Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology Edited by Cynthia D. Coe Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism Series Editor Matthew C. Altman, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism is a series of comprehensive and authoritative edited volumes on the major German Idealist philosophers and their critics. Underpinning the series is the successful Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism (2014), edited by Matthew C. Altman, which provides an overview of the period, its greatest philosophers, and its historical and philosophical importance. Individual volumes focus on specific philosophers and major themes, offering a more detailed treatment of the many facets of their work in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and several other areas. Each volume is edited by one or more internationally recognized experts in the subject, and contributors include both established figures and younger scholars with innovative readings. The series offers a wide-ranging and authoritative insight into German Idealism, appropriate for both students and specialists. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14696 Cynthia D. Coe Editor The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology Editor Cynthia D. Coe Philosophy and Religious Studies Central Washington University Ellensburg, WA, USA ISSN 2634-6230 ISSN 2634-6249 (electronic) Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ISBN 978-3-030-66856-3 ISBN 978-3-030-66857-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66857-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Stefano Asperti/EyeEm, Getty Images, Image ID: 1171109091 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents 1 Introduction Cynthia D. Coe Part I Subjectivity 2 Husserl’s Idealism Revisited Dermot Moran 3 Transcendental Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology: Kant and Husserl on the “Inner Man” and the Human Being Claudia Serban 4 1 Fichte and Husserl: Rigorous Science and the Renewal of Humankind Federico Ferraguto 5 Bodies, Authenticity, and Marcelian Problematicity Jill Hernandez 6 Freedom in Sartre’s Phenomenology: The Kantian Limits of a Radical Project Sorin Baiasu 15 41 63 85 107 vii viii Contents Part II Intersubjectivity and the Other 7 8 9 Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence Jan Strassheim 131 Moving Beyond Hegel: The Paradox of Immanent Freedom in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy Shannon M. Mussett 153 Fanon and Hegel: The Dialectic, the Phenomenology of Race, and Decolonization Azzedine Haddour 173 Part III Ethics and Aesthetics 10 Guidance for Mortals: Heidegger on Norms David Batho 11 Husserl’s Idealism in the Kaizo Articles and Its Relation to Contemporary Moral Perfectionism Takashi Yoshikawa 12 The Blindness of Kantian Idealism Regarding Non-human Animals and Its Overcoming by Husserlian Phenomenology María-Luz Pintos-Peñaranda 13 14 203 233 257 Morality and Animality: Kant, Levinas, and Ethics as Transcendence Cynthia D. Coe 279 Aesthetic Disinterestedness and the Critique of Sentimentalism Íngrid Vendrell Ferran 301 Part IV Time, Memory, and History 15 Redeeming German Idealism: Schelling and Rosenzweig Jason M. Wirth 325 16 Heidegger on Hegel on Time Markus Gabriel 343 Contents 17 18 ix Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty Elisa Magrì 361 Max Scheler’s Idea of History: A Juxtaposition of Phenomenology and Idealism Zachary Davis 385 Part V Ontology and Epistemology 19 The Presence of Kant in Stein Mette Lebech 407 20 Heidegger on Fichte’s Three Principles M. Jorge de Carvalho 429 21 Hegel’s Phenomenological Method and the Later Movement of Phenomenology Jon Stewart 22 On the Mutations of the Concept: Phenomenology, Conceptual Change, and the Persistence of Hegel in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought Stephen H. Watson Part VI 481 Hermeneutics 23 The Thread of Imagination in Heidegger’s Retrieval of Kant: The Play of a Double Hermeneutic Frank Schalow 24 457 Gadamer, German Idealism, and the Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology Theodore George 511 529 25 Too Many Hegels? Ricoeur’s Relation to German Idealism Reconsidered Robert Piercey 547 26 Conclusion Cynthia D. Coe 567 Select Bibliography 577 Index 581 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty Elisa Magrì Often, we think of institutions as the embodiment of some type of authority that establishes normative rules. Religious, social, and educational organizations, for example, are usually characterized as instituting practices, principles, and norms that contribute to public discourse and collective customs. However, this notion of institution in the robust sense of social normativity does not do justice to the historical dimension that informs and constitutes it. An institution is not created ex nihilo but is generated in the course of time, building on the assent of individuals to certain beliefs and collective practices, as well as on the transformation of the social and collective landscape that is informed by those customs. In this respect, the concept of institution refers to the enactment of the social, cultural, and affective ties that are sedimented across history at both individual and collective levels. On this view, institution is closely related to the concept of tradition but is not restricted to it, for the former primarily appeals to the processes of signification that generate and establish traditions of thought and normative frameworks while remaining open-ended. Merleau-Ponty’s 1954–55 lectures on passivity and institution at the Collège de France examine the notion of institution in this specific sense as a process of donation of sense (Sinngebung ) that is pivotal in the constitution E. Magrì (B) Philosophy Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. D. Coe (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66857-0_17 361 362 E. Magrì of meaning across different dimensions, including the aesthetic, the affective, and the historical domain.1 Merleau-Ponty was interested in exploring how meaning is deposited in human experience, producing traditions of feeling and thought that allow for change and transformation. In this respect, institution, for Merleau-Ponty, is inseparable from sedimentation, which bestows meaning indirectly or laterally, namely via symbols, art, and the unconscious. The most significant characteristic of sedimentation is that, even though it typically begins with a particular person, action, or place, its main tendency is toward a generalization that is not directly governed by the mind.2 Consider, as an illustration of this, Merleau-Ponty’s favorite example of institution in the artistic domain, such as the use of planimetric perspective in the Renaissance. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the relation between space and body was not conceived in its generality by Renaissance artists, who “saw only a mode of reporting, not the principle of the report.”3 Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that planimetric perspective allowed artists to establish constant relations between height, breadth, and depth with respect to the distance from the eye. In turn, this choice produced “stability, consistency, compossibility, and rationality.”4 Yet planimetric perspective was not any truer than previous strategies of artistic expression. The use of perspective in painting was an “aesthetic-social choice,” not “a law of nature or even the acquisition of a pictorial, critical consciousness which would be ultimate.”5 By making space a dimension that precedes the positions of objects, Renaissance artists found a way to juxtapose different elements on the same plane without suppressing their gradation in depth. Yet they did not conceive of space as an a priori dimension. This new form of pictorial practice was an attempt to make sense of space from within the practice of visual representation, but the artist did not make any choice involving space as an object of perception. If anything, the artists’ choice consisted in their diverging from a given norm; the same divergence that would later allow the Baroque to entirely re-interpret the meaning of