“Narrative and the Self”
We are, as Proust declared, perched on a
pyramid of past life, and if we do not see
this, it is because we are obsessed by
objective thought.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Phenomenology of Perception
If we wish to grasp the nature of our specifically human existence, an existence that has a certain self-identity and consciousness of that identity, it is appropriate to begin our investigation with the question of temporally, for if one thing is to be admitted, it is that our lives are temporally determined both by the beginning and the end that our physical being exhibits and by the history that threads between, and even beyond these two poles. I do not think that what we call our self or our identity can be adequately considered outside this temporal and therefore historical framework, outside the time of our lives. When we ask of someone who they are, this question generally comes down to a recounting of their passage through time, their autobiography or self-narrative. Already we are talking not merely of temporality as a cosmic phenomenon, of the mere movement of bodies, for example, but of a time whose events are precisely the events in a person’s life. This latter form of temporality is always someone’s.
We could say, with Heidegger, that Dasein (human being) is temporalizing in its very essence. This claim leads one to the position that time is not simply something objective, belonging to what we often call nature, but in addition, and even prior to this, characterizes any being that can set up such an objective realm for itself. Human existence seems in all respects temporal. Accordingly, what must not be lost sight of during the following analysis is that the temporality we seek to describe is that which is most intimate to the human subject, that which is often overlooked due to its very proximity.
This is not to say, however, that temporality is the necessary form of intuitive apprehension for an “I” that itself escapes this temporal constraint, as it was for the Kantian transcendental philosophy. The “I” is caught up in this temporalizing, is itself inseparable from it, and we shall later have occasion to consider the substantiating of this “I.” Initially, and in accord with general phenomenological and therefore descriptive principles, we shall hold firm to experience itself as the horizon within which all objectivities make their appearance, and we will at first presuppose as little as possible concerning the being to whom they appear. This latter being is precisely the problem under investigation in these chapters. A further point: at this early stage we shall remain primarily on the precognitive or passive level of experience. How this level gives rise to or otherwise connects with explicit self-consciousness will be the task of later chapters.
Experience is at once part and whole. The concept of experience can be used to cover the whole of a life (“There is nothing but experience”), and also the parts of a life (“I just had a strange experience”). Another way of saying this is that experiences come to one not in discrete instances but as part of an ongoing life, my life. Experience gains its density and elusiveness precisely through a continuous contextualizing or meshing of part to changing whole; the relating of itself to itself. In a similar vein Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, particularly stressed that “now” is not atomistic but variable, depending on one’s perspective, one’s interest. “Now” can be “this moment,” “this day,” “this year,” or “this life.” It is as though experience is disclosed in the manner of a set of Chinese boxes, one fitting perfectly inside or around another. Experience is in this sense overdetermined; it has an ever unfolding richness or expanse before our reflective gaze. And what applies to experience can also be said, as our example of nowness illustrates, for time.
We wish to consider time as a primary modality of this life that we are. However, much of the philosophical controversy over the nature of our identity arises from the tendency of analyzing experience in terms of component parts only, and of attempting to reconstruct the unity of our lived experience therefrom. One presupposes that experience, in accordance with an objective and reductionist view of time, comes initially in units and that one’s philosophical task is to propose how these units become linked into a unitary chain. But this is to bias philosophical inquiry from the beginning rather than to attempt a more unbiased description of our experience. Perhaps all such problems of unification relate to the age-old metaphysical question of identity and difference, or the one and the many.
While reducing experience to component parts we nevertheless tend also to harbor a firm belief in the unity and coherence of our life, for we generally believe in our identity over time. Identity and difference are here set up as two unfriendly poles of the same concern; we simply attempt the resolution from A to Z or from Z to A. Perhaps, however, the identity and difference scheme only applies to life in the same manner as Merleau-Ponty’s “now,” which is, and without contradiction, both this day and this year, both one day and many. The experience of our identity is in fact so interwoven with difference that neither pure identity nor pure difference can be granted complete precedence. We will see that such metaphysical-sounding problems tend to change appearances if we shed some of our naturalistic assumptions and “return,” as the phenomenologists say, to our experience. Such a return has nothing mysterious or deeply metaphysical about it, but is simply a way of saying that experience may have a broader or different meaning than inherited paradigms allow. It is a way of being wary of our unquestioned presuppositions.
