Hans Ruin
What is memory? For modern psychological-neurological science, the question has a straightforward response. Yet, in its extension, it points toward the deepest aporias of a philosophy of subjectivity and of time. As a first step in a discussion of memory and philosophical hermeneutics, we need to briefly survey the ambiguity of the concept of memory itself. For it resonates also in the ambiguity of its position within hermeneutic thinking, where it has vacillated between a marginal and a fundamental position over the years.
According to the standard definition, repeated in numerous handbooks, memory is “the processes by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved,” ultimately in and through neurological brain mechanisms. It ranges from immediate sensory memory, over short-term, to so-called long-term memory. Other important distinctions concern the difference between procedural memory (attained nonconscious capacities) and working memory (what is actively kept in mind at a certain moment), and between semantic and episodic memory. The distinctions can be multiplied.
Memory can become the object of training and enhancement, through various mnemonic techniques and educational practices, and it is a persistent concern for medicine and psychology where it surfaces as illness- and age-related deficiencies. Over the course of the last half century, memory has also become a central task of technology, through the invention of machines that seek to reproduce precisely the capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information.
The philosophically more difficult and evasive dimension of memory is opened up once we begin to probe the conceptual presupposition of this scientific and technological definition. The key issue here is time. When we say that a biological creature, or a technical artifact, has the ability to retain and recover information over the course of time, time itself is taken for granted as the general, existing framework within which all things exist and occur. As a posited framework for organizing, controlling, and explaining life, this objectified temporal “time-space” is indispensable. With the help of chronometers and calendars, it is mastered so that all that happens can be given a distinct location within it, in time as it were, in a before and after.
It is when we begin to think philosophically about the nature of this framework that we are led toward the deeper aporias of time and temporality. Time itself does not “exist” in any place. Instead, time somehow “holds” things together, giving them continuity. But this holding together does not take place in any exterior space. Rather, the “holding” is somehow constantly happening in and through precisely the retention of an “it was.” Yet this “was” is not available as such, but only through the ongoing “keeping” of the past, that ultimately seems to take place in memory. Memory is thus the locus of what we could call our “temporal sensibility.”
We could call it the “Augustinian” experience of memory, since it was in Augustine's Confessions that it was most compellingly explored. It is an experience of memory not just as a cognitive function situated in a body in time, but as the very medium through which the self has an experience of time and of itself and its own subjectivity. In Book Ten of the Confessions, Augustine describes his memory as this “vast space,” that contains “the sky, and the earth, and the sea,” as well as “all that has been learned,” and not just the impressions of things experienced, but the things themselves when it comes to intellectual abilities, mathematics and reasoning, from whose “secret chambers” it was possible to recall even though it had never entered them through the senses. “Great is the power of memory; a thing, O my God, to be amazed at, a very profound and infinite multiplicity: and this thing is the mind, and this thing am I. What am I therefore, O my God? What kind of nature am I? A life various and full of changes, yea exceedingly immense.”1
In this extraordinary discourse, memory emerges as the site of interiority, of consciousness, and of thinking, and ultimately as the place where the subject has the deepest possible experience of itself and of its provenance. From the viewpoint of this exposition, memory is not just a separate and distinguishable mental function among others, but the very condition for self-knowledge and self-awareness of subjectivity as a temporally and historically constituted phenomenon. It is not incidental that it was to this Augustinian conception of temporalizing memory that Husserl returned in his lectures on inner time-consciousness fifteen hundred years later, recalling it as an unsurpassed achievement.2 From the Augustinian position, memory is not just a restricted mental capacity, but what gives access to consciousness and time, and as such also to history and tradition.
To some extent, the Augustinian reflexive exposition of memory as unfathomable interiority has its philosophical antecedent in the Platonic sense of anamnesis, expounded in several dialogues, notably Meno and Phaedo, and also the Republic, where knowledge is equated with the ability to recollect what was already there in an earlier existence. As a contrast to this Platonic-Augustinian line, we have Aristotle's discussion of memory. His short dissertation De Memoria gives a densely packed analysis of memory as a mental function, which sets the stage for the more scientific exploration of this phenomenon up until modern times.3 Its basic distinction is between the ability to remember and the ability to recall, and he defines memory as a comportment characterized by a perception or conception originating from something “when time has past.”
