Submissão: 09/10/2019 Aprovação:
27/11/2019 Publicação: 18/12/2019
Dossiê Filosofias da memória
Paul Ricœur on collective memory: the cohesion of social life*
Maria Cristina Clorinda
Vendra
Post-doctoral researcher in the
Department of Contemporary Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Prague.
Abstract:
The aim of this article is to present a critical reconstruction of Ricœur’s
analysis of the complex phenomenon of memory as a collective act of
recollection. By focusing the attention on memory as a collective practice,
through the use of resources drawn from phenomenology, sociology, and history,
I will seek to outline the construction of the collective memorial discourse
and its foundations, looking particularly at the eighth chapter of the third
volume of Time and Narrative and at
the work Memory, History, Forgetting.
I will show that our identification and location with others in social
collectivities imply to negotiate a gap between subjective and cosmic time.
Temporality comes, then, in the plural: our being in time is not merely
personal, but rather we are originally involved in a shared social and
historical framework.
Keywords:
Collective memory; Remembering; Narrative; History; Social-phenomenology
Introduction
“Under history, memory and
forgetting.
Under memory and forgetting,
life.
But writing a life is another
story. Incompletion”[1].
Memory is a complex dimension linked
not only to the experience of either the individual or the collectivity, but
also to the way in which that very history is read and interpreted in time.
Generally speaking, memory can be defined as human being’s stratified entity
and unique capacity “to preserve traces of the past and to refer actively to
them within present situations”[2].
More exactly, with reference to Henri Bergson, Ricœur essentially distinguishes
two useful ways to define memory: memory as habits, i.e., as an involuntary
repetition of automatized situations and actions, and memory as distinct
recollection, that is, as an active involvement of the images of the past[3].
Yet, whereas individual memory has been widely analyzed by traditional
philosophy, the notion of collective memory has been explored as a viable
concept in contemporary sociology. It is, then, necessary to understand from a
philosophical perspective how individual memory is connected to collective
memory and which kind of being collective memory is. Ricœur discusses these
themes ranging from cognitive science to sociology, political theory, history,
and other relevant disciplines belonging to the social and human sciences.
Although he does not address the question of memory in a continuous way in his
work, this topic can be considered as an underlying theme in his whole career.
The aim of my essay is to present
Ricœur’s analysis of the complex phenomenon of memory as a collective act of
recollection. The following reflection consists of two intertwined parts. In
the first section, I will discuss Ricœur’s epistemological and hermeneutical
approach to collective memory from his work on narrative. Collective memory
will be here examined in connection with history as a form of narrative
discourse. I then will draw on Ricœur’s socio-phenomenological analysis of
collective memory. Specifically, I will show that memory can be considered as a
discursive and narrative construction, arising from the individual or
collective intentions within a particular socio-cultural and historical
context.
The
narrative understanding of history and the persistence of collective memory
Collective memory is a notoriously
difficult concept to define. Agreeing with Jeffrey Barash’s critical reading of
Ricœur’s interpretation of the notion of collective memory, I argue that
collective experience and collective memory can be understood only through the
elaboration of an adequate theory of symbol that might account for the complex
mediations between human being’s personal experience and memory in the common
sphere[4].
The analogy Ricœur establishes between personal memory and collective memory is
connected with their symbolic and meta-personal sources. Following Ricœur’s
line of reasoning, I think that collective memory can be coherently conceived
as a “web of remembered experiences embodied in collectively communicable
symbols”[5].
In other words, collective memory relates to the instituting act of symbolic
function as a social inter-space. Ricœur develops his examination of the
phenomenon of the collective memory in relation with the problem posed by the
cohesion of the collective sphere in the eighth chapter of Time and Narrative 3 and again in Memory, History, Forgetting. More exactly, Ricœur draws the
attention on the relation between memory and social cohesion when he introduces
his idea of obliged memory. However, whereas in Time and Narrative 3, Ricœur’s idea of obliged memory is developed
within an epistemological reflection on historical knowledge as “standing for”
or “taking the place of” (Lieutenance), distinguished from representation as “giving
oneself a mental image of some absent external thing,”[6] in Memory, History, Forgetting, he
discusses again his idea referring to various other philosophical and
sociological approaches. I argue that Ricœur’s analysis of collective memory
moves from an earlier epistemological and hermeneutical discussion concerning
narrative as a way of characterizing historical knowledge to a phenomenological
approach developing from the question of remembrance (What is remembered?),
passing through reminiscence (Who remembers?), and leading to reflexive memory
(How does one remember?). The connection between collective memory and the
reconstruction of the historical past leads the author to reflect on the
historicity of human modes of understanding and being. Let us focus on the
underlying continuity connecting up these two approaches to the problem of
collective memory. These reflections allow us to show the evolution of Ricœur’s
conception of collective memory from his work on narrative to his last book, Memory, History, Forgetting, published
in 2000. Specifically, in this last work the topic of collective memory is
developed by introducing new concerns. As David Pellauer
puts it, “something new is added […] with the turn to memory and forgetting,
which reflects new issues that had drawn Ricœur’s attention”[7].
