A Single Memory
Christopher Jude McCarroll (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
If you could hold on to just a single memory, just one episode from your personal past, what would it be? Indeed, imagine that it is this memory that you would take into the afterlife, a single recollection that you would relive over and over for eternity. Which memory would you take with you? This fascinating question lies at the heart of the beautiful Japanese film After Life. It is a film that explores the significance of memory in our lives, and the kinds of memories that people value and want to hold close.
We may not believe in such an afterlife, but even if we disagree with the starting premise of the film, it also works as a philosophical thought experiment.
If your life were reduced to just one experience retained in episodic memory, what would you like it to be?
Reflecting on this question, I see how difficult it is to choose. There are so many individual experiences I value, so many memories of people I hold dear. The decision is dizzying.
This struggle to settle on a single memory is also reflected in the film. Some characters are stuck in the way station for processing the newly deceased, unable to choose, destined to become counsellors aiding others in their difficult mnemic decision. In the end, though, everyone must choose a single memory or remain in limbo forever. How might you make the decision? What kind of memory might you want to keep?
There are two fascinating approaches to memory in the philosophical literature that might help us answer these questions. These approaches offer ways of understanding the value remembering has in our lives.
According to Marya Schechtman, certain memories are particularly important in our lives, and we evoke them just for the sake of recollecting them. These are memories that we view as cherished possessions. Such memories are treasured memories—emotionally-laden recollections of important experiences in our personal pasts.
Treasured memories are a species of nostalgia with a complex mix of affective elements. They are frequently memories of bittersweet episodes that are imbued with personal meaning and provide us with a sense of identity through time. In terms of their content, treasured memories can often be about culturally recognized landmarks in life—events such as weddings, graduations, and the like. But they can also be memories of people or places, objects or artefacts that simply matter to us, or represent something meaningful for us.
Such treasured memories seem to be the kind of recollections that many of the characters in After Life choose to hold on to. There is a teenager who, at first, picks a memory of visiting Disneyland, and going for a ride on Splash Mountain with her friends. Being informed of the fact that many teenage girls have chosen similar experiences, she changes her mind and opts for something more original, more related to her own identity. The memory she settles on is more personal and meaningful—the feeling of lying on her mother’s lap, and the deep sense of familiarity that accompanied this experience.
In fact, to get a sense of the kinds of memories that ordinary people might value, the director of After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda, asked more than 500 people to recollect the one experience they would take with them into such an afterlife. Kore-eda was intrigued by how many people chose memories of difficult or upsetting experiences. Such memories seem to echo with the bittersweet quality of many treasured memories.
Another possibility is that the memory itself has a particular quality when we recall it, which we might want to relive over and over. Building on John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience, André Sant’Anna has recently suggested that certain instances of remembering can be experienced aesthetically.
On this Deweyan approach, aesthetic experiences are not restricted to our engagement with artistic artefacts. Even everyday activities, such as conversing with friends or cooking a meal, or noticing the natural environment, can be sources of aesthetic experience. We may undergo an aesthetic experience simply by watching the way the sunlight dapples through the leaves of a tree.
If an experience, whether it be about a work of art or an ordinary aspect of our environment, has a particular cumulative and progressive—and hence narrative—structure, which generates tensions and resolutions, it can be experienced aesthetically. On this view, some instances of remembering share this special structure and can be experienced aesthetically, and the value they have lies in their hedonic or pleasurable character.
Again, some of the memories depicted in After Life seem to resonate with this idea of aesthetic remembering. An old woman decides to hold on to a memory of cherry blossoms being carried by the breeze. An old man remembers the feeling of a warm breeze on his face when he was a boy riding the tram to school. The value of such memories seems to lie in a certain aesthetic character of the recollections, in the recollection of simple sensuous pleasures.
I think both treasured memories and aesthetic remembering are the kinds of memory I would like to hold on to. What I want to explore here are ways in which these mnemic phenomena might be connected.
The idea that treasured memories and aesthetic remembering might interrelate is already something that André has been thinking about; another reason, he thinks, we might treasure memories is for the pleasure they give us when we recall them.
This sounds right to me. But what I want to highlight are some of the ways in which the two phenomena seem to share a similar structure. Perhaps by virtue of this shared structure both treasured memories and memories that involve aesthetic experiences are connected. The hedonic value of remembering might not be a separate reason why we treasure memories, but might fall out of the structure of such treasured recollections in much the same way as memories with an aesthetic character.
One first point of similarity is that both kinds of memories are autobiographical. Not only are they memories of experiences in our personal past, both treasured memories and aesthetic remembering can involve memories of a more general kind, such as lifetime periods or an event that is repeated multiple times.
Another interesting connection is that both mnemic phenomena seem to have intrinsic value. Rather than being put to some practical purpose, we recall them simply for the sake of bringing them to mind. Recalling the past is done for its own sake.
The two types of memories also seem to involve a complex mix of past and present perspectives. It is this multiperspectival nature of the recollection that provides aesthetic remembering with the narrative structure that captures the cumulative and progressive aspect inherent to Deweyan experiences. And such a plurality of points of view, in which our memories are narrativized, also seems to structure many treasured memories.
This structure, with perspectives internal and external to the narrative, is important for generating the tension and resolution that Dewey thought important for aesthetic experiences. But perhaps this kind of tension and subsequent resolution is found in many treasured memories too. They are, after all, frequently bittersweet memories, with layers of positive and negative affect afforded by past and present perspectives.
Of course, there are differences between these mnemic phenomena. For one, treasured memories can be about simple objects or people, and so may in some cases lack the kind of cumulative and progressive structure inherent to aesthetic remembering.
Another point of difference is that treasured memories play a crucial role in maintaining a sense of identity over time. This is not a feature that is ascribed to aesthetic remembering. Nonetheless, work in everyday aesthetics, in which our aesthetic engagement with ordinary artefacts and the environment is brought to the fore, links such aesthetic experiences to the formation of personal identity.
Given this connection between everyday aesthetic experiences and identity, perhaps aesthetic remembering might also be importantly connected to our sense of continuity in some of the ways that treasured memories are.
Whatever the precise ways in which treasured memories and memories with an aesthetic character are connected or diverge, both approaches provide important answers to the question of the value that memory might have in our lives. Indeed, such recollections, which seem to have intrinsic value, resonate with the kinds of memories that the characters in After Life don’t want to let go of.
And so, with these ideas about the particular value that memory might hold for us in place, I finish by posing the same question with which I began. If you could choose just a single memory to hold on to, what would it be?1
I thank Sarah Robins and Marta Caravà for the invitation to contribute to The Memory Palace, and for all their work in making this blog possible. I am also grateful to Marta for helpful comments on the post. In addition, I’d like to thank Marya Schechtman and André Sant’Anna for their inspiring work, and for helpful discussions about these issues. Finally, I would like to thank Paloma Muñoz.