If hermeneutics has traditionally understood itself as primarily preoccupied with meaning, understanding, communication, and tradition, the phenomenon of memory in the more restricted Aristotelian, psychological sense could seem to be of lesser interest, as an auxiliary cognitive function. If, on the other hand, we focus on its relation to subjectivity, time, and history, it appears very differently. If we look at the hermeneutic literature, this inner tension in the concept and phenomenon of memory is illustrated very clearly, as I will now try to show in a survey from Gadamer to Ricoeur, and on up to the present state of the discussion. In the course of this survey, there will be reason also to explore some points of contact between hermeneutics and current theories of collective and cultural memory.
If we look at the literature on hermeneutics from earlier years, in standard handbooks and commentaries, the word “memory” rarely surfaces. A quick glance at the central, indeed the founding, text of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's Truth and Method, will initially also support this omission of memory from the canonic concepts of hermeneutics. Memory is not discussed as a separate theme anywhere in this work, and to most readers it will appear as peripheral to the hermeneutic enterprise, at least when compared with such themes as understanding, experience, historicity, truth, Bildung, and sensus communis. Seen as a mental capacity for retaining information, it is supposedly taken for granted as a prerequisite for any intellectual work, but not in need of a separate treatment in the context of a theory of hermeneutics.
If, however, we look more closely at those few passages where memory is mentioned and discussed, we get a different picture. The most important place for this thematic is the discussion of “The guiding concepts of Humanism” in the introductory part of the book, where Gadamer addresses the idea of Bildung as it appears in Hegel and Helmholtz. He cites Helmholz’s remark concerning the “tact” needed in order to grasp the sense of the past, and how this requires that the most varied experiences can “flow into the memory of the historian or philologist.”4 Gadamer comments critically on this remark, saying that it fails to see the significance of both tact and memory, since it conceives of them as instances of “mental competence.”
Memory, he continues, is not rightly understood, if it is seen only as talent or capacity. Instead, “forgetting and recalling belong to the historical constitution of man and are themselves part of his history and his Bildung.” Furthermore, “it is time to rescue the phenomenon of memory from being regarded merely as a psychological faculty, and so to see it as an essential element of the finite historical being of man.” As such, it implies both an ability to keep in mind and preserve, as well as to forget. In other words, at the very outset of his founding text for philosophical hermeneutics, memory is connected to the finite historical situatedness of man in time. In a footnote to this remark, Gadamer also adds that the history of memory should not be equated with the uses of memory, and with mnemotechnics. “Rather it should be Augustine who stands at the center of the history of this phenomenon, for he totally transformed the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition that he received.”
These remarks are not, however, followed up in the course of the book in the form of any explicit elaboration of memory as historical existence. Still, they set a pattern for a way of thinking about memory in relation to historical and hermeneutic understanding. When we interpret them in this direction, they can also tell us more about the ambiguous role of memory in the overall articulation of the hermeneutic experience. Memory is located at the existential center of historical finite existence. It delineates the space of awareness and receptivity in which this existence is enacted, in a constant play of attention, recall, and forgetting. When memory is only seen as a specific mental-cognitive capacity, and in particular when it is made into the object of mnemotechnical exercise and performance, its genuine meaning is easily covered over.
From Gadamer's brief remarks on memory and mnemotechnics, we can thus also sense how the very conceptualizing of memory as mnemotechnics can lead to misconceptions concerning historical existence itself. When memory takes upon itself the ambition of recording and storing everything, it will tend to generate the idea of a complete mastery of time and history. In its struggle against forgetting, it will risk forgetting forgetting itself. This is not literally stated as such by Gadamer, but it is implied by his argument. Indeed, no other human faculty is more inclined to misconstrue the nature of time and temporal existence than memory. For it is only memory, both in the form of an ideal perfected human memory, and even more so in the idea of the completed historical or technical archive, that can inspire the expectation that time and change can be ultimately mastered, and that the human mind can indeed conquer time in a total archival surveillance of all that has been.
Memory can lead to a misunderstanding of the nature of finite historical time, but as such it can also be the site of its genuine realization. For it is in and through the experience of memory as the finite space of recollection and forgetting that man can return to and enter into contact with the basic predicament of being situated within a limited or finite historical horizon. Memory will then stand out as the genuine existential opening toward the very possibility of temporal and historical awareness and thus toward what is explored throughout the book as the “historicity” of human existence and understanding.