The epistemological-hermeneutical
and the phenomenological approach to collective memory have a question in
common, namely, the question of the representation of the past: how can we make
present what is past, which is irredeemably absent? First, the notion of
collective memory is connected with the analysis of the conditions of
possibility of history as a form of narrative discourse. History involves the
deployment of certain literary practices, such us plot, composition, character,
point of view, and so on. Historical discipline refers to the temporal
character of our existence for the sake of refiguring it. As a narrative
discourse, history is meaningful to the extent it portrays human being’s
temporal features of existence. Embedded in history as actors in a
space-temporal plot, we have to consider the past as having two meanings: past
is no longer there yet still there, i.e., it is at once absent and present.
History is an indirect knowledge developed through the use of traces. Notably,
traces are history’s final epistemological presuppositions. The historical
explanatory comprehension of the course of action is also supported by the
eyewitness testimony of human beings concerning events of the past. According
to Ricœur, historical knowledge “stands for the past, it represents the past,
not in the sense that the past itself would appear in the mind (Vorstellung) but
in the sense that the trace takes place of (Vertretung)”[8].
Differently from a direct mental representation of objects, history is mediated
by the traces of the past. These traces represent the past through mimesis, i.e., they take the place of
the past. Without recapitulating Ricœur’s careful examination of the successive
levels that characterize the historical knowledge as a narrative discourse, I
want to stress here that the duty of memory as “the duty to do justice, through
memories, to an other than the self”[9]
cannot be understood separately from human capacity to narrate. In this regard,
Ricœur’s idea of collective memory can be understood in the context of his
analysis of historical knowledge.
With the overlapping of existential,
social, and empirical aspects, Ricœur’s dynamic model of reconstruction of
historical reality discloses an essentially paradoxical character. On the one
hand, historical knowledge is a realistic claim to grasp the past as a reality
that really was through the use of archives and documents that bear witness to
the past. On the other hand, Ricœur sees a necessary convergence between
history and fiction. This means, for the author, that historical knowledge has
to turn to imagination for help: fiction is what allows the historian to unveil
concrete possibilities, that is, to focus on what might have been. The
documentary proof and the imaginative productive understanding interweave in
the historian’s process of reconfiguration of human being’s past. As such,
while preserving the aspiration to truthfulness, history captures the past by
transporting the historical reality into an analogical narrative. Since historical
narrative discourse stands for the past reality in terms of “such as”, the
ontological status of historical representation can be defined, I believe, as a
metaphorical status. History can, therefore, re-enact the past and recreate, by
means of productive imagination, the past in the timeline of the story. As
Ricœur writes in the eighth chapter of Time
and Narrative 3, “concretization is obtained only insofar as, on the one
hand, history in some way makes use of fiction to refigure time and, on the other
hand, fiction makes use of history for the same ends”[10].
History and fiction interweave in the narration of the past. Hence, the
narrative reenactment of history is linked with a productive imaginative
understanding of the past as something that is no more. Historians deploy
novelistic techniques in order to make things vividly visible as if they were
present. Nevertheless, historians have to be careful since “the danger is, of
course, that the figural ‘as if’ might collapse into a literal belief, so that
we would no longer merely ‘see-as’ but make the mistake of believing we are
actually seeing”[11].
Richard Kearney observes that “this ‘hallucination of presence’ (easily
conducive to dogmatism and fundamentalism) calls, in Ricœur’s view, for ethical
vigilance by historians in to sustain a proper dialectical balance between
empathy and distance”[12].
History re-appropriates the past as
present and at the same time opens up a duty to the otherness of the past. As
such, history deals with a dual fidelity to past as sameness and difference.
Following this line of reasoning, we can stress that there is a fundamental
relation between historical knowledge as a narrative discourse and otherness.
As Ricœur rightly points out, standing for the others of the past, history
allows for different readings and interpretation. Historical discourse is,
then, a social public discourse calling for multiple readings. The author
defends the thesis that narratives testify to what he understands as human
being’s debt toward history in refiguring the past. Historical discourse
responds, then, to the ethical summons to respect the reality of the past.
Consequently, Ricœur claims that historical discourse is ethically responsible
and expresses “the debt we owe the dead”[13]. As
he puts it, historians are “bound by a debt to people from earlier times, to
the dead. It is the task of philosophical reflection to bring to light the
presuppositions underlying this tacit realism”[14]. It
is in this interpretative framework that the notion of collective memory as an
obliged form of memory arises.
Collective memory relates to the sum
of all possible historical narratives that testify to the past. Agreeing with
Ricœur, David Klemm observes that “historical narratives aim to recount the
lived time of past events against cosmic time and owe a specific obligation to
the memory of the dead, an obligation that makes history accountable to the
documentary archives”[15].
Therefore, through historical narratives human being expresses the experience
of feeling obligated to remember what happened in the past. For example, this
experience finds expression in the process of mourning. Obliged memory is
inserted within the unitary flow of human being’s lived experience. More
precisely, through historical discourse, human beings experience their duty to
remember the others of the past and to do justice to these others. In this
speculative context, the historical plot is conceived as “a servant of the
memory of past human beings”[16].
Through historical knowledge we pay off on our debt to the memory of past human
beings. The notion of debt is “inseparable from the notion of heritage”[17].
Differing from the idea of guilt, debt is connected with the remembering of
other people, namely, with the possibility to make the “inventory of the
heritage of those who have gone before us”[18].
