4, Keeping the Past in Mind Edward S. Casey It-was lost to sight but kept in memory. = Augustine, Confessions Memory, therefore, is certainly not the mental process which, at fist sight, one would imagine = Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar 1 K ening the east in mind: where else is it going to be kept? We could perhaps try to keep it in the past itself; but then we would have the past containing itself; but then we would have the past con: taining itself, swallowing its own tail. An event would die out the moment it was born: it would have no continuing protentional halo ~ fulfilled or unfulfilled — nor would it be rememberable. Yet an event ‘shorn of all these attributes would no longer be an event at all. To keep ‘a past event entirely past, with no possible repercussions in the present, would be to deprive it ofits very eventfulness. "Remembrance is now;" says George Steiner in After Babel:! but this is so only because the past, itself is now: is now being reenacted, relived. ‘A timely instance of this very principle is with us tonight. Here ‘we are, in this present, the second evening of yet another SPEP con: ference, but with an awareness that this conference marks the twen- tieth such meeting since the founding of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 1962. (Not 1961: anniversaries, like the birthdays we have come increasingly to dreed, are always one in advance of our expectations; when I became forty, it was pointed out to me by a sadistic friend that I was in fact entering the fifth decade of living on this earth; the arrow of calendrical and clock time is indeed 3A ‘Keeping the Fast in Mind 37 en ever-advancing, always being one-up on us. Lived time, in contrast and especially as our body declines, seems always one-down: to lag behind the calendar and clock, until we reach a point in old age when we may bbe living more in the past of childhood than in the present. But notice that even then we are not living in the past as past but in a past that hhas become, that has taken over, the present.) In any case, we are here, strategically poised in a twenty-year shadow of a past which I am for- tunate enough to have known in the first person. How then do I keep it in mind? ‘Of course mainly by remembering it. It is curious, though, how little detail we can often recall, even of a “founding event" as Eliade might call the first meeting of SPEP. Indeed, it could be argued that the less detailed the better with regard t» commemoration of origins, not ‘hecause they were ignominious or confused but because they encourage repetition of just the sort that Eliade considers essential to celebrations ‘of cosmogonic Urzeiten. There is Washington crossing the Delaware, 4 group of gentlemen meeting in Philadelphia, a Tea Party earlier on, fa few other such happenings, and little else. And yet this suifices to ‘enable us to commemorate our origins as a nation. It is as if something inexorably schematic is at work in matters like this ~ as if the gaps in memory are so functional that they are not even missed. So perhaps it is fine that I canrot remember more than the follow- ing fragments from the past that was the founding event of the society under whose auspices we are meeting tonight: — builliant October weather on the shores of Lake Michigan. — the meetings attended by about twenty people, among them eight cr ten graduate students like myself) were held in a single classroom in Kresge Hall, a classroom that I think I could relocate to this day ito this day: here is the Tong arm of the past extending itself into the present} — some rheoscopic films shown by Erwin Straus, who was then work: ing on the nature of facial expression (Straus later, at a SPEP meeting jn Boston, rose dramatically from the floor and pleaded for recogni tion of the permanent dimension of the past: yet another testimony to its inzeach into the present! — an interminable wrangle one evening over the proper title for the Fledgling society: should ‘existentialism’ or "phenomenology" come first in order, with all the weighty implications of literal precedence? (Actually, this was @ genuine philosophical issue, since John Wilds more or less Heideggerian wish to merge the {wo currents wherever possible was not the wish of certain Husserlian purists: an issue that38 Tl, PHENOMENA OF TIME Keoping the Past x Mind 39 vas finally defused by the subsequent founding of Husserl, Heideg- ger, and Merleau-Ponty Circles), ~ an early Saturday morning meeting that was much too early for the likes of « nightowl like myself to attend: here there is nothing to report except @ notgoing: the event is a nonevent. Now there you have it: my way of keeping this past in mind, Just four or five items survive. Disappointing, is it not? Fositively paltry, you might say. Is not the role of an appointed memnon, the official reminder of heroes, to conserve the past in toto, or as nearly so as pos sible? Have I not failed miserably in this mission? But let us reflect for 2 