Lived time, the time of our lives, is obviously not devoid of meaning. It is not a mere succession of neutral now points, a formal grid transparent with respect to the content of experience. On the contrary, lived time seems to be in strict accord with the present meaning of experience. In other words, our sense of time changes with the significance of our experience. We live through “good times” and “bad times,” we either “have the time” or we do not, though perhaps we can “make time.” Our time—a time of indifference, a time of joy and hope, a time of despair—is bound not simply by a beginning and an end, but between what can more richly be described as “birth” and “death”; we do not end, we die. In this manner we could produce a catalogue of time (and times) that more closely respects its native meaning in our experience.
Of course we are still very likely to encounter the question “But what of time itself, that which we experience in this way?” But such a time is precisely not experienced; it exists for us as a concept only, like the theoretically precise units of atomic clocks that go their accurate way without us. Similarly, we indeed perceive the movements of the planets and of our sun and can generate a concept of time from them, but the time we are considering is the experiencing of such motions by human beings, not their movement per se. As Merleau-Ponty has said,
Nothing will ever bring home to my comprehension what a nebula that no one sees could possibly be. . . . What, in fact, do we mean when we say that there is no world without a being in the world? Not indeed that the world is constituted by consciousness, but on the contrary that consciousness always finds itself already at work in the world.1
The nebula that gave birth to our solar system, the accuracy of clocks, these are both scientific conceptualizations and are experienced only as intellectual constructs deriving from our actual experience of the world, theoretically inferred from it perhaps. The point of this discussion is not, however, to doubt the efficacy of this scientific or naturalistic model, for it clearly produces important technological results.
But let us return to the question of identity. An analysis of temporality will reveal a continuity to conscious life. For the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, this life is linked through a continuous series of what he called temporal protentions (projections of a future) and retentions (consciousness of the immediate past) which give a density and cohesion to the ongoing present. William James expressed this same point rather well:
the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we can look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception is a duration. . .. 2
This view of lived time (or experience) emphasizes its interlocked nature. The present transcends itself in a continual and unbroken anticipation of the future and retention of the past—as in the often cited experience of a musical melody. The various moments of a melody can be cognized as part of an ongoing melody only if our present consciousness is not cut off from the immediate past but includes it as constitutive of its present significance. It is this continuity, this duration, that is presupposed and demonstrated by any of our present actions. We do not need constantly to reformulate or consciously remember our initial rationale or desires to continue meaningfully a present action to its conclusion, for the projected end is part and parcel of the present act. It is because of this linked aspect of time that the present is meaningful in a way that punctual moments could never be.3
Our time consciousness, then, is fundamentally durational and not punctual. But there is a further important implication to this position which bears directly on the question of temporal continuity and identity. To return to Merleau-Ponty:
The present still holds on to the immediate past without positing it as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is wholly collected up and grasped in the present.4
It is precisely this phenomenon, this connectedness, that accounts for the experienced fluctuations of the “now” that we discussed earlier. The richness of the present is such that it discloses its horizons in accordance with the degree of penetration of our intentional gaze, and hence the degree of penetration required by our present task. We reach into the past in a fashion similar (I would not want to say the analogy is perfect) to the way our eyes penetrate the visual field—from the immediate vicinity to the far horizon—and concentrate on objects in the temporal field just as we might single out an object within the field of vision.
Apart from bodily identity, it is the above phenomenon of temporal connectedness that best accounts for our initial sense of personal identity; it certainly appears to be a necessary condition. At any moment we can become aware that the past (or a past) is accessible to us, is with us as ours. We are therefore also aware, though often only implicitly, that the past is tributary to the very meaning of the present. What should become clear here is that our link to a past is not something to be demonstrated, but is instead a given that all else is in various ways dependent upon. We would not wish, however, to conclude that all of one’s life is therefore in theory redeemable—though this is the speculative conclusion of Bergson.5 We would also not want to conclude that the past I am conscious of is the past as it actually was. We will have much more to say about this important problem later.
Let us now consider the human subject in relation to the above account of our lived time. So far we have seen that our temporal existence is characterized by what has been called (following Husserl) the “living present,” a present that contains, as Augustine long ago pointed out in his Confessions, a present of things past and a present of things to come.6 Consciousness, or awareness, is related to and caught up in this present in a dynamic fashion. Time is always my time; it is my life that gradually unfolds (along with the lives of others), and this unfolding is evidenced in my changing awareness, my changing states and developing possibilities. The movement of time is, we want to claim, nothing other than subjectivity furthering itself into its own possibilities.