This is also a way of understanding the similarly ambiguous role that the thought of memory plays in Heidegger's thinking. In the context of the existential analytic, there is no specific analysis of the faculty of memory. Nor does he pay much attention to it in subsequent works. Still, it is notable how his entire philosophical ambition, from Being and Time onward, is in fact conceptually situated in terms of memory and forgetting. The question of being is a problem of memory, or rather of recollection. Again and again, we are reminded that something has been forgotten, namely, being. And ultimately it is not just being that has been forgotten, but the forgetting itself. For this is what Heidegger will say in the end, that we have not only forgotten being, but that we have forgotten that we have forgotten it, so that in the end memory must be the memory of a forgetting. In an important text from the later years, the short appendix to the two-volume work Nietzsche entitled “Recollection in Metaphysics” (Erinnerung in die Metaphysik), he describes the ultimate role of thinking as such a work of memory or recollection, through which we enter again into the original happening of our own history and tradition as something to which we already belong.5
At the core of philosophical hermeneutics in Gadamer's version, we also find a “speculative” or reflexive experience of being spoken to, addressed, and even claimed by precisely that which we are trying to understand. It is the realization that we are not simply the observers and judges of the past, but also the ones being judged by it. The self-image of reason as independent judge and arbiter of reality is questioned once it enters more deeply into a process of understanding of the past. And it is memory, when properly conceptualized, that can open the way to precisely this speculative experience.
In a recent study of Gadamer, Nicholas Davey makes this connection as he tries to explicate the sense of “the speculative experience of truth” in Gadamer. Since this experience is precisely also one of self-implication (that the subject is implied in the process leading up to what is understood), then it also involves recognition, and thus a process of remembrance, as well as forgetfulness.6 In the process of genuine understanding, the subject realizes that it had “forgotten” its previous belonging; or in Davey's words: “These conceptual associations point to the fact that the speculative experience of truth with its centrifugal and centripetal motions is driven by the dialectical tensions between anamnesis (forgetfulness), mimesis (the recognition of the same), and mnemosyne (memory or recall).”7
Davey also quotes a late lecture by Gadamer on Stefan George, where he said: “Mnemosyne rules everything: to keep in memory means to be human” and that the “expression for the retention of memory, mneme, connoted for the Greeks something from menein, from remaining, from becoming stable.”8 The quotation illustrates again the ambiguous role of memory in his thought, where it is rarely thematized and explored as such, but where it on rare occasions, as referred to here, suddenly shines forth as in fact a fundamental framework for his entire enterprise.
In a recent essay, Jeffrey Sims has even suggested that Gadamerian hermeneutics is not just part of a general linguistic turn in modern thought, but more deeply in a “mnemonic turn.”9 The basic idea is again that the mnemonic turn is a turn toward a deeper appreciation of tradition, and of the experience of indebtedness, in other words, that the very concept of memory captures this basic ethos of Gadamer's hermeneutics. Still, Sims does not support this reading with an analysis of the explicit role of memory in Gadamer's work, nor does he have any references to contemporary work on memory as a cultural-theoretical concept. Overall, it is notable that in the few attempts that have been made so far to explore the role and meaning of memory in and for hermeneutics, with the exception of Ricoeur, the explosion of work in “cultural memory studies” over the last three decades is mostly absent. The lack of contact between these two fields deserves a comment, since it can also help us see more clearly the meaning and potential of the mnemonic for hermeneutics in its current development, and also to situate the last writings of Ricoeur.
When Gadamer put together Truth and Method, the theme of “memory” was not very visible in general cultural-philosophical discourse. But from the mid-1970s onward, there occurred a gradual transformation in the general study of culture and history that could rightly be labeled a “mnemonic turn.” For from that point onward, memory emerged as a concern for the humanities at large, and as a new guiding concept. This change was connected to an overall “reflexive” turn in the historical sciences, away from positivism, in favor of neo-Marxist and postmodern critique, often guided by progressive emancipatory political ideas. It included a growing interest in oral history and, in general, in the “uses” of history.
