A função elusiva da memória mecânica na teoria do conhecimento de Hegel

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Guarapuava

Congreso; XII Congresso Internacional de Filosofia: "Filosofia, Literatura e Psicanálise - Interfaces"; 2023

Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste

Hegel himself warned his students and readers that to comprehend the organic connection of the activity of rotely memorizing words with the activity of conceptual thinking is “one of the most difficult points in the theory of mind.” (Enz §464 Anm.). Hegel warning was prescient: according to John Burbidge, a well-known Hegel scholar, Hegel´s account of mechanical memory “has always seemed paradoxical to Hegel interpreters.” (2007:87) John McCumber agrees that the section on mechanical memory in Hegel´s philosophy of subjective spirit “is quite confusing and, to the commentator, even embarrassing” (1993:229), and Willem DeVries also finds Hegel´s manner of speaking about mechanical memory “fairly confusing” (1988:158).When analyzing Hegel´s theory of mechanical memory, the majority of interpreters have considered only two aspects of rote memorization, namely either the disappearance of meaning in the rotely memorized words (among others, Güßbacher 1988, Stederoth 2001, Rometsch 2007, Burbidge 2007) or the entirely abstract internalization of the mind that mechanically memorizes (a.o. Derrida 1967, Houlgate 1996, Nuzzo 2012). In the former case the interpretation focused on the relation between the signifier and the signified meaning of the words; in the latter case, it focused on the relation between the linguistic sign as a whole and the mind. However, the specific position of mechanical memory in Hegel´s systematization of cognitive activities does not rely on those two relations, but on the relation between the meaning of each word with the meaning of the other words. By memorizing by rote rows of words that are not connected with each other by their meanings, but only by the force of the mind that decides to memorize them together, the mind frees itself from any externally given content and sublates the lineal reference of the representational content of each meaning to the intuition at its origin. From now on, the mind can autonomously connect any content to any other content. The actualization of the power (Macht) (Enz §463) of the mind to interconnect signified contents according to its own logical rules accomplishes, for Hegel, the transition to conceptual thought. This kind of approach on Hegel´s theory of mecanichal memory has been advanced by McCumber (1993), Žižek (1995) and Dien Winfield (2009, 2015). Their proposal, however, is insufficient: on the one hand, none of the three authors critically approaches the mainstream interpretations of Hegel´s theory of mechanical memory, so that their reading does not take into account some useful insights of those interpretations; on the other hand, they do not approach some relevant aspects of Hegel´s account of mechanical memory, like, for example, his claim that the moment of being (Sein) represented by the meaningless words that are rotely memorized is sublated in conceptual thought as its objectivity (Objektivität).The objective of my presentation will be to offer a detailed interpretation of Hegel´s theory of mechanical memory in its relation to conceptual thought that, following the general line of reasoning of McCumber, Žižek and Winfield, adresses and remedies the shortcomings of their reading.