“We must,” said Merleau-Ponty, “understand time as the subject and the subject as time. . . . Time is someone.”7 If this co-constitution of the subject with time is correct, then it precludes or renders unnecessary the notion of a one-sided egological synthesis of time. That is, it precludes a founding subject peripheral or external to the stream of temporal genesis such as a transcendental ego.8 Phenomenologically considered, the basic synthesis of time, and hence of the subject, is a passive synthesis (i.e., prior to self-conscious intentions) which, in an important sense, we ourselves are. It is at once something we effect (in living) and something that effects us as subjects. As Husserl has said, “The ego constitutes himself for himself in . . . the unity of a ‘history’ (Geschichte).”9
Husserl’s remark signals the direction in which we have been heading. The overall temporal form of the subject’s genesis is indeed historical. The unfolding of time is the unfolding of our history (our “story,” as the German noun Geschichte also implies). The advantage of the term history over temporality is that it is less remote, in terms of ordinary language, from the actual content of experience. We generally think of history as comprising events and persons interacting, whereas temporality may easily be construed in abstraction from such events. Let us briefly consider how our history is generated at the level of passive constitution. I shall rely on Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations for this brief but pertinent account.
Our consideration of the living present has shown that the present moment rides, as it were, on the immediate past and is also caught up in a futural project. This passive linking of the “now” with the “just passed” and the “just, just passed” (and so on) is already enough to found a temporal continuity for the subject. In the words of William James, “Each thought [moment of awareness] is born an owner, and dies owned.”10 But one need not think of this continuity as necessarily conscious. Consider Husserl’s example:
If, in an act of judgment, I decide for the first time in favour of a being and a being-thus, the fleeting act passes; but from now on I am abidingly the ego who is thus and so decided. . . . Likewise in the case of decisions of every other kind, value-decisions, volitional decisions. 11
Such acts may well become determinants for my future actions, for it is on their basis that I adopt new beliefs and react in a certain characteristic way to a given state of affairs. They can be seen to constitute what Husserl calls an “abiding style” of my acts in the world; a form of predictability that he equates with a “personal character.”12 This character is thus constituted by a more or less unified and unifying substrate of habitualities or dispositions, of act types exhibiting a lawfulness determined by prior sedimented ego properties13—what in medieval thought was termed a habitus.
The habitus can usefully be seen, to borrow a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, as “history turned into nature”; it is a past sedimented into “structuring structures.”14 Such habitual dispositions are formative in both mental and emotional life just as they are in the performance of manual skills, and as such they function in what can be called a passive or unconscious manner. On the broader societal level, the habitus has important functional similarities to the phenomenological concept of a prevailing, though very often unconscious or horizonal, life world (Lebenswelt) of sedimented values, beliefs, and attitudes, the unity of which must be accounted for by similar environmental conditions and prevailing cultural traditions.
The formation of a habitus, then, is the relatively abiding result of our temporal genesis, the result of acts reinforced by reactivation (Reaktivierung in the Husserlian sense) and repetition, but also the result of acts and decisions guided and often determined by a constraining social order and environment. One might also say, following Husserl, that one’s habitus is the mediatory style of one’s contact with the world, and that it generates a cultural world correlated to its structures. The typical style of my being-in-the-world is thus the dynamic equivalent of my habitus, and, as already noted, this habitus is very much the structural basis of my abiding character and also of my identity; this latter point is one we will come back to.
In the beginning of this chapter I stressed that temporality must not be viewed to the exclusion of the life that is temporal. Now, although we have seen this interweaving in action, there is still much that remains to be said concerning this life of ours. Of primary importance is the formation of self-consciousness and self-understanding as they fit into the above scheme. But so far we have barely left the level of what phenomenologists have called passive genesis, and much that has been said could in fact be taken to apply to the lives of chimpanzees as well as to humans. What I intend to investigate is, however, not simply the question of identity at this passive level, for I think that Husserl’s and William James’s analyses of lived time (to name but two attempts) are fairly adequate and convincing here, but the further constitution of the self—that “entity” for which David Hume could find no certain evidence and which is applied to monkeys only by way of analogy or through an act of personification.
