Memory, History, Forgetting - Rilegato

Ricoeur, Paul

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226713415 ISBN 13: 9780226713410

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 2004

Riassunto

<div>Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.<br><br><i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i>, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.<br><br>A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's <i>Time and Narrative</i> and <i>Oneself as Another</i> and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. <br><br><div>&#8220;His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur&#8217;s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.&#8221;&#8212;<i>Library Journal&#160;<br><br></i>&#8220;Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy&#8212;critical, economical, and clear.&#8221;&#8212; <i>New York Times Book Review <br><br></i></div></div>

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

<div><b>Paul Ricoeur</b> is the John Nuveen Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books including <i>Oneself as Another</i>, the three-volume <i>Time and Narrative</i>, and <i>The Just</i>, all published by the University of Chicago Press. <b>Kathleen Blamey</b> has taught philosophy at California State University, Hayward, and the American University in Paris. <b>David Pellauer</b> is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University.</div>

Dalla quarta di copertina

<div>Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.<br><br><i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i>, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.<br><br>A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, <i>Memory, History, Forgetting</i> provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's <i>Time and Narrative</i> and <i>Oneself as Another</i> and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.</div>

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Memory, History, Forgetting

By PAUL RICOEUR

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2004 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-71341-0

Contents

Preface............................................................................................................xvPART I ON MEMORY AND RECOLLECTION.................................................................................1Chapter 1 Memory and Imagination...................................................................................5 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................5 The Greek Heritage................................................................................................7~ Plato: The Present Representation of an Absent Thing.............................................................7? Aristotle: "Memory Is of the Past"...............................................................................15 A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory...............................................................................21 Memories and Images...............................................................................................44Chapter 2 The Exercise of Memory: Uses and Abuses..................................................................56 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................56 The Abuses of Artificial Memory: The Feats of Memorization........................................................58 The Abuses of Natural Memory: Blocked Memory, Manipulated Memory, Abusively Controlled Memory.....................68? The Pathological-Therapeutic Level: Blocked Memory...............................................................69? The Practical Level: Manipulated Memory..........................................................................80? The Ethico-Political Level: Obligated Memory.....................................................................86Chapter 3 Personal Memory, Collective Memory.......................................................................93 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................93 The Tradition of Inwardness.......................................................................................96? Augustine........................................................................................................96? Locke............................................................................................................102? Husserl..........................................................................................................109 The External Gaze: Maurice Halbwachs..............................................................................120 Three Subjects of the Attribution of Memories: Ego, Collectives, Close Relations..................................124PART II HISTORY, EPISTEMOLOGY.....................................................................................133Prelude History: Remedy or Poison?.................................................................................141Chapter 1 The Documentary Phase: Archived Memory...................................................................146 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................146 Inhabited Space...................................................................................................147 Historical Time...................................................................................................153 Testimony.........................................................................................................161 The Archive.......................................................................................................166 Documentary Proof.................................................................................................176Chapter 2 Explanation/Understanding................................................................................182 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................182 Promoting the History of Mentalities..............................................................................188 Some Advocates of Rigor: Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Norbert Elias........................................200 Variations in Scale...............................................................................................209 From the Idea of Mentality to That of Representation..............................................................216? The Scale of Efficacy or of Coerciveness.........................................................................218? The Scale of Degrees of Legitimation.............................................................................221? The Scale of Nonquantitative Aspects of Social Times.............................................................223 The Dialectic of Representation...................................................................................227Chapter 3 The Historian's Representation...........................................................................234 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................234 Representation and Narration......................................................................................238 Representation and Rhetoric.......................................................................................248 The Historian's Representation and the Prestige of the Image......................................................261 Standing For......................................................................................................274PART III THE HISTORICAL CONDITION.................................................................................281Prelude The Burden of History and the Nonhistorical...............................................................287Chapter 1 The Critical Philosophy of History.......................................................................293 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................293 "Die Geschichte Selber," "History Itself".........................................................................296 "Our" Modernity...................................................................................................305 The Historian and the Judge.......................................................................................314 Interpretation in History.........................................................................................333Chapter 2 History and Time.........................................................................................343 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................343 Temporality.......................................................................................................352? Being-toward-Death...............................................................................................352? Death in History.................................................................................................361 Historicity.......................................................................................................369? The Trajectory of the Term Geschichtlichkeit.....................................................................370? Historicity and Historiography...................................................................................376 Within-Timeness: Being-"in"-Time..................................................................................382? Along the Path of the Inauthentic................................................................................382? Within-Timeness and the Dialectic of Memory and History..........................................................384 Memory, Just a Province of History?...............................................................................385 Memory, in Charge of History?.....................................................................................389 The Uncanniness of History........................................................................................393? Maurice Halbwachs: Memory Fractured by History...................................................................393? Yerushalmi: "Historiography and Its Discontents".................................................................397? Pierre Nora: Strange Places of Memory............................................................................401Chapter 3 Forgetting...............................................................................................412 Reading Guidelines................................................................................................412 Forgetting and the Effacing of Traces.............................................................................418 Forgetting and the Persistence of Traces..........................................................................427 The Forgetting of Recollection: Uses and Abuses...................................................................443? Forgetting and Blocked Memory....................................................................................444? Forgetting and Manipulated Memory................................................................................448? Commanded Forgetting: Amnesty....................................................................................452Epilogue Difficult Forgiveness....................................................................................457 The Forgiveness Equation..........................................................................................459? Depth: The Fault.................................................................................................459? Height: Forgiveness..............................................................................................466 The Odyssey of the Spirit of Forgiveness: The Passage through Institutions........................................470? Criminal Guilt and the Imprescriptible...........................................................................471? Political Guilt..................................................................................................474? Moral Guilt......................................................................................................476 The Odyssey of the Spirit of Forgiveness: The Stage of Exchange...................................................478? The Economy of the Gift..........................................................................................479? Gift and Forgiveness.............................................................................................481 The Return to the Self............................................................................................486? Forgiving and Promising..........................................................................................486? Unbinding the Agent from the Act.................................................................................489 Looking Back over an Itinerary: Recapitulation....................................................................493? Happy Memory.....................................................................................................494? Unhappy History?.................................................................................................497? Forgiveness and Forgetting.......................................................................................500Notes..............................................................................................................507Works Cited........................................................................................................607Index..............................................................................................................627