In some respects, it can be said to have been inspired also by philosophical hermeneutics and its discovery of the reflexive interdependency of the historian vis-à-vis history. More visibly, however, it included the rediscovery of and growing interest in the earlier work by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a student and follower of Bergson and Durkeim who introduced the notion of “collective memory” in works written in the 1920s and 1930s. The central idea of Halbwachs was to try to understand the different ways in which what we speak of as “memory” in an individual is in fact maintained and made possible through its belonging to a community, from the family unit, through nation, up to culture. On all these different levels, we can study the different “frameworks” (cadres) that enable the individual to have memories (Halbwachs 1992).10 The notion of “collective memory,” which was introduced in the later work, was never clearly defined by Halbwachs, and its more precise relation to personal, individual memory remained unclear. Yet, as an umbrella term, it proved to be extraordinarily productive, as it paved the way for the study of the dynamics of cultural traditions from a new angle. It made it possible to speak in a more extended sense of “memory,” not just as a name for something individual and private, but as a new master concept in relation to which “tradition” or “historical consciousness” was one possible example.
Halbwachs’s theories were picked up and developed by various different research perspectives. Especially important for the field of cultural memory studies was the work by Jan and Aleida Assmann and their group in Heidelberg from the late 1970s onward. Taking inspiration from Gadamer's hermeneutics, and also from the work of Kosselleck in conceptual history, they began to elaborate Halbwachs’s theories of collective memory in the direction of a general theory of “cultural memory,” a term first introduced by Jan Assmann (1988).11 Through this new terminology, the study of the preservation of cultural inheritance, and of traditions and rituals generally, could be reconceptualized as the study of cultural memory, bringing the concept of memory to the center of the cultural sciences.
In the work of Aleida Assmann, this analysis was complemented in ways that showed a closer proximity to philosophical hermeneutics, in that she stressed the role of forgetting, as itself a necessary condition for tradition, and the inescapable finitude of memory.12 In an article from 2002, she describes the emergence of “memory” as the new “leading term” in cultural history and the cultural sciences.13 She then connects it primarily to the growing realization that history is always “represented” history, in other words, to the general turn toward a meta-reflective approach to historical knowledge and historical narration often associated with the work of Hayden White. Assmann also notes the ambiguous role and significance of memory for the whole discourse about history and historical knowledge. With “memory” we can refer to the Proustian sense of memory as the most genuine form of retrieval of the past, when it again becomes present and restored in a recollection. But to speak of the past as “memory” can also serve to highlight the essential disconnection from this past, that it only exists in the form of an always present and changing image, individual or collective. In the former role, memory points to the irreducibility of testimony and the witness when it comes to the past, not least as it is cultivated in oral history, and in the latter to the always constructed and socially and linguistically mediated relation to the past.
Around the same time as the emergence of the Assmann group, Pierre Nora gathered a group of colleagues many of whom came out of the Annales school of historians, to edit a large-scale history of France. Responding to a sense of a new predicament for historical science, they sought to create a history that could somehow integrate the historian's new awareness of being an integrated part of the history that was to be written, where an earlier illusion of historian as detached witness of the past had been broken. It was also an attempt to write not just the story of what had been, but to explore the places in culture where it created the memory of itself. In this group, too, there was an appreciation of the work of Halbwachs. For the multivolume work, Nora chose the term “lieux de mémoire,” places or sites of memory, published in the years 1984–1992.14 The term turned out to be very well chosen, as it quickly caught on and started to live a life on its own. In a later text from 2002, Nora concluded in retrospect that the entire West European culture in the meantime had undergone an “upsurge in memory,” not just in cultural theory and history, but also in a more general sense, with an increasing preoccupation with memorials, rituals, and museums.15
In the preface to his last great synthetic effort, Memory, History, Forgetting from 2003, Paul Ricoeur comments on a lacuna in his earlier three-volume work Time and Narrative from 1984 precisely in regard to memory, and also in regard to forgetting.16 In making the connection between the phenomenological theory of temporal experience and the literary theoretical interest in narrative and narrativity, he had somehow managed to bypass this phenomenon. In the meantime, the mnemonic transformation in the historical sciences just described had taken place.
In the new book, he therefore stresses the need today to address philosophically the issue of memory, partly in view of what he also sees as an “excess of memory,” even an “abuse of memory.”17 For Ricoeur, the ultimate motive for bringing memory into the discussion of historical knowledge has to do primarily with the question that memory places us before most poignantly, namely, that of the “representation of the past,” the very nature of that having of the past, the access to what was truly there, for in the end “we have no other resource, concerning our reference to the past, except memory itself.”18 And it is in this context that he also brings in “forgetting,” in order to remind us that the representation is always exposed to it as a danger, but also “entrusted to its protection.” In the extension of this topic, he can also bring in the theme of “reconciliation” and “forgiveness” as also conditioned by partial forgetting.
