Kasabova, On Autobiographical Memory

INTRODUCTION

My investigation of autobiographical memory focuses on the following questions: what happens when we remember something and why do we remember some things rather than others? What is the relation between our present experience and our perceived past? My working hypothesis is that autobiographical memory is a constructed continuum. I analyze the conditions for autobiographical memory and provide an account of its structure which, I argue, is hierarchical. I take autobiographical memory to be synonymous with episodic memory, in the sense that this is a memory of significant happenings in our personal lives. One could object that not all autobiographical memories are episodic, since I can remember facts about my life such as my birthday without recalling them as past personal experiences. But do I really remember my birthday, viz the day I was born, or do I ‘just know’ it? I suspect the latter. On the other hand, are all epi-sodic memories autobiographical? Cognitive scientists may object that the results of research on animal memory should also be taken into considera-tion. I think the question of whether animals have episodic memory can safely be suspended, at least until cognitive ethological research can show us whether animals understand the past tense.1 I argue that the structure of autobiographical memory is semantic (and hence specific to humans), in-volving a representational theory and a temporal reference frame, as well as a capacity to construct continuity and I present the conditions and rules for this structure, as well as its elements, abstract features and the relations governing the possible combinations of episodes. Autobiographical or epi-sodic memory is the memory of intentional human actions and experi-ences.

I begin by reconstructing two 19th century memory theories which, from different scientific perspectives, explain our autobiographical mem-ory in terms of a dispositional trace theory. The Bohemian mathematician, 1 Cf. on this John Campbell (1994): 40. I agree with Campbell’s notion of episodic memory as memory of a past event as having a particular time at which it occurred and that episodic memory involves a temporal frame of reference which animals lack. Campbell argues that episodic memory presupposes a linear conception of time, which grounds our ability to locate autobiographical episodes as at particular past times; see Campbell (1997): 105-118. I think episodic memory presupposes our capacity for constructing a continuous temporal reference frame.

Introduction

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philosopher and Roman-catholic priest Bernard Bolzano who was expelled from Prague University because of his nonconformist lectures on religion, examines the problem of memory in his epistemology, the third part of the Theory of Science (1837). 40 years later, another Pragueian scholar, the Lusatian physiologist Ewald Hering (1870), gave a lecture at the Viennese Academy of Sciences in which he calls for an interdisciplinary approach for investigating memory as a general function of organic matter. Both authors consider autobiographical memory as a mental and cognitive event, arguing that memory should not be defined in terms of knowledge because it has conceptual primacy over knowledge. They appeal to trace theory for explaining the causal continuity between past retention and pre-sent recall. On their view, traces are not imprints of earlier events but dis-positions enabling our retrieval of past experiences. This dispositionalist trace theory is an ancestor of the notion of ‘synergistic ecphory’ or the correct configuration of trace and cue, coined by contemporary memory researcher Endel Tulving (1972, 1983, 1999, 2002) following the evolu-tionary biologist Richard Semon (1921).2

I then investigate autobiographical memory from a contemporary per-spective, based on a combination of Husserl’s phenomenological investi-gations on time, imagination and recollection with John Campbell’s step-wise account of autobiographical memory. I relate these to the late Fran-cisco Varela’s reconstruction of Husserl’s theory on time-consciousness and subjective experience, but I also contrast my approach with the em-pirical methods favoured by the cognitive sciences. How are time-consciousness and memory represented? I think there is an equivalence between time consciousness conceived in Husserlian terms of primary impression, retention and protention on one hand and linguistic expres-sions of time in the form of verbal tenses (in most Indo-European lan-guages), viz present, past and future, on the other. This is how we can ex-plain the second equivalence between narrative form or a (re)constructed temporal continuum and the successive temporal order of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. By arguing that our recollections have a semantic base, we can explain the selectivity of autobiographical memory: scenes or episodes that constitute an autobiographical sequence are related grammatically, by means of the syntactic categories of tense, mood, voice, person and gender and the semantic categories of meaning, sense and reference. To put it bluntly, a mood is a mental state as well as a verb inflection and temporal modes are modes of judgment and representation which make up our 2 As far as I can tell, only one philosopher mentions Hering’s theory of memory and its connection with Semon: Ernst Cassirer (1944): “The Human World of Space and Time”, 1972: 50.

On Autobiographical Memory 3

autobiographical memory. For the ‘glue’ constituting an autobiographical memory is not an empirical relation of causality but a semantic relation of ground-consequence which is motivated by affective salience or attention considered as sensitivity to reasons. That is why we remember some things rather than others.

Models of recollection should account for our access to our past. I pre-sent two models for explaining the mental time travel that characterizes autobiographical memory and our representing what is absent. The first model uses trace theory whereas the second model relies on the notion of continuity. My interest in autobiographical memory is conceptual and ana-lytical rather than sociological or cultural. I do not examine autobiographi-cal memory as a socio-cultural phenomenon, nor do I think it likely that philosophical and socio-cultural memory theories are discussing the same phenomenon, even though they tend to agree that memory is a construc-tion – for different reasons. Cultural psychologists argue that memory is a construction as opposed to a natural kind, whereas philosophers consider memory as a mental faculty or a system of cognitive capacities and are concerned with describing how it works and whether it is a source of knowledge.3 I follow Ian Hacking’s (1995) view that in memory, the past is “revised retroactively” and that memory of intentional human actions cannot be a faithful record of the past because that past is under construc-tion: it only becomes ‘the past’ under description.4

3 On memory as a cultural construction see Anna Wierzbicka (2004) “Is “remem-ber” a universal human concept? “Memory” and culture.” See also John Sutton’s (2005) discussion of Wierzbicka, “Language, Memory, and Concepts of Memory: semantic diversity and scientific psychology”. 4 Ian Hacking (1995): 249.

PART I:

RECONSTRUCTING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL ACCOUNT

BASED ON TWO 19TH CENTURY VIEWS

PART I INTRODUCTION

In a fairly recent survey of studies on autobiographical memory, the psychologist William Brewer (1995) derisively describes philosophical clarifications of the concept of recollection as an “armchair method”, as opposed to psychologists’ (more functional) use of empirical methods.1 A philosopher’s interest is indeed conceptual rather than empirical and a phi-losophical investigation is less concerned with the accumulation of addi-tional data obtained in a laboratory than with the theoretical framework experiments presuppose. Whilst philosophers may disagree about the role of recollection played in cognition and the acquisition of knowledge, psy-chologists face the problem of terminological imprecision and disagree-ment about what phenomena the notions of recollection and recollective memory are intended to cover.2

Unlike their psychological counterparts, philosophical theories do not make neurophysiological assumptions about how recollections are stored in a person’s brain or reactivated in his nervous system. The “armchair method” does not deal with empirical considerations about the neurobio-logical aspects of memory, such as the claim that memory traces consist in the consolidation of synaptic connections. Interestingly, however, recent experiments seem to confirm the results obtained by the “armchair method” a few centuries ago.3 Yet empirical confirmation is but a by-product of the philosophical activity of refining, refuting or developing

1 William F. Brewer (1995): 19-66. 2 Cf. Brewer, ibid: 32. 3 Cf. for instance Larry L. Squire and Eric R. Kandel (1999) on the consolidation of synaptic connections and experiments with the sea snail Aplysia,: 110; 133-135, 144. Cf. also Daniel V. Madison (2004) “Electrophysiology of Synapses” and his study of synaptic connections in fruit flies: 42-49. Their experiments show how memories are stored in the central nervous system in the form of traces or synaptic transmissions resulting from a high-frequency activation of neurons. He presents a model for measuring memory traces by the increase of synaptic transmission in neurocircuits, based on the persistent strength of synaptic transmission increase (long-term facilitation or potentiation), also called consolidation switch from proc-ess-based or short-term memory to structural-based or long-term memory. I briefly discuss the consolidation of memory traces from a philosophical point of view in section 4.2.


roles played by concepts such as [recollective memory] or [trace] in phi-losophy of psychology and epistemology for (in my view), the main phi-losophical aim is to determine whether or not these notions suit our needs for providing appropriate descriptions of mental events. Hence disagree-ment among philosophers and psychologists alike, serves to evolve the terminology and improve the methodology of classification.

Our account of memory depends on how we answer the following questions: how do we retain information or reconstruct past experiences and how do we recognize information acquired in the past? Assuming that our memory is a cognitive capacity (Erkenntnisvermögen), the 19th Cen-tury philosopher Bernard Bolzano examined some aspects of what we now call episodic or autobiographical memory.4 I reconstruct the Bolzanian account of episodic memory or recollection and show that his notion of memory-trace provides a useful explanation of the link between experi-ence and recognition.

In addition, Bolzano’s notion of memory trace serves to mark the bor-der-line, or perhaps the transition, between perception and representation: Bolzano’s question is: how do we recognize what we see? In order to an-swer this question, he examines memory experience or what happens when we remember something we have experienced. I then show that a reconstruction of Bolzano’s view on recollection and memory trace yields the outlines of a phenomenological theory about the hierarchical organiza-tion of our memory: recollections consist of nested levels of experience where a perceptual experience is embedded in an intentional experience.5 Episodic or autobiographical memory, then, has a grounded or dependent character. Here Bolzano’s account is close to John Campbell’s stepwise conception of memory: both authors are concerned with the distinction between ground-floor and reflective conditions of knowledge, the reflec-tive referral to a previous experience and the claim that memory judg-ments are grounded on memory impressions or traces.6

4 Bolzano examines the problem of memory in part III of the Theory of Science (1837) (Wissenschaftslehre, abbreviated as WL), or the epistemology (Erk-enntnislehre) and in the Athanasia (1838, abbreviated as A), in his discussion of cognitive capacities (Erkenntnisvermögen), A, 146, ff. The translations are mine, though there are two partial English translations of the Theory of Science, by Rolf George (Blackwell, Oxford, 1972) and by B. Terrell (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), but neither one includes much of the epistemology we are concerned with here, espe-cially §§ 283-4. 5 Cf. on this Paul Ferdinand Linke (a doctoral student of Husserl’s) (1929), §§85-86, 206-209. 6 John Campbell (1994), ch.7, :233, ff.

Part I Introduction

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To approach the question from another angle, in Bolzano’s view, a rec-ollection is a complex cognitive act grounded on a disposition or memory trace. For Bolzano’s notion of memory trace is dynamic: rather than a mental state, it is a trigger which serves to configure our memory-representations. This notion of memory trace anticipates the account de-veloped 30 years later by a fellow Pragueian, the physiologist Ewald Her-ing.7 I argue that these 19th century views are closely related to contempo-rary accounts of trace theory in philosophy and the neurosciences.8 The debate about traces turns on the following questions: how do traces repre-sent past events and how do we re-identify traces over time? How do traces provide causal continuity between a past event and a present recol-lection? I will reconstruct Bolzano’s and Hering’s contribution to this de-bate. The implications of this philosophical discussion concern the concep-tual debate about the cognitive role of memory from Russell, Ryle and W. Von Leyden to Jérôme Dokic.9 These authors, as well as their Pragueian predecessors, focus on this question: is memory is adequately analyzed as retention of knowledge or can it also be a source of knowledge?

7 Ewald Hering (1870)“Ueber das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie” and Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn (1878). 8 Cf. John Sutton’s account of distributed memory traces in two theories of auto-biographical memory. John Sutton (1998). For neuroscientific studies on episodic memory and memory traces, see Tulving and Schacter, Kandel et al., cited below. 9 Bernard Russell (1921). Gilbert Ryle (1949). W. Von Leyden (1960). Jérôme Dokic (2001).

CHAPTER ONE

BOLZANO ON RECOLLECTION AND MEMORY TRACES

1. How do we describe episodic memory or recollection? Bolzano’s reply

Philosophical descriptions of memory experience usually combine two

models, derived from Aristotle and Locke: the “storehouse” model and the “mental capacity” model. The first concerns the retention of information which is considered to be a form, if not a source, of knowledge. The sec-ond model is related to the power of retrieval or reproduction of ideas and usual involves a series of steps combining several mental acts: in this sense, episodic memory is an ability to revive our ideas, accompanied by a belief or judgment that in our past we have experienced the remembered episode. According to Locke, memory is a “repository” or “storehouse of ideas”, as well as a power of the mind “to revive Perceptions, which it has once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before”.1 According to Aristotle, recollection presupposes a temporal gap between the occurrence of an event and my recollection of it, or my experience of “earlier” and “later” and an association of past and present ideas. This gap requires a causal link involving the persistence of a quasi-imprint or trace within me.2 Recollection thus involves the retrieval or

1 John Locke (1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.10.2:150. Locke’s requirement of an accompanying perception is similar to Leibniz’ condi-tion that that our recollection is accompanied by an inner conviction that we have had a certain idea before. Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1765) I.3, § 20 : :82. 2 Cf. Aristotle: “Acts of recollection are due to the fact that one movement [κίνησις – Sorabji translates ‘change’] has by nature another one that succeeds it” On Mem-ory (451b 11) cf. also: “when one wishes to recollect […] he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement which he desires to awaken” (451b29-30), and “[t]he process of movement (sensory stimulation) in-volved the act of perception stamps in, as it were, a sort of impression of the per-

Chapter One

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revival of a past cognition, for we perceive, think or cognize something we have previously perceived, thought or cognized: “I remember that man who called last night” or: “I remember reading this passage in Locke two months ago”. In this context we may pose the question, as Bolzano does, whether episodic memory is not merely a form, but also a source of knowledge? And how do we acquire information in a recollection?3

1.1. Bolzano’s terminology for describing episodic memory

Recollection is the capacity to recall past experiences and to retain in-formation that was acquired in the past. This capacity hence involves re-tention and retrieval, both of which are denoted by the German noun Gedächtnis which, in an older usage, means to think of something previ-ously experienced and recognizing or re-identifying something we are familiar with. In contemporary German, Gedächtnis means a retentive capacity, as well as to retain something previously experienced and recall-ing it at a later time.4 Broadly speaking, Bolzano considers episodic mem-ory (Gedächtnis, Erinnerungsvermögen) as a capacity of our soul to renew or revive in t2 a representation (Vorstellung) we had in time t1 (without the circumstances which are necessary for producing the representation a first time).5 Our memory’s ‘business’ (Geschäft) is to revive past representa-tions and judgments. Bolzano explains that re-collecting (er-innern) liter-ally means to retrieve or call up a representation (eine Vorstellung aus seinem Inneren entnehmen) and to recall it again in our soul (wieder-innerlich werden).6 This retrieval of a representation is made possible by a

cept [τύπος – Sorabji translates “imprint, as it were, of the sense-image”], just as persons do who make an impression with a seal.” (450a31-32); cf. on this topic: Richard Sorabji (1971), passim. 3 Dokic (2001), :222. 4 Cf. on this Hermann Paul (1896, 1935) Deutsches Wörterbuch: 188, as well as contemporary dictionaries of the German language such as the Wahrig (1966, 2002). In German, the notion of memory (Gedächtnis) is closely related to think-ing, since it is derived from the past participle gedacht and, in an older sense, sig-nifies our thinking of something. 5 WLIII, § 284.1: 54. A,I.2 :50; A,V: 151-2. N.B. Bolzano uses Gedächtnis, Erin-nerungsvermögen and Erinnerungskraft as synonyms. He considers memory as a reflexive mental capacity and more specifically, a capacity of thinking (Denkkraft) and knowing (Erkenntniskraft): this capacity enables the soul to look at the traces left by its own activities; cf. WLIII, § 299.2, A,V:146, 153, 159, 168. I reconstruct Bolzano’s account in section 2, below. 6 Cf. WLIII, § 283.4: 51; A,V: 152. Bolzano parses the verb erinnern and nominal-izes the adjective inner. [e]ine Vorstellung aus seinem Inneren entnehmen literally


trace of it which has remained in our soul and our power of recollection (Erinnerungsvermögen or Erinnerungskraft) is the capacity to look at these traces.

Bolzano uses two nouns for “recollection”: Erinnerung and Rückerin-nerung. Whereas the former is the standard German word for recollection and means to recall or bring something into our memory, the more unusual composite noun Rückerinnerung expresses a stronger degree of recollec-tion: bringing something back in our memory. For lack of an appropriate English translation, I shall use “recollection” for both nouns, adding the German Rückerinnerung. I think Bolzano uses the term Rückerinnerung for emphasizing the repetitive and reflexive aspect of the recollective process: we bring back a representation by re-acquiring or recovering in our soul a representation we have acquired in the past. Perhaps Rückerin-nerung denotes cases of recollection which start by thinking of something rather than perceiving it. For in this sense, a recollection is also a judg-ment. I examine this condition below. Anyhow, it seems that when using the word Rückerinnerung, Bolzano takes recollection as a form of reason-ing, which is corroborated by his claim that we “raise” the renewed repre-sentation to a clear one.7 In addition, and according to usage, Bolzano uses the reflexive form of the verb sich erinnern and, interestingly, he em-ploys the genitive construction: dass er sich einer ehemals gehabten Vor-stellung erinnere emphasizing the possessive relation of ‘having’ between oneself and the representation one has had previously.8 The genitive con-struction expresses an older meaning of recollection: to retrieve something

means: “to retrieve a representation from inside ourselves” and wieder-er-innerlich werden means: “to re-internalize [it] again” (innerlich means either to be located inside: im Inneren – or to get [something] inside: ins Innere). 7 “eine […] Vorstellung, die sich in uns erneuert, zu einer klaren erheben, […]. Denn da diese Rückerinnerung ein Urtheil ist, dass wir die Vorstellung A bereits gehabt haben: so wird zu ihrer Entstehung eine Vorstellung von dieser Vorstellung […] erfordert.“ (WLIII, § 284.2: 55). Bolzano’s use of Rückerinnerung seems akin to Leibniz’s use of ressouvenir, cf. (Nouveaux Essais, II,1, § 12: 91. 8 Cf. WLIII, § 283.4: 50, A,V: 152-154. The only time he uses the non-reflexive form erinnern, is when he defines the notion of recollection: “Erinnern, welches soviel heissen soll, als eine Vorstellung aus seinem Innern [..] entnehmen.” (A, V: 152, Bolzano’s italics). The genitive construction also appears in the passages noted above. In contemporary usage, the genitive is gradually replaced by the ac-cusative form and this grammatical shift has caused a semantic shift from the meaning of recollection as “to recall something in memory” to: “to call someone’s attention to something” (as in: ich erinnerte ihn an seine Pflicht). The former meaning is also expressed in the reflexive dative used by Goethe: wenn ich mir ihr Wesen erinnerte (cf. H. Paul (1896:144).

Chapter One

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in one’s memory. Bolzano underlines this sense even more strongly in: das Vermögen, uns unserer eigenen Vorstellungen […] wieder erinnerlich zu werden where he uses the genitive in combination with the adverb “again” and the adjective erinnerlich.9 A literal, though rather tortured, translation would be: “the capacity to recall again our own representations”. The geni-tive construction combined with the repetitive wieder expresses the double paradigm of the two philosophical memory models, the ‘storehouse’ and the ‘mental capacity’. Thus Bolzano syntactically and semantically com-bines retention and retrieval when he introduces his conditions for defining recollection: Um also im strengsten Wortverstande sagen zu dürfen, dass wir uns einer ehemals gedachten Vorstellung wieder erinnern […]: “So that we may say in the strictest sense of the word that we recollect again a representation we had previously thought […].”10

2. Reconstructing Bolzano’s account of recollection

Bolzano claims that in order for a recollection to occur (entstehen), several conditions must be met.11 Recollection involves a mental capacity for retrieving the representations previously retained.12 This is why he defines recollection as: “[…] das Vermögen, uns unserer eigenen Vorstel-lungen […] uns unter bestimmten Umständen wieder erinnerlich zu wer-den” (the capacity to recollect again our own representations under certain circumstances); and the act of recollecting as a retrieval of representations: “Erinnern, welches soviel heissen soll, als eine Vorstellung aus seinem Innern [..] entnehmen.” (Recollecting, which means retrieving a represen-tation from inside oneself).13 So, for Bolzano, when we recollect some-

9 WLIII, § 283.4: 50; cf. also, A,V: 152. 10 A,V:152. 11 WLIII, §§ 283.3-5, 284.1-6, 50-60; A, V, 152-155. Cf. on this Jan Berg (1989) in the editor’s introduction to BBGA, vol. I,13,1 (WLIII, §§ 269-303) :13 and Andrej Krause (2004: 251-253. Earlier commentaries include: Hugo Bergmann (1909: 108-112, §§ 50-52; and Heinrich Fels (1927: 319-448). 12 Representations (Vorstellungen) are here intended as mental or subjective repre-sentations that someone has, cf. WLI, § 48.3. On Bolzano’s distinction between objective and subjective representations cf. WLI, §§ 48, 50; WLIII, § § 270-1, 285; Von der mathematischen Lehrart (ML), § 2. 13 WLIII, § 284.4; A, V: 152, Bolzano’s italics. Cf. also: “Dass sich alle Erinnerung nur auf Ereignisse, die schon vergangen sind, und zwar in so fern nur, als wie sie wahrgenommen haben, also im Grunde nur auf unsere eigenen Wahrnehmungen beziehe, liegt am Tage.” (A,V:151, Bolzano’s italics). Note that by ‘representa-tions’ he means ‘perceptual representations’. Bolzano uses the word “event” (Er-eignis) in the Athanasia rather than in the Wissenschaftslehre, where he refers to


thing, we are aware of our own perceptions and representations and travel back in our own personal experience: we recall what we did yesterday when we remember it by going back and retrieving that event.14 For this reason, recollection only refers to past events in so far as we have per-ceived them, viz to our own perceptions. His first condition is, thus:

(1) a subject x has a recollection r´ if and only if x has the capacity to re-new or retrieve in t2 a (its own) representation r which x previously had in time t1 (without the circumstances which are necessary for producing r a first time).

Bolzano’s account has an Aristotelian undertone, for he characterizes

Erinnerung as a disposition to be affected by a trace and a capacity to re-trieve it; as a mental act involving perception, judging and an association of ideas; and as requiring a trace providing a causal link between a present experience and a past perception.15 A recollection is a renewed representa-tion of a past event and thus can only refer to a past event that we have previously perceived, thought or cognized.16 In addition, both authors claim that recollection is specific to humans because only a human being

representations, but the type of memory he describes is clearly episodic or auto-biographical memory – that is, a recollection of our own experience. 14 Bolzano’s 19th Century notion of episodic memory is confirmed by the neuro-logical results obtained by the memory researcher Endel Tulving, who clarified the concept of episodic memory and the relation between episodic encoding (storage) and episodic retrieval of information in the brain. In his view, episodic memory is characterized not only by an autonoetic awareness, but also by its orientation to-wards the past: episodic memory is the only memory form that is ‘rearward look-ing’. “The individual does something at Time 1 and remembers it at Time 2. But, episodic memory differs from all others in that at Time 2, its time arrow is no more an arrow, it loops back to Time 1” (1998, :265). Cf. Tulving (1972): 381-403; (1983) Elements of Episodic Memory, Oxford, Clarendon Press; (1998): 261-281 “Neurocognitive Processes of Human Memory”. 15 “Nur der erinnert sich eigentlich, dass eine gewisse Erscheinung einst von ihm wahrgenommen worden, der es aus einer von jener Wahrnehmung in ihm noch immer zurückgebliebenen Spur, deren er eben jetzt ansichtig wird, entnimmt, dass er einst jene Wahrnehmung gehabt hat”(A,V, :152). 16 On Aristotle’s account of memory, cf. Sorabji (1971): 1; 35-46. Surprisingly, Bolzano makes no reference to Aristotle, although he cites Empiricist precursors such as Malebranche and Hume on the association of ideas and the law of causality (cf. WLIII,§ 284.note 2: 62-64). Yet he omits Locke whose account is quite close to his own: “And in this Sense it is, that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually nowhere, but only there is an ability in the Mind, when it will, to revive them again; […].”Essay, II.10.2.

Chapter One

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can judge that he or she has already had a certain representation.17 One of the distinctions between humans and (non-human) animals exploited by philosophers and scientists alike is based on the self-awareness criterion: only humans have reflective memory because only humans have personal memory and are capable of self-awareness. Animals, it is assumed, cannot be aware of their own experience, although it is difficult to satisfactorily verify their reflective capacity or lack thereof. But this assumption is made primarily for showing what humans can do rather than for showing what animals cannot do. In this way Bolzano argues that a nonhuman animal is not aware of its own representations, even at the time when it has them and it can certainly not be aware of having had a representation before.18 On this argument, animals have no recollection because, unlike humans, they do not travel back into their own personal past. Besides, even if ani-

17Animals may be able to renew a representation under certain conditions, by asso-ciating two representations, for this is renewal from habit which involves learning, but not recollecting, as Pavlov’s experiment shows: a dog can learn or be condi-tioned to salivate at the sight of an approaching person who had fed the dog in the past, provided it has learned to associate this person with the food by repeatedly seeing the two together. Learning certain skills or ‘knowing how’ to do things in-volves procedural or nondeclarative memory which is reflexive but not reflective. In other words, information is retained unconsciously: we know how to ride a bi-cycle or how to type on a keyboard and we can learn to expect food when we hear a bell without consciously remembering when and where we learnt to do so. The upshot is that animals can be trained to perform and to acquire certain motor skills because they have reflexive memory but they cannot reflect upon their own repre-sentations or recall when a past performance was rewarded with a tidbit (though they will remember the tidbit). 18 “Wir legen daher, wenn wir genau sprechen wollen, den Thieren keine Erinne-rung bei; denn ob es gleich gehabte Vorstellungen unter gewissen Umständen wie-der erneuert, so fällt es doch, so viel wir wenigstens glauben, niemals das Urtheil, dass dies erneuerte, d.h. solche Vorstellungen seien, die es schon gehabt hat. Es ist sich überhaupt keiner seiner Vorstellungen selbst in dem Augenblick, da es sie hat, bewusst, d.h. es fällt niemals das Urtheil: Ich habe diese Vorstellungen. Um so weniger vermag es das Urtheil: Ich habe sie einmal gehabt, zu fällen.”(A, V: 151-152, Bolzano’s italics); on animals’ capacity of learning, cf. A,V: 153; Aristotle, On Memory, 453a7-14, Sorabji (1971: 41-42). This view is also corroborated by Tulv-ing, who claims that animals, children under 4 and patients with frontal lobe le-sions (responsible for storing source memory about particular times and places and maintaining the coherence of an episodic memory) have no episodic memory: they can learn things and know about them, but they cannot recall how they learnt them because they do not remember their own past experience: lacking autonoetic con-sciousness, they cannot go back to the past and recollect it by re-identifying it as their own experience. Cf. on this also Daniel Schacter (1996): 188-9 and Squire and Kandel (1999): 24-26; 106-7.


mals could recall their own experience, they do not have the necessary linguistic competence for making a judgment or expressing their autobio-graphical recollection of a past event. Hence Bolzano’s second and third conditions for recollection are:

(2) r´ is a recollection if and only if x re-identifies r´as r by judging that r´ (a representation of a past event e in t2) = r (e in t1)19

and

(3) x has r´ if and only if x is human, is capable of self-awareness and has linguistic competence

Why does Bolzano claim that a recollection involves making a judg-

ment that we have had a certain representation before? When I see the book on my desk, I remember that I borrowed it from the library last week (where I saw it before). “Remembering that” indicates a doxastic state in my recollection and a cognition: I recognize a representation as having had it in the past.20 I can fix the reference to a remembered object by means of a memory demonstrative when I assert that I remember this book. Recol-lective judgments express the relation between a present rememberer and a remembered object by predicating my present consciousness of a past thing. Thus in the judgment: “I remember this book”, my remembering is said of this book. In making a recollective judgment I resituate the episode in the context of my personal experience by indicating when and where it occurred and I re-identify a thing as being the same as the one I saw at an earlier time. For a recollective judgment confirms the truth of my recollec-tion, namely that I have encountered this representation before and this is

19 “Wenn wir von Jemand sagen sollen, dass er sich einer ehemals gehabten Vor-stellung erinnere: so müssen wir bemerken, dass er diese Vorstellung jetzt eben wieder habe, und zugleich das Urtheil, dass er sie schon einmal gehabt habe, fälle.” (WLIII, § 283.4); cf. also: “Eben so offenbar ist, dass zur Erinnerung im eigent-lichsten Sinne des Wortes eine bloss erneuerte Vorstellung des früheren Ereignisses noch nicht genüge, sondern dass zu derselben das Urteil, dasjenige, was wir uns jetzt vorstellen, sei ein von uns schon einmal wahrgenommenes Ereignis, hinzu-kommen müsse.” (A,V: 151, Bolzano’s italics). 20 Presumably (although Bolzano does not say so) such memory judgments also account for the temporal order of a memory experience. For example, I remember that I first went to the library to look for the book and then had an argument with a colleague about Bolzano. A representation without judgment would not suffice to order events as having occurred earlier or later. But perhaps this is reading would be too Kantian for Bolzano. Cf. also J. Campbell (2001): 169-186.

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why my predication is a re-identification rather than an identification. Bol-zano’s second condition corresponds to the declarative nature of episodic memory: we are consciously accessing and retrieving stored information and we can judge that we have had a certain representation before because we can come to know this by accessing our own past.

2.1. Bolzano’s law of association

In addition, for us to have a recollection, we have to explain how two representations have to be connected in order for one representation to prime or prompt another, or what enables us to infer that there is a causal connection between them, in order to explain how one representation can renew another. Bolzano claims that such a connection consists of several relations: when you have a representation r1, it can cause you to have a second representation r2 which is (spatially and temporally) contiguous and either similar or opposite to r1. So far, this claim is hardly original, since Bolzano merely follows in the footsteps of Aristotle and the Empiri-cists, especially Hume, on the association of ideas.21 Bolzano groups the relations in (at least one of) which two representations must stand in order to produce a recollection, under a law of association:

(4) a representation r´ renews a representation r if and only if r´and r stand in a relation of simultaneity, opposition, temporal or spatial proximity, cau-sality or reciprocal interaction (Wechselwirkung) governed by a law of asso-ciation, revival or renewal l.22

21 WLIII, § 284.3-4; A,V: 153-4. Cf. Aristotle, On Memory (451b19-20) who names the three relations of similarity, proximity and opposition for association of ideas, and also habit or the tendency by means of which images can regularly follow each other (though none of these are necessary conditions for all cases of recollections, cf. Sorabji (1971: 44-46). Cf. also David Hume THN, I,iii.2-6. In section 6 he dis-cusses the necessary connexion which we postulate in order to explain our causal inference (:88). As for association, he claims that “the only general principles which associate ideas are resemblance, contiguity and causation.” (:93). 22 WLIII, § 284.4. In §§ 284.3.a-g: 55-56, Bolzano gives the following examples to illustrate the different relations involved in association: (a) the contiguity of two objects we have once thought as connected or interdependent. In fact, Bolzano gives the example of a part/whole relation: a perception of an elephant’s tooth revives the perception of the remaining parts of an elephant. However, this exam-ple is based on the assumption that our perception must be of a defining part of the elephant – a perception of an elephant’s eye would hardly have produced the same effect (recalling the elephant’s other parts) as the perception of an elephant’s tooth which is a specific feature enabling us to identify something as an elephant. So the prompting representation has to be identified as a specific or essential feature. (b) the substance-quality relation between a person and an attribute, such as stinginess.


Bolzano’s law of association or renewal of representations specifically

addresses the question of how we can make a causal connection between a past event and a present recollection.23 Both temporal and spatial markers are important features of episodic memory, since it tells us about the source of our past experience, that is, when and where an event occurred.24 When I recall a past experience, I should thus be able to identify its source (when and where this experience was acquired) or the time and place when it occurred: rather than remembering the fact that the book on my desk

If we have once thought of someone as a miser, we will recall his stinginess when-ever we think of him. (c) the ground/consequence or cause/effect relation: we re-call a gun on hearing the shot and vice-versa. (d) the relation of similarity: familiar similarities a perceived object shares with others enable us to recall the latter: we see a dog rose and recall a centifolia rose. (e) the relation of opposition: we see a dwarf and recall a giant, or vice versa. (f) location or spatial proximity: we enter a room where someone close to us has died from a long illness and we recall that person lying in on their deathbed. (g) the order of precedent and consequent in a sequence (temporal contiguity): if someone recites the first verse of a poem we know by heart, his recital will prompt us to recall the subsequent verses. In the Athanasia, Bolzano adds the relation of reciprocal interaction (Wech-selwirkung) between simultaneous representations as a condition for the renewal of subsequent representations, A, V, 153-4. Also, in a note to § 286.8, Bolzano calls the law regulating the associative process in perception, the law of simultaneity (Gesetz der Gleichzeitigkeit), whereas in the Athanasia he calls it the law of recip-rocal interaction (Gesetz der Wechselwirkung). He explains that perceptions are formed when several simultaneous ideas are combined according to the law of reciprocal interaction, in such a way that the renewal of one of them also produces a perception of the traces left by anterior perceptions. For example, if someone gives me some bad news, I will receive several simultaneous impressions. If I see this person a second time, my new perception of him or her will stir up a recollec-tion of the bad news associated with this person. Bolzano adds that this law not only determines our souls, but also those of animals. A, V: 151-153. 23 Cf. WLIII, § 284.4.note: 57. It seems that temporal contiguity is the main condi-tion for recollection, since Bolzano says that we must have had two representations simultaneously or at the same time in order for us to have a subsequent representa-tion which renews either one or the other. He adds that by simultaneity he means, in this case, that the first representation did not end before the second one had be-gun, which is another way of putting the relation of temporal contiguity. 24 According to Tulving (1972), there are two types of long-term memory-systems: episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is distinct from semantic or fac-tual memory precisely because episodic memory is an autobiographical memory with a record of past events and not a retention of general facts of knowledge: if I only have semantic memory, I may know that black chocolate tastes bitter, without remembering that I have previously tasted this chocolate.

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belongs to the philosophy library, in my recollection of this event, I re-member that I borrowed the book from that library last week and that I should return it in two days. The relations of simultaneity or opposition, proximity and causality or reciprocal interaction are all involved in main-taining the coherence of my recollection by connecting the contents of a past event to its source, as well as to my present experience: when tasting a piece of black Belgian chocolate, I remember eating such a piece of black Belgian chocolate on my way to Budapest last April, when I nearly missed my connection in Belgrade.

In addition, the vivacity and frequent occurrence of our representations facilitates their renewal in recollection. Bolzano’s condition of frequent occurrence has an ancestor in Hume’s constant conjunction or observed regularity between two events we relate as cause and effect. Degree of vivacity is another (Humean) condition for both the representation that does the renewing and the representation that is renewed.25 Bolzano does not elaborate on this, but perhaps he intends vivacity as a power of reten-tion and retrieval: a weak or faint representation is not appropriate for re-tention because it has no staying power and is quickly forgotten, nor is it appropriate for prompting a recollection because it lacks the power or ca-pacity to retrieve another representation.

Bolzano’s law of association or renewal l can be formulated as follows:

(5) if two representations r1 and r2 were produced at the same time in our soul and a subsequent representation r3 is produced, whose content is the same as (gleichet, einerlei Stoff mit ihr hat) either r1 or r2, then r3 renews r4 and all the more easily, if r1 or r2 were vivid and occurred frequently or lasted longer.26

25 Cf. Hume, THN, I,iii,6. According to Hume, memory ideas obtain their vivacity from the impressions that caused them and memory ideas are more vivid than ideas of the imagination because, unlike the latter, they maintain the same order and form as their original impressions. Unfortunately we cannot always ascertain whether an idea is a memory rather than a product of the imagination: we cannot check whether our memory idea really corresponds to its original impression be-cause we cannot call back the original impression for a comparison; cf. THN I,i,6; I,iii,5. Cf. on this David Pears (1990) who distinguishes between two readings of vivacity: (1) as a pictorial property (or distinctness of colours) and (2) a behav-ioural property (a feature of the way in which images enter the mind) in, Hume’s System, OUP, Oxford, 30-45. Pears favours (2) and I think that vivacity as a prop-erty of an idea which enters the mind “in a forcible manner” may, to some extent, be closer to Bolzano’s use of vivacity, as well. 26 WLIII, § 284.4; cf. also Berg’s reconstruction (1989, :13). In the Athanasia (A, V, :154) Bolzano adds temporal duration as a facilitator for recollecting a represen-tation.


2.2. Bolzano’s condition that the renewing representation and the renewed representation must have the same content

What does Bolzano mean by “same content”? In Bolzanian ontology, two subjective representations or mental events are said to have the same content when they contain the same objective representation (Vorstellung an sich) that is, when they exemplify the same idea as such or denote the same sense.27 So, if “having a content” means “having a representation as such” then, if x has the same content (representation as such) as y, x is completely identical with y. But this notion of identity is too strong for Bolzano’s epistemology: if x is completely identical with y, then x has all particular properties or adherences of y. Complete identity is neither nec-essary nor useful for Bolzano’s account of recollection and I think that he uses a weaker notion of identity for epistemological purposes, such that x is identical with y if x has at least one particular property or adherence of y. The upshot of my reading is that in epistemology “having the same con-tent” does not mean “having complete identity” and that here Bolzano does not mean “x and y have the same content” to imply “x and y have the same representation as such”. He is not trying to solve the ontological problem of “x is completely identical with y” in the case of recollections and fortunately so, because such an attempt would result in an inconsis-tency in his epistemology.28 His condition reads:

(6) r is a recollection r´ of a past event e in t2 if and only if r´, based on l, is a renewed representation of e in t1 and if and only if r΄ and r have the same content (Stoff) c

Why do we not have complete identity in a recollection? First, we can

have no numerical identity, since we must necessarily have at least two (subjective) representations, a renewing r’ and a renewed r. Bolzano’s as-sociationist account uses the ‘mental capacity’ model of memory rather than the ‘storehouse’ model: if he had claimed that one and the same idea

27 Subjective representations have representations as such as their nearest and im-mediate Stoff (content) (WLI, §48.3) and each subjective representation has a cor-responding representation as such (WLI, § 72). 28 But cf. Andrej Krause (2004: 252-3) who reconstructs Bolzano as saying that x has a subjective representation r2 in t2 which has the same objective representation as r1 in t1 and that, consequently, “having the same content”, means “having the same objective representation”. I find Krause’s thorough reconstruction very useful and stimulating, but this aspect of his interpretation is problematic, precisely be-cause, as Krause himself remarks, ‘having the same representation as such’ implies ‘having a completely identical content’ – which is not necessary for recollections or the renewal of representations and leads to several problems.

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is first retained and then retrieved, he would also have had to account for the survival or persistence of this idea and the claim that we have the same idea now as we had yesterday. Either our memory can store an unlimited number of unchanging items, or we can only have a limited number of one and the same ideas. Neither alternative appeals to Bolzano.

