Paul Ricoeur: Memory, History, and Forgetting
The following is a reflection on Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting. I have been helped by the insights in a book review of Andrzej Wiercinski. I have also been aided by Hannah Arendt
Ricoeur continues the project of Time and Narrative involving representation as part of a philosophy of time, thereby describing human existence as historical, and Oneself as Another, where the human capable of talking, narrating, acting, and making oneself responsible. He is developing a philosophical anthropology. In this book, the human being can make memory and history. However, his previous two works left an impasse with respect to memory and forgetting, the median between time and narrative. 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.
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. We are familiar with remembering persons, places, and events we have experienced. We are familiar with forgetting. Yet, where is memory when we are not thinking of it? How does memory work in such a way that we can recall something? How can something we experienced in the past be brought back into the present? When we forget, where to the images go? Why do some vanish and others do not? Where do repressed memories come from when psychoanalysis recovers them? What is the difference between history and faction, or history and the novel? How do historians establish the truth of their narratives? Alternatively, is history simply a point of view or does it have some objective claim or validity? By addressing the issue of temporal duration, Ricoeur makes meaningful a distinction between "immediate memory or retention and secondary memory (recollection) or reproduction"(32). Since the object of intention endures temporally, what is being retained is immediately altered by the "ever new now." This "modification" signifies that "to endure is to remain the same"(35). Thus, this three-part work first takes up the question of memory and recollection in response to questions about uses and abuses of memory in contemporary society. Ricoeur lists these as occurring on a pathological-therapeutic level as the problem of blocked memory; on a practical level as manipulated memory, and on an ethical-political level as obligated memory.
The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. He asks whether history is a remedy for or a hindrance to the problems presented by memory. This leads him back to the question of the epistemology of historical research and writing, a topic he already had addressed in History and Truth (1965) and Time and Narrative. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. What is the relationship between history and memory? History writing contains implicit within it the question of an epistemological inquiry into the historical sciences to answer whether it is a remedy or a poison, which can happen only "on the reflective plane of the critical philosophy of history" (139). Ricoeur's detailed investigation of representation understood as "standing for"(representance)(236) leads him to discern "historical discoursers capacity for representing the past" (237). He wants to describe the ability of the historian to give a credible representation of the past. He examines the relationship between representation and narration. The referential impulse of the historical narrative must always deal with the complexity and obscurity of narrative. The narrative structure ends to form a circle within itself and to exclude reference to what is outside the text. Writing history is an irreducible course of reconstruction to represent the past faithfully. It becomes an instrument for seeking truth as a faithful testimony. 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?
Now the question is to what extent history depends on memory. Historians know more about the past than individuals remember, but can history completely break with an appeal to memory as a kind of testimony? The problem here is suspicion not simply falsification. What is new to Ricoeur’s account is that he sees at work a closer tie between explanation and understanding than he had considered in his earlier work where explanation aids understanding. He now speaks of what he calls explanatory understanding. It runs through what, following the French historian Michel de Certeau, he now calls the historiographical operation that characterizes the entire process of historical documentation, research, and writing. This shift in Ricoeur’s thinking leads him to consider the question of historical representation as an image based on both narration and rhetoric. History as written, he suggests, “stands for” the past as “having been”.
The third and concluding 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. He offers a meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, framed within a hermeneutics of the historical condition of the human beings that were. He wonders where we can speak of a happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. In his indecisiveness he opens a possibility for an eschatology of forgetting. Forgetting links to memory and faithfulness to the past, while pardoning to culpability and reconciliation with the past. A happy forgetting can only arrange itself under the optative mood of happy memory. In his phenomenology of forgetting, he pleads for carefree memory on the horizon of concerned memory, the soul common to memory that forgets and does not forget.
On this basis, he can again ask about human existence as historical, as being within time and uncanny. He seeks particularly to address the problem of forgetting in relation to the three problems listed earlier. Traces of the past can be lost, and that past will be forgotten in the sense of being beyond memory. But what of forgetting where the traces remain? Here is where the problems of blocked, manipulated, or commanded memory remain, especially in the latter case with attempts to order forgetting either through amnesty or censorship. This problem leads to an epilogue on the possibility of forgiveness, something Ricoeur admits is left incomplete. Along the way though, he shows that the idea of guilt, historical guilt necessarily runs up against the limit of the imprescriptible and that forgiveness, which is difficult but not impossible, is something like a gift, one that unbinds the agent from the act. Beyond the distinction of a happy memory and an unhappy one in other words lies the possibility of a forgetting held in reserve.