Historiography has to live up the task of memory, it is not moved by curiosity
alone, but “there are crimes that must not be forgotten, victims whose
suffering cries less for vengeance than for narration. The will not to forget
alone can prevent these crimes from ever occurring again”[19].
Ricœur specifies that “among those others to whom we are indebted, the moral
priority belongs to the victims […] The victim at issue here is the other
victim, other than ourselves”[20].
Otherwise put, collective memory is an obligation to do justice to human beings
that as victims have suffered injustice in history. Blending history and
fiction, our personal and our group identity are reliant on an ethical and
social engagement with the other as an interdependent, subjective, and
contingently situated being. Through the reading and the telling of histories,
we explore collective memory as a source of social cohesion connecting through
the symbolic structure of human being’s experience the individual and the
collective, the past and the present. Surely, memory is linked with human
being’s responsibility for the past taken as a singular selfhood, but also and
at the same time memory and the responsibility for the past are analogically extended
to human being’s capability to perform actions “with and for others in just
institutions”[21].
History is, then, a narrative discourse in which we can experience our
obligation to the memory of the past and where we can find inspiration to
perform responsible actions. As such, the mistakes of the past and the
practices of mourning within particular communities can concretely help human
beings in making future decisions and actions.
For
a social phenomenology of collective memory
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur takes up once again the problem
of the faithful or truthful representation of the past. The concern of the
continuity and the discontinuity between history and fiction is considered in
relation to the theme of memory. More exactly, the author proposes an inquiry
into the reality of the historical past invoking an analysis on memory as an
active instrument that reverberates immediately from the individual to the
collective level. By taking up memory as a topic in its own right, Ricœur seeks
to show to what extent historians are dependent on memory and to what extent
they have to go critically beyond it. The use of commemorative memory and its
possible abuse at the level of social praxis leads to a reflection on
forgiveness particularly in its political form. The epistemological and
hermeneutical reliable perspectives of reconfiguration of the past, shaped by
systematic explanatory moves, are now inserted within a broader phenomenology
of memory. This renewed approach to the reality of the historical past begins
with the analysis of the object of memory, that is, of the souvenir “that one
has before the mind,”[22]
it passes through the search for a given memory, i.e., though amnesia or
recollection, and finally moves to reflective memory, namely, to memory as it
is exercised. The topic of memory is the unifying thread of these three parts
of the book. In other words, the phenomenological analysis of memory is
developed through an anthropological inquiry and an epistemological approach, converging
into an ethical and political concern regarding memory as a work that moves
from repetition to active remembrance.
I argue that Ricœur’s work on Memory, History, Forgetting, can be read
backwards so as to shed light on presuppositions that occurred in reaching that
speculative point. It is my contention here that the second section of the work
clearly recalls Ricœur’s earlier reflections of narrativity as the production
of human time and history. I think that this part can be coherently seen as a further
elaboration of his epistemology of history. Indeed, he discusses again the
three phases of historical operation: the stage of archives, the explanation
and understanding phase, and the representation of the past on the
representative level, while focusing his attention on the connection between
memory and the historian’s intention to produce a truthful reconfiguration of
human being’s historical past. This proves that there is an unavoidable
continuity that runs throughout Ricœur’s analysis of history from his earlier
works to his last masterpiece[23].
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur introduces in a short section
the idea of collective memory arising out of the consideration of the sociology
of the collective memory and the phenomenology of the individual memory. The
notion of collective memory renews the interest on the question “Who?” since we
can always ask to whom this memory belongs. In Time and Narrative and in Oneself
as Another, the author clearly observes that we can give an answer to this
question by using personal pronouns. As he puts it, “the question ‘Who did
this?’ can be answered by using a demonstrative pronoun (he, she, this one,
that one), or by giving a definite description (so and so). These replies
render something in general a someone”[24].
Pronouns are “means of designation from which the self-designation of the
speaking subject follows”[25].
According to Ricœur the capacity to remember is attributed to “all the subjects
that find lexical expression in one or the other of the personal pronouns”[26].
As such, I can speak of my memory, of your memory, of his or her memory, of our
memory and their memory. Memory is a plural phenomenon.
Language is what directs the
self-designation. Ricœur writes: “memory enters into the region of language;
memories spoken of, pronounced are already a kind of discourse that the subject
engages in with herself. What is pronounced in this discourse occurs in the
common language, most often in the mother tongue, which is the language of
others”[27].
Therefore, Timo Helenius observes that in Ricœur’s
thought “the act of self-designation is linked to the capacity to remember
through linguistic mediation – the notion of myself is gathered in the midst of
language that clarifies my relation to my acts by ascribing those very acts to
me as their agent”[28].
Ricœur pushes this discourse much further. The analysis of the role and the
nature of language, leads him to elaborate on the relations between personal
and collective memory. On the one hand, if memory is limited to individuals,
there arises the risk of “isolating recalled memories by making them depend on
specific egos”[29].
On the other hand, memory must not be reduced to a super-concept or a
substantial principle, that is, to a sort of Hegelian objective spirit. Let me
focus on Ricœur’s critical analysis of these two extremes. I argue that
reflecting on the problem of the connection between individual and collective
memory, Ricœur further elaborates his socio-phenomenology strictly dependent on
his earlier phenomenological approach to vulnerability and to his hermeneutics
of the self as a wounded ego-cogito.