Second, recollections are complex or mixed representations, that is, they have both conceptual and perceptual content or, as Bolzano says, they are partly composed of intuitions (Anschauungen), which he also calls sensations (Empfindungen) and which we usually call perceptions in con-temporary scientific English.29 This feature of recollections will be ex-pounded in section 3., below. The sameness of conceptual content can be accounted for by linguistic concepts: two subjective conceptual representa-tions can belong to the same type of objective representation. But if recol-lections are partly composed of perceptions, Bolzano must also account for the sameness of perceptual content. However, he does not appeal to perceptual universals to account for the qualitative sameness of two sub-jective perceptual representations. If he had done so, he would have in-curred the risk of inconsistency, for mental events are unrepeatable and temporary: they appear and disappear in our minds. Bolzano even says that there are representations, especially generic representations of sensation, which, whenever we renew them, “fly past our mind” with a frequency too high for us to grasp all of their individual parts.30

Intuitions are not only singular, but simple representations and two simple representations cannot have the same content because they are their

29 Cf. WLI, § 73. Bolzano does not distinguish between sensations and intuitions, as Empfindung and Anschauung are synonyms for him: “Mit diesem Namen [An-schauung] bezeichnen wir jede einfache, nicht weiter zerlegbare Vorstellung, wel-che ein Wesen von seinem Zustande hat; also eben das, was man sonst auch, und vielleicht deutlicher Empfindung genannt hat, […].” (Miscellanea Mathematica 4 (1813-1814), BBGA, II, B. Wissenschaftliche Tagebücher, vol. 3/2: 139-140). Cf. also WLI, § 72; Bolzano’s letter to Exner, 9.7.1833, (Briefwechsel Bolzano-Exner), BBGA III, vol.4:13. In addition, Bolzano assimilates intuition (Anschauung) and perception (Wahrnehmung) as data of experience and as immediate or noninferen-tial cognitions (cf. WLIII, § 300.12). Moreover, in contemporary English, the Latin derivative intuition is mainly used in a non-scientific sense: “to have a hunch.” For this reason and according to usage, I occasionally use the words “perception” or “perceptual content”, rather than “intuition”. 30 Cf. WLIII, § 286.8 I discuss this paragraph in regard to colour sensations in Kasabova (2004): 247-276. In fact, Bolzano begins his discussion of recollection with the assumption that our representations can end and disappear, which is the premiss for his argument that every representation leaves a certain trace after it has disappeared; cf. WLIII, § 283.1.


content.31 And any two intuitive representations or sensations are numeri-cally different, with two different objective intuitions. Bolzano says that the same intuition cannot occur twice, so two subjective intuitions cannot belong to the same objective intuition, for each subjective intuition has its own objective counterpart.32 For this reason they are not only unrepeatable but incommunicable. Hence, two intuitions cannot possibly have the same content, so something else must account for sameness of content in recol-lections.

My suggestion is, first, a weak notion of identity, such that ‘x and y have the same content’ means ‘x is identical with y if x has at least one particular property or adherence of y’. Bolzano says that from his defini-tion of a representation as the collection or sum of its components without regarding their order, follows that different representations have the same content in the sense that they share a part. For instance, the representations [equilateral pentagon] and [equiangular hexagon] share the component [polygon], as well as the concept of similarity.33 This is his argument for the claim that in the case of recollections, two subjective representations have the same content. On this reading, x and y have the same content’ means ‘x and y have a common part’. So

(7) r΄ and r have the same content c if and only if r and r´ have a common part

The upshot of Bolzano’s view is that an overlap of features and a part-

whole relation are required for memory retrieval and that association is not a sufficient condition for explaining this process. This view was advanced by Sir William Hamilton in 1859 (who coined the notion of redintegration) and developed by Richard Semon in 1904.34 I suggest that Bolzano antici-pates their idea that a whole is re-instated via a part, where ‘part’ is a fea-ture or non-independent property of the ‘whole’. If two representations have a common part, their features overlap and our association of them is a consequence of this overlapping, rather than their cause. We explain the overlap by recurring to the empirical law of association, but memory re-trieval occurs by means of the whole-part relation in which the cue repre-sents an essential part of the whole – as in a rhetorical figure called synec-doche, where a concept with a lesser extension represents or stands for a concept with a larger extension. For example, ‘wheels’ represent a car, the expression ‘hired hands’ represents workmen. Since Bolzano rejects the

31 Cf. WLI, § 92.1. 32 Cf. WLI, § 75. 33 Cf. WLI § 92.1 34 See Daniel Schacter (2001: 168-174). See also R. Semon (1904) Die Meme.

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claim of structural isomorphism, he does not hold that if x is an essential feature of y, then x is a part of y. Instead, he argues that if x is an essential part of y, then a presentation of x enables our recollection of y. I can recall my childhood home by attending to a specific image of a house, or I can recall one of Shakespeare’s sonnets if I am prompted with the line: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”.

The ‘redintegration’ claim corresponds to mnemonic techniques such as the place system or memory theatre. According to Roman texts by Cicero and Quintillian, a place system involves memorizing and visualiz-ing a street of houses or the rooms of a house as a ‘background’ for situat-ing or mapping the main points in a speech onto the different places in the memory theatre fixed in our minds.35 We then move from place to place as we recollect the various parts of our speech or poem from the rooms or figures we have used to retain them. Our knowledge is organized on the basis of our imaging capacity. Probably the basic principle at work in such part-whole organization is semantic: a law governing different semantic roles for connecting words (or numbers) to images in a hierarchical order, such as the tree of knowledge, the Pythagorean number triangle or Lull’s circles that serve to compute features and symbols in a context (the place system) by enabling different combinations or calculations.

2.3. The memory trace

The next question is, of course, what, precisely, is the common part of a past representation and its renewal in a present recollection? On my reading of Bolzano, this common part shared by r and r´ is the memory trace, so that:

(8) r΄ and r have the same content c if and only if r΄ is retrieved from a trace t of r

For the renewed representation of a past event is a revival of the repre-

sentation from which it originates. To put the matter differently: we have two numerically different representations of one and the same past event: this event is compressed in a memory trace left behind by the representa-tion and this latter can be retrieved or renewed without the circumstances necessary for producing it a first time, for retrieval is selective. According

35 For a discussion of mnemonic techniques in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Her-ennium, Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, Cicero’s De Oratore and later works by Ramon Lull et al., see Frances Yates (1966); Richard Sorabji (1971: 22-34); Wolf-gang Wildgen (1998).


to Bolzano, the most important effect of memory traces is that they can cause the appearance of a representation which has the same content as that from which it originates and this is why it is the same representation, more correctly called a renewal, repetition or revival of the source-representation.36

As we saw above, in section 1.1., Bolzano defines recollection as a re-newal of a representation of a past event. The condition sine qua non of this renewal is the trace, for an earlier representation is renewed as I look at the trace it left behind in my soul.37 A memory trace is the after-effect (Nachwirkung) of a representation or the result of an internal change which prompts the revival of a past representation in us and enables us to produce it more easily and with a higher degree of vivacity.38 So a trace is the residue of a representation we look at in ourselves in order to recollect our own experience of a past event. Hence:

(9) x renews r´ if and only x looks at (anschaut) t (r(e in t1 c1)) in t2 (and r´ has c2)

It seems that for Bolzano, memory traces are effects of events, in that

they are persistent after-effects of certain changes in us. Hence traces could be considered as akin to events, since they depend on internal

36 “Die wichtigste [Wirkung der Spuren] ist, dass sie unter Hinzutritt günstiger Umstände das Erscheinen einer Vorstellung bewirken, die einerlei Stoff mit derje-nigen hat, von welcher sie herrühren, die eben darum dieselbe Vorstellung, richti-ger aber eine Erneuerung oder Wiederholung, ein Wiederaufleben oder Wiederer-wachen derselben genannt wird.” (WLIII, § 284.1, Bolzano’s italics). 37 WLIII, § 283.3-4; A, I, 49-50, V: 152. 38 “Etwas, durch dessen Betrachtung uns eine Vorstellung von der Vorstellung A entstehet, muss doch gewiss nur eine von dieser Vorstellung hinterbliebene Nach-wirkung seyn. […]: so dürfen wir die Natur jenes Etwas, welches von einer Vor-stellung in unserer Seele zurückbleibt, noch näher dahin erklären, es sey ein Etwas von solcher Art, das die Erweckung einer vergangenen Vorstellung in uns beför-dert, uns fähig macht, sie künftig leichter in einem höheren Grade der Lebhaftig-keit zu erzeugen. Dass wir nun dieses Etwas eine von der vergangenen Vorstellung zurückgebliebene Spur nennen, […].” (WLIII, § 283.4: 51-52, Bolzano’s italics). Cf. also: “[…] so gewiss ist es auch, dass jede dieser Vorstellungen [einer mit Vor-stellungskraft begabten Substanz], selbst wenn sie schon lange aus unserm deutli-chen Bewusstsein wieder verdrängt ist, oder wenn sie zu diesem deutlichen Be-wusstsein gar niemals gediehen war – eine gewisse, nicht völlig zu vertilgende Spur oder Nachwirkung von sich hinterlasse. Nichts von allem, was je ein Gegens-tand unserer Vorstellung wurde […] kann von uns so vergessen werden, dass es ganz ohne Nachwirkung bliebe.” A, III :88. Cf. also Bolzano’s note 30: 88, A: 298-300.

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changes and Bolzano defines perceptual representations or intuitions as changes in us.39 Thus traces are not immediate effects of an external object but internal after-effects of representations and as such they are not spa-tially located marks in the brain but changes encoded by our nervous sys-tem or stored residues of representations which are not representations themselves. For the latter can end and disappear, whereas the former are their persisting left-overs: unlike representations, traces have (a-)temporal persistence. Here Bolzano is in line with contemporary trace theorists who reject the view that memory is an activated picture of a past event.40 In a way, the contemporary word for traces, ‘engram’, is misleading, for it de-notes a pictorial representation stored as a result of a nervous reaction.

On Bolzano’s view, however, traces do not represent past events be-cause they are not reproductions or copies of past events.41 And even if they were, Bolzano rejects the idea of a structural isomorphism between

39 Since mental changes are the immediate object of our intuitions or perceptions and intuitions are representations of the mental change at their origin, the trace left by a representation (which is partly perceptual) cannot be a property or adherence. On intuitions as representations of a mental change in us which is their immediate object, cf. WLI, § 72. If traces were adherences or properties, they would have to be properties of ourselves, that is to say, of a substance endowed with the power of representation (Vorstellungskraft). Traces may be dependent on us, but that de-pendency does not make them our properties. But cf. on this Krause (2004: 173) who claims that there is an ambiguity in Bolzano’s account of traces, namely that they appear to be real properties (wirkliche Beschaffenheiten) or adherences of substances as well as persistent and after-effects which can never be completely erased. Krause points out that the a-temporal persistence of traces is inconsistent with their being adherences, for the latter are not a-temporal. I agree that these two features are inconsistent, but I don’t think this is a problem for Bolzano, since he does not qualify traces as adherences. 40 Cf. Schacter (1996: 70-71); cf. also J. Sutton (1998 : 301) who argues that traces are not copies or representations of past events, but stored fragments of an episode, which is not the same thing as the memory of an episode. On distinguishing be-tween memory and the trace, cf. also Max Deutscher (1989): 53-72; and Hering (1870 :179, discussed in section 4, below). 41 This is a possible Bolzanian reply to Wittgenstein’s famous objection against memory traces which is based on the assumption that traces are memories or re-productions of past events: “An event leaves a trace in the memory: one sometimes imagines this as if it consisted in the event’s having left a trace, an impression, a consequence, in the nervous system. As if one could say: even the nerves have a memory. But then when someone remembered an event, he would have to infer it from this impression, this trace. Whatever the event does leave behind, it isn’t the memory.” Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol.I, § 220. Cf. on this also Sutton (1998: 301).


representations and their objects: first, representations are not images of their objects and their respective parts do not coincide. Second, the parts of representations do not coincide with the representations of the features or properties of the object they denote.42 Traces are neither representations nor images of past experiences and even if they were parts of representa-tions, they could not be parts of stored past events. Rather, Bolzano sees traces as states that contribute to recollection by accounting for causal con-tinuity across the temporal gap between the time of the event’s occurrence and the time of its recollection, since they persist a-temporally. They are persistent states because they are at rest, unlike the change that caused them. It is interesting that Bolzano also considers the representation itself as a change or movement and the trace it leaves behind as stillness or re-pose (Ruhe).43

2.4. Recollection as form and source of knowledge

Bolzano says that a recollection becomes a cognition as we attend to the representation we have retrieved or renewed by means of the trace it left behind: for by looking at the renewed representation, we raise it to a clear one. And a clear representation is a cognition.44 We may now give a tentative answer to a question put at the beginning of this paper: is recol-lection also a source or only a form of knowledge? Bolzano writes: “Das Wort Erinnerung […] bedeutet ja doch ein Erkennen, das aus der Betrach-

42 See WL I, §§ 63-64. 43 In one of his notes, Bolzano rejects Herbart’s claim that representations are so-mething at rest (etwas Ruhendes), “während ich die Vorstellung selbst als eine Veränderung oder Bewegung betrachte, die Ruhe aber als die von einer Vorstellung hinterbliebene Spur ansehe.” Miscellanea philosophica 5 (1828-1839): 27. 44 “Wir müssen also die Vorstellung A, die sich in uns erneuert hat, anschauen, so mit zu einer klaren Vorstellung erheben.” WLIII, § 284.2: 55. The entire passage is cited below. For Bolzano, “a representation is clear if we represent it to ourselves by way of an intuition.” (WLIII, § 280.3, Bolzano’s italics). The characterization of cognition as degrees of clarity goes back to Leibniz: a clear representation is suffi-cient for cognition. Bolzano claims that we raise a representation to a cognition when we perceive it or when we are conscious of it. He also says that an intuition becomes clear when we direct our attention towards it or when we become aware of it; cf. WLIII, § 284.2. By contrast, an “unconscious representation” (bewusstlose Vorstellung) is a “representation of which we do not have an intuition” (WLIII, § 280.note 4). Note that Bolzano uses the older word “bewusstlos” which literally means “without consciousness”, instead of “unbewusst” which means “uncon-scious”, as well as “without knowing” or “instinctive”.

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tung unsers Inneren hervorgeht.”45 The word recollection signifies a cog-nition which is produced by a self-reflective act: my looking inside myself retrieves a past event when I cognize my past experience by looking at my past and retrieving an event from my own experience. More precisely, my cognition is not of the past event, but of the present trace of that event. Bolzano holds that episodic memory is reflexive, since it refers to my pre-vious experience and thus reveals its own source. Besides, for episodic memory we have to be capable of self-consciousness or autonoetic aware-ness, that is, we have to be able to say that we have had a certain represen-tation before (following Bolzano’s conditions (2) and (3), above). Owing to this reflexive nature, a recollection is not only a form of knowledge, for a cognition of a past experience is produced by looking at one’s own men-tal state. So knowledge is acquired, or rather, re-acquired, in a recollection since a new cognition of an old experience is created by means of a self-reflective act:

(10) therefore x has r´ (and r´ is a cognition or clear representation), if and only if x can (re)produce in the present a past experience by means of a self-reflective act.

If we have a new cognition in a recollection, then recollection can be

considered a source of knowledge, since it is informative about the past.46 We should keep in mind, however, that the retrieval of past information is prone to error. I return to these points in section 3, below.

But self-reflection alone is insufficient for answering the question: how is my memory knowledge grounded? According to Bolzano, a recollection involves making a judgment that we have had a certain representation be-fore.47 He immediately adds that such a judgment is not sufficient for a recollection either, since we can judge that we have had a certain represen-tation before without actually recalling it. So a recollection also depends on the cognitive ground (Erkenntnisgrund) from which our judgment is derived.48 This ground comprises two beliefs: we must believe that the memory is an accurate reproduction of the original event. In addition, we

45 WLIII, § 283.4: 51, Bolzano’s italics. 46 Cf. on this Dokic (2001: 213-232) who explores an intermediary position be-tween the view that memory is purely preservative and the view that memory is a genuine source of knowledge. He argues that episodic memory is also a source of knowledge, since it carries (non-conceptual) information originally acquired by the subject (225-232). 47 Cf. Bolzano’s conditions (2) and (3) discussed above (8-9). 48 “Es kommt nämlich auch auf den Erkenntnisgrund an, aus dem wir dies Urtheil ableiten.” (WLIII, § 283.4: 51).


must believe that this event belongs to our own past and that we directly experienced the memory we are reliving.49 But what is the epistemic value of episodic memory? One problem is, how to verify whether we have had a certain representation before, since memory is not immune to distortion, illusion and misinformation.50

Our self-reflective awareness must be accompanied by a grounded be-lief or judgment: we have to have good reasons to believe that we are re-membering an event from our own past. Bolzano proceeds by eliminating testimony and reasoning as possible grounds for recollection. For example, I can know that I broke my leg as a child without recalling my own ex-perience of that event. But I remember that I broke my leg as a child if and only if my memory is not based on the testimony of older people who were around me during my childhood. An inference is needed if we do not remember an event: if I consider the swelling on my arm and draw the conclusion that I broke my arm in the past and certainly endured great pain, this inference is not a recollection of my pain.51

Bolzano also makes an interesting point in the Athanasia: in cases of recollection which start by thinking of something rather than perceiving it (Rückerinnerung), the correctness of my judgment is warranted by my self-identification: if I judge that I recall how I was watching a coronation as a child, then I do not make a judgment about the identity of the person who was watching that event, but correctly identify the representation as

49 Cf. Tulving’s characterization of episodic memory (1983: 127) 50 Cf. Stephen Ceci’s example of an experiment where pre-school children were asked to report on a visit to a pediatrician and their vaccination a year after the event. The interviewer inoculated them with false memories by means of sugges-tive questions about non-events: they were reminded that they had been shown a poster or told a story and the children would include this in their report, as well as other events, such as a check-up of their ears and nose, although these had not been included in the script. Ceci concludes that misleading information not only distorts children’s memories about personally experienced events, but also influence their memories for non-suggested events related to the suggested events, in: Ceci (1995): 91-125 “False beliefs: some developmental and clinical considerations”. I think that such an experiment is hardly conclusive about how children’s memory works, but it is a useful illustration of perceptual and judgmental errors due to misinformation and memory distortion. Compare on this Leibniz’ claim that recol-lection requires an inner conviction that such an idea has been in our mind before and that this inner conviction is the criterion for distinguishing between remember-ing and all other ways of thinking. “Car cette persuasion où l’on est intérieurement certain qu’une telle idée a été auparavant dans notre esprit est proprement ce qui distingue la réminiscence de toute autre voie de pensée.” Nouveaux essais I.3, § 20 (1990: 82). 51 These are Bolzano’s examples, cf. WLIII, § 284.2: 51.

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mine. Thus, if my present representation of the coronation ceremony is correct, then it is only a renewal of my past representation which I have retrieved.52 But Bolzano’s point does not solve the problem: my certainty that I am remembering a past event is not sufficient for warranting that my representation is truly of a past incident and or that my recollection comes directly from a past experience. In other words, we cannot rule out mem-ory distortion.

Bolzano claims that we make a recollective judgment “aus der Be-trachtung eines in unserer Seele selbst befindlichen Grundes”.53 The cog-nitive ground on which our memory judgment is based, is our present at-tentive perception of a trace of a past event: so in his view, it is the trace which warrants the direct derivation of my recollection from a past event, since it is the trace which enables us to retrieve that event from our experi-ence:

(11) therefore x has a recollection r´ if and only if x judges that r´ (e in t2 c2) = r (e in t1c1) and if and only if x’s judgment is grounded on a percep-tion of t

The successful retrieval of a past event involves a perceptual act: Bol-

zano says that we remember it when we attend to the trace of the past rep-

52 “Irre ich nicht in dem Urtheile, dass ich mich dessen noch erinnere, wie ich als Knabe den Feierlichkeiten einer Krönung zugesehen habe, so muss auch diejenige Substanz in mir, welche die Vorstellung von diesen Feierlichkeiten in meinem Knabenalter aufgefasst habe, noch immer die nemliche sein, die gegenwärtig urtheilt. Denn ist mein Urtheil wahr, habe ich die gegenwärtige Vorstellung von jenen Feierlichkeiten wirklich aus der Erinnerung, so ist sie nur eine Erneuerung jeher ehemaligen, und diese muss also in eben demselben Subjecte, wie meine gegenwärtige, stattgefunden haben” (A, I: 49-50). Bolzano examines the problem of personal identity which I do not go into here. 53 This statement is taken from an important passage on recollection in the Wissen-schaftslehre: “Denn da diese Rückerinnerung ein Urtheil ist, dass wir die Vorstel-lung A bereits gehabt haben: so wird zu ihrer Entstehung eine Vorstellung von dieser Vorstellung und dies zwar eine nur auf sie allein beziehende Vorstellung, d.h. eine Anschauung von A erfordert. Wir müssen also die Vorstellung A, die sich in uns erneuert hat, anschauen, so mit zu einer klaren Vorstellung erheben. Aber auch, wenn die Erneuerung einer ehemals gehabten Vorstellung zu einer klaren Vorstellung erhoben wird, ist es noch nicht die Folge, dass wir das Urtheil, dies sey eine Vorstellung, die wir schon ehemals gehabt haben, fällen, und dass uns somit eine Erinnerung werde. Fällen wir aber dies Urteil, und fällen wir es aus der Be-trachtung eines in unserer Seele selbst befindlichen Grundes: so erhält dies Urtheil den Namen einer Erinnerung; […].” (WLIII, § 284.2: 55, Bolzano’s italics.) Parts of this passage are cited above.


resentation of that event.54 In this way he distinguishes between “remem-bering” and “just knowing” the past. For example: sometimes we just know someone or something without recollecting any visual information about them. A person or event can appear familiar even if we are unable to recall or place them. But if we remember them, we also retrieve visual perceptions about this person or event.55 To put it another way: episodic memory involves an awareness of having had past experiences and this awareness is characterized by visual perceptions. So, when we success-fully retrieve a memory image of what we did last week, we are aware of having had a past experience.

In addition, the perception or attention involved in retrieving a past event has cognitive value, since a new cognition is produced, informing us about the past, when we attend to the trace left by a representation. Atten-tion not only produces memory-cognitions, it also causes intuitive repre-sentations or immediate cognitions which represent the mental state or change at their own origin. Bolzano writes that an intuition is “the nearest and immediate effect of our attention”, whenever we direct it “upon the change that is caused in our soul”.56 Intuitions are reflexive effects of our attention: they represent the mental change and their immediate object is this mental change. Consequently, when our attention is directed onto the trace of a past intuitive representation (or mental change), it retrieves the very representation it once produced. The cognitive ground on which our memory judgments are based is therefore warranted by our attentive per-ception of the trace of a mental state. Our attention revives the trace of a representation it produced in the past and thus reproduces a past represen-tation in the present. Such a reproduction is a cognition, for it is informa-tive and it is informative because it presents information previously ac-quired. Perhaps Bolzano would agree with Campbell and Dokic that our episodic memory is a source of knowledge in the sense that it is “the fac-ulty of reproducing in the present a past informational state”.57 For this is precisely what he intends when using the word Rückerinnerung or re-acquiring (bringing back) information acquired in the past.

54 For Bolzano, attention is a perceptual act, cf. WLIII, § 284.2: A, V: 154-155. 55 On the psychological distinction between remembering and knowing the past, cf. Schacter’s (1996) discussion of various views and experiments confirming the role of attention in recalling visual information and the importance of the latter in recol-lection (23-25 and notes 9-14: 310-311). The distinction is Tulving’s (1972, 1985). 56 WLI, § 72. Bolzano does not say whether we can also have intuitions without attention. 57 Dokic (2001: 227, Dokic’s italics) refers to Campbell (1994: 233).

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3. Some implications of Bolzano’s theory

In this section I examine some implications of Bolzano’s characteriza-tion of recollection and his account of the memory trace and I argue that a dialogue can easily be staged between his views, early 20th Century phe-nomenolgy and current anglo-saxon debates in philosophy about episodic memory at the turn of the 20th Century.

3.1. Recollections as nested experiences with non-conceptual contents

Bolzano claims that recollections are complex or mixed representations containing a perception of a trace of a representation previously perceived. Recollections are mixed representations because they have perceptual as well as conceptual content or, as Bolzano says, they are partly composed of intuitions.58 The intuitive part has a non-conceptual content, the change in me, or the representation that leaves a trace. Intuitions directly present a mental change caused by a real object, this red. Since this content is non-conceptual, it is incommunicable and only partly expressible, which is why intuitions are expressed by demonstratives, such as “this red”, or “this A”.59 Bolzano’s notion of non-conceptual content is based on the view that our perceptual experience contains more than we can discriminate concep-tually. In addition, he says that we can grasp or recognize what takes place before our eyes by recollecting past representations whose traces we per-ceive in our mind. In other words, he uses recollection to explain the cog-nitive process of identification, since we recognize that which we recol-lect, although we perceive more than we remember.60

On his view, our perceptual content is non-conceptual, since we cannot discriminate all our sensations because they “fly past our mind” with a

58 Bolzano considers mixed representations those which are obtained from intui-tions, such as [the rose which spreads this fragrance] or [this rose] (cf. WLI, § 73). The usual English translation of gemischt as “complex” effaces Bolzano’s distinc-tion between zusammengesetzte and gemischte representations: the former are conceptual, whereas the latter are partly intuitive, cf. ML, § 3. Here I consider the latter kind. 59 Cf. WLI, § 72, 326-7; ML, § 6. Bolzano considers intuitions as non-conceptual representations which are simple and singular, their one object being a mental state which I look at (Anschauung). Besides, mixed representations are “mixed” in the sense that they have a non-conceptual or intuitive component (cf. WLI, § 73). 60 Cf. WLIII, § 286.8, quoted in note 76, below. I examine this problem in regard to Bolzano’s account of colour sensations in Kasabova (2004: 247-276).


frequency too high for us to grasp them individually.61 This is why, for instance, we cannot identify all colour sensations induced by the individ-ual colour hues. Nonetheless, our representational states are complex, even though we may be unaware of all their components, for in our recollective activity, we compose those representations ourselves and thus can subse-quently recognize the renewed representations, even without identifying their individual parts. The upshot of Bolzano’s view is that that our per-ceptual experience has non-conceptual contents which are representa-tional, or that representation already takes place at a non-conceptual level.

The conceptual part of a recollection is my judgment that in the past I have experienced the remembered event and my identifying a recollection, in t2 as a representation of a past event that occurred in t1. As we saw above, this judgment must be grounded on a perception of the trace. For Bolzano, a recollection is thus a complex or nested experience composed of several levels or steps.62 This account of recollection as a nested experi-ence is an ancestor of early German phenomenology as well as recent in-vestigations by authors such as Dokic and Campbell.

This hierarchical account of episodic memory was first developed by Linke, an early 20th Century phenomenologist from Leipzig who describes recollections as nested experiences (Schachtelerlebnis), where a perceptual experience is embedded in an intentional experience.63 In a recollection, we grasp (erfassen) a previous experience as the object of our representa-tion. For example, “I recall the tone I heard previously”, means that I in-tentionally grasp my earlier experience. In my recollection, the tone is given mediately, as once having sounded in (hineintönender) my con-

61 “It is true that we compose all our complex representations ourselves by means of a personal activity, but it does not follow from this that we are always conscious (bewusst) of the parts of such ideas, even if we are conscious of the ideas them-selves (cf. § 281). It is common, especially with representations that we have formed in early childhood and have frequently repeated since, that we can no longer identify their parts. This is because whenever we renew these representa-tions, they fly past our mind with such a speed that our intuitive faculty does not have enough time to grasp the individual parts.” (WLIII, § 286.8, my translation). 62 N.B. Compositional structure is one of the criteria for representational states specified by José Luis Bermúdez’ (1998) in his theory of non-conceptual content: 94. Cf. also his 1995 paper: 183-216. I discuss these criteria in relation to recollec-tion below. 63 The notion of “nesting” was coined by J. J. Gibson (1979), but there is an earlier account of memory experience as nested experiences (Schachtelerlebnisse) by P. F. Linke (1929), §§85-86, 206-209. Linke’s point is that representations, such as rec-ollections, are intentional experiences and that nesting (Schachtelung) is a criterion for distinguishing between representations and perceptions (Wahrnehmungen).

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sciousness, but my earlier experience directly presents itself as having been experienced by me.64 I am presently aware of the tone I heard and this awareness is nested or grounded in my previous awareness of a past event. I presently grasp or directly re-acquire the auditory sensations from my past experience (without being presently aware of the event itself). The Bolzano-Linke account fits Dokic’s view that episodic memory is the ex-perience of directly re-acquiring information: “when I remember some-thing in the episodic sense, I have a piece of information which presents itself as being directly re-acquired from my past experience”.65

Bolzano’s account of recollection as comprising a judgment which is grounded on a perception, also foreshadows Campbell’s stepwise concep-tion of memory, according to which memory judgments are grounded on an informational content.66 Bolzano and Campbell characterize episodic memory as dependent on grounding and reflexive condition which must be met in order for memory to yield knowledge. Campbell’s “ground-floor” condition on memory-knowledge corresponds to Bolzano’s condition (11) that our recollection must be grounded on a perception. The two authors also agree on the reflexive condition on knowledge or our previous aware-ness of a past event. According to Bolzano’s conditions (2) and (3), self-awareness is necessary for episodic memory, since we have to be able to identify a past experience as our own: when I say that I remember drinking a glass of red wine last night, I am aware of referring to the source of my previous experience (which is nested in my recollection). Similarly, ac-cording to Campbell, whether memory yields knowledge depends on our way of finding out about a past event.67 I must have informational access other than by testimony or inference in order for my recollection to be a source of knowledge. There must be a direct link between my present memory and my past experience. As Campbell puts it:

“the dependent character of memory means that [the judgment that I saw the butler polishing the revolver] does not count as knowledge, unless I make it in virtue of my having had some access to that polishing, otherwise than through memory. What is required is that, for example, I saw him do-ing it.”68

64 See Linke (1929, § 86: 209). 65 See Dokic (2001: 228, Dokic’s italics). 66 See Campbell (1994: 233). 67 See Campbell (1994: 236-239). 68 Campbell (1994: 239).


If there is a direct link between my past experience and present mem-ory, Bolzano would agree with Dokic that this link is not continuous from past to present and at best guarantees that the relevant memory can be gained or collected.69 Bolzano can make this claim because of his trace-theory: the memory trace guarantees the link between past and present, for it enables us to grasp a memory-experience. The trace carries the core-information or patterns of a past episode which are combined with present information when we recollect what we did or whom we saw yesterday. According to Bolzano’s condition (9), in order to recollect a past represen-tation, we need to look at the trace it left behind. The trace enables our memory to attune to certain informational states and to fill in the patterns of a past event. In this way, our memory experience becomes a representa-tional state allowing us to make the recognitional judgement that we have had this representation before.

I advance the claim that the Bolzano-Linke account of memory experi-ence as intentional, satisfy most of the criteria formulated by José Luis Bermúdez for describing representational states.70 First, a memory experi-ence is representational if and only if the given states are compositionally structured in such a way that we can recognize similar situations and make certain primitive forms of inference. Hence recollections satisfy the re-quirement that representational states have a compositional structure such that their elements can be constituents of other perceptual states.

More importantly, traces can be constituents of different perceptual states, since they configure our memory representations and can be part of other representations than the one we presently retrieve. Traces thus also interact with other representational states, so we can safely assume that Bolzano’s recollections satisfy Bermúdez’ requirement that representa-tional states admit of cognitive integration, meaning that representational states can interact and that we are enabled to recognize similarities be-

69 See Dokic (2001: 228). 70 See Bermúdez (1998: 94) who names the following criteria for describing repre-sentational states: “They should serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory input and behavioral output cannot be plotted in a lawlike manner. They should admit of cognitive integration. They should be com-positionally structured in such a way that their elements can be constituents of other representational states. They should permit the possibility of misrepresenta-tion.” I have slightly modified the order of these criteria in applying them to Bol-zano’s description of recollections and I omit the first criterion because it is quite obvious that in recollections the connections between sensory input and behav-ioural output cannot be plotted in a lawlike manner and consequently it would be begging the question to say that recollections explain our behaviour in such situa-tions.

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tween them. For in conditions (6) and (7), Bolzano stipulates the require-ment that a recollection must have the same content as the past representa-tion, meaning that the renewing representation and the renewed represen-tation must have a common part which is the trace, as I have shown above.

The trace serves as a link between experience and recognition and, if prompted, enables us to retrieve a recollection. The trace a representation left behind is re-combinable with elements of other representational states. Consider, for example, remembering a recent event such as a child playing with a toy car. Retrieving this event requires combining different kinds of information and re-assembling them into a consistent reconstruction of the scene. However, as memory researchers point out, a retrieval is not with-out complications, for we do not simply reactivate the trace or fragments left behind by a past representation of the event. Rather, retrieval modifies memory.71

3.2. Memory distortion

Depending on what cues are available to us as we recollect the episode, some retrieved parts or traces could belong to a different event involving the same participants: we may recall a quarrel ensuing between the child and her playfellow who wanted to recuperate the car, or even a scene in-volving another toy or occurring at a different place. In addition, recollec-tions can be further distorted by misinformation: if a false cue is planted in our more distant memory, such as the suggestion that a similar event oc-curred to us in our childhood, we may even produce false recollections, such as quarrelling about a toy car that never existed. In other words, rec-ollections are reconstructions allowing for misrepresentations or distor-tions and in this way they satisfy a further Bermúdezian requirement for representational states. Bermúdez’ point about the connection between representation and misrepresentation is that we can misrepresent the envi-ronment.72 Recollections (and memory traces) easily satisfy his criterion for allowing the possibility of misrepresentation, because they allow for confabulation. Since retrieval is a reconstructive process where memories

71 On memory distortion cf. also Schacter (1996, ch.4: 98-133) and Elizabeth Loftus (1999) “Remembering what never happened”: 106-118. 72 Admittedly, Bermúdez’ point is headed in a different direction than mine: for him, a representational state must have correctness conditions allowing for the possibility of error. Interactions between representational states are too complex to be invariable, hence the possibility of misrepresentation; cf. 1995: 197-198; 1998: 84.


can be modified, manipulated and even created, we can also remember things that did not happen.73

False memories can be created in different ways, either by our imagi-nation or through various forms of suggestion or even by our own recon-structions of our past, for remembering is a subjective experience, as is our “history”. Thus our recollections can be modified by the way memory is probed (or even by the way it is encoded in the first place) or by how the cues are organized in a retrieval. Autobiographical recollections are modi-fied as traces of past events are retrieved by cues that are reorganized in our own narrative about our past. For example, if I am asked to recollect the events at New Year’s Eve ten years ago, the accuracy of my account will depend on which retrieval cues are used to prompt my recollection. Also, if my recollections are inaccurate, it may be because the retrieval of cues is slightly modified or rearranged each time we recall or re-tell a past event. Or, to put it differently, if our memories are prone to error, it is be-cause there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between a past in-formational state and the present memory experience reactivating or repre-senting this state.74 Each recollection creates new memories of old experi-ences, hence rather than claiming that memories are prone to error, we should question the theoretical paradigm which unquestioningly presup-poses a one-to-one correspondence between past experience and present recollection. As Bolzano reminds us, recollecting something is distinct from knowing that something is true, but this distinction between recol-lecting something and just knowing it does not imply that recollections have no epistemic links to our past, since they are constructions which are intimately related to our self-awareness.75

The question is, how do we extract a memory-trace and how do we construct a recollection? Bolzano gives the following example of how a cue can prompt our recollection effectively or ineffectively: a listing of key words will facilitate our recollection of a speech we learnt by heart if and only if the key words are set up appropriately, but if their order or tim-

73 Cf. Loftus (1999: 107) who points out in her study of memory distortion that “[f]alse memories arise as a natural by-product of reconstruction.” False memories can be created in different ways, either by our imagination or through various forms of suggestion. 74 Cf. on this Schacter (1996: 71); cf. also James L. McGaugh (1995) “Emotional activation, neuromodulatory systems, and memory”: 255-273. 75 Cf. my discussion in section 2.4. above; A, I, 49-50, quoted in note 58; WLIII, § 284.2, quoted in note 59, and A, V, 154-155 on attention and possible memory distortions. In defense of a constructivist model of episodic memory, cf. M.G.F. Martin (2001) “Episodic recall as retained acquaintance”: 257-284.

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ing is incorrect, they will only cause confusion and hence obstruct our recollection because the new information interferes with the stored infor-mation.76 In other words, memory distortion depends on how we construct a past event which in turn depends on the prior and subsequent events sur-rounding the event we want to retrieve. So temporal contiguity or temporal markers (Bolzano’s condition (4), discussed in section 2.1. above), again appear to play a crucial role. Temporal markers are also a debated factor in the dispute about memory traces.

3.3. Re-examining memory traces

The contemporary discussion about memory traces turns on the ques-tion whether or not traces provide a plausible explanation of recollection as a causal process and a grasp of temporal order as “earlier” and “later”. Trace theories such as Bolzano’s purport to explain the continuity between our present experience and the remembered event, that is, how to causally connect past and present. For unless we can grasp causal relations and an assymetric temporal order or unless we have a sense of temporal direction, according to which our experiences precede our memories (and that we have to go back in time to retrieve a past event), we cannot produce auto-biographical narratives.77 In addition, because of the self-awareness con-straint of episodic memory, we also need a concept of the continuity of the self, which Bolzano tried to supplement in the Athanasia with his theory of the soul as a continuous substance, or more precisely, as a simple sub-stance that persists through time.78 Our self or soul must have the ability to be causally connected and traces account for causal dependence by span-ning the gaps between past and present in episodic memory by providing

76 Cf. A, V: 157-8. Schacter (1996: 73; 101), Loftus, Feldman & Dashiell (1995) “The reality of illusory memories”, in Schacter (ed): 47-68) and Schacter (1999) “The seven sins of memory”: 119-137. 77 Cf. A,V: 152, quoted above and Bolzano’s condition (1). The classical causal theory of episodic memory cited in contemporary literature is by C.B. Martin and Max Deutscher (1966), “Remembering”: 161-196. Cf. also J. Campbell (1997): 105-118. 78 I omit the complex topic of the immortality of the soul, since the metaphysical consequences of this debate go beyond the scope of this investigation. On Bolza-no’s concept of the soul, cf. Mark Textor (1999) Ueber die Unvergänglichkeit der Seele, in Bernard Bolzanos geistiges Erbe für das 21. Jahrhundert, E. Morscher ed., Academia Verlag, St. Augustin, 269-294; and A. Krause (2004, ch.3, in parti-cular: 229-97). For the self-awareness constraint, cf. Bolzano’s condition (3) and section 2.4., above.


plausible explanation for the link between episodic memory and the re-membered experiences on which it depends.

