Forgiveness and Moral Understanding 3030731731, 9783030731731

Citation preview

Forgiveness and Moral Understanding

h ug o s t r a n dbe rg

Forgiveness and Moral Understanding

Hugo Strandberg

Forgiveness and Moral Understanding

Hugo Strandberg University of Pardubice Pardubice, Czech Republic

ISBN 978-3-030-73173-1    ISBN 978-3-030-73174-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The work on this book started when I was invited to a workshop arranged by Catharina Stenqvist. The workshop focused on questions I had written about in my book Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception, but I did not want to repeat what I had said there, and I was therefore looking for a new way of approaching related topics. Inspired by something that Camilla Kronqvist had said in a discussion, I realised that forgiveness would be an important topic to think more about. After the workshop, the text I presented was at a standstill for some time, but when Fredrik Westerlund invited me to a workshop, I presented the text again, and the reception it got there, especially from Hanne Jacobs, encouraged me to write a book on the topic. One thing that made this possible is the research position I have had the last couple of years at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, giving me the time to think through the issues in detail. Discussions here have also been important, especially with Maria Balaska, Christopher Cordner and Philip Strammer. Previous versions of many chapters have been presented at seminars, workshops and conferences – at Lund University, Åbo Akademi University, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University of Helsinki, the University of Jyväskylä, the University of Pardubice, the University of Salamanca, Paderborn University, and the University of York – and I am grateful to all who participated in the discussions. Ultimately, though, the most significant insights come in other ways. Philosophers are certainly important also in this regard, but then not in their capacity as professional philosophers. There is therefore a sense in v

vi 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

which everyone I have ever meet has been vital for this book to come about. This tells us something important both about forgiveness and about moral understanding. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.0 1/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. A previous version of chapter 3 has been published as “Forgiveness and Plurality”, Arendt Studies 3 (2019): 195–212.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Forgiveness Beyond Words   3 Forgiveness, a Sketch   6 Philosophy   9 Writing  12 Bibliography  19 2 Being True to Oneself, Being Forgiven 23 The Unreality of Thoughts  24 Forgiveness and Metaphysics  28 Unconditional Forgiveness?  34 A Life in Forgiveness, Together  35 Conclusion  38 Bibliography  44 3 Plurality 47 Introduction  47 Forgiveness in the Denktagebuch  48 Forgiveness in The Human Condition  50 Plurality  57 Conclusion: Arendt and Lessing  61 Bibliography  67

vii

viii 

Contents

4 Reason 71 “Background”  72 More “Background”: Discussing The Son  74 The Son  77 Moral Theory  79 Reasons and Forgiveness  82 Why Give Reasons?  84 Reason and Explanation  87 The Difficulty of Forgiveness  92 Conclusion 100 Bibliography 105 5 Conditions109 Conditions for Forgiving? 110 Conditions for Asking Someone’s Forgiveness? 123 Non-normative Conditions 131 Conclusion 133 Bibliography 138 6 Virtue141 Aristotle on Forgiveness 142 Judgment 143 The Golden Mean 145 Training 149 Answers to an Objection 150 Conclusion 153 Bibliography 158 7 Death161 Being Forgiven by a Dead Person 162 Forgiving Oneself 163 Forgiving Oneself and Being Forgiven 165 Being Forgiven by a Dead Person 167 Forgiving a Dead Person 171 Conclusion 174 Bibliography 176

 Contents 

ix

8 While He Was Still Far off179 Catherine of Genoa: “Purgation and Purgatory” 181 Discussion 186 The Prodigal Son 190 Conclusion 200 Bibliography 205 9 Forgiveness and Morality207 The Moral Influence of the Parents on the Child 213 Moral Development 217 Feeling at Home 219 Bibliography 223 Bibliography225 Index237

