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Article Excerpt
ONE OF THE TASKS OF MEMORY IS TO MAKE AVAILABLE TO US KNOWLEDGE that we have acquired in the past. Let us call this aspect of memory cognitive memory. This kind of memory clearly plays a crucial role in our life--as becomes apparent on those occasions when it lets us down. But by and large, and perhaps surprisingly, most of its time it does its job and the right piece of information comes to mind more or less when we need it. Cognitive memory has been of special concern to philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, who have fruitfully investigated how it works, how and where the information is stored, and how reliable it is. My concern in this paper will be different. There is another aspect of memory that is of equal importance: its role of transmitting responsibilities and commitments from the past. If cognitive memory tells us what we have learned in the past in order that we may better pursue our current projects, this aspect of memory--I will sometimes call it conative memory--constrains our pursuit of current projects. If cognitive memory is, by and large, good news, conative memory is, all too often, bad news. It reminds us of responsibilities that we have acquired and commitments that we have made, of that we ought to have done and did not, and it directs us toward certain actions that we have to do even though they conflict with our current desires and projects.
In the first part of this paper, I want to look more closely at this notion of conative memory, and examine its role in individual life. My main protagonists will be John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche. Locke is significant for his recognition of the intimate relationship between memory, responsibility, and identity. While he did not formulate a conception of conative memory as such (although he came close), I will argue that his account of responsibility and identity requires it. Nietzsche was probably the first explicitly to recognize this concept when he argued that we need what he called a "real memory of the will" if we are to have "the right to make promises." In the second part of the paper, I extend the account of conative memory from the individual to collective memory, and argue that if we understand the role of collective memory in terms derived from Locke and Nietzsche, we will understand its role in the formation of collective identities and the transmission of collective responsibilities. Collective memory is in part cognitive; but we must also recognize it conative role--that is, its role in forming the present will. I will take this opportunity to engage with the important work of Jan Assmann.
MEMORY OF THE WILL: FROM LOCKE TO NIETZSCHE
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, two chapters deal with memory. The first (Locke, 1975: 149-55) was concerned with what was to become a familiar theme: the way in which ideas from the past are transmitted to the present. The second (Locke, 1975: 328-348) was only added in the second edition and had a rather different agenda: what is now, largely because of Locke, known as the problem of personal identity. A hint of Locke's agenda is given by his choice of the term "person." This was, for Locke and just about everyone else in the seventeenth century, "a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit" (Locke, 1975: 346; emphasis added). The problem of our identity as persons, as against our identity as organic beings, collections of cells, or whatever, is to specify the conditions under which we might properly be held legally and, as Locke makes clear, morally accountable for what we did or failed to do on some previous occasion. For Locke this was not just a legal and moral problem; it was also religious and political. Religious doctrine requires that there will be a final judgment in which we all receive our just deserts from God--a "great day, when everyone shall receive according to his doings" (Locke, 1975: 347). Locke thought that this also had political implications: that without the belief in an ultimate sanction, citizens would not have sufficient motivation to obey the secular authority. (It was for this reason that he did not think that religious toleration should be extended to atheists.) But in what relation to me must this future being stand for it to be punished for my failures? Locke's project was to explain, not just how responsibility is transmitted in our everyday existence, but how it is transmitted to those who will face the last court of judgment.
Locke's answer to this question was deceptively simple. In consciousness, we are directly aware of what is ours: pains in our limbs, ideas in our head, and so on. Consciousness informs us of the spread of the self; and in this sense, consciousness involves self-consciousness. Locke argues that this relationship does not occur only with respect to "our present sensations and perceptions"; it can also "be extended backwards to any past action or thought" (335). That is to say, I can be conscious of a past action in much the same way as I can be conscious of a present one. And just as self-consciousness constitutes our various present experiences as experiences of the one self, so too it constitutes our past experiences as experiences of the same self. There are not two separable moment in our experience of the past, one in which we become aware of the experiences as experiences of a past self, and the second in which we identify our present self with the past one. It is rather that in our awareness of the past experiences we identify them as ours; that is, as experiences of our present self. It is this awareness that constitutes us as the same person who performed those actions, and thus rightly held accountable for them.
Consciousness of a past experience is of course "memory"; in current terminology, it is episodic or--more pertinently--autobiographical memory. Initially, however, Locke does not use the term "memory" (though he does on other occasions); he speaks instead of "consciousness." In part, this is because he wishes to emphasize the continuity between the awareness of ourselves as authors of our current actions and the awareness of ourselves as authors of our past actions, and the use of different words--consciousness for the one and memory for the other--might suggest that there are two kinds of awareness at work. But there is another reason: the consciousness that constitutes self-identity must be supposed to reach into the future as well as the past.
For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come (Locke, 1975: 336; emphasis added. See also Sutton, 1998: 174-75).
Locke does not emphasize this point; indeed, this seems to be the only passage in which he mentions it. However, that self-consciousness be future- as well as past-directed is implicit in his claim that the function of punishment is to deter us from the wrongdoing toward which we would otherwise be tempted. We must be able imaginatively to extend our awareness of ourselves into the future and appropriate as our own the punishment to which we would be subject if we were to break the law. The role of consciousness is to collect all our experiences--past, present, and possible future--as experiences of the one self.
There are many problems with Locke's account. Memory is notoriously unreliable. Indeed, Locke's earlier chapter on memory had emphasized this. (His account there gives little hint of the exalted role it is later to play.) Though Locke was aware of the problem of forgetful malefactors who deny with apparent sincerity that they recall their past action, he gives it short shrift. It is a problem, he suggests, that arises only because of...
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