But there are different views about what traces are and what they do. Trace-critics usually base their objections on the assumption that traces are static imprints or copies of past experiences and that traces are preserved perceptions that store events for future retrieval. According to the anti-trace view, memory traces consist of the following paradox: the trace which stores a past event and produces its recollection when activated, originates in elements belonging to present events.79 The glass on the table in front of me that I now perceive is a present event which activates a memory trace containing a past event, namely the glass on the table I pre-viously perceived. But when the event “glass-on-the-table” is retrieved, it happens in the present, yet we remember this event as past. The memory trace paradox is that preserved perceptions or traces are always in the pre-sent and do not enable our awareness of the past. Nor do they provide a ground for recognizing an event as past or using a memory demonstrative for referring to it in a past-tense judgment, such as “that glass was on the table”. Rather, trace-theories are begging the question by presupposing the past event they are supposed to explain.80

Friends of the trace-theory would counter such objections by arguing that although memory involves a re-presentation of the past, trace and memory are not the same thing.81 The question of what traces are and how they link experience and recollection is posed not only in terms of static imprints and the storehouse model.82 As we have seen in section 2.3. above, Bolzano uses a dynamic model of traces, according to which some-one has a recollection or renews a past representation if and only if he looks at a trace prompting this renewal (condition (9)). Traces are not im-prints in the sense of copies of past events; rather they are compressions of past events, precisely because they are residues of representations (and not representations themselves). For this reason traces persist across time, not because they are preserved perceptions, but because they are remnants or

79 Cf. Wittgenstein, quoted in note 48, above. More recent trace critics include Squire (1969), Schumacher (1975-6) and Lewis (1983). For a discussion of these criticisms cf. Sutton (1998: 305) On the memory trace paradox, cf. Gianfranco Dalla Barba (1999): “Memory, consciousness and temporality”: 138-155. 80 Cf. Dalla Barba (1999: 139-141). On the use of memory demonstratives and a defense of the view that we have a direct acquaintance with the past and hence no need for memory-images (or traces conceived as such), cf. Campbell (2001), “Memory demonstratives”: 169-186. 81 Cf. section 2.3., above. 82 Cf. Sutton (1998, passim) who rejects the trace concept as a static storage form in favour of a distributive model of memory.

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after-effects of an experience: they are the sediments an event left behind and these sediments make possible a collection later on, that is, a recollec-tion.

If traces make possible our capacity for recollections, they are disposi-tions which are the remains of past impressions, as Bolzano’s predecessor Leibniz makes clear and, not surprisingly, Bolzano picks up the trail.83 So traces are not mere fragments of past representations for they are not parts of representations, but encoded data or engrams underwriting our capacity to retrieve a past event, for in a recollection, we collect the sediments of the event. Here we have a weaker causal claim according to which memo-ries are enabled or made possible by the trace left by a past event.84 Traces are dispositions that make possible the retrieval of a past experience and the re-collection or reconstruction of the patterns a past event left in our mind. These dispositions can be actualized if certain conditions are satis-fied, that is, traces have the power to be retrieved if they are prompted correctly and they are manifested if we successfully renew a past experi-ence in our recollection.85 We can thus infer traces from their manifesta-tions and explain the causal continuity involved in recollection. This weaker causal claim and the underlying dispositionalist view were devel-oped by Hering, a Bolzanian heir who took up where Bolzano left off and

83 especially in conditions (1) and (9). Leibniz calls traces “des dispositions qui sont des restes des impressions passées dans l’âme […], mais dont on ne s’aperçoit que lorsque la mémoire entrouve quelque occasion.” (Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, II, 10, § 2: 110), my italics for emphasizing the part cited by Bolzano in his note to WLIII, § 283, :53. Leibniz also forestalls Bolzano’s claim that the trace is an after-effect of a representation which can be retrieved if it is prompted correctly (al-though Bolzano does not mention this): “je ne crois point qu’il y ait dans l’homme des pensées don’t il n’y eut quelque effet au moins confus ou quelque reste mêlé avec les pensées suivantes. On peut oublier plein de choses, mais on pourrait aussi se ressouvenir de bien loin si l’on était ramené comme il faut.” (Nouveaux Essais, II,1, § 12: 91). 84 Cf. Deutscher (1989: 61) on the weaker causal claim that memory capacities are based on causal connections. Cf. also Sutton (1998: 297-203) who defines a trace as a cause of the cognitive episode and argues for a dispositionalist view of traces. Both authors discuss memory traces in terms of “causation as sedimentation”, that is, a trace enables or makes possible our capacity for retrieval, whereas the re-trieval itself is triggered by whatever cue that prompts it. 85 N.B. Although traces are dispositions, they are not properties because they have a-temporal persistence. Yet they lack genuine temporal duration, since they are only manifested under certain conditions. For traces are active powers under ap-propriate circumstances, in the same sense that salt is soluble if it is immersed in water or wax is meltable if it is in contact with a flame. Some traces of past events may never be manifested, if they do not receive an appropriate cue.

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indicates causal continuity as a key issue in autobiographic memory: “Only memory spans a bridge across my today and my yesterday”.86

86 “Nur das Gedächtnis spannt eine Brücke zwischen meinem Heute und meinem Gestern.” Hering, (1870 “Ueber das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie”: 179).

CHAPTER TWO

HERING ON THE ROLE OF TRACES IN EPISODIC AND PHYLOGENETIC MEMORY

1. Hering on the role of traces in episodic memory or recollection

Ewald Hering presents the philosophical implications of his physio-

logical memory research in a lecture entitled “Memory as a generalized function of organized matter”.1 He justifies his aim by a methodological remark intended to align scientific interests and emphasizes the interde-pendence of the natural sciences: physics, physiology, neurobiology and psychology are collectively related in memory research.2 In 1870, the bor-ders between psychology and philosophy were not yet clearly drawn and psychology, especially descriptive psychology, was close to contemporary philosophy of mind. This is why Hering first assimilates philosophical considerations and psychological observations and then claims that or-ganic matter and consciousness are interdependent domains for the mem-ory researcher.3 Mental and sensory phenomena coact with physiological factors and in order to investigate these phenomena, physiologists must adapt their conceptual tools. In an unexpected twist on the methodology used by contemporary psychologists, he chooses the “armchair method” they ironize because he recognized the need for a common viewpoint which memory researchers should assume. He rejects the hypothesis of a causal relation between matter and consciousness on the grounds that we lack the knowledge for postulating such a relation. Instead, he puts for-ward the assumption that matter and consciousness stand in a law-

1 Hering (1870). English translation 1913. Unfortunately this translation is often inaccurate and sometimes misleading. My citations refer to the 1870 edition and the translations are my own. 2 Cf. Hering (1870:171), where he refers to himself as a natural scientist about to venture into the realm of philosophical considerations in order to raise his investi-gations to a higher scientific level. 3 Cf. Über das Gedächtnis: 174-6.


governed relation of functional interdependence, such that a change of variables in one domain demands a change of variables in the other; hence mental phenomena are considered as functions of material changes of the cerebral substance (Hirnsubstanz) and vice versa. This hypothesis of a functional correlation between mental and material changes (which I call Hering’s law) permits physiologists to investigate mental phenomena (Er-scheinungen des Bewusstseins), using a method that is scientific, as well as conceptually appropriate for describing non-physiological events.4

Hering distinguishes between representations and the traces they leave behind by claiming that representations appear only fleetingly on the stage of our consciousness and that what remains “behind the scenes” are their traces.5 His use of the stage and scene metaphors indicates that he consid-ers (explicit) memory as a remembering of episodes or scenes of which we have representations. Hering insists that it is only whilst we are conscious of them that they are representations and he argues for memory traces by saying that our proof of their existence consists in the persistence of repre-sentations: we know that they persist somehow, since it only takes a cue to make them reappear.6 He then defines the memory trace as a particular disposition or attunement of the nervous substance (Stimmung der Nerven-substanz), by virtue of which the same sound that was produced yesterday can again be evoked today, provided only that it is prompted correctly.7 Traces are what persist, even though we may not be aware of them, unlike representations which appear and disappear in our consciousness. Hering

4 Cf. Über das Gedächtnis: 175-6. 5 Hume uses the theatre metaphor in a similar way: “[t]he mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” THN, bkI.4.vi: 253. 6 “Nur flüchtig betreten die Vorstellungen die Bühne des Bewusstseins, um bald wieder hinter den Coulissen zu verschwinden und andern Platz zu machen. Nur auf der Bühne selbst sind sie Vorstellungen, wie der Schauspieler nur auf der Bühne König ist. Aber als was leben sie hinter der Bühne fort? Denn dass sie irgendwie fortleben, wissen wir; bedarf es doch nur des Stichwortes, um sie wieder erschei-nen zu lassen.” Über das Gedächtnis: 179. 7 “Sie [die Vorstellungen] dauern nicht als Vorstellungen fort, sondern was fortdau-ert, das ist jene besondere Stimmung der Nervensubstanz, vermöge deren dieselbe den Klang, den sie gestern gab, auch heute wieder ertönen lässt, wenn sie nur rich-tig angeschlagen wird.” Über das Gedächtnis: 179, my translation. Interestingly, in current connectionist models, traces are also described in terms of resonance and attunement, cf. Sutton (1998: 286): “Trace theories and resonance theories are not incompatible. [….] traces are the means by which the system attunes itself to cer-tain inputs.”

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considers traces responsible for our vivid recollection of past perceptions and our ability to experience groups of sensory perceptions in their correct spatio-temporal order as they “return into consciouscness in the full sen-sory vivacity of their original perception.” […]

“This clearly shows that even after sensation and perception have long since vanished, a material trace remains behind in our nervous system, a change in the molecular or atomic structure, by which the nervous sub-stance is enabled to reproduce those physical processes which also produce the corresponding psychological process of sensation and perception.”8

Hering’s physiological explanation of traces as material effects of past

experiences not only accounts for the mechanisms by which traces link experience and recollection, but also anticipates contemporary accounts of how memories are made on a molecular level, that is, explanations in terms of biochemical changes in neural tissues which account for the con-solidation of memory traces.9 From a neuroscientific perspective, Hering’s terminology may sound anachronistic, unlike his point that traces are char-acterized by a structural feature and that recollections are enabled by a trace defined as a change in molecular structure – which anticipates con-

8 “Dies zeigt uns in schlagender Weise, dass, wenn auch die bewusste Empfindung und Wahrnehmung bereits längst verloschen ist, doch in unserem Nervensystem eine materielle Spur zurückbleibt, eine Veränderung des molekularen oder atomis-tischen Gefüges, durch welche die Nervensubstanz befähigt wird, jene physischen Prozesse zu reproduzieren, mit denen zugleich der entsprechende psychische Pro-zess, d.h. die Empfindung und Wahrnehmung gesetzt ist.” Hering (Über das Gedächtnis: 177 my italics). 9 Cf. Squire and Kandel (1999: 144-146) on the consolidation of memory traces. They point out that the switch from short to long term facilitation or potentiation is a switch from process-based to structure based memory. Usually, long-term mem-ory is said to be characterized by an increase in synaptic connections (cf. also my note 1), but Squire and Kandel show that long-term memory is not always reflected in a growth of additional synapses but also in the retraction of pre-existing ones and that therefore the difference between long- and short-term memory is a struc-tural difference in the nerve-cell’s anatomy, (whereas short term alterations are characterized by small changes in the cell’s ability to release the transmitter, since short term memory holds information briefly, so that it can be used or processed). Interestingly, these authors cite Hering at the beginning of their first chapter: “Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole […] our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.” (cf. Über das Gedächtnis: 182, cited in Squire & Kandel, 1999: 1). Cf. also Schacter (1996: 58-60).


temporary experimental views. His postulate of the law-governed relation of functional interdependence between mental and material phenomena is also a basic premiss of contemporary neuroscience. That postulate entails the consequence that recollections are functions of material changes of the cerebral substance and this view is corroborated by contemporary research in neurobiology concerning long-term memory, which is where retrieval occurs, since there information is not held continuously but can be suc-cessfully retrieved at a later time.

The problem for Hering, as well as for current memory researchers, is to account for the interim in long-term memory by explaining what hap-pens to the information: how is it recorded and how is it retrieved?10 If we accept the two premisses that memory traces are synaptic transmissions, that is, connections between two nerve-cells or neurons for transmitting nerve impulses and that events are recorded by the brain in strengthening or consolidating these connections, we may then also accept the assump-tion that long-term memory is characterized by a structural change in these junctions, for it requires a coordinated structure in pre- and post-synaptic cells. In other words, nerve cells have to adapt their anatomy or change their molecular structure in order to facilitate long-term memory. This is Hering’s claim expressed in contemporary scientific terminology: memory traces are neuroanatomic changes or patterns of connections recorded by the brain and our recollections are functions of synapses or transmission sites of nerve impulses.

Traces are thus persisting dispositions or attunements of the nervous substance: information persists in a reduced and dispositional state by vir-tue of the trace it leaves or the structural effect it has on neural tissues. Hering then explains why traces are compressions or reductions of past events and how they enable our memory to attune to present perceptions by grounding the reconstruction of past experiences:

“The nervous substance faithfully preserves the recollection of frequently performed activities. It now reproduces all necessary processes for produc-ing the correct perception, […] but fleetingly, in a reduced way and with-out such duration and intensity that each single segment would be pushed over the threshold of consciousness.”11

10 As Hering puts it: “Was mir gestern bewusst war und heute wieder bewusst wird, wo war es von gestern auf heute? Es dauerte als Bewusstes nicht fort und doch kehrte es wieder.” (Über das Gedächtnis: 178). 11 “Die Nervensubstanz bewahrt treu die Erinnerung der oft geübten Verrichtun-gen; alle zur Herstellung der richtigen Wahrnehmung nöthigen Prozesse, […] re-produzirt sie jetzt, aber flüchtig, in abgekürzter Weise und ohne solche Dauer und

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In a recollection we do not consciously recall every single part of a

past representation or every single representation composing a past experi-ence and what we recall is a compressed version of the original event. Our procedural or implicit memory retains information it does not reproduce in every recollection.12 Hering draws a physio-psychological distinction be-tween two memory systems which corresponds to the philosophical dis-tinction between the ‘storage’ and ‘capacity’ memory models: unconscious or implicit memory retains and preserves representations whilst conscious or explicit memory retrieves or reproduces them. The former, also called procedural memory, is responsible for forming habits and certain motor skills or learning from experience, whilst the latter carries our representa-tions and concepts. Unconscious or implicit memory systems are purely reflexive and preservative, for they are “chains of material nerve proc-esses” involving the retention of information which enables us to know something about an event or how to do something “by force of habit” without recalling the source information that is, without reproducing every single representation. A conscious or explicit memory form such as epi-sodic memory, however, is a source of knowledge which can bring back information from the past, since it involves self-awareness and enables us to reacquire past representations by reproducing past informational states in the present.13

Intensität, dass jedes einzelne Glied über die Schwelle des Bewusstseins gerückt würde“ (Über das Gedächtnis: 180-1, my italics). 12 Or, as Hering puts it, memory is appropriately considered to be an unconscious capacity rather than a conscious one; cf. Über das Gedächtnis: 178. Bolzano, though in a slightly different terminology, also argues that recollections are com-pressions of past experiences because we have retained them in implicit memory. He explains this compression as the high frequency with which representations we have formed in early childhood and have frequently repeated since, fly past our mind whenever we renew them. Similar to Hering (ibid: 178), he considers mem-ory responsible for (mental or subjective) concept-formation: “I believe that this holds particularly for the lower generic representations under which we subsume external intuitions, i.e. the general ideas of colours, sounds, odours, etc.” Cf. WLIII, § 286.8. 13 See Über das Gedächtnis: 178-182. Hering draws an analogy between the proc-esses of unconscious memory and the processes involved in perception: I can cor-rectly perceive a white globe in a few moments, without being aware of the proc-esses involved in becoming aware of a sensation of white, a spherical shape, rec-ognizing its curvature and estimating its size, yet only the final result enters our consciousness. For “our perceptive faculty would forever remain at its lowest stage if we had to consciously construct every perception from the details of sensory matter given through our senses” ( :182). Cf. D. Schacter & E. Tulving (1994)


Episodic memory requires an awareness of ourselves as persons with a history and an ability to travel back in time to retrieve an event from our past. My looking inside myself retrieves a past event when I cognize my past experience by looking at my past and retrieving an event from my own experience. More precisely, my cognition is not of the past event, but of the present trace of that event. Our self or soul must have the ability to be causally connected and traces account for causal dependence by span-ning the gaps between past and present in episodic memory by providing a plausible explanation for the link between episodic memory and the re-membered experiences on which it depends. The memory trace guarantees the direct link between past and present, for it enables us to grasp a mem-ory-experience.

Today we can recall the same sound that was produced yesterday if the past configuration is correctly reconstructed or the patterns supplied by the trace are correctly filled in with our present information or cues. The memory model that emerges from this account is inferential, since mem-ory is considered as a reconstructive process and the role of traces in this process is to provide continuity between experience and recollection. Con-sequently, traces are a relevant explanatory factor of recollection in an inferential model of long-term memory.

2. Hering’s memory colours and cued recall

There is a significant link between Hering’s research on memory and his work in visual science, especially in colour vision. The common point between his analyses of memory (not just episodic memory) and colour perception is the phenomenon of recall: he relates the question of how present cues interact with memory traces to the problem of the colour con-stancy effect (Farbenbeständigkeit), for he explains the latter in terms of memory and even calls colours as we see them memory colours (Gedächt-nisfarben).14 On the other hand, he also determines the conditions of trace retrieval by means of the colour constancy effect, so there is an interaction between memory colours, perceived constancy and the process of activat-ing a memory by rousing an engram from a latent to an active state, or ecphory. The notion of ecphory was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Semon to describe the retrieval process of memory as a match

in“What are memory systems”:11; 26; Schacter (1996, : 170) and Squire & Kandel (1999: 24) on the distinction between implicit and explicit memory. 14 Hering (1878), Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn, English translation by D. Jameson and L. Hurvich (1964), Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, §§ 4, 6. I use this translation in my citations.

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between the cue and the trace.15 Our present question is, how do memory colours work together with memory traces in recovering stored informa-tion and how are memory colours related to perceived colour constancy?

The second part of the question is simple: what Hering calls memory colours is perceived colour constancy. The causal continuity between our past and present perceptions is achieved by the colour constancy effect, that is, the relative stability of perceived colours of surfaces under changes in illumination. For example, if I see snow as white in full sunlight as well as in the orange-red light of the setting sun, I perceive a relatively constant colour, independently of the varying lighting conditions. Things as we see them (Sehdinge) display an approximate colour constancy and, as Hering says, this is why we are able to ascribe very specific or fixed colours to objects: “to chalk white, to sulfur yellow, to coal the color black; we speak of white paper and the black letters of a page.”16 According to Hering, these specific colours of things as we them are memory colours and we are able to identify objects by means of their approximate colour constancy. Memory colours are approximately invariant colour of objects which we

15 See Richard Semon (1909) Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehun-gen zu den Originalempfindungen, Engelmann. According to the “ecphory” theory, memory depends not only on the strength of our associations, but on the relation between the cue that triggers recall and the memory trace, or the similarity between the encoding and retrieval processes: the probability of our recollecting a past event depends on the match between the cue and the original encoding; cf. Schac-ter (1996: 56-71) and Tulving (1983: 12-14) who examines “synergistic ecphory”, or how a present cue and circumstances conspire in rousing a memory trace from a latent to an active state. 16 Hering continues: “[…] Without this approximate constancy, a piece of chalk on a cloudy day would manifest the same color as a piece of coal does on a sunny day, and […] it could not happen that individual objects have fixed colors (bestimmte Farben) for us […] which we call their real color (wirkliche Farben).” Theory of the Light Sense (1878) § 6: 17, Hering’s italics. In Kasabova (2004: 17) I argue against Hering (and Bolzano’s) view on the constancy effect, saying that we do not really see a uniform colour. I now think the direction of my argument was mis-taken: first, the perceived constancy is only approximate, second, the question is how it can be achieved, and third, their study of perceptual constancy points to perceived approximate invariance as a result of adaptive neurophysiological mechanisms for colour coding. Cf. on this Jameson and Hurvich (the English trans-lators of the Lehre vom Lichtsinn) (1997), “Essays concerning colour constancy”: 177-198. N.B. Jameson and Hurvich translate Sehding as seen thing. I prefer to use the ex-pression “things as we see them”, to render the idea of a perceptual process in-volved in seeing something. The past participle “seen” refers to an accomplished or past state of affairs: a “seen thing” is a “gesehenes Ding”, not a Sehding.


see as fixed properties of our memory images of familiar objects. We as-cribe white to paper or black to coal, for these are the memory colours we recognize as belonging to those objects. Our recognition is due to the ap-proximate colour constancy of paper or coal in our past and present per-ceptions, since we could neither recognize nor identify things without some degree of perceived constancy which helps to bridge the temporal gap between past recollection and present experience.17

In reply to the first part of the question put above, Hering says that we can grasp or recognize what takes place before our eyes by recollecting or reproducing past representations whose traces we perceive in our mind and we revive a memory colour if we prompt it correctly. This condition for effective recall is stipulated in his definition of a memory trace as a par-ticular attunement (Stimmung) of the nervous substance by virtue of which the same sound that was produced yesterday can again be evoked today, if and only if the cue matches the engram.18 We can formulate Hering’s con-dition for ecphory or the successful activation of a memory colour as fol-lows:

(i) we activate a memory colour m if and only if there is an attunement or affinity between the present cue and the trace

The affinity between the cue and the engram is a necessary condition

for rousing the trace from latent to active state. If there is a match between cue and engram and the memory colour is roused, we identify the object we see as having a certain colour, based on our recognition of that colour which in turn is due to the correctly prompted memory colour.19 This af-finity is the quality of having the same sound or homophony, as in a piece

17 “For the color in which we have most consistently seen an external object is impressed indelibly on our memory (prägt sich unserem Gedächtnis unauslösch-lich ein) and becomes a fixed property of the memory image (Erinnerungsbilde). What the layman calls the real color of an object is a color of the object that has become fixed (fest), as it were, in his memory; I should like to call it the memory color of the object. […] Moreover, the memory color of the object need not be rigorously fixed but can have a certain range of variation depending on its deriva-tion.” Theory of the Light Sense, § 4: 7. Cf. Jameson and Hurvich (1997: 179) on colour constancy and postreceptoral adaptation which I do not discuss. 18 Cf. Über das Gedächtnis, :179, cited above. 19 “As the memory color of an object is always awakened [wachgerufen] if a mem-ory image of it is aroused [geweckt], […] and it then partly determines the way we see it. All objects that are already known to us from experience, or that we regard as familiar by their color, we see through the spectacles of memory color.” Theory of the Light Sense § 4:7-8.

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of music with one predominant melody or composition mainly based on chords where there is little differentiation in rhythm – that is why Hering uses the resonance metaphor ‘Stimmung’. Homophony is one of Semon’s conditions for memory retrieval which he characterizes as a way of com-bining or superposing information from different source.20 We either by assimilate elements from different components or we differentiate between them and. As Hume would say, we use the relations of similarity, prox-imity or opposition – but according to him these relations define the asso-ciation of ideas, whereas Semon distinguishes between association and ecphory, the former being the explanation of the latter. He describes ho-mophony as an aspect of memory retrieval based on redintegration or a restoration based on a part-whole overlap. Thus I can recall a scene from my past if a present cue correctly configures with it.

How does Hering account for the relation between recognition and recollection? On the surface he says that we recognize that which we rec-ollect, which seems quite banal. But his claim also implies that he recurs to recollection for explaining the cognitive process of object identification and this claim has two implications. If we see a memory colour when there is an interaction of the present cue and circumstances with a memory trace, the first and trivial implication is that memory colours are typical colours of objects which are recalled in connection with familiar objects; hence white is recalled in connection with snow and vice versa. On one hand, the presentation or representation of a familiar object activates the trace of a past representation of this object in our memory, but on the other, our memory representation of an object also influences our present perception of it. The second implication is that memory colours can play a role in object identification provided the ecphory condition is satisfied, that is, if and only if there is a successful match between the present cue and the memory trace and an affinity between physiological and mental events.

In Hering’s view, effective recall is the result of the attunement of the nervous substance or the trace conceived as a neuroanatomic change ena-bling an adaptation to present circumstances or stimulation. It is because of this neurophysiological adaptation that a memory representation influ-ences our present perception. For instance, the perceived degree of colour constancy or the memory colour is a result of how the visual system adapts to our continued visual experience. But this adaptation is itself influenced by memory images in a successful activation of memory traces. Since, according to Hering, perceptual effects are functions of physiological changes (and vice versa), an approximately constant surface colour percept

20 See D. Schacter (2001): 168-9.


is achieved as pupillary changes, retinal or cone adaptation and other physiological factors adapt our perceptual mechanisms under different lighting conditions, thus altering the sensory effects of visual stimulation. Consequently, given that mental phenomena such as memory images coact with the neural visual mechanism, lighting conditions and the present state of the retinal mechanism are only “the primary causal factors of the col-ours produced by the radiations. Associated with them are the reproduc-tions of earlier experiences aroused by all sorts of attending circumstances, and these secondary and to some extent accidental factors help to deter-mine what is seen at a given moment.”21

This is how he explains the formation of memory colours, by means of a reciprocal interaction between the neurophysiological adaptation to vis-ual stimulation, at receptoral and postreceptoral or discriminatory levels on one hand, and the influence of our memory representations (particularly long-term ones) on our visual system. To put it another way, memory col-ours or perceived colour constancy are a projection effect of an interaction between adaptive neurophysiological mechanisms for colour coding. This interaction is governed by Hering’s law of functional interdependence, so that for all memory colours (m1…..mn) which are mental changes c, there is a functional relation Rf with neurophysiological adaptations n such that:

if Rf (m1…..mn, c) and Rf (m1…..mn, n), then c = n

Memory colours coact with memory traces in activating stored infor-mation and this coaction is explained by adjustments between mental and physiological events enabling the retrieval of a past experience. There is an encoding process and a retrieval process, but what is the nature of the element which links them in a recollection? If the trace is an attunement of the nervous substance or a neurophysiological effect of a past experience and a recollection is produced if the trace is correctly configured with pre-sent information in cued recall, what exactly is the cue triggering the re-call?

2.1. The role of signs and abstraction in recollection

A tentative answer is that the successful match between encoding and retrieval processes is mediated by a semiotic relation of signification, be-tween a sign and its representations or meanings. The cue is a sign which

21 Theory of the Light Sense, § 4: 6. Hering develops the notion of reciprocal inter-action (Wechselwirkung) in ch.8, entitled On the theory of reciprocal interaction in the somatic visual field, §§ 37-49.

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is either linguistic or non-linguistic, since ecphory occurs either by repeat-ing the original stimulus or by rousing the engram by means of a sign that represents the original stimulus. Therefore Hering claims that ordinarily people use colours “as signs (Zeichen) by which they recognize objects again (wiedererkennen) and in this way the memory color of the recog-nized object is also immediately brought into focus”.22 We take the colours we see as signs, that is, as objects that stir up or prompt representations.23 So, if memory colours partly determine the way we see objects, this is because we use them as signs which stir up representations or meanings. And if the sign is correctly configured with the trace, it produces a recol-lection because if the trace is activated, it enables us to be aware of a past event and recall is triggered by an attunement with the cue.

A correct configuration between sign and trace which produces a recol-lection involves a process of abstraction and generalization, for to recollect is to abstract or forget the differences between present and past representa-tions by directing our attention to what they have in common.24 But we

22 Theory of the Light Sense, § 4: 11. Cf. also the passage partly cited in note 107, where Hering writes that a memory colour “is always awakened if a memory im-age of it is aroused by any other characteristic of it, or even only by the word that denotes [bezeichnen] the object, it is especially aroused when we see the object in question again or even only think we see it, and it then partly determines the way we see it.” Hering’s notion of signs is close to his Pragueian predecessor’s view that a sign is an object a whose representation [A] can be easily prompted or stirred up and used as a means for producing representations which are more difficult to generate, but which are associated with [A]. Cf. WLIII, § 285.1. N.B. Hering refers to cases where colour recognition helps with object identifica-tion but there are also cases where color identification is a result of object identifi-cation rather than contributing to it, for example colours that are difficult to clas-sify under any lighting conditions, such as the colours of concrete or haystacks; see on this Jameson and Hurvich (1997: 194). 23 As Bernard Bolzano, Hering’s Pragueian predecessor, puts it, the main purpose of signs is to arouse those representations which are their meanings (Bedeutung), for a representation is that which is represented or signified by a sign and a mean-ing is the representation as such (Vorstellung an sich) of a sign; cf. WLIV, § 676; WLIII, § 285.1. Cf. on this Kasabova (2006). 24 According to Bolzano, we abstract representations by directing our attention to them and we raise them to the level of clarity and distinctness as we withdraw them from their context, cf. WLII, § 286.7. Bolzano calls representations obtained by abstraction “deducted representations” (abgezogene Vorstellungen). On con-solidation or the switch from short-term to long-term memory, cf. Schacter (1996: 81-3); Squire & Kandel (1999: 132) and Madison (2004: 42-49). According to them, consolidation is long-term facilitation or potentiation, for on the cellular


can only form abstract representations if we have previously retained in-formation about them and are therefore familiar with their similarities. Our familiarity with similarities between present and past representations is due to a consolidation between our implicit or procedural and explicit memory enabling the survival of memory traces. The memory trace be-comes more stable when short-term or procedural memory is converted into long-term or explicit memory for this is how the brain records past experiences: by strengthening the connections between neurons it strengthens the temporal persistence of the trace. This consolidation of memory traces accounts for our capacity to make abstract concepts or gen-eral representations and use them as signs or cues for recalling various particular representations.

As Hering puts it, only certain particularly noticeable qualities (be-sonders hervorstechende Eigenthümlichkeiten) are reproducible which we have already perceived in other things at previous times and for whose reception the brain was therefore already tuned (gestimmt). This attune-ment is the trace recorded by the brain as a neuroanatomic change ena-bling it to adjust to certain informational states, namely those qualities which are particularly noticeable. Hering continues: “this is how properties that are common to many things are, as it were, separated from their sub-stances and gain an independent existence in our consciousness as repre-sentations and concepts and in this way the whole rich world of our repre-sentations and concepts is constructed of memory’s building blocks (Werk-steine).”25

Abstraction is thus an adaptive feature of our memory to facilitate our acquisition of knowledge by economizing on particular details and con-solidating a coherent sequence from compilations of past representations. If our recollections were cluttered by numerous details, we could not cor-rectly configure the patterns of a past event with a present cue and conse-quently we could not reconstruct the episode. Hence my recollection of entering a room does not involve a conscious recall of every single move I

level this is a switch from process-based or short-term memory to structural-based or long-term memory involving new protein synthesis and gene regulation. 25 “Auf diese Weise lösen sich diejenigen Eigenschaften, welche vielen Dingen gemeinsam sind, im Gedächtnis gleichsam ab von ihren Trägern und gewinnen als Vorstellungen und Begriffe eine selbständige Existenz in unserem Bewusstsein; und so wird die ganze reiche Welt unserer Vorstellungen und Begriffe aufgebaut aus den Werksteinen des Gedächtnisses.” Über das Gedächtnis, :178. Locke (1689) would agree with Hering that abstraction is an economy of thought: “a distinct Name for every particular Thing, would not be of any great use for the improvement of Knowledge: which though founded in particular Things, enlarges it self by general Views;” Essay III. iii § 4 : 410, Locke’s italics.

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made but is a reconstruction of a scene in which past representations are cast or compressed into a coherent sequence edited by my episodic mem-ory.26

3. Hering on phylogenetic memory and his study of instinct

Hering extends his notion of autobiographical memory to phylogenetic memory. His argument for the possibility of phylogenetic memory can be reconstructed as follows: since memory traces are neurophysiological ef-fects of past experiences, memory is a biological feature of human, as well as non-human, animals. Memory thus belongs to the vital processes of living beings. If memory is a biological feature of individual living beings, it must also be a biological feature of a species in general and since all individual animals are endowed with memory, there must also be a mem-ory pertaining to the evolutionary development of a species, viz. a phy-logenetic memory which is expressed by instinctive behaviour. Hering writes:

“On the basis of numerous facts we are justified in assuming that even such properties of an organism which were not inherited but were acquired un-der the particular circumstances in which it lived can be transmitted to its descendants. Therefore every organic substance bestows a small legacy on the germ (Keim) that splits from it, a legacy acquired in the individual life of the maternal organism and added to the greater heritage of the entire species.”27

26 See on this Luria (1968) The Mind of a Mnemonist who discusses the mne-monist Shereshevskii whose recollections were inundated by details at the expense of understanding what he had memorized due to his inability to abstract (or to for-get) cf. on this Schacter (1996: 80-81). Ireneo, the hero of J.L. Borges’ (1962) Fu-nes the Memorious also suffers from this affliction. 27 “Wir sind auf Grund zahlreicher Thatsachen zu der Annahme berechtigt, dass auch solche Eigenschaften eines Organismus sich auf seine Nachkommen übertra-gen können, welche er selbst nicht ererbt, sondern erst unter den besonderen Ver-hältnissen, unter denen er lebte, sich angeeignet hat, und dass infolge dessen jedes organische Wesen dem Keime, der sich von ihm trennt, ein kleines Erbe mitgibt, welches im individuellen Leben des mütterlichen Organismus erworben und hin-zugelegt wurde zum grossen Erbgute des ganzen Geschlechtes.” (Hering, 1870: 184-5); my italics. According to the idioplasm (Keimplasma) theory, a part of the cell (the protoplasm) is hereditary and can be passed on from one generation to another.


The proof, in Hering’s view, that there is a biological feature such as phylogenetic memory which is a function of organized matter, lies in the reproductive performance of cells and sub-cellular structures, a perform-ance which is visible in cellular alterations such as alteration of form, in-crease in size, division and cellular growth.28 He expounds his view using an argument from analogy, supported by late 19th Century histologic re-search: although the nervous system is divided into thousands of cells and fibres, it constitutes an interrelated whole (ein in sich zusammenhängendes Ganze) and interacts with all organs. More recent medical research has confirmed Hering’s assumption, for when an organism responds to envi-ronmental stimuli, the key stimulus triggering a behaviour is received by different sensory cells and their associated neural networks. These latter help the organism to produce an appropriate level of response by integrat-ing the signal from many receptors to determine the degree of the key stimulus. So, roughly speaking, an organism’s reflex responses to specific stimuli are the result of an interaction of its different parts, an interaction largely enabled by the nervous system. By describing the nervous system as an interrelated whole, he also accounts for instinctive behaviour trans-mitting acquired qualities from one cell or organ to another and, by exten-sion, from one organism to another, viz, from a parental organism to its progeny. Hering considers the difference between transmitting or repro-ducing qualities within the same organism (of which the offspring was once a germinal part) or from a parental organism to its offspring merely as a difference in degrees and not as a difference in kind.

Instinct or patterns of behaviour expressing the response of an organ-ism is modifiable, since new characteristics can be acquired and, Hering says, these characteristics can then be transmitted to this organism’s off-spring. For, if something has become second nature in a parental organism, either through a long process of habituation (Gewöhnung) or by regular training, so that, however moderately, it also permeates the cell germinat-ing in it, and if the latter begins a new existence, expands and grows into a new being, this offspring then reproduces what it had once experienced as a part of a greater whole.29 In a way, Hering anticipates evolutionary ge-netics, since he formulates an early theory of genetic transmission of ac-quired qualities from parents to their offspring. He calls this transmission a material connection (materielle Verbindung) between an organism’s ac-

28 Cf. Hering (1870: 184). 29 Cf. Hering (1870: 187).

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quired properties and the differentiating characteristics of its offspring, by virtue of which the latter can itself redevelop those parental qualities.30

Hering then correlates his concept of heredity with memory and this controversial analogy was developed by Richard Semon (1904) in his study “Die Meme”. As I have shown above, Hering considers memory as a reproductive power and memory traces as neuroanatomic changes ena-bling an adaptation to present circumstances or stimulation. And the mem-ory of the nervous substance (Gedächtnis der Nervensubstanz) reproduces organic processes, though not all of them are reproduced on a conscious level, since this reproductive power extends to sub-cellular levels. For this reason, he claims, genetic transmission is a powerful feature of memory, by means of which both inherited and acquired characters are passed on to future generations. Hering’s theory of instinct differs from Darwin’s in that Hering’s account of heredity specifies that the sources of instinct are not only natural selection and inherited habit but that the characteristics inher-ited by future generations need not be innate but may have been acquired by previous generations and passed on.31 The relation between memory and biogenetic processes was cautiously suggested by Hering’s idea that the effects of practice penetrate very faintly into the germ, though they necessitate countless repetitions for influencing the hereditary process. Hering’s view is dispositional: it is not the acquired characteristics that are inherited, but rather the organism’s ability to adapt and its capacity to learn. The suggestion about inheriting acquired characteristics was devel-oped by Semon and was rejected by Lamarckians such as Weismann (1892). Semon had argued that acquired characteristics are inheritable since stimuli leave traces (he calls them engrams) on the protoplasm of the animal or plant. When these stimuli are regularly repeated they induce a habit which persists after the stimuli cease and thus acquired habits can be transmitted from an organism to its descendants. It follows that memory preserves the effects of experience across generations. The analogy be-tween memory and heredity was later baptized the Semon-Hering theory.32

30 Cf. Hering (1870: 185-186). “So ist uns offen genug der Weg angedeutet, auf welchem die materielle Vermittlung zwischen den erworbenen Eigenschaften eines Organismus und derjenigen Besonderheit des Keimes liegt, vermöge deren der letztere jene mütterlichen Eigenschaften auch seinerseits wieder zur Entwicklung zu bringen vermag.” :186. NB: Although there is no explicit indication in the text, Hering was probably aware of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with plant hybrids published five years earlier, in 1865. 31 Hering and Darwin were contemporaries and the Origin of Species appeared in 1892, twenty-two years after Hering’s text On Memory. 32 Hering’s view on the inheritance of acquired characters is in direct contrast with August Weismann’s (1892) theory of heredity and the protoplasm of germ cells.


