Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.9 Life’s Relation with Itself: Memory and the Living Appropriation of the PastAppropriation of the Past
sense of emptiness), defusing the underlying mechanism (the emptiness-fear circle) and hence tracing the experience of emptiness back to the situations it is connected to.
By following these guidelines, we can bring the problematic experience to light and provide a concrete outline of it, so as to grasp its origin and the contexts related to it. This enables us to define a field of inquiry by clarifying the ongoing life situa- tion that governs its understanding. In our example, guided by an analysis of the exacerbation of the problematic experience through the development of the patient’s present relation, we may grasp the person’s sense of emptiness, con- nected to his condition of loneliness and freed from the vicious circle of fear, as an indication that points to his separation and the end of his previous relation- ship. The articulation of this access thus outlines the perspective within which meaningful moments can be disclosed—and with them the possibility of turning toward the past and of being addressed by it (construction). In our example, these moments emerge through an analysis of the end of the patient’s previous rela- tionship and of the ways in which he faced this separation. The establishment of this interpretative condition leads to the development of new directions and hence to a renewal of ipseity in the present: a renewal which cannot be confined to the acqui- sition of knowledge detached from concrete being-there (according to the theoreti- cal approach), but which rather co-constitutes ipseity itself. In other words, the past is appropriated through a new relationship, opening itself up—once again within ipseity—to becoming.
5.9 Life’s Relation with Itself: Memory and the Living
122
and which makes the past accessible to the present—but also the sense of the com- pleted experience, a sense which is immediately familiar to me and manifests itself within the present context of intelligibility.
Whereas memory has to do with a sort of definiteness of the past, I newly find myself in lived experience, not through the observing of past experiences, but through an interpretative context that grows out of the current present; and it is through this access that I come to experience my past in an immediate way. Once again, through the things I come across I encounter myself: my lived experience manifests itself to me, as a phenomenon. In this respect, memories reveal them- selves according to specific aspects within the current sphere of intelligibility;
hence, they give themselves to the extent that I experience their meaning. Therefore, through the enactment of ongoing experiences, I achieve or lose a certain degree of intimacy with my past, with the content of my lived experience. In visualizing a personal experience, I am not remembering it but, in this visualizing way of being there where it is, I am in some relationship to it. In this respect, having oneself means becoming familiar with one’s proper world, and hence with that context of intelligibility within which I myself live and which I re-actualize on the basis of the circumstances at hand.
On the other hand, the fact of directly grasping myself as something familiar within the content of memory reveals the concealed and unprominent presence of a certain motive and/or tendency within that sphere of intelligibility that is not appar- ent in factual life and is usually absorbed by the present circumstances. What such an experience reveals is that every behavior is immediately oriented in the light of life itself, in all of its fullness, and hence by one’s personal story: a living story, a story that lives in concrete experience in terms of the intimacy which life has with itself in each of its relations. This story is newly mobilized at every moment through the availability of lived experiences in actual occurrences, which lend concrete life its fullness. My personal story is thus understood on the basis of occurrences and measured in the light of my life developments, as an expression of my very existence.
The difference between memory and the living appropriation of the past becomes particularly striking in the case of the rereading of a text. Let us start from the con- siderations on rereading made by Paul Valery in a famous essay on Stendhal, pub- lished as the preface to the reprint of Lucien Leuwen, 30 years after Jean de Mitty’s first edition: “I have just finished reading a Lucien Leuwen that is very different from the one I loved so much thirty years ago. I have changed and so has the novel.
I should state right from the start that this second Leuwen, which corrects, expands and improves upon the first, revives and intensifies the charming memory of the old reading—but I will not disclaim the enjoyment I experienced back then” (Stendhal 2002, p. 1263). Two different life stages mark the distance between the old reading and the present one. Valery provides the context for that charming memory: the lit- erary Tuesdays at Mallarmé’s home and the walk he would take with Jean de Mitty after each soirée, when the two of them would stroll down Rue de Rome to the radi- ant center of Paris. The poet then sketches his interests at the time: his enjoyment of Stendhal’s lesser-known novels and the fascination he felt for psychological
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
processes, for the uniqueness of meaning. Each memory, therefore, is situated within a specific circumstance in the past, as the visualization of a thing experienced at a certain time. Such is the phenomenon of memory.
