La freccia e il cerchio
anno 2, numero 2, 2011
pp. 54-56

Giuseppe Gembillo
Memory as a limit, memory as a field

   I can’t remember. Terrible statement, both when uttered by an individual and when it involves the human race. Forgetting, in fact, means deleting from existence; it means removing. The forgotten doesn’t exist; it is completely forgotten, it is covered by darkness. For this reason, at all levels, memory represents and recalls the events in their various manifestations and in the different ways to save them from oblivion. That’s why the term memory refers to a multiplicity of things not only different but also qualitatively opposing. Memory is remembering intensely lived emotions; memory is the rational reconstruction of the events that we believe, after a conscious selection, more important; memory is the hardware of a computer that collects and preserves what stacked up and assembled by a programmer which brings together notions and different news for specific purposes. Our culture has always been well aware of the importance of such ideas. Indeed, the awareness itself of the importance of memorization has brought the western culture to become the undisputed worldwide leader, from the birth of the Greek culture to nowadays, and it has produced a tradition founded on storing data that have formed the basis for all further developments. In a certain sense, therefore, the generalized and critic cult of memory has been the boundary line between the different cultures and what each one of them has been able to build. But this line has emerged even within each culture, its genesis and its developments. To corroborate such affirmations (and among the lots of possible examples), it seems sufficient to recall what Giambattista Vico argues in the dipintura put before the Scienza Nuova in order to to anticipate, to explain and to make more understandable the content. In such a premise, Vico put the statue of Homer so that it appears as emerging from deep darkness that make impenetrable in space and time everything that happened before him. In other words, according to Vico, Homer was not only the first poet but also the first historian of the West, and he represents the limit beyond which our memory becomes empty, sinking and losing itself in the deepest darkness. In this way, the founder of Historicism made us aware of how much we are what we remember; he told us that our individual and collective identity coincides with the knowledge we have of it. Such a consideration, is linked with the revolutionary gnoseological principle Vico enunciated, according to which you can know only what you can do. If it is possible to apply this statement to man, it means that he can only truly understand its own history, the history he made and the one he is able to reconstruct through the collective and individual memory, or rather, through the evidences and the memories it has left behind himself and that are still able to communicate something. About such considerations, Benedetto Croce, ideally preventing a possible objection of the historiographical skepticism, said: if a doubter asks the historian «how can you be sure that all that you tell is really happened?», the entire human race and not only the historian will answer proud and sure: I remember it! But going beyond these passionate considerations, it’s important to stress how Giambattista Vico, with its exhortations in favour of a Scienza Nuova, represented a decisive turning point in the way of being and of thinking of the West world. Since then, man has gradually acquired, as Gadamer noted in the late twentieth century, a precise «historical consciousness»; man has known himself as an historical being and he has searched for his own memories with systematic awareness. Since then, the reconstruction of the past through memory has been no longer (as it was brilliantly told), only an emotional research of lost time, but a deep and rational rethinking of what we have been and of what, therefore, we are now. Indeed, we realized how is necessary to add to the essential emotional basis (from which memory emerges) the critical thinking which is able to distinguish what has been imagined from what really happened. However, this result has been reached after a long struggle, effectively unfinished yet. The dominant belief, in fact, still suffers from the forma mentis proposed by classical science and its philosophy which, even if both inspired by the theoretical Plato and by the anamnesis, invited to disown the past or, if we want to be more precise, they invited to forget it. Take for instance Galilei: though beautifully using the argumentative Aristotelian logics and though using the Pythagorean-Platonic assumption according to which the internal structure of the world is mathematical, however, he proposed to forget all previous philosophy and to start again, applying the new experimental method. He asked to forget all the efforts mankind had done to make a rational sense of its being in the world. He exhorted to confine memory only in the emotional and irrational.
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