Reflections On Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting

Abstract

This recently translated book by Paul Ricoeur is astonishing on many levels: On the personal plane, it is written twenty-five years after Ricoeur retired from the University of Paris-Nanterre and ten years after his retirement from the John Nuveen Chair at the University of Chicago.1 Its 600 plus pages, with over 210 references to contemporary secondary sources in French, English, and German, as well as classical philosophers, is a philosophical tour de force. In fact, it could have been published as three books, one each on the topics in the title. But, the genius of the book is the structure, the interconnections, that Ricoeur weaves among the philosophical paradoxes of memory, the aporias of forgetting, and the mediating role of history-itself fraught with epistemological questions. In his Preface, Ricoeur says that the book is composed of a phenomenology of memory, an epistemology of the historical sciences, and a hermeneutics of forgetting. At the end of these analyses, Ricoeur has an extraordinary discussion of pardon, or forgiving, which involves all three topics, memory, history, forgetting, in an unexpected paradox. Yet, the first puzzle is that we all know what memory is, and forgetting is an experience in everyday life. History, in the common view is the true account of what has happened in the past, usually supported with references to documents, testimony of witnesses, or artifacts. So, what is the question? With memory, we are all familiar with remembering a person, or a place, or an event in our own past. Similarly, we are all used to the experience of forgetting, such as a proper name, or the name of the restaurant we went to years ago. We all learned history in school, the history of our country, our state, Europe in the middle ages, and so forth. Most of all, we enjoy reading history and historical novels. The history of philosophy teaches us that while we take for granted the experiences of memory and forgetting, there are profound philosophical problems, which date from the earliest days of philosophy. Questions such as is the memory when we are not thinking about It is not lost because we can remember it with effort, or sometimes it just comes to us without even trying. How does memory work that we can recall something? How can something that we experienced in the past be brought back into the present? These questions have baffled philosophers and psychologists from Plato to the present. When we forget, where do the memories or images go? And, why do some vanish and not others? Where do repressed memories come from when they are reconstituted by psychoanalysis? With respect to history, what is its relationship to memory? And, what is the difference between history and fiction, a history book and a novel? How do historians establish the truth and accuracy of their narratives? Is there an objective historical truth, or is all history a construct from a particular point of view, expressing the interests of those who have the power to write it? From these few questions, it is clear that each one is worthy of a separate study, but that none of them can be completely understood without reference to the other two. Memory needs to be analyzed in conjunction with its opposite, forgetting. And history is always in tension between memory and forgetting; it depends on the first and is an antidote to the second. Anyone familiar with Ricoeur's style and method can expect that he will establish two poles which seem contradictory or at least incompatible and then search for a middle ground or mediating term. Thus, from the title of the book, one might imagine that history is that middle or mediating term between memory and forgetting. But, the interrelationships are far more complex than that. What I want to do in this review essay is give an account of Ricoeur's analyses of each of the main topics. Then, I will devote some time to particular analyses that I find especially interesting. …