Especially important for this task is an examination of the physical locus of our being-in-the-world (the body), and an examination of those important processes or events we roughly term mental—memory, imagination, emotion, and the like. But beyond these investigations stands another all-important phenomenon: language. Indeed, it is toward an understanding of language as it relates to our historical being and personal identity that our preliminary discussions are particularly oriented. We shall consider the role of embodiment in later chapters, for we should first consider, on the basis of the above analysis of time, that faculty which has, in the occidental philosophical tradition, been very closely related to the concept of personal identity: memory.
We live in memory and by memory, and our
spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort
of our memory to persist, to transform
itself into hope . . . into our future.
Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life
It is perfectly understandable that memory is seen by many thinkers as somehow founding our experience of personal identity and selfhood. In acts of recollection I indeed seem to reactivate or at least contact in some important way moments of my past life, and I can also plot the general course of my life from a past moment up to the present, though often this is admittedly very sketchy. Our prior account of time was an attempt to explain why and how this recollection is, in the first place, possible.
To recapitulate briefly, the possibility for recollection arises from the cumulative horizonal structure of experience itself, what William James called “fringes.” Past and future time can be grasped precisely because it is the still more or less operative horizon of the present; it is the context within which the present (e.g., perception) becomes meaningful, the background against which it makes sense for me. We have also seen how this accumulated horizon settles into a habitus which constitutes the more or less stable, more or less unconscious parameters of my acts in the world. This core accounts for the type or style of life that I lead, and therefore in some measure prescribes such things as the type of evaluations and judgments that I am now likely to make, and also the type of acts I am likely to perform.
What we call the past may, for our purposes, be considered in two primary ways. First there is the linear and objective view of a past stretching away irretrievably behind me, behind the present; the hours, the days, the years I have lived through, and even an interminable past before that. Second there is the more phenomenological-existential approach which makes of the present a being-in-the-world whose richness is inseparable from the accumulated significance of my successive experiences. This latter position is, in an important sense, more primordial because this constant awareness, this experienced weight of the past as it exerts influence in the present, grounds the more theoretical linear view and is in fact the experience the latter is derived from. In other words, without such a presence of the past we would probably not raise the question of past time itself. The linear view is an objective representation or recounting of lived time, and it posits a past, a history, that is irredeemably behind us, a past that is finished and which simply was as it was but is now gone. While we need not doubt the tautology that things were as they in fact were (remembering that they only were, in any meaningful sense, to certain observers or experiencers), it should be clear that now we have only recollections, artifacts, and nothing more. This loss of the past can only be remedied (made to accord with our experience) by a more existential and descriptive approach, one that actually allows us to make contact with and participate in the values of the past in the only way that seems possible, and, we should add, a way that is certainly not free from self-deception and falsity.
We have a present precisely because we are suspended in the network of our past (and impending future), and at any moment we may make this horizon thematic. As Merleau-Ponty has written concerning this experience,
To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting.15 (My emphasis.)
The past, as we have seen, is a dimension of our temporal being and is therefore potentially accessible not merely through static representations (discrete memory images, say) but also, and primarily, by extending or redirecting our awareness in the relevant “direction,” e.g., away from the present praxis which we are caught up in or away from acts of pure fantasy. This process is, as it were, a movement through time that very often attempts to reconstruct a more or less coherent story of certain past events. But we shall see that this coherence is perhaps due more to what we feed into the material than the basic material of recollection itself. Memory images function more as tokens or traces for a certain intended sense than as the sole bearers of sense themselves. The material of recollection is analogous to archaeological finds that still require interpretation for their precise temporal location and sense.
What we must avoid here is the untenable position that such recollections are images which somehow duplicate original experiences, as though now we could relive them precisely as they once were. We tend very often blindly to assume recollection simply to be how things actually were in the past; this is the empiricist’s storehouse of past and faded perceptions, a position that we find highly questionable. Such a traditional empiricist approach may be fine for knowledge claims (“knowing that” or semantic memory, e.g., “I know that I was there at 9:00 P.M.”), but it is impossible to verify for claims relating to a supposed duplication of experience. Much of what we shall say here is in support of this latter rejection.