Chapter One

Memory and Imagination

READING GUIDELINES

By submitting to the primacy of the question "What?" the phenomenology of memory finds itself at the outset confronting a formidable aporia present in ordinary language: the presence in which the representation of the past seems to consist does indeed appear to be that of an image. We say interchangeably that we represent a past event to ourselves or that we have an image of it, an image that can be either quasi visual or auditory. In addition to ordinary language, a long philosophical tradition, which surprisingly combines the influence of English-language empiricism with the rationalism of a Cartesian stamp, considers memory the province of the imagination, the latter having long been treated with suspicion, as we see in Montaigne and Pascal. This continues to be the case, most significantly, in Spinoza. We read in proposition 18 of the second part of the Ethics: On the Nature and the Origin of the Soul: "If the human Body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, then when the Mind subsequently imagines one of them, it will immediately recollect the others also." This sort of short-circuit between memory and imagination is placed under the sign of the association of ideas: if these two affections are tied by contiguity, to evoke one-to imagine it-is to evoke the other-to remember it. Memory, reduced to recall, thus operates in the wake of the imagination. Imagination, considered in itself, is located at the lowest rung of the ladder of modes of knowledge, belonging to the affections that are subject to the connection governing things external to the human body, as underscored by the scholia that follows: "this connection happens according to the order and connection of the affections of the human Body in order to distinguish it from the connection of ideas which happens according to the order of the intellect" (466). This declaration is all the more remarkable in that we read in Spinoza a magnificent definition of time, or rather of duration, as "continuation of existence." What is surprising is that memory is not related to this apprehension of time. And as memory, considered, moreover, as a mode of learning, in terms of the memorization of traditional texts, has a bad reputation-see Descartes's Discourse on Method-nothing comes to the aid of memory as the specific function of accessing the past.

As a countercurrent to this tradition of devaluing memory, in the margins of a critique of imagination, there has to be an uncoupling of imagination from memory, as far as this operation can be extended. The guiding idea in this regard is the eidetic difference, so to speak, between two aims, two intentionalities: the first, that of imagination, directed toward the fantastic, the fictional, the unreal, the possible, the utopian, and the other, that of memory, directed toward prior reality, priority constituting the temporal mark par excellence of the "thing remembered," of the "remembered" as such.

The difficulties inherent in this operation of uncoupling hearken back to the Greek origin of the problematic (section 1: "The Greek Heritage"). On the one hand, the Platonic theory of the eikon places the main emphasis on the phenomenon of the presence of an absent thing, the reference to past time remaining implicit. This problematic of the eikon has its own relevance and its own proper instance, as our subsequent investigations will confirm. Nevertheless, it has become an obstacle to recognizing the specificity of the properly temporalizing function of memory. We must turn to Aristotle to find an acknowledgment of this specificity. The proud declaration that we read in the magnificent little text of the Parva naturalia: On Memory and Recollection-"All memory is of the past"-will become our lodestar for the rest of our exploration.

