‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Sunday 19 November 2017

Truth as Unforgottenness



Let's twitch away the veil for a moment. Core Heidegger, this (from p.17 of the above):


You can click that to embiggen it, if you need to: it's a major topic of Heideggerian thought, of course. Is he right, though? It's certainly the case that ἀληθής means ‘true, real, genuine’, both in the highfalutin philosophical senses that interest H., and also in idiomatic everyday talk. Also the accusative plural, ἀληθῆ, is used for ‘yes’, in the sense of ‘correct, you're right’ when replying to a statement or question. For example, here's Plato's
Εὐκλείδης: ὥστε μοι σχεδόν τι πᾶς ὁ λόγος γέγραπται;
Τερψίων:   ἀληθῆ· ἤκουσά σου καὶ πρότερον.

Eucleides: So I have pretty much the whole conversation written down?
Terpsion: That's right. I've heard you say so before. [Theaetetus 143a]
When Heidegger says ἀληθές ‘literally means’ uncovered he is sort-of correct, except ... well: only sort-of. The word comes from ἀ- (a-, ‘not’) +‎ λήθω (lḗthō) which is a term that can mean ‘hide, conceal’ but which more directly means ‘forget’. The mythological river Lethe (Λήθη) that flows before the entrance to the Greek underworld is the river of forgetfulness, after all, not the river of concealment. It makes you forget, it doesn't ‘hide’ your thoughts in some secret cache. To go into this in a little more detail: the -ληθή- part of ἀληθής is a variant of λανθάνω (lanthánō), which means ‘to cause to forget’, ‘to render [somebody] unknowing’, ‘to deceive’, ‘to flash that magic penlight-of-forgetting from Men in Black in somebody's eye’ (not that last one, obviously). You can see its meaning in use, for instance in Herodotus, διότι οἰκίοισι ὑποδεξάμενος τὸν ξεῖνον φονέα τοῦ παιδὸς ἐλάνθανε βόσκων; ‘because he invited the guest into his home he, without knowing it, fed the person who had murdered his own son' [Histories 1.44]. Or this from Homer:
ὅφρα Ἕκτορα ὀτρύνῃσι μάχην ἐς Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων
αὖτις δ᾽ ἐμπνεύσῃσι μένος, λελάθῃ δ' ὀδυνάων
αἳ νῦν μιν τείρουσι κατὰ φρένας

But let Phoebus Apollo rouse Hector to the fight, and breathe strength into him again, and make him forget the pains that now distress his heart. [Iliad 15.59–61]
None of this is controversial, or obscure, stuff (all these citations are taken from Wiktionary, for example). To say that truth is the anti-deceit, the opposite-of-deceitfulness, is a sort of tautology, but to say that truth is anti-forgetfulness, the antidote to Lethe, is to say something rather more striking and thought-provoking. And my point is: to describe the Greek ἀληθής, the anti-Lethe, the un-Lethe, as unconcealment is actually quite a distorting thing to be doing. Unless we want to argue, as Freud does, that nothing is ever really forgotten, to argue that memories are only ever hidden away in the subconscious, then it surely does not reflect our sense of how our minds work.

To be clear: Heidegger himself knew this perfectly well (a friend of mine, much more knowledgeable about Heidegger and the world of Heideggerian scholarship than I am, once described the latter community as haunted by their inability to think anything that their master had not already thought). Heidegger knew the main etymological root of the word. He just doesn't want it. Iain Thompson tries to spin this in a positive way:



[Iain Thomson's Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge University Press 2005) 145]. But I think Heidegger knows his own etymology is eccentric and that he just doesn't care. I think he really believes truth is an unconcealing, and really doesn't think truth is an unforgetting—as far as I know, he delves no deeper into Unvergessenheit in his writings (I could be wrong). But this makes sense, since central to H.’s approach is the notion that there is a ‘there’ there, a Da that seins: something substantive that can be veiled and unveiled but can never simply fade away into oblivion in the way in which memories are liable. Terry Eagleton's merry dig at H. in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, where he lists a series of quotations about Dasein in such a way as to make it seem that Heidegger is talking about his own schlong, contains a germ of truth, howsoever ribald. There is something to-hand and graspable and, frankly, gendered about Heidegger's Dasein.

Can you imagine a man getting hold of his willy and exclaiming in surprise ‘good grief, I'd completely forgotten I had one of those!’ No. No you can't and I'm guessing that Heidegger rejects the notion of truth as ‘unforgetting’ for related reasons. As he insists in the passage quoted from Plato's Sophist at the top of this post, it is primarily things, πράγματα, that are unconcealed.*

[*There's a nest of problems associated with that etymology too, mind you: a πρᾶγμα (prâgma) is not a thing-y thing, like a table or a penis: it is a thing that is done, something accomplished, the word deriving from πρᾱ́σσω, prā́ssō, “I do”, which is in turn the direct etymological root of our English word practice. But maybe let's not get into that].