Memory, in what can be called its primary or immediate form (following Husserl), is already operative in perception. The very structure of the living present, containing what Husserl called futural protentions and also retentions of the immediate past, accounts for the continued identity of perceived entities and the objects of consciousness generally. It is difficult for us even to imagine living in a world wherein the present is cut off entirely from its immediate past! But if retention is part and parcel of present consciousness, then what we normally mean by the word remembering must be distinguished as a second form of memory. Remembering, or recollection, refers to acts which intend a content that is no longer an operative part of the living present.16 One might call this form of recollection a re-presentation, but this term has strong connotations of a duplication of original experiences. I prefer to see remembering as operating with representatives of the past, where this concept may include symbols, schemes, or other tokens that can stand for the past. A fairly cursory glance at many of our everyday recollections (of people, places, events, etc.) will show just how sketchy and impoverished the material of recollection usually is; as a representation it would be very weak indeed, but as a representative it may be more than adequate.
This latter form of memory (and from now on I shall refer to the former type simply as retention) reaches its apex in what might be called occurrences of déjà vu—experiences of “then is now.” An exemplar of this is the case of the madeleine cake described by Proust in the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past. Here we find not simply a knowledge that the past contained such-and-such an event, but also an imaginative “reliving” of the past in the temporal manner of the original experience (admitting that this can only be presumptive). Such a memory begins with a passive and somewhat brief flash of recollection that, because of its implied significance, prompts the experiencer to unpack, to narrate, the past that it refers to or seems to encapsulate. It is important to note here that in Proust’s case this narrating is in fact a retrieval of the self.
There is, however, one condition built into memory, and this is the “nowness” of the “then,” or the fact that memory implies a present act of recollection that is temporally distinct from the time which is recollected. If one has, in such an experience, lost the awareness of the present in which the recollection occurs, then one can no longer talk of memory but rather of hallucination, delusion, or some such state. For a state to be properly classed as memory, the experiencer must be able to separate the recollection from the present in which it is recollected. Sometimes it is only after the fact that we realize certain experiences we have been caught up in to consist primarily of memories; a similar phenomenon often occurs with dreams. Consciousness of something as memorial, then, presupposes there to be one time within another, past time within present time—rather as a story or novel may have both the time of the narrative and the time of the narrating. On the question of whether deja vu presents the past as it actually was, there seems to be no possible way of proving it and much, as we shall see, that would lead us to doubt it.
The empiricist John Locke viewed memory as central to our experience of personal identity, but with little respect for the difference “now” makes to “then”: “as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far is it the same personal self.”17 Memory in this ideal or veridical state would be the consciousness of a past stream of consciousness, one embedded in the other—the past relived from the standpoint of the present. As already noted, if you take away this present then you remove the point of comparison that is necessary for remembrance to be cognized as such. Certain dream states, for example, may indeed be little more than a rerun of certain of the day’s events, but they usually attain their status as memorial from the perspective of a later comparative reflection.
The question concerning the veridicality of memory, however, is not cleared up by simply saying that the past is relived or remembered, for there is always the influence of the present perspective to contend with. Memorial experience (recollection) is not simply of the past; it is, as we have said, the past for me now, and this qualification makes a considerable difference. Perhaps, as Bergson thought, only in deep sleep do we minimize the influence of the present over the recollection, and this because there is very little guiding prejudice from our present praxis. But an important question to be considered here is the degree of infiltration of imagination into what is recollected.
Imagination is difficult to separate from memory because it shares a similar phenomenal structure. Their difference, where it is discernible, lies especially in the belief accompanying each presentation. In the case of recollection we acquiesce to its pastness because of such factors as familiarity, corroboration with other memories, and a certain involvement of ourselves in what is presented—it may, for example, revive a certain shame that we still feel in relation to the event. The experience of a past as if it were relived or as if “this is how it was” is often enough to draw us into a certain intimacy that may sometimes, though not always, be lacking from simply imaginative projections. However, as especially happens with memories from early childhood, an imaginative projection can easily settle into the gaps left vacant by recollection, such that we can no longer be certain of the difference between them. Imagination very often presents us with a past that we wish we had lived, or with the past as we now wish we had lived it. We might say, with Gaston Bachelard, that imagination augments recollection and the values of the memories recollected.18
What must now be addressed is the important question of personal identity as it relates to memory. We have seen from our earlier analyses how the possibility of memory is founded upon the retentional structure of temporality, but what of the subject whose past this is? We have already referred to Locke in the above account, and it will be useful to look a little further into his influential description of personal identity. What interests us is Locke’s stress on the role of consciousness over against a substance-oriented account of personal identity. Locke writes, “Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it. . . .” He also says, “as far as . . . consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.”19 Personal identity, for Locke, is thus equal to my memorial grasp, equal to what I can now encompass of my past. This position ignores the passive sedimentation of the past into my habitual and unreflected attitudes and general world view (Locke’s account is in terms of temporal expanse rather than density—horizontal rather than vertical), but it aligns well with cases of memory disorder and the loss or deformation of personal identity that can result from such a loss.
