Memory in the Ontopoiesis of Life

From Aristotle to the present, memory has been grasped as a trace or impression of lost reality – bridging physiological experience and consciousness. Philosophers have vainly sought the nature of this bridge. The present-day physiologizing/naturalizing of consciousness is not resolving their congenital continuity, in which the very existence and practice of life is rooted. We have to change our approach (Erwin Straus). The Aristotelian congenital ties between memory and temporality, acquire crucial significance in our primogenital ontopoiesis of life (Tymieniecka). It reveals memory to be the factor that carries this coalescence and the becoming of life itself. This can be the fruit only of the generative springs of life, first phenomenology/philosophy, the ontopoietic logos of life.

In this collection we explore memory in the constitution of reality: rememorizing and interpretation, consciousness/action, facts/imagination, history/myths, self-realization/metamorphosis.