Hering antipicates not only Tinbergen’s famous study of the neuro-physiological bases of innate behavioural patterns, but also a claim that is currently rising in popularity, namely that genes can be influenced by fac-tors other than nature – and that nurture influences nature “because the genetic programme is flexible”.33 According to Tinbergen, animals have certain inflexible reflex responses to specific stimuli: a herring gull will recognize its own egg if and only if the egg is in its nest and it will mistak-enly identify other objects in the nest as eggs. Similarly, a herring gull chick’s will beg for food if it is presented with a beak that as a red spot near the tip, regardless of the colour of the beak or the shape of the bird’s head. Specific stimuli elicit instinctive responses, but the two can co-evolve: dog breeders can domesticate future generations of dogs by breed-ing dog-types without the killing streak, although the dog-species will re-tain one or more remnants of wolf-behaviour.34

3.1. Hering’s explanation of instinct as an expression of memory

Hering expounds the notion of instinct which describes innate behav-iour that is the same across all individuals of a given species by explaining it in terms of his dispositional account of memory traces. Fixed behav-ioural patterns are inherited dispositions or abilities that are first retained as memory traces and then retrieved if they are prompted correctly. If an animal, in obeying its instinct,

“already the first time so easily finds the most suitable means for attaining its ends and its motions are so perfectly adapted to their purposes, this is because of the inherited content (Inhalt) of the memory of its nervous sub-stance, which only needs prompting in order to take the most suitable course of action by itself and always remembers exactly just what is neces-sary.”35

(“Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung”, Jena). Weismann rejects the (Lamarckian) claim that acquired characters or changes in the soma can be inher-ited. I do not know whether Weismann had read Hering. 30 years later Richard Semon (1904, 1909) (who had read Hering); cf. Die Meme (monograph) and Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (1922). NB. Semon (1909) also coined the terms engram and ecphory used by Tulving. 33 See N. Tinbergen (1951) The Study of Instinct. Cf. Matt Ridley (2003) Nature via nurture, who argues for the interdependence of genes and nurture: 129. 34 Cf. Ridley (2003: 51). 35 “dass [das Thier] schon das erstemal so leicht auf die zweckmässigsten Mittel zur Erreichung seines Zieles verfällt, dass seine Bewegungen sich so trefflich und

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Based on his dispositional account of memory traces, Hering also sus-

tains a dispositional view of innate ideas: it is not our ideas that are innate, but the reproductive capacity of the cerebral substance and this reproduc-tive capacity is the memory of the human species. Phylogenetic memory, which Hering also calls the unconscious memory of nature, is expressed as instinctive behaviour in non-human animals and by predispositions or in humans.

“What appears as instinct in animals, appears in man in a less restrained form, as predisposition (Anlage). Of course concepts are not inborn in an infant, but the ability to extract (herauskrystallisieren) them from the com-plex mixture of sensations with such ease and precision is not due to the child’s own labour, but to the labour of the brain-substance of innumerable generations of ancestors.”36

Hering assumes that (i) the link between heredity and memory lies in

innate behavioural patterns or instinct and that (ii) instinct is appropriately explained as an expression of memory:

“[i]f instinct is considered as an expression of memory or the reproductive faculty of organized matter, if we assume that the genus is also endowed with memory, then instinct is understood at once”.37

Instinctive behaviour is therefore correctly understood as an expression

of phylogenetic memory. Hering argues that we should ascribe an exten-sive memory or reproductive faculty to the brain and body of the human

ganz von selbst dem zwecke gemäss regeln : dies verdankt es dem angeerbten In-halte des Gedächtnisses seiner Nervensubstanz, welche nur eines Anstosses bedarf, um ganz von selbst in die zweckmässigste Art von Thätigkeit zu gerathen, und sich immer gerade auf das zu besinnen, was eben nöthig ist.” (Hering, 1870: 191). 36 “Nur erscheint dass, was wir beim Thiere Instinct nennen, hier in freierer Form als Anlage. Freilich, die Begriffe sind ihm nicht angeboren, aber dass sie aus dem complicierten Gemische der Empfindungen so leicht und sicher herauskrystallisie-ren, das verdankt das Kind nicht seiner Arbeit, sondern der vieltausendjährigen Arbeit, der Gehirnsubstanz zahlreicher Vorfahren.” (:193, Hering’s italics). “das unbewusste Gedächtnis der Natur”:194. 37 “Betrachtet man aber den Instinct als Äusserung des Gedächtnisses oder Repro-ductionsvermögens der organisirten Materie, schreibt man der Gattung ein Ge-dächtnis zu, wie man es dem Individuum zuschreiben muss, so wird der Instinct sogleich verständlich, und der Physiologe findet sogleich Anknüpfungspunkte, um ihn in die grosse Reihe jener Thatsachen einzufügen, die wir oben als Äusserungen des Reproductionsvermögens angeführt haben.”(:191).


infant “of that which was developed thousands of times in his ancestors, and by virtue of this [reproductive faculty] he can now learn the skills he needs for living much more rapidly and easily, as far as they are not en-tirely innate.”38

Whether we consider habituation as a form of memory depends on how we answer the following questions: is memory a purely cognitive power or are reflexive (in the sense of involuntary reflexes) abilities such as behavioural skills and simple associative learning also grounded in memory? Most contemporary memory researchers distinguish between the noncognitive or procedural memory system and cognitive memory sys-tems.39 This distinction was criticized by Bennett & Hacker (2003) who consider memory as а purely cognitive power. Consequently, according to them, procedural memory is no memory at all, because it is not cognitive and that if animals can learn or acquire certain motor skills by habituation or continued exposure to a stimulus, this “does not warrant characterizing the animal as remembering anything. For nothing cognitive is involved here. [...] An accelerated reflex or a conditioned reaction are not a form of knowledge. But memory is the retention of knowledge acquired […].”40 On this view, memory is conceptualized in terms of knowledge: that is, knowledge is conceptually prior to memory, so that memory is inferrable from knowledge but not vice versa. Hacker & Bennett’s claim can be for-mulated as follows:

(1) x remembers p if and only if x knows p

If memory is analysed in terms of knowledge, it entails that I cannot remember what I don’t know. I discuss the undesirable consequences of this claim for autobiographical memory in part two, chapter 3.

38 “Gleichwohl müssen wir selbstverständlich, wie dem übrigen Körper, so auch dem Gehirne des neugeborenen Menschen ein weitgehendes Erinnerungs-oder Reproductionsvermögen dessen zuschreiben, was schon tausendfach an seinen Ahnen zur Entwicklung kam, und vermöge dessen er die zum Leben nöthigen Fertigkeiten, soweit sie ihm nicht schon vollständig angeboren sind, jetzt ungleich rascher und leichter erlernt, als sonst möglich wäre.” (Hering, 1870:193). 39 Schacter and Tulving (1994) summarize this position: procedural memory “is involved in learning various kinds of behavioural and cognitive skills and algo-rithms, its productions have no truth values, it does not store representations of external states of the world, it operates at an automatic rather than consciously controlled level, its output is noncognitive, and […] is characterized by gradual, incremental learning and appears to be especially well-suited for picking up and dealing with invariances over time.”: 26. 40 Cf. M.R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker (2003):157.

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But is memory correctly analyzed in terms of knowledge? Or should we extend the concept of memory to noncognitive powers such as sensa-tion and perception in order to explain how certain forms of knowing, such as knowing how to ride a bike, can result from training or habituation? Hering, in direct contradiction with Hacker and Bennett, claims that what we call the force of habit is actually the force of memory.41 He refers pre-cisely to unconscious or procedural memory systems that are “chains of material nerve processes”. He considers this form of memory as purely retentive, since it governs behavioural skills and enables us to act by force of habit, viz instinct. Habituation and learning modify the synaptic trans-missions between neurons because they modify the capacity of neurons to transmit signals and memory traces are formed when these modifications persist.42 This is why even primitive animals such as Drosophila can be conditioned to avoid odours associated with electric shock, because they can acquire a certain disposition.

Hering would agree with Bennett & Hacker that the fruitfly has not ac-quired knowledge, but unlike them, he would explain this ability in terms of memory traces: the reason why the fruitfly has acquired this ability lies in its ability to form memory traces of past events. Animals can be condi-tioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli and some of these be-havioural skills are noncognitive, but it does not follow that they do not involve memory, only that the memory system involved is implicit and unconscious. Hering considers memory as complex, which is why he re-fers to “memory’s building blocks”, through which our knowledge is built.43 If we could not retain information, even on a primitive level of conditioning and association, we could form neither perceptual nor con-ceptual representations. Not all forms of learning and memory are forms of cognition, but they are conditions for acquiring knowledge. The structure of memory is hierarchical, ranging from noncognitive to cognitive forms, and the highest memory form, viz recollection or autobiographical mem-ory, is also a source of knowledge because it involves self-awareness. Her-ing’s claim can be formulated as follows, in two parts which correspond to the distinction between retention and retrieval:

(2a) x can learn p if and only if x remembers or retains p (procedural and phylogenetic memory)

41 Cf. Hering (1870: 182). “Was wir die Macht der Gewohnheit nennen, das ist seine [des unbewussten Gedächtnisses] Macht.”, Hering’s italics. 42 Cf. Hering (1870: 177, 180) cited above. 43 Cf. Hering (1870: 178), cited above.


Learning certain skills or ‘knowing how’ to do things involves proce-dural or nondeclarative memory which is reflexive but not reflective, for it is the result of an involuntary response rather than of a conscious thought. In other words, information is retained unconsciously: we know how to ride a bicycle or how to type on a keyboard and we can learn to expect food when we hear a bell without consciously remembering when and where we learnt to do so. Animals can be trained to remember certain things under certain conditions, using association of stimuli, for this is remembering from habit and involves primitive learning, but not recollect-ing or retrieval, as Pavlov’s experiment shows. Dogs can learn or be condi-tioned to salivate at the sight of an approaching person who had fed the dog in the past, provided it has learned to associate this person with the food by repeatedly seeing the two together. So, if animals can be trained to perform and to acquire certain motor skills, this is because they have pro-cedural memory, but no cognitive memory form whose final productions the individual can retrieve due to his or her conscious awareness (though they have other cognitive memory forms).44 The second part of Hering’s claim is:

(2b) x can cognize p if and only if x remembers or retrieves p (recollection or episodic memory)

One of the distinctions between the memory systems of human and

(non-human) animals exploited by philosophers and neuroscientists alike is based on the self-awareness criterion: only humans have reflective memory because only humans are capable of self-awareness. Animals, on the other hand, are said to have no personal memory because they have no sense of self and hence cannot be aware of their own experience. Regard-ing the question of self-awarenes, I think we should distinguish between higher- and lower-order organisms, even though this distinction is prob-lematic, for it is not clear-cut. Nonetheless, higher-order organisms such as mammalian animals may be said to have some awareness of their own experience and a basic sense of self or self-awareness, not one involving language and thought, such as self-recognition or self-identification, but rather a primitive form of discrimination: they have a sense of their body

44 Autobiographical memory is the only explicit memory form involving self-awareness, but there are other cognitive memory systems which are also attributed to non-human animals, namely primary or working memory and semantic or fac-tual memory. On these distinctions, cf. Schacter & Tulving, (1994, 26-28).

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as distinct from others’ bodies which they perceive.45 For example, they can feel pain as theirs and they are aware of their spatial extension and distance between them and other bodies. Such a primitive awareness of one’s own body thus implies a capacity for spatial discrimination or awareness of spatial relations (whether this claim also holds for reptiles, insects or invertebrates is a question I will not discuss here).

It does not follow, however, that higher-order animals also have auto-biographical memory which has a reflective condition: we have to be able to say that we have had a certain idea, perception or experience before, for recollections are produced by means of a self-reflective act. In other words, a cognition of a past experience is produced by looking at one’s own mental state. And this self-reflective act creates a new cognition of an old experience, since it is informative about our past. Consequently auto-biographical memory is a cognitive ability which depends on autonoetic awareness and according to Hering, this reflective form of memory de-pends on procedural memory, including phylogenetic memory. His study of instinct shows that memory is a complex of imbricated memory sys-tems, both conscious and unconscious, and the former depend on the latter. These systems are connected by the memory traces which ensure their retention and enable their retrieval.

Hering concludes his brief treatise on memory by a defense of phy-logenetic memory:

“Oral and written traditions have been called the memory of mankind and there is some truth in this adage. But there is another form of memory which is the innate reproductive capacity of the cerebral substance and without it, written and oral language would be mere empty signs for later generations. The greatest ideas, immortalized a thousand times in writing and language, are nothing to brains which are not attuned to them, for they do not just need to be heard; they need to be reproduced.”46

Hering’s point is that without memory traces, our species would have

no memory and we, as individuals, would have no recollection, nor could

45 Cf. Dan Zahavi (2005) on infants’ primitive sense of self; Subjectivity and Self-hood, ch.7: 179-222. 46 “Man hat die mündliche und schriftliche Überlieferung das Gedächtnis der Menschheit genannt und dieser Spruch hat seine Wahrheit. Aber noch ein anderes Gedächtnis lebt in ihr, das ist das angeborene Reproductionsvermögen der Gehirn-substanz, und ohne dieses wären auch Schrift und Sprache nur leere Zeichen für das spätere Geschlecht. Denn die grössten Ideen, und wären sie tausendmal in Schrift und Sprache verewigt, sind Nichts für Köpfe, die nicht dazu gestimmt sind; sie wollen nicht blos gehört, sie wollen reproducirt sein.” (Hering, 1870: 194).


we recognize what takes place before our eyes, since recollection grounds the cognitive process of identification.

Hering expounds an account of memory trace for explaining autobio-graphical and phylogenetic memory forms by showing that there is a mate-rial or neurophysiological link between conscious and unconscious life. He determined this link as a particular disposition or attunement of the nerv-ous substance and thus provided a neuroanatomic account of the memory trace using a philosophical method of conceptual clarification and descrip-tive analysis. I tried to show that the implications of this 19th Century ac-count of mental and neurobiological properties can be retrieved in current memory theory. It follows that not only philosophy but history of philoso-phy, is relevant for scientific research and the ongoing interdisciplinary discussion of a form of memory that is oriented to the past.

Conclusions and second thoughts

The purpose of the first part of my investigation was to present and situate Bolzano and Hering’s views in the geography of memory research and to tie them into current debates among philosophers, memory re-searchers, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, using an analytical and philosophical method. However, it also raises important questions concerning the process of recollection and autobiographical memory. Roughly, the questions can be divided into three categories: the first con-cerns the terminology and the conceptions of memory; the second regards the problem of translation and translatability between the language of the brain and the language of mind in the domains of philosophy, physiology and the neurosciences. These problems lead to a third category of ques-tions, such as: what is the language of memory? What is the epistemology of memory? If we cannot define the former, we are unable to clarify the latter.

Terminological questions are symptomatic in the problems of translat-ing issues between mind and body: translation is inadequate, which is why both scientific and philosophical memory-terminology is metaphoric. A metaphor is used to transfer a familiar word from an object it ordinarily designates to something to which it is not literally applicable, based on a comparison between unlike entities. For example, in the statement: “this theory has a strong foundation”, theories are compared to buildings. In memory theories, different levels of analysis are disregarded, for memory metaphors result in reification, either by psychologizing a general concept such as [idea] as a sense datum or by explaining a dynamic process as a static object. Reifications are introduced by philosophers and used by them

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and neuroscientists alike and they become part of everyday language, as Locke’s metaphor: “memory is a storehouse of ideas”. Memory metaphors such as storehouse, theatre, recording, trace, wax imprint, or encoding information give rise to various theoretical paradigms, conceptions and confusions about memory – in philosophy as well as in cognitive science. The latest model is an informational one, where the brain is compared to a computer. Regardless of the fact that the first computer was supposed to imitate the brain, the brain is now modelled on the computer. This model is unsatisfactory for, as Hering points out, human memory is not a mecha-nism but an organic process.

More recently, the neurobiologist Steven Rose (1992, 1998) called for a return to an organic view of memory because recall and forgetting are active processes and not passive inscriptions or erasure of data.47 In addi-tion, reification results in the problem of localizing memory either neuro-physiologically (in the hippocampus) or biochemically (in glycoprotein synthesis). Rose trained chickens to avoid pecking at a chrome bead with a bitter taste (passive avoidance training) in order to determine the bio-chemical alterations in memory formation and concluded his experiments by expressing a serious doubt about whether his findings could legitimize general claims about memory formation.48 He suggests that memory con-sists of a series of cues which are not stored in one and the same place in the brain and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between ‘bitter bead’ and a unique memory site. First, ‘bead’ is not a unitary experience for the chick but has a series of cues that requires several memory-sites – for colour, shape and taste – and the recall of the experience ‘bitter bead’ is elicited by any one of these cues which will have enabled the bird to learn to avoid it. By using tests based on a variation method (a bitter yellow bead, a new blue bead, lesioned birds), he found that there were lasting cellular changes in the chicks’ brains. He concludes that an engram or trace can reside in the brain without being stored in a single site, thus avoiding Lashley’s paradox, according to which an engram resides simul-taneously everywhere and nowhere in the brain.49

But the use of reifying metaphors raise the following question: can the brain “store” information? The claim that it can, rests on the assumption that when we perceive something and remember what we learnt, some-thing is stored. But storage is distinct from retention, for to remember that p = to retain that p, not to store that p – retention implies storage, but stor-

47 Steven Rose (1992) The making of memory; (1998) Lifelines, life beyond the gene: 288-231. 48 Rose (1992), ch.10: 241-273. 49 Rose (1992), ch.11: 281-8.


age does not imply retention because retention is an ability and an ability cannot be stored.50 In addition, we cannot store events or facts but we can remember where we put our keys or that World War II ended in 1945. The brain is not a photograph album, nor does it “store” sentences!

So, what is ‘stored’? On the representation-as-image theory, a memory which represents the original experience is a mental image which is a copy of the original experience. As a result of the mistaken assumption of an isomorphism between a representation and an image on the one hand and a copy and an original on the other, neurons are said to ‘contain’ or ‘store’ a representation of the original experience in the form of synapses. An addi-tional query resulting from this hypostasis and the confusion between dif-ferent levels of analysis and different epistemologies is, whether it is the nervous system which remembers or the animal? Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel (1999, 2001), for instance, aims to explore all philosophical and psychological questions related to cognition with meth-ods and concepts of molecular biology, viz, he explains higher level phe-nomena in terms of lower level phenomena. The perils of such an explana-tion lies in its reductionism and the risk of misplaced causation or the fal-lacious assumption that post hoc implies propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) as well as the equally fallacious assumption that there is just one true explanation.

Of course it all depends on what we want to explain – and in order to be clear about that, we have to determine whether the notions describing an event or phenomenon are appropriate. Here the question is not only whether a theoretical paradigm suits our needs and purposes but whether it does the work it is supposed to do. A theory on recollection should provide a plausible explanation not only of what it is we remember, but also why we remember it. We should be left with a satisfactory account of how our autobiographical memory works. As it is, having reconstructed some phi-losophical accounts which combine into a more or less coherent explana-tion of recollection and memory traces and even merge with some con-temporary memory research in the neurosciences, various unsettling ques-tions remain concerning the relation between remembering and recogni-tion, the problem of time and temporal relation in recollection, how we get the idea of the past, the role of imagination in memory construction as well as memory distortion.

The dispositional view of memory traces held by Bolzano and Hering refutes localist and archival models of memory. But although the ‘mental capacity’ model is preferable to the ‘storage’ model, it also has various shortcomings. Memory traces as effects of an inner change or structural

50 Cf. M. R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker (2003), part 2, ch.5: 164.

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analogues explain the causal continuity between past retention and present recall but this account does not tell us why there should be a continuity – or what, precisely, is this continuity or continuum? In order to examine this question, we must leave the dichotomy of the ‘storage’ and ‘mental capacity’ models and find a different perspective on the retention/retrieval problem which Aristotle put in a nutshell as a disposition not to forget something and a successful search in recollecting it.51 The task at hand is to determine the nutshell. In the second part of this work, I examine the notions of continuum, perceived time and perceived past and the role of first-person perspective and deal with questions such as: what is the rela-tion between self-awareness and autobiographical memory? What is the role of recognition or discovering the significance of a past event? In what sense is our memory of the past?

51 See Sorabji (1971): 42.

PART II:

CONSTRUCTING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ACCOUNT DRAWN FROM HUSSERL

PART II INTRODUCTION

The theories I reconstruct in part I center on memory traces and the epistemological problems concerning autobiographical memory. The main question is, whether this form of memory is purely retentive or also infor-mative and, if it is informative, how we bridge the temporal gap between past retention and present recall. Trace theory, considered as dynamic and dispositional, provides an answer to this question but there are disturbing loose threads, not so much due to trace theory itself, as to the prototype of recollection and autobiographical memory it presupposes. This prototype determines the phenomenon of memory in terms of knowledge, so that memory is accordingly definable as a cognitive state.

Apparently, however, memory is incorrectly analyzed in terms of knowledge, since there are also procedural or non-cognitive forms of memory. Is autobiographical memory or recollection correctly analyzed in terms of knowledge? This question is based on the assumption that cogni-tion has conceptual priority over retaining and retrieving whatever knowl-edge we have acquired. If autobiographical memory is analyzed in terms of knowledge, retention is tied to cognition as recollection is to recognition and we are facing Plato’s problem in the Phaedo: I recognize Simmias because I recollect him upon seeing his picture but in order to recollect Simmias, I must have known him at an earlier time. Hence cognition pre-cedes recollection and recollection precedes recognition. In addition, I must be able to cognize both Simmias and his picture (as picturing Sim-mias).1 If the picture is to remind me of Simmias, I must recover the knowledge I have of Simmias inside myself which presupposes that I ac-quired this knowledge beforehand and that I am thinking of Simmias. Also, I must perceive a similarity between Simmias and the picture in see-ing the picture as a subject (depicting Simmias) and not only as a physical object.

However, it does not follow from my seeing the picture as representing or presentifying Simmias that the picture has to remind me of him. I can think of (and recognize) the picture as presentifying Simmias without rec-

1 Plato: Phaedo (73c-74a), translated by R. Hackforth (1955). N.B. Socrates argues that learning is recollection and that learning something is made possible by earlier knowledge of that thing (74d-75a).


ollecting Simmias himself. A further link is needed to draw my attention, something like an ‘attention-magnet’, providing me with a relevant reason for recollecting – and recognizing – Simmias. Another worry is that if I must think of Simmias in order to recollect him, I don’t need to be re-minded of him since, at present, I am already thinking of him. The whole point of autobiographical memory is the paradox of a ‘perceived past’, viz that the past is ‘brought back’ to the present, so the ‘attention-magnet’ is not my thinking about Simmias but a motivational feature which focuses my attention (and my thoughts) on him because it is relevant to my present experience.

I now propose a different way of tackling autobiographical memory and reformulate the problem by asking: why do we remember some things rather than others? Rather than examining the relation between recollec-tion and knowledge and classifying autobiographical memory as a mental state which is either cognitive (informative) or not, I suggest we investi-gate the reasons that underwrite our recollections or what motivates our autobiographical memory for, if we can answer this question, we can ex-plain the structure of recollection, that is, how it works – which in turn provides some clarification about its nature. I discuss temporal relations and temporal perspectives in autobiographical memory, focusing on rela-tions between events and actions, because in recollection, what has hap-pened to a person and how they perceive themselves grounds or explains what they are doing now or where they are going, rather than vice versa.

A past action only becomes an action under a description, in the sense that an intentional act such as recollection is a description or narration.2 In this sense, actions or processes of doing something to achieve an aim, are narrative constructions and descriptions produce actions because they open new intentions through new conceptions and viewpoints. A past action is an earlier, now absent action which is ‘brought back’ and re-experienced under description. It is an old action which took place under a different description than the one we currently use in our recollection. Thus past actions become renewed actions through recollection. In recollecting an episode, we do not produce it in the same order of succession as we ex-perienced it, nor do we re-live it in real time (that which is measured by clocks). We should observe a triple distinction between lived (or per-ceived) time, clock-time or measured time and re-lived time or recollected time. In autobiographical memory we construct, abbreviate and condense the elements of an occurrence into a sequence or unit which is connected semantically and an action is the phenomenon emerging from that seman-

2 See G.E.M. Anscombe (1959) Intention.

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tic continuity. Past actions are not only relived and revived under new de-scriptions as we recall them, they are produced by our acts of recollection.

My account requires that our autobiographical memory is representa-tional, as well as linked to a sense of time and a sense of self. For mental time travel or orientation to particular past times, requires a sense of tem-poral order and a sense of self. In this I follow John Campbell (1997) who argues that our autobiographical remembering requires a grasp of the lin-ear connectedness of time in memory and a spatiotemporal continuity of the self so that we are able to locate particular episodes as having occurred at particular past times.3 But unlike Campbell, I argue that this linear tem-poral order and temporal continuity are constructions and I try to expound the grounding principles of this construction named autobiographical memory.

In addition, I argue for a foundationalist rather than a causalist account of temporal order in autobiographical memory. For a top-bottom approach in philosophy, causality is less important than explaining the relation be-tween reason and consequence. Besides, pace veridicalist theories, my hunch is that it is difficult to isolate the causal processes involved in this form of explicit memory from those involved in other mental activities such as imagining, believing, thinking or reasoning, so we don’t really have any clear-cut criteria for determining causality in memory. A mem-ory-model based on the distinction between storage and retrieval has to account for causality, but autobiographical recollection allows for a model which does not rely on that distinction. Interestingly, connectionist mem-ory models such as John Sutton’s (1998) also eliminate causality, because on this view memory consists of dynamic patterns rather than static ar-chive: the storage and retrieval model is discarded in favour of a single system which processes distributed representations.4 But Sutton argues for a construction of human memory out of more basic though fleeting capaci-ties investigated by Descartes as ‘animal spirits’ or nervous fluids which do not presuppose self-consciousness. My account is limited to autobio-graphical memory – ‘human memory’ involves a complex of explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious memory forms ranging from proce-dural systems governing motor skills to semantic, working and episodic memory. My hunch is that a philosophical investigation of subliminal processes presupposes an access provided by liminal states, viz a con-scious self as well as a sense of self.5 However that may be, my investiga-

3 John Campbell (1997): 105–118. 4 John Sutton (1998). 5 See Bernard J. Baars (2002) on the integrative function of consciousness: “The consciousness access hypothesis: origins and recent evidence”: 47-52.


tion is focussed on the problem of our liminal memory – more precisely our autobiographical memory and the problems of self-awareness, per-ceived time and the phenomenal (or ‘intuitively given’) continuum.

On a foundationalist or ground-consequence account of autobiographi-cal memory, temporality is not explained in causal terms; rather, the tem-poral (and asymmetrical) relation of causality follows from the a-temporal relation of ground-consequence. Causality presupposes an earlier-to-later temporal direction whereas ground-consequence does not. Does recollec-tion presuppose an earlier-to-later temporal direction? I think not for, or so I shall argue, this direction is a construct, at the very least because the no-tion of autobiographical memory implies that we consider ourselves as agents: when we bring back an event from our past experience, in a way we bring about the past. This is an admittedly anti-realist stance with re-spect to statements about past objects and events: their truth depends on our finding out about it or being able to prove it, as an intuitionist would say. And they are justified in the light of what is now the case, for in a rec-ollection we only posit the past. To misquote Dummett: in recollection, we are speaking of objects which pass out of existence but can still be referred to and such objects are things in virtue of which a statement is true (or false).6

In a recollection, there are three main temporal phases: ‘now’, ‘earlier’ and ‘later’.7 ‘Now’ is a necessary condition for discriminating between an ‘earlier’ and a ‘later’ phase and a sequence of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ phases is the result of a ground-consequence relation. The temporal position ‘earlier’ grounds the temporal positions ‘later’ and ‘later’ is grounded in ‘earlier’ because ‘earlier’ explains ‘later’. The former gives reasons for the latter. Hence ‘earlier’ stands to ‘later’ in a ground-consequence relation and not in an empirical cause-effect relation, for ‘earlier’ explains why ‘later’ is the case, as in q because p. I now live in Sofia because I moved there three years ago. The later event is based on the earlier event and presupposes it as a necessary condition, but both temporal phases depend on the first per-son perspective of ‘now’, viz these temporal positions are relative to

6 For a realist account, cf. Michael Dummett (1969) “The reality of the past”: 358-374. 7 My view is based on Bolzano’s account of grounding (Abfolge) in WLII, §§ 111, 198, 221.note; WLIII, §§ 300.9, 311.2, 316.3, 316.note.1 and Husserl’s account of foundation and dependence relations (Fundierung) in the Third Logical Investiga-tion (1901), §§ 7, 13, 14-24. Both authors hold that empirical laws are grounded on or derived from theoretical laws. These accounts go back to Leibniz’s liaison de vérités and ultimately to Aristotle’s distinction between οτι and διοτι. For an analysis of Bolzano’s view see Kasabova (2002).

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‘now’. We could also say that ‘now’ is a phase which is presently per-ceived, whereas ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ are phases which are (now) repre-sented. The temporal succession of our recollection is a construct which appears as a ‘flow’ or continuum, although it consists of discrete episodes. The structure of recollection is analogous to the stratified structure of cinematographic drama, for in recollection, episodes of my personal past appear cinematographically, as reconstituted aspects of things and events that I once experienced.

CHAPTER THREE

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY CONSTRUCTED

1. A method for describing autobiographical memory

I present the necessary and sufficient conditions for autobiographical memory in a model devised by combining John Campbell’s stepwise con-ception of memory and Husserl’s structural account of memory as presen-tification (Vergegenwärtigung).1 My account of autobiographical memory is largely based on Husserl’s fruitful theory of memory and inner time consciousness.

What do we remember of our personal experience and what is the rela-tion between autobiographical memory and narrative? And how are our recollections related to our concept of self – which is based on a teleologi-cal sense of the ends for which a person exists?2 If we ask any one of a number of elderly grandmothers to tell us her personal memories, chances are her tale will consist of certain emblematic events recast in a sequential order, such as her first love, her graduation, her wedding to a handsome officer who died several years ago, the births of her children, events re-lated to them and her grandchildren, as well as the consequences of certain historical and political events on her life, such as the war. Why do we re-member some things rather than others and how do we recall events from our personal past? What is the relation between memory and phantasy on one hand and memory and self-awareness on the other? And what is the time of our autobiographical memory? These questions require some con-ceptual and methodological clarification, for assuming (as I do) that auto-biographical memory is a constructed continuum, the main problem is identifying the limits introduced into our personal coordinate system. These limits are temporal marks or occurrences at a particular moment

1 John Campbell (1994); Edmund Husserl, see Hua vols X, XI, XXIII, XXVI, XXXI, XXXIII. See also the elucidating discussion by John Brough (1975) “Husserl on memory”: 40-62 2 The teleology is Aristotelian: living beings grow, reach maturity and decline. Human beings, we may add, grow into self-aware persons.

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which we count (and account for) and we can introduce infinitely many limits, for the time of recollection is countable (or recountable) and, being a continuum, it is infinitely divisible. The countable aspect of time is on a par with its narratable aspect.3 The limits are discrete elements because they are periods or temporal stages we single out or count, whilst our rec-ollection is a continuum analogous to a cinematographic drama, that is, a composition with a moving sequential order. But why do certain occur-rences count for us? And, furthermore, how do they become whole num-bers in the continuity of our past, a temporal continuum which emerges from a discrete underlying structure?

My assumption underlying this investigation is that autobiographical memory consists of different levels or strata and involves different proc-esses. A failure to recognize these differences has lead cultural psycholo-gists and other theorists to identify autobiographical narrative with auto-biographical memory on the mistaken assumption that personal narrative is on a par with our concept of self or personal identity.4 Autobiographical memory is intimately linked to our narrational ability or rather, our mental movie-making ability, and we must examine the conditions, collection of rules as well as the common features constituting what we have come to call autobiographical memory, before deciding whether or not to define it in terms of personal identity. I also argue that we should reverse the ante-cedent and consequent in the question whether autobiographical memory is a condition for our self-awareness, thus: is self-awareness a condition for autobiographical memory? For surely we require a sense of self for

3 The idea that time is countable dates back to Aristotle’s view of time as what we count or measure and not that with which we count, in Physics 4.11, 220a10-21; 4.14, 223a21-9. For a discussion of the view that for Aristotle, time is a countable aspect of change but not a measuring unit, see R. Sorabji (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum, Duckworth, London, 2002: 84-97. 4 See for example Jerome Bruner (1993) “The autobiographical process”: 38-56 and (1994) “The ‘remembered’ self”: 41-54. See also Oliver Sacks (1985) in “A matter of identity”: 105 who argues that our identities are our narrative and that “each of us is a singular narrative”. Although I don’t think there is a one-to-one correspondence between self and narrative, if only because our personal recollec-tions can (re)produce a number of selves, I partly agree with Sacks’ second claim that to be ourselves, we must ‘recollect’ ourselves and that we need a continous autobiographical narrative to maintain our continuous identity or self. For a differ-ent viewpoint cf. Bogdan Bogdanov (2006) who points out the binary mechanics involved in an autobiographical narrative: the narrator as a remembering subject not only produces a narrative but is also modified by the process of recollection, so we should inquire not only about what he remembers but about what happens to him as he remembers (and understands his narrative): 171.


producing a self-biography; consequently, if autobiographical narrative is intimately linked to autobiographical memory, we already have to have a sense of self in order to reproduce its past episodes.

1.1. Autobiographical memory and self-awareness

I examine the problem of autobiographical memory or recollection from a philosophical perspective, that is, by using an analytical methodol-ogy for describing a mental event and its cognitive role in order to explain what happens when we recall an event of our past. I argue that the identifi-cation of autobiographical narrative and autobiographical memory has to be proved, rather than assumed: first, the two notions are not coextensive, since there are different memory systems and memory forms. Our recol-lections are not only in narrative form. Autobiographical memory is an explicit memory form and a cognitive memory system also called episodic memory but there are other memory systems from which it must be distin-guished: procedural memory, responsible for behaviour and learning: knowing how to ride a bike, for instance, does not require conscious recol-lection. In addition, there are other cognitive memory systems, called pri-mary and semantic memory: remembering that World War II ended in 1945 or that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet does not involve recalling our per-sonal experience.5 Besides, none of these other memory systems depend on our narrational capacity and all of them are implicit memory forms, except for primary or working memory which is concerned with short-term processing of information.

In addition, we do not need to produce a life history in order to be aware of our own selves. But self-representation is not (yet) autobiogra-phy. Our self-awareness is merely manifested by referring to ourselves with the pronoun “I”, that is, we represent ourselves as persons by saying: “I am fine”, “my head hurts” or “I would like to go for a walk” but, espe-cially in cases of memory-loss, one can also use the word ‘I’ without iden-tifying or recognizing oneself as the subject that our statement refers to. But if we have lost the ability to recall our past, our sense of self is also impaired.6 Thus, when the main character in the film Memento loses his

5 Cf. on this D. Schacter & E. Tulving (1994): 11; 26. 6 See on this Patricia Smith Churchland (2002): 65-66. She discusses the case of a patient who has lost his autobiographical memory due to the destruction of the temporal lobes and suffers from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia (the loss of the capacity to learn new things). Yet he is still able to refer to himself by using the first person pronoun and therefore has a conscious representation of himself as a person. In addition, as Shoemaker (1968, 1994) famously claims: “[m]y use of

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short-term memory, he is not only deprived of the capacity to learn and retain new things but also loses a sense of self – he knows who he was, but not who he is because he remains trapped in an endless present as his tem-poral horizon is deprived of its retentive and projective dimensions. This Husserlian point is discussed below, in section 2.

If we accept that there is such a thing as autobiographical memory, our acceptance presupposes that we accept the existence of mental states. My mental states are shadowed by a sense of ownership or an awareness of myself as a single subject (or owner) of mental states and hence I experi-ence myself as being psychologically single and complex. Although we can refer to ourselves without identifying ourselves, we cannot avoid an ‘essential’ indexical in the Kantian sense that self-awareness accompanies – and is therefore part of – representations of objects. Kant argues that it must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all of my representations.7 His argument holds particularly well for autobiographical memory which depends on a first-person perspective, for I own my past experiences in a double sense of being their subject as well as their author, so my recollec-tions are an experience which combines ownership and agency (unless I am suffering from depersonalization). I am aware of having perceptions, emotions and thoughts. I am aware of recalling my favourite color as a child and at the same time I am also aware that I am having that recollec-tion. This awareness of self can be peripheral to whatever object or event I am focusing on, but it remains a necessary background for my mental states. The fact that these are my mental states does not depend on my attending to them, but awareness of self grounds awareness of having mental states. So awareness of mental states as properties of myself pre-supposes an awareness of myself as a subject a capacity for being affected by our mental states – hence an awareness of my past experience presup-poses an awareness of myself or a basic sense of self. This is how we can read Kant’s claim that self-awareness is a “consciousness of what we un-dergo as we are affected by the play of our own thoughts”.8

the word ‘I’ as the subject of [statements such as ‘I feel pain’ or ‘I see a canary’] is not due to my having identified as myself something [otherwise recognized] of which I know, or believe, or wish to say, that the predicate of my statement applies to it “Self-reference and self-awareness.”: 80-93. 7 Kant, KrV 131, § 16. 8 Kant, Anthropology (1798), Ak. VII:161. The claim that self-consciousness is an inner sense also appears in the first Critique: ‘the I that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits […]; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intui-tion, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am […], B155.


Being affected is necessary but not sufficient for self-awareness : I must own my past experiences not only as a subject, but also as their au-thor. Narrative, obviously, is a kind of agency but the kind of act necessary for self-consciousness is more basic. As Kant would say, this act is an ap-perceptive synthesis which represents the sensory manifold as coherent and recognizable entities.9 I cannot recognize a thing unless it is discrete and for it to appear discrete to me, it first has to appear in a spatio-temporal structure and, in addition, I have to represent it. And my repre-senting something is an act – I am aware of listening to a concert just by doing it. In the same way, I am aware of recalling last week’s concert just by doing it and if I am aware of recalling it, then I am also aware that I am recalling the concert. This is what phenomenologists following Husserl and Merleau-Ponty call ‘pre-reflexive’ or ‘tacit’ self-awareness involving self-appearance, where an experience is given not as an object but as sub-jective or intentional experience. Their position is consistent with the view held by analytical philosophers such as Goldman or Bermúdez that a non-conceptual form of self-consciousness is more primitive than higher forms of self-consciousness.10 Whilst I am occupied with or doing x, my atten-tion is focused on x and not on my doing (or thinking of) x. And whilst I recall doing x I am tacitly aware of my lived experience of recalling x without directing my attention towards this awareness. Besides, I am im-mune to error through misidentification when I am aware of x which en-tails that I am immune to error through misidentification when I recall my earlier experience of x.11 Self-awareness, then, is a sense of being affected as well as a representational (but non-conceptual) base for recollecting, re-identifying and recognizing objects and events. As Peacocke (1997) puts it: having a property is sufficient in relevant cases for its subject to refer to and ascribe the property to itself.12 In other words, having a property is attributive but not yet predicative. Every event I remember is an event of mine in the sense that I experienced it, even if I have edited myself out of it.

