Vinh asked:

What do you think of the following question?

"Memory: Is there a more fragile human faculty? Without it, what are we? It is the only record we have
of who we were and what we want to become. Take it away and only a spiritless machine is left, free
of conviction, free of purpose."

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Memory provides the narrative structure to our lives whereby we (re)claim and presume our identity.
Take away the memories and the answer to the basic question of identity 'who am I?' is very hard to
answer.

And of course in a wider cultural sense memory is an important reference point: forgetting our history
or letting the past die is an injustice to the victims, sufferers of actions that have a direct relation to the
present (wouldn't ignoring the testimonies of holocaust survivors give National Socialism a
posthumous victory? Isn't there then a duty to remember?).

Memory is the capacity to carry the past in the present to unite time and identity in a consciousness in
a 'now', such that my life is understood as a continuity of events, maintained in the container of the 'I'.
Take this away and all we have left is as you say, a spiritless machine and yet it seems that I could
have had any other memories and still be me. For example I have a memory of my dinner, but that
memory could have been different if I had decided to go fishing today. My memories seem to be
contingent, they could have been anything. How does this harmonise with the claim that memories
make us who we are?

Is that account really what happens or all that happens? Doesn't the question of memory answer not
'Who am I' but 'What am I'?

Imagine a case of an amnesic asking us 'who am I?' we try to answer the person in terms of what
they do, where they live, their family relations, there achievements. That is we try to answer the
question of who by responding in terms of what, in terms of events, Memory constructs a life for
consciousness. But is the who question saturated by the what? In other word 'Does consciousness
exhaust the notion of subjectivity?' (This is a question raised by Levinas.)

Is there something about us that escapes the unity of consciousness, that is not continuous, in
memory that escapes the confines of the present?

Levinas thinks so and he thinks he can locate it in the ethical responsibility I have regarding other
people, a responsibility that cannot be transferred or assumed by anyone else. Levinas' basic idea is
this: I am who I am due to the fact that there is no one else able to take my place in the world, a fact
that is generated in being singled out to answer to the other person's needs and wants. It is this
singularity that is essentially mine and makes me, me.

Being a subject for Levinas means being subjected, being held responsible, to the point of dying for
the other. As a responsible subject I am not for myself, not enclosed in the structures of time and
identity of memory and consciousness, but am for-the-other. Being for-the-other means that there is
no self or I' of self-identifying consciousness. It means ultimately that I am not even at the origins (the
base, the ground floor) of myself. What makes me me is beyond, outside the realm of memory of
recall of any past that could be maintained in the present. the other precedes and makes possible my
subjectivity.

Here we have a situation where meaning, purpose and conviction is entirely separate from memory
we are no longer spiritless machines, at the mercy of contingent experience but the very embodiment
of spirituality.

Brian Tee