The comprehension of the precise
contours of the idea of collective memory implies to extend the
socio-philosophical reflection beyond oneself and the other seen as individual
human beings in order to encompass identity in its collective dimension.
Collective Memory is something collectively experienced in the past that truly
lies at the heart of our shared identity. The analysis of collective memory and
the cohesion of life in common are complex socially and politically charged
connected phenomena. Ricœur’s task to elaborate on collective memory and on the
social cohesion of the collective sphere of human life from a
socio-phenomenological standpoint is accompanied by the most significant
explanatory resources of his hermeneutical thinking. Specifically, the author
begins by inquiring about the responses to the question of collective memory
given by two past philosophical and sociological orientations: John Locke’s empirical
perspective and Maurice Halbwachs’s writings on the
social construction of memory.
Locke’s philosophical approach to
the nature of individual memory and Halbwachs’s
sociological contribution to that topic show important sources of the
presuppositions concerning memory in the Western tradition. The investigation
of these two different and opposing attempts provides the conceptual framework,
i.e., the basic theoretical horizon within which Ricœur’s notion of collective
memory itself becomes intelligible. Thus, let me briefly sketch Locke’s and Halbwachs’s antithetical contributions to the topic of
memory, before I move on to Ricœur’s position. I argue that the study of these
two different approaches has a great impact on Ricœur’s conception of collective
memory. In other terms, I believe that a helpful outline of his basic
orientation to the topic of collective memory can be drawn in relation to the
work of Locke and Halbwachs.
In the context of the rise of the
modern Western nation-state, of political liberalism and market economy, John
Locke’s thought represents a clear individualistic reaction against political
absolutism, that is, against any political hierarchical framework in which
rights are vested in the nobility. Positioning himself within classical
liberalism, this English theorist of the social contract conceives human beings
as individual entities free to do anything they desire so long they do not
infringe on the rights to life, liberty, and property of others. Grounding his
social analysis on the fact that each human being is a rights-bearer, for Locke
any society and any group is the sum of the individuals who compose it.
Otherwise put, community is an arithmetical sum of human beings. What held
together collective existence is the economic interaction and the contract
established among atomistic individuals in a framework provided by political
institutions. The definition of individuals as bearers of rights is connected
with the concept of memory as constitutive of our personal identity, as a
necessary condition for our autonomy and legal responsibility.
In Locke’s view, memory is conceived
as a storehouse from which we can exact images of past events and retrieve past
experiences at any time without any loss of information. Specifically, personal
identity is tied to the continuity of consciousness. For Locke, consciousness
is what allows the identity of a human being to persist over time. There is,
then, an equation between consciousness, personal identity, and memory. As he
writes in his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1689) it is
the same consciousness that makes a
man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only, whether it
be annexed only to the individual substance, or can be continued in a
succession of several substances. For as far as any intelligent being can
repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it has of it at
first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far it
is the same personal self[30].
In this attempt to define human being’s personal identity in
terms of memory, it can be said that the consciousness of the past is, at
least, the same as memory. In sum, personal identity relies on memory as one’s
own conscious ability to recall past experiences. Therefore, we can coherently
conclude that in Locke’s perspective the priority always falls on the side of
individual memory.
Maurice Halbwachs,
in contrast to Locke’s methodological individualism, argues that historical
memory and collective memory have priority over autobiographical individual
memory and personal memory. Belonging to the second generation of the
Durkheimian school of sociology, according to Halbwachs,
memory is not a phenomenon pertaining only to human being as an individual
being, but rather it is inevitably socially conditioned even in the most
individual aspects. Otherwise put, memory is a social fact that confers
identity on individuals and groups. Individual memory depends, then, upon
collective memory. As Halbwachs argues: “no memory is
possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and
retrieve their recollections”[31].
Therefore, memory is delivered from different social frameworks and
collectivities such as the family, the generation, the nation, etc.
According to Ricœur, we can
recognize a negative and a positive level in Halbwachs’s
reflection on memory. First, for Ricœur, the negative argument can be resumed
as follows “when we no longer belong to the group in the memory of which a
given recollection is preserved, our own memory is weakened for lack of
external supports”[32].
On the other hand, the positive level consists in the acknowledgment that our
personal remembering can occur only where we situate ourselves “within the
viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective
thought”[33].
Human memories always take place in socially marked places. These social
frameworks of memory provide human being with the means for ordering and
organizing his or her memories. In short, it is in these social contexts that
we can find the preconditions for recollecting experiences and for making them
meaningful. As such, the social framework is considered as an inherent part of
the work of recollection. In Halbwachs’s perspective,
as Ricœur observes, “adult memories do not differ from childhood memories. They
make us travel from group to group, from framework to framework, in both
spatial and temporal sense. Recognizing a friend from a portrait sends us back
to the milieu where we have seen him”[34].
Therefore, instead of a universal kind of collective memory, the French
sociologist claims that there is necessarily a multiplicity of collective
memories representing the various groups that constitute our belonging. Halbwachs clearly claims that: “a man who remembers alone
what others do not remember resembles somebody who sees what others do not see.
It is as if he suffers from hallucinations”[35].
