Augustine and the Locus of Collective Memory

In the books X and XI of his Confessions, Augustine aims to tackle the intriguing questions of memory and time, respectively. His phenomenological as well as rigorous approach has attracted many later commentators. Also Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) can be taken as one of these, although Ricoeur’s angle is decisively distinct from that of Augustine’s – it can be said to represent a certain “hermeneutical rationality”. By using Ricoeur’s material as a springboard, this paper aims to examine both the possibility and the locus of collective memory (part I) as well as Ricoeur’s reply to Augustine’s challenging question “quid est enim tempus?” (part II).

I

The first question could be titled as “between historical consciousness and collective memory”. However, the inquiry will begin by memories that are most notably as private as they are subjective. Ricoeur asserts in Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, in English 2004) that there is a “tradition of inwardness” in understanding memory. He defines it by laying out three distinct characters: 1) “memory does seem to be radically singular: my memories are not yours”, 2) “it is in the memory that the original tie of consciousness to the past appears to reside” and 3) “it is to the memory that the sense of orientation in the passage of time is linked”.

This notably (Neo-)Platonic tradition is already potent in the texts of its initiator, St. Augustine, but Ricoeur sees the tradition to really gain its force with Locke, Kant and Husserl. Whereas Augustine was not able to distinguish between identity, self and memory, and also lacked the conceptual tools for a transcendental definition of the word “subject”, the modern sense of “inwardness” is brought up with these later thinkers. Indeed,...

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...of collective memory. It is by the supporting, correcting, and critiquing function of history that the sphere of collective memory appears in the first place. The dynamics of memories is set against a petrified history, and they appear only in the light of this impersonal narration that represents the “family history”, “the operating history of Fukushima nuclear power plant”, or “the history of the Egyptian 2011 uprising”. In this critical space opened by the history of a communicable whole it becomes possible to say that ‘I remember, because we cherish a common memory of this experience’. This, however, leads to asking the conception of time.

Works Cited

Barash, Jeffrey A. Barash, “Analyzing collective memory” in On Memory: an interdisciplinary approach, ed. Doron Mendels (Oxford-Bern-Berlin-Bruxelles-Frankfurt am Main-New York-Wien: Peter Lang, 2007), 101-116.