictly historical origin or root.

32. This might seem to make photography a mere instrument in the situation, just another case of “standing-reserve” via “enframing” (in Heidegger’s disparaging words). Yet, granting that photography is subject to reductive technological manipulations at every point, this is by no means its only possible fate. It can be, as it is designed to be in the present instance, an agency for opening a future of appreciation, for preserving the past in a maximally meaningful way. Here the paradox is that it is precisely the photograph that serves so naturally as a paradigm in passivist models of memory: a paradox to which I shall return in the concluding pages of this chapter.

33. On the virtuality of remembering in contrast with its actuality, see chapter 2 and section VI below.

36. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Stanza I, The Four Quartets in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 175.

37. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 86.

39. See David Farrell Krell, On the Verge (New York: Humanities Press, forthcoming).

40. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), II, Investigation VI, secs. 8–12, 36–39.

41. Autonomous remembering is not to be confused with spontaneous remembering, although the two can certainly overlap. Spontaneous remembering may include anything from Husserlian primary memory (especially in its “sinking back” character) to Proustian “involuntary memory” (e.g., the tea-tasting episode).

42. But it is wrong to assert, as does R. S. Benjamin, that in all cases “a claim to remember is in principle falsifiable or verifiable by observations which are in no way connected with the state of mind of the person making the claim . . . memory claims are verifiable in principle by recourse to publicly ascertainable facts” (“Remembering,” in D. F. Gustafson, ed., Essays in Philosophical Psychology [New York: Doubleday, 1964], pp. 182–83). This is so only in one subclass of the category of “truth to the that” and does not apply to cases of “truth to the how” at all. Nor is it true that “we treat our memories of such things [as dreams, feelings, thoughts] as though they are verifiable independently” (ibid., p. 183n). As we know that they are not verifiable by others, we do not treat them as if they were: we keep them, and their grounds for confirmation or disconfirmation, within the self-system, where possibilities of self-deception are admittedly rife and where others can offer help only indirectly.

44. Imagining is characteristically indifferent to truth in any of its major senses since it pursues the purely possible and not the actual as such; and thinking, in its inferential, hypothesizing, and speculative moments, is not concerned with the issue of truth as such.

45. For the notion of “remaining over” see Husserl, Ideas, I, secs. 31–33; for that of “abiding possession,” see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), secs. 27, 36.

46. See A. R. Luria, The Mind of A Mnemonist, trans. L. Solotaroff (Chicago: Regnery, 1968), esp. pp. 149–59.

47. F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 208. See also p. 197: “the past operates as an organised mass.”

48. Hegel, The Science of Logic, section 112 (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), Addendum; as translated by William Wallace, The Logic of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 209.

49. For Derrida’s interpretation, see his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Stony Brook, NY: Nicolas Hays, 1978), pp. 76–106. On the repeatability of eidos in relation to memory, see my essay “Memory and Phenomenological Method” in W. S. Hamrick, ed., Phenomenology in Practice and Theory (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1985), pp. 35–52.

50. See Martin Heidegger, “Der Satz der Identität” in Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 11–34.

51. Reminiscing in words provides another instance of a medium—in this case, language—which, despite its aspirations to transparency, brings with it an inherent thickness. Consider only the ways in which various narrative forms may convey the same past event with important nuances of difference. As I have insisted in this chapter, neither words nor images are necessary to remembering. But both constitute valid and vital media of exchange between the remembering present and the remembered past: they, too, form part of memory’s thick autonomy.

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 68.

3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. J. Yolton (New York: Dutton, 1965), chap. 27, sec. 10.

4. For a contemporary discussion of multiple personality, see B. G. Baum, ed., The Psychiatric Clinics of North America: Symposium on Multiple Personality (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1984).

5. On dissociation, see Bernard Hart, The Psychology of Insanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), chap. 4.

6. “[In recollection] the immediate ‘I’ already enduring in the enduring primordial sphere, constitutes in itself another as other. [It is a matter of] self-temporalization through de-presentation” (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970], p. 185).

7. “Consciousness [i.e., memory] of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity” (Joseph Butler, First Appendix to The Analogy of Religion [cited in J. Perry, ed. Personal Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 100]).

8. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 3: “Das Gedächtnis ist die Versammlung des Denkens.”