Memory enables the social link among individuals, family traditions, customs of
class, beliefs, and places. What seems to me significant in Halbswachs’s
analysis is the fact that memory is basically a social action based on our
lived experience, namely, it is an active production of ourselves as social
beings. Personal remembering is collective since we collect our remembered
experience in the social contexts of past experience within the socially
situated remembering in the present. In this way, “we produce expanded versions
of ourselves as social beings by bringing into view distinctions only visible
by comparing our experience across two different social milieus”. In
conclusion, following Halbwachs’s view, remembering
is a collective shared framework of meaning determined by the various social
groups to which we belong. We cannot exercise our memory as a-social
individuals, but rather as social beings belonging to different groups. Based
on spatial and temporal reconstruction, if memory is not located in the social
space of a group it necessarily fails.
In his mature thought, Ricœur offers
a mediating position between these two polar opposite perspectives. First, the
author acknowledges that Locke’s model has the merit of making memory a
criterion of personal identity. Locke gives greater prominence to the fact that
memory is something properly mine: it is my own memory. As Ricœur observes,
asserting the possession of memories
as one’s own constitutes in linguistic practice a model of mineness
for all psychical phenomena […] it was John Locke who, by virtue of the
flexibility of the English language, began to theorize the operation by
introducing the expression ‘appropriate’ as well as a series of semantic moves
with the word ‘own’ taken in its pronominal or verbal form[36].
Yet, Ricœur especially appreciates that within the framework
of his theory of memory, Locke rejects the Cartesian solution to the problem of
personal identity in terms of substantial unity. Accordingly, Locke argues that
“personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance, but […] in the
identity of consciousness”[37].
Otherwise put, for Locke, it is not the fact of being the same substantial
substrate that ensures human being’s identity, but it is only the consciousness
and the continuity of memory that he or she has of himself or herself as being
one and the same person to make identity an “uninterrupted continuity between
the first and last stage in the development of that which we can consider to be
the same individual”[38].
In a crucial comment in Oneself as
Another, Ricœur recognizes that, through the rejection of substantiality
and the adaptation of psychological continuity as the main criterion for our
self-identity, Locke has anticipated a concept which will occupy a central
place in his social ethics: that of selfhood. By this remark, Ricœur emphasizes
that Locke’s thought introduces “a caesura in his analysis without having to
give up his general concept of the sameness of a thing with itself. And yet the
turn to reflection and memory did, in fact, mark a conceptual reversal in which
selfhood was silently substituted for sameness”[39].
Nevertheless, Ricœur sees in Locke’s
conception of memory two major difficulties. The first concerns Locke’s
argument that self-identity consists in the consciousness that human being has
as being one and the same though memory. Ricœur observes:
to Locke and his partisans will be
regularly opposed the aporias of an identity hinging on the testimony of memory
alone; psychological aporias concerning the limits, the intermittence (during
sleep, for example), and the failings of memory, but also more properly
ontological aporias: rather than saying that a person exists inasmuch as that
person remembers, is it not possible, Butler will ask, to assign the continuity
of memory to the continuous existence of a soul-substance? Without having
foreseen it, Locke revealed the aporetic character of the very question of
identity[40].
Second, Locke’s perspective comes up against another serious
challenge, notably the well-known following problem of social atomism whereby
society is seen as nothing more than a collection of individuals. In this
social framework, where human beings as self-interested, equal, and rational
social atoms are aggregated together on the basis of the social contract, all
other forms of collective identity are extraneous to the formation of this
society. Without the articulation of the social contract, collective identity
is destined to be absent. That is to say, if the social contract did not exist,
human beings would be deemed to lack a sense of themselves as constituting a
group or a collectivity, i.e., what Locke calls “one body”. Ricœur rejects such
an individualistic starting point. Against Locke’s perspective, he thinks that
Lockean position of social atomism and political contractualism
can hardly account for the complex lines of social cohesion. For Ricœur, society
is a very concrete reality and not a mere assemblage of individuals who remain
divided even when together. In other words, as Barash critically stresses,
Ricœur believes that “beyond a series of individual identities constituted by
personal recollections”[41]
it is necessary to “search for an appropriate principle of social cohesion”[42].
Following the elaboration of Ricœur’s thought, I argue that the ultimate
meaning of one’s individual life, as fundamentally an ontologically relational
life developing within the plural web of relationships, provides the
theoretical ground for thinking social cohesion.
Aware of the limits of Locke’s empiricism, Ricœur directs a
critical analysis to the idea of collective memory and social collectivity
elaborated by Maurice Halbwachs. According to Ricœur,
Halbwachs fails to recognize the individual. Although
the French social scientist clearly emphasizes that individual members might
“vary in the intensity with which they experience group memories,”[43]
he adds that “each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this
viewpoint changes as my relationships to other milieus change”[44].
Therefore, common memory is differently experienced by each human being within
varying contexts. As the French historian Pierre Nora notes, for Halbwachs “memory wells up from groups that it welds
together, which is to say […] that there are as many memories as there are
groups, that memory is by nature multiple yet specific”[45]. However, agreeing with Barash’s critical
reflection on collective memory,[46]
I believe that in Halbwachs’s perspective individual
memory is effectively displaced into the collective one. Even if on the one
hand it is true that Halbwachs recognizes that memory
is plural and yet individual, on the other hand the individual dimension of
memory is absorbed in the social and collective frameworks. In short, I argue
that going beyond Durkheim’s focus on the social, Halbwachs’s
emphasis on the notion of collective memory is favored at the expense of the
individual act of recollection. Accordingly, discussing the complexity of Halbwachs’s sociological position, Ricœur emblematically
observes:
But does Halbwachs
not cross an invisible line, the line separating the thesis ‘no one ever
remembers alone’ from the thesis ‘we are not an authentic subject of the
attribution of memories’? Does not the very act of ‘placing oneself’ in a group
and of ‘displacing’ oneself or shifting from group to group presuppose a
spontaneity capable of establishing a continuation with itself? If not, society
would be without any social actors[47].
