I come into the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are treasures of countless images of things of every manner.
—St. Augustine, Confessions
I convince myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my deceitful memory recalls to me.
—Descartes, Meditations
We moderns have no memories at all.
—Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” first published in 1874, opens with the following fable:
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, [are] fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure.... A human being may well ask [such] an animal: “Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” The animal would like to answer, and say: “The reason is that I always forget what I was going to say”—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.1
Not wholly unlike the bovine beings here described by Nietzsche, we have not only forgotten what it is to remember—and what remembering is—but we have forgotten our own forgetting. So deep is our oblivion of memory that we are not even aware of how alienated we are from its “treasures” and how distant we have become from its deliverances. Memory, itself preoccupied with the past, is practically passé—a topic of past concern. Despite its manifold importance in our lives, it is only in unusual circumstances that remembering remains an item of central concern on contemporary agendas. These circumstances themselves tend to be distinctly self-contained and removed from ordinary life, whether they are found in psychoanalytic sessions, Eastern visualization techniques, or experiments in cognitive psychology. Philosophers have come to despair over finding a constructive approach to memory; they have discredited and discarded a number of existing theories, especially those that make representation of the past the basic function of remembering; yet they have rarely offered a positive account of memory to take the place of rejected theories.
The fact is that we have forgotten what memory is and can mean; and we make matters worse by repressing the fact of our own oblivion. No wonder Yates can claim that “we moderns have no memories at all.” Where once Mnemosyne was a venerated Goddess, we have turned over responsibility for remembering to the cult of the computers, which serve as our modern mnemonic idols. The force of the remembered word in oral traditions—as exemplified in feats of bardic recounting that survive only in the most isolated circumstances2—has given way to the inarticulate hum of the disk drive. Human memory has become self-externalized: projected outside the rememberer himself or herself and into non-human machines. These machines, however, cannot remember; what they can do is to record, store, and retrieve information—which is only part of what human beings do when they enter into a memorious state. The memory of things is no longer in ourselves, in our own discerning and interpreting, but in the calculative wizardry of computers. If computers are acclaimed as creations of our own devising, they remain—whatever their invaluable utility—most unsuitable citadels of memory, whose “fields and spacious palaces” (in St. Augustine’s phrase) they cannot begin to contain or to replicate. Although certain non-human things can indeed bear memories—as we shall see toward the close of this book—computers cannot. Computers can only collect and order the reduced residues, the artfully formatted traces, of what in the end must be reclaimed by human beings in order to count as human memories. In this respect, our memories are up to us. But for the most part and ever increasingly, we have come to disclaim responsibility for them.
In the same essay as that cited above, Nietzsche suggests one of the motives for our amnesia concerning memory: “Even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows; but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.”3 Nietzsche himself advocates the concerted practice of “active forgetfulness”—all the more imperative if his doctrine of eternal recurrence is ultimately true. For if everything recurs an endless number of times, we would be well advised to avoid remembering anything that has happened even (apparently) only once! To recall what has happened an infinite number of times—including our own acts of recollecting—would be to assume a crushing burden. As Milan Kundera has put the matter:
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.4
“Splendid lightness” is fostered by forgetting, an active forgetting of that which becomes intolerably heavy when remembered. Kundera continues:
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.5
Could it be that in following the path of forgetting, we have indeed missed one fundamental form of “life’s most intense fulfillment”? Have we perhaps lost touch with the “earth” of memory itself, its dense loam? Is not the way of forgetting a way of obscuring, even of renouncing, the sustaining subsoil of remembering? As Kundera also remarks: “The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly body, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”6
The half-reality induced by forgetting, its oblivious half-life, tempts us to attribute the full reality of remembering to machines. As if by a rigid law of compensation, the logic seems to be: the less responsibility I have for my own remembering, the more I can forget—ultimately, the more I can forget my own forgetting. And the more I can forget, the more responsibility I can ascribe to other entities: most conveniently to computers, or to my own brain or mind regarded as computerlike. Thus my own alleviation exists in inverse ratio to their encumberment. As I become more like the happy unremembering beast, free from the “dark, invisible burden”7 of remembering, machines or machinelike parts of my own being become burdened with the heavy tasks formerly assigned to my unassisted self. Like Nietzsche’s Last Man, I smile and blink in my memoryless contentment as I come to rely on data banks and mass media to hold and transmit memories for me. Not only do I not do my own remembering, I have forgotten to remember. I no longer know how to remember effectively or even what I want to remember. In this state I am failing to remember remembering.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?8
For us moderns, Kundera’s question comes to this: what will we choose—the way of remembering or the way of forgetting? Perhaps it is already ‘too late to answer this fateful question meaningfully. We may already have lost our anamnesic souls to the collective amnesia embodied in machine-memory. Such a loss might be acceptable if eternal return were truly to obtain. If Nietzsche is correct, relief from the heaviest of burdens might well lie in the frivolity of forgetting, a frivolity that follows upon handing over responsibility for remembering to machines.
