Motivations of remembering. Contributions to a concrete phenomenology of recollection.

KRETSCHEL, VERÓNICA

Workshop; Motivation and Time; 2024

The experience of remembering invites us to think. From the memory of the irrelevant and the forgetfulness of the essential, everyday situations –causing as many torments as joys– account for a relationship between the present and the past that "is alive". Husserlian phenomenology has offered elements to describe these experiences of recollection. In a first stage, within the framework of the static phenomenology of the Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, recollection can be described on the basis of two oppositions. On the one hand, in comparison to other forms of presentifications -such as expectation, fantasy or presentification of the present- and, on the other hand, in relation to the founding dimensions of time: the phases of time consciousness (retention, original impression and protention). We find in these texts a multilevel description of the act of remembering and a first indication of the motivations for it. Husserl states that a memory can either emerge or be produced voluntarily (Hua X 37) and thus we can identify two modalities of the motivation of recollection: a passive one (when the memory "emerges") and an active one (when it is produced voluntarily). Secondly, genetic phenomenology gives the possibility to describe in a more complex way this experience and, thereby, to make its motivations explicit. In the Analyses on Passive Synthesis Husserl argues that the phenomenology of association makes possible to overcome the abstraction of time-consciousness studies undertaken from a static perspective (Hua XI 128). Association is presented there as a higher continuation of the doctrine of the original constitution of time (Hua XI 118). Along with this, perceptual consciousness itself can be characterized as "a consciousness that awakens" the past (Hua XI 118). A study linking statics and genetics studies on time will provide us with a concrete description of remembrance that goes beyond the formality of the synthesis of time and accounts for its motivations. This implies, first of all, the possibility of articulating the mechanism of retentional modification, as a movement that accounts for the sinking of retentios as they move away from the present, with what actually occurs in the present of recollection. The syntheses of association constitute both the sensible units that affect us in the present as well as the relations that we maintain with the content of our past. The aim of this contribution will be to describe the act of remembering and its motivations in concrete terms, that is, by taking into account its complexity and the different levels at which it takes place. This implies carrying out a description that combines static and genetic studies and makes explicit the different syntheses that articulate our relationship with the past.