Abstract
The marriage of memory and method in philosophy has been a notably uneven event. The unevenness is dramatically evident in the differences between Plato and Husserl regarding the relation between method and memory. These two most profound of philosophical Eidetikers, deeply allied in their common concern for securing insight into essential structures, are just as deeply devided when it comes to the role of remembering in philosophical method. This is not to deny that each is obsessed with devising the best possible method for attaining an apodictically certain grasp of essences, and there are important formal similarities in their respective conceptions of method. For instance, in both cases a stagewise procedure is advocated, whether this be in the form of moving step-by-step up the divided line (as outlined most completely in The Republic 509–11) or as a matter of executing successive “reductions” (i.e., philosophical, eidetic, phenomenological-transcendental, as presented most accessibly in Ideas). Indeed, Platonic dialectic and Husserlian reduction can be said to possess the same view of the primary task to be accomplished in such stepwise methods: namely, the overcoming or suspending of the stranglehold which common belief or opinion brings with it. Doxa and the “natural attitude” are seen as at once inevitable qua starting-points and evitable by the proper pursuit of a prescribed philosophical method, which promises to cleanse their cloying effects.
“Even concerning this ultimate goal, the origins and specific rights of the lower stages should not be forgotten”.
—Husserl, Experience and Judgment, section 10.
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Notes
Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972), p. 36. In what follows I draw on Sorabji’s excellent analysis of Plato at ibid., pp. 35–46.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper, 1968), pp. 150–1.
Sorabji expresses this point by saying that the memory of earlier knowledge is related to the recollection of such knowledge as (i) preceding the latter; (ii) being its condition of possibility; (iii) being forgotten in the interim. Cf. Sorabji, p. 40.
Sorabji, p. 40. Cf. Philebus 34C: “when the soul that has lost the memory of a sensation or what it has learned resumes that memory within itself (ex hautou) and goes over the old ground, we regularly speak of these precesses as ‘recollections’ ”.
“As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything [in previous existences], nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only - a process men call learning - discovering everything else for himself” (Meno 81 d).
On the last two points, see Sorabji, pp. 35–6.
René Descartes, Mediations on First Philosophy, trans. D.A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), p. 39. My italics.
“If I examine the faculty of memory, imagination, or any other faculty, I manifestly find [only] what in me is feeble and limited, but what in God I understand to be immense”, Descartes, p. 37. On pp. 19–20, memory is omitted from Descartes’ list of powers that determine human beings as thinking things.
Descartes, p. 40; my italics. Elsewhere a different use of memory is suggested, one which ties it to a trust in God’s non-deceptiveness: “it must be fixed in one’s memory as the highest rule, tl1t what has been revealed to us by God is to be believed as the most certain of all things” (Principles of Philosophy, Part I, section 76; my italics).
Ideas, section 36. Most of this is in italics in the text. It is hardly accidental that Descartes’ methodological doubt is discussed only a few paragraphs before in this same section. Husserl says that “we link on here”, even though he is concerned to disaffiliate himself from Descartes’s tendency to turn doubt into denial.
“Although I observe that there is in me this infirmity, namely, that I am unable always to adhere fixedly to one and the same knowledge, nevertheless I can, by attentive and frequently repeated meditation, bring it to pass that I recall [this infirmity] every time the situation demands; thus I would acquire a habit of not erring”, Descartes, Meditations,p. 40.
“Imagination and Phenomenological Method”. In F. Elliston and P. McCormick eds. Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 70–82. In several respects, the present essay can be considered a companion piece to the earlier effort.
Cf. Ideas,sections 3, 4, 23 and especially 70: “We draw extraordinary profit from what history has to offer us, and in still richer measure from the gifts of art and particularly of poetry. These [latter] are indeed fruits of imagination (Einbildungen)”.
See especially section 70 of Ideas.
“Free variation in imagination” is discussed most fully at Experience and Judgment, trans. J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), section 87a. The invariant thus obtained is explicitly likened to a Platonic eidos minus its “metaphysical interpretations” at p. 341.
On these conceptions of Kant’s, see The Critique of Pure Reason A 100–1–3, A 120–24, B 180–82; Critique of Judgment, sections 22, 48.
On this last point, see Experience and Judgment, section 87c (“Congruence and Difference in the Overlapping Coincidence of Multiplicities of Variation”) and Marcy C. Rawlinson’s analysis of it in a forthcoming essay on “Theory of Essence in Proust and Husserl”.
This is not to mention the further facts that (a) the interlocutor’s responses in a given dialogue can be considered as a form of free variation in imagination; (b) a number of substantive Platonic themes, e.g., the nature of Eros and of image-making, offer profound meditations on imagination itself.
The recently published volume of Husserliana, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein,Erinnerung, ed. E. Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980) does not change this assessment, though it does show how deeply interested Husserl was in the structure of “image-consciousness” itself. There is a discernible tendency in this collection of writings, however, to subordinate imagination to memory. Cf. sections 1, 3, 11, 13, 15 as evidence of this tendency.
Ideas, section 34; my italics. This passage exemplifies another equality as well: that of the factual vs. the non-factual, the presentational vs. the presentificational. In eidetic inquiry, facts have no priority over fiction.
The two terms are used synonymously, e.g., at The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 52.
Crisis, p. 50.
Crisis, p. 361.
Crisis, p. 361.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 241–2, 265.
Ideas, section 33, my italics.
Ideas, section 50; translation emended. Compare similar passages from the Crisis written almost twenty-five years later: “Through the epoché a new way of experiencing, of thinking, of theorizing, is opened to the philosopher; here, situated above his own natural being and above the natural world, he loses nothing of their being and their objective truths” (Crisis,section 41, p. 152; my italics). Cf. also p. 253: in undertaking an epoché “nothing at all can be lost”
Experience and Judgment, section 87a, p. 340.
On this characterization of retaining-in-grasp as “active - passive” see Experience and Judgment, sect. 23 a-b.
On these various avators of retaining-in-grasp, which are considerably more complex than I have presented them here, see Experience and Judgment, sections 23 and 24.
Experience and Judgment, section 87c, p. 343. The title of this section is “the Retaining-inGrasp of the Entire Multiplicity of Variations as the Foundations of Essential Seeing”.
Experience and Judgment, p. 343. It is difficult to make this passage compatible with the claim in the next sentence that “the overlapping coincidence… takes place of itself in a purely passive way”. Surely, we still have to do here with a situation of “passivity in activity
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), II, 684–88. Husserl discusses “watchfulness” (Achtsamkeit: “needing” in Gibson’s translation) in Ideas, sections 35 and 37; no link is there made to phenomenological method.
On the distinction between accessibility and availability in memory, see Robert G. Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1976), pp. 10 ff. On encoding and registration, see Crowder, Chapters 4, 6.
As Husserl says in the Cartesian Meditations: “in the case of evidence of immanent data, I can return to them in a series of intuitive recollections that has the open endlessness which the ”I can always do so again“… creates. Without such ”possibilities“ there would be for us no fixed and abiding being” (Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 60; his italics).
See The Phenomenological Movement, II, 694–98.
Cf. Husserl, Ideas, sections 90–94, 98–100, 124; and Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), section 31.
J. Breuer and S. Freud, Studies on Hysteria (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 297.
See R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), Chapter 5.
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 325–45.
Gadamer, pp. 273 f., 337 f., 358.
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Casey, E.S. (1985). Memory and Phenomenological Method. In: Hamrick, W.S. (eds) Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Phaenomenologica, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9612-6_3
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