But what if Nietzsche’s doctrine of die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichens is itself moot? What if it is (therefore) not too late to choose? What then? Might we then take seriously once more the genuine weight of memory instead of mindlessly opting for the spurious lightness of forgetting? Can we remember to remember? Can amnesia give way to anamnesis?
Before we can begin to answer such questions, we must undertake two tasks in the remainder of this Introduction. First, concrete evidence of memory’s decline in prestige needs to be adduced if the claims just made in section I are not to seem merely dogmatic or rhetorical. I will set forth such evidence in this section and in section III, while remarking upon certain counter-currents in section IV. Second, a look back to an earlier time, when memory was highly valued, is called for—not only as a foil to the modern plight but as itself an important part of the very background that we have forgotten. This backward look will occur in sections V to VII, which will consider the fate of memory from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment.
Given our defensiveness before the weight of the past—which, as a direct consequence, we tend to regard as something merely “fixed” and “dead”—it is not altogether surprising that we have turned in recent times to machines as repositories and models of memory. If the past can be reduced to a dead weight, then it can be deposited in machines as just one more item of information. Our most commonly employed current metaphors for memory betray this action of consignment along with a scarcely concealed denigration: “memory machine,” “machine memory,” “photographic memory,” “memory bank,” “storage system,” “save to disk,” “computer memory,” “memory file,” and so on. What is most noticeable in any such list of descriptive terms is the way in which memory is construed by reference to an apparatus or procedure that is strictly mechanical and nonhuman in nature: above all, the computer with its extraordinary powers of compression and retention of discrete units of information. Indeed, the currently most influential models of memory in experimental psychology are those based on “information processing” as enacted and exemplified by computers. I shall not here debate the claims of advocates of “AI” that “natural” human intelligence can be successfully replicated and even improved upon by computers.9 I wish only to call attention to how readily memory has become assimilated to a machine as paradigm—to its own disadvantage. Precisely because the machine in question is viewed as endless in its resources and all but miraculous in its operations, “merely” human memory comes to suffer by comparison: subject to more severe constraints in its quantitative capacity than a computer, such memory is also subject to more extensive errors in its functioning. No wonder that human memory is impugned, implicitly or explicitly, by being analogized to something that remembers more efficiently than do human beings themselves.
The problem lies not in computerization as such. Computers may well have superior memories—so long as they are dealing with expressly chunkable, bit(e)able information—and they deserve recognition on this score as enormously effective prototypes of how the form of remembering we call “memorizing” might operate. That is, if such remembering were itself mechanical, which it is not! The problem resides, rather, in the tacit undermining of the authority, scope, and value of human memory in its own domain—in its ongoing performances in everyday life. Just what these performances are and exactly how they take place, will represent the major preoccupation of the present book. “What is wanted,” as Freud remarks, “is precisely an elucidation of the commonest cases.”10 It is ironic and revealing that to undertake a detailed description of just such cases is to accord to remembering a form of respect that is rarely granted in this age of artificial intelligence.
Concomitant with the current metaphorization of memory—the translatio or “transfer” of its basic sense or structure into the very different sense and structure of computing machines—we find the singularly striking fact that the lexicon of currently used terms for memory has dwindled considerably in the last two centuries. How many of the following words, all of them employed by writers of English in earlier times, do you recognize, much less use yourself?11
—“memorous” (memorable)
—“memorious” (having a good memory; being mindful of)
—“memoried” (having a memory of a specific kind)
—“memorist” (one who prompts the return of memories)
—“mnemotechny” (“mnemonics,” itself hardly a familiar word today)
—“mnemonicon” (a device to aid the memory)
The contemporary rarity of such terms, terms once familiar to ordinary speakers of English, should give us pause. Where have all the words for memory gone? The impoverishment of our vocabulary for (and about) remembering goes hand in hand with the general decline in esteem which memory has suffered in modern times and is, indeed, its first symptom.12 Presaged in the replacement of orally transmitted memories by handwriting and (especially) printing, the disappearance of an earlier and richer vocabulary has left us with considerably diminished verbal resources.13
Further evidence for memory’s declining prestige is found in several other areas that merit brief examination here. Memorizing, once a standard pedagogical tool in primary school, is no longer emphasized in the early years of education. True, children are still occasionally required to memorize a poem or a brief prose passage; but this serves more as gesture than as substance, reminding us of a period, only several decades past, when memorizing was a much more integral part of the curriculum. At that time, educators believed that students learned certain texts best by committing them to heart (i.e., “memoriter,” another word fallen into disuse) and that the very activity of memorizing, beyond furnishing a shared cultural tradition, was beneficial to a child’s mental development. We need not defend these practices, which were sometimes over-rigorously applied in an oppressive zeal for achieving the exact repetition of prescribed material.14 The point is that such practices, however misapplied they may have been, are now conspicuously absent from contemporary curricula.15 Their very absence reflects a general devaluation of memory.