9 Kant, KrV, B 153-8. 10 See Dan Zahavi’s useful discussion of phenomenological self-awareness (2005), chapters 3 and 5. See also Alvin Goldman (1970), A Theory of Human Action: 96 and J-L Bermúdez (1998); The Paradox of Self-Consciousness: 274. 11 See S. Shoemaker (1968, 1994) on the immunity to error through misidentifica-tion relative to the first-person pronoun: it is not possible for me to make a mistake as to the identity of the person who is experiencing x or who is remembering an experience of x. “Self-reference and self-awareness”: 80-93.

12 Christopher Peacocke (1997). “First-person Reference, Representational In-dependence, and Self-knowledge”.

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But agency (or narration) without the inner sense (or being affected) is insufficient for self-awareness: consider the case of Luria’s patient Zazet-sky who writes three thousand pages of autobiography in order to recollect his self.13 Zazetsky cannot put his pieces together again or relocate him-self. He tries to recover all his memories but he cannot reappropriate his self. He cannot discriminate between what is his and what is not because he no longer has an appropriate sense of what he is. His agency does not attribute a sense of ownership to his recollections because his explicit self-narrative cannot compensate for his loss of an implicit sense of self or ba-sic self-awareness. Whilst a robust self is a result of most autobiographies, in Zazetsky’s case, his sense of self is too faint to occasion a gravitational pull for the pieces of his narrative to recollect into a self. A pre-reflexive access to experience is required for motivating reflection about that ex-perience, orienting recollections of it and re-identifying it as mine.

Autobiographical narrative is a result of our linguistic ability to express our past experience and our grasp of a temporal order оf “earlier” and “later”. In addition, autobiographical narrative implies recognition and recognition requires both memory and use of concepts, since I can recog-nize something if and only if (i) I remember it, that is, if its sight awakens a feeling of familiarity accompanied by a revival of a past experience; (ii) I can identify that experience as mine; (iii) I can relate a past and a present representation of that thing, viz I can remember something if I can locate in time (iv) I can re-identify that thing as being the same one, viz, that the past and present representations represent or mean the same thing. From these conditions follows the assumption that I can recall an elapsed ex-perience as mine if and only if I can locate it in time and that in order to recall a past event as mine, I must also recall the past act in which I per-ceived/thought/judged that event.

Identifying an experience as mine and re-identifying a past object or event requires not only a mastery of concepts but an awareness of a tem-poral continuity between my present perception and my past recollection. In recognizing this thing here as the same one as the thing I saw yesterday, I recognize the relation between them (what they have in common) and I ascribe the same meaning to that thing.14 Consider a flashback experience or a sudden recollection of a past event, often triggered by a present cue. A present perception of a certain setting can stir up a scene from our distant

13 A. Luria (1972) The man with the shattered world. 14 Cf. on this Kant on the synthesis of recognition, Critique of Pure Reason A78/B104, A121 and Husserl on the synthesis of identification in the complemen-tary texts to the Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre (1908) Husserliana, vol.26 :177-219.


past when we recognize and identify what the two have in common. Thus my perception of a florist selling roses outside the railway station can prompt a recollection of a scene ten years ago, when I saw a florist selling roses near the zoo. The question is, what determines this recognition? Why does (or should) the sight of a florist selling roses awaken my memory of an earlier scene? A tentative answer might be that this scene has an affec-tive force or salience for me and the flower-seller stands out in an affec-tively charged relief, as Husserl puts it, because she is grasped in a rele-vant object-like connection.15 Obviously, identification involves differen-tiation, but it is affection, rather than perception which is a necessary con-dition for awakening to, or recollecting something, because it brings into relief a sense that is already implicit in the background and which becomes explicit once more as it emerges into the foreground. I re-constitute or reproduce the past as I presentify it again.

1.2. The ‘remembered’ self

The question is, what is the relation between memory and narration? There are kinds of recollection involving presentification by thinking of something past rather than perceiving it: for example, if I am asked to name the best papers at the Sozopol conference last September, the words “Sozopol” and “September”, may cue my recalling a few papers. For a more satisfactory recovery I may have to summon further cues by thinking of the people who were there and the various topics discussed at the con-ference until I again presentify my past experience of the conference and my evaluation of the papers. There is little doubt that narrative skills facili-tate recall, but should we identify remembering and narration?

How is the psychological event of remembering what we were previ-ously aware of related to the verbal expression or memoir? Is the narrative merely a manifestation of that event or does it provide the underlying structure of the episodes we recall? Autobiographical accounts are recon-structions or constructions of our past and hence of ourselves and therefore autobiographical memory is no less a source of fiction than its literary counterpart, the composition classified as a distinctive type of text accord-ing to certain narrative functions. I take the concept “autobiographical genre” as applicable to personal tales in oral or written form. Autobiogra-phies are composed when we think of something that happened to us and tell it to someone. Typically, an autobiography always has a hero, namely

15 See Husserliana XI, § 35: 216-7. My account of autobiographical memory is largely based on Husserl’s convincing theory of memory and inner time con-sciousness. Cf. also John Brough (1975: 40-62).

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the person telling his or her story. In speaking or writing about myself, I present myself as the protagonist who used certain instruments to achieve a goal in a particular scene or to whom something (usually bad) happened at a particular time and place.16 Our episodic or autobiographical memory thus involves narration and constitutes us as a storyteller, for it enables us to weave our personal tale using cognitive as well as cogitative powers, such as belief, thinking and interpreting. And the construction or recon-struction of our past experience also provides the basis for constructing another fiction: the remembered self. We could even argue that reminis-cence requires two selves, a present and a past self which require a bridg-ing process rather than identification.17

Our self is subject to change as we modify our accounts of the past and, consequently, of ourselves which is why our accounts of a past ex-perience can have many variations as we re-tell it. But in order to ‘recol-lect’ ourselves in a narrative, we need an awareness of ourselves as well as an awareness of (subjective) time and our sense of self (or selves) is main-tained by autobiographical narratives which construct our past by repro-ducing our experience as we mentally turn towards events of our personal past. So autobiography is memory construction and the most important function of this construction lies in providing continuity between our past and our present, as our narrative “I” bridges the temporal gap between past experience and present recall.

However, rather than multiplying the number of selves, a theory of recollection requires the condition of re-identification for an appropriate description of this event. For although autobiographical memories, as well as their corresponding narratives, have a first person character, the narra-tive “I” is not a necessary requirement for the sameness of the past and present self. Strictly speaking past self and present self are not one and the same, although they have a common part. For this reason, in order to em-phasize the discontinuity between present and past identities, an autobiog-rapher can also use the second or third persons to refer to her past selves, as the German writer Christa Wolf does in her memoir Patterns of Child-hood. Wolf’s narrator deliberates: “And the past, which can still command linguistic conventions and split the first person into the second and the third – has its hegemony been broken? Will the voices subside? I don’t

16 Cf. on this Vladimir Propp (1928)’s famous structural analysis in Morphologie du conte, éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1965, 1970. And for the Ancient Greeks an epi-sode (έπείσóδιον) is a dialogue scene in a tragedy. 17 Cf. on this E.S. Reed (1994) “Perception is to self as memory is to selves”, 278-292.


know”.18 Yet in an autobiography, the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, and “she”, share a common part, the protagonist who guarantees the continuity of the (re)constructed self – a continuity Wolf exposes as problematic. For a story is not one, just because it is about one person.19

There are two aspects to this continuity: the first one concerns the role of the first person and the second aspect concerns the unity of action. Al-though the position occupied by the ‘I’ changes in each autobiography, the first-person is the one who provides its perspective and goal-directed ac-tion – and hence its continuity. Since autobiographical time is a countable continuity, it requires someone to do the counting, for the continuity called autobiographical time is a mental state. My autobiographical recollection consists of various periods, points and counterpoints, situated in and se-lected by an implicit first person-perspective in a temporal frame with re-gard to my actual now: thus: ‘before my wedding’ or ‘after my graduation’ are ‘viewpointed’ representations, as in a film subject where a movie is shot as a visual autobiography of a single subject. Although the shots (or the representations) don’t make it explicit whose viewpoint is being re-ferred to, they are organized and focused by a first person perspective.20 Even if I have edited myself out of a particular episode, I am still ‘behind the scenes’ since I am both actor and stage-manager of my autobiographi-cal recollections.

The second aspect of continuity in autobiographical memory is that a rememberer is a single and complex individual – she has more than one part and therefore she also has more than one story, more than one voice and several past tenses in which to tell it. As in epic and tragedy, what is of central importance in autobiographical memory (from the narrator’s point of view) is not the main character, but the action. If the action is appropri-ately built around him, the latter will emerge as hero, framed by the plot-structure or fable. For what autobiographical memory represents is not just the character but the past actions and experiences which make up the hero-character’s life and our recollections must have unity of action if they are

18 Christa Wolf (1976) Kindheitsmuster (2002), :594, my translation. Cf. on this Paul John Eakin (2000) in “Autobiography, Identity and the Fictions of Memory”, 290-306. 19 See Aristotle, Poetics, ch.8 (following Butcher’s and Halliwell’s respective translations). 20 Cf. John Campbell (2004) “What is it to know what “I” refers to”: 206-218. Whilst Campbell examines the question whether our use of ‘I’ has a semantic foundation and discusses spatial relations concerning the first-person position, I use his point about the spatial content of vision for showing the implicit first per-son position in autobiographical memory (which is also a kind of vision).

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to be life-like. Usually some cosmetics is needed for improving the ap-pearance of that life, which is why selection and editing are important, but the basic plot-structure or fable is that of beginning-middle-end, ‘before-now-after’ or past-present-future. Past events are ordered according to motive and final purpose, in a sense-making structure to appear coherent and intelligible: events lead up to and are completed by, a single end (te-los).21

Evidently there are various forms of pastness, but they also have the structure of ‘before’ and ‘after’, from a first-person perspective of the pre-sent as ‘here’ and ‘now’ because, at least in most Indo-European lan-guages, this is how grammatical structure shows the course of time. The temporal distance of a retrospective account is linguistically expressed by tenses: the before-past (ante-preterit), simple past (preterit) and after-past (post-preterit) are the main tenses expressing distant and nearer past times with regard to a 0 point ‘now’.22 Human teleology and motivation are re-flected by linguistic expressions for temporal divisions, since most of our statements concern some part of what belongs to the past and to the future. ‘I had written the letter whilst listening to the news, but that was before your father called’ is equivalent to ‘your father called after I had listened to the news and written the letter’. In addition, the perfect (aorist) and im-perfect tenses temper our recollections by giving movement and pause to our narrative, as well as determining its speed and focus. As Jespersen puts it, “the imperfect is used by him to whom one day is as a thousand years and the aorist by him to whom a thousand years are as one day”.23 We use the aorist or historical past when we condense series of actions into one, editing or abstracting from episodes we consider inessential, whilst we use the imperfect for focusing on a particular action without abbreviating its duration. (I return to the role of focus in recollection below).

Self-narrative is a necessary ingredient in our (re)construction of a self or selves, but probably only on the level of recall and recognition or our reflective referral to a previous experience rather than on the largely im-plicit levels of encoding and retention. Nor is self-portrayal a necessary condition for explicit tasks such as processing and reactivating informa-tion. Rather, we remember scenes and episodes and edit them in a narra-tive form. Precisely because of this ‘editing’ process, a self- narrative is

21 Cf. Aristotle’s condition that “plot-structure, as the mimesis of action, should be a representation of a unitary and complete action;”, in the Poetics, ch.8, 1451a in Halliwell’s translation and commentary (1987): 101-105. 22 For a clear discussion of tenses, see Otto Jespersen (1924) The philosophy of grammar: 254-277. 23 Jespersen (1924): 276.


not merely a recalling and recounting of life events. We impose an order on them, having considered and decided how they fit together – what to include, what to delete and what to add to embellish our tale – so in self-narrative events do not and cannot appear in the same way as they were lived. Hence our narrative self is a construction where we organize our experience into a coherent and goal-directed unity and this construction necessarily involves confabulation.24

It is questionable, however, whether autobiographical memory can be fully explained in terms of narration, for it seems that this form of memory is episodic or scenic rather than narrational, so the identification of narra-tion and autobiographical memory should be explained. And our explana-tion should hold not only for recollections involving thinking rather than perceiving, but also for flashback experiences. The underlying question is, whether the ‘mise en scène’ is prior to the scene itself, or vice versa. Can I have flashback experiences without a narrative form which determines or prompts my reliving a past event, such as my ‘seeing again’ the beloved seaside and ‘being displaced’ into the past? Our answer depends on whether we consider narration or description of events as a semantic bind-ing that determines our recollection of the past scene we are re-experiencing or whether we consider our autobiographical memory as consisting of independent episodes – and whether the episode itself is a part or a story.

1.3. What is an ‘episode’ in episodic memory and what is the connection between episodes?

Is an episode a distinctive incident in a series of related events or is it a sequence of events itself? Regarding autobiographical memory, how we conceive an ‘episode’ depends on how we measure our experience – what temporal scales we apply to it and how we focus on our past experience. In addition, episodes of personal memory have a dramatic plot-structure: they are connected series of events which are emotionally relevant for me as protagonist and narrator and in this sense my recollection is a connected succession of shots which constitute my personal movie. For under an autobiographical description, personal drama represents or imitates action and in an autobiographical recollection, actions are consequents of charac-ter and involve an emotional impact. Since human biographies cast their narrator as hero in their account relating reversal of fortune and recogni-tion which may be brought about by recollection and may require tragic

24 On the narrative self as construction cf. Zahavi (2005): 112-113.

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suffering or pathos, there is an appropriate analogy between Aristotle’s conception of tragedy and autobiography as narrative.

To put it differently, plot construction precedes episode, as Aristotle points out and episodes are integrated into a composition or plot-structure.25 For it is plot-structure that constructs (rather than mirroring) the experience of our memory. Sequences of events are connected in our recollections either necessarily or ‘for the most part’.26 This connection which holds ‘for the most part’ is teleological, as are human actions. Just as an action is for an end, the structure of our recollection is for an end and its components of choice, action and consequence are aligned according to that end – to cast the self in a panorama of its own making. Episodic or autobiographical memory is backward-looking and motivated by a hypo-thetical or subjective necessity. I recall my thesis defense accompanied by a feeling of dread and a sense of inevitability that both my past and my future were on the line. The episode of the thesis defense fills the gaps between parts of my past and my future. Although episodic memory is usually conceived as a memory of something significant that happened in our personal lives, I suggest that this significance comes to the fore only against a certain background: I remember my thesis defense as an episode in my own history not just because of its impact, but rather because the continuity of that history allows for the impact of my thesis defense. An episode, although it may be a self-contained part of a larger sequence, is recalled in terms of the way it became involved with my past experience and it either stands between discrete past events or it stands out from that experience as a component of a larger composition, depending on the fo-cus of my recollection.27

On a large temporal scale, episodes are related in a temporal order as ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’: my wedding is closer to my actual ‘now’ than my first birthday party. Episodes can range from minutes to years, for the ‘past’ is indeterminate; its condensation or extension depend on how it surfaces under my description. Episodes are discrete and continuity emerges as a felt subjectivity. Looking back, I recall my thesis defense as relevant to my present. I focus on my past experience from my present perspective and my first person account is measured by psychological or subjective time (ranging from minutes to years). On this scale, episodes

25 Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 17. 1455a-b, translated by S. Halliwell (1987). 26 Aristotle, Poetics. ch.7, 1450b20. 27 In musical compositions, for example, an episode is a passage between state-ments of a main subject or theme, as in a rondo or fugue and in Ancient Greek tragedies, such as Euridipus’ Iphigeneia in Tauris, an επεισόδιο occurs between two choric songs, such as Orestes’ fit of madness which occasions his capture.


may be either distinct or they may overlap. Their smooth progression in my recollection constructs an apparent continuity between discrete events that is, the continuity emerges as something as something I feel because I am attentive to the underlying reasons or motives connecting those events. Whether a particular episode stands out or not depends on whether it is an attention-magnet, that is, on its affective salience. I return to this point in section 3, below. Yet my autobiographical memory itself is not smooth, but has cracks and holes, fissures and folds, for I can lose or forget certain episodes in the plot as easily as I can recall others. On a smaller temporal scale, a single scene can be an episode, as for example, the ring exchange during a wedding ceremony. Or an episode can itself be a component of a larger episode: at a party, someone made a video clip of the mirror facing a group of tango dancers in an attempt to include himself in the event, a cameraman turned actor in his own movie. In recalling that particular epi-sode (or by looking at the film) I bring to mind other parts of the larger episode.

2. What are the conditions for autobiographical memory?

The connection between remembering and narrating is an old humanis-tic paradigm, sustained by narrative psychologists and philosophers.28 My assumption is that if autobiographical memory is conceived as stepwise, we can show how these two events are not only related but integrated.29 Autobiographical memory is appropriately described by using a composi-tional and hierarchichal structure, from ground-floor conditions such as retention to reflective conditions of knowledge such as retrieval which imply verbal expressions, such as: “I recall the tone I previously heard” that manifest a re-acquisition of my earlier experience which I directly grasp in my recollection as having been experienced by me. We also re-quire an assymetric temporal order for explaining our present renewal or retrieval of past representations in recollection. For our experiences pre-cede our recollections, which is why we have to go back in time to retrieve

28 Cf. for example Gilbert Ryle (1949) Concept of Mind :279. Cf. also J. Bruner (cited in note 4, above), R. Fivush et al. By contrast, Ian Hacking (1995) rejects “memory-politics” or “[t]he doctrine that memory should be thought of as narra-tive”. Rewriting the Soul, ( 250-1). For an intermediate position, cf. Eakin (2000) “Autobiography, Identity and the Fictions of Memory”, 290-306. 29 Cf. J. Campbell (1994 :233, ff.) who claims that episodic memory is “the testi-mony of one’s earlier self” and that an analysis of the form of knowledge involved in memory necessitates a distinction between ground-floor and self-reflective con-ditions on knowledge.

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a past event. So, unless we have a sense of temporal direction, we cannot produce autobiographical narratives. But on the reflective level, the narra-tion is part of my episodic memory, as a judgment that in the past I have experienced the remembered event, for I re-identify a recollection in t2 as a representation of a past event that occurred in t1. In other words, in making a recollective judgment I resituate the past episode in the context of my personal experience by indicating when and where it occurred and I re-identify a thing as being the same as the one I saw at an earlier time.

2.1. Ground-floor conditions and primary memory or retention

Autobiographical memory is an explicit or conscious recollection of past episodes belonging to one’s personal experience. It requires certain ‘ground-floor’ conditions, starting with primary memory or retention, where we see the past or, as Husserl puts it, where the past constitutes it-self.30

Husserl’s notion of retention provides an answer to the problem: ‘how do I explain my consciousness of the past’? Every single mental state is an awareness of time passing, since it also contains past and future phases. This question concerning our experience of temporality and temporal du-ration was already posed by Augustine in the paradoxical form of a past-containing nowness.31 Do we perceive temporal extension as past or pre-sent? What do we describe when we say that an event or interval has a short or long duration? The past has ceased to be, so how does it persist? The present has no duration or, at best, a specious duration of which we may be immediately aware but cannot assess whilst the event is occurring. Augustine’s solution to this paradox is to consider past, present and future as mental states of memory, attention and expectation, respectively. Con-sequently, when we measure the duration of an event, what we are measur-ing is in our memory and for Augustine it follows that temporal duration is

30 See Husserliana X, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), text no. 50, :332. N.B. William James (1890) made a similar distinction between primary and secondary memory using a terminology akin to Husserl’s. Primary memory “comes to us as belonging to the rearward portion of the present space of time and not to the genuine past”, whereas secondary memory is the knowledge of an event “of which we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before.” Principles of Psy-chology: 646, 648. Both James and Husserl consider primary memory not as ‘just-past’ but as that which is presently attended to. 31Augustine (1961) Confessions, ch. 11.


an extension or expression of the mind (distentio animi) and that in meas-uring duration, we are describing a psychological process.

It seems reasonable to suppose that our experience of temporal dura-tion is subjective and that, in this sense, time is a mental dimension – since measuring or describing time presupposes the measurability of time which, in turn, requires the existence of someone who does the measuring. Husserl agrees with Augustine that our experience of time is subjective and that perception of temporal duration is intimately linked to memory, but he solves the Augustinian paradox of a ‘now’ that contains a past mo-ment by introducing the notion of retention. Husserl also avoids the Em-piricist’s trap of representing a past moment in the present through asso-ciation (or a version of the trace theory where memory traces are consid-ered as stored copies or of past perceptions) and on the assumption that representations occur by resemblance. As I argued in part I, we do not store little pictures or strip cartoons of events in our minds and memory traces are not high fidelity reproductions. Husserl’s point is that retention does not require storage of past experiences because retention is not, strictly speaking, a memory of the past. Rather, Husserl argues that reten-tion belongs to perception: it is a ‘comet’s tail’ joined to the actual percep-tion.32 So perception is structured in a way that retains the past and reten-tion thus is a presentation (since it is part of perception) and not a repre-sentation or presentification, as is the case of secondary memory or recol-lection.

Roman Ingarden (1968), Husserl’s student and critic, advances a dif-ferent conception of the perceived past, using the notion of living memory (lebendiges Gedächtnis).33 Ingarden argues that Husserl’s notion of reten-tion does not give us access to the immediate past because its objective domain is part of the present, although it refers to the immediate past. Ac-cording to Ingarden, living memory is a mode of consciousness in which the past constitutes itself for me, thus taking me beyond the domain of the actual present. For in living memory, I can retain objects or events rela-tively distant from my present. It seems that living memory functions on the principle of a synecdoche, a rhetorical figure in which a part stands for the whole, as ‘wheels’ stand for ‘car’. In reading a novel, for example, I condense and abbreviate the sense of the part I have already read because as I continue reading, my living memory retains those parts of the novel which are representative of the whole, such as the culminating phases of events, the main characters and any other facts that particularly impressed him or evoked his emotions, viz, that which is particularly significant,

32 See Husserl, PZB, (1905), § 11: 459 33 Roman Ingarden (1968) Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks: 100-106.

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since we cannot retain the entire work. Ingarden describes living memory as a peripheral and unspecified feeling that something has happened which is closely related to my present, including certain consequences which are relevant to what is actually happening now. For example, I have a living memory of the beginning of a sentence which I have continued to think and add to.34

Living memory is a way of bringing the past into the present, rather like an echo or after-image, whereas Husserl’s retention is a way of bring-ing the present into the past. It seems that both authors are trying to ex-plain our experience of temporal duration and our consciousness of suc-cession. But Ingarden attempts to shrink time-consciousness to our appre-hension of the immediate present and to explain our consciousness of suc-cession in terms of successive consciousness: we are now conscious of the immediate past by retaining it in living memory. Husserl, by contrast, re-jects the “dogma of the momentariness of the whole of consciousness” and holds that consciousness must reach out beyond the ‘now’ to the past and future phases of a temporal object, so that we can directly perceive its suc-cessive phases.35 That is why he argues that retention belongs to percep-tion and that our perception is structured in a way that retains the immedi-ate past. In our experience of the present, we also have a sense of the past and the future or, as William James (1890) puts it, our experience of the present “is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time.”36

Retention is the consciousness of what is just past and it does not con-tain echoes or after-images. Rather, it is an intentional mode directed to-wards the immediate past which is also a consciousness of succession. Unlike living memory, retention is not holding onto the now by its edge, although it is a present-living-past, but the past is perceived in an inten-tional act directed towards the slipping object. Husserl explains our ex-perience of temporal duration using the example of a melody. In hearing a melody, I do not just experience a primal impression of one note which is then replaced by the next note. Instead, I retain the sense of the first note as I hear the second note and I also anticipate the third note, for even if I

34 See Ingarden (1968) : 102. 35 See John Brough (1996) “Presence and absence in Husserl’s phenomenology”: 3-15. 36 William James (1890) Principles of Psychology, vol 1: 609. Husserl read James and disagreed with the latter’s associationist view but paid special attention to the specious present or the experience of duration. See on this Francisco Varela (1999) “The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness”: 266-306.


do not know the melody, I know that there will be another note. I am cer-tain of hearing the note that has just passed and retentive certainty is a belief that is incapable of being crossed out.37 We do not reconstruct a melody by perceiving the present note and adding to it a memory of past notes (nor do we recall their full duration), but we are aware of the melody by directly perceiving successive notes. If anything, it is the momentary phase that is an abstraction we must first construct. Husserl claims that our consciousness has a triadic structure: retention, primal impression and protention to which correspond three temporal phases of the object: just past, now and future. I discuss this point in chapter 4, below.

Autobiographical memory is best defined as remembering an episode in my own history: I ‘see again’ the sunset I once perceived. I have a memory of an earlier perception which is revived or reproduced and seen again in memory. “Now it is seen as if hidden by a veil, then as breaking through the haze.”38 So the second condition for the successful retrieval of a past event is a direct link between my present memory and my past ex-perience and therefore involves a perceptual act. For my autobiographical memory is a window to my past – an elapsed present that once again ap-pears in memory. This is also how we can distinguish between “remember-ing” and “just knowing” the past. For example: a person or event can ap-pear familiar to us even if we are unable to recall or place them. Some-times we just know someone or something without recollecting any visual information about them and without situating them in a spatio-temporal context. Familiarity is an enduring feeling or condition of consciousness but it is incomplete without a recollective act that determines the person or event. If we remember them, we also retrieve sensory perceptions about this person or event and we can situate the present episode in a past con-text.39 How is situating-in-context relevant to retention?

Husserl’s model of intention and fulfillment also applies to remember-ing. Retention is not only an intentional mode, it has a double intention: on one hand, an object or event is remembered with regard to its temporal extension or enduring content – as something with duration. The fulfill-

37 See Husserl, Analyses concerning passive synthesis (English translation by An-thony Steinbock), Hua vol.9: 155, footnote 94. ‘incapability of being crossed out’ translates ‘Undurchstreichbarkeit’. 38 Husserl. Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898-1925), English translation J. Brough, Husserliana, vol. XI :345 ; see also :241. 39 On the psychological distinction between remembering and knowing the past, cf. Schacter’s discussion of various views and experiments confirming the role of attention in recalling visual information and the importance of the latter in recol-lection (1996, 23-25 and notes 9-14, 310-311). The distinction is Tulving’s (1985).

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ment of this moment of retention occurs in recall or secondary memory, when the object is once again intuitively given and appears before me. On the other hand, an object or event is remembered with regard to its location or enduring context – when and where it occurred. The fulfillment of the second moment of retention occurs when we actualize a memory which takes us from the past to our actual present, that is, when we restore or renew the temporal continuity – when the episode is situated in a temporal context which gives back its meaning. The object is meant in its temporal determinacy: I remember the play I watched at such and such a point in time, just as it was seen at that time.40 So, when I successfully retrieve a memory of the play I attended last week, I recover this event as I am aware of having had this experience at an earlier time. I am reliving it from my present viewpoint or memory which allows me to reach back to the earlier ‘I’ who watched the play.

Third, autobiographical memory requires an awareness of ourselves as persons with a history and an ability to travel back in time to retrieve an event from our past.41 This memory-form is a cognitive ability to recollect what we did yesterday by going back and retrieving that event: episodic memory is oriented to the past, viz we remember what we were previously aware of. In recalling what we did yesterday, we exercise our ability to bring back that event from our own experience. For example, the state-ment: “I remember seeing that flower-seller at the zoo yesterday” ex-presses an episodic memory. It is an explicit recollection of an event I ear-lier perceived – an act in which a past object or event is intended and pos-ited. The remembered event need not be of the past, it can be either past, present or future, but my episodic memory enables me to place it in time and refer to it as I recollect it from a previous experience. Thus I can re-member my appointment at the dentist’s tomorrow morning (if I am aware of having made that appointment at an earlier date). For memory is the capacity for retaining something we were previously aware of, whereas recollection is the retrieval or bringing to mind of knowledge retained.42

To put it another way: episodic memory involves an awareness of hav-ing had past experiences and this awareness is characterized by sensory perceptions which provide a scene for this experience. The Memento char-

40 See Husserl, PZB: 185. 41 On the distinction between ground-floor and self-reflective conditions on knowl-edge, cf. John Campbell (1994): 233. Cf. Tulving 1972, 1983, 1998, 2002) on the notion of episodic memory. 42 I follow Bennett & Hacker (2003) who formulate this classical distinction in the clearest possible way: “Memory is the faculty for the retention of knowledge aquired. Recollection is the bringing to mind of knowledge retained.” :154.


acter lacks this awareness – he has no window to his past because he can-not retain his personal experiences in primary or short-term memory. This case illustrates the stepwise structure of autobiographical memory: we have some sense of ourselves if we lack primary memory or retention, but we are literally a figure without a background, since we lack a temporal horizon or halo against which to situate and delimit (or outline) ourselves. We cannot recognize past experiences as ours.

In a famous experiment, the Swiss neurologist Claparède (1911) se-cretly attached a pin to his palm before visiting a severely amnesic patient who could not remember him and did not recognize him although she saw him every day. When he shook her hand, the patient was pricked by the pin and withdrew her hand. The following day, the patient had no explicit memory of the doctor or the incident but she refused to shake his hand because “sometimes there are needles hidden between the fingers of hands that people shake”.43 She has an incremental and implicit memory of a past experience of a needle’s prick from which she had learned to be wary of shaking hands, but she could not re-identify this experience as her own, not only because she has not retained it, but because she has lost access to it. This patient cannot make the connection between the event and herself, probably because her self-awareness has no semantic foundation and she has no semantic or verbal access to that event, so she cannot recognize it as something she lived, nor does she have an inner temporal consciousness of the object and her relation to it. She has an incomplete sense of what it is like to have that experience because she lacks the capacity to feel it as hers, viz a sense of ownership. Hence she can make an impersonal (and a-temporal) generalization but she cannot say why she would not shake the doctor’s hand.

2.2. Reflective conditions and secondary memory or reproduction

These ground-floor conditions for autobiographical memory under-write a set of secondary conditions which are reflective or reproductive. Secondary memory or recollection retrieves what is retained in primary memory: it involves re-presentation and presentification. The fourth condi-tion states that we have to be able to say that we have had a certain idea, perception or experience before, for recollections are produced by means of a self-reflective act. In other words, a cognition of a past experience is produced by looking at one’s own mental state. And this self-reflective act

43 E. Claparède (1911) Recognition et moïté: 79-90.

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creates a new cognition of an old experience, since it is informative about our past. Consequently autobiographical memory is a cognitive and cogita-tive ability which depends on autonoetic awareness. My looking inside myself retrieves a past event when I cognize my past experience by look-ing at my past and retrieving an event from my own experience.

The fifth condition for autobiographical memory is a sub-condition of the fourth: I re-identify my past experience by looking at my past and re-trieving at t2 an event I experienced at t1. This re-identification is not only a recognition, but a cognition, for it is informative about the past since it presents information previously acquired. And we have to be able to re-identify a past experience as our own: when I say that I remember drinking a glass of red wine last night, I am aware of referring to the source of my previous experience. We cognize or come to know that we have had a cer-tain experience before – and this cognition modifies our experience as well as our behaviour by reproducing a past informational state in the present.44

Autobiographical narrative is an explicit step in this ‘grounded’ or con-ceptual series of conditions of autobiographical memory. Consider Roma Ligocka’s memoir, The Girl in the Red Coat. Roma describes the flashback she experienced when she first saw Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List and re-identified herself as that little girl who always wore a strawberry red coat, made for her by her grandmother. Her key statement reads: “That was me! The little girl in the red coat, in the film. No, not in the film. In real life. For real.” As she watched the film, Roma was re-living a part of her own life. In re-identifying herself, she recognizes ex-plicitly that she had been – that she still was – the girl in the red coat in Kraków’s Ghetto – a traumatic childhood memory she relives after half a century. This scene stands out because it has affective salience for the nar-rator and she sees it once again by living in the memory and presentifying, maybe also re-colouring, this episode of her past. Thus she not only repro-duces, but constitutes her past – for it is unlikely that the three-year old girl of the original scene would use the same descriptions as the 50 year-old woman watching the film. So, Roma-the-narrator is the girl in the red coat, independently of whether or not she is the girl shown in Spielberg’s film. Apparently Spielberg used the image based on another true story and without knowing anything about Roma Ligocka. But Roma’s story is the same story, for the scene depicting the little girl in the red coat prompts her autobiographical memory and she is displaced back into an episode of her own past. “Her black eyes looked straight into mine. And I knew whom I had been looking for and from whom I had been so desperately trying to

44 Cf. Jérôme Dokic (2001, :227); cf. also John Campbell (1994, :233).


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run all these years and all my life. I know who I really am. I am that anx-ious little girl in the red coat!”45

Another conceptual part of a recollection is my judgment that in the past I have experienced the remembered event and my re-identifying a recollection, in t2 as a representation of a past event that occurred in t1. A recollection involves making a judgment that we have had a certain repre-sentation before – this condition corresponds to the declarative nature of episodic memory: we are consciously accessing and retrieving stored in-formation and we can judge that we have had a certain representation be-fore because we can come to know this by accessing our own past. When I see the book on my desk, I remember that I borrowed it from the library last week (where I saw it before). “Remembering that” indicates a doxastic state in my recollection and a cognition: I recognize a representation as having had it in the past.46

I can fix the reference to a remembered object by means of a memory demonstrative when I assert that I remember this book. Recollective judgments express the relation between a present rememberer and a re-membered object by predicating my present consciousness of a past thing. Thus in the judgment: “I remember this book”, my remembering is said of this book. In making a recollective judgment I resituate the episode in the context of my personal experience by indicating when and where it oc-curred and I re-identify a thing as being the same as the one I saw at an earlier time. For a recollective judgment confirms the truth of my recollec-tion, namely that I have encountered this representation before and this is why my predication is a re-identification rather than an identification. Memory judgments also account for the temporal order of a memory ex-perience. For example, I remember that I first went to the library to look for the book and then had an argument with a colleague about Kant. A representation without judgment would not suffice to order events as hav-ing occurred earlier or later.

Having outlined the conditions of autobiographical memory, I now ex-amine memory’s temporal modes and Husserl’s phenomenological de-scription of lived time and its features of retention and recollection in or-der to further clarify the underlying problem of explaining and construct-ing temporal continuity.

45 Roma Ligocka (2000): Das Mädchen im roten Mantel :462, my translation. 46 Cf. J. Campbell (2001): “Memory Demonstratives”, 169-186.

CHAPTER FOUR

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY, TIME AND CONTINUITY

0. Introduction

On a par with the two levels of conditions for autobiographical mem-ory, ground-floor and reflective conditions we have the distinction be-tween two levels of temporal modes in which events and objects appear to us, as well as two corresponding degrees of temporal acts of conscious-ness. Memory is consciousness of the past and that particular conscious-ness also comes in two steps: retention and recollection, as we have seen. Retention is the ground-floor level of perceived past events and objects appearing as just-past. Retention belongs to the structure of perception and hence directly presents its objects. Recollection, on the other hand, is the reflective level of recalling not only the past object, but recalling it as past. In order to do that, we have to recall the elapsed act as well as the elapsed object so that what is not now present once more appears before us.

Recollection presentifies the past and constructs a temporal continuity of discrete episodes as ‘earlier’ and ‘later’: its sequences are arranged as the parts in a literary work. If we read it, events unfold in a successive time-span, as they do in a cinematographic drama. As in literary or cine-matographic works, autobiographical recollection uses different temporal perspectives and foci of attention: either we bring our past close to our present by betaking ourselves back into that past or we once again live an episode we experienced at an earlier time by presently renewing our ex-perience of that episode, as happens in a flashback. Either our present mode determines our past or our past determines our present – this is what Merleau-Ponty calls the specious reversibility of time: on the intentional level, present and past are reversibly intertwined.1 In the first case, we

1 Merleau-Ponty (1968) Le visible et l’invisible: 243-4. Merleau-Ponty rejects Husserl’s notion of retention because it is only ‘one-way’, whereas the relation between past and present is reversible. I think he is right, although the past’s con-figuration of the present is not usually something we are aware of and difficult to


willingly turn away from the present and slip or sink into a past mode, whereas in the second case, the past is catching up with us, as it were, maybe independently of our will. I argue that such focusing of attention is similar to what Gestalt psychologists and Wittgenstein call ‘seeing as-pects’. Similarly to switches in temporal perspective from present to past, only certain kinds of ‘aspect-switches’ are subject to the will, although unlike aspect-switches, temporal switches are related to an affective state or attention. I consider attention as an affective state or a sensitivity to reasons, a discriminatory capacity which is not an emotion or a perception but rather a capacity for recognizing emotional or perceptual saliences. If I notice a large, salivating dog baring its teeth at me, I am aware of the threat if I recognize or evaluate that animal as dangerous. In this case, the affective salience of the event is detected by my fear of the dog.2

1. Retention and attention: modes of temporal continuity

Temporal phases have different modes of appearance: the now appears in the temporal position of the present, whereas the just-past appears as posited in the past. The ‘now’ is the source of the new, whereas the past is the source of the old. Thus retention does not preserve the content of the past, it is an awareness of the past as it slips away from the present but it belongs to the living present. I can mentally distinguish between my ex-perience of the present and that which progressively acquires degrees of pastness: as I listen to a melody, the first sounds slip or sink into the past whilst the second and third sounds are being played. And I grasp the mel-ody as a whole because I can still apprehend the sounds which are just-past. What has elapsed is present as just-past because there is an appended remnant or active residue in my perception of the actual now which over-laps with my perception of an earlier now: x recalls y at t2 because there is an overlapping of y at t1 and y at t2.3

The connection between temporal perception and succession probably dates back to Hume’s claim that “[f]ive notes play’d on a flute give us the impression and the idea of time”, namely that the idea of temporal dura-tion is derived from a succession of ideas or impressions.4 But the relation of succession between intervals does not by itself account for our percep-

evaluate. Besides, Husserl’s main point is that the ‘past’ is a result of imagination and affective salience, so the direction of the temporal arrow is irrelevant, since both ‘past’ and ‘present’ are arbitrary coordinates. 2 See Clotilde Calabi (2005)’s stimulating paper “Perceptual Saliences”: 253-269. 3 See F. Varela (1999): 266-306. 4 Hume, THN I.iii.3: 36-37.

