The first part of Memory, History, Forgetting is devoted to the phenomenology of memory. Husserl’s notion of intentionality – summarized by the dictum that all consciousness is consciousness of something, which Ricoeur here calls “object oriented” and interprets as putting the what before the who – is suggested as a starting point. “If one wishes to avoid being stymied by a fruitless aporia, then one must hold in abeyance the question of attributing to someone… the act of remembering and begin with the question ‘What?’” (p. 3).
He notes that Plato bequeathed to posterity an approach to memory (and also imagination) centered on talking about a kind of presence of an absent thing. Aristotle is credited with clarifying the distinction between this kind of memory and the kind of doing involved in the effort to remember something. “Memories, by turns found and sought, are… situated at the crossroads of pragmatics and semantics” (p. 4). It is the pragmatics of recollection that will eventually provide an appropriate transition to the who of memory, but there will also be a difficulty with an inherent potential for a kind of abuse of active recollection, foreshadowed by Plato’s worries about the manipulative discourse of the Sophist.
It will be important to distinguish memory from imagination as having different kinds of objects, and especially to avoid a too-easy assimilation of memories to images (which he elsewhere applies to imagination as well). Memory is supposed to be concerned with a real past, and although images do seem to play a role in our experience of memory, Ricoeur suggests it will be a secondary one.
He urges that we consider memory first from the point of view of capacities and their “happy” realization, before questions of pathology and error. “To put it bluntly, we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place” (p. 21). He also thinks it is possible to at least “sketch a splintered, but not radically dispersed, phenomenology in which the relation to time remains the ultimate and sole guideline” (p. 22).
There is a problem of the interconnection between preverbal experience and “the work of language that ineluctably places phenomenology on the path of interpretation, hence of hermeneutics” (p. 24). There is also an extensive problem of the relation between action and representation.
Memories are essentially plural, and come in varying degrees of distinctness. We remember diverse kinds of things in diverse ways — singular events, states of affairs, abstract generalities, and facts. We have practical know-how that closely resembles an acquired habit, and other memory that apparently has no relation to habit. There is a contrast between memory as evocation and memory as search. He recalls Bergson’s notion of a dynamic scheme as a kind of direction of effort for the reconstruction of something. From Husserl, there is a distinction between retention and reproduction. There is another polarity between reflexivity and worldliness. From Bergson, there is another distinction between “pure memory” and a secondary “memory-image”.
Ultimately, memory involves a search for truth, an aim of faithfulness. It will have to be shown how this is related to its practical dimension, concerned with memory’s uses and abuses.
What Ricoeur terms the abuses of memory include the Renaissance “art of memory” celebrated by Frances Yates, which connected artificial techniques of memorization with magic and Hermetic secrets. We will “retreat from the magic of memory in the direction of a pedagogy of memory” (p. 67). Natural memory, too, as Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx pointed out, can be blocked, manipulated, or abusively controlled. The phenomena associated with ideology are a part of this. Communities attempt to obligate us to remember things in certain ways, and to forget certain things.
Ricoeur would like to avoid both the radical subjectivism of “methodological individualism” and an immediate sociological holism of a Durkheimian sort. In this context, he again pleads for a deferral of the question of the “actual subject of the operations of memory” (p. 93).
The Postmodern Peripatetic 