Consider in this connection the steadily decreasing interest in mnemotechnical devices and systems through which to improve one’s powers of memory. Although “mnemonics” retains a certain curiosity value—as is witnessed in the popularity of Lucas and Lorayne’s The Memory Book16—it is no longer the object of assiduous study on the part of ordinary people. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thousands of New Yorkers flocked to hear such mnemotechnical experts as Fauvel-Gounod, Aimé Paris, and Dr. Pick, all of whom promised vastly improved memories to their handsomely paying auditors. By 1888, however, William Stokes could complain in the ninetieth edition of his popular tract Memory: “In spite of all that has been said and done [in the past], we may say comparatively—almost absolutely—that the art [of memorizing aided by technical devices] is a thing unknown!”17 This lament rings still more true today, nearly one century later.
Not even the eloquent efforts of Frances Yates in The Art of Memory to reconstruct the early history of a distinctive mnemotechnical tradition and to indicate its now largely forgotten importance in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance worlds is likely to revive a widespread interest in mnemotechnics per se. The author herself revealingly disowns any personal stake in the memory method she so lucidly recounts: “There is no doubt that this method will work for anyone who is prepared to labor seriously at these mnemonic gymnastics. I have never attempted to do so myself”18 The most eminent expositor of the ars memorativa tradition chooses not to use this art to improve her own memory. This choice is symptomatic not just of the decreasing employment of mnemotechnics but of a still more momentous loss of interest in cultivating memory for its own sake.
Still another sign of the times is the regrettable fact that reminiscing as a central social practice has faded from style. By “reminiscing” I do not refer merely to a stray recounting of times past, but to those particular social situations in which older, more experienced persons recollected past events in the presence of younger auditors. These occasions endowed memory with a decisively communitarian dimension. Moreover, reminiscing was often the only way in which an otherwise unchronicled part of the past was reclaimed for others, especially if the person who did the retelling was the last surviving witness. In a more leisurely age—for instance, before World War I in the Middle West—reminiscing was a frequent feature of family gatherings and other social settings. It is now, by the late twentieth century, an increasingly uncommon phenomenon—doubtless due to the disintegration of the extended family structure and to a concomitant lack of veneration for the elderly in our culture. Whatever the exact causes, the clear result is that memory has been driven still further into retreat.
One of the most telling evidences of the marked decline in the prestige of memory can be found in the notable fact that four of the leading theoretical treatments of memory undertaken in the last one hundred years have approached remembering through the counterphenomenon of forgetting. It is as if a more direct approach would be futile and question-begging: memory is best understood via its own deficient mode. Let us consider in cursory fashion the four cases in point.
NIETZSCHE
As we have seen in section I, Nietzsche stressed the virtues of “active forgetfulness,” that is, the capacity to forget not merely by lapsus but willfully and for a purpose—so as to erase, or at least to cover over, the scars which repeated remembering would only turn back into open wounds. Such willed forgetting is the counterpart of the enforced remembering which Nietzsche detects in societies anxious to ensure rigid conformity to law on the part of their members.19 But, for the individual, forgetting is by far the more crucial of the two activities: the individual “wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past; however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him.... He says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for whom every moment really dies.”20
FREUD
It is a fact worth pondering that psychoanalysis, so often regarded as a form of “memory therapy,” was originally much more concerned with forgetting. Although Breuer and Freud proclaimed the cure of symptoms by the abreactive or cathartic recall of traumatic experiences in their Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud himself backed away from this therapeutic optimism only two years later when he became persuaded that his patients’ apparent memories of seduction were actually fantasies disguised as memories. By 1899, he had become profoundly skeptical of the validity of any purported childhood memories, since such memories are likely to be “screened” in various ways;21 and he came to believe in a generalized childhood amnesia which represents the involuntary (but still purposive) forgetting of large tracts of one’s early experience.22 The aim of psychoanalysis became, accordingly, to “fill in the gaps in memory,”23 to undo the baneful, pathogenic effects of forgetting wherever this is possible. In 1909, Freud could say almost cynically that “the weak spot in the security of our mental life [is] the untrustworthiness of our memory.”24 More generally, what Freud called “the blindness of the seeing eye”25 may be taken as referring to the forgetting that shows itself to reside actively in the heart of remembering like an insidious virus, ready to do its destructive work there—with the result that psychoanalysis can be said to consist in a continuous struggle against the forces of forgetfulness.