perspective. On this view, the sedimentation of a given practice, while being contingent to particular events and places, institutes lasting nexuses between form and content, theory and praxis, norms and uses, which are never definitive. With regard to this, it is noteworthy that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on institutions are intended to also offer a revision of Hegelianism. For MerleauPonty, Hegel’s philosophy represents “the discovery of the living, real and original relation between the elements of the world. But Hegelianism situates this relation in the past in order to subordinate it to the systematic vision of the philosopher.”6 In his notes, Merleau-Ponty praises the Hegelian aspiration to understand the nexuses that hold together history, nature, and 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 363 thought. This was the aspiration to understand experience through logic, to paraphrase Hyppolite,7 whose existentialist reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit deeply influenced Merleau-Ponty.8 At the same time, however, Merleau-Ponty also manifests his distance from Hegelianism, which he finds committed to “the systematic vision of the philosopher.” The worry here is that systematic philosophy fails to do justice to the contingency of the real as well as to the ephemeral character of the present. This is a constant leitmotif of Merleau-Ponty’s constant dialogue with Hegelian philosophy.9 Already in his 1946 paper on “Hegel’s Existentialism,” for example, Merleau-Ponty argues that Hegel’s philosophy could enrich and revive contemporary existentialist theories, but such a task could only be achieved by the Phenomenology of Spirit and not by Hegel’s late philosophy. In the former, Merleau-Ponty envisaged the possibility of vindicating the role of reason over the anxiety and the contradictions of the human condition.10 In contrast to this, for Merleau-Ponty, the Hegel of 1827 fell victim to the fallacy of interpreting history through the lenses of logical reasoning. Hegel failed to contextualize and interpret his own position in history as a philosopher. The historical process described by Hegel’s late lectures could only lead—for Merleau-Ponty—to the establishment of a hierarchical social order governed by reason and inhabited by none other than the philosopher himself. Instead, the Hegel of 1807 was concerned with revealing the logic at work at the levels of society, culture, religion, and philosophy. Unlike the late Hegel, the young Hegel would not replace human experience with universal thought but rather retrieve the latent logic sedimented in collective life. Only in this way does absolute knowledge, the culminating moment of the Phenomenology of Spirit, become “perhaps not a philosophy but a way of life.”11 Ten years after the publication of “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Merleau-Ponty’s skepticism toward Hegel’s mature philosophy reflects the same worry. His greatest preoccupation concerns the contemplative attitude that resurfaces in the very notion of an absolute knowledge independent from space and time. Pointing out the co-implication of Hegel’s philosophy of history and the cunning of reason, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the one who observes the opacity [of history] sets himself up outside of history, becomes a universal spectator.”12 If reason underlies the course of history and if the philosopher is the only one who can grasp the sense of such an unfolding, it turns out—Merleau-Ponty argues—that the cunning of reason is nothing but philosophical knowledge. And in order to obtain such a knowledge, which abstracts from accidental events and particularities, philosophers are compelled to be indifferent to contingency, thereby becoming spectators of the universal. 364 E. Magrì Merleau-Ponty’s critical remarks are still fruitful today, despite being partly outdated. To be sure, the opposition that Merleau-Ponty draws between the young and the late Hegel does not seem to acknowledge Hegel’s generative view of social norms or the relevance of historical transformations within philosophy of history.13 Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty tends to overlap absolute knowledge, absolute spirit, and the spirit of world history, without distinguishing between the account of absolute knowledge outlined by the Phenomenology of Spirit and the notion of absolute spirit that appears in the third part of Hegel’s system in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Such a distinction is typically based on the different systematic transitions that link together objective spirit and history across the two works.14 Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty’s worry concerning the contemplative attitude engendered by Hegel’s philosophy still deserves further examination today, not simply as an isolated issue in the Hegelian scholarship but rather as a fundamental philosophical question. If absolute knowledge was indeed meant to represent “a way of life,” what sort of life would that be like? The ending of the Phenomenology, in particular, posits relevant issues because of the emphasis it places on spirit’s self-recollection and inwardization (PhG §808).15 Is absolute knowledge meant to initiate a new historical beginning, or does it sublimate the course of history into the ecstatic dimension of speculative thought? Given the limited scope of this chapter, my analysis will be restricted to Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Deepening Merleau-Ponty’s appraisal of this work, I argue that Hegel’s view of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology consists in a process of sedimentation that is very much in line with Merleau-Ponty’s in that it revolves around a phenomenological-inspired view of institution. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s skepticism, however, I suggest that absolute knowledge is compatible with an account of ethical memory that reactivates potential new beginnings in history and society as a form of critical awareness. For Hegel, memory is not simply the locus of transmission of sense but rather the activity through which concepts are instituted in order to be communicated, shared, and taken up in history. On this view, subjectivity is not a mere shell that is left aside once a more mature and solid knowledge is established, for it corresponds to the source of reference of ethical memory. Accordingly, this chapter primarily shows that both Hegel and MerleauPonty employ a theory of institution that is fundamentally linked to sedimentation, memory, and self. By exploring the connection between these concepts in both philosophers, my aim is to provide a ground to critically 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 365 reconsider contemporary discussions of ethical memory, such as the account put forward by Avishai Margalit. The Interiority with Escape: Merleau-Ponty’s Dialectic of Sense Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on passivity and institution are heavily indebted to Husserl’s late manuscripts, particularly The Crisis of European Sciences, including the appendix on The Origin of Geometry (C: Appendix VI). In these manuscripts, Husserl explores the original meaning of mathematics and geometry, discussing the relation between science and culture, and issues of universal history in general. Husserl’s key insight is that Galileo Galilei introduced a whole new paradigm in the history of Western thought by conceiving of geometry as the language of nature. As Husserl remarks, this was less a product of deliberate choice than a natural development of geometry as a science, namely as a lively forward movement of acquisition and transmission of knowledge. The hallmark of Galilei’s pioneering demonstrations, however, lies—for Husserl—in the use of geometry as idealization of the experiences that characterize the natural attitude. In the translation operated by geometry, bodies become limit-shapes, namely ideal entities whose relations can be converted into numbers in order to verify the consistency of the physical laws underlying their movements. As Husserl writes: In place of real praxis—that of action or that