Memory and Understanding
A reflection
All of understanding is interpretation, and there is no act of understanding that is itself not also an act of interpretation.1 2Nothing that is given to us in experience gives its own ready-made interpretation, no data we would seek to understand indicates of itself how it is to be understood nor what exactly it is. Whatever it is we would wish to understand, we must determine how best to interpret the relevant data; once we have determined how to interpret the relevant data and have actually done so, we have understood the data in question, for we have determined what it is.
For example, if I notice the echo of a sound wafting down the hall at night, I do not in the very moment that I first hear it know what it is nor, if it is a real sound, what it is a sound of. Am I hearing things because it is dark and the wind is howling through my house’s eaves and I am frightened? Or, is it really a sound I’ve heard? If so, what exactly am I hearing? I have to stop and attend to what I noticed, consider it in relation to what follows it in time, and then consider both in light of my memories of similar past occurrences. As I attend, consider, and bring the light of my memory to bear on what I am attending to and considering, I recognize the notes of a piano woven together through time in the form of the first movement of Mozart’s sonata K331. That is not all. While there is a piano in my house, I recognize that the sound does not match what I remember my piano sounding like; moreover, the sound I am hearing is slightly tinny—at which point I recognize that what I am hearing is an older digital recording that my family owns. No part of what was there given in experience gave of itself exactly what it was; I had to interpret it, and in interpreting it I came to understand it.
Or take a darkening gray sky on an increasingly windy summer day. One might say it is obvious that the darkening gray of the sky and the increasing strength of the wind indicate an oncoming storm, as if these things taken together lead one immediately and straightforwardly to understand them, to recognize that they mean a storm is coming. But this is not so. You see shades and blotches of gray across the sky, see the leaves of nearby trees upturned, feel your skin and clothing and hair brushed and moved by something invisible, and you hear the sound—small and large, near and far, of howling and rustling and whistling. It is, rather in light of your memory of similar past events and the dynamic confluence of things they involve and how they have (very nearly) always preceded a storm that leads you to interpret, to understand, what is now being given you in experience as indicating an oncoming summer storm. Nothing in your experience and what was given in it led you directly and straightforwardly to an understanding of what you were experiencing; you had to draw on your memory, no matter how very quickly, and interpret what you were experiencing in light of your memory. Once you so interpreted the givens of your experience, you understood them.
And finally, the words a student, colleague, spouse or child is speaking to you when they are spoken. As anyone who has ever heard a language spoken they did not understand, words spoken do not by themselves give their meaning, do not by themselves move the one who hears them to understand them—let alone to understand the meaning they express. It is in light of our memory, often rather vast, of learning over many years a language and how one deploys words in that language that we are able to understand what words are being spoken to us. It is, moreover, our memory of how such words and the particular sort of concatenation of those words we are now hearing, as well as what role context—including voice pitch and body language—plays that allows us to interpret the meaning being communicated to us right here, right now. In no way are we made immediately and directly to understand the words we are hearing and the meaning being conveyed by them; we have to interpret those words in light of a vast memory of prior relevant experiences and their outcomes. Once we have done so, and no matter how quickly, the words being spoken to us, then we have understood them; to successfully interpret those words is to understand them.
Without memory and what is stored in memory, without remembered experiences and recollected interpretations of experiences and what was given in those experiences, there is no understanding in the present, for no interpretation in the present would be possible. One would simply have what we can get very close to if we have disciplined ourselves to bracket one or other dimension of experience and focus in on it: we would have a continuous conscious perceptual flow with no actual meaning, no actual intelligibility. It is memory and our reflections in light of growing memory that allow us to render what is given in conscious perception, to turn the data of experience, into something that is for us actually something we have interpreted and so actually understood.
But there is no universal memory, and no one memory is formed in the same contexts, and thus no memory contains what every other memory contains. While the operations of perception, memory, and interpretation or understanding are the same, the contents in light of which the latter two proceed (memory and interpretation/understanding) are never the same in any two instances. Thus, it is never enough for us to find something obvious to judge that it is necessarily obvious of itself. For not only does nothing give of itself its own interpretation (as we saw above), but we have no immediate, self-evident grounds for thinking that another’s memory is so formed and so contented that they could be expected to interpret things exactly as we would.
A possible rejoinder to the above is that communities share meaning, that members of communities—religious, linguistic, and so on—share a set of received and remembered contents, with the implication being that those contents are standardized, regularized, across the instances of their reception in memory. But this is not true: for each set of contents is received in the memory of a singular life in a particular set of formative circumstances—familial, temperamental, historical, and so on. Not only, then, would we have no reason for thinking such perfect standardization across memories is possible in the mere reception of regularized contents, but, as each person will come to receive that set of contents through acts of interpretation which themselves occur within and through determinate life situations and histories, we should expect those contents to be interpreted in their givenness differently, thus doubly ensuring differences in their reception across instances of memory, even in the same community. How what is interpreted is interpreted is, at base, the same across instances of interpretation, but what is understood as actually understood does not as such entail that it will be or must be interpreted thus in every other instance where the same sort of givens of experience are considered.
The best we can do, perhaps, is not attempt to enforce interpretations across acts of interpretation and contexts within those acts occur, but rather to cultivate a culture supporting careful and disciplined attention to how we interpret what we interpret, a culture in which we support each other in interpreting what we interpret in the most reasonable and responsible ways we are each able, no matter whether the outcome of one attempt at understanding finally diverges from another. This, of course, would require a culture that encourages and sustains efforts at turning toward and attending to one’s own cognitive operations—a difficult thing.
Header image: Peder Balke, Two Sailing Boats by Moonlight (1843)
The notion that all of understanding is ultimately interpretation I first received from Gadamer. See H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, part 2 (especially section 4 of the same).