To forgive is not to forget. It is this idea of forgiveness as a gift, but not one requiring or expecting a gift in return but as something received and passed on as a second gift that leads the discussion of mutual recognition and states of peace in Ricoeur’s last book, The Course of Recognition. Ricoeur’s argument there starts from the surprising fact that there has been no recognized theory of recognition like what exists for theories of knowledge. In fact, when he looks in the dictionary, he finds that the word (which in French carries as strong a sense of gratitude as of what English calls recognition) has numerous lexical senses. Ricoeur proposes to construct a chain of conceptual meanings that runs from recognition in the active voice to its use in the passive voice, to being recognized. The demand for recognition that runs through this sequence can only be answered, he claims, by mutual recognition, “where this mutual recognition either remains an unfulfilled dream or requires procedures and institutions that elevate recognition beyond the friendship of face-to-face relations to the political plane” (The Course of Recognition, 19). This sequence of concepts of recognition runs from identifying something to identifying oneself to recognizing and being recognized by others. In the process the concept moves away from simple identification with knowledge. Instead, it opens the way to knowledge as it relates to self-knowledge and genuine community for which one is and can be grateful in that recognition “lightens the weight of obligation to give in return and reorients this toward a generosity equal to the one that led to the first gift [of being recognized]” (243).
The treatment of religious themes provides the basis for an important subject of a critical inquiry to establish some rules for treating religious and theological problems within philosophy. He has an epilogue, Difficult Forgetfulness, which introduces the subject of forgiveness to an eschatology of memory. He complements the exploration of memory and historiography with the religiously saturated issue of forgiveness, which constitutes the horizon common to memory, history, and forgetting. Forgiveness allows one to approach history without anger or prejudice. Always in retreat, this horizon slips away from any grasp, a thought that opens before us the possibility of religious transcendence, the facticity of human existence being the provision for our journey of life and the provision for human passage out of this existence and into the unknown. This slipping away of the horizon makes forgiving difficult. However, as capable beings, we are somehow paralyzed in our ability to act, given the overwhelming power of fault, culpability, and guilt. These are boundary situations implied in every contingent situation and belongs to what we ourselves have designated by the phrase our “historical condition” on the level of an ontological hermeneutics. The experience of fault offers itself as a given to reflection. It gives rise to thought. This is the structure of the imputable nature of our actions. There can, in fact, be forgiveness only where we can accuse someone of something, presume one to be or declare one guilty. And one can indict only those acts that are imputable to an agent who holds oneself to be their genuine author. In other words, the imputable nature of action is that capacity, that aptitude, by virtue of which actions can be held to someone’s account. This metaphor of an account constitutes an excellent framework for the concept of the imputable nature of human action. On its objective side, fault consists in transgressing a rule, whatever it may be, a duty, including its recognizable consequences, that is, fundamentally, a harm done to others. The negative experience of fault contains the dimension of evil. The reference to evil suggests the idea of an excess, of an unbearable overabundance.
Yet, in the mystery of feeling this fault being lifted is what we experience as forgiveness. Forgiveness places the seal of incompleteness on the enterprise of memory and history, but also casts new light on the difficult subject of reconciliation in history. Forgiveness is not normal, normative, or normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, standing the test of the impossible. He suggests an eschatological perspective on memory, history, and forgetting. Narrative is selective, which creates a problem for historical truth. Forgiveness involves elusion and evasion to protect the self from unbearable memories. Forgiveness is both an ability and a burdensome task. The odyssey of forgiveness is at the heart of selfhood. To be bound by a promise, the subject of an action must also be able to be released from it through forgiveness. The temporal structure of action, namely, the irreversibility and unpredictability of time, calls for the response of a twofold mastery exerted over the carrying out of any action. A significant asymmetry exists between being able to forgive and being able to promise. Forgiveness disassociates the debt from the burden of guilt. It releases the agent from the act of agent. The separation of the agent from the act should create a culture of forgiveness. In the play Measure for Measure, by Shakespeare, Isabella asks for mercy for her brother, wanting him to separate the sin from the person who did it. She also wants him to consider that God has found a remedy for our sin, and therefore, surely, he can find a remedy in this case, and no one will think badly of him. However, his continual appeal is to strict obedience to the law, thereby leaving no room for forgiveness. Freedom is at the heart of forgiveness, for one does not forgive under compulsion and the act frees the agent to continue living responsibly. It restores the capacity to act for the guilty person.