The central part of this study, "A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory," will be devoted to an effort to form a typology of mnemonic phenomena. Despite its apparent dispersion, this study aims at determining the original experience of temporal distance, of the depth of time past, through a series of approximations. I will not conceal the fact that this plea on behalf of memory's mark of distinction has to be paired with a parallel revision of the thematic of the imaginary, similar to what Sartre undertook to do in his two books, L'Imagination and L'Imaginaire, a revision that would tend to dislodge the image from its alleged place "in" consciousness. The critique of the picture-image would then become one document in the file common to imagination and to memory, a file that begins with the Platonic theme of the presence of the absent.

However, I do not think that one can be content with this twofold operation of specifying the imaginary, on one hand, and memories, on the other. There must be an irreducible feature in the living experience of memory that explains the persistence of the confusion conveyed by the expression "memory-image." It does appear that the return of a memory can only take place in the mode of becoming-an-image. The parallel revision of the phenomenology of memories and the phenomenology of images will encounter its limit in this image-making process of memories (section 3: "Memories and Images").

The constant danger of confusing remembering and imagining, resulting from memories becoming images in this way, affects the goal of faithfulness corresponding to the truth claim of memory. And yet ...

And yet, we have nothing better than memory to guarantee that something has taken place before we call to mind a memory of it. Historiography itself, let us already say, will not succeed in setting aside the continually derided and continually reasserted conviction that the final referent of memory remains the past, whatever the pastness of the past may signify.

'

THE GREEK HERITAGE

The problem posed by the entanglement of memory and imagination is as old as Western philosophy. Socratic philosophy bequeathed to us two rival and complementary topoi on this subject, one Platonic, the other Aristotelian. The first, centered on the theme of the eikon, speaks of the present representation of an absent thing; it argues implicitly for enclosing the problematic of memory within that of imagination. The second, centered on the theme of the representation of a thing formerly perceived, acquired, or learned, argues for including the problematic of the image within that of remembering. These are the two versions of the aporia of imagination and memory from which we can never completely extricate ourselves.

Plato: The Present Representation of an Absent Thing

It is important to note from the start that it is within the framework of the dialogues on the sophist and, through this person, on sophistry itself and the properly ontological possibility of error, that the notion of the eikon is encountered, either alone or paired with that of the phantasma. In this way, from the very outset, the image but also by implication memory are cast under a cloud of suspicion due to the philosophical environment in which they are examined. How, asks Socrates, is the sophist possible and, with him, the false-speaking and, finally, the non-being implied by the non-true? It is within this framework that the two dialogues bearing the titles Theaetetus and Sophist pose the problem. To complicate matters further, the problematic of the eikon is, in addition, from the outset associated with the imprint, the tupos, through the metaphor of the slab of wax, error being assimilated either to an erasing of marks, semeia, or to a mistake akin to that of someone placing his feet in the wrong footprints. We see by this how from the beginning the problem of forgetting is posed, and even twice posed, as the effacement of traces and as a defect in the adjustment of the present image to the imprint left as if by a seal in wax. It is noteworthy that memory and imagination already share the same fate in these founding texts. This initial formulation of the problem makes all the more remarkable Aristotle's statement that "all memory is of the past."

