Douglas Shepardson: Augustine and Plato on Recollection: Essence, Genesis, and Mechanism

Augustine's relation to Platonic recollection has been a source of controversy for at least the past fifty years, since O'Connel's "Pre-Existence in the Seventh Letter" (Revue des études augustiniennes 15: 1969, 67-73). Since then, positions in the literature have ranged quite extensively. After summarizing these views, I argue that there are really three distinct questions entangled in the various positions: the essential question of what recollection is, the genetic question of where the objects of recollection come from, and the mechanistic question of how recollection works. The essence of Platonic recollection, I argue, is thetaking up from latency to explicitnessof special information that cannot be derived from this world. Here, Plato and Augustine are in full agreement: the human mind is marvelous in that it possesses information it couldn't acquire solely through experience. Plato and Augustine differ, however, in their answer to the genetic question. For Plato thinks we acquire this special information through a previous existence, but Augustine (at least in his later works) thinks we acquire it through being "made in the image of God," or so I argue. For if God contains divine ideas, we too — being made in God's image — should contain copies of them. Thirdly, Augustine goes beyond Plato in answering the mechanistic question Plato never addresses. How exactly can one find the latent information one possesses within oneself? Augustine apparently answers this puzzle with the doctrine of illumination: a divine light enables us to find the information already present within us.