The commemorative past

THOMAS BRIDGES Montdair State College

T H E C O M M E M O R A T I V E PAST

I

For historiography, the past consists in the totality of facts which are no longer present facts and which therefore are no longer accessible to direct inspection. The task of historiography, accordingly, is the reconstruction and imaginative representation of facts and events which are no longer present, a reconstruction and representation based upon presently existing .evidence. Today our fundamental relationship to. the past is determined by conceptions which are rooted entirely in this historiographical understanding of the past. To say that man exists historically has come to mean that man has the capacity to reconstruct the earlier phases of the encompassing process of development in which he finds himself enmeshed, and, in some measure, to foresee (and therefore to, determine) the phases of that development which are yet to be realized. Man's historical existence is thus understood to consist not in any essential relationship to the past as such, but rather in a certain relationship to the past conceived merely as a prior phase of a continuing development or evolution.

However, there is another way of encountering the past, another and far more essential way of understanding and experiencing the nature of the historical and the character of man's historicity. Levi-Strauss is speaking of this other way of encountering the past when he writes :

But why do we set such store by our archives ? The events to which they relate are independently attested, in innumerable ways : they survive in the present and in our books; in themselves they are devoid of meaning; they acquire it entirely through their historical repercussions and the commentaries which explain them by relating them to other events... They need only all have been published, for our knowledge and conditio.n to be totally un- affected were a cataclysm to destroy the originals. We should, however, feel this loss as an irreparable injury that strikes to the core of our being... The virtue of archives is t o put us in contact with pure historicity. As I have already said about myths concerning the origin of totemic appellations, their value does not lie in the intrinsic significance of the events evoked : these can be insignificant or even entirely absent, if what is in question is a

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few lines of autograph or a signature out of context. But think of the value of Johann Sebastian Bach's signature to one who cannot hear a bar of his music without a quickening of his pulse... Archives thus provide something else : ...they give a physical existence to history, for in them alone is the contradiction of a completed past and a present in which it survives, sur- mounted. Archives are the embodied essence of the event. 1

What is said here concerning archives is equally true of any entity which can become for us a bearer of the past. There are few who have not perceived at one time or another that peculiar significance which can pervade, say, the site on which a great battle was once fought or the place in which some fateful event once occurred. When visiting such places as the Ford Theater or Omaha Beach, for example, we seem to experience a certain participation in the events which happened there : the past which such places bear seems strangely to possess a presence which is deeper and more power- ful than that possessed even by the things and events making up the actual circumstances of our visit. In the same way, every family has its sacred objects, its utensils and artifacts passed down through generations, whose presence someway expresses and secures the family's supratemporal unity, its deepest reality. Thus, opposed to the historiographical understanding of the past is an understanding of the past which possesses an entirely different character - - an understanding for which the past is not the totality of facts no longer actual but rather a presence in which the contradiction of past and present, the actual and the no longer actual, is overcome.

Now the question I wish to deal with here is this : precisely what is being .experienced and understood concerning any given entity when it is experienced and understood in this way as a bearer of the past ?

I I

However, before we can attack this question directly, we must be dear about certain fundamental features of our more commonplace experience of the environment. Above all, it is essential for us to grasp clearly that pervasive feature of experience which plays such a central role in Dewey's philosophy - - that is, the phenomenon of contextuality, the fact that we never experience singular objects or events wholly in isolation from others, but rather always within and in terms of environing contextual wholes, i.e., always as momentary foci of more comprehensive relational totalities or experiential fields which determine the way in which those things and

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events are encountered and understoo& Let us consider, for example, the various ways in which an entity such as Washington Square Park in New York City might ordinarily be encountered. It is dear that such an entity is never confronted in actual experience as an objectivity which is absolutely and exhaustively given to our understanding, wholly independent of the prevailing situation within which it is encountered. Rather, what is given on any particular occasion represents only a limited aspect of the park, the aspect being determined by our particular motives and interests at the time as well as by things and events within the park. The sight-seer approaches the park within a different relational context than does a mother taking her child for an afternoon walk; a city planner or a parks department official, on the other hand, in their professional capacities would be immediately concerned with still other facets of the park's total existence, and a working artist or an urban sociologist would encounter the park within a quite different frame of reference.