If we are going to engage in redemptive behavior in dealing the unexpected consequences of human action, forgiveness, which serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose sins hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation, will be necessary. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.
Reflect upon the difference between karma and grace. What you put out comes back to you, as in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, or even “as you sow, so you will reap.” You know the law of physics that for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is at the heart of the universe. It seems like grace has come along to upend all of this on the level of personal relationships. Grace upends our relationship with God. It defies reason and logic. Grace interrupts the consequences of your actions. In my case, and I suspect in your case as well, that is good news. Most of us have done plenty of stupid things, and much worse. Grace does not excuse our wrongs. Grace acknowledges in personal relationships that none of us will live our lives perfectly. We need to give and receive grace to maintain relationships that matter. In our relationship with God, grace acknowledges that we will never be religious enough. Somewhere, probably where we least expect it, we will fall short. Fortunately, we do not have to depend upon our religiosity. We know of this grace because God has offered it in Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, grace defeats religiosity and replaces it with grace.[1]
The letter to the Hebrews places so much emphasis upon forgiveness of sin. It does so based upon the Old Testament sacrificial system in the First Temple and the Jewish practice in the Second Temple. I would like to ponder for a moment why giving and receiving and forgiveness is so important.
The focus of the sacrificial system was forgiveness of sin. The problem with this focus is that it is too narrow. The web of human relationships is so intricate that even when we act out of the best of intentions, our actions can negatively affect others as well as ourselves. We may not have all the evidence that we could have had. We may act too quickly. We may not act quickly enough. We may not have developed the insight necessary into ourselves, the nature of people involved, or the seriousness of this moment, to act appropriately and courageously. Human action is always open-ended and therefore ambiguous. We may be physically sick, and this causes us to act in a confused way. We may never learn of the harmful effects of our well-intentioned actions.
The point is, there are many reasons to give and receive forgiveness that do not reflect the moral implications to which sin points us. Forgiveness helps to keep us going, not allowing a past act, whether a mistake or a sin, to define us. The human condition is such that we need forgiveness, and we need to extend forgiveness far more than we realize. We must not forget that we need to direct this redemptive activity toward ourselves.
The wearisome sequence of revenge for past wrongs that only provokes further revenge is a chain people can break only through forgiveness. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover. We would remain the victims of its consequences forever. Yet, a path needs to become open human relationships that says that what is done is not always done, the broken can be fixed, that the ravaged can be restored. That you can have another swing, that you can wife the slate clean, and you can go back to square one. Forgiveness is costly primarily to the one who forgives. The one who forgives gives up the right to justice or revenge and chooses mercy. Anyone who has truly forgiven another knows what this means. Respect for the person is sufficient to prompt forgiveness for the sake of the person. To think that we owe respect only where we admire or esteem the person constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.
I direct your attention to a few sayings of Jesus.
Matt 6.12 And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors
Matt 6.14-15 For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Luke 11.4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us;
Mark 11.25And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."
One who acts never quite knows what one is doing, and thus everyone becomes guilty of consequences they never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of one’s deed one can never undo it, that the process one starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who does not act. All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that one appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what one has done. To condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who forfeits one’s freedom the very moment one makes use of it. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving.
Jesus is consistent with his Jewish tradition in its emphasis of forgiveness. The entire sacrificial system was a way of helping people confront their need for forgiveness. That system dealt with sin, but also with unknown transgression. The story of Joseph in Genesis is a profound reflection on family relationships and the need for forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.[2] Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God — as though God, not humanity, would forgive through the medium of human beings — but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Human beings in the gospel are not supposed to forgive because God forgives and they must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing people from what they have done unknowingly. In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance. The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.
The most plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as intricately connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. What was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus. An example is Luke 7:36-50, “Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little,” and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self - revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with qualities and shortcomings no less than with achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. However, if we cannot love, we can at least respect the person, and this is sufficient to prompt forgiving what a person did, since we do so for the sake of the person.