moment on the very disappointment. Or rather more exactly, the lack of it in the circumstance. You do not really expect of me, nor I of myself, that total recall be practiced on this or any comparable occasion of recollecting. The mystery is why we do not expect more of ourselves in these matters — why we are willing ‘o put up with partial recall only, with schematic representations of ‘the past rather than the past returning in full regalia. If recollection is really reproduction — as both Kant and Husser] insist on calling it = then why do we not more often keep the whole past in mind down to its last detail? Why not, when (a) there are occasions when this would be extremely useful [for example, in court trials: in examinations; in historical-mindedness generallyl; and (b) we know that itis in fact a human possibility: as witnessed by Sheresheveski, the Russian mne- monist studied by Luria who could recall fifteen years later, and word: for-word, several stanzas of The Divine Comedy read to him just once in Italian, a language he did not know? Nevertheless, the occasions in adult life when full recollection i called for are relatively rare, and many of them can be aided by mechanical devices {for instance, the always operative camera that records all transactions at banks); and the posses sion of eidetic memory can be more a curse than a blessing: Sheresheveski was so overburdened and even incapacitated by his gift” that he had to develop techniques to forget much of what he would ‘otherwise have perfectly retained! But the question will not go away quite so quickly. Apart from -reasons of utility or psychic tranquility, why do we not remember more ‘than we usually do remember? ‘thinkers as contraposed as Bergson and Freud have both posited that we do in fact hold the entire past in mind = only in a form whose reactivation is impeded (for example, by the distraction of current concerns or by repression}. This view dies hard; ‘even after the belief in discrete engrams of memory has been given up, elaborate electrochemical models of the brain continue to imply that somehow, somewhere (if not in engrammatic traces then in reticular circuitry pervading the brain as a whole|, the past continues to exist intact, coiled up cozily. Contemporary cognitive psychologists dis- tinguish between ‘availability’ and "accessibility" in memory storage “available” means what is presently on tap and ‘accessible’ what could become on tap, the unmistakable implication being that in principle everything experienced or learned is ultimately accessible given the right means of access. Indeed, all of mnemotechnics from Simonides to Lorayne and Lucas rely on precisely the same premise: it can all be recovered if only we go about it in the right way. But this premise is otiose even if it turns out to be true. Surely not even most of the past has to be retained for it to be effectively and successfully kept in mind. 0 ‘What is bound to mislead us is the dichotomist assumption that keeping in mind must be either an entirely active or an utterly passive affair. This assumption has plagued theories of memory as well as other mental activities. On the activist model, keeping in mind would be a creating or recreating in mind of what is either a mere mirage to begin with or a set of stultified sensations. Much as God in the seventeenth century was sometimes thought to operate by continual creation, so the mind was given the same lofty powers in the Romantic thought that represented a reaction to much of what the seventeenth century stood for. But the activist model is by no means limited to the Roman: ‘tic idealists or Naturphilosophen; it reappears in more than one phase of phenomenology; and it informs the sober theorizing of Bartlett and Piaget on the nature of remembering On the passivist model, on the other hand, the mind is mute and unconfigurating; it takes in but does not give back other than what it takes in; itis a recording mechanism only. Something like this view is at work in empiricist theories of ‘m_mory, considered as restricted to the contents of Humean “impres- sions? and arranged according to their order and position in time; it continues in Kant’s notion of “reproductive imagination’ as operating by association alone; and itis found flourishing today in asychological accounts of what is revealingly called “human associative memory"? It is all too evident, I think, that where the activist model gives too little credit to the incomings of experience, the passivis: model gives too much. To begin with, there is too much there in experience, too much density in it, to claim that we are continually creating or constructing it And yet it is equally mistaken to believe that itis all there, graven42 TL, PHENOMENA OF Tim ngepang me Fuse ure wisi - Ww Here we must ask: how do things now stand with regard to the ‘vexing issue of whether remembering is an active or passive affair? ‘Let us go back to the language of "keep" for a moment. It isa strik- ing fact that both