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tion of succession which is why we need the notion of retention or primary memory – to maintain the earlier terms of a series whilst we perceive the actual ones and anticipate the following ones, by means of which we com-pose a perceived succession of ideas. If I say, “the dog is barking”, you retain “the dog” which sinks into the past as you hear “is” whilst you an-ticipate another word to complete the statement. You grasp the sense of my statement by means of this ‘saddle-back’ awareness of the present which constitutes our experience of temporal duration, either on a large scale or a small scale, since I also have a successive morphological grasp of the sense of words. If I say “aeroplane”, you retain the first phoneme as just-past and anticipate the last one as about-to-appear while you hear the mid-dle phoneme. In addition I am aware of the temporal extension of the se-quence of a sentence, or word but that requires reflection on the temporal flow and hence a repetition in secondary memory. Similarly, we perceive the succession of tones A^B^… or, respectively, the succession of tempo-ral phases within each particular tone, as well as the succession of the phases of our perception of the sequence A B…. As James writes, the “unit of composition of our perception of time is duration, with […] a rearward-and a forward-looking end.”5 For there is always a ‘now’ or center from which we focus our attention and it is bounded by an intentional horizon of an immediate past into which a present moment sinks or slips, as well as a projective horizon of an immediate future towards which a present moment protends.

Time’s flow appears discrete because our acts of perceiving time are discrete and ‘divide’ temporal continuity into countable or measurable units of duration. There is no ‘real’ mental unit of time (or a physiologi-cally absolute duration) because there is no invariant point ‘0’ (a temporal indifference point) between any two intervals of perceived duration. All we can measure and objectify is our time-sense and this objectifying en-deavour presupposes an observer’s position and the distinction between past, present and future. With regard to autobiographical memory, we are not examining clock-time but phenomenal time, that is, internal time or time in first-person experience and the time of objects as they appear in my personal recollection.

Phenomenal time has a tripartite texture: it is a boundary condition of temporal objects, a relation between an object and a mental act, viz a tem-poral dimension of our acts of consciousness, such as perceiving, thinking or imagining, as well as a substrate of consciousness. In order to be count-able or perceivable, temporal flow not only has to be divisible but divided or broken down into discrete units of duration. Thus temporal duration is

5 James (1890): 609. See also Husserl, PZB: 217.


measured by our perception. And, since our temporal consciousness has a triadic structure or three act-phases, a ‘now-phase’ tending rear-wards into a past phase and forwards into a future phase, its objects also have a triadic temporal structure or temporal horizon. If our time-consciousness were a consciousness of ‘now’ without the features of protention and retention, we could not have an experience of time, as Husserl’s commentator and translator, John Brough, points out: “a melody, whose successive notes were heard all at once as now, would not appear as a melody at all, but as a crash of simultaneous sound”.6

I sustain Husserl and Brough’s claim that the ‘real’ temporal format of an object is not phenomenologically accessible to us and that all we dis-cern is the temporal format of the experienced object. This is why the psy-chological time of our personal experience is not measurable by mapping it onto the real number continuum. Even Benjamin Libet’s (2004) experi-ments on conscious detection do not provide an objective timing of events composing episodes of my first-person consciousness. Libet claims to de-termine mind time, not unlike his 19th Century predecessors in Wundt’s laboratory who looked for a physiological time-unit to measure our mental time-sense or sensible present (what W. James famously called the ‘spe-cious present’).7 The question of whether our cortex anticipates voluntary decisions such as when to make a certain movement (and whether our free will is a side-effect of our neuronal network), cannot be determined by objective timing because we cannot associate the lived time of an episode with a point in objective time.8 Libet merely maps the conception of an objective time and a continuous real line onto a subjective experience of time without measuring the subjective experience of a movement, such as my wrist flexion. My point is that in subjective experience, my wrist flex-ion is grasped as a single meaningful unit or non-discrete whole and this semantic unit has a temporality which does not correspond to objective time-measures such as 100 milliseconds. The discreteness (or rather, ‘dis-cretization’) appears with the introduction of limits into this lived semantic continuum of temporal experience and such an introduction of limits in-volves using the triadic order of phenomenological (and autobiographical) time, viz primary impression, retention and protention.

Retention is the awareness of the past as it slips away from the present, but this awareness does not preserve the content of the past. But what one retains is not (yet) given as past because retention by itself is insufficient

6 John Brough (1989) “The phenomenology of inner time consciousness”: 272. 7 Cf. E.G. Boring (1941) Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology: 579-80. 8 See Benjamin Libet (2004) Mind Time.

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for an awareness of an object as past: I need recollection or secondary memory enabling me to re-identify and recognize an object as past. With-out primary memory or perceived past, however, I can have no experience of an object’s constancy or an event’s duration because my emergent per-ception is accompanied by a comet’s tail of my just-past perception. Re-tention presents just-past phases in their various degrees of pastness or the periphery of the central present phase, for it constitutes the temporal halo or horizon of my primal impression. I cannot perceive the actual phase without this periphery of a perceived past.

Husserl’s (1905, 1917-18) ‘figures of time’ represent these slipping moments and their increasing degrees of pastness in a slope referring to a source-point that is the primal impression in the actual now – the now is the source-point of all temporal positions. Merleau-Ponty (1945) criticizes Husserl’s diagram as being too static and incorrectly representing time as linear, since our perceiving the past is a dynamic and non-linear event. Perhaps Husserl was aware of the shortcomings in using points and lines for representing temporal extension, for in the Bernauer Manuskripte (1917-18) he explicitly attempts to represent the temporal continuum and the differences in retentional slippage.9 Retention is the active presentation of an absence that arises from our dynamic apprehension of the now which, at the same time, is a modification of the now as moving from cen-ter to periphery. Thus the slippage is a non-linear event, yet Husserl repre-sents retention as longitudinal or vertical intentionality. On the other hand, Husserl claims that consciousness is always a nexus (Zusammenhang) and that retention itself has a double intentionality.10 Retention intends the past mental act as well as the past object of that act – or the duration of tempo-ral experience as well as the duration of temporal objects and events. I am aware of a sound that has just died away because the now and the just-past are present to me, viz, the experience of the sound and the experience of my hearing the sound. Retention intends moments of the just-past phase of an object or event and it both retains and modifies those elapsed moments. My perception implicitly intends the temporal background of an object whilst it explicitly presents that object as temporally extended. The im-plicit intention becomes explicit in secondary memory, in which the repro-duced past bears the character past.11

9 Husserl (1917-1918) Bernauer Manuskripte (Hua, vol.33): 230-237. The diagram criticized by Merleau-Ponty (1945, Phénoménologie de la perception, 477) is in PZB, 28, 320. 10 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, Hua 33 :290-2 11 Husserl, PZB: 55.


According to Husserl, inner time is composed of two continua – a horizontal continuum of temporal places is connected with a sloping con-tinuum of past phases, so that each temporal place traverses the continuum of past phases and each past moment is past not only in relation to the pre-sent, but also in relation to preceding past phases. For the temporal thing, although inserted into the temporal form, has a shifting orientation in rela-tion to the living now. Each past moment modifies the present: to the ac-tual ‘now’ is joined a comet’s tail of retentions which slip or sink into the past. Husserl’s diagram is an attempt to depict temporal succession and to explain how the temporal order of earlier and later (and our idea of the past) arises, whilst showing the relation of the temporal object to my living now. Therefore he uses a coordinate system with a vertical and a horizon-tal axis: the horizontal axis depicts the continuity of an object or event, such as a melody and the vertical axis depicts the phases of consciousness or the continuity of temporal experience.

The ‘now’ we presently perceive punctuates or cuts off the horizontal continuity. Husserl explains how temporal distance or the horizontal axis arises, viz the abscissa of a coordinate point 0 on the x axis. On this ab-scissa, momentary phases t1 to tn are introduced as ideal limits and these limits or points are accompanied by shadows or modifications – the reten-tions slipping into oblivion. Point 0 is the limit between appearance and retentional horizon. The diagram represents how we perceive events in a temporal order and, despite its shortcomings with regard to the dynamicity of perception, Husserl’s main concern is, I think, the semantic and pre- cognitive structure of temporal perception. He points out that retention preserves and modifies past phases: the latter do not continue to stand out from the temporal flow, for otherwise we could not perceive a temporally extended object or event. Instead of hearing a melody, we would only hear a single note or, rather than perceiving an episode in dynamic succession, a single image would remain frozen in our mind, which can happen in recalling traumatic events, such as a car crash. So, past phases are not pre-served in an unmodified way, but they retain fixed temporal positions in relation to each other: note a at t1 precedes note b at t2 which is succeeded by note c at t3.

Husserl’s main point is not that without retention (and, respectively, protention) my experience lacks temporal continuity, since our subjective experience is discrete – a feature which becomes apparent on a larger scale: when we recall episodes of our past, we do not recall them in real time but ‘edit’ them by segmenting them or cutting out details and then compiling our past perceptions – as does a movie-maker – in subjective time, viz in a coherent sequential order of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. In this sense

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our re-lived experience is a construct and the momentary phases of a per-ceived succession are ideal limits of that succession which we perceive in a continuous flow.12 Similarly, our experience of hearing a long sound is continuous because we perceive it as a whole by synthesizing it from dis-crete points – we cannot grasp it as a continuum because a continuum is indecomposable – and its points are non-independent entities that exist only as points of transition.13 They can only be exhibited in the coordinate system of our first-person narrative where we first introduce limitations or temporal intervals and then recast what we hear into a coherent sequence. Phenomenal time is duration without points: when I perceive a train rush-ing into the station, I segment or dissolve this duration into grains or blurs (rather than independent points) within a delimited subjective time-span ranging from just-past to now-becoming. Our apprehension is dynamic and schematic on a non-conceptual level: we introduce limitations into our own spatio-temporal coordinate system of ‘I, ‘here’ and ‘now’ in order to construct a continuous perception which spans across discrete events.14

To put it differently, in our perceptual experience discrete events ap-pear continuous because they overlap and we order them sequentially be-cause of this overlapping. In observing a process or course of events such as a shooting star or a bird in flight, our experience of temporal duration and an object’s persistence is constituted by unitary interrelations of altera-tions of that object – as Husserl puts it – or overlapping: there is an active residue or trace (of a just-past) in my perception of the actual here-and-now and that is why primary memory is also my perception of the now. This retention is not an after-image or some kind of picture, but a mode of presentification of an earlier now and thus a presentation of the past which is a non-independent moment of the present.15

1.1. Retention as temporal background

We perceive an enduring temporal object as inserted into a temporal order of now, before and after or, to use Husserl’s spatial metaphor, as something with a foreground and a background. The figure and back-ground are a dynamic duo because perceiving the past (and the present) is

12 See Husserl, PZB :217. 13 See on this Hermann Weyl’s phenomenological and mathematical analysis of the continuum (1918) Das Kontinuum; see also John Bell (2000): “Hermann Weyl on intuition and the continuum” 14 see Karl Bühler (1934) Sprachtheorie, ch.7 on the deictic field and deictic words. 15 Husserl, PZB : Beilage VI, 113-114 ; PZB (1905), § 19; Husserliana 11 (Analy-sen zur passiven Synthesis) : 371.


a dynamic and non-linear event: I retain the moments just now slipping away as I perceive an actually present moment and I could not perceive a present moment unless it stands out in relief against a background of slip-ping just-past moments. In a similar vein, Gestalt psychologist Edgar Rubin (1921) claimed that something can only be perceived if it appears against a background, viz segregating a visual image into a figure and background is a step in perceptual organization which is part of the visual process. Rubin used the figure-ground structure for explaining that what is perceived as ground and what is perceived as figure do not have a shape in the same way. Frequently, the background shape is not registered as hav-ing a shape at all. When looking at reversible figures such as the vases and faces or the double cross, one shape becomes the background of the other: either we see a white cross on a black ground or vice versa.16 And the as-signment of an image region as ‘figure’ or ‘background’ determines on how we perceive a shape, on whether we notice it or not, because our at-tention is focused on the ‘figure’ or that which has contours. Consequently, our object recognition (our identification of shapes) is determined by the qualitative segregation of an image into figure and background or to which region we assign the contours. But why? The fact that physiological find-ings seem to corroborate Rubin’s claim does not solve the semantic prob-lem of how we determine which two sides of a contour are at the front or how we interpret the image by assigning the owner of the contours.

Nonetheless, it is our assignment of an image region as ‘figure’ or ‘background’ that determines on how we perceive a shape, on whether we notice it or not, because our attention is focused on the ‘figure’. When reading a map, for example, we may recognize (or not) the contours of a certain country it is meant to represent. We look at a map of Europe and recognize the shape of an area corresponding to the Black Sea but we may fail to see or segregate the contours of Bulgaria which remain in the back-ground because they are not salient. We fail to assign the contours to that region and do not discriminate the figure from the ground. Hence we can-not identify or recognize the figure. In temporal terms, the ‘background’ is the part that is more distant or in the past, whereas the ‘figure’ emerges in the temporal foreground. I hear a melody if I discriminate the form of the musical motif – if I understand the organization of the tones and recognize the whole as a melody.17

16 Edgar Rubin (1921) Visuell wahrgenommene Figuren. 17 Carl Stumpf (1911) introduced the notion of concordance as an organizational principle of tone perception or the “good fit” of a chord within a particular key – akin to the law of Prägnanz or ‘good form’ in visual perception. “We call concor-dance that feature of the chord which marks it a concord, that is, its construction is

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When my perception is directed towards something, I single out (and recognize) the figure from the ground by attending to the contours. Ac-cording to Rubin and Husserl, the contours and the region bound belong together, as illustrated by ambiguous figures such as the vases and faces or the black/white cross. We do not see the two shapes simultaneously. In temporal terms, the ‘background’ is the part that is more distant or in the past, whereas the ‘figure’ is in the temporal foreground. I presently hear a melody or perceive a figure as something which emerges from a back-ground. Husserl argues that the foreground is nothing without a back-ground and the appearing side is nothing without the nonappearing side: “the reproduced duration is the foreground; the intentions directed towards the insertion [of the duration into time] make conscious a background, a temporal background.”18

A plausible explanation for our ‘recognizing a whole’ or perceiving a figure against a background is that we perceive groups rather than singular elements, types rather than particulars and invariants rather than variables. We perceive a figure or an organized whole with regard to a group of its possible variations or transformations. The claim that we recognize invari-ants presupposes a form or schema of which individual situations are (variable) instances, a relation of one-many and a law by which we pick out the pattern or group or to measure the change in data. Ernst Cassirer uses the group concept to correlate perceptual constancy and geometrical transformations or the perceptual flux and the mathematical continuum in order to explain our perception of discrete spatio-temporal objects. On his view, a percept or a geometrical figure has describable properties which do not change if their system of coordinates changes: for example, the sides of a triangle that do not change under the rotation through a definite angle or an alteration in scale, are a group which is invariant under changes in the system that describes it.19 Likewise, the parts of an ambiguous figure

according to the principle of the maximum quantity of tones with the octave, in ascending order according to the degrees of consonance […] with the fundamental [note]. “Konsonanz und Konkordanz,”: 134, my translation. 18 “Kometenschweif”; see Husserl 1905, §§ 14, 25 in PZB, :35, 55 ( English trans-lation of PZB by J. Brough) cf. also Hua vol. 11: 371. The other metaphor Husserl uses is that of halo (Hof) or horizon. PZB, 3: 105; 45:304, Hua, vol.22 (1913) : 241-243; Hua, vol. 26 (1908): 218. 19 Schema logic and the method of variation are used by philosophers, logicians and mathematicians (such as Bolzano and Frege). Depending on the theory, the form (or schema, collection or class) either precedes an instance or is generated from instances (or situations), so that variation either presupposes or induces a conceptual or logical form. Ernst Cassirer (1944) relates perceived constancy and conceptual form by presupposing the formation of invariants (or groups) in percep-


such as Boring’s young/old woman (where one part is the background of the other) do not change, regardless of whether it is considered as the side-view of a young woman’s head or the three-quarter view of an old woman’s face.20 The law governing recognition of a whole postulates an invariance through changes of context or system of reference. This invari-ance does not lie in the percept (or the intuitively given figure) since, de-pending under which geometrical system we consider its properties, a cir-cle is transformed into an ellipse and an ellipse into a parabola or a hyper-bola. Rather, it lies in “the rule by which the elements are related to each other”.21

1.2. Attentional rhythmics and salient phenomena

Figure/ground segregation is an attentional modification or emphasis by contrast. We see something by putting it into relief. And to grasp an event or object we recede from it and, by withdrawing from it, we play it in counterpoint. A figure emerges against a background. This change of place or movement from ground to figure where something is put into re-lief is a result of what Husserl calls attentional rhythmics (attentionale Rhythmik) or the rhythmics of noticing (Rhythmik des Bemerkens).22 The relation between rhythm and attention probably dates back to Wundt (1896), the father of experimental psychology – the battlefield of various philosophical and psychological interests which eventually split between empirical and descriptive psychology and between philosophy and psy-chology. According to Wundt, the visual field (Blickfeld) consists of a fo-cus and a margin and contains the viewpoint (Blickpunkt) of attention or range of apperception. One of his reasons for investigating rhythm was to determine the temporal range of our awareness – to measure the span of attention on a particular scale, as well as to determine rhythmic kinesthetic sensations (rhythmische Tastbewegungen) as a source of temporal repre-

tion and geometrical transformations by referring to group theory. Cassirer points out that the notion of ‘group’, first introduced by Cauchy relates mathematical and perceptual domains. He discusses Helmholtz’s and Klein’s views on geometry and relates them to Hering and Gestalt psychologists’ experiments concerning the phe-nomenon of perceptual constancy (or variation, as in Rubin’s figures). He argues that the projective transformations of geometrical figures is grounded on the same laws (of group transformation) as perceptual phenomena. “The concept of group and theory of perception”: 1-36. 20 E.G. Boring (1930): “A new ambiguous figure”: 444-5 21 Cassirer (1944) : 8. 22 Husserl (1893-1912) Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nach-lass, Hua vol. 38: 283-293; cf. also Ideen I, Hua vol.3, §§ 35, 37.

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sentations (Zeitvorstellungen), in order to ascertain a physiological basis of the sense of time.23

Husserl also investigates the temporal range of our consciousness us-ing the notions of attention and rhythm but the parallel between him and Wundt goes only so far, since Husserl not only proposes a top-bottom model in his revision of Brentano’s descriptive psychology but explicitly rejects the naturalization of consciousness and the empirical method of investigating mental acts.24 Husserl uses the searchlight metaphor (Strahl)25 in referring to the temporal structure of a representation and the corresponding temporal phases of an object: the searchlight or attention-span is directed to the actual now-phase of an object which is surrounded by a temporal horizon of ‘before now’ and ‘after now’ – viz the retentional and protentional phases of our awareness of an object or the range of ap-perception.

Husserl considers attention as the basic function of spontaneous awareness or a basic mode of synthesis and he distinguishes between no-ticing (bemerken) and paying attention to something (aufmerken). Notic-ing is a passive feature of attention or passive mode of synthesis which denotes an activity without being a spontaneous act. If I notice a purple spot on your chin, my attention is affected by this spot which comes to the fore without my intending it or being oriented towards it, as would be the case if I were paying attention to the purple spot. In noticing it, I am not actively engaged with it, yet in my perception of your chin something emerges, viz is raised up (Hebung) without being intended by a mental or linguistic act.

For Husserl rejects the two-component theory of perceptual change ac-cording to which attentional content is composed of perceptions and inten-tions or identical attentional matter and attentional form where only the latter changes, whereas the former remains the same. For attention is not intention or a distinct intentional act but a modification of a mental act and we do not send an attentional beam into an appearance which then takes on the features of the beam. Rather, our grasping of the phenomenon is activated. A correct description of the perceptual process cannot be that we

23 Wilhelm Wundt (1896) Grundriss der Psychologie, § 11 :174-5. Cf. on this Edwin G. Boring (1941): 583. 24 See Husserl (1911) „Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft“: 294-310. N.B. In a critical discussion on Wilhelm Wundt, Husserl (1913) also points out that, unlike Wundt’s attempt, his own method really is a ‘reform of psychology’; “A draft of a ‘preface’ to the Logical Investigations” in Introduction to the Logical Investiga-tions, § 12: 54. 25 Hua, vol.26 (Bedeutungslehre, ergänzende Texte) : 218


send an attentional beam into an unchanging phenomenon, since the lat-ter’s appearance depends on the perceptual process. Nor can we rightly claim that we have an enduring perceptual awareness in which our inten-tional acts emphasize or make something salient. Rather, salience is a property of the phenomenon which provides reasons or motivations to which our mental acts relate by discriminating it. Motivation has a direc-tive power on attention and this power belongs either to an affective force, such as desire or, as I should like to argue, to a sensitivity to reasons: a ‘because’ or ‘therefore’ attitude that grounds and justifies our actions. I see a burning cigarette on the table. I notice it, then I heed it by deliberating my course of action or whether I should extinguish it. I extinguish it be-cause I am aware of the dangerous possibilities that could result from my letting it burn. By exercising our capacities of deliberation and discrimina-tion, we thus construct perceptual saliences as reasons for our actions.26

A perception is informed or modified by an attentional beam (Strahl) but retains an abstract feature. For we are aware of an appearance without intending it or being oriented towards it, although our perception is modi-fied by acts of presentification or attentional modes. I see the ashtray. Then an imaginary picture emerges in my perception, taking on contours, and now I grasp what I had so far passively noted and not definitely deter-mined. In paying attention to what I see, I determine it more precisely as an ashtray, the sides of which are decorated by certain figures and colored in different hues.27 In this way, the ashtray appears as a specifically in-tended phenomenon which has the property of salience: it is the fore-ground of my perception.

Husserl describes changes in perception and recollection in terms of foreground and background in order to distinguish between different as-pects of the perceptual process.28 Our perception has a rhythmical quality or differentiated distribution and an alteration of the attentional mode is necessary for a phenomenon to stand out and be grasped by an intentional act. Looking at my desk, my cup of coffee emerges from amongst the other objects scattered there, such as the lamp, books, post-its, the key-board and the screen. An alteration in my attentional mode is necessary for noticing the cup emerging from the background, as well as my receding from the desk, so that there is some distance between myself and what I see and this distance enables me to ‘measure’ what I see and gain a per-spective of it with regard to its relative position and its distance from me. My focusing on the cup puts this object in relief by contrasting it with a

26 See Calabi (2005: 253-269). 27 See Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Hua vol.38: 282. 28 See Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Hua, vol.38:282.

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more undefined background. Focusing is an adjustment of the eye to see things at different distances; it involves adjusting to a change of place by a change in pace and attentional rhythmics accounts for the latter. Thus, from my actual perspective, the cup emerges from, or is salient of, the desk. Perceptual alterations between foreground and background, where certain things stand out whilst others remain backstage or out of the atten-tional spotlight, are analogous not only to a change in focus or orientation, but also to a change in pace between different perceptual modes. For an object or event to emerge or stand out in relief, a change in the speed of my perception of it is required, more precisely an alternation between two modes of attention. This change of pace accounts for the differentiated distribution in our perception or the rhythmical quality of our attention.

What emerges in attentional rhythmics is arrhythmic and a-rithmetic in the sense that it is discriminable against the foreground-background rhythmics of attention and can be individuated or identified as an individ-ual whole. Hence, since it can be discriminated, a perceptual salience is a countable unit or number (αριθμός). A perceptual salience can be repre-sented by a whole number or integer, for it emerges from a continuum of real numbers or discrete entities which remain in the background as transi-tional points lacking contours unless they are detected and brought to the fore or constituted as salient by a modification of our sensitivity or a change in our attentional mode.

In a note on attentional alterations in recollection, Husserl extends his doctrine of attention to recollection: attentional modifications retain an abstract feature in a changing perception and the background modes of perceptual acts also have an objectual relation. Likewise, recollection is not to be analyzed as consisting of two related moments viz an attentional form and an identical attentional matter. An alteration in the attentional mode modifies the recollection, just as the retentional process modifies the original impression. But this seems contradictory, for how can I modify a past perception? A recollection modifies the appearance of a perception and the modification is temporal, since what appears is not what is now perceived but what has been perceived, so that the past appearance is pre-sentified: ‘I see again’. The other modification concerns location: a recol-lection either situates me in the past or it places what I remember before me. If a recollection emerges, a phenomenon emerges with an attentional form, a concrete phenomenon with a character of remembrance or modi-fied perception. I can once again heed what I heeded at an earlier time. But my heeding is not part of my modified recollection, since it occurs in my actual now, rather it is a modifier of my recollection. Also, I can now over-look an object or event I singled out in my recollection and instead focus


on its background which now emerges in a new light in my attentional alteration .

In recalling my earlier perception of a silvery mobile phone, I can sub-sequently direct my attention to the shop-window constituting the back-drop in what I perceived and I have a ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung’).29 My attentional alterations of this recollection do not belong to what I remem-ber (so in that sense the past perception is unmodified), but I do remember that I just heeded a silvery mobile phone. If I then orient my attention to the shop window I co-perceived, my attentional pace adjusts to the back-ground but what is adjusted is not my perception but my imagination, for in recollection my focusing is imagination-oriented. I can ‘move around’ in my recollection, using what Karl Bühler calls imagination-oriented deixis. Deixis pointers are anchored in our bodily coordination system: ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘here’ or ‘there’. In recollection, these pointers are orientation clues integrated in our own (displaced) coordinate system to orient ourselves (and our hearers) in imagination.30 Since recollection involves presentifying things that are absent, our perceptual space is trans-formed into a stage where the viewer or speaker presents (either to himself or to an audience) a scene or an imagination-oriented deixis, using indica-tive coordinates which he or a hearer can see, hear or read by using their imagination: one person guides another with orientation clues for dis-placement in imagination or imagination-oriented pointing: I remember the walk I took along the Seine: ‘I was here, he was there and the river was glittering to our right’.

In a recollection I am displaced into an imaginary change of location: ‘here is the shop-window, right there is the silvery mobile phone which caught my eye’. In recollecting or re-presenting something the way I per-ceived it, I thus alter my standpoint in imagination. Or I displace the mo-bile phone in my imagination, so that it now stands before me, as a small body close by or a large body far away. Whether an object comes to me or whether I am displaced into an imaginary journey depends on whether I am recollecting an action or an event and on my perspective or position: either I have a bird’s eye view or I am positioned in the location I am re-calling: I either have a scenic memory of my office or my recollection posits me sitting at my desk in the office. In the first case, my office is salient of my panoramic memory of my working scene which I visit in an imaginary journey, from a bird’s eye perspective. In this case I describe a situation or event using deictic clues: “this is my desk, here is my PC,

29 Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Hua, vol.38:294. 30 See Karl Bühler (1934), Sprachtheorie, 1965: 134-40. I further discuss imagina-tion-oriented deixis in recollection in Kasabova (2008): 331-350.

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there are my folders”. In the second case, I describe a scene as an action: I recollect myself as working in my office, so that my desk is salient of my office from my recollective viewpoint in situ.

Attentional alterations in recollection are similar to filming technique in that both are based on perceptual selection and displace the viewer us-ing imagination-oriented deixis: for a coherent visual narrative, we cut scenes in certain places, we focus on a particular action and changes of point of view occur for the viewer as the camera jumps from long-distance to close-up and around, displacing the viewer by using deictive coordi-nates. In recalling my childhood home I see the living room: my imagina-tion-oriented pointers moves from the blue wallpaper to a Persian rug and a couch in the corner. Either I move around in the room or I have a bird’s eye-view of the room as a scene.

1.3. Husserl’s halo and core metaphors

Unlike retention and attention, acts of presentification such as recollec-tion or phantasy are not only modificational acts, but intentional modifica-tions of perception: in such acts, perceptions are reproduced and thus modified. When I presentify last night’s dinner, my recollection is a modi-fied version of the dinner that was present last night and now hovers be-fore me as I am directed towards it. The direction of my recollection can point outwards, to the periphery or inwards, to the core (the perception). Husserl uses the concepts Hof (halo) and temporal horizon (Zeithof) for naming the background, as well as the duo core (Kern) and halo (Brough’s English translation of Hof) for the semantic relation between a mental act and its temporally structured object, viz, an object built according to its background and foreground or halo and core. A recollection or presentifi-cation is directed either towards the halo or the core of a perception and consequently the object appearing in that perception is determined closely or fully. In the latter case, the object is identified and appears fully in the foreground – it is intended explicitly in my recollection. In the former case, the object remains vague and some features do not appear but are intended implicitly.31 The concepts halo and core refer to our ‘grasping’ (Auffassung) of a temporal object in a representation and this is ultimately a question of focusing and attentional rhythmics.

31 See Husserl (1913), Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI logischen Untersuchung, Hua, vol.22/1: 141-3; 240-3. Husserl uses the concepts of halo and core for de-scribing the intentional directions of fulfillment with regard to external percep-tions.


The spatial metaphors of background and foreground also connotate mnemonic techniques for developing memory: the place system always has a background on which to place one’s figure (or number or parts of a speech). The Rhetorica ad Herennium recommends using background scenes or places and foreground images which should be carefully out-lined, as well as visual imagery for anchoring words or numbers we wish to memorize.32 There is an interesting analogy between the ‘memory thea-tre’ developed by Giulio Camillo in the 16th Century, in which the place system evolves to forming images within an architectural framework, and Husserl’s ‘Hof’ and ‘Kern’ metaphor: ‘Hof’ literally translates as court (or courtyard). Usually the latter surrounds the building, so that the house is at the centre (the Kern) of its ‘Hof’. A Roman house, however, has the court or atrium is at its centre. Camillo’s memory theatre also has a court or ‘Hof’ at its centre. The ‘Kern’ – a kernel or nucleus – is the central, most significant part of a whole. Situated at the centre, the horizon is shown as that which determines the contours, especially if the horizon turns out to be hidden inside the appearing figure. Or maybe Husserl covertly uses two synonyms: ‘Hof’ and ‘Kern’ which denote interchangeable places, in the same sense that background and foreground are interchangeable, insofar as the background may switch into the foreground, depending how we focus on or organize the contours, just as we organize the contours of an am-biguous figure, either automatically or at will. “And thus each thing in perception has its reverse side as background.”33

A ‘Hof’ can be either an enclosed area or a surrounding area, whereas a halo rather denotes the latter, although we may assume that the source of light surrounding an object or divine being comes from within rather than without. Perception is always accompanied by halo (Hof) or spatial and temporal nexus. The temporal halo is double, in that it is orientated to-wards the future as well as towards the past, so that “every perception has its retentional halo and its protentional halo”. Hence recollection or secon-dary memory has a temporal halo because that halo is a property of the perception intended by a recollection which, as a modification of a percep-

32 Rhetorica ad Herennium, attributed to Cicero, English translation by Harry Caplan, 1954, III.xviii-xx: 211-15. See on this Sorabji (1972 : 22-30) who also suggests that various expressions such as ‘in the first place’ or ‘commonplace’ may have been transmitted to the present day via Aristotle’s Topics and the Rhetoric, having originated in the system of place memory. For a detailed account of mem-ory systems, see Frances Yates (1966) The art of memory, 1984. 33 Husserl, PZB :304.

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tion, also contains the perception’s temporal horizon.34 It is perception which provides the possibility of awakening or anticipating – of retention or protention.

The retentional and protentional halo posits the boundary conditions of experience because it acts as a constraint on what appears, viz the phe-nomena or the ‘Kern’. Likewise, the temporal horizon also acts as bound-ary condition for memory itself: which “exists in a nexus of memories with an order terminating in the actual now of perception.” The appear-ance standing before me in recollection is what has been given in percep-tion at an earlier ‘now’, what we have seen or heard at that time and as recollection intends it, our earlier experience is thrown into relief against a background of other recollections.

“Every memory of which one is specifically conscious is a privileged member of a vague surrounding memory, of a memorial background (Erin-nerungshintergrund). Every memory tends forward [it places what it re-members before it], but it is also a terminus of tendencies. It itself has a background of the past (Vergangenheitshintergrund), a past that is relative to its now.”35

My recollection of hearing the song of the mermaid Lorelei on the bar-

rel-organ stands out from the background of the past as I focus on the song I heard then. The barrel-organ piece is the retentional core (Kern) or full appearance. This core fills the intention of my retention.36 Halo and core are a duo in the sense that the former is intentional, whereas the latter is the fullness or the core filling the intention, the appearance on which my attention is focused. But the reason why my attention is focused on a given appearance lies in the temporal horizon. Husserl claims that the Hof and particularly the Zeithof is essential for the relation of signification (Sinnes-beziehung) between an act and the enduring object, viz for the awareness, that this thing I see now is the same as the one I saw yesterday.37

The horizon is what bounds the now – it conditions our experience of an appearance because it warrants the overlapping or congruence

34 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein…: 263; PZB: 105. Cf. also: Experience and Judgment:166, Cartesian Meditations:44-45. 35 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein… : 296. (English translation by Brough, 2005). 36 Husserl uses ‘Kern’ as a synonym of ‘Erscheinung’, when discussing what ap-pears in my apprehensional act when I am turned towards something; see Phanta-sie, Bildbewusstsein…:266, 284, 296; Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Logi-schen Untersuchung (1913) Hua vol. 22/1: 143, 241-2. 37 Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre, 1908 (Hua vol.26:177).


(Deckung) of our past and present meaning : what I see is always accom-panied by a temporal horizon and a retentional halo, particularly in recol-lection. The ‘now’ of the rememberer overlaps with the remembered ‘now’, so there is a congruence of his past and present experience: the fullness of his present experience is ‘dimmed’ on the periphery of the full-ness of the past experience and vice versa, depending on what he attends to.

The retentional and protentional halo allows for the temporal continu-ity and unity of an enduring object. This discrete overlapping is a basis of identification of an object which occurs via the relation of signification. This is what Kant calls synthesis of recognition, except that, according to Kant, this synthesis requires memory as well as a rule of apperception or capacity for judging in accord with a rule for applying concepts: we have to be able to judge that an earlier and a later representation are represent-ing the same object.38

1.4. Consciousness of concordance and retentive certainty

Husserl agrees with Kant that we need recognition in order to relate different representations but, for him, the ‘synthesis’ of recognition com-bining recollection and present perception is the passive synthesis of a retentive certainty of what is just past, a belief which is a modality and neither an attitude, nor a cognition, nor does it require a normative rule governing the use of concepts. It is a consciousness of concordance (Ein-stimmigkeitsbewusstsein) belonging to the representing intention: “an im-pressional intention that refers to a nexus of intentions through which the relation to the actual now is brought about.”39 We have a retentive cer-tainty that this thing I see now has the same sense as that one I saw yester-day because the two representations have an overlapping temporal hori-zon, a passive synthesis grounding my belief that the enduring thing is the same. Our belief is an awareness of a complete accord between the two representations and this awareness is grounded on a temporal nexus com-posed of protentional halos, retentional halos and a memorial halo. And retention is a mode of belief-certainty that is incapable of being crossed out because it belongs to what is just past.

In a recollection, the halo of presentification (of the appearance) will be the mode of remembrance and the core is the remembered thing, since memory displaces what is remembered in its own nexus of pastness. The

38 See Kant, KrV, A115, A121, A126. 39 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein…:244. Brough translates Einstimmigkeits-bewusstsein as consciousness of harmony.

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halo of the recollection overlaps with the retentional halo of the perception in which the appearance was presented. My recollection is enabled by the intentions (the retentions and protentions belonging to the perception as well as to the memory) embedded in the temporal halo. The nexus of re-tentional and protentional halos connects the recollection to the actual now of perception, the terminus of the recollection. Last night’s illuminated theatre now hovers (schwebt) before me.40 This appearance of the hover-ing theatre is a temporal being – it has duration. Perception allows for de-grees of presence and empty retentions let the past appear with degrees of pastness. The emptiness of the retentions is fulfilled in recollection: I see an illuminated theatre, but is it this one (the same one) I saw last night? Maybe they only overlap in part. The remembered theatre may be a differ-ent one than the one I presently perceive. If the two theatres do not com-pletely overlap, they do not have the same meaning and I must adjust the sense of my recollection as grounding the non-identity of the object. There is a complete overlapping if and only if I recognize the recollected theatre as being the same one as the perceived theatre. For Husserl, our recogni-tion is based on a fundamental modification of perception as recollection to which belongs a consciousness of concordance, as our present percep-tion and past recollection are inserted into the temporal order of our ex-perience. The consciousness of concordance is a necessary condition for recollection and recognition (Wiedererkennen) first, because it grounds the continuity of our recollection: we represent the same thing by means of similar memory images: I remember a house, and during my recollection now it sinks away, disappears and now it reappears. I develop this point in section 2, below. Second, a recognition, or cognizing again occurs only in an act of agreement or concordance (Uebereinstimmung) which enables our identification of this, what I now see as the same thing as I saw then.

The meaning (Bedeutung) of a recollection also depends on the nexus in which I posit or think the object: I remember the tower on the hill. I situate the tower in its connection with a background (the hill) and the retentional halo gradually fills out with the contours of the appearing tower – the vague halo becomes determinate. The halo is the sense di-rected towards the nexus and if the intended sense of the appearance over-laps with the sense of the nexus in which I posit the appearance, then they have the same meaning. This sameness of meaning gives continuity and unity to the object. For the appearance – say, the appearance of the tower – is a temporal being which endures, changes, etc. An immanent tone also endures, changes, etc. but it is not an appearance. For the appearing thing, the temporal object, persists as a unity and for it to appear to us, our

40 See Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein… :295-6; PZB : 185.


awareness of it comprises “along with the point of actually present sensa-tion, the continuity of fading sensations that pertain to the sensations be-longing to earlier nows”.41 It is the retentive trail that extends the now-point of the tone. For an appearance has duration and duration cannot be represented without being posited in a temporal nexus. In the case of a recollection, we cannot posit (or believe) the tower without a retentional and memorial halo, which is why we need a belief or Einstimmigkeitsbe-wusstsein.42

In Husserl’s diagram of time, the coordinate point 0 is the limit be-tween appearance (on the horizontal axis) and sense (Sinn) (on the vertical axis) – 0 is an intention or modification that can find its core. Husserl calls this core a dark presence (dunkle Präsenz) which requires a clear percep-tion as fulfillment or, in the case of secondary presenting, a dark recollec-tion is fulfilled by imagination. The dark presence is the zero limit be-tween an empty halo and a full core: it is not an originary presenting where nothing appears, but it is physically present (ist doch leibhaftig da), pos-ited in the mode of presenting.43 Thus sense conditions our awareness of the appearance, since it is the basis of temporal awareness. The sense of an experience is grasped as the searchlight (Strahl) of a representation is di-rected towards the appearance (or core) here and now for, in the process of identification, our searchlight spans across the appearance’s undetermined halo of ‘before’ and ‘after’. That is why perception is always accompanied by a halo (Hof) or horizon because this horizon is the meaning of a given appearance.