Now given this essential contextuality of experience, two further points must be carefully considered. First, we must observe that, while it is true that the sight-seer, the city planner, the artist, the derelict, etc., each encounters Washington Square Park within different contexts or frames of reference, it is nevertheless true also that all of these diverse contexts are encompassed by and comprehended within a more general and inclusive contextual whole. This all-encompassing context is constituted by the prevailing configuration of the contemporary public world - - an unexpressed, implicit background-totality determined by the unique order of cultural realities prevailing at any given time. Thus, for example, while the mother who is walking her child and the city planner are involved with different contextually determined aspects of the park's concrete existence - - the one knowing the park as a familiar collection of trees, benches and busy play- grounds, and the other concerned with it as an object to be managed and even altered with a view to its functional relationship to the surrounding areas of the city - - nevertheless, in both cases the park is encountered as already implicitly determined in its objective reality by its place in the cultural context, the prevailing world-configuration, which is shared by both the city planner and the mother. The experienced reality of the park - - what the park is for those who are concretely involved with it - - is clearly affected, for instance, by the character of the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to it, as well as by its location relative to the financial, commercial,

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industrial and purely residential areas of the city. Moreover, it is also affected by the prevailing character of New York City itself, its place in the life of the nation and its place in the world. But still other very pervasive, if less tangible, features of the contemporary world equally determine the way in which the park is experienced and understood. For example, the ever-present cloud of soot which hovers over the park and dirties the sky, the jet airliners thundering above, the muffled roar of heavy traffic on nearby thoroughfares - - all these subliminal presences symbolize and evoke the myriad harsh realities of industrial civilization. Again, the numerous university students who frequent the park are reminders that the park belongs to a world which contains such things as universities - - and all the problems, issues and turmoil connected with them. Again, the sight of the very rich who live nearby combines uneasily with the view of certain other permanent fixtures of the park: hopeless, vile derelicts, socially alienated young people, vigilant policemen circling about on their motor scooters, and so on. Such phenomena, though hardly noticed by a hardened veteran of the park, nevertheless communicate effectively the fundamental realities of the age and form the unexpressed, pervasive background in terms of which the park is concretely experienced and from which the park derives its immediate, objective reality. In short, while Washington Square Park may be encountered in different ways depending upon the particular experiential context within which we are concerned with it at any given moment, nevertheless there exists a fundamental, all-encompassing context which determines the experienced meaning or reality of the park for all those who deal with it in any way whatsoever - - and this fundamental context consists in the unique configuration of cultural realities which forms the contemporary public world, that pervasive background-totality which at every moment constitutes the most general horizon of all experience.

There is a second observation which we must make with regard to this fact of the thoroughgoing and essential contextuality of experience. The observation is this : the all-encompassing context or world-background constituted by the prevailing configuration of cultural realities determines not only the way in which we encounter and understand the things and events making up our environment, it also determines the way in which we objectively understand ourselves. The human self bears no resemblance to an absolutely contextless and worldless Cartesian ego, one which exists and apprehends itself quite apart from all concrete situations and social circum-

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stances. On the contrary, we first come to understand who we are, we first come to assume an objective identity and a personal existence, only with the dawning awareness and recognition of our relationships to others and of the concrete possibilities which our cultural milieu opens to us. Self- understanding is no less a function os context and situation than is our understanding of the environment. The self of which we are obscurely aware in everyday life is a self which is implicated totally, implicated without remainder, in the prevailing realities which constitute the encompassing social world. Of course, this must not be interpreted to exclude the freedom involved in our evident capacity to determine our own self- development, that freedom which enables us to rise above circumstances and to take a different path; it is, as a matter of fact, always possible for us to undertake one career or course of action rather than others, to seek one status rather than another, and to alter ourselves and our situation in any number of ways. Yet, in every case, the concrete, practical possibilities among which we choose already stand open to us as fully interpreted paths, paths whose meaning and character is determined entirely by the cultural context in which they are discovered and to which they inseparably belong. Individual selves derive their appearance of ontological independence and primacy from the very fact of the pervasiveness of this all-encompassing cultural context; and the world-background in terms of which we always understand ourselves remains for the most part invisible and unexpressed simply because its fundamental configuration constitutes the essential pre- supposition and condition of all selves. Thus, in summary, we must say that it is only within and in terms of the all-encompassing context constituted by the prevailing configuration of the cultural world that we first experience and understand what any given entity is and who we are; it is the prevailing configuration of cultural realities which grounds and determines the objective identities of both things and persons.