10. Heidegger traces this predominance to the fact that eidos, Plato’s preferred term for “form,” originally meant “visual aspect.” See his essay, “Plato’s Theory of Truth” in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. W. Barrett & H. D. Aiken (New York: Random House, 1962), III, 367–98.

11. I explore this matter further in my essay, “Keeping the Past in Mind,” Review of Metaphysics 37 (1983), pp. 77–95.

12. Plato, Meno 85 d. Sorabji comments: “is not finding knowledge within oneself recollection?” (R. Sorabji, Aristotle On Memory [London: Duckworth, 1972], p. 40).

13. See Plato, Philebus 34 D: “When the soul that has lost the memory of a sensation or what it has learned resumes that memory within itself (ex hautou) and goes over the old ground, we regularly speak of ‘recollections’.”

14. Thus, a matrix is “a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed”; “a place or point of origin and growth” (Oxford English Dictionary).

15. Heraclitus, Fragment 119 (Diels-Kranz). “Fate” translates daimon, guardian divinity.

19. On encoding specificity, see E. Tulving and D. M. Thomson, “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory,” Psychological Review 80 (1973):352–73.

20. George A. Miller, “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” reprinted in N. J. Slamecka, ed., Human Learning and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 233. It is to Miller’s credit that he does recognize “limits” on the model he first proposed in 1956. One of these limits is imagery: “Images seem much harder to get at operationally and to study experimentally than the more symbolic kinds of recoding” (ibid.).

21. On this point, see J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger on Remembering and Remembering Heidegger,” Man and World 10 (1977):62.

22. I have considered the same three regions in more detail with respect to the freedom of imagination in Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 207–31.

23. S. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:50n. Freud underlines the word “freedom.”

24. Goethe, “Proverbs in Prose,” in The Permanent Goethe, ed. Thomas Mann (New York: Dial Press, 1948), p. 640.

25. On Harold Bloom’s analysis, the anxiety of influence results in a “misprision” of the works of predecessors. We could just as well say “misremembering” in the circumstance. (See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], pp. 63–80.)

26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 27.

27. On the idea of im-Griff-behalten, see Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), sec. 87.

28. I have pursued this parallel between Husserl and Plato further in my essay, “Memory and Phenomenological Method,” in W. S. Hamrick, ed., Phenomenology in Practice and Theory (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985), pp. 35–38.

29. On reactivation, see Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 353–78.

31. It is striking that the etymology of “monster” includes the Latin monēre, “to remind,” “admonish.” A monster, by its very monstrosity, calls us back to our senses when it does not overcome us utterly. On the concept of the monster, see Catherine Keller, A Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), chap. 2.

32. S. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Standard Edition, 12:150; his italics.

33. Ibid., p. 148: “descriptively speaking [the goal] is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression.”

34. For Freud’s own account of his change of views on this question, see ibid., p. 147.

35. On infantile amnesia, see ibid., pp. 148–49, as well as the second of the Three Essays on the Theory of Psychosexuality, Standard Edition, 7:174–76.

36. It is to be noted, however, that Freud does not equate amnesia with forgetting. An item can be “ ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed—was never conscious” (Standard Edition, 12:149).

37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. A. Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 7; my italics.

38. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. M. H. Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 5.

40. Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, trans. N. Metzel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 156. Heidegger makes a quite comparable claim:

forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a positive’ ecstatical mode of one’s having been—a mode with a character of its own. The ecstasis (rapture) of forgetting has the character of backing away in the face of one’s ownmost ‘been’. . . . Only on the basis of such forgetting can anything be retained. . . . Just as expecting is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa. (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 388–89; his italics).

41. For a general treatment, see G. Reed, The Psychology of Anomalous Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

44. See M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 267 (working note of November, 1960).

45. “Tout participe de la mémoire si l’on se place au point de vue de la mémoire au sens large” (J. Piaget & B. Inhelder, Mémoire et intelligence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. 476.

46. Black Elk, cited in Black Elk Speaks, ed. John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 17.

47. See Plato, Republic 472: “Perhaps you do not realize that, after I have barely escaped the first two waves, the third, which you are now bringing down upon me, is the most formidable of all” (Cornford translation).

48. The full formulation is “to be, to exist, is to participate.” This is the title of the entry of March 23, 1938, in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. Peter Rivière (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 16–17.

NOTES