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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Philosophers have regarded memory of the events of one's own past, which I will call experiential memory, as importantly personal and have written with conviction about the value of personal memory. Annette Baier writes: “Out of a large range of acts, attitudes, and postures … intending and remembering have a central role to play in any adequate philosophy of mind …. Both intentions and memories are, in a special way, personal.” Mary Warnock writes that while all creatures learn from experience and thus have memory, “[h]umans have another capacity which is to reflect on their lives and histories. This is the kind of memory that must be thought of as mental, not physical, for it must be experienced, and experienced privately within the mind of each one of us. I cannot have your memory.”
In a tradition of theorizing about memory deriving from Locke, we value experiential memory as fundamental to developing a sense of self as unified and continuous and to developing moral capacities for accountability and self-knowledge. What I find particularly interesting in Warnock's description of memory is the forceful linking of value to uniqueness through reference to what cannot be shared.
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4 One can understand someone's past as representative of the life of a group without that person so understanding their own past.
5 Washington Coalition for Comfort Women, ‘Comfort Women History: Chronology of Dates and Events,’ http://www.comfortwomen.org/chronology.htm (1998).
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10 For a comprehensive overview, see Acklsberg, M. and Shanley, M. ‘Privacy, Publicity, and Power: A Feminist Rethinking of the Public-Private Distinction,’ in Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Hirschmann, N. and Stefano, C. Di (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 217Google Scholar: “Feminists have explored the ways the distinction [between public and private) obscures the exercise of power within the so-called private realm, masks the maleness of the public realm, and ignores the way the publicprivate distinction itself is a social construction that reflects the exercise of power and the allocation of resources in both realms.“
11 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 4Google Scholar.
12 In 1994, in DSM IV, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) was changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I use the older terminology in this paper as I do not discuss the disorder but merely refer to some of Hacking's remarks about it.
13 I am indebted to Andrew Brook's careful description of DID: ‘The Soul Strikes Back! Comments on Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul,’ presented at the Canadian Philosophical Asssociation, Brock University, St. Catharine's, Ontario, May 1996.
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15 Hacking, characterizes himself as “skeptical, analytical, and constructionalist.” Rewriting the Soul, 3Google Scholar.
16 Hacking, prefers to speak of our redescribing rather than reinterpreting the past, but will accept the latter. Rewriting the Soul, 247Google Scholar. I prefer “reinterpretation” to “redescription” because of a concern about philosophical models of memory that I raise at the end of the paper.
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27 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 255Google Scholar. See also Hacking, 17: “My very neutrality makes me cautious about even the name of our topic. Names organize our thoughts.“
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32 For some interesting discussion of the connection between responsibility and retrospective evaluation, see Card, C.The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), chap. 2Google Scholar.
33 Even if one were to agree with Hacking that a diagnosis of MPD has a tendency to encourage some of the ethical concerns he raises, given the reported incident rate of child sexual abuse, one would still need an account of why most women who understand their pasts as containing this harm are not properly understanding their pasts.
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39 Many writers have discussed the difficulty of representing the Holocaust and some have explicitly raised the question of whether the Holocaust can find a place in collective memory. But Hacking is not the only writer to choose this example as exemplifying collective memory in order to frame investigation of women's memories of abuse. In Searching for Memory, memory scientist Daniel Schacter, similarly motivated to write a book partly in response to women's memories of abuse, finds it natural to map the terrain of contemporary memory debate by first referring to an attempt of revisionist groups to “recast society's collective memory of the Holocaust” (p. 8). Reference to the memories of Holocaust survivors as cases of traumatized memory in feminist discussions have outraged many writers who see this as an attempt to appropriate serious and uncontested examples of traumatic harm in order to bootstrap women's memories into a weighty moral category. But I am also disturbed that these memories are the sole representatives of collective memory in Hacking's account, as I take part of the implied contrast to be the seriousness of such memories as compared to women's memories. There is a credibility and authority to shared accounts of the past emphasized by this example. For Hacking, the politics of personal memory has none of this credibility. He refers to it as a “brouhaha.“
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41 For an analysis and critique of standard ways of thinking about communal memory, see Connerton, P.How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
42 Counter memory can take the form of men using December 6 as an occasion to remember aspects of their relations with women. David Lees, for example, reflects at a December meeting of Metro Men Against Violence (Toronto): “I sat in the back row trying to stay in the shadows and wondering what I could say …. that twice I have struck a woman in each case to keep her from striking me; that my truly vicious gift for silence and distance was taught to me by my mother. ‘Domestic violence'presents itself to me as an unfaded, 30-year-old image of a man standing in a kitchen with blood from a hammer blow pouring down his face, asking a woman to be more reasonable” (The War Against Men,’ Toronto Life 26:18 [1992): 46-7). In a recent article in a Halifax student newspaper, Stephen Brown wrote: “I am not going to feel guilty anymore that I used my virginity on the anniversary of Marc Lepine's murder of fourteen women at Montreal Polytechnique …. I am not going to feel guilty anymore that I have been with different women in different ways …. I am not going to feel guilty anymore that each of them was raped before and after me- because I did not rape them. I am not going to feel guilty anymore that I did use them because they did use me. That's what it's all about, right?” ('Take Back the Bullshit,’ Picaro [September 29, 1998): 9).
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47 For example, the efficiency of assimilating native peoples to colonial cultures by placing native children in residential schools also depends on the vulnerability of children as young rememberers.
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59 For a version of this view as supported by contemporary memory science, see Schacter, Searching for Memory, 71Google Scholar.
60 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 254Google Scholar.
61 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 247Google Scholar.
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63 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 257Google Scholar.
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65 I am grateful to Andrew Brook and especially Jan Sutherland for stimulating and helpful conversations about Hacking's work.