Among the religious aspects of forgiveness is the experience of guilt. Ricoeur refers to Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, in identifying three sorts of guilt.
Political is guilt associated with the citizen by reason of belonging to the same political body as state criminals. He points to the suspension of the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. In this case, the extreme seriousness of the crime justifies the suspension of the limit society places upon itself to punish the crime. Justice must be done. Pardon cannot be substituted for justice. To forgive would be to ratify impunity, which would be a grave injustice committed at the expense of the law and, even more so, of the victims. Such crimes are de facto the definition of the unforgivable. There is no expiation for such crimes. Yet, something is owed to the guilty. One may call it consideration, the opposite of contempt. One can understand the scope of this provision of the spirit only if one leaves the special region of extreme crimes and returns to common crimes. Their authors have the right to consideration because they remain human beings like their judges; as such, they are presumed innocent until they are found guilty. Political guilt results from the fact that citizens belong to the political body in the name of which the crimes were committed. In this sense, it can be termed collective on the condition of not being criminalized: the notion of a criminal people must be explicitly rejected.
Critical theory in the political arena has forgotten that forgiveness is essential in all human relationships, and that includes forgiving the institutions that they have created through their participation in them. It reduces political and economic relationships to the oppressor/oppressed relation. Their anger and alienation have stopped mature reflection. They are not at all concerned with what really exists. The result of such reasoning is alienation and resentment. Reconciliation becomes impossible becomes forgiveness becomes a sin that masks alienation. Such thinking ends rational discourse with each other or the possibility of normal human interaction. Some people grow to love their resentment. They cannot envision what their life would be like without resentment. This can happen on a personal and national level. Such persons find it difficult to live in a human world, with all the imperfection and ambiguity that means, while at the same time recognizing that we take initiative and responsibility for this moment to move the future toward a peaceful and just place. Such thinking suggests that they want to take me to a world no human being could inhabit, maybe even one without economic classes, in the fulfillment of the dream of the romantic movement. They often develop some idealized and perfect picture, smoothly operating to their satisfaction, failing to deal with the rough, often difficult realities of a human world.
Moral guilt related to all the individual acts susceptible of having contributed, in one way or another, to crimes of state. With moral responsibility, we move one step further away from the structure of the trial and we come closer to the center of guilt, the bad will. This concerns the mass of individual acts, small and large, that contributed by their tacit or explicit acquiescence to the criminal guilt of the politicians and to the political guilt of the members of the body politic. Here, the collective responsibility of a political nature ceases, and personal responsibility begins. Asking for forgiveness is also being prepared to receive a negative response: no, I cannot, I cannot forgive. The model of exchange takes for granted the obligation to give, to receive, and to give in return. Forgiveness spans an interval between the high and the low, between the great height of the spirit of forgiveness and the abyss of guilt. This asymmetry is constitutive of the forgiveness equation. It accompanies us like an enigma that can never be fully plumbed.
The radical command to love the enemy as an enemy is the only way out of the dilemma presented by offering the gift of forgiveness. The measure of the gift of forgiveness is the love of one’s enemies. And with this is associated the idea of a loan without any expectation of return. Faithful to the gospel rhetoric of hyperbole, according to this commandment the only gift that is justified is the one given to the enemy, from whom, by hypothesis, one expects nothing in return. But precisely, the hypothesis is false: what one expects from love is that it will convert the enemy into a friend.
Finally, the guilt termed “metaphysical” that arises from the fact of being a human being, in a trans-historic tradition of evil. Forgiveness has the effect of dissociating the debt from its burden of guilt and in a sense of laying bare the phenomenon of the debt, as a dependence on a received heritage. But forgiveness does more, for it should release the agent from the act. Separating the guilty person from the act, in other words forgiving the guilty person while condemning the action, would be to forgive a subject other than the one who committed the act. This assumes that the capacity of commitment belonging to the moral subject is not exhausted by its various inscriptions in the affairs of the world. This dissociation expresses an act of faith, a credit addressed to the resources of self-regeneration. Such an act of trust pairs forgiveness and repentance. Referring to the notion of radical evil in Kant, Religion with the Realm of Mere Reason, under this modest heading—“the restoration . . . of the original predisposition to the good” (89)—the entire project of a philosophy of religion centered on the theme of the liberation of the ground of goodness in human beings is veiled and unveiled. Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than the offenses and faults already committed. One is held to be restored to this capacity for acting, and action restored to its capacity for continuing. This capacity is signaled in the small acts of consideration in which we recognized the incognito of forgiveness played out on the public stage. This restored capacity is enlisted by promising as it projects action toward the future. The formula for this liberating word, reduced to the bareness of its utterance, would be: you are better than your actions.