Following Ricœur’s line of reasoning, Halbwachs
is critically accused of depriving the individual of his own memory. In other
terms, Ricœur strongly criticizes Halbwachs for
having gone too far leading to the conclusion that “we are not genuine owners
of our own memories”[48].
Nonetheless, for Ricœur, Halbwachs’s “surprising
dogmatism”[49]
does not provide grounds for dismissing the recognition of a remarkable aspect
of his work. More exactly, Ricœur accepts Halbwachs’s
thesis that no one ever remembers alone, we always remember with others and
with the help of others.
Undoubtedly, human being’s memory
makes use of the memories of others and grows up surrounded by social phenomena
and gestures, images and landscapes. But instead of building on the thesis that
individual memories are fragments of an all-encompassing collective memory, for
Ricœur collective memories emerge from the interaction and the productive
exchange of individual memories within a framework provided by societal memory.
As Robert Bevan observes, Ricœur’s argument “leads, to some extent, to a
homogenization: a shared memory and, consequently, a shared attitude to
representations of the past – including architecture”[50]. In
this assessment, individual memory and communal memory, which are rooted in
public space and in social structures, exist in multidirectional and
simultaneous relationships. The social locations of meaning specific to
remembering practices are always implicated in the ways in which mediated
representation of the past are imagined and transposed. At this point, in commenting
on Halbwachs’s work, Ricœur points out that, in the
first instance, “it was the personal act of recollection that the mark of the
social was initially sought and then found. This act of recollection is in each
case ours. To believe this, to attest to it, cannot be denounced as a radical
illusion”[51].
Yet, using a quasi-Leibnizian idea of perspective, Halbwachs
adds that
while the collective memory endures
and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is
individuals as group members who remember […] I would readily acknowledge that
each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint
changes as my position changes, that this position itself changes as my
relationships to other milieu change[52].
Ricœur succinctly argues that naively “Halbwachs
himself believes that he can place himself in the position of the social bond,
when he critiques it and contests it”[53]. In
brief, the French philosopher rejects Halbwachs’s
idea of social framework and collectivity as something unilaterally imposed to
every individual consciousness. Finally, the he concludes that Locke’s and Halbwachs’s perspectives lead
to the same negative conclusion:
whether we consider the sociology of collective memory or the phenomenology of
individual memory, neither has any great success than the other in deriving the
apparent legitimacy of the adverse position from the strong position each,
respectively, holds: on the one side, the cohesion of the states of
consciousness of the individual ego; on the other, the capacity of collective
entities to preserve and recall common memories[54].
After carefully having weighed up the arguments and counter
arguments, Ricœur locates his own elaboration of the notion of collective
memory squarely within the history of philosophy and the social scientific
studies, aiming at epitomizing the relation between individual and plural
identity in the social sphere. Acknowledging an intrinsic relationship between
memory and identity, individuality and collectivity, the French author attempts
to locate collective memory in an intermediary zone. In this way, in Ricœur’s
phenomenology of memory, the notion of collective memory assumes an
intermediary configuration between the idea of individual’s memory, as it is
exemplified in the work of John Locke, and the assumption that common memory is
an entity standing above and beyond the individuals constituting it, as it is
presented in the sociological approach of Halbwachs.
Otherwise put, the question of collective memory arises together with the
problem concerning the way in which the principle of cohesion of plural
existence is formulated. Thus, Ricœur’s elaboration of the concept of
collective memory is linked to the determination of a principle needed to
understand the collective sphere as a being-in-common. As Barash comments,
Ricœur’s phenomenology of collective memory is parallel to the task of finding
a principle of the common social world which would be
capable of avoiding the two opposing
tendencies which have continually hunted ethico-political
theory in the modern world: at the one end, the Scylla of atomized private
interests out of which collective cohesion is supposed to spontaneously spring;
at the other end, the Charybdis of the crushing domination by the organic
State, conceived as a Volksgeist
or, to speak the twentieth-century totalitarian language which distorted
Hegel’s thinking, as ‘substantial homogeneity’[55].
From Locke’s approach to memory, I believe that Ricœur is
influenced to direct his attention at the side of individual memory. We must
not lose sight of the fact that individual memory is closely connected to the
inwardness associated with our personal experience, that is, it is linked to
the mineness of lived selfhood and with its endurance
over time. However, against David Pellauer’s
interpretation of Ricœur’s philosophy, I believe that it is not completely
correct and even dangerous to argue that for Ricœur “the priority will always
fall on the side of individual memory”[56].
If, on the one hand, it is true that Ricœur attempts to preserve both personal
identity and memory from being absorbed ecstatically into the collective
processes, on the other hand, though, I argue that in Ricœurian
conceptualization of identity, he highlights human being’s individuality cannot
exist apart from the collective context. This is just another way to say that
human being is ontologically a socially situated relational being whose life
can be interpreted and explained only in relation to others. In Ricœur’s
thought, then, I think that there is a dialectical balance between the view of
each person as singularity and the common life of the greater collectivity.
