Table Of ContentRemembering
Studies in Continental Thought
GENERAL EDITOR
John Sallis
CONSULTING EDITORS
Robert Bernasconi William L. McBride
Rudolph Bernet ]. N. Mohanty
John D. Caputo Mary Rawlinson
David Carr Tom Rockmore
EdwardS. Casey Calvin 0. Schrag
Hubert Dreyfus f Reiner Schiirmann
Don Ihde Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell Thomas Sheehan
Lenore Langsdoif Robert Sokolowski
Alphonso Lingis Bruce W Wilshire
David Wood
REMEMBERING
A Phenomenological Study
Second Edition
EDWARD S. CASEY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
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© 1987 and 2000 by EdwardS. Casey
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in
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The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casey, EdwardS., date
Remembering : a phenomenological study I Edward S. Casey. -2nd ed.
p. em. - (Studies in Continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33789-5 (alk. paper)-ISBN 0-253-21412-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
l. Memory (Philosophy) 2. Phenomenology.
I. Title. II. Series.
BD181.7 .C33 2000
128'.3-dc21
00-057231
1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00
To The Memory of
My Parents
Catherine ] . Casey Marlin S. Casey
And in Remembrance of
the Vanished World of
My Grandparents
Daisy Hoffman ] ohntz ] ohn Edward ] ohntz
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix
PREFACE xix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii
INTRODUCTION Remembering Forgotten:
The Amnesia of Anamnesis 1
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
I First Forays 20
II Eidetic Features 37
III Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase 48
IV Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase 65
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
PROLOGUE 88
V Reminding 90
VI Reminiscing 104
VII Recognizing 122
CODA 141
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
PROLOGUE 144
VIII Body Memory 146
IX Place Memory 181
X Commemoration 216
CoDA 258
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
XI The Thick Autonomy of Memory 262
XII Freedom in Remembering 288
NOTES 315
INDEX 358
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Rethinking Remembering
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
From the start, I intended Remembering to be a companion volume to my
earlier book Imagining, and it is gratifying to witness new editions of both books
now appearing at the same time. This fortuitous event will underline what the
two texts have in common: above all, a shared phenomenological orientation, a
commitment to a close and detailed description of the various forms and direc
tions taken by each act. The close comparison of imagining and remembering
is hardly new; the two acts have been linked ever since Aristotle's inaugural
discussion of human mental activity. Hobbes, Hume, and Kant expressly yoked
them together as alternative but complementary fates of perception-its
epistemic extension vis-a-vis past episodes (memory) or future happenings
(imagination).
Although it is plausible to pair the two acts in this and other ways, by 1977-
a year after the publication of Imagining and a decade before the appearance of
Remembering-! had begun to discover basic differences between them that
disallowed any claim (such as Hume's) that they are both offshoots of percep
tion, its direct or indirect"c opy." In an essay of that same year entitled "Imagin
ing and Remembering" I maintained that despite their intimate collusion on
many fronts (e.g., in the activity of the historian, in dreams, and in time-con
sciousness) they remain as distinct from each other as perception is from both.
They differ from each other with regard to such fundamental things as the de
gree of familiarity they entail, their positing of content as existing or not, and
their comparative corrigibility.1
This is not to deny that the two acts are also significantly similar. Not only is
neither parasitic on perception, but each is at once free and autonomous. Both
submit to what I call "intentional analysis," according to which each exhibits
certain comparable modes of operation (e.g., imagining or remembering that
something is the case; imagining or remembering how to do something); and
each features a "presentation" that has both a specific content and a spatia
temporal world-frame, along with a characteristic mode of givenness. Never
theless, even at this bare beginning level, important differences emerge. The
autonomy of imagining is "thin," that of remembering "thick." Where inten
tional analysis uncovers only three basic act-forms of imagining, it detects many
more kinds of remembering: e.g., primary and secondary, remembering to-do
something, remembering on-the-occasion-of some event, remembering-as (i.e.,
my friend as depressed), remembering-what (e.g., what Burlington is like), et
cetera. Rather than the specific content of what we remember being simply
surrounded by a mere "margin" of indeterminacy as in the case of imagining, an
entire atmosphere permeates what we remember. In remembering, there is a
tenuous but consistently felt "self-presence" of the rememberer that inheres in
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