Unfinished Notes, Augustine's Confessions Book X and Plato on memory.
- jerryproctor
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
I was never able to bring this paper together. It didn't help that I was on-call the last week before the final day of class.
One-line summary: Memory as recollection of knowledge acquired before birth (Meno and Phaedo), memory as impressions on a wax tablet (Theaetetus), and the effect of writing on memory (Phaedrus).
Plato on memory:
Meno 81a–86b: Plato's famous doctrine of anamnesis, or recollection. Socrates argues that what we call learning is really recollecting knowledge the soul possessed before birth. The demonstration with the enslaved boy and the geometry problem is the classic example.
Links: https://iep.utm.edu/meno-2/
Phaedo 72e–77a: Plato develops the recollection argument more explicitly in connection with the soul's pre-existence. We recognize things such as equality because sensible examples remind us of the perfect Equality we somehow knew before birth.
Links:
Theaetetus 191c–200d: this is probably the closest Plato gets to something resembling a psychology of ordinary memory. Socrates compares memory to a wax tablet given by Mnemosyne: perceptions and thoughts leave impressions in it, and remembering involves retaining and recognizing those impressions. He then introduces the aviary image, in which pieces of knowledge are like birds we possess but may fail to grasp correctly when needed.
Links:
Phaedrus 274c–275b: in the myth of Theuth and Thamus, Plato discusses writing and memory. Writing is presented as something that may actually weaken internal memory because people will rely on external marks instead of exercising recollection themselves.
Links:
Augustine:
His great question is not simply how memory stores information. It is how the self can search itself when the instrument doing the searching is itself part of the mystery.
Memory contains sensations, knowledge, emotions, absences, forgotten things, and even the strange awareness that something has been forgotten.
In the Meno, learning is presented through anamnesis, recollection of knowledge the soul already possesses. In the Phaedrus, writing both preserves knowledge and threatens living memory by replacing inward understanding with external marks. In the Myth of Er, souls choose lives, pass through forgetting, and return to embodiment.
Professor's reply: Plotinus unites these things. There is a kind of memory that collects sensible objects and there is a kind of memory that relates to knowledge of eternal things. When souls go towards embodiment, one of the biggest challenges is drawing towards memories of the intelligible rather than memories of the sensible. I would like to see citations to the locations where you find these sense. Paraphrases need citation as much as quotations because it helps a reader retrace your steps.
I am not familiar with Plotinus, so I'll have to take her word for it, here. She seems to be saying that Plotinus takes several Platonic strands that appear separately in Plato and incorporates them into one psychology of the soul.
Plato's anamnesis language makes eternal truth sound like something remembered from a previous condition of the soul. If I understood her correctly, Plotinus inherits that structure but develops a metaphysics in which the higher part of the soul has, in an important sense, never completely ceased to belong to the intelligible order.
Originally written for ENGL/THEO 569 – The Restless Heart: Augustine’s Confessions (SU26), Dr. Lesley-Anne Williams, Memoria College, Summer 2026.
