For those of us who, like one of the author’s boys, are curious about “[w]here do our memories go when we lose them?” it would be a joy to read Memory and the Self  (2016). The book is a multidisciplinary enquiry concerning the relation between the memory and the self. Memory, despite its inaccuracies and deficiencies, has an indispensable role in the constitution of the (autobiographical) self. Almost all the other elements of the book are mentioned in the title. That is to say, Rowlands relied on the resources of the phenomenological tradition (works of Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Proust, etc.) and occasionally refers to the relevant scientific literature. The book is also somewhat autobiographical, not only because it is the autobiographical self (say, in contrast to the metaphysical self) that is put in its centre, but also because Rowlands unreservedly invokes introspection and scenes from his history to cement his thesis. Owing to the multidisciplinary nature of the book, Rowlands discusses the ideas (for want of a better word) generally enough to make them available to a wide audience. The arguments of the book begin with platitudes and familiar dichotomies, e.g., dichotomies between personal and phenomenal unities, causal and associative processes, autobiographical and non-autobiographical memories, awareness of and awareness with, affective and embodied, procedural and declarative memories, etc. Rowlands masterfully develops these elementary remarks into engaging philosophical discussions as regards the self and its presence in the memories. For example, he begins from the rather elementary distinction between the act and the content of memory, to attend to the rather engaging question of the fate of the act of the memory after the departure of its content (8). The upshot of the discussion is that the content of the memory could be lost or retained, but Rowlands seeks to substantiate the point that, either way, the act of remembering can shape us in ways just as significant as the content of memory (13).

          Rowlands takes great pain to overcome the prejudice as regards the privileging the content of remembering over the act of remembering, in the way of substantiating his insight. After providing a detailed account of different kinds of memories, e.g., declarative, semantic, autobiographical, episodic, etc., (chapter 2), Rowlands focuses on the intertwinement of the experiential/episodic memory and the self. The episodic memories are weakly autobiographical, and they are context-sensitive, in the sense that they include deployment of the recalled information is a function of the context in which the information was first acquired (42). The episodic memories implicate the person who possesses them in their mode of presentation, without including the person as their intentional object.  The modes of representation are introduced to explain the individuation of the intentional states (chapter 9). 

Rilkean memories emerge out of the episodic memories and possess experiential characteristics. But they are neither episodic nor semantics (despite the assumption that their content is sculpted out of the episodes remembered), neither procedural nor declarative. They are not Freudian either (65-70). Every act of remembering can become a Rilkean memory through losing its content. The concept is inspired by a novel of Rainer Maria Rilke. To the extent that they could be characterised at all in non-metaphorical terms, they are involuntary autobiographical memories that could be specified by bodily and behavioral dispositions. There are embodied Rilkean memories, such as the funny gait of a runner with a forgotten knee injury is the memory of former knee pain. Then again, there are affective Rilkean memories, which involve sensations, feelings, and modes, and are deeply embedded in the environment (60). Both types of the Rilkean memory contribute to the style-based identification of the idiosyncratic characteristics of a person. Rowlands improvises the notion of Rilkean memory to show how the memory could underlie the self, despite memory’s natural deficiencies and endemic inaccuracy. It is, after all, the idiosyncratic inaccuracies of the memories that bestow upon every self its personal characteristics, or to borrow a term of literary studies, its style. Accordingly, Rowlands argues that “[t]he presence of self in memory is a necessary condition of a memory counting as episodic”, and “[t]he inseparability of content and act of remembering is a necessary condition of the presence of self in memory.” (152).

           The generation of the autobiographical self depends on the memories. Obviously, forgetfulness and other forms of memory loss could cause problems for this theory of the self. However, Rowlands wants to claim that although forgetting is a problem for a memory-based version of metaphysical self, it has no bearing on the autobiographical self, which is based on the Rilkean memory (chapter 5). Rowlands argues that forgetting could even play a positive role in the constitution of the autobiographical self. This is because forgetting could be motivated and purposeful, say when remembering is useless or pernicious. It has been claimed that the passive positive forgetting that is definitive of Rilkean memory have a role in the constitution of the autobiographical self. Each one of use forgets the parts of the past that she/he deems as irrelevant in her/his idiosyncratic ways. There is a close relation between the style of the person and the facts that she/he wants to forget.

          Rowlands’ view is quite innovative and original, and he skillfully combines his views on phenomenology, literary studies, philosophy of mind, and the empirical psychology. That being said, I have to add that Rowlands’ main thesis (i.e., Rilkean memory) has not been adequately supplemented by the scientific resources. Of course, Rowlands mentioned the neuronal underpinning of the forgetting that is explicable on the basis of the disruption of the encoding by an active inhibitory control mechanism. But there is no saying that these neuronal mechanisms could be subsumed under the passive and positive mode of the Rilkean memory.  Similarly, in chapter 6, Rowlands remarks that the inaccuracy of the memories was grounded in the neurological studies of flashbulb memories and neurobiology of remembering. But once more, it is not quite clear that the neurological studies (Nader 2003; Neisser et al. 1996; Neisser and Harsch 2017) that are referred to by Rowlands contribute to the confirmation of his thesis. That is to say, I do not think the neuronal processes that are referred to by Rowlands need to be subsumed under the general category of Rilkean memory. I can understand that Rilkean memory is a theoretical concept that does not need to be confirmed by experiments.  This theoretical concept has to be embraced in view of its explanatory virtue (73). The Rilkean memory is supposed to explain how the autobiographical self is held together despite the deficiencies of the content of the memory (148). However, at time one may doubt that the Rilkean memory is well-defined enough to underlay the best explanation of the unity and identity of the person. Application of phenomenological methods and literary notions enhance the expressive power of Rowlands’ theory only at the cost of adding to the complexity of the theory. It is not my intent to suggest that Rowland’s theory is groundless or unattractive. But the book does not do its best to cement the viability of the idea “Rilkean memory” before applying it in the way of explaining the identity and unity of the self. For all that, Memory and the Self is a recommendable book, on account of Rowland’s original philosophical views, as well as his lively literary style.

References

Nader, Karim. 2003. “Memory Traces Unbound.” Trends in Neurosciences 26 (2): 65–72. doi:10.1016/S0166-2236(02)00042-5.

Neisser, Ulric, and Nicole Harsch. 2017. “Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger.” In Affect and Accuracy in Recall, edited by Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser, 9–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Accessed March 21. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511664069.003.

Neisser, Ulric, E Winograd, E T Bergman, C A Schreiber, S E Palmer, and M S Weldon. 1996. “Remembering the Earthquake: Direct Experience vs. Hearing the News.” Memory 4 (4): 337–58. doi:10.1080/096582196388898.

Rowlands, Mark. 2016. Memory and the Self : Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190241469.001.0001.

© 2017 Majid Davoody Beni

Majid Davoody Beni, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the Amirkabir University of Technology. Among other thinks, he recently has published “Structural Realist Account of the Self” (2016) in Synthese.