as a noun and as a verb this word has both active and passive meanings. As a noun, "keep" can mean either "the act of keeping or maintaining” or “the fact of being kept As a verb, it means either "take in, receive, contain, hold" (and more specifically to "take in with the eyes, ears, or mind” or to ‘guard, defend, protect, preserve, save" These bivalent meanings, differing as they do, are not at all incom patible. Indeed, precisely by means of the component actions of keep- ing, traced out just above, they are complementary to each other and more crucially} simultaneously realizable. Thus "the act of Keeping’ by virtue of its remaining with what is kept, helps to constitute "the fact of being kept” And the taking in or holding is a guarding or saving thanks to the element of withholding that conceals the keeping and thus the kept itself. Consider how this occurs in a concrete case of remembering. I remember attending a SPEP conference in New York at the New School for Social Research and having to change lecture halls atthe last moment to accommodate Hannsh Arends talk, for which @ large crowd had showed up. Since 1 had helped to plan this conference, I felt respon sible for things going smoothly. After the new hall had been arranged, L walked over with Arendt, who had been quite upset about the change. But she cooled down in the course of the walk and went on to deliver ‘a marvelous lecture on the Socratic conception of virtue. As with so ‘many memories, this is very schematic in character: I remember little ‘more of the occasion than I have here reported. Yet I would certainly ‘want to say that I have kept it in mind all these years, and in precisely the bivalent senses just discussed. The memory has been actively main tained by being revived from time to time (for example, when ever I think of Hannah Arendt for whatever reason}, and by this very revival it has attained a state of "being kept” in mind throughout. At the same ‘ime, it was received, taken in, at a most impressionable point (both in my life and during the meeting itself) and preserved or saved thanks to this very receptive sensitivity. ‘What we can observe in any such example is a delicate dialectic of the active and the passive, the receptive and the spontaneous. There fs, at the very least, a constant going back and forth between these dimensions. Heidegger was attuned to much the same thing when he wrote that “what keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us"* The hold is held" in remembering, and this is accomplished by its keeping. The hhold, what holds me, is constituted by the particulars of a memory (Ms. ‘Arendt’ ire, her piercing dark eyes, the mollifying walk) as they are assembled by the setting in which they in-here (here the New School ‘meeting itself). These are givens of the past of which I can be no more than a more or less receptive witness; they bear down upon me and may even burden me if I become obsessed by them. But I bear up on them in turn by holding, keeping hold on the memory itself. I bear it in mind actively, keeping it on the agenda there. It is not that I simply store this experience and regain access to it as if it had been packaged ‘or pickled on some psychical or neuroanatomical shelf. Having taken in the experience, being kept by it initially (“impressed ‘struck’ we say inadequately], I keep it subsequently by bringing it back to mind ‘again, thereby restoring it. And myself as well: for not only Hannah ‘Arendt but my-being-in-her presence is kept on, recollected from the shards of the scene so imperfectly recalled in terms of detail. No mat- ter: the experience has been kept in mind. Tt has been remembered, and in a way that is at once active and passive — so much so that we fare no longer constrained to choose between these traditional alternatives. v [Now that we know something about how the past is kept in mind, its basic holding action, we must pursue a quite different line of thought by asking: is the past kept within the mind alone? Can we confine it to this tenure, critical as it is, and important as it is to stress, in the fact of efforts to locate remembering elsewhere? Such efforts currently tend to seek the essence, or at least the formal structure, of memory either in the functioning of the brain or in information-processing mechanisms. Neither is adequate to the task of providing a truly com- prehensive account of remembering. Neurophysiologists are stil bitterly Sivided over determining the minimal unit of memory — whether it be celluar, molecular, synaptic, or holographic ~ and cannot begin to explain its higher-order operations (except to say that these somehow involve the rhinencephalon, the mamillary bodies, and various parts of the cerebral cortex). In fact, the most significant work to emerge from this perspective concerns the pathology of memory as this is occasioned by the brain's malfunctionings; and in this respect, the contribution of neuroanatomy to the understanding of human memory curiously rejoins