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Forgiveness is challenging. To ask someone’s forgiveness (or to say that one is sorry, that what one did was wrong, or anything similar) is hard, and the same goes for forgiving someone. This is not always so, but often, in one respect typically so. When thinking about forgiveness, when doing philosophy about it, it is a good idea not to lose sight of these difficulties but to place them in the foreground. A challenge is no mere difficulty. The difficulty consists in the change I have to go through, not primarily on my own but in relation to someone else. I am challenged, and I am challenged by the one whom I have hurt or who has hurt me, by her presence, by she herself, as it were, not by what she is doing or saying, for she need not do or say anything particular. Thinking about forgiveness is thus one way of thinking philosophically about our relations to each other, and it is thus one way of coming to the heart of morality. That forgiveness is challenging might seem to be a simple point, but it has important consequences. Above all, the normative question, the question about when one should and should not forgive, as central as it often is in the standard philosophical discussion of forgiveness, will no longer be seen as the central one to ask in this context, and it will not even be possible to phrase in that way. For as long as that question is seen as central, one takes for granted that the principal difficulty is one of knowledge, that what we primarily need is to be told whether we should forgive or not. And if that is not the central difficulty, the task of philosophy as concerns © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_1

1

2 

H. STRANDBERG

forgiveness is not to come up with something immediately useful, but rather to come to a deeper understanding of our life with forgiveness, a deeper understanding that will certainly change what we do in some or many ways, but that cannot be translated into a piece of advice. Without such a deeper moral understanding the normative question will not have a foothold, and that this foothold is lacking is evident from the fact that the challenging nature of forgiveness will greatly, and more or less unknowingly, influence the way we go about answering the normative question. For example, what one sees as counting against forgiveness will obviously be indicative of what one finds challenging, and phrasing the question as one about when one should and should not forgive therefore risks hiding what the issue in fact concerns.1 In this book, I will consequently not ask such a normative question. In other words, I will not challenge forgiveness, in the sense of trying to show that forgiveness is (sometimes) a bad thing, and not praise it either. But as has hopefully already become clear by now, I will not remain “neutral”, because that would precisely mean to try to avoid taking on the challenge of forgiveness and thus fail to see forgiveness clearly. Another consequence of the above simple point is that my task here will not be to come to an understanding of forgiveness in isolation or in particular.2 Forgiveness is challenging insofar as human relations are challenging, and thinking philosophically about forgiveness is thus rather a way of shedding some light on some aspects of our life together as such. In other words, thinking philosophically about forgiveness aims at deepening one’s moral understanding. Even if philosophers who discuss forgiveness sometimes seem to be, or explicitly claim that they are, doing conceptual analysis, I do not believe that this is so. No one would take her analysis to be invalidated by the fact that some use of the word forgiveness can be found that does not square with it.3 The alleged counter-examples can be explained away as being non-standard, non-central or non-paradigmatic, but the question is then what basis that distinction has. And the answer to that question is obviously that the philosopher in question finds certain uses of the word more important than other uses, perhaps rightly so. In other words, what the analysis is about is not the word “forgiveness” but rather that importance.4 We thus come back to my above observation: thinking philosophically about forgiveness is a way of shedding some light on some aspects of our life together as such.5 Furthermore, the philosopher need not only focus on a more limited range of uses than found in actual speech; she can just as well use the word in novel ways, in order to

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

make the reader (and perhaps herself) see certain features of our moral life in a new light. For that happens in actual speech too. For example, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder Zosima says, “My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right.”6 This seems senseless, for what his brother is asking their forgiveness for is not his having been, say, a bird catcher, and, furthermore, what are the birds supposed to answer? The task for me as a reader of the novel would then simply be to try to do what Zosima did, to try to see if I can find some sense in what his brother was doing. And if I do, if I now see some sense in what I initially found senseless, that means some change in my moral understanding. Thinking about forgiveness philosophically is thus not a matter of conceptual analysis. Thinking philosophically about forgiveness is a way of shedding some light on some aspects of our life together as such. Forgiveness thus here serves as a tool, as a lens through which that life is seen. Thinking philosophically about forgiveness aims at deepening one’s moral understanding. In order to explain this in more detail, let me now approach the whole issue from a slightly different angle.

Forgiveness Beyond Words If John asks me whether Mary has forgiven me for something I did to her, I may answer by saying that she has said so. This might be enough; answering the question in that way can be understood as dismissing it. But if John knows that she has said so, what I need to point to if I want to answer the question is other things: to speak in general terms, the way in which the relation between me and Mary has changed since the time it was troubled. And such a change may take place without anything specific having been said at all. John’s question may make me realise that what I once did to her has not been a problematic matter in our life together for a long time. And Mary could come to realise the same thing, if, say, John puts the corresponding question to her. This does not mean that what we say to each other is unimportant, but in order to understand the importance it has, we must pay attention to more than the words. If someone is asking for my forgiveness, she is not asking me just to utter specific, potentially empty words, but to relate to her in a new way, to reassure her that such a change has already taken place or that a change for the worse never took place, and the words I utter – or better, what I say – may be part of such a change and reassurance.

