Remembering, Second Edition

A Phenomenological Study

Edward S. Casey

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780253114310
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Fenomenologia in filosofia

Remembering
A Phenomenological Study
Second Edition
Edward S. Casey

A pioneering investigation of the multiple ways of remembering and the difference that memory makes in our daily lives.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

"An excellent book that provides an in-depth phenomenological and philosophical study of memory." —Choice

"... a stunning revelation of the pervasiveness of memory in our lives." —Contemporary Psychology

"[Remembering] presents a study of remembering that is fondly attentive to its rich diversity, its intricacy of structure and detail, and its wide-ranging efficacy in our everyday, life-world experience.... genuinely pioneering, it ranges far beyond what established traditions in philosophy and psychology have generally taken the functions and especially the limits of memory to be." —The Humanistic Psychologist

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editor

Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
First Forays
Eidetic Features
Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
Prologue
Reminding
Reminiscing
Recognizing
Coda
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
Prologue
Body Memory
Place Memory
Commemoration
Coda
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
The Thick Autonomy of Memory
Freedom in Remembering

Part One Keeping Memory in Mind

I

FIRST FORAYS

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.

—Wittgenstein, On Certainty

I

It is evident by now that if we are to question such an entrenched tradition of neglecting memory as has just been outlined in the Introduction, a more complete grasp of the phenomenon itself is required. Without this grasp, we run the risk of spinning in free space, speculating as to the right direction in which to move. Like Kant’s dove of metaphysics, we shall cleave the air in vain unless our random groping can succeed in finding a more certain way. Just as metaphysics for Kant must become a metaphysics of experience if it is to cease to soar in sheer speculation, so we likewise shall touch earth by following the “secure path” (sicheren Gang) provided by ordinary experiences of remembering.¹ It is only by the careful examination of such experiences that we shall be able to discern what is basic and distinctive about memory as we enact it unselfconsciously (and for the most part unwittingly) every day.

Indeed, it is just because remembering is so ubiquitous in our lives—so pervasively present there—that we must make a special effort to excavate it from its deeply embedded position in human experience. It has been claimed by cognitive psychologists that “recent research has made it increasingly clear that there is almost no conscious awareness of perceptual and memorial processes”²—at least in their everyday enactments. This conclusion is unduly pessimistic, especially if it is taken as implying that any effort to describe remembering as it occurs consciously is foredoomed to failure. Nevertheless, it does underscore the need for a cautious and detailed assessment of memory—just the sort of assessment which we do not trouble to make in the throes of daily demands. In these throes, we make use of memory unquestioningly, treating it as stock-in-trade, as something ready and reliable. So ready and reliable, indeed, that we do not pause to consider what it is and how it performs—and usually it performs so well that we lose explicit awareness of its very operation within us.

Let us suspend the well-oiled mechanism of memory for a while, plunging into the midst of things so as to capture consciousness of what it is that we do when we remember. In this way we may begin to achieve that “conscious awareness” which psychologists have decried. I shall begin at the only place where one can effectively begin in trying to obtain a full account of the phenomenon—namely, with my own experiences. Since I have attempted to justify this reliance on first-person description elsewhere,³ I will plunge into the task unabashedly here by citing several instances of my own remembering. These are not proffered as definitive, or even as strictly representative, of my own (much less of others’) experiences. They are exemplary only in the sense of providing preliminary samples of memory at work. Rather than a systematic conspectus of types of remembering, they constitute a loosely knit cluster of cases—but a revealing cluster nonetheless.

II

Example #1

While putting together the above preparatory reflections, I found myself suddenly remembering a visit to Yosemite National Park which I made at the age of nine or ten in the company of my family. We had come over to Yosemite from San Francisco, and my expectations were very keen as we approached the park in our car. My first distinct recollection is of a breath-takingly panoramic vista of the park from a roadside viewing point. I can recall rushing from the car (a green Buick?) over very dry and dusty ground to look out at the valley below. (I also now recall a photograph of myself and my sister taken at precisely this point—a photograph displayed for a number of years afterward on my mother’s dressing table. It showed us two children eagerly occupying the foreground while Yosemite beckoned in the background through pine trees.) Concerning what followed this entry to the park, my memory is discontinuous and yields only several seemingly isolated episodes, presenting themselves in no definite order. First, there is a view from below of the “Dome” (is this the correct name?), accompanied by a feeling of awe at viewing the massive protuberance. (This memory is suddenly interspersed with a much more recent memory of hearing about a group of four or five mountain climbers who had scaled the face of the formation.) Second, there emerges a vague image of the cabin where we had spent the night (or nights—I do not recall how long we stayed in Yosemite). Even in the absence of definite images, I feel certain that the cabin itself was situated low in the valley, was surrounded by fir trees and near a stream, and was a place where bears might roam (this last thought mixing fascination with fear). Third, I have a comparatively distinct recollection of approaching and viewing the great waterfall in the park—of running ahead of my parents and sister along the path of approach and suddenly being confronted by the cascading fall in all its breathtaking height and power. I recall being over-whelmed and standing staring at it for some time, until my family finally caught up with me. And that is all. Following this last scene there is a decided fading-out, and I can remember nothing more—not even the departure from Yosemite, a departure which I must have found difficult after such an exhilarating experience there.