Refusal to forgive may be a moral act. Not forgiving may be a legitimate action, with its own progression, motivation, and justification. In many circumstances, the proper and most emotionally authentic course of action may be not to forgive. Such moral unforgiveness could be that of a truth-teller who refuses to pardon and avoids the temptation presented by reconciliation. Such a stand would say: Excuse me, but I will not reconcile with you until you acknowledge that you have abused me. You say: Thank you very much but I will not forgive you unless accompanied by the confession and repentance that I John 1:8-10 commends. Easy forgiveness makes for hard justice. Justice, in fact, will not happen through the path of easy forgiveness. When people persist in mouthing empty phrases and despising discipline, justice cannot happen. Thus, we may need to consider that forgiveness and unforgiveness are not opposites but points on a continuum. The same internal processes can lead to emotionally authentic resolutions in either direction. Anyone who has gone through the profound and punishing process of conscious forgiving or not forgiving emerges more self-aware, more related to others, and less burdened by the past. A famous saying is "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all."[3] This is not quite right. Understanding need not lead to forgiveness, but it can lead to wisdom.[4]
Ricoeur suggests a discourse of the exploration of the horizon of completion of the chain of operations constituting this vast memorial to time which includes memory, history, and forgetting. He speaks of eschatology to underscore the dimension of anticipation and of projection belonging to this ultimate horizon. It suggests a mood of desire. He sees the intimate connection between the spirit of forgiveness and the horizon of completion. The beautiful quest is for happy memory. Faithfulness to the past is a wish. Like all wishes, it can be disappointed, even betrayed. The originality of this wish is that it consists in a representation taken up again in a series of speech acts constituting the declarative dimension of memory. Like all speech acts, those of declarative memory can also succeed or fail. For this reason, this wish at first is seen as a claim, saddled with an initial aporia: the aporia that is constituted by the present representation of an absent thing marked with the seal of anteriority, of temporal distance. Throughout this work he has presented a typology of mnemonic operations of the ways in which the dilemma of presence and of absence can be overcome. It is only at the end, in the wake of the Bergsonian analysis of the recognition of images and under the fine name of the revival of images, that the preeminence of the phenomenon of recognition was confirmed. Reconciliation is the discriminating factor, for it places its final stamp on the entire series of mnemonic operations. Recognition becomes the small miracle of memory. And as a miracle, it can also fail to occur. Recognition sums up every act of memory. In certain favorable circumstances, such as the right given by another to remember, or better, the help contributed by others in sharing memories, recollection can be said to be successful and mourning to be checked along the fatal slope of melancholy, that attraction to sorrow. If it were so, happy memory would become memory at peace.
Finally, the reflexive moment of memory culminates in the recognition of oneself in the form of a wish. In this respect, the sketch of a theory of attribution, under the threefold figure of the attribution of memory to the self, to close relations, and to distant others deserves to be reconsidered from the perspective of the dialectic of binding and unbinding proposed by the problematic of forgiveness. In return, by extending in this way to the sphere of memory, this dialectic can move out of the sphere of guilt to attain the scope of a dialectic of reconciliation.
Ricoeur then puzzles about unhappy history. The major fact made apparent by the comparison between history’s project of truth and memory’s aim of faithfulness is that the small miracle of recognition has no equivalent in history. This gap, which will never be entirely bridged, results from the epistemological break made by the system of writing imposed on all the historiographical operations. Testimony is the founding fact of historical discourse. Entrusted in this way to another’s credibility, testimony transmits to history the energy of declarative memory. But the living word of the witness, transmuted into writing, melts away into the mass of archival documents which belong to a new paradigm, the paradigm of the “clue” which includes traces of all kinds. The chasm between history and memory is hollowed out in the explanatory phase. Historical knowledge gives the advantage to those architectures of meaning that exceed the resources of even collective memory. History is not only vaster than memory; its time is layered differently. History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it. Why? Because memory remains the guardian of the ultimate dialectic constitutive of the pastness of the past, namely, the relation between the “no longer,” which marks its character of being elapsed, abolished, superseded, and the “having-been,” which designates its original and, in this sense, indestructible character.
