Paul Ricoeur addresses memory in two ways: personal and collective. Memory is both an opportunity and an obstacle for the individual, within social change, to protect identity. Memory as an agency of identity reminds us of ourselves (Ricoeur, 1985:56). Ricoeur reflects on the relationship between this consecutiveness and time; he states that biological time plays a critical role in collective memory formation. The lived time defining the past is based on physical continuity.
While looking for traces of the past, like a historian, we examine what happened in the past based on the connections between documents and facts. The "self-practice" and "awareness" that human builds through past experiences is a goal to be encountered at the end of this path. At the end of the process, we can reach "self-knowledge" by interpreting the "traces" left on earth by those before us.
The human is the student of the text of the earth. "Self-knowledge" requires the harmonic of memory and the traces of the past. Those traces, which we can refer to as self-traces, can be works of art, architectural structures, historical events, poems, metaphors, or symbolic events. Through those traces, one is separated from oneself and, by meeting the other, rediscovers oneself.
Memory is a paradox in which existence is withdrawn or absence is present. The only way and symptom to communicate with what is withdrawn are to follow the traces in the residual layers of time. The paths have turned into a sign in which we now feel the existence of the extinct. We need those traces, and we mourn the loss because we will never be able to reach the presence of the retracted thing again. All memories are iconic and transcendent.
What makes a human being is her ability to remember. Augustine says that memory is the stomach of the mind. It can store things without itself tasting them. (Augustinus, 1993:23).
Augustine distanced memory from the idea of a two-dimensional trace, added forgetting into it and perceived it in three dimensions. He introduced the perception of depth because people live by remembering, forgetting, and narrating.
All human consciousness is narrative. One can't remember a memory as it is. One tells a story when one tells a memory of the past because each narration is an interpretation. Each level has a narrative dimension because it tries to establish an order between irrelevant heterotopic and chaotic data and does it through imagination. We are describing an event of the past attempts to form a series of those chaotic events through words or language. Both our past narratives and identity definitions are, therefore, a narrative. We pass what is in the narrative through a plot and convey it selectively. We may only address some dimensions while discussing some events. Each time we tell the same event, we produce a different story. What is remembered is, therefore, always a story but not the truth itself. The story of that moment is also experienced through what is planned to be done in the future.
Human perception of time is fictional; therefore, we always place ourselves as a character in a narrative. Each story has an imaginary and accurate dimension.
Setting an order between the intrigues of narrative characters constitutes a paradigm for individuals. One with the narrative identity allows us to connect seemingly irrelevant memories and to rewrite their own story. Defining our identity is the story we write and tell through an aesthetic language as we live.
When memory looks back, it sees our memories; but when it looks to the future, it considers the promises we made; promises about the future are tools that make it possible to change static memory. We need a solid memory to remember a promise that we have made. We make promises witnessed by others, offer a possibility of change, and enable metamorphosis. Each promise is meaningful to humanity and has a generous, operational, linguistic, and ethical dimension. Forgetting about a promise is the opposite of memory, and betrayal can be defined as the opposite of a promise.
We cannot separate individual identity from collective identity. There is no memory of an individual; they all concern the others. Stories are swaps of memories that bring us together with others. As stories change, we obtain new data from others and include ourselves. This exchange reshapes our personal and collective identity between ourselves and others. Through memory, we preserve past stories and make them our own.
By remembering and repeating, we keep alive suppressed pathological traumas. However, the relationship between psychoanalysis and the therapist is inadequate for collective memory. The optimal way to overcome traumas in collective memory is to use stories and artistic narratives to bring records of our memory and others.
The "promise" that triggers the change in the individual memory corresponds to utopia in the collective memory that desires to fulfill the promises for social change. Ricoeur represents the cultures, promises, dreams, and hopes of the past as a close follower and maintainer of joint promises. Staying true to the promise is not a personal endeavor, but it is to remain faithful to the promises of the past, namely to the future. The past is not something that has already been experienced and ended; it is still alive. In other words, when we turn to the past, we also turn to the future where people of the past have turned. In this sense, being self-meaning is seeing the reflection of a utopia in the memory.
No thought or word has ever come to exist from scratch. Just as people cannot live without dreams, societies cannot live without utopia. If we do not have a utopia, we fall into the tyranny of ideology. All dreams are worse than the imprisonment of the truth because utopia is based on imagination. Imagination encourages people to create new collective stories. Through utopia, we renew memory, remember, and keep the promises of the past made to the future.
Utopia, a collective promise, has allowed us to move from narrative identity to ethical self. We take responsibility for learning to be ourselves. The connection between "responsibility" and "respond" also shows that responsibility means responding to someone. This answer corresponds to promise and utopia. This promise corresponds to the artistic language that constitutes our identity.
Imagination and experiences encourage people to create new collective stories. Through utopia, we renew memory, remember, and keep the promises of the past made to the future.
Utopia, a collective promise, has allowed us to move from narrative identity to ethical self-entity. It helps us to take responsibility for learning to be ourselves with the connection between the words "responsibility" and "respond"; it also shows that being responsible means responding to someone. This answer corresponds to the promise and utopia that constitutes our identity with artistic language.