From time to time I will watch (usually in segments) the 2004 film The Ister, which is a three-hour fascinating re-telling and interpretation of Heidegger's talks on the Hölderlin (1770-1843) poem which was written sometime in the early 19th century.
As with all of Hölderlin's works, the poem (which is set on the Ister/Danube) is excellent and provocative, weaving together a tapestry of philosophy and myth, tracing a metaphysical narrative connecting Hellenistic and German cultures. Heidegger (1889-1976) touched on many of these points and more during his 1942 lectures. He remains a controversial figure but his treatment of Hölderlin's poem touches on a wide range of philosophical issues. His legacy was poisoned by his association with the Nazis. He has his defenders (who say he was not a Nazi) and detractors who are convinced otherwise. His legacy is further complicated by the fact that he was involved in romantic relationships with Jewish women, including the highly respected Hannah Arendt during the 1920's and again in the 1950's.
The 2004 film is filled with interesting discussions, and following the river from its mouth to it source is something of a treat. It's a commentary on Western philosophy, history, and much more. Focusing primarily on a three philosophers, the main commentator is Bernard Stiegler who despite his many faults and shortcomings (he is not a Christian), nevertheless offers a great deal of food for thought. In this respect he is similar to another philosopher he is often associated with - Jacques Derrida.
It's also instructive for those who would understand the basic ethos and style of Continental philosophy as opposed to the Analytic forms that have to come to so dominate the Anglo-American sphere. This is not to endorse either school (if schools they be) but simply to recognize there are different epistemological frameworks and both have their strengths and weaknesses, dangers, and limitations.
I was struck in particular by Stiegler's comments on memory. This is in connection to a larger discussion on how technology and culture work together and advance each other - a series of related concepts Stiegler refers to as technics. Interestingly in this particular exchange the discussion of memory is framed somewhat differently from his previous writings in Technics and Time.
In the film, he views the question of memory from three aspects. First, there is memory in the sense of genetic continuity and DNA. Or in the past we might have said bloodlines and families.
He also spoke of cultural memory in the form of existing systems, tools, and other relics from the past. Some things we take for granted, others we interact with and it drives reflection. For my part, this line of thinking opens up a Pandora's Box regarding the role and place of history and cultural memory in terms of epistemology, questions like 'Common Sense', and the values and meaning attached to such things. Can we view things objectively apart from mediation? Stiegler doesn't touch on these latter points but they immediately come to mind and all the more as he touches on a final point - that of Individual Memory.
This was interesting because he differentiates this from genetic memory. In today's Anglo-American sphere (and largely the West) the assumption is more or less materialistic. You are your brain and thus all your memories, emotions, experiences are all tucked away somewhere in your brain. Obviously they haven't found them yet but it's assumed they are there. Where else could they be? In a materialist world there is no other possibility.
Now Stiegler (who committed suicide in 2020) might have been a materialist and was simply suggesting that individual memories are lost - thus not transferred genetically. But that seems a bit of a tangle to me. How would he know that? At this point the discussion would necessarily diverge into a discussion of inherited traits, characteristics, preferences, and dislikes which might be connected to the experiences of ancestors - but admittedly could not be rooted directly in past individual memory. In Technics and Time, the third option regarding memory is the nervous system and it's possible (I haven't read the work) this is the individual memory he's talking about. If so, that's pretty sad, especially for someone who seemed to wrestle with the problems of materialism, consciousness and the like. Romans 1.22 immediately comes to mind.
For my part, the fact that genetic and cultural memory live on - with all the fascinating implications this implies but that individual memory dies, is an occasion for further reflection.
First, we must wrestle with to what extent that memory might live in that a person has written a diary, told their stories, recorded interviews - things that allow those memories to live and keep interacting with subsequent generations. But these are now secondary memories which are likewise interpreted through the epistemological filter of those who hear or read them.
In reality they are tertiary because even the memories of the person experiencing them are subject to various filters of interpretation, time, recollection, meaning, and so forth. I can think of events in my own experience that were something a watershed for me - and yet the other person involved can scarcely remember the exchange. It was something mundane and almost meaningless to them. It's also the stuff of songs, novels, and poems to be sure.