Husserl is saying that I don’t recognize the appearance but I grasp the relation between sense and appearance – the concordance (Uebereinstim-mung) between words and an object. I recognize the state of affairs (Sachverhalt), viz how certain things relate to each other, what a certain object is called (what it means) or the relation between words and an ob-ject. This passive synthesis of belief is a certainty that a semantic relation

41 Husserl, PZB:280. 42 Husserl’s notion of consciousness of concordance probably originated in Carl Stumpf’s (Husserl’s ‘Doktorvater’) research on dyadic tonal fusion or blending (Verschmelzung) and his distinction between consonance and concordance (see note 65 above on Stumpf’s notion of concordance). According to Stumpf (1898), the sensation of consonance is a result of tonal fusion, viz when we hear two tones as a uniform (einheitlich) whole and hence relatively free of dissonance: “Fusion is that relation between two sense-perceived elements in which they form a whole rather than a mere sum”. See “Konsonanz und Dissonanz” (1898): 107 (my transla-tion). 43 See Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Logischen Untersuchung (1913) Hua vol. 22/1: 241-2.

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obtains between a name and its object. It is not a judgment or doxic act but an understanding, similar to what Husserl calls ‘thinking of’ or modified judgment. I can understand something without making a judgment. I can understand the statement: “a tower stands on the High Way” by positing a phantasy-tower on a street that I have before me in memory. The tower is a phantasy-formation fulfilling the retentive halo. Understanding occurs if the phantasy-construct corresponds to or concords with a corresponding thought-formation. This concordance grounds what Husserl calls a sympa-thetic or sympathizing belief-mode (sympathetischer, sympathisierender Glaubens-modus).44 ‘Once upon a time’ posits something as having ex-isted in the spatio-temporal world and thus we imagine or posit, in a partly normal and partly modified way, a princess, a castle and other ingredients of a fairy-tale as ‘having existed’. Similarly, in supposing an arbitrary mathematical theorem, “the single numbers are ultimately posited as mathematical actualities”. Autobiographical memory also works in this way: when I suppose that ‘in my youth, I was very beautiful and had many admirers’, my supposition posits those admirers as an autobiographical actuality which is a construct of recollection.

2. Recollection and constructed continuity

Recollection is autobiographical memory properly speaking (as we have seen, retention is a form of perception rather than memory). Recol-lection involves recognition and re-identification, for it is a process by which an individual not only retrieves and recreates events from the past but also recognizes them as belonging to the past and, more specifically, his own past. He re-collects something he once had in his mind and has not attended to in the meantime. Calling to mind last week’s dinner at the restaurant involves a presentification based on my recognizing that scene as past and re-viewing the events.

On the stepwise conception of memory, recollection is secondary memory in which, unlike retention, there is no smooth or fading tie to the present. An account of recollection deals with the question how past, and hence absent, perceptions or ideas return into our consciousness. To recol-lect something involves being aware and mindful, as opposed to being forgetful or mindless. Rather than seeing what is past, secondary memory constructs the past by re-presenting earlier perceptions. A recollection represents the melody I heard, the pain I felt or the glittering jewel I saw. Retention is a form of perception but recollection is a form of representa-

44 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein.. : 380.


tion. And a representation presents something absent of which we have no sensory perception: we have sensory perceptions of present things which we do not need to presentify or represent. In addition, a recollection is accompanied by the awareness that these earlier perceptions have been present that is, something appears as having been perceived. So if we re-produce an earlier perception of something, then that thing appears as hav-ing been present, at least to our mind, for of course we can also remember things that did not happen and hence were not actually present. Thus a recollection is not just a recalling of an earlier perception but has the char-acters of reproduction and of pastness, for it implies a possibility of re-flecting upon and hence reproducing an earlier appearance or series of appearances and bringing them to the fore (back to the present). According to Husserl’s essential law (Wesensgesetz) governing representations, the reproduction of the perception of an external object is a representation of that object: Repro (Pe) = Re.45 We may assume that recollection acts ac-cording to this law: as a reproduction which represents a perceived object or event.

To put it differently, a presentification of the perceived object or event also modifies the perception: in a recollection, the perception of the brightly illuminated theater or of my headache is representationally modi-fied: I do not feel my past headache, but I can represent it by positing (re-producing) it in recollection as a pain that I have felt. Likewise, the brightly illuminated theatre appears (or reappears), but it is not now pre-sent. On this line of reasoning, it follows that what is present is not the same object. This is precisely what Husserl claims. But how does this claim fit with his assumption of a direct perceptual link between our past and our present? I argue below that Husserl’s position is not only non-contradictory, but also plausible. So, how does autobiographical memory link ‘then’ and ‘now’? In section 2.2. and 2.3. I shall propose a Husserlian reply, but first we must examine the root of the problem, namely continu-ity.

2.1. The problem of continuity

In part I., chapter 3, § 1 of this work I present an argument for recollec-tions as nested experiences with non-conceptual contents, citing P.F. Linke (1929)’s view of recollections as Schachtelerlebnisse. I now rebut this argument. Linke considers nesting (Schachtelung) as a criterion for distin-guishing between intentional and non-intentional experience – the former

45 See Husserl, PZB, § 27: 58 and PZB, appendix XII: 128.

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are representations and the latter are perceptions. Recollections are repre-sentations and thus intentional: they grasp a previous experience as the object of our representation. Husserl, by contrast, argues that in a recollec-tion we grasp both the object and the act that originally intended or per-ceived it. On Linke’s account, a perception is embedded in my recollection whereas on Husserl’s account, a recollection modifies the original percep-tion. Both authors consider recollection as representational in regard to the question of composition: a recollection is representational if it is composi-tionally structured, that is, if its elements can be constituents of other expe-riential states, allowing us to infer, for example, that a certain experience a at t1 is similar to a second experience b at t2.

The differences between their theories lie in their implications for per-ceived temporal continuity. According to Linke, an earlier experience is embedded or nested in the later experience. This claim entails that our continuous representational experience consists of nested layers, at the core of which is a non-conceptual representational content. The heteroge-nous nature of perception and recollection, however, is problematic for explaining our temporal experience as continuous. For if recollection is defined as a nested experience, then this definition does not account for the intuitive continuum, viz the experienced continuous flow of phenome-nal time. This objection was raised by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl (1918), a decade before Linke wrote his main text. Weyl’s objection is underwritten by the assumptions that phenomenal time is the most fundamental continuum and that there is an irradicable difference between intuitively given continua such as our experience of time, space or motion and the “discrete” exact concepts of mathematics, such as the concept of real number. He criticizes the view of continuity as a flow con-sisting of (and dissolving into) points for, according to him, phenomenal time is a genuine primitive which we can determine approximately but not exactly.

“precisely what eludes us is the nature of the continuity, the flowing from point to point; that which lets the continually enduring present continually slip away (beständig hinüber- und hinabgleiten) into the receding (ab-sinkende) past”. 46

46 Hermann Weyl (1918) Das Kontinuum, § 6 on the intuitive and the mathematical continuum: 65-74. my translation. Cf. the English translation by S. Pollard & T. Bole (1987), Dover Publications, New York: 92. See on this John Bell (2000) “Hermann Weyl on intuition and the continuum”, http//publish.uwo. ca/~jbell/Hermann%2520Weyl.pdf. Weyl gives the following example of why we cannot adequately bridge the discrepancy between phenomenal time and the con-cept of real number (and, respectively, a conceptual description) of temporal dura-


Weyl conceives recollection similarly to Husserl – not as a nested ex-perience, but as a complex and uniform conscious experience of an actual now which, with its temporal position, slips away (viz Husserl’s retention or primary memory which is a form of perception). The content of my conscious experience persists not because it is ‘nested’ but because it both perdures and changes. Weyl writes:

“What has slipped away can re-emerge – certainly not as an experience that I have anew, but rather as the content of a (cogent) recollection: then it has become something past. In the objective picture I form of life’s flow, it is to be posited against what is now present, as that which occurred ear-lier.”47

Weyl points out the compositional and re-presentational nature of sec-

ondary memory which intends its object as occupying a position relative to the actual now, for the ‘earlier now’ is posited with regard to the coordi-nate-point of my actual temporal location. In this sense, recollection is a construction we can explain by using a Weylian conception of the contin-uum, so that we can effectively correlate descriptive concepts with phe-nomenal temporal experience: in order to exhibit temporal points (such as ‘earlier now’), we posit a rigidly punctual ‘Now’ (streng punktuelles ‘Jetzt’). But the ‘earlier now’ is not embedded in the ‘actual now’ – the temporal moment of my past experience of sitting in a university hall is not contained in the present moment of my facing a computer screen;

tion and why it is questionable to dissolve a period into temporal points, even if the following two conditions were satisfied: say I express my perceptual finding that during a certain period I saw a pencil lying there as follows: (1) “in every temporal point which falls within a certain time span OE” I saw a pencil lying there. (2) If P is a temporal point, then the domain of rational numbers to which l belongs if and only if there is a time point L earlier than P such that OL = l.OE. If we take the time span OE as a unit, then each temporal point P is correlated with a definite real number. Weyl points out that in order to be valid, this correlation should be grounded in temporal intuition but the latter cannot provide evidence either way and that the experienced temporal flow cannot be represented as a continuum of individual points; § 6:67-68. N.B. Weyl cites both Husserl and Linke in a footnote “über das Zeitproblem” ( :70), referring to Husserl’s Ideen 1 §§ 81,81 and Linke’s phänomenale Sphäre und das reale Bewusstsein” (1912, ch.6). Linke (1929) is even more explicit on recollection as a nested representation. 47 Weyl (1918) “Das Entschwundene kann auftauchen – zwar nicht als ein Erleb-nis, das ich von neuem habe, wohl aber als Inhalt einer (triftigen) Erinnerung: dann ward es das Vergangene; in dem objektiven Bild des Lebensablaufs, das ich mir mache, ist es gegenüber dem, was jetzt da ist, als das Frühere zu setzen.” Das Kon-tinuum, § 6: 70, my translation.

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rather, it is a limit or temporal point introduced into the (intuitively given) continuum of my temporal experience. But this temporal point is a non-independent point of transition, so it cannot be embedded, because that would presuppose it to be a unit. And the relation ‘earlier than’ is deter-mined on the collection of such temporal points, as a concordant (or con-gruence) relation of temporal intervals, from my ‘actual now’ facing the crisp images displayed on my monitor to my ‘earlier nows’, from sitting on an old, narrow bench in a university hall to sitting in a stroller in the park.

We can appropriately account for temporal continuity in recollection if and only if we consider temporal points as non-independent points of tran-sition, that is, as smears or smudges with blurred contours and if and only if we consider temporal points as fixed within a coordinate system without giving their exact determination. Single points in a true continuum “cannot be exhibited” because they are not genuine individuals and cannot be de-fined by their properties. They can be determined approximately, never exactly, and in terms of a coordinate system Weyl calls “the inevitable residue of the eradication of the ego” (das unvermeidliche Residium der Ich-Vernichtung) in the geometrico-physical world.48 In other words, con-sciousness and its contents are not only incompatible with exact mathe-matical representation but resist the latter. Weyl’s phenomenological stance is undeniable and the notion of the ‘I’ (of an aware subject) as a coordinate system develops Husserlian points whilst anticipating Bühler’s (not to mention Merleau-Ponty’s) investigations on deixis and the bodily coordinate system of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. However that may be, for our purpose his view is instrumental in explaining autobiographical memory as a constructed continuum in terms of a coordinate system with non-independent temporal points. For continuity between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is not only a result of autobiographical accounts, it is the backbone of auto-biographical memory. The linear time-structure of autobiographical narra-tives (regardless of the ‘gaps’) is a result of an intuitively given continuum which is constructed in our personal coordinate system.

Whilst this account may not solve all the problems involved in describ-ing autobiographical memory, it at least provides a plausible explanation of how our past and present are linked. If my hypothesis is correct, it pro-vides a tentative solution to the ‘temporal gap’ problem – if we accept the claim that ‘then’ is a point of transition exhibited in the continuum of con-

48 Weyl (1918), §6: 72. See on this J. Bell’s (2000) appendix on Weyl’s Analogy between Egos and Coordinate Systems in “Hermann Weyl on intuition and the continuum”. In this appendix, Bell points out Weyl’s intended criticism of Husserl, as well as the unfortunate absence of specific textual evidence.


scious experience and that ‘earlier than’ is a relation of temporal intervals relative to a posited ‘actual now’, we no longer need to presuppose a tem-poral gap between the time of an event’s occurrence and the time of its recollection which we then have trouble justifying, as I show in discussing trace theories in part I of this work. Underlying that presupposition is the view that recollection is constituted of, or decomposable into, individual points and this view does not account for our experience of phenomenal duration or what we are aware of: a smeared ‘now’, sinking away. In re-calling it, we turn towards it, returning or ‘awakening’ the past object-like formation by exhibiting it. Such exhibition takes place in imagination. At the same time, exhibiting (or representing) a past event is a conceptual construction – if we accept the idea that recognition is cognition if and only if it proceeds by construction (analogous to Kant’s mathematical cog-nition, except that it does not construct mathematical concepts but pro-vides access to the past). Autobiographical recollection does not deal with general principles and procedures but constructs particular objects. Hence, like mathematical cognition, recollection ‘considers the universal in the particular, indeed even in the individual, yet nonetheless a priori […] without having had to borrow the pattern for it from any experience.”49 How do we exhibit or represent past objects or events? We construct them by means of imagination which provides an ostensive access to a past ob-ject or event by presenting us with a construct or schema. This schema is not an image or mental picture but a rule which makes it possible for us to see again a scene of the past, by reproducing it, so that the past object is once again intuitively given and stands before us in full dress.50 A past object or event cannot be represented by an image, no more than a concept can be represented as an image. Both are represented by a rule – which has an access to a degree of generality that an image lacks.

Why should recollection require an access to generality since our auto-biographical memory is individual? Obviously we do not have a general memory of a toothache just as we do not have a general experience of a toothache. But neither do we have a memory of the toothache, rather we remember a toothache and how it ruined our day. For past objects or events, the ‘generality’ is not universal but specific and situational – we remember a certain Christmas rather than the Christmas 11 years ago. My hunch is that autobiographical memory is plastically specific rather than rigidly singular and personal: it has qualitative units which are not singular but situational: we recall the brightly illuminated theatre as a qualitative

49 KrV, B742-3. 50 See KrV B180-181 on Kant’s famous (or infamous) schematism and the distinc-tion between schema and image.

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unit and without all the details it consisted of, but as a specific situation which can be moulded and re-moulded by recollection because the ele-ments composing it are related as a group, viz describable or re-collectable following a rule that picks out the invariance through changes of context or system of reference.51 Imagination allows for variation of particular elements of objects or events under changes of context, provided the ele-ments are related to each other by a rule applying a group concept (or a Kantian schema).

My claim about the role of imagination in recollection raises the obvi-ous question of verifiability and validity: if my link to the past is con-structed in imagination, what warranty or cognitive value can it possibly have? Does it not invalidate memory as a source of knowledge? These questions are straightforward enough but, or so I shall try to argue, the problem is that my access to the past, even if it involves perception or di-rect awareness, cannot occur otherwise than by construction in imagina-tion.

2.2. The role of imagination and belief in recollection

If autobiographical memory involves an awareness of our past, it fol-lows that this form of memory also tells us about the source of our past experience, that is, when and where an event occurred.52 When I recall a past experience, I should thus be able to identify its source (when and where this experience was acquired) or the time and place when it oc-curred: rather than remembering the fact that the washing machine flooded the kitchen, in my recollection of this event, I remember that the machine broke down two days ago and that I then called the mechanic who was supposed to repair it later that week.

The perception or attention involved in retrieving a past event has cog-nitive value, since a new cognition is produced, informing us about the past, for whether memory yields knowledge depends on our way of find-ing out about a past event.53 A direct access, for example by seeing some-one do something is necessary in order for my recollection to be a source

51 See on this Cassirer (1944) o :cit. 52 According to E. Tulving (1972), there are two types of long-term memory-systems: episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is distinct from seman-tic or factual memory precisely because episodic memory is an autobiographical memory with a record of past events and not a retention of general facts of knowl-edge: if I only have semantic memory, I may know that black chocolate tastes bit-ter, without remembering that I have previously tasted this chocolate. 53 Cf. J. Campbell (1994, 236-239).


of knowledge (and not indirect access by testimony or inference). But how reliable is our recollection? How can I be certain that my memory of that brightly illuminated theatre or of a famous painting such as Botticelli’s allegory of spring is not a phantasy which I imagine without actually hav-ing seen it – even though I may believe that I have seen it? Or vice versa: I may be certain that I have not seen Botticelli’s painting because I do not recall having seen it or having been to the Uffizi, although there are data to the contrary (such as photographs or eye witnesses).

The answer is that I cannot be certain either way, because if autobio-graphical memory is a construction it also involves imagination and even distortion, since I can also remember things that did not happen. Memory and phantasy are interrelated: I can become lost in memory as I linger in the beloved rooms of my childhood home which hovers before me. In my reproductive recollection, I modify the memory – my reproduction is a modification. Furthermore, even if I recall this past episode, I still have to account for the temporal discontinuity between past and present and the possibility of a screen memory when I access a just-past experience: sup-pose what I recall is not the past episode in question but a fragment of an episode concealing an earlier event. In this case, the earlier episode has become inaccessible – a past without a present – whereas a later past im-poses itself onto the present scene.

At the very least, if there is a direct link between my past experience and present memory, then this link is not continuous from past to present and at best guarantees that the relevant memory can be gained or col-lected.54 If this is so, how can I assert that what I am now perceiving is something I perceived in an earlier now? How can I claim “that what is past was present?55 An obvious answer is that I must believe it was pre-sent. Belief is a necessary feature of memory: I trust my memory as a source of information about my past if I am certain that my recollection

54 Cf. J. Dokic (2001: 228). 55 Husserl, Collected Works, vol. XI, appendix XVII, :248; cf. also text no 10, 345-6. In PZB he famously queries whether ‘perceived past’ is not akin to the paradoxi-cal ‘wooden iron’ (hölzernes Eisen) :415. Cf. the discussions by T. Van Gelder and F. Varela (1999) in Naturalizing Phenomenology: 245-318. For what it’s worth, I think Van Gelder wrongly claims that Husserl’s account can be recuperated by sacrificing his claim that there is a direct perceptual link between our past and our present. On Van Gelder’s view, Husserl’s contribution to cognitive science is that we can intend the past (and the future) without perceiving them. If that is so, Husserl’s account is saved by trivialization. Without the perceptual-link-claim, Husserl’s theory loses its momentum – for if we extract perception from the link between past and present we also lose the justification of that link by perceptual salience (conceived as an affective force).

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represents my earlier perception of an event. But recalling something is distinct from knowing that something is true and even my certainty that I am remembering an event of my past does not guarantee the truth of my recollection. And why should our recollections be faithful reproductions of past events? The correspondence between past events and our recollec-tions is not a case of veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, for our past episodes are constructs under present descriptions or recollections which modify our past perceptions as well our self-presentation by either improv-ing or devaluing our past self (or selves).

Consider James Frey’s controversial memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003).56 His life-story became a best-seller and then he was accused of making up key parts. Apart from the fact that the resulting controversy made his memoir an even bigger best-seller, the question is not so much whether truth really matters in autobiographies but to what extent we can justifiably accuse someone of lying when he tells us about our past. The question is not only: ‘who wouldn’t embellish the facts when trying to publish ?’ – and subsequently face a moral jury of disgruntled readers and furious fellow-writers who claim that you have discredited their trade – but rather: ‘how truthful can you possibly be in recollecting your past?’ One problem is that publishers consider memoirs as nonfiction and, whilst fiction has no claims to truth, nonfiction does. Yet both genres are telling stories, viz constructing a continuous sequence of events to produce a pur-posive unity of action. However that may be, autobiographical recollec-tions are truth-committed in that they disclose grounds for beliefs and ac-tions, but they do not have truth-makers (e.g. facts to which they corre-spond), nor do recollectors try to come to know the truth when remember-ing, rather they recall what the story demands, viz they give a coherent account which warrants the re-presentation of their past. But how can such a re-presentation or reproduction be directly linked to perception?

Husserl argues for a direct perceptual link between present memory and the past by claiming that recollections are modifications of perceptual acts on one hand and by rejecting the image theory – the view that our memories are pictorial representations or copies of past events: we do not perceive an image or copy of what is past but the past object itself, in a different intentional mode. My recollection of the brightly illuminated theatre I attended last night is not an analogous image and remembering is not pictorial imaging. Rather, my memory image is a construction or com-pilation of a number of past perceptions edited into a coherent sequence or episode. For there is a shift in my narrative perspective: my recollection of my attending the theatre combines a first- and a third-person perspective: I

56 James Frey (2003) A million little pieces.


‘see again’ the theatre (which is not now present) and I also reproduce my earlier act of perception, for I grasp the temporal context or location (‘when’ and ‘where’) of the remembered event as well as the event itself as an enduring content. This is the condition sine qua non of autobio-graphical memory: my explicit memory of a past event is at the same time an implicit memory of my earlier act of perceiving the object. The brightly illuminated theatre appears again in my presentification, along with my awareness of its past-ness, since the very fact that I am aware of having experienced this event before now shows that I am situating my memory as past in relation to my actual now.

Hence I am also aware that this memory appearance is “at bottom a different object” and not the theatre itself, for it is posited by my belief.57 This is how my memory can both remain in touch with an actual past and modify it in reproducing it. My present belief only re-presents my past belief. In my present memory I believe that what I remember actually ex-isted in the past and this memorial belief is derived from a past perception which in turn appears in the mode of belief. Consider Husserl’s example of a perceptual illusion: in a museum he sees a young woman holding a cata-logue and after a while he recognizes that it was a figure made of wood and wax, designed to trick the perceiver. Once we have recognized our error, we can still ‘see’ the figure now as the human being, now as the wax figure, but its sense has a ‘different mode of being’ – that of an illusion and hence of a different belief. Likewise, from my present position I can consider that what I saw yesterday as a human being is for me today a wax figure.58 And my recognition of the figure as a mechanical mannequin also marks a temporal discontinuity: my present perspective is different from my past perspective.

In recalling the brightly illuminated theatre I attended, my perception is in the mode of belief, viz the episode appears ‘as if’ I were perceiving it and I have what Husserl calls a double focus: either from the reproductive position of the ‘as it were’ or looking back from my present position in the ‘now’.59 In the first case, I live in the past in memory, in the ‘as if’ or ‘as it were’: such autobiographical accounts are usually in the subjunctive mood: Consider the following passage from Nabokov’s “act of vividly recalling a patch of the past”.

“I see again my old schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. […] A sense of security, of well-being, of summer

57 Hua X, :184. 58 Hua XI, 351-354. 59 Husserl, Collected Works, vol. XI, text no.19, :672.

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warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the pre-sent. […] Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”60

“Everything is as it should be”, precisely because the “robust reality”

of memory “makes a ghost of the present”, that is, memory does not pre-serve the past, it conditions its recovery. Reminiscences containing expres-sions such as: “I could” or “I should have been” are hypothetical assump-tions or implications of the form: ‘suppose that if p, then q’. The subjunc-tive mood expresses a possibility (or, in some cases, an impossibility), regardless of whether our conjecture is of the future or the past : “suppose that I had gone to Harvard, what a great lawyer I should have become”. Recollections, on the other hand, are expressed in the indicative mood: “I did not go to Harvard, nor did I become a great lawyer”. The indicative mood corresponds to the second position: looking back from my present position in the ‘now’: at t2 I am aware that I did (or failed to do) y at t1. In a similar manner, Husserl distinguishes between phantasy and secondary memory: pure phantasy does not have the character of ‘seeing again’ which is essential to recollection, for I posit something as a possibility and hence the ‘as if’ in phantasy is not the same as that of memory where I posit the object as past.

2.3. The workings of recollection: salience, attention and recognition

If there is a perceived past, there is a temporal perception which di-rectly links our present memory and our past perception. This direct link is part of our constructed temporal continuum or narrative form and we can thus characterize autobiographical memory as a component of our (pre-sent) experience. If autobiographical memory is complex, viz a perception of a just-now which sinks or slips away into the past and a form of presen-tification when I retrieve or reproduce the episode I previously perceived, then autobiographical memory is a modified perception which does not present but re-present my earlier experience by positing it as an episode of my personal past. The remembered object or event is cast as a reproduc-tion of an original perception which I take cognizance of in the mode of belief: I posit it by recognizing it as something intimately familiar. Thus, in my personal coordinate system fixed by the indexicals I, here and now, I

60 V. Nabokov (1947), 75-77. Cf. on this Eakin (2000): 292-293. Note that Nabokov entitles his work an autobiography revisited, as if to comment on the autobiographical genre.


can perceive the past by focusing on my experience from my present per-spective. I (was) there, then and I remember x as having-perceived-x: I recall the train as having seen it rushing into the station last week. On one hand, the temporal foreground or present episode derives its meaning from its context in my past. On the other hand, the past becomes the foreground of my perceptual experience as I ‘see again’ the scene of my past. This perceptual experience of the past is possible because attention is an affec-tive state which zeroes in on an event, introducing limits into the contin-uum of real time: attention delimits or cuts out a segment from this intui-tive continuum, a segment which emerges as salient that is, with an affec-tive force, in the searchlight of my perception. In addition, attention moti-vates my construction of the continuity called autobiography because per-ceptual saliences provide reasons why I should construct this continuity.61

I will briefly sketch an account of attention in order to cut a path across the thorny area generated by cognitive research into the relation between memory and emotion with a bottom-top method. Trauma or the relation between emotional stress and past experience which is either blocked or recalled, is an important focus of this research but there is little a philoso-pher can add to it, mainly because here emotions are reduced to neuro-physiological or biochemical processes.62 On this experimental and cogni-tivist view, affects or ‘feelings’ are assimilated to emotions, following the James-Lange tradition. Unlike them, I adhere to a cognitive account of emotions according to which pain and fear are feelings distinct from emo-tions such as joy, pride, love or hate which are a separate category of men-tal capacities in that they have a cognitive base and are directed at inten-tional objects.63

Attention is an affective state, but it is not an emotion or an act but an act-quality which modifies an act. Although attention is distinct from in-tention, it has an emotional aspect, viz preference. Roughly speaking, at-tention is a mental disposition (and hence dependent on a mental act) which accompanies and directs our recollection: we are turned to the brightly illuminated theatre we have seen, “we aim at it, we mean it in the specific, appropriate (prägnant) sense.”64 Attention can modify our recol-lection because it enables us to conceive various possibilities. I have

61 See Calabi (2005: 253-269). She defines saliences as grounds for action and attention as sensitivity to reasons. 62 See Jaak Panksepp (1995): “Emotion as a Natural Kind Within the Brain”: 137-55. 63 See Ronald de Sousa (1987), The Rationality of Emotion. 64 Husserl, LU5, Hua vol. 19/2, § 19, my translation (Findlay translates ‘prägnant’ as ‘pregnant’ which is literally correct but misses the connotation of Prägnanz).

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shown this in ch.3, section 1, § 2 by analyzing figure/ground segregation as an attentional modification. In addition, attention has a preparatory function: it is a way of being occupied with an object or event which en-ables us to prepare for certain experiences and act appropriately. Attention is an emphatic function which accompanies mental acts and, because it is selective, attention enables us to segregate perceived or recollected objects and events.65 This selective function of attention is interest or preferring and preferring is a (sometimes non-cognitive) emotion revealing the emo-tional value of a recollected object. Perhaps it is even the source of emo-tional value. For example, the recollection of my grandfather’s smile has an emotional value which is disclosed by my preference, viz by my assign-ing it a special position in my autobiographical memory. Similarly, past objects such as an old photograph or a family jewel can carry an emotional value for us as a material link between our present and past and this value is disclosed by our preferring these objects to others. My hunch is that what orients attention and motivates preference is not an emotion; rather, the emotion is an effect of the attention-magnet that draws attention from other things to this one. Although emotion colors and enhances the sali-ence of a past object or event, as a source of joy, sadness or anger, it does not draw my attention or cause this salience. Rather, the salience is pro-duced by an attention-magnet which is embedded in the recollected situa-tion, not as a sensory stimulus but as a detectable reason.

However, two objections immediately arise: first, although emotions can be controlled by directing our thought, what directs our thought may also be an emotion: if I now hate a person I have loved, I focus on them by attending to different configurations of them and what redirects my atten-tion to a different set of their attributes is my present emotion of hate. Sec-ond, one could argue that emotions are a source of salience and hence an attention-magnet, in that they put into relief certain features of events, ob-jects or situations, assigning them a weight in our experience that they would not have otherwise had. Consider how Iago incites Othello’s jeal-ousy: he directs Othello’s attention to Desdemona’s friendship with Cassio and the lost handkerchief by suggesting which conclusions might be in-ferred without specifying them himself. Once Othello’s attention focuses on the lost handkerchief, his jealousy pervades his judgment and compels him to infer Desdemona’s guilt on the basis of evidence which, without Iago’s insinuations, he would not have thought about.

Still, I think the motivating force behind Othello’s jealousy is his sensi-tivity to Iago’s reasoning, viz to the persuasive force of the latter’s argu-

65 See Husserl, LU5, Hua vol. 19/2, § 19, where he defines active attention as in-terest.


ment. This persuasive force characterizes informal deductive arguments or enthymemes in which we are persuaded to fill in the blanks ourselves, that is, to infer a conclusion from the premisses on the strength of our convic-tion that it is true. So the source or ground of salience is not the emotion itself but rather my sensitivity to the reasons for experiencing the emotion, viz attention.66

If attention is defined as sensitivity or responsiveness to reasons, should it not be cognitive or representational? Not necessarily: attention is a mood or inflection of my recollection which modifies or changes the form of my earlier perception, but it depends on the representation it modi-fies, so it is not a representation itself. As a mood, attention is an attitude of the mind towards a representational content, an attitude which is deter-mined by the perceived situation and its relation to that situation rather than by the perceiver’s intention. On Husserl’s view, attention has an ac-tive and a passive mode: (aufmerken) or paying attention to and noticing (bemerken), respectively.67 The passive mode of attention is not yet a cog-nitive state, rather it is an experiential state of being affected by something (analogous to retention as primary memory) and the active mode of atten-tion is a cognitive state in which I aim at or focus on something (analogous to recollection as secondary memory). It seems that attention requires a stepwise (or at least a two-step) theory, just as autobiographical memory does

An example of the passive mode is this: if my attention is caught by the ticking of a watch, my recollection is modified by the ticking without my necessarily being aware of its context: I can notice the ticking of a clock without even identifying (or cognizing) it, yet the ticking can act as an attention-magnet. Let’s say I recall my irritation when sitting in a den-tist’s silent waiting room whilst running late for another appointment and I am counting the minutes ticking away. In this recollected situation, the ticking is salient, viz my attention is drawn to the clock’s rhythmic pulsa-tion marking the passing moments and my increasing lateness – and my sensitivity to the consequences of the ticking, as well as to the reason for having to hear it in the first place, grounds my equally increasing irritation. Or, to put it another way, my response to the reason for my lateness is re-vealed by the ticking which motivates my irritation.

The active mode of attention, also called interest, is on a par with rec-ognition: I recognize my past irritation if my attention is in the active

66 This is Calabi’s (2005) view. I agree with her and I think it also works for recol-lection. 67 See my discussion of attentional rhythmics in ch. 3 section 1.2 and Husserl: Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Hua, vol. 38: 283-93.

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mode, viz directed to the ticking. As I discussed above, recognition is a form of recollection involving working and semantic memories, but it is distinct from autobiographical or episodic recollection. For recognition is knowledge by acquaintance and hence it is characterized by a feeling of familiarity when we re-experience a past event or when something per-ceived at an earlier time is again encountered. We may recognize or dis-criminate a familiar face without being able to put a name to it but (epi-sodic) recollection is required for renewing or reproducing the whole con-figuration of face-name-relevance-to-me.

My recognition discriminates or constructs the ticking as a salience or relevant reason if my attention has been motivated or activated to turn to it on the grounds of having detected it (in the passive mode) as affectively prominent or salient (merklich). In recollection, I turn towards the dormant retentional affection which acts as an attention-magnet. I am re-collecting (or awakening) the past event or object-like formation which has a relief of salience (Merklichkeitsrelief). This relief is segregated (or a configuration emerges) in the attentional pulse of passive detectibility (Bemerksamkeit) and active attention (Aufmerksamkeit).68 Salience is detected by passive attention and constructed by active attention in recollection. A dormant retentional affection is a recollection without relief and lacking in clarity, whereas an affective awakening means that the recollection has a relief and a higher degree of clarity. The zero degree of affective force is the limes or boundary of retentional past, the limit between liminal and sub-liminal memory.

A recollection renews or reproduces a past event or object when the latter’s relevance to my actual situation is recognized. On one hand we have a sensitivity to reason and on the other, we have a response to reason which determines our course of action. Interest is a response to reason, for to be interested in something is to be actively involved in something I have a proprietary claim to or where something is at stake for me. In a recollec-tion, these two aspects of attention are tied together as an affective force which produces recognition. Attention as salience discriminated and con-structed, is a cognitive and representational state.

Recollection and recognition are thus not merely linked, but the latter depends on the former. In addition, recollection is linked to action, for the way in which we remember and cognize past events determines how we act in the present. If that is so, recollection is a sufficient condition for explaining the relation between perceiver and agent, whereas interest or active attention is a sufficient and necessary condition for explaining this relation. Since perception is not merely something that happens to us but

68 See Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Hua, vol. 11, § 35: 166-7.


something we do (following the late Francisco Varela and Alva Noë), an ‘enactive’ experience, our perception depends, as Noë puts it, on how we stand in relation to how things are and keeping track of what we do, which in turn affects what we experience.69 Keeping track of what we do (and how what we do affects our experience) involves primary memory or re-tention. How we keep track of what we do involves attention and secon-dary memory or recollection.

Above, I showed that recollection produces recognition by integrating passive and active attention and that the latter qua interest is a response to reason which determines our action. I advance what I consider to be a plausible explanation of the mechanism of recollection, conceived in terms of Aristotle’s theory of drama and mimesis. Roughly speaking, we under-stand present connections between characters and events once we discover what happened to them in the past. This is how recollection can determine our course of action – and this is also one of Aristotle’s conditions for a successful tragedy. In drama, recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge and, not surprisingly, Aristotle designates recognition depend-ing on memory as one of the aspects of tragedy.70 Again, I consider the phenomenology of recollection rather than empirical questions concerning neural activity or what some cognitive scientists call the ‘subpersonal functional architecture’.71 The structure (or architecture) of recollection is hierarchical, as I hope to have shown : from subliminal to supraliminal (or subpersonal to personal) levels. However, since to date we have no plausi-ble scientific evidence that the brain produces memories and other mental states, explanations based on synapses and biochemical processes are no less hypothetical accounts for the working order of recollection than the one I propose.72

This ‘mechanism’ of recollection is conceivable in terms of Aristotle’s theory of drama as mimesis of an action. On this view, “the objects an imi-

69 See Alva Noë (2004) Action in Perception; cf. Calabi (2005) op.cit. 70 See Aristotle’s Poetics on αναγνώριση depending on memory: “from a man’s consciousness being awakened by something seen. Thus, in the Cyprioe of Di-caeogenes, the sight of the picture makes the hero burst into tears; and in the Tale of Alcinous, hearing the harper Odysseus is reminded of the past and weeps” ch. 16, 1454b.36-1455a.1. I follow Butcher’s and Halliwell’s respective use of ‘recognition’ instead of Bywater’s ‘discovery’. Nichev uses познаване and Gude-mann uses Erkennung – both terms are closer to ‘recognition’ than to ‘discovery’. 71 See Susan Hurley (2006) “Active perception and perceiving action”: 205-259. 72 Even neurobiologists such as Francis Crick and Christof Koch admit that there is no plausible scientific explanation for relating activities of the brain and (sub)personal experience; see “A framework for consciousness”: 119-26.

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tator represents are actions”.73 Aristotelian mimesis is neither formal (pre-supposing a correspondence between a mimetic subject and a model) nor behavioural imitation or emulation but make-belief using counterfeit rep-resentation or hypotyposis where what is represented or ‘made visible’ is in a different format from what is ‘given’ to our senses but none the less accessible.74 For in order to give an appropriate representation of experi-ence, we must describe the experienced world or how we keep track of how things are. Recollections are not snapshots that are laid out in detail for us to see all at once. Similarly, a dramatic action is not given all at once but relies on plot-structure, viz a coherent organization of events enabling an observer to discriminate the action. Under a mimetic representation (or description) an action appears continuous, but this continuity consists of discrete events: the plot-structure as a mimesis of action is organized in a discrete three-part structure of beginning, middle and end.75 A possible reality is thus represented according to the temporal structure of phenome-nal reality.

Plot-structure or fable is distinct from plot-action or the subject (what a literary work is about): plot-structure is the designed pattern of action, the story or configuration of events representing an action.76 The plot structure prompts the observer’s recognition or discovery of the reasons underlying that action and recognition enabled through recollection is one of the ways for constructing saliences or reasons for actions. If constructed, these sali-ences produce anagnorisis or a transition from ignorance to knowledge. On Ingarden’s view, for example, past events that are recollected may ‘now’ disclose motives for conduct or action that ‘then’ were still hidden. As a consequence of their disclosure (Enthüllung), the action changes its essential character and appears in a different light. What we held to be a defense against a foreign attack is revealed as a masked attack or what then appeared to us as a victory is now seen as an escape from danger.77 In this non-analogous sense a poet, playwright or screenwriter is an image-maker who ‘produces a mimesis of one of three things: reality past or pre-sent; things as they are said or seem to be; or things as they ought to be”.78 The same can be said for autobiographical recollection.

73 Aristotle, Poetics, ch.2.1448a 74 See Paul Woodruff (1992) “Aristotle on Mimesis”: 73-95. 75 See Aristotle, Poetics, ch.7.1450b.26-36. 76 Aristotle uses ‘muthos’ which Nichev translates as ‘фабула’. Buckley (1907) also uses ‘fable’; Bywater (1965) uses ‘plot’ and Halliwell (1987) uses ‘plot-structure’ which seems closest to contemporary usage. 77 Roman Ingarden (1968) Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks:123, 126. 78 Aristotle, Poetics, ch.25.1460b 8-11.