This delicate balance between
individuality and plurality, as a fil
rouge that permeates all aspects of Ricœur’s thought, is clearly reflected
in his phenomenological approach to collective memory. Not surprisingly, after
the exploration of the complementary resources arising from Locke’s and Halbwachs’s perspectives on memory and common life, in
attempting to steer between these two extremes, Ricœur goes back to Husserl’s
phenomenology. More exactly, Ricœur returns to and retrieves once again the
elements of the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian
Meditations concerning the apprehension of the coexistence between the
polarity of the transcendental Ego and the Egos of the others. In sum,
Husserl’s goal is to explain and examine the possibility of comprehending the
constitution of the communal context. Without recapitulating Ricœur’s polemical
attack to Husserl’s totalizing idealism, what is of crucial importance here is
Husserl’s theory of “apperceptive transfer” or “analogizing appresentation”
as a useful model for understanding the connection between individual and
collective memory. Yet, for the reasons stated above, in my opinion it would be
incorrect to speak of a passage from individuality to collectivity and
vice-versa. For Husserl, the a-priori appresentation
constitutes the condition of possibility of grasping the other in the communal
sphere. According to the German phenomenologist, the other cannot be given to
us in an original way, but only through analogy. More precisely, the other is
seen as a modification of the ego, that is, the other is given through a prior
understanding of ourselves and through an irreducibly mediated intention. Conceiving
the other “in me, yet as other”, opens up the possibility of apprehending
others as communal others.
As Barash observes, the analogical appresentation serves to Husserl as “the starting point for
a theory of intersubjectivity at the different levels of articulation of the
social world, from interpersonal interaction to ‘the higher intersubjective
communities’ that designate larger collectivities”[57].
However, differently from Ricœur’s perspective, Husserl’s theory of the
constitution of communities is not grounded on the work of collective memory.
Ricœur writes:
the final paragraphs of the famous
“Fifth Cartesian Meditation” do indeed propose the theme of “communalization”
of experience at all its levels of meaning, from the foundation of common
ground of physical nature to the celebrated constitution of ‘higher
intersubjective communities’ (still called ‘personalities of a high order’), a
constitution resulting from a process of ‘social communalization’. We certainly
do not encounter the word ‘common memory’ in this broadened context of
transcendental phenomenology, but it would be perfectly in harmony with the
concept of ‘worlds of culture’, understood in the sense of ‘concrete lifeworlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate
communities lives their passive and active lives’[58].
Agreeing with Barash’s critical reading on the topic of
collective memory, I argue that the absence of this notion in Husserl’s work is
not astonishing. In his theory of interpersonal communities, Husserl conceives
the self-certitude of the transcendental ego as “an absolute basis for
meaningful interaction in the common life-world, independent of historical flux
and contingency”[59].
Although Ricœur flatly rejects Husserl’s foundational subjectivity and his
claim for an absolutely certain grounding, in his thought on collective memory
he draws inspiration from Husserl’s principle of analogy. In other terms,
Ricœur uses analysis as a critical principle that allows us to make
intelligible the relation among human being’s personal life, social cohesion,
and collective memory. Accordingly, Ricœur claims:
it is only by analogy, and in
relation to individual consciousness and its memory, that collective memory is
held to be a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the
course of the history of the groups concerned, and that it is accorded the
power to place on stage these common memories, on the occasion of holidays,
rites and public celebrations[60].
In short, inspired by Husserl’s notion of analogy, in his
theory of collective memory, Ricœur stresses that there is an analogical
relation between individuals and groups. In other terms, we can argue that
Ricœur’s theory of collective identity and collective memory depends on the
strict analogy that connects individual and community. My purpose here is not
to deny the role that analogies play between individuality and collectivity,
singularity and sociality. Nonetheless, I argue that it is necessary to find a
justification for such analogies. If Husserl anchors his notion of analogy in
the fundamental self-certitude of the transcendental subject, endowing the ego
with an Olympian perspective, Ricœur’s preoccupation with the relations that
can be analogically applied to individual and community offers up an
alternative ground.
I think that Ricœur’s account of the
analogy between individual and collective memory finds its own justification in
his broader hermeneutics of symbols. It is within the symbolic framework that
individual memory can interact with societal memory. But what does Ricœur mean
with the concept of symbol in relation to the problem of collective memory? It
seems to me essential to briefly clarify this difficult point. Surprisingly, we
can observe that in his discussion of collective memory in Memory,
History, Forgetting, the French author does not
present any adequate analysis of the role and the function of the symbol in
bringing about social cohesion[61].
Yet, the notion of symbol takes different meanings in the different periods of
Ricœur’s thought. To simplify, we can recall two principal articulations of the
concept of symbol in his oeuvre. The
first articulation relates to the narrow sense of the term symbol as a superior
realm, i.e., as a figuration of what cannot be grasped in the domain of direct
experience such as the lamb as the liturgical symbol of Israel’s deliverance.
