Brief notes about the mediation between memory and history in the light of platonic phármakon

Abstract

Writing the history can be a remedy or a poison to the memory, depending only on who does it and how it is done. The discussion around the word pharmacón (that in Greek means, among others, remedy or poison at the same time) in the dialogue “Fedro” is initiated by Socrates when narrating a myth about the emergence/invention of writing that is presented by its creator as a pharmacón. The writing, while pharmacón, represents precisely the problem faced on the mediation between memory and history before the constant hurdle between truth of history and veracity (the fidelity of memory). The truth of history and its relation with the veracity is essentially connected to the epistemological autonomy of the historic science against the mnemonic phenomenon. Ricoeur undertakes a critic against the intention of History self knowing constituting an absolute knowledge in total reflection especially as thought by the romantic and post-romantic German philosophy and thus, abandons the Hegelianism affirming that the thinking consideration of the History made by Hegel was an interpretative operation, a hermeneutic phenomenon, which submits like any other to the end intending with Gadamer to think “pos Hegel”. What is concluded with Ricouer is that the opposition between memory and writing is not total once the true speech is written on the soul, a speech of the true memory, of a happy memory, sure of being from its time and sure of being able to be shared. It is in this way that the writing can be faced as a risk to take because the writing of the true memory with true words is a sow.