The idea intrigues me, nonetheless. I've always found the whole ‘truth is disclosure’ thing hard to grok, if I'm honest. I think I understand H.s point, but that's not to say that it feels right to me, exactly. On the other hand, the long tradition of critiquing ‘truth as correspondence’ is hard to dismiss (what I mean is: I understand why so many philosophers have issues with the correspondence theory of truth). But what might ‘truth as unforgetting’ or ‘truth as unforgottenness’ look like? Truth as that which we cannot forget, what cannot slip our mind without returning to it? Or Truth as something we choose to prioritize in our memories? What might a mnemonics of veracity look like?

I suppose it would, for one thing, thinking of aletheia like this would tend to relocate Truth from the world of things, veiled or otherwise, into the human mind, which is where memories live and sometimes die. That seems broadly right to me. After all, a line is not ‘true’ until a human being checks it, animals do not act with fidelity or infidelity, they merely act—truth in that sense is a human concern. And so on.

Defining truth as the stuff that isn't forgotten, or perhaps as the stuff which can't be forgotten, has some strange implications, though: it's going to imply that the big things, the traumatic things, are ‘truer’ than the small-things, the trivial things, the forgettable neither-here-nor-there gubbins. One might think that's the wrong way about, I suppose. Although perhaps not: a trauma, of the sort that one cannot forget howevermuch one might wish to, presumably marks that place where one's wishful-thinking has come painfully into collision with reality, where (we might say) the truth of Reality has stomped onto our fantasy version of it. Perhaps there's merit in viewing such painful states of mind as true because unforgettable.

If we want to insist that trivial and forgettable things can also be ‘true’ we may want to determine in what way that holds. I meet somebody at a social function, and they tell me their name, and we engage in smalltalk; and half an hour later I can't remember his name, and the next week I've forgotten I ever met him. In what sense was that encounter ever ‘true’? It's not to suggest it is valueless (the opposition is surely not ‘true’/‘worthless’), but it is to suggest, I think correctly, that truth matters, and one of the indices of that fact is that we tend not to forget the stuff that matters. (Or do we? I don't know. Maybe this is completely off-base?).

And there are other strange implications of thinking along these lines. So for example, how would a false memory figure in a metaphysics of truth-as-unforgottenness? As a flat contradiction in terms? As an expressive aporia to be conceptually navigated with care? False memory is believed by some to be a codifiable psychological or psychiatric syndrome (defined by Peter J. Freyd as ‘a condition in which a person's identity and relationships are affected by memories that are factually incorrect but that they strongly believe’)—although it's worth adding that ‘False Memory Syndrome’ is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and plenty of psychiatrists don't believe in it. What's not controversial, of course, is that human memory is not a gold-standard flawless record of reality, that it is prone to distortion and elision, to a process of narrativisation and tidying-up, that it is malleable and that it stretches and compresses as we access it. That surely doesn't sound like the stoic capital-T truth of the philosophers, or (indeed) of the scientists. But that also may be part of what makes it worthwhile thinking of truthfulness in these terms: not totally to relativize the concept of truth, or to go all Jesting Pilate, but to acknowledge the procedures by which a notional but spurious ‘gold standard’ of 100% accurate memorialistion of ‘reality’ is a chimera, the extent to which all memory always already involves processes like selection and narrativization, by way of making the case that truth itself also always already involves those processes.