2.4. Back to Bolzano or why autobiographical memory has a semantic base79

If recollections disclose motives for conduct and actions and serve for constructing saliences or reasons for actions, what is the explanatory force of the ‘because’? For instance, now I feel ashamed because of a cutting remark I made earlier. My shame is explained by my recollection of my past behaviour. As Wittgenstein puts it, what justifies the shame is the whole history of the incident.80 For the latter discloses the motives of the former: the history of the incident explains why a feeling of shame is the case. In order to account for the relation denoted by the conjunction ‘be-cause’, I now return to Bolzano and the grounding relation (Abfolge) which holds between true propositions that are compatible as ground and consequence. I argue that the grounding relation is the semantic base of autobiographical memory. First, it yields an epistemological account of how saliences are constructed in recollection or the ‘because’ relation be-tween past reasons and present action. Second, the grounding relation is the ordering relation between tensed expressions such as: “it is the case that” or “it was the case that”.

Bolzano uses this relation as a kind of proof for explaining why some-thing is the case or how it is grounded.81 From an epistemological point of view, whenever I cognize something, there must be a reason (Grund) why I cognize it.82 We understand a fact on grounds of its explanation: know-ing that p on the grounds of q where q explains why p is the case. But on Bolzano’s view, knowing that p on the grounds of q or recognizing that q

79 Thanks to Lilia Gurova and Nikolai Obreshkov for prompting me to expound the semantic condition of autobiographical memory. 80 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 644. This is a case of prima facie justification. 81 ML, § 13 (1833-1841) in BBGA, II, A, vol.7, Grössenlehre; WLII, § 162. For an account of Bolzano’s ground-consequence relation and his notion of justification, see Kasabova (2002: 21-33) and Armin Tatzel, “Bolzano’s theory of ground and consequence” (2002: 1-25). For an account of the grounding relation and anaphoric pointing in recollection, see Kasabova (2008): 331-350. 82 ML, § 13. (cf. also WLII, § 198, WLIII, § 314, Aetiologie, § 4) “Von allem, was ich erkenne, muss ein Grund vorhanden sein, warum ich es erkenne”. Bolzano distinguishes objective grounding from epistemic and causal grounds. In addition, the grounding relation is distinct from deducibility (Ableitbarkeit) or logical con-sequence. Bolzano determines the concept of grounding (Abfolge) as a “concept of an ordering of truths which allows us to derive from the smallest number of simple premisses the largest possible number of the remaining truths as conclusions” WLII, § 221.note.

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implies recognizing that p could be just what he calls a subjective ground-ing or epistemic reason (Erkenntnisgrund). My belief that p because q is subjectively grounded if it is based on testimony or an observation state-ment rather than a proof showing that p is a consequence of q or depends on q. Subjective grounds, as premises, are confirmations (Gewissmachun-gen) which produce a cognition or which follow from a cognition as con-sequences. Hence in a confirmation we obtain an epistemic reason (Erk-enntnisgrund) or the certainty that p. Such a subjective ground is what we obtain in a recollection enabling recognition, when we construct saliences or recognize reasons for actions. The question is, whether we also obtain an objective ground (Begründung) and a ‘because’ relation which holds independently of our cognition, as in: p is true on the grounds of q and q explains why p is the case, so q justifies p.

Bolzano’s grounding relation obtains in formal and material implica-tions or consecutive clauses (Consecutivsatz) and the latter concern us.83 Consider the statement: ‘he is in prison because he committed a crime’: p ‘he is in prison’ is grounded or explained by q ‘he committed a crime’. q explains why p is the case and p is true on the grounds of q, independently of epistemic reasons or causality. Now consider a recollective statement: ‘I remember the flower-seller because she was at the station last week (where I saw her)’ expresses the material ground-consequence relation (or implication) as follows: ‘I remember the flower-seller’ is grounded by ‘because she was at the station last week’. The reason I remember the flower-seller is because she was there. My recollective statement is at least partly grounded by a statement expressing the existence of the flower-seller.

My recollection is a consequence of my previous perception of the flower-seller and can be derived from the statement: ‘she was at the sta-tion’ which explains the recollective statement. In other words, the con-secutive clause expresses the consequences of the events related in the main clause and the link between them is not epistemological but seman-tic. This irreflexive semantic link is quite simply the order of antecedent and consequent and I argue that this link is what autobiographical memory is based on. The link is irreflexive in the sense that no ground (or conse-quence) can be the complete ground (or consequence) of itself.84 Hence, for the grounding relation to hold, it is important not to invert the order of antecedent and consequent.85

83 WLII, § 168. 84 WLII, § 204. 85 Not surprisingly, Bolzano notes that it is important not to invert the order of antecedent and consequent in proofs, for then the grounding relation does not ob-


Bolzano distinguishes the grounding relation from epistemic reasons on one hand and from causality on the other. Ground and consequence cannot be special kinds of cause and effect, because causes and effects are real objects, whereas grounds and consequences are propositions denoting singular terms and a ground-consequence relation holds between proposi-tions independently of whether the objects of the proposition actually exist or not. For example, the truth that in an equilateral triangle all angles are equal is a consequence of the truth that an isosceles triangle has two equal angles. In addition, Bolzano explains causality in terms of the grounding relation. Causal propositions are determined by a ground-consequence relation between other propositions, so that the causal proposition: “x causes y” actually expresses the ground-consequence relation: “the truth that x exists is related to the truth that y exists as a (partial) ground (Theil-grund) is related to its (partial) consequence (Theilfolge)”.86 Or, to recur to an Aristotelian example: my statement ‘you are pale’ is (partly) grounded by your paleness.87

Bolzano refers to partial grounds and partial consequences because the grounding relation is intransitive with regard to the nearest grounds. The death of a patient suffering from tuberculosis is a consequence of the ill-ness, but it is not a consequence of the cold drink which may have brought about the illness. If p is the nearest ground of q and q is the nearest ground of a third proposition r, then p is only a partial or auxiliary ground of r.88 Intransitivity is important for the ordering of ante and post in a ground-

tain. For example, the truth that an equilateral triangle is possible contains the ob-jective ground of the truth that two circles cut each other, “but if one only pays attention to the mere knowing, then the converse relation might quite easily occur”. If the order of the propositions in the demonstration is inverted, we fail to state the correct ground of the truth to be demonstrated. We know that an equilateral triangle is possible by confirming this on grounds of the truth that two circles cut each other, but that is only the subjective ground. The objective ground is this: two cir-cles cut each other because for every two points a and b there must be a third, c, which has the same distance ab from both a and b, so that ca = cb = ab. Anti-Euklid (manuscript, dated 1816-1840, published 1967: 210-211). Cf. WLIV, § 525; ML § 13. 86 WLII, § § 168; 201 ; see also Bolzanos Wissenschaftslehre in einer Selbstanzei-ge, p.82.: “[…] die Lehre von den objektiven Zusammenhängen zwischen den Wahrheiten (...) einem Verhältnisse, kraft dessen einige Wahrheiten der Grund von anderen, diese aber die Folge jener sind; woraus dann auch das wichtige Verhältnis zwischen Ursache und Wirkung hervorgehe und auf eine neue Art erklärt wird.” 87 Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk Θ 10: 1051 b 6-9. 88 WLII, § 213, Bolzano’s example.

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consequence relation: if a proposition p is the nearest ground of a second proposition q, then q cannot be the nearest ground of p.

Besides, as I showed in chapter 1, Bolzano requires an overlap of fea-tures and a part-whole relation for memory retrieval. The grounding rela-tion is the semantic cornerstone of the part-whole relation which is the principle of the memory trace. A (whole) recollection is re-instated via a trace which is activated by a present perception. Thus I can recall an entire poem if I am prompted with a single line or I can recollect a past seaside holiday by looking at pictures of a seaside resort. The recollection is partly grounded by the trace (its auxiliary ground). On my reading of Bolzano’s ground-consequence relation, particularly regarding its conditions of irre-flexivity and intransitivity, its crucial function is the ordering principle of ante and post or ground and consequence and the semantic dependence of the latter on the former.

This ordering principle also regulates positioning in time by means of tensed expressions. The grammatical divisions of time expressed by verbal tenses such as ‘wrote’ or ‘write’ are grounded by a semantic dependence relation between ‘ante’ and ‘post’, or the sequential order of ‘is’ and ‘was’ and this is an objective grounding relation which is necessary for express-ing positions in time. The main divisions in time (at least in Indo-European languages) are based on the ante-post principle: positions in time are constructed from a theoretical zero-point ‘now’ back to the post-preterit, preterit and ante-preterit tenses and forward to the ante-future, future and post-future. The relation between present results of past events and the past events themselves is expressed by a perfect which tends to become a preterit or aorist, as in ‘he (has) passed out because he (has) drunk too much’ or ‘because he is after drinking’, as the Irish would say, becomes ‘he (has) passed out because he had drunk too much’. Provided it bears the same relation to a past period as the perfect does to the present, a retrospective past time is expressed as the ante-preterit: ‘I have seen him last week’ becomes ‘I had seen him last week’.

If we could not refer back to previous positions in time, there would be no autobiographical memory to speak of. That is the semantic condition of autobiographical memory and even of semantic memory, the so-called memory for facts. Conscious recollection is a mental state which tells us about what is inactual or occurred in the past, just as perceptions tell us about what is actual or happening now and imagination tells us about what is possible or could occur. Recollection posits a past possibility, just as imagination posits a future possibility and both mental states represent events that are not presently occurring, whereas perception presents events that are presently occurring. More importantly, the zero-point ‘now’ is a


consequence of ‘then’, it is grounded on the past tenses which explain why ‘now’ is the case. As I mentioned in the introduction to part II of this work, ‘earlier’ grounds ‘later’ and ‘later’ is grounded in ‘earlier’ because ‘earlier’ explains ‘later’. The former gives reasons for the latter (and the latter are positioned as having occurred before).

In addition, tense distinctions indicating the position of an action or event in the past, present or future are defined in relation to the position in time when the action or event is described. The relation in which respec-tive positions in time are defined is the grounding relation: actions or events stand in a ground-consequence relation and this relation sequen-tially orders their positions in time as ante and post where the former ex-plains the latter, from the perspective of the theoretical zero-point ‘now’ or the time of the utterance. This perspective presupposes an agent and an ergative language system which identifies the agent. Verbal tenses indicate the action (and its continuity or completeness) in relation to the time of the utterance and the verb identifies the animate perceived instigator of the action, as in: ‘John broke the window’ or ‘the window was broken by John’, since the agentive relation is governed by cases which are not matched by the grammatical surface-structure relation of subject and ob-ject.89 Consecutive clauses expressing the ground-consequence relation, such as ‘she cried because he hit her’ coordinate the agentive relation and the sequentially ordered positions in relation to the action. This is also how the ‘because’ relation coordinates agents, actions and events in autobio-graphical memory. That is why autobiographical memory has a semantic base. Recalling a lazy summer, I say: ‘It was a restful time because I slept a lot, watched movies and read several paperbacks a week’. Or, remember-ing that John broke the window, I posit my past perception of that event as antecedent to my present recollection which is its (partial) consequence. Since my recollection occurs because of my perception, my recollection is justified, for the grounding relation obtains.

Conclusion

In these two chapters I tried to present a plausible top-bottom account of autobiographical memory: how it is structured, how it functions and why it works the way it does. The structure of autobiographical memory (and memory in general) is hierarchical, from liminal to supraliminal lev-els, which is why a step-wise account of autobiographical memory in terms of retention and reproduction or primary and secondary memory,

89 See on this Charles Fillmore’s famous paper The case for case (1967:25).

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respectively, seems appropriate. I argue that autobiographical memory is a construction and that the necessary conditions for this construction are autonoetic awareness and the ‘I’ as a coordinate system, perception of time or chronaesthesia, viz a time that is sensed and tensed, as well as an expla-nation of how and why autobiographical recollection is continuous. Such an explanation requires a rigorous formulation of continuity, viz a function or relation between variables that varies smoothly, without abrupt breaks or jumps. In mathematics, continuity is defined using the notion of limit to account for the progressive and unbroken approach of a function to a value. I sustain an intuitivist view, viz that continuity in recollection is constructed similarly to mathematical continunity: recollection only ap-proximately reproduces our experience of a continuous temporal flow.

An interesting problem in recollection is the question of how we can apprehend something absent. Apprehension of absent things is possible, as the last Graz school Gestalt psychologist Gaetano Kanisza has shown in his diagrams of triangles and rectangles: we can visually experience an absent geometrical figure, the contours of which are marked by partially occluded disks: we see a ‘subjective triangle’.90 In recollection, we also apprehend things that are not-present: we see again a scene we once per-ceived. Husserl says of the remembered object: “Now it is seen as if hid-den by a veil, then as breaking through the haze.”91 Even if the veil were lifted a little, I would not confuse my recollection of a sunset with a per-ception, yet I have access to it, as if it were a perception, in the mode of make-belief, the ‘as-if’ mode reproduced in imagination. Either I relive earlier experience as the past runs its course again in successive phases or I vaguely recall a song I once heard or a professor I once met, without having a full-blooded recollection of my past experience. Either I am dis-placed into the past, or my recollection hovers at the periphery of my ac-tual present, depending on how I attend to it. I argue that our recollection is grounded by our interest or active attention which constructs saliences reasons that ground and justify our recollection. These saliences function as attention-magnets – they are detectable by passive attention or sensitiv-ity to reason.

Finally, I explain recollection as construction in Aristotelian terms of dramatic art, as mimesis of an action. Why expound a view of secondary memory as a construction that follows the rules of works of art? Because our first- and third-person interest in recollection, as well as in narrating and reading autobiographical accounts is not in where a character is going

90 Gaetano Kanisza (1955) “Margini quasi-percettivi in campi con stimulazione omogenea”: 7-30 91 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, Hua 23 :345 ; see also: 241.


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or even what he is going to do, but in what happened to him for that, in turn, determines what he is going to do. That is how (and why) autobio-graphical memory is forward-directed by being oriented to the past: it con-structs the past as surely as it constructs the reverse temporal linearity leading up to it.

FINAL CONCLUSIONS

The aim of this investigation of autobiographical memory was to work out a philosophical explication of how it works and to formulate plausible replies to questions such as: ‘what are the defining features of autobio-graphical memory?; ‘how is it structured and how does it function?’; ‘what is a recollection and what are the sufficient and necessary conditions for a recollection to occur?’ I approach the problem of autobiographical mem-ory as an historian of philosophy using an analytical method and my re-search is based on the assumption that history of philosophy reveals the nuts and bolts of contemporary ‘interdisciplinary’ discussions.

In my top-bottom analysis I do not claim to determine the ‘nature’ of autobiographical memory; rather I assume that, whatever else it may be, this nature is organic, viz pertaining to living human beings as a basic, integrated, coordinated and active structure. On this assumption I forge a tuning fork for determining the diapason or range of ingredients and con-ditions for, autobiographical memory. In order to work out the ‘whole oc-tave’ of the processes constituting this active structure called autobio-graphical memory, I use the method of variation of parameters.

The method of variation involves considering the same notions and conditions in different situations, as well as considering or construing no-tions and conditions as variable, or varying certain components in a given situation. For this reason I examine autobiographical memory across vari-ous disciplines. The method of variation involves considering the same notions and conditions in different situations, as well as considering or construing notions and conditions as variable, or varying certain compo-nents in a given situation. For this reason I examine autobiographical memory across various disciplines, from epistemology, neurophysiology, cognitive science and phenomenology to semantics and literary techniques on one hand and contrasting memory theories through several centuries of philosophy, on the other. A side-effect of such a broad-scale approach is to brand it as interdisciplinary. Certainly, memory has to be considered from different perspectives to integrate its contributing factors – but that work can hardly be carried out by a single researcher. Instead, I attempt a varia-tion of autobiographical memory’s parameters in two memory systems in order to determine its range of voice through all notes.


My investigation comports two complementary parts expounding two models of autobiographical memory: first, I reconstruct an epistemological account based on two 19th Century views using a dispositional notion of the memory trace. Bolzano and Hering’s respective memory theories may not be well-known but they are emblematic of a position in epistemologi-cal philosophy (now re-formatted as cognitive science) which produced the so-called ‘mental capacity’ model of memory. This model deals with the problem of causality in recollection, viz how we can infer that there is a connection between a past and a present experience and how we can explain the latter as prompted by the former. Memory traces as disposi-tions can account for the renewal of a past experience in the present – they are residues or persistent states that enable recollection by bridging the temporal gap between the time of the occurrence of an experience of an event and the time of its recollection. This memory model correlates em-pirical and conceptual data according to Bolzano’s motto that what is cer-tain on grounds of reason cannot be refuted by a contrary experience.1

The second memory model is phenomenological: following Husserl, it describes autobiographical memory as a construct directly linked to per-ceived experience via imagination and the rules of make-belief that govern its reproduction of personal past experiences. In addition, this model pre-supposes the notions of conscious experience and self-awareness and a first-person perspective. From a phenomenological point of view, autobio-graphical memory is the memory of intentional human actions and experi-ences. The paradox of recollection as the ‘perceived past’ is unravelled by combining Husserl’s and Campbell’s stepwise accounts of autobiographi-cal memory. Primary memory or retention is actually a kind of perception involving foreground/background segregation. Secondary memory or rec-ollection is not explained by recurring to causal relations but using an intu-itionist notion of continuity (following Weyl) and a subjective temporal framework. On this model, describing secondary memory is describing how we keep track of our past and tell our own history and involves affec-tive as well as doxastic states, viz attention and judging.

The upshot of my research is that across both memory models, certain notions, conditions and conjunctions remain constant: a hierarchical or step-wise structure of perception and reflection; a capacity for auto-noetic awareness, viz a sense of self and a sense of ownership of a recollection; a sense or awareness of time; a whole-part relation and the condition of re-identification and recognition. Other concepts are complementary: the memory trace in the first model is complemented by the continuity condi-tion in the second model. The epistemological model’s causal relation is

1 See Bolzano, WLIII, § 283.5.

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complemented by the phenomenological model’s temporal modes. The first model’s ‘resonance’ metaphor is complemented by the second model’s ‘concordance’ metaphor. The first model’s assumption that auto-biographical memory is oriented to the past is complemented by the sec-ond model’s assumption that an autobiographical recollection constructs the past. The cognitive problem of reproducing in the present a past infor-mational state is resolved by the phenomenological analysis of perceptual salience and the role of attention. It follows that the epistemological model is compatible with the phenomenological model and that autobiographical memory has describable properties which remain invariant under changes of context or changes in the system that describes it. Such invariances are a sufficient condition for asserting that these properties are plausible be-yond a reasonable doubt. The recognition of the rules relating these invari-ances is a necessary condition for describing autobiographical memory.

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INDEX

A ability 1, 9, 13, 36, 42, 45, 54, 56,

58, 60, 63, 72, 73, 76, 88, 90 abstraction ........................49–51, 87 action 55, 67, 79–82, 103, 105, 106,

120, 123, 126–129, 133, 134 affection ..............................77, 126

affective 77, 93, 103, 119, 123, 126, 137

after-effect ........................23, 24, 38 animals ...... 1, 14, 15, 17, 52, 55–60 appearance 23, 41, 80, 93, 97, 102–

104, 108–111, 113, 121 Aristotle 9, 13, 14, 16, 64, 69, 72,

79, 80, 82, 107, 127, 128, 131 Aristotelian 13, 71, 128, 131,

134 attention 3, 11, 25, 29, 35, 50, 67,

75, 84, 87, 92, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102–106, 108, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 134, 137, 138 ~al ............... 101–106, 125, 126 ~-magnet .. 67, 83, 124–126, 134 attentive......................28, 29, 83

attunement........... 41, 43, 47–51, 61

B belief 9, 26, 27, 78, 87, 109, 111,

118–122, 130 believe 26, 27, 44, 74, 111, 119,

121 Bermúdez, José-Luis ..31, 33, 34, 75 Brewer, William .............................6 Brough, John ..... 71, 77, 86, 95, 106 Bühler, Karl.................. 98, 105, 116

C Calabi, Clotilde 93, 103, 123, 125,

127 Campbell, John 1, 2, 7, 15, 29, 31,

32, 36, 37, 68, 71, 79, 83, 88, 90, 91, 118, 137

capacity 1, 7, 10–14, 18, 22, 38, 44, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 73, 74, 88, 89, 93, 109, 137 ~ model of memory 9, 12, 19,

44, 63, 64, 137 Cassirer, Ernst.........2, 100, 101, 118 cause ..................17, 18, 21, 38, 131

causal 2, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 25, 36, 38–40, 45, 46, 49, 64, 68, 69, 129, 131, 137

causality 3, 13, 16, 18, 68, 69, 130, 131, 137

cognition 6, 10, 15, 25, 26, 29, 45, 58, 60, 63, 66, 89, 90, 91, 109, 117, 118, 130 cognitive 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 29, 30,

33, 38, 48, 57–62, 66, 67, 73, 78, 88, 90, 118, 119, 123–127, 136, 137, 138

cognitive ground........ 26, 28, 29 colour constancy.................... 46–49

~ effect ............................ 45, 46 concept 3, 6, 13, 21, 36, 37, 54, 58,

61, 71, 72, 77, 100, 101, 114, 117, 118, 129 ~ual 2, 3, 6, 8, 20, 30, 31, 40,

58, 61, 66, 71, 90, 91, 100, 114, 117, 137

condition 9, 11, 13, 16–19, 21, 23, 32, 33, 36, 37, 47, 48, 60, 69, 72, 77, 78, 80, 87, 89–91, 94,

Index

150

108, 110, 121, 126, 129, 132, 137, 138 ground-floor ~s 7, 32, 83, 84,

88, 89, 92 reflective ~s..................7, 83, 92

confabulation..........................34, 81 configuration 2, 45, 50, 92, 126, 128 consciousness 14, 15, 25, 32, 37,

40–44, 51, 68, 71, 74, 77, 84–87, 89, 91, 92, 94–97, 102, 109, 110–112, 116, 127 conscious 25, 31, 41, 44, 51, 54,

59–61, 68, 73, 84, 86, 95, 100, 108, 115, 117, 132, 137

construction 3, 11, 12, 63, 68, 78, 81, 82, 99, 115, 117–120, 123, 134 construct 69, 70, 98, 112, 117,

137 constructed continuum ... 1, 71,

116 content 18–21, 30, 55, 79, 87, 93,

95, 102, 115, 121, 125 sameness of ~ ............19–23, 34

continuity 1, 2, 3, 8, 25, 36, 38, 39, 45, 46, 64, 68, 72, 78, 79, 82, 83, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 123, 128, 133, 134, 137 continuous 1, 33, 36, 72, 95, 98,

114, 119, 120, 128, 134 cue 2, 21, 34, 35, 38, 41, 45–51, 62,

76, 77 ~d recall ..........................45, 49

D description 3, 67, 78, 81, 82, 91,

102, 114, 128 Deutscher, Max ................24, 36, 38 disposition 2, 8, 13, 38, 41, 43, 55,

56, 58, 61, 64, 123, 137 ~al 43, 54, 55, 56, 63, 66, 137 ~al trace theory ........................1

Dokic, Jérôme 8, 10, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 90, 119

doxastic state .................15, 91, 137

E ecphory ...................2, 45–48, 50, 55 emotion........................ 93, 123–125 engram............24, 45, 47, 50, 55, 62 episode 9, 15, 24, 34, 38, 51, 67,

78, 79, 81–83, 87, 88, 90–92, 95, 97, 119–123

epistemological 19, 66, 129, 130, 137, 138

event 2, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 24–29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 44, 45, 63, 69, 73–78, 83, 84, 87–91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 105, 113, 117, 118–124, 133, 137

experience 1, 2, 7, 9, 13–15, 17, 20, 23, 26, 27, 30–38, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 54, 59, 60, 62, 63, 71, 73–98, 108, 110–118, 122–124, 127, 128, 134, 137 nested ~ ............30, 31, 113–115

experimental ................ 43, 101, 123 explanation 7, 36, 37, 42, 45, 48, 55,

63, 81, 100, 116, 127, 129, 134 explicit 54, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 88,

90, 96, 115

F first person............69, 73, 78, 79, 82 forget ..............18, 50, 52, 62, 64, 83

G grounding 32, 43, 68, 109, 110, 130

~ relation See ground-consequ-ence relation

H Hacking, Ian ........................... 3, 83 Hering, Ewald 2, 8, 24, 38–63, 101,

137 human 1, 3, 13, 15, 52, 56, 59, 62,

68, 81, 82, 121, 136, 137 Hume, David ..13, 16, 18, 41, 48, 93


Husserl, Edmund 2, 69, 71, 75–77, 84–88, 91, 94, 95–116, 119–126, 134, 137

I identity ........... 19, 21, 27, 28, 72, 75

identical............................19, 21 imagination 2, 18, 35, 63, 93, 105,

111, 117–119, 132, 134, 137 ~-oriented deixis ..........105, 106 imaginary .....................103, 105

Imagination ................................118 information 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 26,

27, 29, 32–34, 36, 42–46, 48, 49, 51, 58, 59, 62, 73, 80, 87, 90, 91, 119 ~al content..............................32 ~al state 29, 33, 35, 44, 51, 90,

138 Ingarden, Roman ............85, 86, 128 inner sense..............................74, 76 instinct..................52, 54–56, 58, 60 intention 87, 96, 102, 108, 109, 111,

123, 125 ~al 1, 3, 7, 31, 33, 67, 75, 86,

87, 92, 94, 102, 103, 106, 108, 113, 114, 120, 123, 137

intuitions ....... 20, 21, 24, 29, 30, 44 invariant ................46, 94, 100, 138

J James, William ...........84, 86, 94, 95 Jespersen, Otto ............................80 judgment 2, 9, 11, 15, 26–28, 31,

32, 37, 91, 112, 124 judging .............13, 15, 109, 137 recollective ~........15, 28, 84, 91

K Kandel, Eric 6, 8, 14, 42, 45, 50, 63 Kant, Immanuel ........74, 75, 76, 91,

109, 117

knowledge 2, 6, 7, 8, 17, 22, 26, 32, 40, 51, 57, 58, 66, 67, 83, 84, 88, 118, 126, 127, 128 form of ~ .................. 25, 26, 57 knowing 29, 35, 58, 87, 90,

120, 129 knowing how....... 14, 58, 59, 73 source of ~ 3, 9, 10, 25, 26, 29,

32, 44, 58, 118, 119

L law of association ........... 16–18, 21 learning ....14, 44, 57, 58, 59, 66, 73 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm .... 9, 11,

25, 27, 38, 69 Libet, Benjamin .......................... 95 Ligocka, Roma ..................... 90, 91 Linke, Ferdinand 7, 31–33, 113–115 Locke, John ...........9, 10, 13, 51, 62 Loftus, Elizabeth.................... 34–36 Luria, Alexander .................... 52, 76

M memory 1–3, 6–15, 18, 20–22, 24,

26–29, 32–41, 43–52, 54–64, 66–69, 71–73, 76–79, 81–85, 87–91, 105, 107–110, 112, 117–123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 136, 137, 140–148 ~ colours ......................... 45–50 ~ distortion ....27, 28, 34–36, 63 ~ experience 7, 9, 15, 31, 33,

35, 45, 91 ~ judgment .7, 15, 28, 29, 32, 91 ~ loss ..................................... 73 ~ model .12, 37, 44, 45, 68, 137 ~ system ......44, 57–60, 73, 107,

118, 136 ~ theatre ........................ 22, 107 ~ trace 6–8, 22–24, 30, 33, 34,

36–38, 41–43, 45–49, 51, 52, 54–56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 85, 132, 137

autobiographical ~ .... 1–3, 6–8, 13, 17, 39, 58–61, 63, 64,

Index

152

66–69, 71–74, 77–79, 81–84, 87–92, 94, 112, 113, 116–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132–138

episodic ~ 1, 7–10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 26, 27, 29–32, 35, 36, 40, 44, 45, 52, 59, 68, 73, 81–84, 88, 91, 118

explicit ~ 44, 45, 51, 59, 68, 73, 89, 121

implicit ~............44, 73, 89, 121 living ~.............................85, 86 long-term ~ 6, 17, 42, 43, 45, 50 phylogenetic ~ 40, 52, 53, 56,

58, 60, 61 primary ~ 73, 84, 89, 94, 96, 98,

115, 125, 127, 133, 137 secondary ~ 84, 85, 88, 89, 94,

96, 107, 112, 115, 122, 125, 127, 133, 134, 137

short-term ~......6, 42, 51, 74, 89 working ~...................59, 68, 73

mental 3, 12, 44, 61, 63, 68, 72, 85, 94, 95, 117, 123 ~ act 9, 13, 94, 96, 102, 106,

123 ~ capacity.............9, 10, 12, 123 ~ change.........24, 29, 30, 41, 49 ~ event ... 2, 7, 19, 20, 48, 49, 73 ~ phenomena........40, 41, 43, 49 ~ state 2, 8, 26, 29, 30, 60, 67,

74, 79, 84, 89, 127, 132 mimesis ................80, 127, 128, 134 mind 9, 18, 20, 27, 30, 31, 38, 40,

41, 44, 47, 61, 83, 85, 88, 95, 97, 112, 113, 125

mode 85–87, 92, 93, 98, 102, 109, 111, 120–122, 125, 126, 134 attentional ~ .................103, 104

modification ........96, 102, 104, 107, 110, 111, 119 attentional ~ ........101, 104, 124

N Nabokov, Vladimir .............121, 122

narration ...............67, 76–78, 81, 84 narrative 2, 35, 67, 71–73, 75–83,

98, 106, 120, 122 autobiographical ~ 36, 72, 73,

76, 78, 84, 90, 116 neuroanatomic .....43, 48, 51, 54, 61 Noë, Alva................................... 127 non-conceptual .....26, 30, 31, 75, 98

~ content ..........30, 31, 113, 114

O object 15, 17, 24, 25, 29–31, 46–48,

50, 55, 61, 66, 69, 74, 75, 76, 85–117, 120–126, 133, 134 ~ive 12, 19, 20, 21, 85, 95, 115,

129–132 order 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 33, 35, 42,

59, 60, 67, 81, 91, 95, 100, 108, 127, 130, 131 sequential ~ 71, 72, 97, 98, 132

P past 1–3, 9–11, 13–16, 22, 23, 26,

27, 29, 31, 33, 35–37, 44–48, 59–61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73, 76–78, 80–100, 104, 107–110, 112–114, 116–124, 126–128, 132–138 ~ episode ....33, 73, 84, 119, 120 ~ event 1, 8, 13, 15, 17–19, 22–

26, 28, 29, 31–33, 35–38, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 58, 64, 76, 81, 84, 87, 90, 91, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 128, 132

~ experience 1, 2, 7, 10, 14, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 42–45, 49, 51, 52, 60, 69, 74–78, 81, 82, 85, 87–90, 109, 115, 118, 119, 123, 134, 137

personal ~ .....14, 70, 71, 78, 122 sense of the ~......................... 86

perception 7, 9, 13, 16, 17, 20, 28, 29–32, 42–45, 48, 58, 60, 76, 77, 85–87, 92–115, 118, 119,


120–123, 125–127, 130, 132–134, 137 perceive 10, 25, 30, 37, 44, 46,

60, 62, 66, 67, 84, 86, 94, 96–100, 110, 120, 123

perceptual 7, 12, 20, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 46, 48, 49, 58, 87, 98–106, 113, 115, 119–121, 123

persist ...................25, 37, 41, 58, 84 phantasy ............... 71, 106, 119, 122 phenomena 6, 40, 42, 63, 74, 101,

108 Phenomenology..........................119

phenomenological 2, 7, 75, 91, 95, 98, 116, 137, 138

Plato .............................................66 present 2, 8, 9, 29, 33, 36, 37, 44,

45, 67, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84–88, 90, 92–98, 106, 112–116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 133, 134, 137, 138 ~ experience 1, 13, 18, 36, 47,

67, 109, 137 ~ification 71, 77, 85, 89, 98,

103, 106, 109, 112, 113, 121, 122

~ify ........................ 77, 106, 113 prompt ............ 16, 17, 35, 47, 50, 77

R reason 67, 68, 124–127, 129, 130,

137 recall 2, 10–15, 17, 22, 27, 29, 34,

35, 44–48, 50, 51, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 73, 75–78, 80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 92, 97, 117–120, 123, 125, 132, 134

recognition 7, 34, 47, 48, 50, 63, 64, 66, 76, 77, 80, 81, 90, 99, 101, 109, 110, 112, 117, 121, 122, 125–128, 130, 137, 138

recollection 2, 3, 6–51, 58–61, 63, 66–69, 72–96, 103–137

redintegration ..................21, 22, 48

reflection........................ 76, 94, 137 reflective 7, 14, 59, 60, 80, 84,

92 self-reflective....... 26, 27, 60, 89

re-identification 16, 78, 90, 91, 112, 137 re-identify 8, 10, 14, 15, 75, 76,

84, 89–91, 96 relation 1, 3, 11–18, 21, 36, 40, 41,

43, 46, 48, 49, 54, 60, 63, 64, 67–69, 71, 76, 77, 79, 89, 91–94, 97, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 111, 116, 117, 121, 123, 125–134, 137 ground-consequence ~ 69, 129,

130–133 part-whole ~ ........... 16, 21, 132 whole-part ~ ........................ 137

remember ......1, 3, 7, 10, 13–15, 18, 27–30, 32, 35, 37, 57, 59, 62, 63, 67, 71, 75, 76, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 104, 105, 110, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 130 remembrance ............... 104, 109

remind.......................................... 66 representation ....... 2, 7, 10–34, 38,

41, 44, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 63, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 84, 85, 91, 102, 106, 109, 111, 113–115, 125, 128 ~al 1, 31, 33, 68, 75, 113, 114,

125 ~al state ................... 33, 34, 126 past ~ 28, 29, 33, 34, 37, 38, 44,

47, 48, 51, 52, 83 reproduce..................................... 77 reproduction 9, 24, 26, 29, 49, 85,

89, 113, 119, 120, 122, 137 reproduce 29, 42, 43, 44, 53,

54, 60, 73, 77, 87, 90, 96, 100, 106, 113, 121, 122, 126, 134

retention 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 44, 58, 60–66, 80, 83–98, 106, 108,

Index

154

109, 110, 112, 115, 118, 125, 127, 133, 137 retentive 10, 58, 66, 74, 87,

109, 111, 112 retrieval 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22,

26, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 59, 60, 68, 83, 87, 88, 132 retrieve 10, 11, 13, 18, 20, 22,

25, 26, 28, 29, 33–38, 43–45, 55, 59, 61, 83, 87, 88, 90, 112, 122

rhetorical figure......................21, 85 Rose, Steven.................................62 Ryle, Gilbert .............................8, 83

S salience .... 103, 122–126, 128–130,

134 affective ~ .......3, 77, 83, 90, 93 perceptual ~ 93, 103, 104, 119,

123, 138 salient phenomena................101

Schacter, Daniel 8, 14, 21, 24, 29, 34–36, 42, 44–46, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59, 73, 87

schema ....................... 100, 117, 118 self 36, 45, 59, 60, 68, 71–83, 120,

137 ~-awareness 14, 15, 32, 35, 36,

44, 58, 59, 64, 69, 71–76, 89, 137

~-consciousness ...26, 68, 74, 75 semantic 1, 2, 3, 11, 17, 22, 59, 68,

73, 79, 81, 89, 95, 97, 99, 106, 111, 118, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133

Semon, Richard 2, 21, 45, 46, 48, 54, 55

sensation 20, 21, 30–32, 42, 44, 56, 58, 101, 111

sensitive ~ to reason 3, 93, 103, 123, 126,

134 Shoemaker, Sydney ................73, 75

skill ...........14, 44, 57, 58, 59, 68, 77 Sorabji, Richard 9, 10, 13, 14, 16,

22, 64, 72, 107 stepwise conception of memory ... 7,

32, 71, 112 storage 13, 37, 44, 62, 63, 64, 68, 85 Stumpf, Carl .........................99, 111 subject 13, 26, 66, 72–75, 78, 79,

82, 93, 116, 128, 133 ~ive 2, 12, 19, 20, 21, 35, 44,

75, 78, 82, 85, 95, 97, 98, 130, 131, 134, 137

succession 67, 70, 81, 86, 93, 94, 97, 98 successive 2, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95,

134 Sutton, John .3, 8, 24, 37, 38, 41, 68 synapse .....................42, 43, 63, 127

T temporal 1, 2, 16, 17, 36, 51, 67,

69–75, 79–89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 128, 134, 135, 137 ~ continuity 68, 76, 88, 91, 92,

93, 94, 97, 109, 114, 116 ~ duration 18, 38, 84–86, 93, 94,

98, 115 ~ extension ......... 84, 87, 94, 96 ~ gap 9, 25, 47, 66, 78, 116,

117, 137 ~ horizon ....................... 74, 109 ~ interval ................98, 116, 117 ~ mode ................ 2, 91, 92, 138 ~ order 2, 15, 36, 68, 76, 82,

83, 91, 97, 98, 110 ~ relation ................... 63, 67, 69

tense..........................2, 80, 132, 133 past ~ .............1, 37, 79, 80, 133 verbal ~ ................... 2, 132, 133

testimony ..........27, 32, 83, 119, 130 thought 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 51, 59,

67, 74, 76, 83, 84, 124


155

think 10, 11, 17, 27, 50, 67, 68, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 86, 94, 110, 112

time 1, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 25, 31, 36, 37, 43, 45, 63, 66–68, 71, 72, 76–88, 91–97, 102, 104, 108, 111, 114, 117, 118, 123, 126, 132, 133, 134, 137 perceived ~.................64, 67, 69 phenomenal ~...........94, 98, 114

Tinbergen, Nikolaas .....................55 trace 2, 7, 9–11, 13, 17, 20, 22–38,

41–51, 54, 62, 98, 132 ~ theory ........ 2, 3, 8, 66, 85, 117

transition .................. 7, 98, 116, 128 truth.... 15, 57, 69, 91, 120, 129, 131 Tulving, Endel 2, 8, 13, 14, 17, 27,

29, 44, 46, 55, 57, 59, 73, 87, 88, 118

U unconscious 25, 44, 56, 58, 60, 61,

68

V Varela, Francisco 2, 86, 93, 119, 127 variation..47, 78, 100, 101, 118, 136

method of ~ ........... 62, 100, 136

W Wittgenstein, Ludwig ..... 24, 37, 93,

129 Wolf, Christa.......................... 78, 79 Wundt, Wilhelm........... 95, 101, 102

Z Zahavi, Dan ..................... 60, 75, 81

Documents

Kasabova, On Autobiographical Memory