4 

H. STRANDBERG

That there is such a distinction between someone saying to me that she has forgiven me and forgiveness having taken place has two important consequences. First, in order to come to a clearer understanding of what forgiveness is about, it is not enough to pay attention to what it means to ask for forgiveness and to what it means to say to someone that one has forgiven her. This is clear also for the reason that it is not only I and the person I have wronged who could come to realise that forgiveness has taken place (no matter whether words of forgiveness have been uttered or not), but the same also goes for the bystander, who might reflect on the forgiveness he sees in our case, reflect on it by himself or together with a fourth person. He might, for example, measure his, or generally existing, difficulties of forgiving others against what he sees in our case, which means that he could call attention to a spirit of forgiveness in our relation despite, or precisely because of, the fact that forgiveness is seldom an explicit issue for us. For if the concept of forgiveness is used by the protagonists themselves, this often indicates that forgiveness is not a matter of course for them. What we aim at when struggling to forgive is a situation in which the concept is not used anymore – understanding what we are struggling for is imagining such a situation – and it is this that the bystander notices when he points to a tacit spirit of forgiveness contrasting with, say, his own case. The philosophical discussion of forgiveness does therefore not need to restrict itself to situations in which the concept is used by the protagonists; indeed, a clearer understanding of what forgiveness is about may be acquired by paying special attention to situations in which it is not used by them. Second, if forgiveness could be reduced to the words uttered, the philosophical analysis of it would be a relatively simple matter. But since it cannot, the analysis depends on which cases I understand as real examples of forgiveness. And this is to a large degree a moral question. I may, for example, consider the word a mushy one and avoid using it, but for a reason I do not admit even to myself, the reason being that it calls my attention to relational difficulties I have that I do not want to be reminded of. Conversely, I may use the word indiscriminately, in order to hide for myself a demand for a more taxing change in my relation to someone who has mistreated me, a demand that I see but do not take on board. The same things of course go for what I take it to mean to ask someone’s forgiveness.

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

This is a general difficulty in moral philosophy: taking moral philosophy seriously means having to deal with your own moral difficulties. Or, to put it in more positive terms: moral philosophy must be done with constant attention to what goodness in its fullness would be in the particular situations discussed, in tension with which our actual life must be understood. The ordinary use of moral concepts is therefore of great interest but cannot be taken at face value, for they may be used to make turbid a moral understanding that their use is consequently conditioned by in an indirect, subterranean way.7 Highlighting such a tension also makes it possible for us to become aware of another important thing in this context. That a tension exists means that the tensional situation of the person in question cannot be understood without paying attention to the elements making up that tension. More specifically, the understanding the person herself has of her situation is full of such tensions: moral insights, not fully conscious and not fully actualised. For example, when struggling with myself whether to forgive someone and ultimately forgiving her, I do not start out from a situation where moral understanding is totally absent, for in that case there would be no struggle, but that understanding is not unaffected by the struggle, as if I were perfectly clear about everything the whole time. Expressed in slightly different terms: that I struggled with myself about the issue shows that I was alive to the issue and felt addressed by the call to forgive. Such a moral understanding does not only show its presence when someone struggles with the issue but also when reacting to the issue with, say, outrage. We should hence not presuppose moral concepts to have an either/or character, as if moral understanding, forgiveness or, say, love were either fully present or totally absent. Paying attention to the tensional character of moral life means paying attention to the dynamics of what is neither totally absent nor fully present. This is then one way of understanding why I took issue with the normative question. If one takes the central question to be one about what we should do, as if morality only entered the situation by means of such a question, then one fails to notice that morality is already part of the situation from the start. For otherwise there would be no difficulty at all. A philosophical discussion about forgiveness is, among other things, precisely a way of understanding these difficulties, difficulties that would be there no matter whether one believes that they can be “solved” or not (and the difficulty is of course partly that when in the midst of it, I will not

6 

H. STRANDBERG

be clear-sighted about these issues, for example about whether there is a “solution” or not).

