Remembering: A Phenomenological Study

by Edward S. Casey

Remembering
A Phenomenological Study
Second Edition
Edward S. Casey

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

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

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

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

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

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

Studies in Continental Thought―John Sallis, general editor

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

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Professor Edward Casey was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009-10, and he was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

His recent research includes investigations into place and space; landscape painting and maps as modes of representation; ethics and the other; feeling and emotion; philosophy of perception (with special attention to the role of the glance); the nature of edges.

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1987, Edward Casey’s study of memory remains one of the most comprehensive and nuanced treatments of memory in recent philosophical literature. For Casey, memory studies is (or at least was in the late twentieth century) in decline: the dominant model for human memory in the modern era is computer memory, which consists in the mere representation of past data. The dominant archetype of computer memory and its concomitant metaphors—“machine memory,” “memory bank,” “save to disk,” and so on—has, Casey maintains, undermined the authority, scope, and value of human memory, which pales in comparison to computer memory, at least in the narrow terms of recollective ability. Casey therefore strives to revitalize memory studies and memorial culture by way of a “detailed, dispassionate description of human memory itself—one that neither subjects it to experimental treatment nor turns over primary responsibility to machines as models” (10). The result of this effort is a multifaceted exploration of memory that moves from a mentalistic and individualistic description to one that incorporates memory’s embodied, communal, and intrapsychic contexts. Memory, for Casey, turns out to be a much more complicated and powerful phenomenon than the dominant computer memory model indicates.

As Casey tracks this movement from memory thinly conceived to memory thickly conceived, he frequently reminds his readers that memory is a polymorphic phenomenon. Whereas earlier philosophers like William James and Edmund Husserl conceptualized memory in more or less two basic forms—“primary” or “retentional” vs. “secondary” or “reproductive”—Casey explores intermediate forms between these basic ones as well as several other fundamental mnemonic modes. In one sense, Casey’s descriptions move from mind to world as he de-subjectivizes memory—that is, as he posits memory less as the possession of an individual subject and more as a phenomenon with its own autonomy within and between human subjects. Thus, whereas the first section of the book explores memory’s eidetic features and intentionality (in its act and object phases), the second presents additional mnemonic modes that “cannot be contained within the meshes of mentalism,” like those involved in physical reminders and the discourse of reminiscence. Consequently, whereas the eidetic and intentional analyses are neatly schematic—we can remember simpliciter (i.e. simple items, events, or persons), remember-that (i.e. more complex states of affairs), remember-how, remember-to, remember-as, remember-what, or even remember the future (52-63)—Casey’s descriptions of less obvious mnemonic modes are less formal, somewhat more speculative, and less representational in their epistemic presuppositions. In the third section of the book, Casey moves beyond a mentalistic portrait of memory in more radical ways: if the mnemonic modes of the previous section are situated halfway between mind and world, the phenomena of body memory, place memory, and commemoration, each of which receives a full chapter in the third section, are more firmly rooted in the world (beyond the subject) itself. By the third section, memory has been almost entirely de-subjectivized, situated now in bodies, physical places, and commemorative activities between persons.

Commemoration, in particular, is especially important for Casey. Like reminiscence, it is a communal form of memory: when one commemorates, it is necessarily with others—even intrapsychic others—with whom one is in community. Commemoration involves what Casey calls commemorabilia—that is, the media by which commemoration remembers its commemorandum, or its memorial content—of which there are two basic types: ritualistic and textual. It presupposes and activates body and place memory, each of which plays a central role in ritualistic and textual forms of commemoration like, for example, the Eucharist, which takes place in a distinctive sacred space (a church, and more specifically its altar) and involves the corporeal participation of communicants who consume the elements of bread and wine. And, by way of communal “participation” between commemorators—a concept Casey lifts from Platonic metaphysics and renders immanent in its scope—commemoration helps overcome “the separation from which otherwise unaffiliated individuals suffer. . . . [It] creates new forms of sociality, new modes of interconnection” between past and present, self and other, and otherwise differentiated human communities (250-251). In the end, Casey views commemoration as a kind of primordial form of memory: “To remember is [simply] to commemorate the past,” he insists, since commemoration uniquely “affirms the past’s selfsameness in the present by means of a consolidated re-enactment” that in turn ensures the past’s perdurance into the future (256-257). Put differently, commemoration functions in much the same way as memory in its basic temporal orientation: toward the past, in the present, for the sake of the future.

In the final section of the book, Casey concludes his de-subjectivization of memory with the notion that memory has its own autonomy. What Casey means by “autonomy” is not always clear—he often synonymizes “autonomy” with “freedom,” but later differentiates the subject’s freedom in memory from memory’s freedom qua autonomy (see the last chapter)—yet his basic point is apparent: memory is inextricably wedded to the past yet neither so passive that it merely represents the past without alteration nor so active that it utterly transforms the past to the extent that memorial claims should not be trusted. In other words, memory is autonomous in that “I recall the same past differently on successive occasions: now as I recapture it in reminiscence, now in body memory, now commemoratively,” etc. (286). In its autonomy, memory is both free from the past and its particularities—i.e. that it is not bound to repeat these particularities in the same way every time I remember—while also free for the positive affirmation “that the past was thus-and-so as a fact, or was experienced in such-and-such a way. In this circumstance,” Casey explains, “memories are not reducible to mere evidential sources, mere pre-texts to truth: affirmation cannot be reduced to confirmation” (282). To affirm the past in memory is not merely to confirm that it recollects past experiences truly, as if the truth of past experience exists separate and apart from memory, which either does or does not represent the past accurately; rather, truth in memory manifests in autonomous memorial praxis, when memory freely affirms the past as past. Put differently, “memorial truth is discovered within the various matters of memory, not outside them or beyond them” (283). Importantly, for Casey, memorial truth of this kind does not simply refer to accurate representations of the past; even when memory recollects the past inaccurately, it can still “convey the ‘how’ of the remembered situation and perhaps also its ‘that’ as well,” and this affirmation of the past, however partial, reflects memory’s autonomy (282-283). In short, when Casey insists on memory’s autonomy, he ostensibly means to contest an unreflective memorial determinism: memory has its own kind of agency and thus is not bound to remember the past in specific ways determined by the laws of natural or psychic forces.