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Now given the fact that the objective meaning and reality of Washington Square Park and of every other entity is wholly determined by its relative place and function within the prevailing world-configuration, what is it precisely which is revealed or discovered about the park, about ourselves, and about the world when the park becomes for us a bearer of the past ?

As we have observed, any person using Washington Square Park today

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encounters the park wholly in terms of the context of cultural realities, the world-configuration, which now prevails. The objective reality of the park is wholly determined by such factors as the present location of the park relative to the other districts of the city, the prevailing character of its surrounding neighborhoods, the pervasive influences of industrialization and urbanization, and many other similar factors too numerous to mention. However, it can easily happen that some visitor to the park, in a contempla- tive moment, might glance briefly at the row of elegant Georgian homes which still line Washington Square North and suddenly realize a fact which he had always theretofore taken for granted : namely, the fact that this very park, this very place, was once a part of, was once fully incorporated within a very different world. During the time in which the James family lived just off the square, for instance, the fashionable and graceful residential district of Washington Square still lay in the northern area 0f the city; the upper parts of Manhattan, beyond the city's suburban fringe, were still being cultivated. The city itself, of course, was not at that time a world center of finance and trade, but rather was little more than a provincial seaport on the frontier of European civilization. Again, the vast territory to the west was not then a domain of garish billboards, huge mechanized t:arms and sprawling urban centers, but rather a harsh wilderness, a land of savages and great buffalo herds. It was these and similar factors which made up the configuration of the world within which the James family and their contemporaries moved; it was these prevailing realities which formed the background and provided the frame of reference in terms of which Washington Square was then encountered. Today the Georgian homes of Washington Square North constitute a standing invitation to all who encounter them to rediscover, to re-establish momentarily this world within which they were created and to which their creators belonged. Where such a rediscovery is not made, the past of Washington Square can only remain something essentially irrelevant to, something strangely detached and 'distant from its vital actuality. But in a deeper sense, where such a rediscovery is not made, Washington Square itself has not been truly discovered. We must now attempt to determine more clearly the nature and content of this momentary rediscovery and revival of a formerly prevailing world-configuration - - for it is precisely in this phenomenon of rediscovery that we most directly encounter the essence of the historical.

Let us note first that this rediscovery consists essentially in a momentary

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suspension of the reality-claim of the world-configuration which presently prevails. To rediscover and re-establish a formerly prevailing world-configuration is to allow that world-configuration to determine for a moment our experience and understanding of the particular region of our environment which we are considering; it is to renew for a moment the reality-claim of the world-configuration to which our environment once belonged. This suspension of the contemporary world-configuration constitutes the primary and essential condition for all authentic understanding of the past. No matter how "correct" is our reconstruction of past events, the past must always remain a dead abstraction, lacking any vital experiential connection to the present, until the world-configuration which constituted the setting and background of those earlier events has been momentarily re-established as present through the suspension of our contemporary world-background. However, this is not to say that a detailed knowledge of the prevailing world-conditions of an earlier time is strictly necessary for an authentic rediscovery of the world-configuration of that time - - although it is true that the more knowledge we do have of those world-conditions, the easier and more complete will be our suspension of contemporary world-conditions. Wha t is primarily important here is not the re-establishment of a cultural setting whose features might be presumed to correspond exactly to all the features of an earlier age - - as if some highly complex theoretical attitude were involved. What is crucial is rather just this suspension itself, for with this momentary suspension of the reality-daim of our contemporary world- configuration comes the full realizatlon - - the authentic historical insight - - that the familiar environment of our daily life was once intimately incorporated into an entirely different world-configuration. When Washington Square or any other entity becomes for us a bearer of the past, we sense through it the presence of a world to which it once belonged; but the presence of that world can come to prevail for us only to the extent that the reality-claim of our own contemporary world-configuration is suspended or bracketed. The more complete this suspension is, the more profound is our realization of the significance of the apparently trivial fact that our environment has known a past. But why should the content of such a realization be considered significant ?

