Hatırlamanın edilgenliği: Husserl, Proust ve Merleau-Ponty

We know that phenomenology was born with the idea of being the main science of all sciences. If we separate this idea from the period, we may receive too an error. At that time, thanks to the works of Freud, psychology was very popular and claimed to be the main science behind all sciences. It would not be wrong to say that Husserlian phenomenology was founded to oppose this vision and show that philosophy, or rather phenomenology, is the true science. In this research, we started with the desire to study whether phenomenology is a main science as phenomenology thinks about itself. We started this research for this purpose, but the subject we have chosen to work on is remembering. We know that the subject is very important for the human being, and we thought that it would adapt to our research since it is the subject on which Freud is most concentrated. Furthermore, we went in this direction and also wanted to examine whether phenomenology is fundamental in the field of memory. The path we followed was, of course, to bracketing, like the method in phenomenology. Our first objective was to try to understand Husserl's philosophy by opening it up and finding where the notion of remembering is in his philosophy. As we have already said, phenomenology attempts to distinguish itself from psychology. Suddenly, it was inevitable that there would be a phenomenological discussion on remembrance and memory because remembrance became a major issue in that era. But before all this, we can also see the work on memory in the history of philosophy. Remembering is not only always an important subject in philosophy, but also the most important thing that makes people human. We are all as we remember. After examining the philosophers before Husserl, we discovered that for every philosopher who deals with the philosophy of memory also mentions the three common points: perception, time and object. In phenomenology, we know very well that consciousness is consciousness of something. In other words, by perceiving things at every moment, we are aware of them. What we're doing here, as we said, is actually perception. And we cannot have a memory of something without perceiving it. Here we see the perception-memory relationship. Then, the object-memory relationship has two sides. First of all, at the moment of perception that we talked about above, if something did not exist, we could not perceive it because, as phenomenology says, consciousness is consciousness of something. So, it has to be an object for us to be able to perceive it. Second, what we remember is also an object. Also, what we remember is not in the present, memories are always moments that have not broken with the past because they were experienced in the past, but we remember them in the present. And here we see the time-memory relationship. While these topics are the common traits, we see in all philosophers talking about the philosophy of memory, the fourth comes with phenomenology: passivity. When we turn to the object we want to perceive, we see that what we perceive is more than that object. That is to say, we become aware of the object that we want to perceive but also the things that we do not intend to perceive at that moment. To explain them, we need passivity. Thus, our research question is whether passivity reveals a correct and inconsistent understanding that can explain all angles of memory in phenomenology. In this work, we have attempted to deal with passivity in phenomenology. We have discussed it from Husserlian philosophy. Husserl's texts entitled Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Experience and Judgment, Analysen zur passive Synthesis [Analyze of Passive Synthesis] and Cartesian Meditations guided us in this discussion but also On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time helped us to understand the lack of philosophy when passivity is absent. We continued our research with the series of novels In Search of Lost Time by Proust. As we know, Proust wrote texts on memory, of which we can see the most diverse and varied examples. For this reason, we examined how the passivity constructed by Husserl works in the examples in the second part of our research. Finally, we tried to reveal an understanding of memory based on the text Phenomenology of Perception, in which Merleau-Ponty revealed his philosophy of memory. We begin by examining time in Husserl. After considering that the understanding of Husserl's time in his older texts is unsuitable for remembering and philosophy in general, we have reached passivity by examining his later texts. We see that there are two types of passive synthesis: retention and sedimentation. In Husserl's philosophy, we see that what is called passivity is in fact a synthesis. Sedimentation is a passivity than taking things in the background with the thing that catches our attention because we have synthesized them without realizing it and have taken them all in one way or another. It is a passive synthesis because we do not know the act of perceiving at that moment. Then, it is a synthesis because we synthesize everything that we perceive. On the other hand, retention is briefly during, before and after. When we perceive something, we become aware of what is happening because it is happening during the act of perception. Previously, we are not conscious of this object, but afterwards, we continue to have consciousness since we withdraw it. Husserl speaks of the body in his text of Cartesian Meditations, after having revealed all his sense of passivity. So first he established consciousness, then he says we have a body. Since Husserl is often criticized for not remaining in consciousness, we endeavored to examine whether this criticism was founded. To see this, we looked at the passivity of examples in Proust's novels. After having seen the necessity of passive synthesis in the domain of memory, we continue to examine this Husserlian system in the novels of Proust. We sought to determine if we needed a more complex understanding of the body that functions in harmony with consciousness. Additionally, we decided to study Proust because Proust was the most important writer in the history of literature who most clearly gave us examples of remembering. Moreover, knowing that Husserl, Proust and Freud prepared their work in the same period, we thought that the philosophy of the time was also suitable for this research. After examining the examples and the different types of memory in Proust, such as voluntary memory, habitual memory, and memory of places, with the help of Casey, we have come to the conclusion that passive synthesis is necessary because memory is an association and that we can make the synthesis. In the example of voluntary memory, we have seen the different aspects that a memory has and to remove everything at the same time as a whole, it is necessary to make a synthesis. We also thought that one of these aspects was the habitual body memory that allows us to act without thinking about it each time. Then, we examined that memory has a relationship with space because there is the memory of places. This is also why we need a body that works with consciousness. We cannot control the memory of places with our consciousness alone. In short, we can say that there is no memory without bodily memory, without involuntary memory and without memory of places. As the Husserlian philosophy was not sufficient to explain the whole understanding of memory, we tried to build a good philosophy of memory so that phenomenology could be the rigorous science and we continued our research with Merleau-Ponty because like Merleau-Ponty developed phenomenology, we thought to find the answer in him. Even if the relationship between body and memory could be found in Merleau-Ponty, the problems in the synthesis part caught our attention. When we examine Merleau-Ponty's book of Phenomenology of Perception, we find that his approach to the subjects we are dealing with is quite different from those of Husserl. Even though he took the idea of retention from Husserl, it is not at all a passive synthesis as Husserl thinks. According to him, when we perceive things, they come with the synthesis and that is why, we can perceive it, but it is not us who do the synthesis. Thus, we could say that to obtain a well-functioning philosophy of remembering, the body must play an important role in this system, as much as we need a passive synthesis. Although we do not believe that either Husserl or Merleau-Ponty were wrong in their ideas, we have concluded in our research that we can resolve certain shortcomings by reading the philosophy of these two philosophers together. Since memory is an intangible experience but we all live, we thought the question was important. We hope that this memoir will enlighten those who are researching this subject. Keywords: Recollection, memory, passivity, time, perception, passive synthesis, retention, sedimentation, primary memory, voluntary memory