And maybe I was proposing a false step, earlier, when I suggested that thinking of truth as unforgettingness means relocating it into the human mind. It would certainly accord more with an Ancient Greek ethos if we instead pondered what unforgettingness might mean in a social and political, rather than a personal, sense. It matters that we remember history, because the alternative, famously, is to be forced to relive it: which is to say, the unforgetting of history is a truth which, if we lose it, leads to a state of collective falsehood hospitable to all manner of preventable horrors. That sounds about right, I think. ‘Holocaust deniers’ (to take one example) are people who wish to replace a terrible collective truth with a more politically serviceable (to them) lie. In his essay on this subject, Adam Phillips notes that ‘what we are urged to remember is bound up with how we are being urged to live. The preferred life has its set of preferred memories’ [Phillips, ‘The Forgetting Museum’, Sides Effects (Penguin 2006), 131] and that's both right, I think, and an important consideration if we want to think about the truth. Then again, Phillips, more Freudian than I (though I'm pretty Freudian, if I'm honest) thinks both that we tend to forget trauma, or at least that we try to do so, and that the repressed always returns, which commits him to a model in which, on some profound level, forgetting becomes literally impossible, and we are, often neurotically and painfully, condemned to truth. I'm genuinely not sure about that. Is it right?
An obsession with memory blinds us to the abuses of memory and to the uses of forgetting. Of certain things we should be asking—and perhaps the Holocaust is one, if one among many—not how they should be remembered, but how they should be forgotten? [Phillips, ‘The Forgetting Museum’, 133]
Should we, though? Would that be truthful, in the sense I'm arguing here?
Our (modern) fear is that we won't get our forgetting right, or that forgetting is not possible; it may, of course, be a wish that atrocities cannot be forgotten: that we cannot bear very ourselves as creatures who actually forgot things. We tend to forget experiences that are too much for us, that are, in the reductive language of psychology, either too pleasurable or too painful. We equate the forgettable with the trivial or the unbearable; but by the same token we believe that it (the memory, the experience, the desire) is still there, somewhere, and capable of returning. And we have a place for the trivial where it is effectively disposed of (‘Remembering everything is a form of madness,’ one of the characters in Brian Friel's Translations says). There is haunting and there is discarding; and it is not always within our gift to decide which is which. And it is this, perhaps above all, that makes forcing people to remember—rather like forcing them to eat—at once so implausible and so morally problematic. [Phillips, 133]
I don't know, in this essay on the Holocaust, whether Phillips brackets ‘the trivial and the unbearable’ together in deliberate allusion to Arendt's banality of evil thesis, but it is suggestive. Nobody, I think, has ever declared that the truth must be comfortable; indeed, a certain lack of comfortableness may well be the badge truth wears to distinguish it from the cosiness of lying, and lying to one's self. Forcing somebody to eat if, say, they are on hunger strike, or because a psychological pathology has rendered them anorexic, may well be morally problematic, but it is hardly implausible, or arbitrary, in the way Phillips is suggesting here.

And I find myself thinking that the limitation of our memory, though it is clearly a practical necessity after the fashion of the line from Friel Phillips quotes, may also be a kind of moral and personal falling-away. If we could remember everything without going mad, as Coleridge, in one of the odder passages of the Biographia, insists will be the case after our deaths when we all go to heaven, then we would at least have a truer sense of how things were, and therefore are. In Borges's ‘Funes’ we have our fable on the horrors of perfect unforgetfulness, and it's a deservedly famous piece of writing. But there are also fables of the mendacity of our conscious elimination of memory, and they deserve to be as well known. The moral of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance, is that the costs of wilfully killing our memories far outweigh its immediate benefits, and that rings true to me. Dickens's Christmas novel The Haunted Man (1848) advances the same moral: Redlaw is plagued by unhappy memories, is offered a bargain by a ghostly alter-ego to select his bad memories and forget them all. But doing so plunges Redlaw into a, to him now baffling, angry misery. The forgetfulness, and the anger, spread to Redlaw's family and friends; and only at the story's restoration of memories to all is happiness restored. The book concludes with this deeply Dickensian moral: Lord keep my memory green.


I've always been intrigued by this little book by Dickens: by no means his most successful work, commercially or aesthetically, yet a fascinating story to have been written by a man who spent his whole life suppressing the public (though of course never the personal) ‘memory’ of his deprived childhood, his sufferings and abandonment in the Blacking Factory.

I suppose it means thinking of, as it might be, Alzheimer's Disease not just as a distressing illness, but as a kind of existential mendacity, a falling-away from the truth of full humanity: not by way of making an Erewhonian judgement on the sufferer, but in terms of the sorts of stories we tell ourselves about our humanity. It might also mean that we define ‘true love’ as that love in which we find ourselves unable to forget the other person, both in the sense that we find our thoughts constantly reverting to them, but also in the sense that we are unable to forget their other-personhood, that they are another person, distinct from us, whose alterity we must respect and with whom we must keep faith. ‘Is desiring,’ Phillips asks, in a different book, ‘a way of telling the truth?’ [Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Faber 1995), 26] to which I'm tempted to reply: how could it be anything else?

