The Intelligence of Forgetting: On Memory, Mercy, and the Space to Begin Again - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Intelligence of Forgetting: On Memory, Mercy, and the Space to Begin Again

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What if forgetting wasn’t a flaw in cognition—but a sacred form of intelligence? In this episode, we explore how Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of “active forgetting,” Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes, and Jacques Derrida's archive fever help us rethink forgetting not as error, but as refinement. We move through Francisco Varela’s enactive mind and Simone Weil’s attention as ethical presence, to explore how forgetting becomes authorship, mercy, and presence.

This is not a eulogy for memory, but a revaluation of how intelligence operates through omission, rhythm, and rest. From cognitive science to grief, from collective forgetting to personal healing, we trace how forgetting can make space for clarity, intimacy, and truth that is felt—not stored. Forgetting is not absence. It is structure. It is a space in which something new can live.

The episode explores forgetting as spiritual technology, narrative ethics, and cognitive mercy. It asks: who are we without the compulsion to recall everything? What if we are shaped not only by what we remember, but by what we allow to fade? Through motifs of rhythm, breath, and letting go, forgetting is offered here as a form of permission.

This episode follows the philosophical arc of On Solitude, Clarity, and the Refusal to Perform, extending the ethics of restraint into the terrain of memory, story, and the invisible intelligence of the mind when it decides not to hold.

For those exhausted by the archive—this is not forgetting as collapse. It is forgetting as authorship. As breath. As return.

Why Listen?

• Reframe forgetting as intelligence, not defect
• Explore philosophical and cognitive theories of memory and its limits
• Understand the emotional role of forgetting in grief and healing
• Engage with Nietzsche, Borges, Derrida, Weil, and Varela through lived insight
• Feel the permission to forget as a soft, ethical act

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1989.
• Borges, Jorge Luis. “Funes the Memorious.” In Labyrinths. Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.
• Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Varela, Francisco. The Embodied Mind. MIT Press, 1991.
• Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Routledge, 2002.

Bibliography Relevance

• Nietzsche: Provides the philosophical base for forgetting as vitality and freedom from memory’s weight.
• Borges: His character Funes demonstrates the paralysis of perfect recall—making forgetting an evolutionary need.
• Derrida: Frames the digital age’s compulsive memory culture as pathological—adding urgency to the case for forgetting.
• Varela: Enactive cognition supports forgetting as epistemic necessity and attentional design.
• Weil: Her contemplative ethics illuminate forgetting as a path to presence and mercy.

What part of you survives because you let the rest go?

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