of considering empirical possibilities having to do with actual and really [i.e., physically] possible empirical bodies—we now have an ideal praxis of “pure thinking” which remains exclusively within the realm of pure limit-shapes…. Through a method of idealization and construction which historically has long since been worked out and can be practiced intersubjectively in a community, these limit-shapes have become acquired tools that can be used habitually and can always be applied to something new—an infinite and yet self-enclosed world of ideal objects as a field for study. Like all cultural acquisitions which arise out of human accomplishment, they remain objectively knowable and available without requiring that the formulation of their meaning be repeatedly and explicitly renewed. (C §9, 26) The mathematization of nature corresponds to the translation of ordinary experience into the ideal language of forms and symbols. In this respect, sedimentation is operative in two main senses. In one way, meaning is sedimented in mathematical symbols without the necessity of a concomitant 366 E. Magrì intuition. This means that mathematical formulas are abstractions of regular movements and interactions that occur between physical objects. The original intuition underlying the apprehension of those relations is not required in the application of the formula. In this sense, Galilei’s law of gravitation provides a shortcut for dealing with physics problems without having to go through the steps of Galilei’s experiment. In a similar way, Husserl argues that cultural objects, such as pincers or scissors, are habitually seen and employed as tools for cutting and gripping things and not as aesthetical or material objects. We perceive cultural objects as embedded with the practical significance that we habitually bestow upon them. Thus, in another and deeper sense, the root of sedimentation is habituality, conceived as the temporal stratification of acts of apprehension. Sedimentation represents a form of “living retention” without which there could not be any science, for retention provides the transmission of sense originally grasped by evidence.16 From this point of view, the problem of the mathematization of nature can be explained in terms of the failure to reactivate the living retention that underlies acts of meaning apprehension. According to Husserl, geometry was originally meant to pass on its goal of deductive reasoning, enabling the formation of logical nexuses between propositions without necessarily abstracting from, but rather preserving, their reference to concrete reality. Unfortunately, such a desideratum was not fulfilled, as geometry was employed by natural sciences as a formal discipline, severed from the concrete experience of nature. This means not only that the ties with concrete experience are cut off in favor of a formalistic approach to truth. The subject of experience is also replaced by an impersonal reference point that is devoid of self-relation. As Husserl points out, to be a person means to have a position in space through the constant and peculiar reference to one’s own body, in and through which the surrounding world becomes available.17 Thus, spatiotemporal localization is an inadequate characterization of personal individuation, for the latter depends on the temporal succession of lived experiences that inform the psychic sphere. Husserl’s view, which is also elaborated in Ideas II,18 is that the sedimentation of the lived experiences through which the ego takes a stance and develops a personal attitude, is a habitus that projects the self into the world, motivating their choices and actions. Merleau-Ponty’s course notes draw further attention to the dimension of emptying out of meaning (Sinnenentleerung ) that is distinctive of natural sciences. And yet, for Merleau-Ponty, the emptying out of meaning is not exclusive of geometry but intrinsic to the institution of a domain of knowledge. Merleau-Ponty argues that signification is “not timeless,” “it does not descend from the principles to the consequences.” On the contrary, and in a 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 367 quite Hegelian fashion, true “idealization raises itself up above itself by means of recurrence, does not surpass it without preserving it.”19 If a domain of knowledge is to have meaning at all, its transmission and universalization can only be obtained in virtue of the donation of sense (Sinngebung ) that is actualized in every instance of knowledge acquisition. However, like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty was aware that traditions can be passed on even when the ability to reactivate their originary source of sense is lost. What guarantees, then, the persistence of sense across history? Merleau-Ponty’s concern can be summarized as follows: If science and culture are understood in terms of sedimentation of knowledge, and if the reactivation of knowledge is necessary for the transformation of the latter into a tradition, how can there be tradition in the face of forgetfulness and mechanization? Merleau-Ponty’s approach to this problem is eminently dialectical. The core idea of his reflections is that every institution involves a dialectic between meaning constitution and forgetfulness. Once meaning is generated and established, its genesis is forgotten and yet the sign that carries the meaning remains. Prima facie, Merleau-Ponty’s approach seems to resonate with Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous claim that “all reification is forgetting.”20 However, the process of sedimentation that underlies the notion of institution cannot be reduced to reification, for it is not the end result of a productive activity. For Merleau-Ponty, the sign is not the residual of the process of signification. For the sign, along with the consciousness that interprets it, produces a field of sense that is capable of being reactivated at any new emergence of the sign in other contexts of experience. This is what sedimentation is: the persistence of the trace of the forgotten, “and thereby a call to thought which depends on itself and goes further.”21 Without a community of selves who take up the solicitation to thinking that is preserved in the sign and who, thereby, think through it, there would not be any truth or knowledge. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “double horizon”22 that is not restricted to the holder of the experience in the now but that also includes, as a virtuality, the possibility of an extended generalization. In order to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s argument, it is helpful to consider the example that he provides in both his 1949–52 lectures23 as well as in his 1954–55 notes on institution and passivity.24 Drawing on Wertheimer’s Gestalt psychology, Merleau-Ponty recalls how learning competencies are acquired in geometry, specifically when calculating the surface of the parallelogram. This requires that one understands the underlying Gestalt or organizing principle of the figure. In Wertheimer’s example, a five-year old who has already learnt how to calculate the surface 368 E. Magrì of the rectangle and has fully grasped the sense of the geometrical demonstration seeks “to straighten out” the parallelogram. She proceeds by cutting off a triangle from one end, moving it around to the other side, thereby turning the parallelogram into a simple rectangle. Whether the parallelogram is presented in the classic, horizontal way or turned around (Fig. 17.1), the child is not taken aback, because she has developed “structural understanding.”25 This means that the child does not proceed by blind recollection of the teacher’s demonstration. On the contrary, the child’s learning is activated by the application of part-function relations. To acquire a genuine understanding of the equivalence between the parallelogram and the rectangle one needs to activate productive thinking, i.e., synthetic, interpretative insights that bestow sense on symbolic forms. Gestalt psychologists like Wertheimer understood apprehension in terms of grasping and intuiting the inner structure or organization of the object. Such an approach challenges associationism in that it maintains that knowledge is produced by trials and errors, producing changes in the way items are grouped and constructed in order to satisfy the structural requirements of the situation. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty does not use this example to emphasize the productivity of thinking activated by the Gestalt. On the contrary, he insists on the retention that is necessary to laterally extend the proof of the demonstration to variations of its examples. For Merleau-Ponty, Wertheimer’s investigations show that the generalization of sense underpinning geometrical transformations and constructions retains signification.26 Generalization does not proceed from empirical facts to ideas but rather from the transformation of a field of knowledge into another. On this view, the truth of geometry Fig. 17.1 Wertheimer’s parallelograms. Credits: Aaron Sloman (https://www.cs.bham. ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/orthogonal-competences/), Creative Commons License 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 369 (as of any domain of true knowledge) is based on the idealization that transforms the field of experience into a symbolic order that yields the possibility of a repetition. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty repeats that signification cannot be obtained without a “return to the concrete” or without “recurrence.” Recurrence is not sheer repetition, which would lead to the mechanization of the formula as well as to the blind acceptance of the demonstration. On the contrary, recurrence refers to the way in which meaning is taken up and renewed in an actual field of experience.27 To put it in other words, the institution of a domain of knowledge is not established once its formal truth has been demonstrated, for it requires a living and continuous dimension of apprehension and recreation of the original truth, which in turn extends, modifies, and enriches the very field in which that truth was originally grasped. This is the reason why Merleau-Ponty conceives of institution as the enactment (not the result) of the sedimentation of sense. While the model that Merleau-Ponty presents is dialectical, it also differs from Hegel’s approach. For Merleau-Ponty, universalization “is thought in perceptual terms (soil of knowledge, horizon)”28 ; it does not evolve by becoming other than itself, but rather by returning to the empirical origin as an “interior.” What Merleau-Ponty hints at here is the possibility of a critical engagement with the past within a field of knowledge that allows always new ways of thinking through the original model, whether this is a scientific intuition, an artistic innovation, or an emotional breakthrough. The interior is the domain of experience that is enlarged and progressively transformed by the active relation to a concrete object of experience. On this view, knowledge is generated by engaging traditions of thought, thereby reactivating in a lateral way the principles and intuitions that are sedimented in the past. Such a task is not accomplished by a plurality of subjects working in a parallel way, each having his or her underlying intentional grasping of the object. Crucial to the transmission of geometry as a field of knowledge is the co-participation in the “soil” of pre-geometric experiences. After all, geometry demonstrations are not elaborated in a vacuum but developed within a context that is later integrated in the epistemic principle. Accordingly, the transmission and sedimentation of a given tradition of thought is not realized by a plurality of minds working independently from one another, but rather accomplished by a community of consciousnesses, each embodying a position within a common field that guarantees continuity of knowledge. Only in this way does the resumption of the past in the present leave the former “in its originality, does not truly ‘surpass’ it, does not falter itself to contain it all [in its entirety] plus something else.”29 At this level, Merleau-Ponty distances himself from Hegel’s “logic of history”: 370 E. Magrì In its interiority with escape, this passage from decentering to decentering, without absolute decentering, in this exteriority which does not forbid encroachment, there is truly union of exteriority and interiority, at each moment, while Hegel unifies them only by pushing them to the absolute: absolute real or fact, absolute rational or concept, being unified as absolutes.30 For Merleau-Ponty, Hegel’s philosophy precludes the opening of new possibilities, closing up the dialectic of sign and meaning into an absolute, speculative unity. Before discussing, in the next section, the alleged lack of “escape” of Hegel’s approach, it is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to the resurrection of the past in the present is essentially a form of collective memory. As put by Vallier, memory for Merleau-Ponty is neither restricted to personal memory nor based on phenomenological analyses of egoic retention: “It is not about recalling what I did last Friday night; it is about reanimating a past, even a past that was not my own, in order to understand it and to alter the landscape of my present.”31 This type of non-personal memory, as it were, is characterized by a nonegoic modality of retention, which manifests itself as consciousness of a field of knowledge. This is the form of retention that animates the work of the intellectual historian, who seeks to further explore the nexuses between past and present by inquiring the conceptual framework in which determinate traditions of thought originated. Certainly, historians do not have to be personally involved in their research in order to generate knowledge. And yet their commitment to explicate the moral and political significance of past events informs their quest for accuracy and understanding. Thus, on a deeper level, non-egoic retention represents the modality in and through which intersubjectivity becomes an instituting power in that it motivates consciousness to further appropriate its sense and history. That there is intersubjectivity and not just a plurality of views means, for Merleau-Ponty, that the fitting together of many different subjective viewpoints is brought about by history, tradition, and culture as a foundation that does not have any ultimate foundation. Once the concept of institution is understood as a form of sedimentation, the former does no longer operate as archaeological anteriority or as normative authority. On the contrary, an institution constitutes a horizon of sense that informs the present, and whose persistence calls to the exercise of thought in the now. 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 371 Absolute Knowledge as Sedimentation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is best described as a journey of formation. Like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship or Faust, the Phenomenology of Spirit describes the journey of human spirit through different phases of development that culminate in absolute knowledge. The systematic development that Hegel describes has generally been taken to characterize the substance of Hegel’s dialectical method. To be sure, the evolution of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the development of a subjective mind that experiences the dialectical contradictions arising within its own experience of the world. On the one hand, truth is presented as an organized whole; while, on the other hand, knowledge unfolds and sediments as the result of spirit’s journey. And yet, both sides are cognate dimensions of a single comprehensive experience that is supposed to lay the ground for a holistic theory of truth. However, it is worth noting that, strictly speaking, at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness does not yet qualify as a subject of experience. As pointed out by Russon, the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates that the sense of ourselves that we typically live with—a coherent sense of ourselves as independent agents, coherently integrated with the human and natural world—is an achievement (indeed, a complex negotiation with the conflicting infinities of reality, desire, and others) and