There's one other thing that occurs to me, in this context, and that has to do with dreams. It is liable to entail me, though, in a some lengthy and involved elaboration, and this post is already long enough to be getting on with, so I'll try and keep it short. In a nutshell, though, it's the idea I talk about in this post, that came from writing an essay on the idea of ‘prosthetic memory’ for Bas Groes's Memory Project volume last year. What I came to think was that, in addition to those two undeniable features of mental life, short-term memory and long-term memory, there is a third mode (as it were) of memory: dreams. I don't, it is important to stress, mean our memory of our dreams, the bits and pieces of half-recalled gubbins with which we wake up in the morning. Those are conscious memories of the dream, conscious short- or long-term memories depending on whether they stay with us or not, and so reducible to the first two kinds of memory. I mean the dreams themselves, whether or not they get translated into our two kinds of conscious memory. And I mean to treat dreams as a third mode by which the mind remembers stuff.
Long-term memory and short-term memory are, clearly, both actual features of the human mind, more or less rational and structured ways of sorting past events and states of mind into retrievable form. But it seems to me impossible to deny that dreams are also a way in which the mind 'remembers' stuff. Since it is not a rational, or retrievably sorted (except at a kind of second hand, where elements but never the totality of a dream are 'logged' in the conscious memory), it is possible to neglect this fact, but fact is nonetheless surely what it is. If dreams aren't a way of 'remembering' things, then I don't know what they are. But if they are, and given that they run on radically different lines to the sortable-retrievable logic of long and short term memory, then it is worth thinking about what this tells us about how dreams mean, how they factor into the being-in-the-world of human beings as examples of homo memorius. There is bound to be a bias towards researching memory as a function of the conscious mind, since that's the sort of memory that is amenable to data gathering and the testing of hypotheses. But we ought, surely, also to consider memory as a function of the subconscious mind.
One aspect of this would be to ponder the truthfulness, or otherwise, of dreams. Is the default state of our dreams, like the default state of our desires, necessarily true? And this takes us back to the Ancient world, to Homer and Vergil. Because, for those cultures, the truthfulness or mendacity of dreams, treated as prophesies, becomes very important. Here's how the end of Vergil's sixth book of the Aeneid ends, with Aeneas returning to the lands of life after his time in the chambers of the dead:
There are two gates of Sleep, one of which, they say,
Is made of horn and offers easy passage
To true visions; the other has a luminous, dense,
Ivory sheen, but through it, to the sky above,
The spirits of the dead send up false dreams.
Anchises, still guiding and discoursing,
Escorts his son and the Sibyl on their way
And lets them both out by the ivory gate. [1212-19; Heaney's translation]
The two gates are from Greek mythology: Vergil, here, is adopting an image from Homer's Odyssey 19:562. The seemingly-arbitrary distinction makes more sense in Greek, where there is a play upon the words linking κέρας, "horn" to κραίνω, "fulfil", and linking ἐλέφας, "ivory", and ἐλεφαίρομαι, "deceive". Hard to capture that in English, but hard too in Latin: horn is cornū, which means both horn and the crescent moon; ivory is elephantus, which word also means 'elephant'; though Vergil also uses the different word, eburna, which also means ivory. Nobody knows why Vergil brings his hero back to the real world via the ivory, not the horn, gate. It does rather imply that the Aeneas of the rest of the poem is some kind of a lie. Still:
Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera fertur
cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris,
altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto,
sed falsa ad caelum mittunt īnsomnia Mānēs.
Hīs ibi tum nātum Anchīsēs ūnāque Sibyllam
prōsequitur dictīs portāque ēmittit eburnā.
[Aeneid 6:893-8]
could be Englished as
There are two twinned gates of Sleep, of which one is made
of the moon's crescent horns, through which true shades exit easily;
the other gleams with the shine of polished elephantine-tusk,
but through this the spirit-sent dreams are all a phantom task.
So Anchises attends his son and the Sibyl,
dismisses them with these words through the gate of ivory.
Maybe elephant/all phantom is too cheesy a pun. My theory is that the crucial thing here is not the true shades/false dreams thing. It's the easy (facilis) passage of the one, and the implicit hard passage of the other. Facilis descensus Averno, remember. It's not that Aeneas is a false dream: it's that he is true and false, first off easily descending, like a moonbeam sliding down; and then elephantishly clambering back up, like Hannibal's war-beasts ascending the Alps, to his mortal skies. And truth itself, I suppose, can be a phantom that haunts our desire to forget, or an easy remembrance. True, dat.

4 comments:

  1. I love it when you do posts like this, Adam.

    About Heidegger: isn't this swerving away from truth-as-unforgetting necessary to his project of forgetting Socrates and remembering the pre-Socratics? If truth is unconcealment then it is not, as Socrates taught through Plato, anamnesis. (And if this is a look back to the pre-Socratic, might it not also be a sneaky look forward to the Christian notion of the apocalypse — the unveiling — of history, perhaps fitting for a thinker growing closer to a political movement which implicitly promised a kind of violent tearing away of history's veils?)