It was in this period that de Mitty offered Valery the slim volume of Lucien Leuwen, and within this context of occurrences, the poet’s own inner world mani- fests itself: “As a young man I used to place love so far above and so far below … Perhaps I had good reasons to feel so intimately affected by those indefinable quali- ties; on the other hand, I was amazed that this was the case.” Here the poet evokes that bygone world in which he, a somewhat prudish young man, had been charmed by a primitive and imperfect Leuwen—for such had been the circumstances!
A distance of 30 years stands between the charm which the poet experienced in the past and his familiarity with the novel he had first read in his youth, a familiarity ensured by his present access to the book. Valery, the literary egotist who has found his way, now regains the past enjoyment of reading—a sweet, living experience—
only by renewing his grasping of himself: “because I could not stand—and still cannot stand—that a literary work may deceive me to the point that I can no longer clearly distinguish between my own personal feelings and those conveyed by the writer’s artfulness. I see the pen and I see the person holding it. I pay no attention, I do not need his emotions. I only ask him to tell me about his means” (p. 1264).
Valery here exists in some relationship to his past!
This second phenomenon is very different from that of memory, as it means hav- ing that lived experience within reach in the present. The experience of reading a text which I had in my youth gives itself according to a current sphere of intelligibil- ity that determines the aspects according to which both the experience in question, and the circumstances in which it took shape, become accessible. What emerges is the way in which a lived experience from the past becomes familiar to me, how I newly find myself within it. The very context of occurrences, within which reading disclosed Valery’s own world, is grasped through the motivations characterizing the ongoing conditions. It is evident, therefore, that while access to these occurrences represents the connection between past and present, it depends on what themes and problems present experience poses in the light of the foreseeable future. Any grasp- ing of life relations—the fact of having oneself—cannot amount to the collecting of past occurrences, and less still to a hermeneutical Nachträglichkeit, whose direction is determined by the phantasmagorias of an analyst faithful to his a priori; rather, it must be oriented by life itself, in all of its fullness.
In this respect, a person’s relationship with his or her past is always preserved by becoming a story. This relationship, renewed through actual occurrences, points to a being-there that concretely exists precisely by virtue of its relation to what it con- ceives and chooses as its story. This being-there gives itself a story within which to live through the way in which it takes charge of its own past on the basis of the events it encounters. This perspective allows us to understand the following claim by Heidegger: “The proper organon of understanding life is history, not as the sci- ence of history or as a collection of curiosities, but rather as lived life, how it goes along in living life” (GA 58 1992, p. 193).
124
As it flows by, experiencing the world which it is attuned to, and which enables it to find itself on every occasion, our life articulates itself as intelligibility or the lack thereof, as the acquisition or loss of familiarity with itself, with the environ- ment it lives in, and with others. Within such an encounter with a self that con- stantly renews itself, generating meaning, what also takes concrete shape and acquires relevance is experiences, which may be of greater intensity and therefore define one’s perspective while at the same time disclosing a new horizon of expec- tations. In this sense, in the situation at hand, I will grasp and single out a particu- lar field of meaningfulness with respect to the overall context of my factual experience, on the basis of which I will experience myself in relation to how I deal with my own world. We here catch a glimpse of that peculiar interweaving of an experienced past, more or less sedimented according to certain changing inclina- tions, and the horizon of expectations defined by it—a tension which is resolved again and again through the enactment of ipseity. What we have here is the end- less dialectic between sameness and ipseity, mediated and configured by a narra- tive that makes it possible to integrate the diversity, variability, discontinuity, and instability within a coherent story, engendering what has been described by Ricoeur as a person’s narrative identity. Ricoeur thus argues that the essential dif- ference between the narrative model and all other models of connection lies in the status of the event which, by entering into the flow of the narrative, in each case connects the person to his or her own story.