HEIDEGGER
The inner dynamic of all of Heidegger’s philosophical work may be said to consist in a prolonged effort to deal with the forgetfulness of Being. This forgetfulness has afflicted the Western mind from Plato onwards and continues in the present in the form of an ontological blindness which Heidegger terms “subjective presence” in the wake of Descartes, and which reaches an apogee in the idolatrization of modern technology (including, as a paradigm case, computers). Thus, Being and Time, Heidegger’s magnum opus of 1927, opens with the plaint: “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being. This question has today been forgotten.”26 Later, in Being and Time, forgetfulness, even in its ordinary forms, is interpreted as more primordial than remembering: “In the ‘leaping-away’ of the Present, one also forgets increasingly. The fact that curiosity always holds by what is coming next, and has forgotten what has gone before, is not a result that ensues from curiosity, but is the ontological condition for curiosity itself.”27 The many works which have followed Being and Time can be considered as sustained, if often oblique, attempts to overcome the forgetting of Being in order to induce an adequate remembrance of it which Heidegger comes to term Andenken, “commemorative thought.”28
EBBINGHAUS
In 1885, Ebbinghaus inaugurated the experimental study of memory with the publication of Über das Gedächtnis.29 This slim volume gave the results of numerous experiments involving rote remembering which Ebbinghaus performed upon himself in the early 1880s. The remembering was of nonsense syllables that were as free as possible from semantic ambiguities. Nevertheless, what emerges from a close reading of this seminal monograph is that Ebbinghaus was in fact measuring the rate at which he had forgotten a given group of nonsense syllables. As a consequence, the famous “Ebbinghaus curve of memory”—shaped roughly like this:
—is in fact a curve of forgetting, mapping out the precise amount of material that failed to be remembered at particular points in time. Thus, even within a fastidious laboratory setting that was the first of its kind in Western psychology, remembering ceded place to forgetting.
It is a striking coincidence that Ebbinghaus’s fateful study was published just three years before the final edition of Stokes’s Memory appeared. At the very moment when the demise of the art of memory was announced, the science of memory was born. What had been left to amateur teachers of memorizing, minstrels of memory and sometimes its sophists as well, was now to be given over to the quantitatively precise, experimentally expert hands of laboratory psychologists—psychologists very different in kind from those whom Freud was to inspire. In the aftermath of Ebbinghaus, the ranks of the experimentalists are now legion; their approaches to memory are widely disseminated and discussed in professional journals, where they are regarded as providing the most exact and reliable penetration into the mysteries of memory. What began as an isolated attempt to measure forgetting with a new precision has spawned an entire industry of research into the nature of remembering itself.
Despite the undeniable ingenuity of this research and its many methodological merits, it remains yet another symptom of a pervasive subsiding of interest in memory. What has faded from focus in the eyes of the common man has been scrutinized ever more minutely behind the closed doors of the psychological laboratory.30 And concurrently with memory’s withdrawal from display as a standard method of public education and as an object of public exhibition by professional mnemonists, technology has supplied publicly available (but entirely mechanical) mnemotechnical aids that displace the burden of memory from individuals to machines. These machines, whether they be hand-held calculators or room-size computers, sound recorders or video playback devices, offer practically irresistible aid and comfort to the imperfect individual rememberer. Easily available, usable, storable, or disposable, these prosthetic memories have become indispensable instruments of modern living.
In the end, the scientific study of memory and the presence of elaborate electronic aides-mémoire are only the currently most manifest symptoms of the declining interest in “remembering in the old manner.”31 Whatever the ultimate reasons for this decline, we must acknowledge it as an established fact, an intrinsic feature of ever-increasing proportions within Western culture. It has become such a deeply entrenched tendency at the level of praxis and theory alike that it would be Luddite-like to try to reverse, or even to lament, the trend. At the most, one can hope that a detailed, dispassionate description of human memory itself—one that neither subjects it to experimental treatment nor turns over primary responsibility to machines as models—will aid in restoring a long-neglected concern for remembering construed in its own terms and given regard for its own sake. In keeping with Husserl’s dictum “to the things themselves!” such an account is what the present study purports to offer. And in this admittedly nonscientific but nonetheless descriptively rigorous way we may begin the difficult process of remembering memory for what it is and can be.