M o r e deeply understood, this suspension of the reality-claim of the contemporary world-configuration constitutes a liberating transcendence of the contemporary. It constitutes a transcendence of the contemporary insofar

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as any rediscovery and re-establishment of an .earlier world-configuration frees the environment from the meanings assigned to it within the contemporary world-configuration, thereby revealing environmental entities as essentially transcending the determinations received by virtue of their place within the contemporary world. For example, to experience and understand Washington Square momentarily in terms of the world-configuration which prevailed during the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century is to let the park emerge within a world whose configuration differs con- siderably from that with which we are familiar. Within this emergence of Washington Square Park as determined by its former world-setting, two moments or aspects may be distinguished. On the one hand, we witness a momentary transformation and reconstitution of the park's concrete experiential reality as it assumes its place within the freshly rediscovered world- configuration: for a moment, Washington Square is revealed as that actuality which was known by the first residents of its Georgian homes, those residents whose world also included the vast western frontier, the open farmlands of mid and upper Manhattan, and, not far from Washington Square, the charred wreckage created by the great fire of 1835. Yet, on the other hand, in the moment of this transformation and reconstitution of the park's concrete reality, we are equally struck by the realization that it is this very place - - this very park that we had previously encountered only in terms of the familiar configuration of the contemporary world - - which in fact was experienced and understood in this radically different way by the original residents of Washington Square North and which in fact belonged wholly to their world. Thus, at the heart of the rediscovery of a formerly prevailing world-configuration, at the heart of this recovery of 'the past of Washington Square, lies the realization of an Menti U which transcends the great differences between our Washington Square and the Washington Square which the James family knew, an identity in which the contradiction of past and present, the actual and the no longer actual, is overcome. When Washington Square becomes for us a bearer of the past, it becomes the focus of a presence in which the gulf separating that which is from that which is no longer is momentarily abolished. It is in this identity of past and present, this transcendent presence that the deepest reality of the park is grounded. Once we have achieved this authentically historical insight, Washington Square can never again fit comfortably within the limits of the place assigned to it in the contemporary world; never again can it be taken

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for granted along with all the rest of our everyday environment in its merely routine and commonplace reality. On the contrary, Washington Square will hereafter always point beyond its purely contemporary determinations, announcing that its essential being and primary significance does not lie exclusively in its current uses and functions within the contemporary world, but rather lies in the very fact that it has belonged (and still belongs, insofar as we remain committed to preserve them) to worlds other than that one which presently prevails. What we had previously only vaguely understood but had always taken for granted concerning the park, namely, the fact that it has known a past, now emerges as the essential fact, the most significant of all.

We have still to consider one other effect of the suspension of the contemporary which is involved in the concrete rediscovery of a formerly prevailing world-configuration. We noted earlier t h a t not only is our understanding of the environment for the most part determined entirely by the configuration of the contemporary world, but, in the same way, our understanding of ourselves is also fundamentally determined by that prevailing world-configuration. In view of this fact, we must expect that the suspension of the reality-claim of the contemporary world-configuration will alter the way in which we understand ourselves no less than it alters the way in which we experience and understand our environment. Let us now briefly examine this modification in our self-understanding which the suspension of the contemporary brings about.

First we shall recall that, in any authentic experience of the historical, the suspension of the reality-claim of the contemporary world-configuration involves at the same time a certain renewal of the reality-claim of a formerly prevailing world-configuration. Accordingly, in this suspension of the contemporary, we witness, on the one hand, a suspension of the self- understanding within which we have always lived previously and which is determined by our place and role within the contemporary world; and, on the other hand, we experience a participation in a self-understanding determined by the general features of the world-configuration whose reality-claim has been momentarily renewed. Thus, when Washington Square o.r any other entity becomes for us a bearer of the past, we sense through it not only the presence of a world to which it once belonged, but also the presence of a way o,f being-in-the-world - - a way of being-in-the- world wholly determined by the general configuration of the world to which

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it too belonged. Again, let us note that this self-understanding in which we for a moment come to participate need not be presumed to correspond perfectly to the self-understanding of any particular individual or group for whom the re-established world-configuration was actually contemporary. What is essential in this case also is just this momentary suspension itself, this momentary bracketing of the self-understanding in which we ordinarily live, and for this suspension all that is required is a momentary assumption of another possible self-understanding, one which is wholly dependent upon a world-configuration which once did in fact prevail. This suspension constitutes the very heart and source of all authentic historical understanding, fo~ through this suspension we become decisively aware that the self-understanding in which we ordinarily live is ultimately grounded in and determined by the configuration of the contemporary world.

