Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography
Mark Rowlands
Abstract
It is common, and natural, to suppose that our memories help make us who we are. After all, what could make us the persons we are if not the experiences we have had during the courses of our lives? And how could these experiences be retained if not through our memories of them? The kind of memory in question is episodic memory. Episodic memory, however, has certain deficiencies that cast doubt on its ability to play this role in making us who we are. We all forget vastly more than we remember. And what we do remember is often decidedly inaccurate. If we were collages of memories, most of these ... More
It is common, and natural, to suppose that our memories help make us who we are. After all, what could make us the persons we are if not the experiences we have had during the courses of our lives? And how could these experiences be retained if not through our memories of them? The kind of memory in question is episodic memory. Episodic memory, however, has certain deficiencies that cast doubt on its ability to play this role in making us who we are. We all forget vastly more than we remember. And what we do remember is often decidedly inaccurate. If we were collages of memories, most of these memories would be missing, and many of the ones that remained would be markedly inaccurate. How, then, can these memories make us who we are? The answer lies in revising our understanding of what is remembered in episodic memory. The content of such memory is not what it has been taken to be. The content of episodic memory is always infused with style. The act of remembering sculpts the content of memory out of the marble block of the remembered episode. A person is in each of her memories in the way the style of a sculptor is in her creation. At heart of this account—the lynchpin on which the arguments of this book turn—is a peculiar form of contentless remembering: Rilkean memory.
Keywords:
content,
forgetting,
memory,
persons,
style
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190241469 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190241469.001.0001 |
