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.

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 up 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 ultimately 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 similar to 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 therefore 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 simply being identified 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 imputability of our actions. There can, in fact, be forgiveness only where we can accuse someone of something, presume him to be or declare him guilty. And one can indict only those acts that are imputable to an agent who holds himself to be their genuine author. In other words, imputability 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 imputability. 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. Another effect of pairing fault with evil in this way: 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, and it should not be, either normal, or 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. 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.