However, we must observe that this awareness also possesses a far more profound and significant content. As we saw earlier with regard to our understanding of the environment, the suspension of the contemporary not only reveals, the way in which our ordinary experience of environmental entities is determined by the world-configuration within which they are encountered, but it also makes manifest the fact that the deepest reality of the environment essentially transcends the determinations which the environment may possess by virtue, of its place either within the contemporary world-configuration or within any world-configuration which has formerly prevailed. The suspension of the contemporary, that is to, say, also reveals that the deepest reality of the environment is grounded in a presence in which the contradiction of the actual and the no longer actual is overcome - - an underlying identity of the past and the present which is made manifest through environmental entities which have participated both in the contemporary world-configuration and in world-configurations which are no longer contemporary. Now the suspension of the reality-claim o.f the contemporary world-configuration may be seen to yield the same revelation with regard to our understanding of ourselves. This suspension not only brings us to the awareness that the self-understanding in which we ordinarily live is fundamentally determined by the world-configuration to which it belongs, but it also at the same time renders accessible a self-understanding which essentially transcends all determinations having their source exclusively in one particular world-configuration as distinguished from another. Just as the suspension of the contemporary reveals that the familiar

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entities of our environment essentially transcend the meanings assigned to them within the contemporary world-configuration, so also this suspension reveals that the ground, the deepest source of our self-understanding transcends all determinations having their origin in the contemporary world-configuration. Just as the suspension of the contemporary brings to light a presence which overcomes the contradiction of past and present, the actual and the no longer actual, so also this suspension brings to light a self-understanding which corresponds to and is grounded in this presence : this presence itself is revealed as the essential ground and source of all self-understanding - - a presence in which the great differences which sever the self-understanding of generations now living from that of generations which have gone before are reduced to nothing, a presence in which the gulf separating the living from the dead is overcome. Thus, when Washington Square or any other entity becomes for us a bearer of the past, it becomes for us the focus of a presence which makes manifest the ground of our essential unity with those who preceded us; the very fact that an entity has known a past, i.e., has participated in world-configurations prior to that one which presently prevails, becomes the ground for the experience of our essential community with those who have gone before, the essential community of the living and the dead. Once this discovery has been made, never again can we identify ourselves wholly with our place and role within the contemporary world-configuration; never again can we understand ourselves wholly apart from any essential relationship to those who have preceded us; never again can the dead be thoughtlessly understood as those who once existed and who have simply vanished forever. To rediscover at the heart of ~the contemporary world a world-configuration which once formerly prevailed as contemporary is ultimately to discover in what sense it is true that the vanished dead, paradoxically, are those who are most present of all : for it is precisely that presence, that sphere of transcendence, in which our indissoluble unity with the dead is experienced which constitutes that which is deepest, most real and most present in ourselves as well as in the environment which surrounds us.

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Thus, to encounter Washington Square or any other entity in its essential historicity as a bearer of the past is to rediscover at the heart of the world

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which currently prevails a world-configuration to which that entity once belonged; this rediscovery involves, on the one hand, a suspension of the reality-claim of our own contemporary world-configuration, and, on the other hand, a certain renewal of the reality-claim of the world-configuration which formerly prevailed. Now let us designate this rediscovery, understood to include all its constitutive moments, with the term commemoration. It will be useful to extend this terminology also to those four moments or aspects which we have distinguished within the unity of commemoration. Thus, let us term that formerly prevailing world-configuration which is rediscovered in the moment of commemoration the commemorative past. It will be recalled that the rediscovery of a world-configuration which has formerly prevailed constitutes at the same time a certain transcendence of the purely contemporary - - that is, at the same time renders accessible a sphere of transcendence in which the present and the past, the living and the dead are revealed in their essential identity and indissoluble unity; let us term this sphere of transcendence the commemorative presence. Again, we have seen that this presence is focused upon and made manifest through entities which have in fact participated in world-configurations which are no longer contemporary as well as in the contemporary world-configuration; let us call any entity which assumes this function a commemorative object. (It is important to note that virtually any entity can become a commemorative object: words, beliefs, actions and institutions as well as particular things and places.) Finally, let us term that unity of the living and the dead which is grounded in and revealed through some particular commemorative object a commemorative community. These four constitutive moments of commemoration clearly must not be regarded as discrete parts of a larger whole; rather, they should be viewed simply as different aspects of a single reality : fully and properly understood, each of the four moments we have distinguished contains within itself and expresses the phenomenon of commemoration in its entirety.