not our “given” state.32 Subjectivity is not given from the outset, but it is achieved in the process of actualization of spirit as a self that relates to an external world. Such fundamental directedness to the world, which is perceived as being independent but no longer alien to the self, represents the most significant outcome of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology, which has for very good reasons been at the center of a number of divergent interpretations. Here, Hegel shows that the relation between self and world requires the activity of consciousness as a subject of desire that is capable of transforming reality, thereby actualizing thinking and abstract thought.33 By defending a developmental view of the self, which is always enacted as a pole of desire, action, and thought in the world, Hegel allows the distinction between a minimal and a more robust view of self. While the former is the prerequisite for any theory of truth, the latter refers to the constitution of reality that the self brings about through practical agency and theoretical understanding. If the minimal view of the self is the logical condition for having knowledge, the robust view refers to 372 E. Magrì the self-determination of subjectivity and its constitutive role in shaping the very reality of which knowledge is about. On this view, absolute knowledge is science in that it coincides with the conceptual organization of what spirit has learnt throughout the phenomenology. Absolute knowledge encompasses both subjective and objective processes of spiritual self-determination. This notably includes the actualization of the personal self but it also covers struggles, pain, and conflicts. For spirit’s development34 is bound to other selves and evolves by going through self-fragmentation, conflicts, and social and cultural crises. In this sense, the development of spirit is tied to temporality, and yet absolute knowledge does away with time consciousness. What is appropriated by absolute knowledge is neither an event nor the transcendence of an absolute value. At the level of science, all the experiences that characterize the journey of spirit precipitate onto spirit itself, making it absolute, namely stripped out of temporality. More specifically, absolute knowledge is linked to the concept (Begriff ), which is defined as the content that is developed and brought about by spirit and that is finally apprehended and appropriated as the self ’s own doing.35 The insistence on the sphere of the self (Selbst ) at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit is worthy of attention because the self of absolute spirit does not amount to the self of subjective spirit or to any subjective stance. This is precisely the reason why a reader like Merleau-Ponty would be put off by the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. What kind of subjectivity is involved at the level of absolute knowledge? Since the self of absolute knowledge is not an individual, how can it possibly inform the substance of absolute knowledge? In relation to this issue, it is possible to identify three main readings: a meta-philosophical approach, a genetic reading, and a cultural-historical inspired interpretation. The first position is best represented by Winfield. According to Winfield, absolute knowing posits the necessity of removing the form of representation that is tied to spirit’s temporal evolution in order to achieve the pure element of knowing. This reading aims to explicate the link between the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic. By culminating in absolute knowledge, the Phenomenology paves the way for the “minimal initial characterization of science...: the thinking of thinking or logic.”36 In this sense, the self of absolute knowledge would correspond to a meta-philosophical position that is meant to introduce to an entirely new realm of philosophical thinking, namely the logic.37 The second position is that of Ferrarin,38 according to whom the self or “I” in Hegel takes up different senses depending on whether it appears to us in the form of spirit or in that of the concept. Ferrarin emphasizes that 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 373 the “I” in Hegel is said in many ways. In the case of absolute spirit, Ferrarin stresses the dialectic of alienation that is distinctive of self-consciousness and that Hegel radicalizes at the level of absolute knowledge in order to show the transformation of metaphysical substance into metaphysical subjectivity. The third position is represented by Nuzzo, according to whom absolute knowledge differs across the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia, respectively. While she recognizes that absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology institutes a new speculative beginning, she argues that the account of absolute knowledge provided by the Encyclopaedia puts forward a theory of absolute memory that does justice to a renewed and ethical sense of collective subjectivity. In a way, each reading testifies to the systematic value of Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge. Yet Ferrarin’s and Nuzzo’s positions take very seriously the possibility that absolute knowledge represents more than a transitional step in Hegel’s system. Focusing more closely on Nuzzo’s approach, I intend to further discuss the connection she establishes between absolute knowledge and memory. Nuzzo proceeds by distinguishing two distinct and yet interconnected levels of memory in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, she identifies memory as the inner force and reactivating power of the Phenomenology of Spirit. On such a reading, memory operates as the texture of the Phenomenology in that it channels the shapes of consciousness into a unitary process, propelling the advancement of spirit forward. The distinctive character of such a process is that every moment of spirit’s development dialectically institutes the possibility of a new beginning. As Nuzzo argues, “memory seems to be, for Hegel, more of the future or of the present, than of the past.”39 Memory serves the goal of opening up the future, while dialectically positing the reality of spirit. On the other hand, Nuzzo argues that memory is present in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a distinct figure or Gestaltung, namely as ethical memory. By ethical memory, Nuzzo refers to the process of social recollection that is distinctive of the Phenomenology of Spirit once spirit becomes reason, establishing itself as a historical dimension. For Nuzzo, the emergence of memory as ethical memory in the Phenomenology of Spirit is tied to the constitution of ethical life, in which individuality and universality are mediated with each other. This means that memory must abandon “its merely psychological, individual, and accidental character, and reach its ‘higher determination’ or ‘common sense’ (Gemeinswesen).”40 Memory becomes ethical insofar as the negativity of forgetfulness is preserved but also overcome through collective acts of social and historical significance. Antigone, Christianity, and the Terror become figures of acts 374 E. Magrì of memorialization that cement the unity of the community. At the level of absolute spirit, however, history “is translated and overcome in the atemporal and aspatial dimension of the pure ‘concept.’”41 Interestingly, Nuzzo identifies a second, more compelling dimension of ethical memory, which she calls “absolute memory,” in the account of absolute knowledge that Hegel provides in the Encyclopaedia §§552–53. On her view, unlike the Phenomenology, which inscribes the work of memory into history only to let this vanish in the shadowy dimension of pure thought, the concluding paragraphs of the Encyclopaedia are systematically related to and dependent on world history. In this case, Nuzzo argues that absolute spirit enacts a form of memorialization that inscribes the works of spirit in a trans-historical or eternal dimension. As Nuzzo writes, “The works of absolute spirit are the ‘sites’ of a meaningful recollection of history in the dimension of a present that is no longer national or political but cultural in a universal sense, that is, at once, individual and truly global, historical (and, systematically, ‘post-historical’) and eternal.”42 The significance of this form of dialectical memory is that it does not bring back to the past, but “posits the past as spirit’s eternal present.”43 As an example of this, Nuzzo refers to specific intersections of personal and collective memories that can be found in the works of Toni Morrison as well as in Primo Levi’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz in Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man). As Nuzzo argues, Morrison’s writings represent a form of literary archaeology, which––unlike any historical or autobiographical accounts––uses fiction in order to institute the truth. For Morrison, the writer who seeks to find and expose the truth about the interior life of people who did not write their own story (e.g., slave narratives) draws on the “recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the image.”44 A photograph, the corner of a room, the memory of a voice, even when dimly recalled, track a journey along which the writer reconstitutes the interior life, the world-horizon of a forgotten event, person, narrative. The writer (or the philosopher, for Hegel) does not try to conjure up a fictional reality, but rather aims to inscribe in the realm of language the truth, namely the personal and intrinsic world-relatedness and stance of the subject. In this sense, truth consists in positing a new present, a new work, wherein what is missing (because it was forgotten) is re-posited, and what has never been there (because it belongs to the aftermath) can live in images that generate new awareness. Images and not facts, for “facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”45 This is why Nuzzo argues that “it is only from the standpoint 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 375 of a memory that is truly absolute because it is not made of facts (psychological or historical) but of images, that the world—subjective and objective, internal and external—can be (re-)created and lived anew.”46 Similarly, Levi’s narrative of the lager camp serves the. function of absolute memory—that is, of a memory animated by imagination, feeling, and empathy, but also by reason; a memory that conjoins the personal and the collective in the dimension of a concrete and shared humanity, a memory unequivocally bound to time and history and yet also permanent and eternal.47 For Nuzzo, absolute knowledge in the Encyclopaedia represents the space that reason inhabits when it enacts itself as absolute memory, namely as a rational reconstruction of the meaning that informs history, including testimony of horrors and abuses such as Levi’s. Drawing on Nuzzo’s account of ethical memory, it is however possible to re-read Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology as a form of absolute memory that does justice to the sedimentation of self across time. Written between 1945 and 1947, Se questo è un uomo is the lucid account of Levi’s imprisonment in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, following his capture by the Fascist militia in 1943 due to Levi’s affiliation with the Resistenza movement. Shortly after his arrival in a detention camp for prisoners of war, Levi was selected by a German SS squad to be transferred to the Auschwitz camp along with other Jewish people. A worldwide classic in the literature on genocide, Se questo è un uomo is also—at the same time— a powerful illustration of testimony and trauma that exposes the absolute annihilation of human corporeality and individuality. As has been noted,48 Levi’s narrative strikes us not only because it reveals the daily dehumanization inflicted to the Auschwitz prisoners. Levi’s writing transfixes the reader also because it begins with a reconstruction of how Levi was imprisoned (an account given in the past tense) that suddenly shifts to the present tense when Levi recalls his arrival and subsequent time spent in Auschwitz. “This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this.”49 In re-enacting the experience of the concentration camp, Levi cannot help but relive the trauma of Auschwitz in diachronic continuity in the effort to situate and understand it. In this way, a traumatic experience becomes an eternal present that informs the existence of the survivor. As aptly put by Caruth: The insistent reenactments of the past do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred. Trauma, that is, does not simply serve as 376 E. Magrì record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.50 The difficulty of owning one’s experience, especially traumatic experience, lies at the core of memory as an exercise in self-appropriation. From this point of view, it appears that the function of ethical memory is not restricted to historical time but to a process of self-owning. While Levi’s memoir epitomizes a collective experience, its intersubjective character and the very possibility of its communicability rest on the persistence and transformation of the self across the different transitions of one’s narrative. Levi’s memoir, just like Morrison’s writing, are paradigms of absolute knowledge in that their “absolute” character rests on the appropriation of the self as the author of one’s actions and thinking. In this sense, the self represents the only condition that guarantees continuity of acting and thinking. Hence, it is not surprising that Hegel elevates it to the form of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology. In emphasizing the presence of the self, Hegel argues that absolute spirit owns the content of its experience, and such ownership represents a universal principle that admits lateral universalization, namely it provides the basis for philosophical reflection and appropriation. The recollection of the different shapes of spirit at the end of the Phenomenology indicates the continuity and necessity of the self, i.e., the fact that spirit is a concrete form of self-reference that is constantly modified and enriched by experience. By owning its own doing, spirit posits self-reference as the condition of its own truth, namely it establishes the possibility of philosophical or scientific understanding. In apprehending itself as a universal principle, absolute spirit institutes science as the space of conceptual thinking, where all the past experiences of spirit can be narrated and thematized as its own doing. In this sense, absolute spirit does not achieve self-knowledge by contemplating its past development, but rather by appropriating and recognizing itself. Here lies the possibility of the repetition, the productive and fertile “recurrence” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks with regard to personal and cultural institution. Once again, repetition is not the mechanical transmission of a given content but the actualization of a possibility that is deeply and firmly rooted in the appropriation of one’s development. While the self is always the result of a specific process, its permanence and evolution across different experiential, practical, and theoretical domains require a continuous act of re-appropriation. In order to own itself, spirit needs memory not as the subjective faculty of remembering but rather as the institutionalizing power that lets thought and experience sediment, thereby creating spaces for inquiry, reflection, and ethical interrogation. In this sense, memory is, like habit, a 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 377 second nature that spirit gives itself in order to crystallize its own spontaneity, thereby laying the foundations for its critical reappropriation. The importance of owning one’s experience can be further appreciated if one considers the political uses of memory where individual narratives are deprived of their sources of agency and reduced to narratives that either hypostatize or victimize the role of the agents. This is, for instance, the case of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge graduate abducted and tortured to death while researching Egypt’s independent trade unions. Depicted by the press either as unconscious spy or as a martyr of the Egyptian Revolution, his story is still