But even these personal memories will fail to capture (in some capacity) the full range of experience and emotions connected with events - all the more with our nebulous memories from early childhood, or some kind of trauma. We also remember things wrongly and from the standpoint of bias. Regardless, these memories are ours. I will always remember driving away from a restaurant parking lot in Bakersfield, California and seeing my father standing there in the rear-view mirror, and wondering if I would ever see him again as I headed down Highway 99 toward I-5 and the Grapevine. I didn't. But I also haven't been back to that spot and since it's been over thirty years I'm guessing that were I to see it again - it would probably be very different from what I remember. This is assuming the restaurant is even still there.
And yet strangely there are other places that I have revisited after twenty or thirty years that are exactly as I remembered. I cannot account for it.
The point being, that those individual memories and memories of experience are lost when a person dies and this is a real occasion for elegy. There is something very sad about that, about what has been lost - and yet it's also interesting to think about how if the person is a Christian and we see them again - so many of these memories won't really matter. How all this works, we do not know. What will we remember? And how will we remember it? We do not know.
But I think the elegiac spirit of reflective lamentation is appropriate and I think it could (and certainly has) spawn a myriad of possibilities in the realm of the arts. And these would be legitimate as they are 'real' and yet since they are in some sense subjective, they may not necessarily convey or fit with the good, true, and beautiful criteria of those promoting a Hellenistically inspired 'Christian' or pseudo-Western worldview.
Once again, as this world is fallen, and we are sinners, our capacity for understanding let alone depicting what is truly good is limited. That which is true is that which is eternal and thus we cannot grasp it with our limited and fallen empirical abilities. One could also argue that such 'true' depictions could fall afoul of Divine command regarding the prohibition of heavenly depictions. And beauty is a concept resting on coherence and yet also relies on intuition regarding symmetry, proportion, and much else. I would argue it also rests upon transcendent qualities which once again are not easily (or even really possible) to define in technical terms, let alone if we pursue the foundations of beauty which rest on the good and the true - which are to some extent impenetrable to us. An eternal perspective tells us that someone who may be 'ugly' in term of classical definitions of beauty may be in fact beautiful and this will be fully manifest in eternity. And likewise there are many who are 'beautiful' who are rotten and ugly souls. I learned that back in high school when I finally got to date one of the top-tier beauties and after spending some time with her, realized I did not enjoy her company. And, isn't it funny that she didn't seem so beautiful to me as time went on.
Christ is Truth of course and yet this is speaking on another level. We can root the beauty of a flower, the ocean, a sunset, song, painting, or a pretty face, to a creational ground rooted in Christ but that doesn't really help us to understand, explain, or express the beauty of these things.
They may be symbolic expressions themselves, or symbolic of something else - now we may or may not be touching on natural revelation. Or they may be 'real' but only real in the sense of the temporal post-Edenic order which given its impermanence is not real in the ultimate sense. And indeed even the jaded beauty of the girl in high school was certainly fleeting. I'm quite certain that given the many decades that have passed - her beauty has certainly faded. It was illusory and yet - we also know of older women (wrinkles and all) who are still in many respects beautiful, but this is qualified in connection with their age. Does that mean beauty changes in relation to context?
This is not to say matter is inherently less than real as some ancient heterodox thinkers might have expressed and which some (who are little better than Christian Materialists) would accuse us. The distinction is in the Scripture. Paul is abundantly clear about that which is real and that which is fading away.
And yet in this lesser sense, even the things of this life are real - as opposed to Real. Our memories are real. Our experiences are real. Our interpretation of them is real - even if (and this becomes rather tangled) our understanding is limited and corrupted by our own limitations, corruption, willful blindness, bias, or limited context. If our misunderstandings make our memories into lies - then we have a problem indeed. If we employ that criteria, then everything is a lie. It would not be self-defeating or an expression of dissonance to state that to some extent even this is true.
Individual memory is real - in some sense. It is right to lament its loss and to reflect on it. It is appropriate to express this (or attempt to express this) in terms of the arts, even if the elegiac result is something other than what the architects of Neo-Christendom would wish for. They are driven by an agenda and their thinking is necessarily shallow. Complexity and multifaceted thinking does not help to foster a coherent social vision. Since we're speaking of memory we would do well to remember that.
I do not endorse The Ister, but there's some good intellectual fodder contained therein. The time of the film (at the turn of the century and millennium) also provides the occasion for reflection. The settings along the Danube are fantastic and in some cases trigger personal memories of places I've been (hmmm.....), and I thoroughly enjoyed the constant juxtaposition between Heidegger and Hölderlin who despite his madness easily remains one of my favourite poets.