...Stoppard posed the quandary: "One of the questions that haunts me—it's a question for philosophers and brain science—is, if you've forgotten a book, is that the same as never having read it?" With a slight twist, you could put the question another way and it would contain all the intrigue and wily psychic machinations that have accompanied Stoppard throughout his blazing achievements and rich personal life: if you forget the unpleasant experiences you've once lived through—if you choose to begin the tape at 1946 instead of 1937—does that mean they never happened? ["Playing with Ideas," November 26, 2006]The question, of course, is whether we've really forgotten that book. And whether experience of which we can't recall a memory is really gone and can have no effect on us. I don't think so.
Not only does Stoppard's question seem to ignore a hundred years of thinking about the unconscious, I think I have a recent counterexample from my own experience. In October, I wrote a post (footnote 2) in which I referred to revelation made to someone else and recommended to us as authoritative (because "it's in the Bible") as being merely "hearsay" as far as we're concerned. Then, a few weeks later, I discovered that that is how Thomas Paine also referred to it in a book that I had read 50 years ago...and "forgotten"—not forgotten that I'd read it, but forgotten precisely what Paine had said.
Q.E.D.?
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