Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

It was Bergson who first attempted to distinguish “habit memory” from “image memory.” By the latter he meant any form of representation of past experience, typically via visualization; it is what we normally term “recollection.” Before Bergson made the pointed suggestion that there are at least two fundamental forms of memory, it had been widely assumed by philosophers and psychologists alike that there is only one basic kind of remembering, namely, recollecting. This was the case whether recollection is conceived in a transpersonal setting (as by Plato, who made it essential to all eidetic knowledge) or in a strictly personal context (which is how we tend to think of it today). Either way, recollection is considered to be reproductive in operation, proceeding by isomorphism — whether this be an isomorphism between dianoetic diagrams in the soul and the Forms, or between “ideas” that resemble “impressions,” or between mind and its own past being. The premise at work throughout this redoubtable tradition is that remembering, if it is to work at all, must replicate past events in an explicitly representational format. These events in turn make up the life history of the Individual rememberer (this holds true even for Plato insofar as the history of a given soul includes episodes of viewing the Forms in a previous life).