In any effort to unforget our own forgetting, we need all the support we can find. Strangely enough, it can be found close at hand. Beneath the amnesiac flood tide of indifference toward remembering are distinct undercurrents of respect. This respect is observable in certain everyday attitudes toward memory. Notice, for example, our irritation at someone who continually repeats himself or herself: why doesn’t this person remember that he or she has told us the same thing before, indeed, just yesterday? Standing in contrast with this banal circumstance of disappointment—which nevertheless betrays definite expectations about the use of memory—is the amazement we experience upon reading such a book as Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist.32 Whatever its untoward effects upon individuals who possess it, “photographic memory” remains in our spontaneous judgment an enviable and extraordinary gift. When such a memory-for-minutiae is combined with intelligence of the highest order, as in Homer or Seneca the Elder, Milton or Freud, the prospect of such genius redoubled strikes us as awesome. In yet a different way, there is a haunting sense that something abidingly important has been lost in the near-elimination of memorization from education, as is reflected in the often-heard complaint that our memories have become slovenly and unreliable in comparison with those possessed by our forebears only a few generations back.
These various attitudes, pallid as they may appear in the face of the massive decline just described, nevertheless attest to a considerable lingering concern with the role of memory in ourselves as individuals and in our civilization generally. We do seem to care, at some level, about memory’s sinking fortune; its subsiding fate over the past century—indeed, since the Renaissance—does matter to us, even if we feel personally powerless to stem the tide toward diminution in esteem and enfeeblement in use. Stymied in the present and altogether uncertain of the future, we are naturally led to look back—not without envy or nostalgia—to a time when memory was deeply revered and rigorously trained, as it was in ancient Greece.
Memory was a thematic, even an obsessive, concern of the early Greeks. The very survival of the rich oral culture of the Archaic Period (twelfth to eighth centuries B.C.), depended on concerted, disciplined remembering: “Language and thought for the early Greeks grew out of memory.”33 Until the introduction of alphabetic writing—that “recipe not for memory, but for reminding,” as Plato says in the Phaedrus34—the Greeks were forced to rely on the memorial powers of individuals, especially on those who had received special training.35 The mnemon, for example, was someone who kept track of proceedings in law courts without the benefit of written documents. In mythical representations, the mnemon was a servant of heroes who reminded them, at crucial moments, of divine injunctions. Thus Achilles was accompanied by a mnemon who was enjoined to warn him that if he were ever to kill a son of Apollo, he would be put to death. But this appointed reminder failed in his function and was himself put to death.36 The bards who chanted the Iliad, in which this particular tale is recounted, were themselves mnemonic masters who had no written texts to aid their memories. They were almost certainly required to undergo memory training in which they learned to employ mnemotechnics of various sorts, including the use of systematic meters (e.g., hexameter) and internally varying epithets. Such artifices were sorely needed in view of the taxing tasks to which the bard’s memory was submitted. Many verses of the Iliad are little more than copious catalogues of names of warriors (including their place of origin and their exact form of military strength), the most important horses, names of servants, etc. The memorization of such verses was not intended merely to impress audiences with virtuoso performances. It was the sole means of keeping an entire body of collectively held lore alive. As Jean Pierre Vernant remarks, it was by the recitation of these seemingly unending compendia that:
there was fixed and transmitted the repertory of knowledge which allows a social group to decipher its ‘past’. [Such recitations] constitute the equivalent of the archives of a society without writing: purely legendary, they correspond neither to administrative demands nor to an attempt to glorify royalty nor to a historical concern.37
Memorization in the Archaic Period was therefore more than a mere device for keeping facts straight—more than an efficient storage and retrieval system. It was a way of getting (and staying) in touch with a past that would otherwise be consigned to oblivion; it was a fateful fending off of forgetfulness.38
The past to which the bard transported his audience was more mythical than historical: “The ‘past’ is an integral part of the cosmos; to explore it [in epic poetry] is to discover what lies dissimulated in the depths of being.”39 To be conveyed into this past is to be able to forget, however briefly, the anxieties of the present. Here forgetting and remembering work hand-in-hand, each helping the other to realize an optimal form—in contrast with the conflictual relationship that we have witnessed in the thought of Freud and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Ebbinghaus. Indeed, for the early Greeks generally, forgetting and remembering form an indissociable pair; they are given explicit mythical representation in the coeval figures of Lesmosyne and Mnemosyne, who are conceived as equals requiring each other.40 Or, more exactly, the two co-exist, but in this co-existence Mnemosyne, the pole of remembering, incorporates Lesmosyne, the pole of forgetting:
‘Lesmosyne’ derives from the same root as ‘Lethe’ and means exactly the same thing [i.e., forgetfulness]. The sphere of the Muses, which arises from the primordial Goddess Mnemosyne, also has the benefit of Lethe, who makes everything disappear that belongs to the dark side of human existence. It is only both the elements—giving illumination and letting disappear, Mnemosyne and her counter-pole, Lesmosyne—that make up the entire being of the Goddess, whose name comes solely from the positive side of her field of power. This [is a] union of the opposites under the dominion of the positive.41
“Mnemosyne”: if this name is remembered at all today, it is as “the Mother of the Muses,” a formal (and formidable) figure who stiffly receives a sceptor from her daughters, the nine muses. Just as there is little that is inspired or inspiring in this traditional depiction, so we moderns are not inspired by this Goddess. We have forgotten, if we ever knew, that it is she who enthuses poets:
She first makes [poets] inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed; for the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence, not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems. So is it also with the good lyric poets.42
As poets are thus enraptured by the instreaming of Mnemosyne, so their “rhapsodes” or recitants are likewise possessed or “held”43—and so too are those who listen raptly to their impassioned readings. Altogether, three rings are suspended from the loadstone who is Mnemosyne and who, “through all the series, draws the spirit of men wherever [she] desires, transmitting the attractive force from one into another.”44
Mnemosyne is a source not only of inspiration but of knowledge as well. It is due to her infusion from above that the poet is able to know how the mythic past really was: how things were in illud tempore (that former time). Mnemosyne possesses a sophia or wisdom that is in principle omniscient. This is why Hesiod can describe her as knowing “all that has been, all that is, all that will be.”45 Hence the parallel between the poet who is informed by Mnemosyne and the prophet or seer who is guided by Apollo: both poet and prophet know more than they know, more in any case than they could know by their own unaided efforts. Whereas for the prophet this knowing is primarily of the future, for the poet it is mainly of the past—it is a knowing that is, in Heidegger’s word, a commemorative “thinking back”:
When it is the name of the Mother of the Muses [i.e., Mnemosyne], ‘memory’ does not mean just any thought of anything that can be thought. Memory is the gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought about first of all. Memory is the gathering of recollection, thinking back ... Memory, Mother of the Muses—the thinking back to what is to be thought is the source and ground of poesy.46
An echo of this view is detectable in the Romantic definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” We need only substitute “knowledge” for “emotion” in this formula of Wordsworth’s to be in full accord with the ancient Greek vision of Mnemosyne’s unique gift of recollective knowing. It is a striking fact that Mnemosyne is the only deity in any Western pantheon whose name explicitly denotes memory; the Greeks’ general veneration of memory finds expression in her status as a Goddess, the highest honor it was within their collective means to bestow.47
The deification of Mnemosyne, and with her of an entire mythical past, could not survive the emergence of philosophy in its specifically Platonic form in the fifth century B.C. For Plato, recollection (anamnesis) is less of any particular past—personal or mythical48—than of eidetic knowledge previously acquired. The highly personified figure of Mnemosyne disappears; not named in the few myths which are allowed to survive in Platonic dialogues—where myths are designated “second-best” accounts—she is foreign to the austere dialectic that Plato proposes as the unique mode of access to philosophical knowledge. A premise of this dialectic is that the knowledge being sought is already possessed by the individual inquirer, who therefore requires no inspired infusions from a presiding Goddess.49 Even the very highest level of knowledge, episteme proper, is to be gained, or rather regained, “from within” (ex hautou)—from within the individual’s already acquired cognitions. The fact that these cognitions have been forgotten makes the process of inquiry recollective in character; the remembering, however, is not undertaken for the sake of reviving past experiences per se—not even learning experiences—but only for the sake of bringing knowledge as such back to mind.
Plato represents a critical moment of transition. The exaltation of memory and the attribution to it of divine powers give way to a view of it as an instrument of dialectical inquiry—an indispensable instrument but an instrument nonetheless. Granted, Platonic anamnesis does point beyond an individual’s finite existence in time; it helps him or her to cohere to a greater whole (namely, the universe of Forms). Nevertheless, the primary role of memory is to aid in bringing inquirers from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. Or more exactly, memory itself becomes a function of knowledge: “Mnemosyne, supernatural power, has been interiorized so as to become in man the very faculty of knowing.”50 Important as memory is in this capacity, it is difficult to avoid viewing its growing secularization in Plato’s hands as marking a first moment of the decline in its prestige in the early Greek world.