Although, as we have seen, habitus is history turned into nature and the past is therefore operative in the present, self-consciousness is another matter. My identity for myself is the identity I am conscious of, the identity I can bring to awareness. This identity is not necessarily something objective and pregiven that can simply be turned toward and noted (as though “I” were outside it); its nature is rather correlated to my interests and to the degree of penetration of my recollection, the expanse it surveys. In a certain sense this makes me responsible for my identity. One might talk, for instance, of Proust’s identity being richer or broader than that of other people because he devoted a great deal of time to this recuperative act (assuming his major work to be primarily autobiographical). Let us now look further at this question of personal identity and its relation to recollection. We shall continue with Locke, then move on to Hume; both thinkers were among the first to address this question in depth.
Whereas the definition of man also takes account of physical or bodily identity, the definition of person, for Locke, relies primarily on a continuity of awareness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. . . .”20 It is this identity over time and the contents encompassed by it that constitute, for Locke, our “self,” and this therefore includes the consciousness of our own bodies.21 What is important to note here is that our identity is independent of the normal changes in our body and principally dependent on consciousness and memory. For Locke, the resulting self, as we saw earlier, cannot be reduced to an entity or substance underlying identity. In this sense he was anti-Cartesian.
In not substantizing this self, Locke was criticized for giving ontological precedence to the “I think” (the “mental” process) rather than to the “I am” which is usually presupposed by it.22 A remark by Bishop Butler, David Hume’s contemporary, emphasizes this point: “One should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity. . . ,”23 Locke’s view, however, eschews such a (perhaps metaphysical-religious) supposition and relies solely on empirical observation. But it was Hume who reaped many of the results of Locke’s position and provided a significant rebuttal to Butler.
It is common knowledge that Hume’s empiricist epistemology demands that our knowledge claims rely on “impressions” (or perceptions) for their validation. This led to Hume’s notorious repudiation of the “self”:
when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at anytime without a perception and never can observe anything but a perception. 24
In thus rejecting the empirical evidence for an intuitively given (an “impression”) and substantial soul, Hume ends in what might be called agnosticism. But having avoided this underlying metaphysical substance, he proceeds with the remaining and important task of explaining the nature and genesis of our belief (which he nevertheless admits exists) in personal identity.
Hume discovers certain relations operative on the flux of perceptions that create a sense of continuity across our impressions (perceptions), viz. resemblance, contiguity, and causation. For these categories to be effective, however, memory must already be in effect: “Had we no memory, we never shou’d have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.”25 Significant here, because different from Locke, is that although Hume also grounds personal identity on memory, he then proceeds to the notion of causation as the final phase in constituting this identity. This important move allows him to extend identity beyond the memory consciousness of Locke, and this by simply inferring back along a chain of causes that may no longer be intuitively given. The following remark can be taken as a criticism of Locke:
will he affirm, because he has entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the same person with the self of that time; and by that means overturn all the most established notions of personal identity? . . . Twill be incumbent on those, who affirm that memory produces entirely our personal identity, to give a reason why we can thus extend our identity beyond our memory.26
This is an important point. It is indeed the case that we commonly extend our identity beyond explicit consciousness of past events, and we do this by a form of inference. There is, however, a point in Locke’s favor that should be mentioned here, for what goes beyond explicit consciousness is only thought to be, it is a “remembering that” such-and-such occurred but without a recollected presentation or impression of the past experience; it is an inference only.
For Hume, imagination serves as the underlying synthetic activity that is indispensable for constituting the world as we know it, for it is imagination that grounds causality and the other relations. Memories are thereby knit into the fabric of our world, and they attain their status as memory largely through connectedness with other events known and recollected. An isolated image might, as we have said, easily be an hallucination or phantasm if it did not link into the broader network of memorial events that form our past life. Some type of causality is indeed at work here. How often have we said something of the form “No, I must have only seen it on television, because I know I was actually away in Europe at the time.” Images are not memorial in and of themselves; they require a context, they require corroboration from related events to become meaningful or be meant in a certain way. Another way of saying this is that memory attains its important status as it links into and develops part of the story of our lives.
