La marca del pasado

• Autores: Paul Ricoeur
• Localización: Historia y grafía, ISSN 1405-0927, Nº. 13, 1999, págs. 157-185
• Idioma: español
• Títulos paralelos:
  • The mark of past
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • This article examines both the epistemological and the ontological status of the past which at one "has been" and is remembered by individuals and societies, but which, and ordinary language tell us, is "no more". An important tradition of reflection that has focused, since Plato and Aristotle, on the conservation of the past by memory, has attempted to account for memory in terms of the metaphor of the impression. This article, on the contrary, argues that the plural memory retained by a number of individuals, upon which historical knowledge depends, cannot simply be derived from this traditional presupposition concerning memory. Memory which is at once plural and public that is the source of the historian's research most directly concerns the testimony of witnesses, the possibility of confronting different testimonies, each with the others, which constitutes the basis of the credibility of the historian's argument. Hence, it is less a problem of the resemblance of the historical narrative to narrated events -inherited from the traditional tendency to identify memory with the impression- than the confrontation of witnesses in their different degrees of trust worthiness, which makes it possible to understand the significance of the narrated event. This reflection concerning the disparity between memory and history is followed, in the second part of this article, to an analysis of the temporality that characterizes the past which is remembered. It leads to a questioning of the privilege accorded, in the synthesis of the three modes of time, to be present in the philosophy of saint Augustine and to the future in that of Heidegger. To liberate history from the paradigm of the trace, from the metaphor of memory as impression, is tantamount to the retrieval of mode of temporalization of the past which has previously been neglected: this other relation to the past intends, while underlining the status of the witness that characterize the historian's endeavor, to place in evidence the idea of the debt toward the past. It is consciousness of the debt toward the past, and of need of deliverance from the debt which, by means of history, aims at emancipation from "the unkept promises that have been blocked or repressed by the later course of history, through which a people, a nation, a culture, may attain a living and open conception of its own traditions"