15.10.2026 Diary XLV Anamnesis: is remembering learning?

15.10.2026 Diary Page XLV

Nothing that happened in the past has changed. What changed is the question I return to it with.

Thursday. As I carried my coffee to the desk, today's word was on my mind: anamnesis.

In Greek, anamnesis comes from the verb anamimnesko: to remember, to recall, to remind. Ana adds something like "back, again" here, and mimnesko means to remember. Amnesia, the name for forgetting, is from the same family, the form with an a added at the front. Forgetting and remembering are two ends of the same root. In the aletheia entry I wrote about Lethe, the river of forgetting. Today I am looking at the opposite bank.

I liked one more thing. In medicine, a patient's history is still called anamnesis today. When a doctor asks "when did this start, what were you like as a child," what they are doing is this very word. Most of a diagnostic interview, too, consists of turning back to look at the past. For ADHD as well, symptoms are required to have started in childhood, before the age of twelve according to the DSM-5.

Meno's impasse

Plato's dialogue Meno actually begins with the question of whether virtue can be taught. Halfway through, Meno puts a hard question in front of Socrates: how will you search for something you do not know? If you do not know what you are looking for, how will you recognise it even if you come across it?

This question is called Meno's paradox, and it is still unsettling. You don't need to search for what you know, and what you don't know, you couldn't recognise even if you found it. There seems to be no room left for learning.

Socrates's answer is strange. It rests on what he has heard from priests, priestesses and Pindar: the soul is immortal, has been born many times, and has once seen everything. So what we call learning is the soul remembering again what it knew before. Searching and learning are entirely remembering.

The boy and the square

Socrates does not leave it at words. He calls a young slave born in Meno's house and draws a square in the sand. The side is two feet, the area four feet. The question is this: how do we draw a square with twice the area, that is, eight?

The boy answers at once: let's double the side, make it four feet. Socrates draws it and they look together. The area comes out as sixteen. This time the boy says three feet. The area is nine. In the end the boy says: I don't know, Socrates.

Socrates does not count this as a loss. The boy no longer thinks he knows something false, he knows that he does not know. Then he draws the diagonal of the square and asks. The boy, believing he has found his own answer, sees that the square built on the diagonal is eight. In the aporia entry I wrote about why the impasse is valuable. The boy in the Meno is its clearest example: he reaches knowledge by passing through the impasse.

There is a fair objection here too. Socrates asks the boy leading questions, and the boy mostly says yes or no. Is this really knowledge coming to the surface, or a well-prepared steering? Philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and I cannot decide either.

The lyre in the Phaedo

Plato returns to the same idea once more in the Phaedo, this time on Socrates's last day. He has two arguments. The first is about equality: we have never seen two sticks that are perfectly equal, they are always a little different. But we know what equality is, and we did not acquire this knowledge with our eyes. So we must have known it before we were born.

The second is an example I like more. When a lover sees the lyre of the one they love, they remember not the lyre itself but its owner. The object calls up something else. Socrates calls this anamnesis. Seeing one thing opens the door to another.

No need to believe it

Plato ties this to the transmigration of the soul, and I don't have to believe that. I can carry on with the rest of this entry without believing it.

But I take two things. First, knowledge is sometimes not added from outside but shaken loose by the right question. Second, the line between remembering and learning is not as sharp as we think.

Modern memory research looks in the same direction. In 1932, in his book Remembering, Bartlett showed that remembering is not playing back a recording but reconstructing. Every time we remember, we rearrange the pieces according to whatever frame we have at hand.

I also tell myself this: to remember something, that thing first has to have a place in me. I cannot remember a memory I never lived. So remembering is never a job from scratch. There is a ground, and the question touches that ground. For some reason this idea does me good, because it says the past was not wasted.

The frame that came at twenty-two

I got my diagnosis when I was twenty-two. Nothing that happened in the past changed. The unfinished things had been left unfinished, what I forgot had been forgotten, the days I misjudged time had been misjudged.

What changed was the frame. I returned to the same memories with a new word: attention, procrastination, time blindness. Next to every memory fell an explanation that was not there before.

Now the question I need to ask Plato is this: is this remembering or learning?

The events were in me. In that sense I am remembering. But the frame to read the events was not in me, it came from outside: from a doctor, from books, then from years of my own observation. In that sense I learned. My difference from Socrates's boy is this: the boy thought he had found his own answer, I know the answer was given to me.

But Socrates's method is not foreign to me. Even when the frame is given, half the work is still mine, because no one finds for me which memory fits which sentence. The frame brought the question. I searched for the answers one by one.

In the post-diagnosis grief article I described the tiring side of this search. Today I want to add this: anamnesis does not only illuminate. Some memories look softer in the new frame, some heavier. Both happen, and there is room for both.

Remembering, for someone who forgets

I can't skip this irony: I am writing about remembering as one of the people who struggle most with their memory. My working memory scatters easily, I can't be sure I turned off the stove, I can lose the end of a sentence while saying its beginning. In the is forgetfulness normal article I described the everyday side of this.

But I think these two areas are different. Everyday forgetfulness is new information failing to hold on. Anamnesis is old knowledge coming back in a new light. One flows away, the other waits and comes out when it finds the right question.

That is why I keep a notebook. The notebook is a place that waits for the question that will come back. When I read a sentence I wrote months later, sometimes I don't remember the person who wrote it. I learn her again.

Questions for myself

Today at the desk I wrote these questions and left them unanswered:

Which old event am I reading with a different word today? What do I now call the thing I once called laziness? Is there a memory I am still keeping under the wrong word? Which is the lyre that will remind me?

The fourth one is from the Phaedo. Someone's voice, a smell, a street. Sometimes when I am walking I turn a corner and fall into another time. Those corners are my lyre.

I think that is why I love walking. While walking, the mind is not searching for anything, and when it isn't searching, sometimes something comes by itself. This is a small answer to Meno's paradox: what I am not looking for can come my way precisely because I am not looking for it. And when I find it, I feel that I recognise it, that is, that it already had a place in me.

A piece next to the concept

Erik Satie: Gymnopédie No. 1.

From 1888, for solo piano. Above the piece is a tempo marking Satie wrote himself: Lent et douloureux, that is, slow and painful. In the left hand two chords calmly come and go, in the right hand the melody rests above them. Its name comes from a festival held in Sparta called the Gymnopaidiai.

Its link with anamnesis is, I think, this coming and going. The piece keeps returning to the same place, but on each return the sound is heard a little differently. The same two chords also carry the memory of the previous return.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow is Friday. The word: kharis. In Greek, grace, what pleases, what is given freely, and at the same time thanks. Today I looked at the past and noticed that I am indebted to those who gave it a frame. Tomorrow I will try to find the name of that debt.