In ordinary usage, the word "commemoration" most often refers to a ceremonial remembrance which honors and celebrates that which is remembered. However, in the broad sense in which we have used the term, "commemoration" signifies a remembrance in which far more is at stake than the mere celebration and honoring of the remembered object. Commemora- tion, as we have conceived it, is a remembrance through which we are recalled and recollected into that presence constituted by the transcendence

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and abolishment of the gulf separating the present from the past and the living from the dead. In commemoration, we momentarily turn away from that purely contemporary domain of incompleteness and exigency within which we ordinarily live, and for a moment come to be re-established in the truth that that which is deepest and most real in ourselves as well as in the things around us consists in a participation in the underlying, un- failing union of that which is and that which is no longer. Commemoration is thus the remembrance of and the recollection into that presence to which we, along with all men both living and dead, essentially belong, and through which the final significance of all things is made manifest and preserved.

The notion of commemoration developed here illuminates, I believe, a region of experience, a dimension o.f life, which is all too little considered and understood today - - and to our inestimable loss. As we mentioned at the outset, today our relationship to the past is wholly determined by conceptions which are essentially historiographical in character, by conceptions grounded in the notion of history as a causally determined unfol- ding of events. The famous triumph of historical (or, more precisely, historiographical) consciousness in the modern world has in fact amounted to the triumph of the concepts of development and evolution in every domain of human life and understanding. Consequently, while it is true that no age has been more assiduous than ours in the task of rationally reconstructing the past, it is also true that no age has ever been more oblivious of the past as such - - that is to say, less conscious of the continuing presence of the past as the ground and depth of our everyday life and environment. Everywhere it is the contemporary which dominates; everywhere the doctrine prevails unchallenged that ideas and institutions must constantly be "brought up to date" and made to conform to the needs and spirit of the times. Tradition is viewed as an irrational constraint on individual spontaneity and as an unfortunate obstacle to efficacious social and economic engineering. The authority of established social arrangements rests solely upon their capacity to continue producing desired results while ceaselessly adapting to new conditions. Thus, at the very heart of modern historical consciousness lies a phenomenon which we might characterize as the solipsism of the contemporary : an exclusively historiographical relationship to the past gives rise to a world focused exclusively upon the actual, a world in which all value and authority is founded exclusively upon

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the needs, interests and aspirations of the living. But man's existence is authentically historical only insofar as it is com-

memorative; the source and ground of historicity lies precisely in what we have termed the commemorative presence; only where this commemorative presence determines man's relationship to the present as well as to the past is there history. It is commemoration which constitutes the life and heart of all tradition, which forms the deepest substratum of the social world, and which binds generations together. When this understanding of the past fails and falls into oblivion, as it has in the modern world, the gradual erosion of the social bond, the gradual deracination of the social world, must inevitably follow. Yet commemoration can never be wholly absent from family and community life. Every family has its sacred objects, even if their sacredness is disparagingly explained in terms of "sentimental attachment". Every community has its memorials, its holy places, its traditions, even if their deepest meaning is never understood. But it is precisely in this failure to understand the meaning of our ties to the past that the tragedy lies. It is this failure to understand which turns family dwellings into mere "machines for living", traditions into empty cultural habits, and "historic sites" into sightseers' curiosities. Certainly there can be no more urgent and significant task for the "philosophy of history" than to provide this understanding whose absence continues to impoverish our life.

N O T E S

1 Tile Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld (Chicago, z966) pp. 24z-z42.

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The commemorative past