Memory and Recollection

Abstract

Chapter 5 establishes the role of memory and recollection in their mutual relation in Plotinus. This requires a careful reading of the relevant texts in Plato and Aristotle and also a meticulous reconstruction of the arguments in the Enneads. Memory for Plotinus is not the Platonic storage of images or imprints coming from the sensible or the intelligible. Rather, memory is a power of imagination used by the soul for the reconstruction and reproduction of the currently absent, which the soul performs starting with the initial sensible impact that becomes the occasion to form a particular memory. Recollection, on the contrary, takes the form of a rational discursive rethinking that reproduces the soul’s experience of the intelligible objects. Recollection, then, is constituted by a triple motion of the descent, staying, and return of the soul to the intelligible.