"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651)
This seems right. Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:
1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.
2. If scientism is true, then it is not the case that (1).
Therefore
3. Scientism is not true.
I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason. To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life. For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be a succession of consciousnesses but not the consciousness of succession. But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument. And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory. To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion -- and thus as following from the premises -- I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.
But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument. The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions. ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.) This retention -- a term Husserl uses -- is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.
And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.
The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.
Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3). Example of commutativity: (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3. The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind). Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge? Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.
But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat. We are of course meatheads. But squeezing meaning out of mere meat -- there's the trick!
Companion post: Pascal on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience
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