A priori social models are memory disguised as logical deduction

Evidence

The theory of memory, indeed, furnishes an unexpected theoretical justification for such a priori social models as those of Schiller, for we may say that such apparently indefensible reasoning is as it were the conceptual disguise which memory takes, and it is as though the eighteenth-century philosophers were able to reinvent the psychological truth of individual existence only by imagining themselves to be in the act of deducing, through reason, the characteristics of the historical state of nature and of original human society in general. Thus, what looked most abstract turns out to be concrete on a wholly different and unexpected level, and Schiller’s famous words about the objects of nature win a new and profound resonance: “They are what we were; they are what we must once more become. We were Nature just as they are, and our culture must lead us back to Nature along the path of Reason and Freedom. They are therefore the representation of our lost childhood, that which will eternally remain dearest to us; for that reason, they fill us with a certain sadness. At the same time, they symbolize for us our highest possible completion in the realm of the Ideal, and for that reason they awaken in us the noblest exaltation.” But what Schiller took to be the hypothetical origins of humanity itself turns out to have been but reason’s way of misinterpreting the prehistory of the individual psyche. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 228

Categorization

• XREF: The “childhood”/ontogeny-recaps-phylogeny move connects to Jameson’s later discussion of Benjamin’s critique of historicism and the dialectic of myth and history.
• QUESTION: This reframing of deduction as misremembered ontogeny — is Jameson reading this back into Schiller, or claiming Schiller somehow anticipated it?