This conception, which is tied to the Christian tradition, is developed in Ricœur’s
book On Interpretation: Essay on Freud
(1965) against Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbol, elaborated in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923), as
far too broad. The second articulation of the concept of the symbol relates to
the broad sense of it. A little more than a decade later in the first volume of
Time and Narrative (1983) Ricœur’s
changes his mind but without ever explicitly referring to this change in his
writings. Drawing directly on the perspective of Cassirer, Ricœur writes:
“symbolic forms are cultural processes that articulate experience as a whole.
If I speak more precisely of symbolic mediation, it is to distinguish, among
symbols of a cultural nature, the ones that underlie action and that constitute
its first signification”[62].
What is of particular importance in my discussion on collective memory is the
concept of symbolic mediation. With reference to Cassirer and to the conception
of symbol elaborated by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book
The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973), the notion of symbolic mediation allows Ricœur to reintroduce in his
mature thought the theory of the symbol as a source of intersubjective
cohesion. The configuration of the public sphere depends on the interpretation
and the communication of the fragmented symbolic networks, which have
interwoven significances according to the perspective of the group that
interprets them. As Barash puts it, “it is through the cohesion and continuity
of these intertwined symbolic networks that the past and the present are joined
together in a horizon of experience and remembrance that is turned toward the
future, shared by contemporary generations of different ages whose lifespans
overlap”[63].
Although in Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur does not relate to the theory of symbol
deployed in Cassirer’s thought and the anthropology of Geertz to his theory of
collective memory, it seems to me clear that these two theories constitute the
background to understand the use of the notion of symbol in his phenomenology
of collective memory. Otherwise put, Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory can be,
then, understood in connection with his hermeneutics of symbols, namely with
the possibility to interpret the multiplicity of social contexts as symbolic
frameworks in which human actions take place. Briefly stated, the symbol has a
fundamental role for understanding the analogies that individual and community
presuppose. Through the mediation of the symbolic engagement, human being’s
individual awareness is inserted within the “intersubjective cohesion refracted
in the fragmented perspectives of the groups that are engaged in collective
relations”[64].
In this way, Ricœur claims that there is a mutual building up between
individual and collective memory. These presuppositions lead him to the
hypothesis of a triple assignment of memory: to ourselves as individuals, to
close relationships, and to others. Ricœur suggests, then, that there is “an
intermediate level of reference between the poles of individual memory and
collective memory, where concrete exchanges operate between the living memory
of individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which we
belong”[65].
Yet, he adds that “it is, therefore, not with the sole hypothesis of the
polarity between individual memory and collective memory that we must enter
into the field of history, but with the hypothesis of the threefold attribution
of memory: to oneself, to one’s close relations, and to others”[66].
The relations with closely related persons “occupy the middle-ground between the
self and the ‘they’”[67].
These closely related persons are people, “who count for us, and from whom we
count”[68].
Through these relations I can approve the fact that I am existentially able “to
speak, act, recount, impute to myself responsibility for my actions”[69].
To remember means, therefore, to rediscover our existential social
situatedness. It is only through self-attestation arising from the relations
with the others that memory is made concrete. Following Ricœur’s phenomenology
of memory, we can argue that re-membering, resting on
symbolic mediation, is set on the path of mutuality as social shared
con-textuality. In conclusion, I think that Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory
cannot be understood without his hermeneutic of symbol since there is no memory
that is not mapped into an already existing social inhabited space, in which
the collective communicability of experience finds its own place.
Conclusion
Through the application of the
phenomenological, sociological, and historical tools, in this article I have
explored Ricœur’s approach to collective memory from his epistemological and
hermeneutical analysis to his socio-phenomenolgical
perspective. We have emphasized three major points. First, we have seen that
the individual consciousness cannot be considered as ultimate foundation of
collective memory. Second, drawing upon phenomenological resources, we have
focused the attention on the singularity of lived experience and lived
subjectivity. As such, we have understood that in Ricœur’s perspective
collective memory cannot be considered neither as a sort of objective spirit
nor as the mere addition of individual memories. In short, collective memory
has emerged in its historical dimension as a dynamic and vulnerable phenomenon
linked to the pre-figuration, the configuration and the re-configuration of
social reality. Let me offer now a few concluding remarks.
Ricœur’s approach clearly shows that
memory can neither be limited to the personal capacity to remember belonging to
a singular individual, nor can collective memory be considered as a sort of
objective spirit invoking a holistic perspective. Otherwise put, memory is at
the crossroad of history, personal identity, and community. Characterized by a
temporal tangle, memory is a dynamic phenomenon that plays a key role of
actualization, re-actualization and re-activation of the past. The
representation of the past has a social importance and can be considered as a
major societal challenge. Memory works through images and narrative
imagination. Memory is, then, mostly narrative and can be regarded as a
laboratory in which possible human individual and collective realities can be
tested. As such, remembering is directly linked to human ability to use
language and to tell stories, as well as to the problem of truth-claims and to
the idea of narrative identity. According to Ricoeur,
human being’s collective and individual identities are not static structures,
but rather on-going tasks, processes of constancy and rectification that
synthesizes the horizons of past, present, and future. Through the mediation of
the narrative function, memories are transformed in personal and common
stories, that is, in declarative plots in which the events are grasped together
in a coherent and meaningful causal network. Linked to the complex development
of his hermeneutics of symbols, Ricoeur’s theory of
collective memory reveals its critical purpose and its productive exercise.
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