Remembering, Second Edition

Edward S. Casey

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2000

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 Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
First Forays
Eidetic Features
Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
Prologue
Reminding
Reminiscing
Recognizing
Coda
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
Prologue
Body Memory
Place Memory
Commemoration
Coda
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
The Thick Autonomy of Memory
Freedom in Remembering

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
1. First Forays
2. Eidetic Features
3. Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
4. Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
Prologue
5. Reminding
6. Reminiscing
7. Recognizing
Coda
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
Prologue
8. Body Memory
9. Place Memory
10. Commemoration
Coda
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
11. The Thick Autonomy of Memory
12. Freedom in Remembering

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253114310
• Langue: English

Extrait

Remembering
Studies in Continental Thought
GENERAL EDITOR
John Sallis
CONSULTING EDITORS

Robert Bernasconi

William L. McBride
Rudolph Bernet

J. N. Mohanty
John D. Caputo

Mary Rawlinson
David Carr

Tom Rockmore
Edward S. Casey

Calvin O. Schrag
Hubert Dreyfus

Reiner Sch rmann
Don Ihde

Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell

Thomas Sheehan
Lenore Langsdorf

Robert Sokolowski
Alphonso Lingis

Bruce W Wilshire

David Wood
REMEMBERING

A Phenomenological Study Second Edition
EDWARD S. CASEY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress
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1987 and 2000 by Edward S. Casey
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casey, Edward S., date
Remembering : a phenomenological study / Edward S. Casey.-2nd ed.
p. cm. - (Studies in Continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33789-5 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-253-21412-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Memory (Philosophy) 2. Phenomenology.
I. Title. II. Series.
BD181.7 .C33 2000
128 .3-dc21
00-057231
1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00
To The Memory of My Parents
Catherine J. Casey Marlin S. Casey
And in Remembrance of the Vanished World of My Grandparents
Daisy Hoffman Johntz John Edward Johntz
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
I First Forays
II Eidetic Features
III Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
IV Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
P ROLOGUE
V Reminding
VI Reminiscing
VII Recognizing
C ODA
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
P ROLOGUE
VIII Body Memory
IX Place Memory
X Commemoration
C ODA
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
XI The Thick Autonomy of Memory
XII Freedom in Remembering
NOTES
INDEX
Rethinking Remembering
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
From the start, I intended Remembering to be a companion volume to my earlier book Imagining, and it is gratifying to witness new editions of both books now appearing at the same time. This fortuitous event will underline what the two texts have in common: above all, a shared phenomenological orientation, a commitment to a close and detailed description of the various forms and directions taken by each act. The close comparison of imagining and remembering is hardly new; the two acts have been linked ever since Aristotle s inaugural discussion of human mental activity. Hobbes, Hume, and Kant expressly yoked them together as alternative but complementary fates of perception-its epistemic extension vis- -vis past episodes (memory) or future happenings (imagination).
Although it is plausible to pair the two acts in this and other ways, by 1977-a year after the publication of Imagining and a decade before the appearance of Remembering -I had begun to discover basic differences between them that disallowed any claim (such as Hume s) that they are both offshoots of perception, its direct or indirect copy. In an essay of that same year entitled Imagining and Remembering I maintained that despite their intimate collusion on many fronts (e.g., in the activity of the historian, in dreams, and in time-consciousness) they remain as distinct from each other as perception is from both. They differ from each other with regard to such fundamental things as the degree of familiarity they entail, their positing of content as existing or not, and their comparative corrigibility. 1