waiting to be narrated transnationally, avoiding the reduction to either political polemic or sheer rhetoric.51 The value of absolute memory consists precisely in the fact that memory cannot be separated from the self who has enacted its own story. And yet, since memory is by definition tied to the negative and the forgotten, its intrinsic connection to ownership is a call to interrogate the author of any shared narrative. Thus, the “living retention” that is necessary to activate productive thinking is, for both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, tied to the appreciation of trans-historical and trans-cultural subjectivity. Ethical memory works by instituting nexuses and relations between self and other that are sedimented across time in shared fields of knowledge, and whose reactivation requires dialectical thinking, which is not bound by time or space. This is why, memory is, for Hegel, one of the most complex and sophisticated abilities of the mind, which is closely related to both habit and thinking.52 Rethinking Ethical Memory with Hegel and Merleau-Ponty What kind of memory is at stake when we speak of ethical memory as a form of intersubjective institution? Certainly, ethical memory is not a variation of our episodic memory, whereby we recollect events and facts of the past by representing them to us. Ethical memory is not semantic memory either, for it does not imply that a subject S remembers the events of its past as these occur at t1, t2, etc. Semantic memory does away with the self, whereas ethical memory requires personality. Ethical memory works as a form of sedimentation once the essential moments that constellate history are preserved as relational nexuses between self and alterity. This is why absolute spirit in Hegel, just like the concept of institution in Merleau-Ponty, does not depend on the conscious remembering of the mind, for it consists in the reactivation of a principle and not in representational thinking. In this sense, ethical 378 E. Magrì memory is connected or indexed to a self without this self being the subject of an act of remembering. It follows that the actualization of ethical memory is not the mere flow or gallery of past images. It is rather a communication of meaning and sense that circulates back and forth in the realm of culture, thereby instituting new beginnings. Indeed, the culmination of absolute spirit in the Phenomenology is the impulse to become something other, namely to evolve and to enact itself once more in time and history. In this respect, Hegel’s view of ethical memory complements and integrates Merleau-Ponty’s insights on institution and sedimentation. For Merleau-Ponty, memory institutes the possibility of a new beginning as a power of decentering, that comprehends in itself a plurality of perspectives. Likewise, for Hegel, ethical memory is enacted on an absolute level when knowledge and being no longer stand opposed to each other, but rather reactivate each other in an open-ended activity. This is, for Nuzzo, the most significant feature of absolute memory, namely the ability to express and name what is otherwise inexpressible. This does not mean that absolute memory provides history with ad hoc and a posteriori justifications. The main achievement of absolute memory actually consists in naming and addressing what is otherwise doomed to be anonymous, empty, or forgotten. The possibility of instituting freedom as a space for conceptual communication is rooted in the presence of the self, which is the condition of identity and unity, but also of difference and fragmentation. Hegel links the presence of the self to the ethical responsibility of dialectical thinking, which is autonomous in the practice of looking for the truth but always bound to the systematic and co-evolving development of reality. At this stage, it is legitimate to wonder whether there is a space where ethical memory can be enacted. To be sure, ethical memory is not a space for contemplation, but a space for knowing and acting. The difference between ethical life and absolute knowledge is that the latter is not a historical and material transmission of knowledge and norms. And yet, as ethical life facilitates common criteria of making sense of the world, likewise absolute knowledge enables conceptual communication. Ethical memory can be enacted only as form of “recurrence” in Merleau-Ponty’s words, namely as a task of re-actualization of former traditions and narratives in the present. In this sense, ethical memory is not tied to historical spaces or times but represents the critical power that interrogates the past to better understand the matrix of the present and to project such awareness in the future as a form of responsibility. This is particularly relevant in order to appreciate a specific value of memory, namely its power of resistance. 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 379 With regard to this, I would like to draw a few conclusions concerning the ethical value of memory in contemporary discourse. In his well-known discussion on the ethics of memory, Margalit distinguishes between common and shared memory. While the former aggregates the memories of all the people who remember a certain episode that each of them experienced individually, the latter requires communication: A shared memory integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode—for example, the memory of the people who were in the square [during 9/11], each experiencing only a fragment of what happened from their unique angle on events—into one version. Other people in the community who were not there at the time may then be plugged into the experience of those who were in the square, through channels of description rather that by direct experience. Shared memory is built on a division of mnemonic labor.53 As Margalit points out, we cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of what we remember. We cannot be morally or ethically praised for remembering or for failing to remember. Yet Margalit defends the paradigmatic value that memory has when it creates a legacy or a heritage that guarantees the continuity of the remembrance of those events that are laden with ethical value, whether they inspire respect, gratitude, or horror. Such a commitment institutes, for Margalit, communities of memory. In a way, Margalit’s account of shared memory reminds us of MerleauPonty’s reflections on cultural and historical institutions, which depend on dynamics of intersubjective responsiveness. Drawing on Hegel, however, it is possible to integrate this view of shared memory with a critical stance. In this revised sense, ethical memory allows reason to distance itself from the past, never accepting any event as absolute or definitive, but actually warning against the possibility of stagnation and hypostatization. This is possible in that memory does not neutralize the self, but rather institutes its permanence. The self stands for the immanent principle that allows the institution of logical, affective, social, or historical nexuses between form and content, theory and praxis, norms and social institutions. By uncovering the dimension of the self that is in place in absolute memory a critical distance between thought and history is obtained. For philosophy is essentially the exercise of critical thought, independent from external authority. Indeed, by instituting nexuses of identity and difference, memory helps us to not repeat past mistakes. It is in light of such a capacity that I would then like to re-read the conclusion of the Phenomenology of Spirit , when Hegel 380 E. Magrì writes that comprehended history represents the Golgotha of absolute spirit, without which the life of spirit would be “lifeless and alone” (PhG §808, 493). Here, the emphasis lies on the solitude of absolute spirit once it is deprived of its capacity of reactivating a new beginning. Hence, at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel reminds us that the life of absolute spirit cannot do without others. This capacity is, I believe, inseparable from the sedimentation of the self in absolute memory, and only in the cultivation of the latter as critical thinking does memory open up a new dimension for thinking and acting, namely a new form of life and collective engagement.54 Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity. Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. L. Lawlor and H. Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 2. For a thorough discussion of this crucial aspect in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project, see Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, “Merleau-Ponty: Potenza dell’istituzione,” Discipline Filosofiche XXIX, 2 (2019): 71–88. 3. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 43. 4. Ibid., 45. 5. Ibid., 46. 6. Ibid., 79. 7. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 8. For a discussion of Hegel’s readings in twentieth-century France, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Alison Stone, “Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hegel , ed. D. Moyar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 9. See also Enrica Lisciani Petrini, La passione del mondo. Saggio su MerleauPonty (Naples-Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2002), 156–68; and Luca Vanzago, The Voice of No One. Merleau-Ponty on Nature and Time (Milan: Mimesis, 2017), 35–44. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 65. 11. Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” 64. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 63. 13. For a critical re-assessment of Hegel’s argument in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History see Simon Lumsden, “Second Nature and Historical Change in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2016): 74–94. 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 381 14. See Angelica Nuzzo, Memory, History, Justice in Hegel (New York: Palgrave, 2012). Nuzzo’s argument will be discussed more in detail in the next sections. 15. Ernst Bloch famously drew attention to this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy in his Hegelian meditations, where he suggested that Hegel’s philosophy was inhibited by the phantom of anamnesis: Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951). For an appraisal and contextualization of the role of temporality in the Phenomenology of Spirit, see Joseph C. Flay, “Time in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 259–73; Remo Bodei, La civetta e la talpa. Sistema ed epoca in Hegel (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014); and Valentina Ricci, “The Role of Erinnerung in Absolute Knowing: History and Absoluteness,” in Hegel on Recollection, ed. Valentina Ricci and Federico Sanguinetti (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 1–20. For a normative approach that does away with the problem of temporalization, see Robert Pippin, “The ‘logic of experience’ as ‘absolute knowledge’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 210–26. 16. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), Appendix II, §7, 328. 17. C, Beilage I, which is unfortunately not translated in Carr’s English edition of the Crisis. 18. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojecewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), §§50–55. 19. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 54. 20. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 191. 21. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 59. Interestingly, Adorno develops a similar line of interpretation in his aesthetic theory, where he argues that “aesthetic success is essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the content [Inhalt ] sedimented in the form.” See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum), 139. I am very grateful to Gareth Polmeer for the pointer. 22. Ibid., 61. 23. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949– 1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 24. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 55. 25. Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking, ed. Michael Wertheimer (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 35. 26. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 55. 382 E. Magrì 27. On this aspect, see also Derrida’s commentary of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’. An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962). 28. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 59. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Robert Vallier, “Memory—Of the Future: Institution and Memory in the Late Merleau-Ponty,” in Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of Self , ed. David Morris and Kym McLaren (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 119. 32. John Russon, “The Project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in A Companion to Hegel , ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57. 33. See Judith Butler, “Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 17–59. 34. Naturally, spirit translates Geist, which in Hegel’s philosophy captures the complex reality of subjectivity, understood both as a psychophysical reality (characterized by consciousness and practical agency) as well as objective reality (in terms of practical achievements that involve sociality, law, and culture). While it is customary to capitalize “spirit” in the English-speaking literature, in the following I prefer using it in lowercase to avoid any hypostatization of the self that emerges in the course of the development of Geist. 35. “The concept requires the content to be the self ’s own act. For this concept is, as we see, the knowledge of the self ’s act within itself as all essentiality and all existence, the knowledge of this subject as substance and of the substance as this knowledge of its act” (PhG §797, 485). As is well-known, Miller translates Begriff with the “Notion,” which I have here replaced with “concept” (in lowercase) to preserve the meaning of “comprehension” that is implicit in the German begreifen. 36. Richard Winfield, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 379. 37. The vexata quaestio concerning the exact role of the PhG with respect to the system is an object of open debate. See, for instance, Hans-Friedrich Fulda, “‘Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit’: Hegel’s Program and Its Implementation,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, 21–42. 38. Alfredo Ferrarin, Thinking and the I: Hegel and the Critique of Kant (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). My response to Ferrarin’s reading can be found in “Review of Alfredo Ferrarin, Il pensare e l’io. Hegel e la critica di Kant (Rome 2016),” Critique, February 2018: https://virtualcritique.wordpr ess.com/2018/02/18/elisa-magri-on-alfredo-ferrarins-il-pensare-e-lio-hegel-e-lacritica-di-kant/. 39. Nuzzo, Memory, History, Justice, 23. 40. Ibid., 29. 17 Sedimentation, Memory, and Self in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 383 Ibid., 48. Ibid., 154. Ibid. Toni Morrison, “The Sites of Memory,” in The Source of Self-Regard : Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 239. Ibid. Nuzzo, Memory, History, Justice, 161. Ibid., 163. Katharina Kraske, “Il corpo come testimone. La corporeità come esperienza centrale del lager nelle tesimonianze di Primo Levi e Liana Millu,” DEP: Deportate, esuli, profughe: Rivista telematica di studi sulla memoria femminile no. 29 (2016): 43–55. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 15. Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 151. Franco Palazzi and Michela Pusteria, “Remembering against the Tide: Giulio Regeni and the Transnational Horizons of Memory,” Open Democracy, 25 January 2018: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/ giulio-regeni-murder-transnational-memory-egypt-italy. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind , trans. Michael Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131, 198. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 51–52. I presented earlier versions of this paper at the University of Oxford, the University of Padua, and Boston College between 2018 and 2019. I am grateful to all participants in those talks for their helpful questions and comments, especially to Susanne Hermann-Sinai, Gareth Polmeer, Francesca Menegoni, Luca Illetterati, and Vanessa Rumble.