Ricoeur does not relate to the work of Assmann group, but in his book he refers frequently to the work of Nora, and he includes a discussion on Halbwachs.19 The overall theoretical framework in his book remains that of phenomenology and hermeneutics. When developing his account of memory, he moves from Plato and Aristotle to Husserl, commenting on Augustine, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. It is in critical contrast to this tradition of “inwardness” that he then brings in the perspective of Halbwachs under the label “The external gaze.” He is open to the claim that memories are maintained intersubjectively, but following his phenomenological orientation he remains skeptical vis-à-vis the attempt to reverse the order between individual and collective. He therefore criticizes the formulations where Halbwachs seems to suggest that individual memory can be fully explained in terms of its social conditioning. In this discussion, the old tension between sociology and phenomenology is thus enacted again, notably the methodological debate between the priority of first- or third-person perspective.
Finally, I would like to point to one of the most recent contributions to philosophical hermeneutics, where the impact of the mnemonic dimension of Gadamer's thinking is also brought to the fore in a very promising way. Jim Risser's celebrated The Life of Understanding (2012), with the subtitle “A Contemporary Hermeneutics,” includes several chapters that are explicitly concerned with the role and meaning of memory. He shows how the idea of overcoming “inauthenticity” in favor of “authenticity” in Heidegger's early writings anticipates the later idea of overcoming a “forgetfulness” of being. In the later writings, the individual existential dimension of this move from forgetfulness to recovery is captured in concepts such as Erinnerung, Andenken, and Gedächtnis, where the very work of thinking is equated with the restoration of a meaning once lost. In Gadamer, he also sees how this problematic takes the shape of a “recovering” and “saving” of the words that can bring us closer to a realization of our human predicament. Risser suggests that we think of this hermeneutic work of recovery as a “convalescence,” as also a “time of memory.”20
It is then not a final and complete overcoming, resulting in the clarity of memory as opposed to the obscurity of forgetfulness, but of a “Verwindung” that brings health rather than sickness. And Risser stresses wisely that it cannot simply be reduced to a nostalgia for what once was. The saving that takes place in this form of recovery is one that is aware of inescapable loss. For this reason, he also argues strongly against the common perception that Gadamerian (and for that matter, Heideggerian) hermeneutics be simply “conservative.” The kind of memory involved in this process of transmission of heritage and tradition has a dialogical nature, where the very idea of a final overcoming is itself overcome.
All this takes place within and through a “tradition,” an Überlieferung, which is itself made possible by the very phenomenon of language and meaning. Again, against the critique that this idea of tradition is monolithic and normative, Risser points to the possibility of its transmission as that which itself is not a content of tradition, but an “openness” that constitutes the “immemorial in memory.”21 With this way of articulating the speculative dimension of Gadamer's account of tradition as a happening of meaning and truth, he brings out in a compelling way a mnemonic dimension of his thinking that could potentially also connect it to the more sociological accounts of tradition as cultural memory.
His account also has a way of accommodating the often-voiced criticism that this speculative and transcendental account of tradition will naively reproduce a specific and already canonized tradition, by stressing that this sort of memory will require a “constant attention”22. Only thus can it bring out the undetermined possibilities. In the end, it is the great challenge of hermeneutics to respond to the question: “What does it mean to accomplish tradition?”23 For Risser, this is answered in a normative sense by pointing to the need for attention and vigilance in regard to the past, so as to enable it to rise from its ashes—a gesture of opening oneself to its reemergence, as a journey into the foreign, as also an experience of freedom.
In another of the chapters, “Beyond Distress: Toward a Community of Memory,” he elaborates the Gadamerian idea of Bildung and sensus communis in the direction of a “community of memory.” To share a life is to take part in a communal memory, but again not in the sense of a Hegelian Erinnerung where all the wounds are healed without scars, but rather a memory in dialogical relation with the past as both lost and retrieved and, as such, also containing a promise for a future. He wants to think of this community not as a closed community, with responsibility for a particular memory, but rather as an open promise for a retrieval to come.
In Risser's book, there is no explicit connection to contemporary cultural memory studies, nor with the work of Ricoeur, but through his way of grafting a discourse of memory onto Gadamer's understanding of understanding and tradition, he opens a trajectory that points toward expanding the reach, significance, and cultural relevance of hermeneutics in a situation where the role of tradition, inheritance, and cultural identity is increasingly addressed in terms of memory and memorial practices.