Memory and time

Abstract

The article is devoted to the philosophical aspects of the theory of memory, that is how memory makes possible the experience of time for us. The material is divided into three parts: 1) “Memory and the past”; 2) “Memory and the present”; 3) “Memory and the future”. In the first section it is considered that for a person, oneself, one’s world, history, culture have a sense of being worked through memory, passed through the crucible of memories. And everything that a person sees through the shadow of memory seems to be transfigured, filled with meaning, mysterious, paradoxical. The world in fact is revealed to us through the work of memory. Its main function is to return the past, revive it, melt its frozen outlines, re-live it again. In the second section it is shown that for a living memory there is no rupture between the past, the present and the future. And all the long-dead, gone, from the point of view of everyday consciousness, factually is. Memory does not restore the past, it always generates it, does not allow it to disappear. In the third section we analyze the fact that we are always in the future in relation to the past that we are trying to remember. The future is the blood of the present. The present and the past are alive, because they are shrouded in the future. Everything that is not just remembered, but restored by creative imagination, does not change, it lives forever. All this allows us to talk about the memory of the future. The paradoxical structure of the memory makes it possible for us to live in time and create the world around us and ourselves.

Keywords:

memory, memory as the basis of spirituality, living and dead memory, fantasy, imagination, inconceivable memory, memory and eternity