Let us reread the Theaetetus, beginning at 163d. We are at the heart of a discussion centered around the possibility of false judgment, which concludes with a reference to the thesis that "knowledge is simply perception" (151e-187b). Socrates proposes the following "attack": "Supposing you were asked, 'If a man has once come to know a certain thing, and continues to preserve the memory of it, is it possible that, at the moment when he remembers it, he doesn't know this thing that he is remembering?' But I am being long-winded, I'm afraid. What I am trying to ask is, 'Can a man who has learned something not know it when he is remembering it?'" (163d). The strong tie of the entire problematic to eristic is immediately obvious. Indeed, it is only after having crossed through the lengthy apology of Protagoras, and his open pleading in favor of the measure of man, that a solution begins to dawn, but, before that, an even more pointed question is raised: "Now, to begin, do you expect someone to grant you that a man's present memory of something which he has experienced in the past but is no longer experiencing is the same sort of experience as he then had? This is very far from being true" (166b). An insidious question, which leads the entire problematic into what will appear to us to be a trap, namely, resorting to the category of similarity to resolve the enigma of the presence of the absent, an enigma common to imagination and memory. Protagoras tried to enclose the authentic aporia of memories, namely, the presence of the absent, in the eristic of the (present) non-knowledge of (past) knowledge. Armed with a new confidence in thinking, likened to a dialogue of the soul with itself, Socrates develops a sort of phenomenology of mistakes, where one thing is taken for another. To resolve this paradox he proposes the metaphor of the block of wax: "Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another, and of pure wax in one case, dirtier in another; in some men rather hard, in others rather soft, while in some it is of just the proper consistency." Theaetetus: "All right, I'm supposing that." Socrates: "We may look upon it, then, as a gift of Memory [Mnemosyne], the mother of the Muses. We make impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember [mnemoneusai] among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves; we hold the wax under our perceptions and thoughts and take a stamp from them, in the way in which we take the imprints [marks, semeia] of signet rings. Whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image [eidolon] remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget [epilelesthai] and do not know" (191d). Let us note that the metaphor of the wax conjoins the problematics of memory and forgetting. There follows a subtle typology of all the possible combinations between the moment of knowledge and the moment of the acquisition of the imprint. Among these, let us note the following pairs: "that a thing which you both know and are perceiving, and the record of which you are keeping in its true line [ekhon to mnemeion orthos] is another thing which you know ... that a thing you both know and are perceiving and of which you have the record correctly in line as before, is another thing you are perceiving" (192b-c). It is in an effort to identify this veridical characteristic of faithfulness that we will later reorient the entire discussion. Pursuing the analogy of the imprint, Socrates assimilates true opinion to an exact fit and false opinion to a bad match: "Now, when perception is present to one of the imprints but not to the other; when (in other words) the mind applies the imprint of the absent perception to the perception that is present; the mind is deceived in every such instance" (194a). We need not linger over the enumeration of the different kinds of wax, intended as a guide to the typology of good or bad memories. But let me not fail to mention, however, for our reading pleasure, the ironic reference (194e-195a) to "those whose wax is shaggy" (Iliad II!) and "soft." Let us retain the more substantive idea that false opinion resides "not in the relations of perceptions to one another, or of thoughts to one another, but in the connecting [sunapsis] of perception with thought" (195c-d). The reference to time we might expect from the use of the verb "to preserve in memory" is not relevant in the framework of an epistemic theory that is concerned with the status of false opinion, hence with judgment and not with memory as such. Its strength is to embrace in full, from the perspective of a phenomenology of mistakes, the aporia of the presence of absence.

With regard to its impact on the theory of imagination and of memory, it is the same overarching problematic that is responsible for the shift in metaphor with the allegory of the dovecote. Following this new model ("the model of the aviary" in the words of Burnyeat), we are asked to accept the identification between possessing knowledge and actively using it, in the manner in which holding a bird in the hand differs from keeping it in a cage. In this way, we have moved from the apparently passive metaphor of the imprint left by a seal to a metaphor that stresses power or capacity in the definition of knowledge. The epistemic question is this: does the distinction between a capacity and its exercise make it conceivable that one can judge that something one has learned and whose knowledge one possesses (the birds that someone keeps) is something that one knows (the bird one grabs in the cage) (197b-c)? The question touches our discussion inasmuch as a faulty memorization of the rules leads to an error in counting. At first glance, we are far from the instances of errors of fit corresponding to the model of the block of wax. Were these not, nevertheless, comparable to the erroneous use of a capacity and, by this, to a mistake? Had not the imprints to be memorized in order to enter into use in the case of acquired knowledge? In this way the problem of memory is indirectly concerned by what could be considered a phenomenology of mistakes. The failed fit and the faulty grasp are two figures of mistakes. The "model of the aviary" is especially well-suited to our investigation inasmuch as grasping is in every case comparable to a possession (hexis or ktesis), and above all to hunting, and in which every memory search is also a hunt. Let us again follow Socrates, when, as a true sophist, he surpasses himself in subtleties, mixing ring doves with doves but also non-doves with real doves. Confusion is rampant not only at the moment of capture but also with respect to the state of possession.

By these unexpected divisions and duplications, the analogy of the dovecote (or the model of the aviary) reveals a richness comparable to that of the foot mistakenly placed in the wrong print. To the mis-fit is added the erroneous grasp, the mis-take. However, the fate of the eikon has been lost from sight. The Sophist will lead us back to it.

The problematic of the eikon developed in the Sophist comes directly to the aid of the enigma of the presence of absence concentrated in the passage in Theaetetus 194 related above. What is at stake is the status of the moment of recollection, treated as the recognition of an imprint. The possibility of falsehood is inscribed in this paradox.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Memory, History, Forgettingby PAUL RICOEUR Copyright © 2004 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226713415
• ISBN 13: 9780226713410
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 642
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile