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Culture and Memory

Reminiscences and Symmetries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Britta Rupp-Eisenreich
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“I shall attempt the analysis of memory … because memory in some form is presupposed in almost all other knowledge.”

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921)

“Beginning with homo sapiens, the formation of an apparatus of social memory stands out as the foremost problem of human evolution.”

André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole (1965)

Meme, Mneme, Mnemosyne: two neologisms, one dating from 1976 and the other from 1904, and the mythical figure personifying Memory from the time of the Titans - a strange primordial deity that the imagination brought forth even before the time of mortal men began. Her name is all that survived through the ages, yet this fleeting presence among the gods was just as consequential as a major figure like Prometheus. Could she have been conceived of as an indispensable condition for human beings to usher in the reign of culture?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 180 , December 1997 , pp. 135 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966). On Mnemosyne, the reader is referred to Marcel Détienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris, 1995; first ed. 1967); see in particular the new preface "Retour sur la bouche de la Vérité," pp. 5-31; tr. Janet Lloyd, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996).

2. Anon., Ad Herrenium, 86-82 B.C., cited by F. A. Yates, FRENCH TITLE etc., p. 18.

3. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, New York, 1989; 1st ed., 1976), pp. 192-193.

4. Dawkins, (see note 3 above), pp. 322-323.

5. Dan Sperber, La Contagion desidées. Théorie naturaliste de la culture (Paris, 1996), pp. 46 and 141.

6. Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, vol. 14, (1991, 19th ed.); see also The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 9, 1989; Le Trésor de la Langue française, Vol. 11 (1985) records the normalization of the term "mnemic" by citing Sigmund Freud's Abrégé de la psychanalyse" in which the expression "traces of memory" Erinnerungsreste) is translated by "restes mnémiques" or mnemic remains.

7. The immediate interest generated by Semon's theory is manifested in Meyers grosses Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 14 (1906, 6th ed.), p. 4.

8. Ewald Hering, Ueber das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Vienna, 1870), translated into English by the editor of the American monist league (Chicago, 1895): On Memory and the Specific Energies of the Ner vous System (an address delivered before the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 1870).

9. Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen un das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Physischen zum Psychischen (Jena, 1886); Contributions of the Analysis of Sensa tions, trans. C. M. Williams (Chicago, 1887).

10. It is worth noting that the posthumous Essay on Instinct was recently pub lished in French a volume edited by Patrick Tort, Pour Darwin (Paris, 1997), pp. 247-274.

11. Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens (Leipzig, 1904; 3rd ed. 1911) and Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Organempfindungen (Leipzig, 1909; 2nd ed. 1922).

12. Richard Semon, Das Problem der Vererbung erworbener Eigenschaften (Leipzig, 1912).

13. August Weismann, "Semons Mneme und die Vererbung erworbener Eigen schaften," Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 3 (1906); Heinrich Ernst Ziegler, Die Vererbungslehre in der Biologie und in der Soziologie. Ein Lehrbuch der naturwissenschaftlichen Vererbungslehre und ihrer Anwendungen auf den Gebieten der Medizin, der Genealogie und der Politik (Iena, 1918), pp. 163-165.

14. Meyers grosses Konversationslexikon (1928, 7th ed.).

15. Francis Darwin, "Lectures on the Physiology of Movement in Plants. 1. Asso ciated Stimuli," The New Phytologist 5 (9) (1906); M. M. Hartog, Problems of Life and Reproduction (London, 1913), p. 275.

16. Richard Semon, "Die Fussohle des Menschen," Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie (1913). Hertwig refers to this in his synthetic work Das Werden der Organismen (Iena, 1916), p. 607.

17. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London and New York, 1921).

18. Ernst Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum, Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig, 1905).

19. Felix Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. 1. Zur Sprache und zur Psycholo gie, chapter "Memory," pp. 598-600 (Stuttgart, 1906; reprinted Frankfurt, 1982).

20. Samuel Bogoch, Biochemistry of Memory with an Inquiry into the Function of the Brain (New York, London, Toronto, 1968), p. 194.

21. Eugen Bleuler, "Die Mneme als Grundlage des Lebens und der Psyche," Die Naturwissenschaften (1933), p. 21; "Mnemistiche Biologie und Psychologie," Psychiatrisch-neurologische Wochenschrift (1935), p. 37.

22. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Vogler, eds., Neue Anthopologie. 1. Biologische Anthropologie (Munich, 1972), p. XXXIII. The ambitious idea of seeking to integrate the different branches of anthropology in a unified science did not succeed.

23. A. Remane, "Konsequenzen der Evolutionsforschung," in Gadamer and Vogler, Neue Anthropologie, p. 321.

24. Hans-Joachim Flechtner, Memoria und Mneme, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1974-1979): Gedächtnis und Lernen in psychologischer Sicht (1974); Biologie des Lernens (1976); Das Gedächnis-ein neues psychophysisches Konzept, with an introduction by Detlev Ploog (1979).

25. Auguste Forel, "La mnème dans la schizophrénie," Annales médicopsy chologiques (1926) 2, p. 275.

26. August Forel, review in Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie 3 (1905). As we have seen, this journal also published Weismann's attacks on this subject.

27. August Forel, review in the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie 5 (1905), a journal in which Forel also placed a note in 1919 in memory of Semon (no pun intended), as he did in the journal of Freemasonry Sonnenstrahlen.

28. Auguste Forel, Les Fourmis de la Suisse… (1873; 2nd ed., 1920); Auguste Forel, Le monde social des Fourmis comparé à celui de l'Homme, 5 vols. (Geneva, 19211923); tr. C. K. Ogden, The Social World of the Ants Compared with That of Man (London, New York, 1928), 2 vols.

29. Anne Marie Wettley, August Forel. Ein Arztleben im Zweispalt seiner Zeit (Salzburg, 1953); also see the entry on Forel in Patrick Tort, ed., Dictionnaire du Darwinisme et de l'Evolution (Paris, 1996), pp. 1705-1710.

30. August Forel, Das Sinnesleben der Insekten. Eine Sammlung von experimentellen und kritischen Studien über Insektenpsychologie (Munich, 1910), pp. IX-X. This collection of texts was written in French between 1878 and 1908; republished and revised, it was translated by Maria Semon, Richard's wife, who also translated essays by Charles Darwin in 1842 and 1844, which her son Francis published in 1909. Maria Semon also translated Lloyd Morgan, who was him self the publisher of G. J. Romanes, whose approach to animal psychology, positing a gradual increase in complexity that could eliminate the frontier between instinct and intelligence, would warrant a comparison with the work of Semon and Forel. Forel also cites Sir John Lubbock, Darwin's neighbor and friend, who was as well known for his studies in prehistory and his theories on the origin of civilization as he was for his pioneering role in the observa tion and the interpretation of the social life of insects: the connection between Lubbock and Forel merits exploration. In English, see August Forel, The Senses of Insects, tr. MacLeod Yearsley (London, 1908).

31. Auguste Forel, Homme et Fourmi. Comparison de la société des fourmis à celle de l'Homme. Programme humain praticable (Lausanne, 1923), pp. 5-11; Auguste Forel, Der Weg zur Kultur (Vienna-Leipzig, 1924); this publication contains the "cultural program" sent to President Wilson in 1914 under the title "The United States of the Globe.”

32. Auguste Forel, op. cit., 1923, pp. 23-38; and op. cit., 1924, pp. 9-14 and 117-120.

33. André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964-65). See in par ticular vol. 2 for the chapter "La libération de la mémoire." Leaving aside the entomologist's obsolete vocabulary, it would be interesting to analyze the cor respondences between Forel and Leroi-Gourhan.

34. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Frankfurt, 1972). This text (first published in London in 1948) was written in 1930.

35. On "diffusionism," see my article in the Dictionnaire du Darwinism et de l'Evo lution, pp. 1205-1215.

36. Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981), pp. 1-4.

37. Ibid., p. 7.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., p. 27.

40. Jean-Luc Jamard, "L'évolutionnisme anthropologique est-il un péché?", in Patrick Tort, ed., Darwinisme et société (Paris, 1992), p. 645; Tim Ingold, Evolu tion and Social Life (Cambridge, 1986), p. 366. Note that William James was in direct contact with Ernst Mach, a connection that could bring us back full circle to the mneme.

41. Lumsden and Wilson, (see note 37 above), p. 30.

42. Dawkins, (see note 3 above), p. 189.

43. Ibid., pp. 296-97, pp. 322-323 and passim.

44. Ibid., p. 201.

45. Ibid., p. 11.