Memory is more than a simple recollection of particular past events; it is often a gateway to the feelings and moods that were prevalent during entire phases of our lives. When we remember how it felt during school days, late adolescence, or the first weeks in a new city, we tap into something deeper than merely recalling particular events—something more encompassing that reflects our affective orientation toward the world during those times. In the following, I will outline this dimension of memory, drawing on philosophical insights and empirical findings to shed light on what it means to recall the characteristic feelings of past life phases.
Personal remembering is typically understood in terms of episodic autobiographical memory, which refers to the ability to recall and mentally represent specific events from one’s past. For example, you might vividly remember walking into your high school cafeteria for the first time or unpacking boxes in your new apartment after moving for work. Episodic memories are rich with sensory detail; they allow us to reconstruct particular moments of our past as if watching scenes unfold in our mind’s eye.
However, when we try to remember not just what happened but how it felt during past periods, episodic memory alone seems insufficient. The feelings associated with certain life phases are typically broader and more pervasive—less tied to individual episodes and more reflective of an overarching mood or existential orientation. These recollections involve what could be called “affective phasic memory” (APM), which captures the global background feeling that persisted or dominated during a former life phase.
A helpful starting point for thinking about these kinds of memories comes from Clare Mac Cumhaill’s notion of “phasic memory.” Mac Cumhaill focuses specifically on cases where re-encountering artworks gives rise to recollections of former life phases. For her, certain artworks—such as pieces of music or novels—have formal properties (e.g., rhythm, harmony, timbre) that can occasion powerful affective resonances with earlier stages or phases in one’s personal history. In these moments triggered by re-engaging with art forms experienced long ago, individuals may find themselves remembering “what it was like” to be themselves during those earlier times.
Mac Cumhaill highlights this phenomenon using a passage from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, where Swann involuntarily recalls his “season of love” with Odette upon hearing Vinteuil’s sonata again. The sonata acts as a trigger for Swann’s affective access to his past life phase—not through reconstructing discrete episodes but through evoking an overarching feeling he had during that period. According to Mac Cumhaill’s account, formal aesthetic properties inherent in artworks play an essential role in enabling such phasic memories; they are constitutive elements shaping how past existential moods resonate anew within present experiences.
While Mac Cumhaill’s insights provide valuable tools for exploring this phenomenon via artworks specifically, my position broadens her framework significantly by emphasizing that APM does not require engagement with art at all. While re-encountering music or literature may serve as triggers for some individuals’ phasic memories (as Mac Cumhaill describes), these affective recollections can also arise independently through other stimuli—such as smells (e.g., catching whiffs reminiscent of childhood kitchens), flavors (e.g., tasting food associated with familial gatherings), conversations about shared history among friends or family members, or personal reflections on formative experiences prompted without external cues altogether.
I want to suggest that central to understanding APM is the concept of existential feelings, introduced by philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe. Existential feelings are fundamental affective orientations that shape how we experience ourselves and the world, and these can persist over extended periods of time. Unlike emotions such as joy or anger, which are directed at specific objects or events, existential feelings provide a pre-intentional background structure for all experiences. They include states like feeling alive, distant, isolated, overwhelmed, disconnected from things, or in harmony with one’s surroundings.
Existential feelings are in my view crucial for understanding APM because they explain how affective recollections capture not just isolated emotional reactions but entire ways of being affectively related to the world during particular life phases. For instance, recalling your late adolescence might involve reactivating an underlying sense of anticipation mixed with vulnerability—a pervasive affective coloring of all interactions during that time rather than discrete emotional responses tied to specific episodes.
Empirical findings from affective neuroscience further illuminate how such memories can function independently from episodic memory while aligning closely with embodied aspects central to existential feelings. Studies show that emotional states are encoded differently than factual information about events; while episodic recall relies heavily on structures like the hippocampus for integrating context, affective memories engage regions like the amygdala responsible for processing affective significance.
This distinction suggests that recalling past feelings tied specifically to life phases may activate neural circuits specialized for affective regulation rather than those traditionally associated with episodic memory. For instance, research on olfactory memory has shown how smells bypass thalamic relay stations (involved in sensory integration) and connect directly to brain areas like the amygdala—allowing odors to elicit intense affective reactions even without activating higher-order cortical networks necessary for constructing explicit episodic memories.
The relevance here is clear: embodied systems supporting existential feelings play an active role in shaping broader experiential landscapes across temporal horizons beyond isolated snapshots within discrete moments captured via episodic memory alone.
Philosophically speaking, APM invites us to rethink how we categorize types of personal recollection. While episodic memories provide detailed reconstructions anchored in particular contexts, APM reflects a broader phenomenology: the sense of being affectively related to the world at a former life phase.
Overall, APM allows us to reconnect with past existential feelings based on stored sensory fragments combined with current beliefs and interpretations. Rather than merely reliving isolated episodes from our history through episodic recall mechanisms alone, APM renews our affective connection with former life phases by bringing aspects of their characteristic feelings back into present experience. This capacity has profound significance for how we make sense of ourselves over time. By revisiting key periods through their prevalent existential feelings—whether triggered externally by smells or internally via reflection—APM helps us narratively conceive of ourselves as persons who change while maintaining continuity across different stages in life.
Katja Crone
Katja Crone is a professor of philosophy at TU Dortmund. Her research focuses on topics in the philosophy of the mind, such as memory, collective intentionality, social cognition, personal identity, and self-consciousness.
I have been working on this topic for over a decade, yet my work has never been cited. This is particularly disheartening (and colonialist) for someone coming and working from South America. Rowlands has also developed ideas similar to the author’s argument.