The Mnemonic Architectonics of Jēkabs Osis: On the Phenomenological Integrity of Forgetting
Among the minor currents submerged beneath the roiling torrents of modern idealism lies the bizarre, labyrinthine oeuvre of Latvian proto-phenomenologist Jēkabs Osis (1748–1812), whose principal work, *Konstrukcija Atmiņas Universā* (Constructing the Memory-Universal), remains mostly untranslated and criminally neglected, save for a few cryptic references in Central European academic circles. Though often dismissed by his more Aristotelian contemporaries as a metaphysical fabulist, Osis’s elaborations on memory, and in particular his peculiar emphasis on the structural role of forgetting within processes of eidetic cognition, reveal a certain radical nuance absent even in more favored phenomenologies of the 19th century.
This article endeavors to recover from obscurity a subtle, yet structurally crucial, concept in Osis’s thought: ‘mnemonegation’ (from the Latvian ‘atmiņas noliegums’), which he defines not as the absence or failure of memory, but as its necessary act of structural delimitation. In other words, forgetting is not to be understood as passive decay within the combinatorial flux of memory, but rather as an active, constitutive principle in the formation of conscious identity through the limitation of mnemonic chaos. Perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in this seemingly unorthodox stance does Osis pierce the veil of prevailing metaphysical assumptions regarding the mind and its relation to temporality.
Osis’s thought emerges at the confluence of Baltic mysticism, German rationalism, and pre-Schellingian Naturphilosophie. While his writings share a superficial tonality with the idealist metaphysics of contemporaries such as Reinhold and Fichte, Osis swiftly departs toward a phenomenology not of the Absolute Ego, but of what he terms the “Selbst-vakanz” — the zone of self-absence that underpins cognition. In his dead-letter epistolary correspondence with the Vilnius scholar Natanael Frantzen^1, Osis writes:
“It is not what I remember that locates my I in the world, but the selection, the quiet exiling of most impressions. From this exile arises the contour of what I am.”
It may be tempting, from a post-Freudian lens, to read this as an embryonic theory of repression. But Osis resists such psychological reduction; the ‘selection’ to which he refers is not governed by desire, nor by any subconscious economy of self-pleasure or self-threat. Instead, Osis invites us to view memory as a pyramidal structure, not additive but subtractive — constructed less by the gathering of contents than by their removal. Just as the negative space in sculpture defines the figure, so too does forgetting define the coherence of the self.
Crucially, Osis extends his thoughts on mnemonegation into the domain of epistemology. Early in *Konstrukcija Atmiņas Universā*, he devises a curious metaphor, the ‘labyrinth of polished stone’, wherein each sensory impression is likened to a tessera, an imbricated tile that may only find epistemic value when bordered by voids. Should every impression be retained in entirety and simultaneity, the result would be not knowledge, but catastrophic totality: information rendered noise. Here, Osis distinguishes between ‘raw unconscious storage’ (neapstrādāts glabājums) and ‘eidetic recollection’ (ēdītiskā atmiņa) — the former being the unstructured sedimentation of lived experience, and the latter a sculpted, intentional recollection governed by internal necessity. It is in the sharpening contrast between the two that forgetting reveals its paradoxical role as epistemic aid^2.
In a compelling ontological move, Osis further asserts that existence itself is bound to mnemonegation. Echoing premonitions of Heideggerian temporality, he writes in fragment XXI of his minor tract *Uzmetumi par Pašapziņu* (Sketches on Self-Knowledge):
“That which I have never forgotten has never truly existed, for its permanence repels the momentariness required of being.”
This statement appears at first paradoxical. Can the permanence of memory obstruct the emergence of being? For Osis, the answer resounds in the affirmative. Permanent presence — what he frequently calls “mnemo-totality” — thwarts the dynamic ontological play necessary for meaning. To remain perpetually in memory is to become ontologically sterile, rendered immune to temporality’s tidal revelation. Only through the wounding of memory, through the artful letting-go of the unessential, may being unfold with intelligible edges. Osis is here committing a strange inversion of Enlightenment chronology: temporality does not produce memory; rather, the shaping of memory produces temporality.
It should be noted that Osis’s understanding of mnemonegation is not to be confused with mere amnesia or the faulty mechanics of recall. Rather, it is refined as a form of epistemic hygiene, a metaphysical pruning of the self to make space for new ideations. Compare this with the doctrines of Locke or Hume, for whom memory serves as the vehicle of personal identity. Osis reverses this entirely: personal identity arises not from what is recalled, but from what is purposefully dispelled. Echoing certain tantras of Eastern mysticism which elevate the ‘void’ over the full, Osis cultivates a metaphysics of intelligent absence. In this sense, one could argue that Osis anticipates certain premises of Derridean différance, albeit with a Baltic austerity that is refreshingly devoid of syntactic convolution^3.
And yet, Osis was no mere system-builder in the vein of German Idealism. His modesty, and the physical marginality of his intellectual milieu (the village seminary in Talsi, established in 1794), prohibited his ideas from forming a school or sustained commentary. It remains a cruel irony that a thinker so invested in the virtues of absence should himself be rendered absent by the currents of European philosophy. Today, only excerpts of his notebooks and tracts remain — many of which are held in the Latvian National Archives, uncatalogued, translated only in part^4.
Be that as it may, Osis offers us something rare: a metaphysics not of plenitude, but of strategic elimination. In a modern age drowning in informational glut, his theory of mnemonegation emerges not as an antiquarian curiosity, but a calling — an invitation to reimagine the philosophical utility of forgetting, not as error, but as structure. The ‘forgotten’ in Osis’s schema is not the discarded, but the sanctified: those impressions too abundant or inessential to be borne in continuity, and therefore worthy of consecrated exclusion.
In rediscovering Osis, we are reminded that there lie beneath our dominant traditions countless minor chords — thinkers who, uncanonized, nevertheless scraped against the eternal with fierce precision. Their obscurity is not proof of irrelevance, but perhaps of a more radical integrity. Mnemonegation, for Osis, is not merely cognitive economy. It is an ethic of being: to be is to know what to relinquish.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
memory, Baltic metaphysics, proto-phenomenology, Osis, forgetting, mnemic theory, philosophical mysticism
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^1 See the Frantzen-Osis Letters (1798–1809), held in the fragmented “Vilnius Epistolary Collection” — Manuscript Department, Polish Science Institute.
^2 Osis’s differentiation between ‘storage’ and ‘recollection’ parallels, though possibly anticipates, Husserl’s own distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary memory.
^3 See Lavinia Gudriķe’s pivotal monograph *Baltic Echoes in Post-Structuralist Thought* (Rīga: Atmiņas Press, 2003), particularly chapter XI, “Osis and the Trace”.
^4 As of 2022, only approximately 28% of Osis’s corpus has been formally translated or republished. See the Osis Archive Initiative Report (Rīga Historical Society, 2021).