This is not to deny that the two acts are also significantly similar. Not only is neither parasitic on perception, but each is at once free and autonomous. Both submit to what I call intentional analysis, according to which each exhibits certain comparable modes of operation (e.g., imagining or remembering that something is the case; imagining or remembering how to do something); and each features a presentation that has both a specific content and a spatiotemporal world-frame, along with a characteristic mode of givenness. Nevertheless, even at this bare beginning level, important differences emerge. The autonomy of imagining is thin, that of remembering thick. Where intentional analysis uncovers only three basic act-forms of imagining, it detects many more kinds of remembering: e.g., primary and secondary, remembering to-do something, remembering on-the-occasion-of some event, remembering-as (i.e., my friend as depressed), remembering-what (e.g., what Burlington is like), etcetera. Rather than the specific content of what we remember being simply surrounded by a mere margin of indeterminacy as in the case of imagining, an entire atmosphere permeates what we remember. In remembering, there is a tenuous but consistently felt self-presence of the rememberer that inheres in what is remembered-in contrast with imagining, in which the imaginer is often distant or absent from what is imagined. 2 And when it comes to eidetic analysis, there is the striking fact that, whereas describing the six essential features of imagining took up the major part of an entire book, the corresponding traits of remembering occupies only a short chapter of ten pages.
I
These various differences point to a larger truth: the mansions of memory are many. So polymorphic is remembering that no single set of intentional structures or eidetic features can capture the whole phenomenon. Primary traits (e.g., encapsulment/expansion) are continually complicated by secondary traits (e.g., schematicalness) which refuse to be reduced to the simplicity of any central description. No wonder Remembering is almost twice as long as Imagining; no wonder, either, that it took so long to write! I thought I could polish off this successor volume in several years; instead, it took a decade to write. Remembering itself proved me wrong. I had to face up to the paradox that imagining, often taken to be the quintessence of the quirky and the quixotic, showed itself to be more regular in its enactment and structure than remembering, usually assumed to be the more reliable and sober of the two acts. 3
As I settled into a more complex project than I had bargained for, I came upon a veritable proliferation of anomalies. Anomalies not construed as abnormalities-that is another matter, i.e., the pathology of memory, on which I shall touch below-but as departures from accepted norms. Whereas it had been assumed by memory theorists as astute as James and Husserl that remembering comes in just two basic forms ( primary or retentional vs. secondary or reproductive ), it became clear to me that there is an entire set of intermediate forms of remembering: intermediate between primary and secondary memory, as well as between mind and world. These included such familiar (yet rarely investigated) kinds of memory as recognizing X as Y, being reminded of B by A, and reminiscing. Despite important differences, 4 these mnemonic modes take us from the realm of mind to the larger reaches of the surrounding world-from the involuted concerns of mentation to the way the world shows itself to be filled with recognitory clues, effective reminders, and things that inspire reminiscence. Instead of memory being confined to mind alone-as its own root memor, mindful, signifies-it enters here into a continuing close collusion with the lifeworld of its experience.
In Part Three of Remembering I took a further and still more heterodox step. By then, it had become evident to me that mind, rather than being part of the solution to an adequate phenomenology of memory, was endemic to the problem. At least this is so if mind is conceived as a receptacle of representations-as it has been since at least Descartes. In Pursuing Memory Beyond Mind, I argue that the privilege accorded to recollection (another name for secondary memory, i.e., long-term visualized recall of a previously experienced episode) is only another way of privileging mind itself as the source and container of representations. To pursue memory beyond mind is to seek exemplary instances of memory that are not tied to recollections and thus not to the mind as their unique vehicle.
I found three such exemplars of remembering that are not exclusively mentalistic, representational, or recollective: body memory, place memory, and commemoration. Here the pivotal phenomenon is place memory, that is, the fact that concrete places retain the past in a way that can be reanimated by our remembering them: a powerful but often neglected form of memory. Body memories are not just memories of the body but instances of remembering places, events, and people with and in the lived body. In commemoration, body and place memory conspire with co-participating others in ritualized scenes of co-remembering.
The discovery of this triad of non-representational and non-recollective rememberings meant the virtual explosion of the hegemony of older models of memory. This phase of my memory-work can be seen as deconstructive, since it questions the accepted paradigms of remembering as re-presencing in favor of a more polymorphic visi