Thinking and Recollecting: The Logical Memories of Being

Abstract

After the Phenomenology, memory — the ethical memory of spirit and the phenomenological memory of consciousness — seems to disappear along with phenomenological history. For, not only the opposition of consciousness that heretofore has driven on the phenomenological process, but consciousness itself has now disappeared (or has “sunk to the ground”) in the pure, atemporal element of the concept. At this point the Logic begins. But has memory really vanished as the logical process begins? Is it not, rather, a crucial implication of the inner logic of Erinnerung — a logic already at play in the Phenomenology — that suggests that memory is present and effective precisely there, where its negation is more radical? But what would be, in this case, the “logical memory” at work in the determination process of the pure concept?