Memories are not what they are because they somehow mirror a pregiven and meaningful reality (Merleau-Ponty’s “self-subsistent picture of the past”). Recollection, like perception, involves a considerable degree of interpretation; this is especially apparent in traditional psychoanalytic practice where the meaning of what is recollected may go through various stages of interpretation. Our access to what we call the past is guided by current interest, and the past is rarely if ever unfolded in the same way twice (though we may have, say, numerically the same visual images more than once).27 To put this another way: the past is not always experienced as fixed, over and done with. The past only approaches “objectivity” when it is documented in some repeatable and accepted form, as in history books, for example. But the past may also become dogmatized to attain a fixed sedimented form in our own thoughts. Furthermore, what we regularly remember from the distant past is often just a repeatable token or icon taken for the real thing. Here we again link up with the notion of memory consisting of representative images and thoughts.
The kind of causality that Hume discusses is not far from the causality utilized in scientific praxis, where the relations are of logical and necessary connections: if A, then B. But what must not be forgotten with respect to such causal and logical investigations is that they are themselves carried out within a certain context; they are part of a larger program, part of a broader scientific narrative. To discover this narrative we must always be ready to ask, “But why is that result or that research important?” Our actions do not occur in a vacuum, but are woven into the fabric of an encompassing and often demanding praxial situation. The scientific narrative is what plots (no matter how vaguely) the nature and purpose of this situation.
Applying the above view to memory, we see that a similar configuration occurs. Beyond actual recollection I may rightly infer other events preceding or following that which I remember, events that are causally connected with it. But along with this mere recounting of events another type of “causality” is operative, one brought about by the demands of understanding. When a past state of affairs is reflected upon, a degree of emplotment is enacted. What this emplotment does is turn occurrences, discrete events or images, into moments in a narrative composition, and it is, I contend, this narrative structuration that most effectively generates our understanding of the past.
James Olney has said of autobiography that it has the power of “transforming the mere fact of existence into a realized quality and a possible meaning.”28 In this respect we can say that memories, or images we take to be memorial, are very often occasions for interpretation and narration, just as many perceptions also are. This is what we may usefully call the hermeneutic dimension of memorial awareness. To illustrate the above process we shall consider some examples taken from the work of Marcel Proust.
In Proust’s writings we find many instances where a present perception will, through resemblance to something past, set off memorial reverberations or associations that promote the unfolding of a past drama, which may at first be purely passive. Proust in fact extols this passive dimension:
Several summers of my life were spent in a house in the country. I thought of those summers from time to time, but they were not themselves. They were dead, and in all probability they would remain so. Their resurrection, like all these resurrections, hung on a mere chance.29
Intellect, he says, must be put aside in favor of those chance or involuntary sensations or objects that are a reservoir of the past’s lived meaning and that may bring the past alive in a way that mere cognitive remembering cannot do.
Now although this account has a great deal of truth in it, it is surely not the whole story, as we will see. Proust himself does not stop his “reminiscences” at this point of chance encounters but goes on to unfold his past in great length and detail. The past, he says, may remain “captive forever [in the object], unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free.”30 Here we already see the need for a preliminary hermeneutics; we must both recognize and name: “Now and again, alas, we happen on an object, and the lost sensation thrills in us, but the time is too remote, we cannot give a name to the sensation, or call on it, and it does not come alive.”31
The sensation, the image, it could even be a word, functions in the manner of a symbol that rings with potential meaning. We know there is a message here for us, but very often this situation is like encountering a person we have known and whose name now escapes us along with the relevant details of our acquaintance; we are frustrated at having forgotten, and no conversation ensues because we must turn away from the other to avoid embarrassment. The encounter with such images places a demand on us, a demand to be heard, to be deciphered. Perhaps this demand occurs because the deciphering is also, in effect, a retrieval of ourselves. This form of retrieval becomes more explicit in Remembrance of Things Past:
One experiences, but what one has experienced is like those negatives which show nothing but black until they have been held before a lamp, and they, too, must be looked at from the reverse side; one does not know what it is until it has been held up before the intelligence. Only then, when one has thrown light upon it and intellectualized it can one distinguish—and with what effort!—the shape of what one has felt.32
If the past, then, is not to remain just a collection of vaguely intuited phantasms, it must undergo interpretation, and this is intellectual work. Memories, in what I take to be the primary sense of the term, are the result of such interpretation. This situation is somewhat like encountering a new metaphor. For a metaphor to be more than a mere novel figure of speech it must give rise to a new insight; it must imaginatively refigure or redescribe its object or resituate the subject it is addressed to. In the case of memory it is a question of reconstituting, as it were, the drama surrounding a certain imagined object or state of affairs (presumed to be from the past), which may likewise refigure the past and quite possibly also resituate the subject (in both a cognitive and emotional sense—as in Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit). The philosopher and poet George Santayana was very aware of this imaginative-reconstructive ingredient:
When I remember I do not look at my past experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own manufacture, as if I were writing a novel and I attribute this intuited experience to myself in the past, or to the other person.33 (My emphasis.)