    And the relationship between dreams and memory is a fascinating question, one that I have thought about often, though badly, especially in the context of scientists' inability, so far, to understand exactly why animals sleep. They just know that animals who are deprived of sleep die. But there are increasingly strong suspicions that, for us humans anyway, sleep allows the stitching up, not of the raveled sleeve of care exactly, though perhaps also that, but the events and experiences of the day into a kind of patterned garment. (A coat of many colors? "Look, this dreamer cometh!") So perhaps there is something prophetic about that great scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude in which the people of Macondo suffer from an "insomnia plague" and gradually start forgetting everything, so that those who still remember hang signs on cows so people can find out what cows are called and what they are for, and eventually the biggest sign of all is hung over the Main Street of the town: GOD EXISTS.

    Surely this takes us back to Joyce, who was fascinated by the fact that what we remember of sleep and dreams is never and cannot be the experience itself. He wants the "nat language" (night-language, natural language, not-language) of "everynight life," but all he has is what he variously calls "murmeries," "mummeries," "maimeries," "mem'ry" — the latter almost there but truncated. The experience is always "leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia." "You wouldnt should as youd remesmer. I hypnot."

    Damn it, Roberts, look at the rabbit hole you've sent me down.

    I suggest that we collaborate on a book about all this. We should call it The Rememberment of Morpheus.

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  2. Alan: rabbit holes, is it? Oho ...

    "About Heidegger: isn't this swerving away from truth-as-unforgetting necessary to his project of forgetting Socrates and remembering the pre-Socratics? If truth is unconcealment then it is not, as Socrates taught through Plato, anamnesis. (And if this is a look back to the pre-Socratic, might it not also be a sneaky look forward to the Christian notion of the apocalypse — the unveiling — of history, perhaps fitting for a thinker growing closer to a political movement which implicitly promised a kind of violent tearing away of history's veils?)"

    Yes, that's well put I think. I mean, I'd always assumed Heidegger's beef with Socrates and the whole post-Socratic tradition was that it was just wrong, a wrong direction, so I suppose he wants to put it one side and start over, rather than 'forget' it. But the anamnesis point is very well made, and surely has something to do with the specific emphasis H. wants to put on his concept. I hadn't thought of that. And if I’m honest my larger ignorance of all the ins-and-outs of Heidegger, as opposed to the Stuff Everyone Knows About Him, makes me wary. Very wary. I flat don’t know, for instance, how much work has been done (lots I’d assume) on the intersection between H.’s radical ontology and his politics and the traditional and right-wing political and also the Christian contexts of his time. I daresay there’s loads.

    And the relationship between dreams and memory is a fascinating question, one that I have thought about often, though badly, especially in the context of scientists' inability, so far, to understand exactly why animals sleep. They just know that animals who are deprived of sleep die. But there are increasingly strong suspicions that, for us humans anyway, sleep allows the stitching up, not of the raveled sleeve of care exactly, though perhaps also that, but the events and experiences of the day into a kind of patterned garment. (A coat of many colors? "Look, this dreamer cometh!") So perhaps there is something prophetic about that great scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude in which the people of Macondo suffer from an "insomnia plague" and gradually start forgetting everything, so that those who still remember hang signs on cows so people can find out what cows are called and what they are for, and eventually the biggest sign of all is hung over the Main Street of the town: GOD EXISTS.


    The fact is that the dreaming life is basically inimical to the fundamental logic of proper scientific enquiry (not a phrase I intend in a demeaning way, that last, incidentally)—because it can’t be readily quantified, because all our knowledge of the content of dreams is ineluctably subjectivity and science prefers the objective. But you’re clearly right about the absolute necessity of REM sleep, and therefore the absolute necessity of the patterning of memories according to some (mostly occluded, but clearly real) logic.


    Surely this takes us back to Joyce, who was fascinated by the fact that what we remember of sleep and dreams is never and cannot be the experience itself. He wants the "nat language" (night-language, natural language, not-language) of "everynight life," but all he has is what he variously calls "murmeries," "mummeries," "maimeries," "mem'ry" — the latter almost there but truncated. The experience is always "leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia." "You wouldnt should as youd remesmer. I hypnot."


    Dammit, I’m going to have to go back to Finnegans Wake, aren’t I? I made a concerted attempt to read through the whole thing a couple of years ago, but ended up dipping and selecting and skimming through. Although that may not be a wholly terrible strategy for reading that impossible book, actually …

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  3. Incidentally: “I suggest that we collaborate on a book about all this. We should call it The Rememberment of Morpheus.”

    You’re joking, but I would genuinely be completely up for this. What a title!

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    Replies
    1. Maybe I'm not joking ... email to come (when I get all these papers graded, that is).

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