On the Pluriformity of Being I

Which is the pluriformity of memory

This is the first part of a two-part series.

Anything that is known or can be known is given in experience; and what is given in experience, whether it is recognized at the time it is so given, is given in conscious experience, conscious awareness, which is itself the bleeding edge of memory.¹ Whatever we are to know we must first understand, first interpret, and what we are to interpret we must first touch, taste, see, hear, or smell; we then interpret what is given through our senses in light of experiences that have since flowed through the bleeding edge of our respective memories and undergone interpretation through the medium of language, itself something remembered that we have received from those in our respective communities through the conscious experience thereof. And because any conscious activity, including the activity of consciousness or awareness itself, is necessarily united in act with its object (lest we find ourselves caught in an absolute and inescapable solipsism), what is given in conscious experience exists by the same existence as the acts through which they are given; furthermore, all further acts of understanding, reflecting, knowing and loving also exist by the same existence as that which is understood, reflected upon, etc. as such—for these, too, are acts undertaken within conscious awareness and have as their respective objects what is explicitly or implicitly given in consciousness or awareness. But as consciousness, conscious awareness, is one, and because consciousness is memory—even if perhaps not the whole of memory—and because what is given or occurs in consciousness exists by the same existence as consciousness, everything that is given or occurs in consciousness exists by the existence of memory; the being of what is sensed, perceived, understood, known and loved as such, as well as the being of each of these activities, is the being of memory. All of this is clear from our work done on this Substack so far.

The above, however, does not entail that we are left with a form of Monism—or so I would contend. For the being of memory—which is being as we know it—is pluriform, and its pluriformity is not only due to real distinctions among its various modes and the modes in which it is given (which are themselves distinct modes of memory), but also because of the communal character of memory, which is subsequently the communal character of being.

Each of the above points regarding the pluriformity of memory—which is, again, the pluriformity of being—deserves separate attention.

That the modes of givenness and actuality in memory differ among themselves is clear enough from a simple and cursory examination of those givens. What may not be so clear is that these different modes of givenness fall into three general dynamic memorial structures—namely, that of cognition, love, and what we may term the sub-stantive originary field of memory or memory as the field of ontic origination, all three of which are formally distinct from each other while not being distinct in existence or being.

First, cognition.

What is given as touched differs from what is given as heard, and so on with the other three senses; their givens are brought into a synthesis in and by memory whereby we are able to recognize unitary and disparate objects, but the example of infants coming to coordinate interiorly their sensory givens, as well as the many ways in which we can be mistaken about which sensory given belongs to what consciously experienced object, indicate well enough the real distinctions among the senses as modes of experiential givenness. If one turns to further cognitional acts that grow out of the actuality of sensible givenness, one finds, further, modes of givenness differing from one another: while what is attended to are givens given through the bleeding edge of memory, to attend to and notice these is to render them as attended to and noticed (one can let the fluxive flow of sensible and sensual experience simply flow on without noticing it); to have insight into or to interpret what is then attended to is to transmute both the disparate set of sensible givens, they synthesis in memory and in light of memory, and their being attended to or noticed into that which is understood or interpreted as such; subsequently, what is sensibly given, noticed or attended to, and interpreted or understood is further transmuted into that which is reflected upon and inquired into as reflected upon and inquired into; and then, at last, all of the aforementioned can be transmuted into that which is judged of as such—that is, knowledge proper, which is the end or goal or flowering of our cognitional activities as such. From the givens of sense experience as such all the way to the activity of knowing, what is given in consciousness, insofar as it falls within and is carried through the entire cognitional structure ending in knowing, is at each stage of transmutation formally distinct from each prior and subsequent stage, different in its mode of givenness or in what it is as given, but it is at every stage as much as what is at any prior or subsequent stage; and this structure, all of its parts of which are equally, spans and includes the whole of consciousness, for it is a progressive conscious activity that includes as its total regulative object simply the whole of whatever is given in consciousness at any one stage of its unfolding, insofar as knowing is in itself dynamically aimed always and already at knowing all that can be known, which is whatever is given in consciousness or awareness. Thus, cognition.

Second, love.

While one must in some way know what he loves, he need not love what he knows—and often enough does not. In fact, knowing can just as easily be put to the service of hatred as it can of love; we see this again and again across history and the domains of our own individual lives such that no concrete examples are necessary. To know, then is not to love, for knowing need not involve or issue in loving. Thus, knowing and loving, knowledge and love, are distinct. And love, while its object reaches to all that is lovable, which is all that is knowable, which is all that is given in consciousness—as the multitude of those recognized as saints and sinners, heroes and villains, all potentially falling along each possible divide between what can be loved and what can be hated attests—it regards anything given in consciousness (which includes all the acts of cognition and their objects!), but it regards it as lovable.² Love, furthermore, has its own dynamic structure by which, through a series of transmutations, what is given in consciousness becomes loved, starting from sense experience to the active act of valuation that is love proper: first, there are felt harmonies with a potentially loved object, affections and emotions and desires that are the resonances of love’s primary sense (touch) in light of and out of remembered past and previously interpreted experiences (as of good, desirable, or of bad, undesirable) with something we might come to love fully; this is transmuted but also brought up unmitigated into the conscious activity of affectively-charged and -drawn attention (which is its own kind of attention distinct, as all lovers of anything recognize, from mere attention),³ which is followed by the implicit or explicit valuation of the same object as lovable, which is then followed by active love toward this same object (which is an orientation of one’s energies and memorial resources toward realizing the perdurance and blossoming of the loved object). Love, then, is its own dynamic structure of formally distinct modes of conscious activity and formally distinct modes of conscious givenness, each being a step along the way toward the blossoming of love that is active love that flows forth in loving action. But love is just as much a conscious activity as knowledge is and all that issues within one’s multi-staged dynamic cognitional structure in the flower of knowing; it thus exists by the same existence as knowledge and as all that issues in knowledge. Therefore, knowledge and love, and the dynamic structures that issue in each as their flower precisely as knowing and loving respectively, exist by the same existence but remain distinct modes of conscious givenness and formally distinct conscious activities; their being is the same, but what they are and how they are, are equally distinct. Thus, love.