The literary allusion is very important here, for it stresses the important narrational factor in remembrance. For Santayana the objects and events of our past are revivified through “moral imagination.”34 It is this latter ability that creates a dramatization characteristic of lived and hence valorized experience. As Santayana implies, it is the narrative result that we take to be the structure and import of our past lives. And it should be clear why novelists must become experts in this form of reconstitution if they are to present in their works something with the depth and dimensions of life itself.
A further factor to consider here is that, as we saw before, the past may be narrated in many ways. It is very easy to believe that the past is something irredeemably fixed and determined behind oneself, for in a certain sense this is true; objectively speaking, I have presumably been to certain places at certain times and have done certain ineradicable things. We have also seen from Husserl that the “I” is the abiding result of such acts. But there still remains the all-important question of the meaning of the past for me now.35 I am not a machine that simply displays the past; I also respond to the display, and experience consists of both these factors at once. I may recall a definite datable event, I may even recall what that event meant to me at a prior date, but there is no necessary reason why this meaning should still be operative or important to me. In fact, even my recollection of what an event once meant to me will already be told from a new perspective, out of a new background, as part of a new narrative.
Our accounts of the past can only be expected to have a degree of consistency if they are written down or are remembered and retold frequently. This is, for example, the practice in many religious groups where the dogmas are recited regularly. It is also present in compulsives where an event (possibly traumatic) is obsessively run through again and again. But there is an incipient stagnation in all such enterprises, as Nietzsche well knew. In the language of Rudolf Bultmann, the kerygma must be interpreted anew for a new age, a new world view. The change such reinterpretation brings about is, we have been arguing, natural to human understanding and development.
What we cannot escape in the case of recollection is Gadamer’s hermeneutic principle of “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte). We are finite historical beings whose understanding is mediated by and made possible through our history. We have no transcendental standpoint from which the past may be seen without the interference of “subjectivity” (the present). This means that there never was such a pristine or finished meaning to the past; a supposedly “true” meaning that we ought now to recapture or coincide with, that we might once and for all pin down. In matters of the past we cannot escape the historicity of our gaze and our interests. However, this position need not lead to a total relativism where anything goes, where any interpretation will do, for the past we would recapture is woven into the same fabric that guides our understanding. As Bultmann has also stressed, “The subjectivity of historians does not mean that they see falsely, but only that they choose certain perspectives and proceed by way of asking questions.”36 We cannot avoid this perspectivism if we seek to understand and not merely repeat by blind rote or chronicle. It is a trait of a naive objectivism to believe that events have, or had, a univocal meaning which constitutes the “truth” of those events. The past, on the contrary, and if our analyses are correct, should be viewed as part of our lives, and because life is unfinished so is the meaning of the past.
What now becomes crucial for our endeavor is to consider further the narrational and interpretive aspects of recollection, especially with a view to grasping the implications this has for personal identity and selfhood. So far little has been said about the self, the subject who recollects, and it is interesting just how much can be said about memory without having to analyze this mysterious “entity.” The self is nevertheless intimately bound to most of our conceptions of memory and recollection. The kind of continuity that pertains to memory has usually been linked with the kind of continuity that is required by a notion of self and especially of self-identity. It is also, we often say, to a particular self that the various memories accrue; I am their owner, as it were.
Beyond this is what we may call the motivator position, which maintains that “I” remember, that “I” think. Here we find the self as an agent, as an instigator of acts. While it must be admitted that we do indeed say “I think,” “I remember,” and so on, there has been a troubled history surrounding the ontological status of this “I.” What interests us here is the degree to which our talk of the self is self-constituting rather than referential to an ontologically prior subject. The next chapter will go part way toward answering, in a broad fashion, some preliminary questions concerning the self, particularly the self’s implication in the narratives and practices of our life-world.
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