---
slug: lorenz-memoria-f22188b4
title: "Lorenz on Memoria"
author: "Hendrik Lorenz"
work: "The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle"
section: ""
year: "2006"
tradition: classical
themes:
  - memoria
fragment: |
  'Remembering (τ µ,µνη˜σθαι) is the presence within one of the power that con-veys one [sc. to the thing in question], so that one is conveyed to it from oneself and from the changes one has within oneself, in the way described'
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Memory, for Aristotle, is not storage. It is a power that moves — a capacity within the soul that conveys you toward something, and does so from within you, from your own changes, your own accumulated alterations. The Greek is careful: you are conveyed *from yourself*, which means the passage back is not retrieval but transit. Something in you has been changed by the original experience, and that change is what carries you now.
  
  This cuts against the way we habitually think of remembering as a kind of mental filing — finding the right drawer, pulling the record. Aristotle's picture is stranger and more bodily: you are moved by what you have already undergone. The pathos deposited in the soul becomes a vector. Memory is thus continuous with desire and with motion, which is why Aristotle treats it in the same neighborhood as imagination — phantasia — rather than in the neighborhood of pure intellect.
  
  What follows from this is that forgetting is not a failure of storage but a kind of immobility, a loss of the conveyance. And what you cannot be conveyed toward, you cannot grieve, cannot want back, cannot even know is missing. The soul's relationship to its own past is a question of whether the changes within it still have enough force to move.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The verb "conveyed" is doing the philosophical work here. Not retrieved, not recalled — conveyed, as if memory is a current that carries you rather than a container you reach into. The distinction Aristotle presses is between the inert deposit of a past experience and the living movement back toward it: genuine remembering is the activation of a power, initiated from within, driven by changes already present in the soul. What makes this precise is the reflexive structure — "from oneself and from the changes one has within oneself." Nothing external triggers the journey; the soul contains both the traveler and the road. Lorenz's reconstruction shows how far this is from a simple storage model, and how close it is to something more dynamic — memory as an enacted relationship with what is absent. The past, on this account, does not sit waiting; it draws you, and the capacity to be drawn is already yours.
parent_id: Lorenz_2006_The_Brute_Within_Appetitive_Desire__par0077
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Lorenz writes:

> 'Remembering (τ µ,µνη˜σθαι) is the presence within one of the power that con-veys one [sc. to the thing in question], so that one is conveyed to it from oneself and from the changes one has within oneself, in the way described'

— Hendrik Lorenz

Memory, for Aristotle, is not storage. It is a power that moves — a capacity within the soul that conveys you toward something, and does so from within you, from your own changes, your own accumulated alterations. The Greek is careful: you are conveyed *from yourself*, which means the passage back is not retrieval but transit. Something in you has been changed by the original experience, and that change is what carries you now.

This cuts against the way we habitually think of remembering as a kind of mental filing — finding the right drawer, pulling the record. Aristotle's picture is stranger and more bodily: you are moved by what you have already undergone. The pathos deposited in the soul becomes a vector. Memory is thus continuous with desire and with motion, which is why Aristotle treats it in the same neighborhood as imagination — phantasia — rather than in the neighborhood of pure intellect.

What follows from this is that forgetting is not a failure of storage but a kind of immobility, a loss of the conveyance. And what you cannot be conveyed toward, you cannot grieve, cannot want back, cannot even know is missing. The soul's relationship to its own past is a question of whether the changes within it still have enough force to move.

---

Hendrik Lorenz · *The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle* · 2006