Third, memory as sub-stantive originary field or as field of ontic origination.

Depending on how one approaches the matter, this is either the easiest or the most difficult aspect of the pluriformity of memory to appreciate, for it is formally neither what is given in and through the structures of love and knowledge nor any of the activities that lead toward the activities of loving and knowing proper; but it can only be recognized through acts of perception, attention, understanding, and care—and so on. That is, it can only be recognized through our knowing and loving. But then again, many live an exteriorized and exteriorizing conscious life such that all they recognize, or at least what strikes them as all that is evident, are the objects of conscious activity as real and not the “howness” of that givenness, not recognizing that they are objects and thus always and already given as—sensed, perceived, recognized, etc. Either way, though, it is fine: One can really start anywhere he is—after all, that is where he must start!

From the bleeding edge of memory that is immediate conscious awareness to the depths of memory whence what we consciously experience, attend to and notice, interpret, recognize, care about or love (and so on) flows and can later be brought forth again as remembered into conscious awareness—all that we find in memory, and wherever we find it, is given in its actuality: we experience this givenness, have and appreciate it (or overlook it), but we have no say over whether it is actual and remains actual or not—as anyone haunted by traumatic experiences despite their wishes is fully aware, as anyone who has known joyous and beautiful experiences that sustain them through hard times can recognize. Knowing does not create their givenness, loving does not produce their being given; rather, the givenness of all that is given emerges, originates, in concert with all else that exists and moves therein and therefrom, from the vast field of memory as that which gives forth what is given and as that which stands beneath and keeps in being the same.

While knowing and loving and all that goes into knowing and loving, as well as their objects and the objects of the acts located along the dynamic structure through which knowing and loving proper finally come to realization, exist by the same existence that memory as originating and sub-stantive field and are thus only formally distinct from it, in a real sense, the last of the three is prior to the first two: without the givens of conscious experience as such and without their givenness as such, there would be for us no knowledge and no love—even if the former can only be known and loved through the latter two. But memory as originating and under-standing field, the ground from which the givens of conscious experience and their givenness are given and sustained, is distinct from knowing and loving; all are found in consciousness and thus exist by the same existence as consciousness, but what each is is different from the other two, and thus altogether they constitute memory as triformal, as tripartite—one in being (for all of it is being as much as any other part) but three formally.

There is more to the pluriformity of memory (and thus being) than the triformality of memory. For in and through memory we encounter others that are not ourselves: we have friends, family members, neighbors, and so on, all of whose existence seems clearly not our own. In part two, we will take up this second aspect of the pluriformity of memory and find that, indeed, memory, and so being, is always and already communal, that for memory to be at all is to be with, in, and through other memories. But again, this we will take up in the second part.⁴

1. Header image: J.M.W. Turner, Yacht Approaching the Coast (circa 1840-45).

2. “What about hate and hatred?” one may ask. To hate, I would respond, follows upon love and is not formally distinct from love but is rather an aspect of the working of love for the sake of its chosen object. If I love money, my hatred for what would diminish my horde of money simply is a disposition toward warding off that which would diminish my store of funds. And if I hate those who attack my friends, it is not that hatred is here a distinct phenomenon but rather an outworking of my love for my friends, which seeks to preserve them from that which would harm them or diminish their good. There is thus no reason to posit a further power of hatred beyond love but rather to take hatred as one expression of love itself.

3. As some readers have surely already noticed, and that without reading the work of Pierre Rousselot, love and knowledge condition each other, inform each other. Yes, one loves as he knows to love and in light of what he knows about what may be loved; but it is also true that what one comes to know, and how one comes to know it, is informed by one’s loves. As those who have noticed themselves going from not being in love to being in love, a beloved, once one’s beloved, takes on new light, “shows up” to one in a way he or she had not before—which conditions how one thinks about him or her thence. A proper treatment of this relationship between the dynamic structures of love and of knowledge would here take us too far afield; for now, the interested reader is encouraged to read Pierre Rousselot S.J.’s essay “Spiritual Love and Apperceptive Synthesis.”

4. Those interested can begin thinking about lines along which the second part of this inquiry may proceed by revisiting this piece.