By the very next generation the secularization of memory was complete, thanks to the diligent labors of Aristotle. This transformation was accomplished in three steps. First of all, Aristotle effectively undermines the transcendent aspects of memory—whether these be mythical or metaphysical—by simply ignoring them. He distinguishes two forms of remembering, “memory” and “recollection,”51 and in so doing he restricts memorial phenomena to a finite, sublunar realm. In this realm remembering yields no eternal verities about Gods or Forms, but only empirical truths about happenings within the compass of an individual’s life. Second, Aristotle’s account insists on the intimate link between memory and the personal past: “Memory,” he says laconically, “is of the past,”52 where it is clear that he means a past which I have experienced or witnessed in propria persona. Not only am I constrained to revive this particular past, but I must do so by taking account of the “time-lapse” between its original occurrence and my present remembering; indeed, Aristotle offers a detailed discussion of just how this lapse of time is to be calculated.53 Third, this time-bound, first-person past comes contained in an image. Since images belong exclusively to the perceptual part of the soul, any attempt to link remembering and eidetic knowing in the manner of Plato is placed in question. At the same time, any residual claims concerning memory’s liberating influence are undercut, for images are conceived exclusively as copies of past experiences, internal replicas resulting from a mechanism of isomorphic imprinting in the soul. Memory, in short, is “the having of an image regarded as a copy of that of which it is an image.”54
Image, perception, time: these had been the very things that remembering, in Plato’s vision, helped us to escape or overcome. Images are the lowest level of experience, belonging to the abject realm of reflections and shadows, eikasia; perception is linked with pistis, one level upwards in the epistemic ladder; and time is for Plato the “moving likeness of eternity,”55 an eikon of what is cosmically ultimate. Therefore, in construing memory in terms of the imagistic, the perceptual, and the temporal, Aristotle is conceiving it unremittingly under the aspect of seculae seculorum; he is bringing it down to earth—down to the domain of the finitely rememberable.
The finitizing of human memory so evident in Aristotle’s seminal treatise De Memoria et Reminiscentia—a work whose very brevity may be said to symbolize the diminishment to which memory is submitted in its pages—had for its outcome a dramatic splitting in future considerations of the phenomenon. On the one hand, in keeping with Aristotle’s own primary bias, there emerged an entire tradition of what may be called “passivism,” in which remembering is reduced to a passive process of registering and storing incoming impressions. The passivist paradigm is still very much with us, whether it takes the form of a naive empiricism or of a sophisticated model of information processing. In fact, since Aristotle’s position was first formulated, passivism has been the predominant, and typically the “official” (i.e., the most respected and respectable), view of memory. On the other hand, and as a consequence of this very fact, there has grown up a countervailing tradition of “activism,” according to which memory involves the creative transformation of experience rather than its internalized reduplication in images or traces construed as copies. Echoes of activism are detectable in Plato and Aristotle themselves, especially in the shared conviction that recollection takes place as a search56—a conviction still resounding in notions of “rehearsal” and “retrieval” as these have arisen in cognitive psychology. But it is not until recent times that full-fledged activist models of memory have been developed: e.g., in Janet’s idea of the retroactive transformation of memories by means of their narration; in Freud’s praxis-oriented concepts of interpretation and construction in psychoanalysis; in Bartlett’s theory of the evolving character of memories as these are reconstructed by various memorial schemata; and in Piaget’s similar theory that memories directly reflect changing schemes of accommodation to and assimilation of experience.57
The traditions of activism and passivism have remained remarkably independent of each other from Periclean Athens to the present day. Perhaps only in the case of Plato and Freud—those curious confrères in so many matters—do we witness a meaningful working alliance between the two traditions. Each thinker likens memory to imprinting (whether this be on a wax tablet or within specifically “psychical” neurones in the brain); but each also comes to adopt a more activist position, evident in Plato’s metaphor of searching for memories in an “aviary” of the soul as well as in Freud’s stress on recollection in psychoanalysis as a process of active “working through.”58
Short of these creative compromises, we are left with the extremes of passivism and activism, exemplified respectively by such antithetical figures as Aristotle and Piaget. In between, there is a history of the repression of memory’s potentially transformational role. This is not to deny that, along the way, various valiant efforts have been made to give back to memory some of its lost allure—most notably, in the magical and mystical uses of mnemotechnical systems in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But Yates, who traces the rise and fall of these efforts so movingly, ends her study abruptly in the seventeenth century. After Leibniz,59 the transformative powers of memory, when they were noticed at all, were accorded a distinctly marginal position. Much as Platonism survived at critical moments only in the form of a subterranean and subversive Neoplatonism, so the art of memory (itself the sole context in which memory was still venerated) continued only as a hermetic discipline.
When mnemotechnics was revived in the eighteenth century in a nonhermetic form it had become a merely pragmatic discipline, suitable only for aiding in the memorization of masses of facts—for instance, geographical facts of latitude and longitude, which became of special concern in the wake of the explorations of the world undertaken in preceding centuries. In this practical setting, as distant from Athens as could be imagined, memory was valued merely as a means of arranging and preserving facts efficiently. Even if some of the techniques employed in training memories (e.g., the system of places) were identical with those used by the ancients, they were no longer learned for the sake of sophia but only to render one’s memorial powers more capacious and retentive. The model of human memory as a computer was already beginning to take shape in dim outline, and it is telling that Leibniz was at once the last philosopher to take the art of memory seriously and the first to have envisaged the real possibility of computers in his search for a “universal calculus.”