REMARKS

(1) What stands out first of all is the contrast between the perspicuousness of a number of parts of this memory—e.g., the initial scene of first viewing Yosemite, the appearance of the “Dome,” the spectacle of the waterfall—and the equally striking indefiniteness of so much else in the same memory. This indefiniteness extends to at least four different parts of its content: place (e.g., the vaguely located and unspecified overnight resting place); time (how long the visit lasted; what my exact age was when it occurred); objects (the make and color of the family car; the clothes I wore); names (the proper name of the “Dome” or of the waterfall); and sounds (e.g., that of the crashing waterfall).

(2) It is to be noticed that such indefinitenesses are not so radical as to vitiate the memory altogether; with the possible exception of the overnight site, they all possess some minimal determinacy. I was somewhere between nine and eleven years old, since I am certain that the trip took place in the period 1948-1950; and I am reasonably sure that the trip occurred in July or August, since my family always vacationed in one of these two months. Similarly, my guess that the family car was a green Buick is based on other memories of our having such a car at approximately that period of time. And I can safely conjecture that the visit to Yosemite was less than a week and more than a day in duration when I think of other comparable visits while on vacation. Notice that in each of these cases the probable range of indefiniteness is established by recourse to material not contained in the memory itself—most typically, to other memories from the same general period of my life—and to simple inductive and deductive modes of inference (inductive in the case of the probable length of the visit; deductive in the case of the year of the visit, since I know that it could not have occurred before 1948 or after 1950, when distinctly different vacations, explicitly remembered now, were undertaken). Of course, in the act of remembering itself I did not choose to employ these reasoning procedures, nor was I even aware of their operation. I simply remembered objects and events as being located at such a place and at such a time, and as having such and such a character—without yet considering the probability or verifiability of these claims.

(3) There was another, and this time wholly intrinsic, role of other memories within my remembering of the visit to Yosemite. At two points, a quite differently based memory intervened: that of the photograph taken at the time of the visit and prominently displayed later, and that of hearing about a recent scaling of Half Dome (such is its correct name). Each of these intersecting memories played a distinctive, though mostly unnoticed, role in my primary act of remembering. The dramatic news story of the scaling underscored, at the moment of remembering, the precipitous and sheer structure of Half Dome which had so impressed me at the time of my first seeing it; I suspect it also linked up with a wish or fantasy of climbing it myself, which I may have had at the time, though I don’t remember that at present. The memory of the photograph, in contrast, had the effect of confirming and fixing the moment of approach to Yosemite and thus of underlining my excited anticipations. Indeed, one might venture that the photograph played a very special and complex role in my experience. Not only did it offer documentary proof of the historical fact of the particular moment in question, but it itself very likely contributed to the survival of my own recollection. Seeing the photograph on my mother’s dressing table in later years regularly reminded me of the episode photographed and thus of the visit as a whole. The photograph and its memory may have become emblematic of the trip to Yosemite, so much so that I can now recall relatively few other incidents that took place after the photographing of that first scene.

(4) The sense of myself in this recollection is somewhat peculiar. On the one hand, I have a very clear sense of my own place and role, of being present and active in the first scene of the memory—of myself scrambling to get a view of the long-awaited valley. This sense of self-presence was perhaps again strengthened by the photograph’s having been taken at just this point, since the iconic image of myself in the photograph bespeaks the fact of my having been personally present at the initial scene. On the other hand, my felt presence in the other remembered scenes was considerably diminished in comparison. I was always there, somehow in the remembered scene, and never wholly absent from it; but I was there in a curiously diluted and dispersed form: faceless and almost bodiless, a mere onlooker who observes not himself but what is spread before him in nature.⁴

(5) My sense of other persons in such a memory is closely related to my sense of self-presence. My sister has a pronounced presence in the memory of the first scene—no doubt aided once more by the photograph. But after this she fades from focus almost entirely. So do my parents, although I have an attenuated sense of their co-presence with me and my sister in the same initial scene. They are implicated as our spectators or on-lookers, just as, in now remembering that unrepeatable moment, I look onto all four of us together.