Two corollaries result from this fragile constitution of historical knowledge. On the one hand, mnemonic representation, lacking the assurance of recognition, has as its sole historical counterpart the precarious nature of the concept of standing for. Second corollary: the competition between memory and history, between the faithfulness of the one and the truth of the other, cannot be resolved on the epistemological plane.
Is this the final word on the shadow that the spirit of forgiveness would cast on this history of the historians? The true response to the absence in history of an equivalent to the mnemonic phenomenon of recognition can be read in the pages devoted to death in history. The work of mourning definitively separates the past from the present and makes way for the future. The work of memory would have attained its aim if the reconstruction of the past were to succeed in giving rise to a sort of resurrection of the past. The wish of the history is to uncover, behind the death mask, the face of those who formerly existed, who acted and suffered, and who were keeping the promises they left unfulfilled? This would be the most deeply hidden wish of historical knowledge. But its continually deferred realization no longer belongs to those who write history; it is in the hands of those who make history.
Our uneasiness concerning the right attitude to take about the uses and abuses of forgetting, in the practice of institutions, is finally the symptom of a stubborn uncertainty affecting the relation between forgetting and forgiveness on the level of its deep structure. The question returns with insistence: if it is possible to speak of happy memory, does there exist something like a happy forgetting? An ultimate indecisiveness strikes what could be presented as an eschatology of forgetting. First, the arrival of a memory is an event. Forgetting is not an event, something that happens or that someone causes to happen. Second, forgetting develops enduring situations, which in this sense can be said to be historical, since they are constitutive of the tragic nature of action. Third, the undecidable character of the polarity that divides the subterranean empire of forgetting against itself: the polarity between forgetting through effacement and forgetting kept in reserve.
Forgetting might be an act. To return to the past, one must forget the present, as in states of possession. To return to the present, one must suspend the ties with the past and the future, as in the games of role reversal. To embrace the future, one must forget the past in a gesture of inauguration, beginning, and rebeginning, as in rituals of initiation. And “it is always in the present, finally, that forgetting is conjugated.”
If memory is in fact a capacity, the power of remembering, it is more fundamentally a figure of care, that basic anthropological structure of our historical condition. In memory-as-care we hold ourselves open to the past; we remain concerned about it. Would there not then be a supreme form of forgetting, as a disposition and a way of being in the world, which would be careless indifference, carefreeness?
Faith brings the possibility of getting free of the past and therefore of beginning anew in each moment as we hear and fulfill the summons to love. The new age becomes an age of love as I am a lover and directed toward the future. The new age is a present reality in the activity of love, especially in forgiveness that frees one from the past. In Christ, such forgiveness is already present. The believer and the neighbor are in the same situation as sinners who receive grace. The believer needs to look upon the neighbor as the one already forgiven. In the neighbor, the love of Christ meets us. Love, understood as the manifestation of the love of God, is a release from the past. Faith implies understanding and obedience.[5] A genuine human life is one we live out of what is invisible and in which we have surrendered all self-contrived security. Such a life is by the Spirit and in faith. This life becomes possible through faith in the grace of God. We trust the invisible and unfamiliar as it encounters as love and gives us a future that means life. Such grace forgives sin and frees us from the past. The past holds us in bondage. Through the past, we seek to secure ourselves and cling to what is perishing. Such an attitude is sin because it is closure against what is invisible, and the future of the gift God wants to give. Faith means opening ourselves freely to this future. Such faith is obedience as we turn from self, surrender security, renounce any attempt to be acceptable and gain our true life. Such an attitude is freedom.[6]
[1] Bono: In Conversation, inspired some of these reflections on karma and grace.
[2] Hannah Arendt says too much when she said that the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.
[3] Madame de Stael, Corinne, Book 18, Chapter 5.
[4] Jeanne Safer, Must You Forgive, Psychology Today, 1999.
[5]
[6]
Comments
Post a Comment