The mathematization of nature so prominent in Galileo and Newton as well as in Leibniz meant that memory, too, would eventually become mathematized, whether in “computer language” or in some other equally formalized symbolism. Before this began to happen in any thorough fashion (and it still has not occurred in a format that can pretend to general acceptance), memory’s fate was one of constant disparagement by philosophers. Descartes dismisses memory in the Meditations as one of the most dubitable of human capacities: “I convince myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my deceitful memory recalls to me.”60 When the methodological doubt introduced in the first Meditation is lifted later in the text, Descartes does not even bother to restore his (and his reader’s) confidence in memory by any specific argumentation.61 In much the same spirit, Spinoza writes off memory in his Ethics with the derisive remark that it is “simply a certain association of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, which association arises in the mind according to the order and association of the modifications (affectiones) of the human body.”62
Hume, arch-empiricist, echoes Spinoza, arch-rationalist, by emphasizing that “the chief exercise of the memory is not to preserve the simple ideas, but their order and position.”63 “Order and association,” “order and position”:64 these strikingly similar formulae reinforce a common point. If memory is constrained65 to depict past events in the precise order in which they occurred, it is thereby compelled to mimic them, to offer an image or copy that is related to them by isomorphic representation of position or form. No less than in Aristotle, indeed even more vehemently in the agile hands of Hume, memory has become a copying machine, a mere replicator of experiences.66
This resolutely passivist view of memory is in no way altered by the many epigoni of Hume who carried forward the enormously influential movement of associationism.67 Nor is it overturned even by Kant, formidable critic of Hume in so many other respects. On this matter uncharacteristically timid and traditional, Kant treats memory in The Critique of Pure Reason only under the evasive heading of “reproductive imagination,” which is held to be strictly empirical in status and to operate by association alone.68 With Kant, we reach the point at which memory has lost, not only its former attraction and power (“productivity” belongs to imagination alone), but also its own name, since the term “memory” does not occur once in the entire Critique,69 Here, in extremis, is a deeply defensive denial of memory’s importance in human experience, constituting in effect a radical philosophical put-down.
Despite the earnest efforts of Bergson and James at the end of the nineteenth century, of Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century, and of cognitive psychologists in the last few decades, memory has not received anything like the recognition it was given in ancient Greece or in the Renaissance. It is altogether characteristic of the present situation that the most recent extended philosophical treatment of memory in English, Norman Malcolm’s Memory and Mind,70 is almost entirely critical and polemical in nature. Malcolm’s book tells us very effectively what remembering is not, showing up the contradictions and inconsistencies in many current conceptions. It does not, however, tell us in any adequate way what memory is—what its consists in, how it operates, what its origins and limits are. Perhaps the time has come for a careful description of the positive features of remembering, its operation in everyday life and in natural contexts. Perhaps, too, on the basis of such a description, we can come to remember memory anew, recapturing some of the depth and vitality which early Greek poets and thinkers appreciated so fully and which we have just as fully forgotten. Such remembering—such re-viewing and re-valuing—does not require a re-divinization of this elusive power; it is not a question of resurrecting Mnemosyne in person or in name. But it is a matter of reinspiring respect for what the Greeks called mnēmē and the Romans memoria. As memor means “mindful,” so we need to become re-minded, mindful again, of remembering described in its own structure and situated in its own realm—a realm neither mythical nor mechanical but at one with our ongoing existence and experience. Then memory might reassume its rightful place in the pantheon of essential powers of mind and body, self and other, psyche and world.
By attending patiently to memory’s many infrastructures and thereby respecting it as a phenomenon in its own right, we can begin to undo the self-forgetful forgetting that has led to such disrespect for its fields and spacious palaces. Rather than fleeing its dark embrace—its heaviness—and handing it over to machines, we can start to apprehend its intrinsic lightness, its own luminosity. Or more exactly, we may come to realize that its heaviness is not altogether “deplorable” nor its lightness simply “splendid.” We may even be able to choose both its lightness and its weight, its power to alleviate and illuminate as well as its capacity to embroil and bog down.
If this is indeed a genuine option, we need not envy the beast in its bovine oblivion. Setting aside our own self-inflicted forgetting, we can look forward to remembering in the old manner—and in many new ways as well.
Is there, then, a freedom in remembering, a freedom unknown to animals and machines alike? Perhaps. But we cannot possibly answer this last question until we know more about the character and course of human remembering itself.