(6) “Looking” is the appropriate term here, since the memory in question presents itself in almost entirely visual terms. I do not “hear” again the talk that must have attended the taking of the photograph, the expressions of awe that I and the other members of my family probably emitted at various points during the visit, or even the deafening roar of the waterfall. All is silent—so silent as to be somewhat eery, otherworldly, a world apart. The visual imagery itself is discontinuous and inconsistent, sometimes bright (though not brilliant) and delineated (though not as fully delineated as objects in a comparably complicated perceived scene). But some of the images are very dim, to the point of lacking color, and shapeless, as if lacking contour and even depth. The overall effect is of a moving montage of visual contrasts.

(7) The temporality of the recollection is also peculiar, and seems to consist of three quite diverse components. First, the memory exhibits an inbuilt successiveness as its scenes unfold with a certain rhythmic regularity. The regularity is pronounced enough for the same succession to appear on re-rememberings—and yet not strong enough for me to be certain that the order of succession in the memory exactly corresponds to the order in which the original events took place. Did I really gaze upon Half Dome before seeing the waterfall? Probably—since Half Dome is so prominent a feature of Yosemite valley. But all that I know for certain is that within my memory there is a self-regulated progression from the Dome scene to the waterfall scene. Second, while thus moving along in a quasi-linear fashion, the memory also seems to draw me in. I sense that I am, in some inexplicable way, re-entering the past, being taken up by it, even becoming, to some degree, at one with it: temporality here is not chronological or linear but a matter of absorption in a measureless depth. Third, I nevertheless retain a distinct sense of being still anchored in the present—precisely the present of the act of recollecting itself. I am now remembering this sequence of past scenes, and I do so from a temporal vantage point that does not belong to these scenes themselves. Here I sense the enormous gulf between the present moment of remembering and the scenes remembered: these latter almost seem to belong to another life and certainly to another part of my life.

(8) The emotional tonality of this memory deserves brief mention. Throughout the remembering there was a sense of muted exhilaration at having been in such a magnificent setting. This exhilaration modulated into awe when I was facing Half Dome and the waterfall in memory. Also felt was the mounting excitement of the first scene, an excitement fueled by expectations of what was to come as the park was entered. I notice that it is difficult to determine exactly where such emotion as originally experienced ends and where the same emotion as now felt-in-the-remembering begins, though I am convinced that the former is more acute in tenor and less worked through. On the other hand, a faint nostalgia, a subtle mixture of longing and pleasure, arises; it attaches itself less to the elapsed contents of the memory than to the present experience of remembering, lending it a poignant if subdued character.

(9) The nostalgia and poignancy no doubt reflect the origin of the memory in childhood and in a particularly pleasant moment of childhood at that. It is worth noting how spontaneously I reverted to this particular memory as a first example—as if to say “here is a paradigm for other memories, a memory of memories!” Despite the ambiguous and problematic nature of such a memory—as revealed, for instance, in its temporality and emotionality—it seems capable of assuming a privileged position among all the myriad memories accessible to me at a given moment. What is it about this portion of the past that makes it such a suitable and tempting subject for recollection?

Example #2

A memory of a relatively recent event comes to mind. I recall going to the movie Small Change a few weeks ago—exactly when, I am not certain. After dinner nearby at Clark’s, my two young children, my wife, and I had walked briskly over to the Lincoln Theater, stopping briefly at a paperback bookstore on the way. Anticipating a large crowd, we arrived early and were among the first to purchase tickets. There ensued a wait that seemed much longer than the ten or fifteen minutes it actually was. The children were especially restive and had difficulty staying in the line that had formed—Erin attempting some gymnastic tricks on the guardrail by the entrance, Eric looking at the posted list of coming attractions. Finally the doors were flung open, and we entered at the head of what was, by then, a considerable line. Once inside, we sought seats approximately in the middle of the theater, settled there, and interchanged positions a co...