Casey reiterates his concern with this foil when, in the final chapter, he re-subjectivizes memory and posits the subject’s freedom in memory. Whereas Casey’s description of memory’s autonomy effectively bracketed the self qua rememberer, his analysis in this chapter underscores the notion of “mineness” in memory—i.e. the idea captured in the proposition that “these memories are mine.” If my memories are truly mine, then I am in some sense responsible for them, and this responsibility presupposes some kind of freedom in memory. Casey focuses on two types of memorial freedom in particular: the “freedom to be oneself,” tethered to Locke’s thesis that personal identity is intertwined with memory (“we are what we remember ourselves to be,” Casey writes), and the “freedom of in-gathering,” inspired by Heidegger’s claim that “memory is the gathering of thought” (290-292). The first kind of freedom is more familiar: if we are indeed what we remember ourselves to be, then our memorial freedom bears upon the responsibility we have for who we are. Importantly, this memorial freedom is temporally bi-directional: it concerns both my memory of the past and the memory I will have of my past in the future. As Casey explains this futural orientation, “my eventual personal identity is very much a function of what I shall remember myself to be—which is in turn a function of what I now remember myself to have been. And what I now remember myself to have been is by no means a fixed affair. It is once more a matter of freedom, specifically the freedom to decide which features of my previous life to honor or reject, celebrate or revile, in the future” (291-292). In this sense, the memorial freedom at the heart of the freedom to be oneself is expressly evaluative: it is based on the values one holds in the present that in turn determine how one remembers one’s past. The second kind of freedom, the freedom of in-gathering, is less familiar as a concept yet readily identifiable in our experience: it refers to “a freedom of amalgamation, of creating synthetic wholes, and not just of selecting parts. At the same time, this freedom involves the decision to preserve the wholes thus drawn together: to validate them as memorable, as worthy of being retained in memory” (293). Put simply, the freedom of in-gathering denominates the freedom we have to synthesize and schematize our remembered experiences in myriad ways and, concomitantly, to narrate different stories at different times about who we are and how we became our current selves. Ultimately, Casey focuses on these two kinds of memorial freedom in an effort to offer a new (or perhaps revived) model of memory that is not wedded to the deterministic metaphysics presupposed by mechanistic models of memory. Even if memory is by no means completely within our control—Casey does not avow an exclusively activist conception of memory—it is neither merely mechanical nor entirely subject to biological determinism. “What remains in memory remains up to us,” Casey insists, “if not precisely when we wish or as we wish, nevertheless as belonging to the realm of our own freedom to remember” (304).

If there is one notable lacuna in Remembering, it is what the precise relationship is between memory’s autonomy and the subject’s freedom in memory. If memory as a kind of agent has its own autonomy, how does this bear upon the subject’s freedom to remember? Does the subject work in conjunction with autonomous memory in free remembrance? Can autonomous memory inhibit as well as enhance the subject’s freedom in memory? Relatedly, can autonomous memory inhibit or enhance the subject’s responsibility for its identity, insofar as personal identity is rooted in memorial freedom? While the idea of autonomous, de-subjectivized memory is provocative, Casey leaves these important questions unanswered. Still, Remembering sets forth an array of helpful concepts and distinctions that, taken collectively, paint a comprehensive and multifaceted portrait of one of the most primordial phenomena in human existence. Casey’s expansive phenomenological approach to the study of memory pays impressive dividends and invites further study of human freedom and responsibility in memory—in short, a more comprehensive ethics of memory that takes its cue from Casey’s phenomenological descriptions.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding text. Unfortunately, I didn't get to quite read the book in its entirety due to time constraints for the project I'm working on, but I really enjoyed it. I've been fascinated by memory for some time now in my research and this book digs deep into every facet of it. Glad it's earned a permanent spot on my book shelf for me to go back to some time.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intensely challenging but ultimately extremely rewarding book. I admit to skipping around a bit in sections where the propositions Casey was putting forth felt ambiguous and lacking contour, but otherwise I was very much on board—interested, engaged, questioning. A favorite passage, one of many that will stick with me:

“By attending patiently to memory’s many infrastructures and thereby respecting it as a phenomenon in its own right, we can begin to undo the self-forgetful forgetting that has led to such disrespect for its fields and spacious palaces. Rather than fleeing its dark embrace—its heaviness—and handing it over to machines, we can start to apprehend its intrinsic lightness, its own luminosity. Or more exactly, we may come to realize that its heaviness is not altogether ‘deplorable’ nor its lightness simply ‘splendid.’ We may even be able to choose both its lightness and its weight, its power to alleviate and illuminate as well as its capacity to embroil and bog down.”

[pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happened upon this at the library today, gave it a skim through, and I have to say: absolutely FANTASTIC. Though the issue of remembering is inherently abstract and circuitous (PROUST), never once did it feel like the elegance or lucidity of the writing was compromised. Casey knows what the hell he's talking about and he knows how to make it damn well readable too.

"Think of it: memory not in the brain or mind but in the world. Anything... can become memorial. The fact is that memory is more a colander than a container, more porous than enframing. Its final freedom of in-gathering is a freedom of letting the world in through its many subtle pores... only in order to allow us to realize how richly we already inhabit the world without." (310)

Going to have to check this one out for further reading later.