Forgiveness, a Sketch As should be clear by now, I am working here with some specific ways of understanding forgiveness. This understanding is not a conceptual claim but a matter of moral understanding (and thus contrasts with some takes on it, while supplementing others). It is neither an axiom nor something that can be axiomatically justified, but an understanding that the book as a whole will, hopefully, be able to convey. Speaking very loosely: forgiveness could be said to have taken place when what I once did to Mary has ceased to be a problematic matter in our life together, or, from the point of view of John, the bystander, when something done by me, seen by him as destructive to my relation with Mary, is by us never given the chance to destroy it. Or, with a slightly different emphasis: asking someone’s forgiveness is about recreating our relationship, about not letting that which has happened change it for the worse, about making things good or even better than they once were. Very loosely, of course, for it is possible to find examples where these descriptions do not capture the crucial features, and even when they do, these descriptions are not by themselves very enlightening, being not sufficiently detailed (for example, much depends on the specific way in which something ceases to be, or never becomes, a problematic matter). The above brief sketch should not be understood as claiming that someone who still bears a grudge against someone must be lying if he says that he has forgiven her; the point is rather, first, that one should not deny the sense it makes for someone to say that forgiveness is still a live issue in such a situation, and second, and more importantly, that discussing forgiveness philosophically does not mean pointing out just anything that could be said about the topic, but pointing out things that are important, specifically morally important, to pay attention to. As is clear from the above sketch, forgiveness, in the sense in which I will mostly use it, is nearly related to reconciliation. But this does not mean that forgiveness is simply to return to a previous stage of the relationship. When the issue of forgiveness, as concerning a specific act, arises in a generally troubled relationship, those general troubles form a background the attention to which is necessary in order to understand the issue of forgiveness here. Forgiveness makes visible – more or less clearly, of course – what goodness might be here, and will therefore not leave the

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

relationship as it is, in so far as that challenge is taken up. For example, when forgiveness takes place in a relation of inequality, forgiveness will challenge the inequality and thus not leave it as it is. The same goes for a relatively untroubled relationship: even if forgiveness points us towards what we once had, it still points in a spirit of love that would transform our relationship if we held on to it. The word “reconciliation” is perhaps ambiguous, depending on whether you emphasise “re-” (and the word might then stand for not much more than the end of fighting) or “-conciliation” (and here we get something morally much more important, togetherness in its fullness, dialogue, speaking, but even more being addressed by and listening). This topic has been touched upon by many philosophers discussing forgiveness, and drawing on what two of them have said in relation to it could serve as an introduction to my way of approaching forgiveness. So, Aurel Kolnai writes: “Reconciliation” is likely to be largely based on forgiveness but it emphasizes the result, not the essence, of forgiveness; and is a reciprocal return of Fred and Ralph to friendly relations, not a one-sided change of Fred’s attitude to Ralph. It can occur that forgiveness is not accepted, in which case no reconciliation ensues.8

Now, the distinction between essence and result is only a clear one if the result is external to the phenomenon, but in that sense almost anything can be the result of forgiveness, and reconciliation and forgiveness are surely more closely related than that. So, what the issue concerns is Kolnai’s claim that forgiveness is one-sided whereas reconciliation is reciprocal. The latter is no doubt true, but what about the former? Fred might say to Ralph that he has forgiven him, and Ralph might answer that he does not care. If Kolnai is right, this would mean that the issue of forgiveness is over and done with, and that the problem between Fred and Ralph is now simply a different one. But is that so? Is it not possible that Fred says to himself that if Ralph is not willing to listen to him now, then he will get back to him another day? In other words, for Fred something would be lacking, and the process of forgiveness would not have come to its end, irrespective of the fact that his way, seen in isolation, of relating to Fred may be the same the whole time. The fact that Ralph does not want to see him might also give rise to new bitter and malignant thoughts in Fred, thoughts not unrelated to those he had been able to overcome, and the

8 

H. STRANDBERG

question of forgiveness would then arise again. Most importantly, Kolnai’s claim makes it very unclear how asking somebody’s forgiveness is related to forgiveness; as soon as we also focus on asking somebody’s forgiveness, on wanting to be forgiven, forgiveness will be seen as much more of a reciprocal issue. As a contrast to Kolnai’s claim, compare Kierkegaard: It is certainly the one who did wrong who needs forgiveness, but the loving one who suffered wrong, he needs to forgive, or needs reconciliation, a word which does not as the word forgiveness make a distinction by calling attention to the right and the wrong, but lovingly has on its mind that both are in need. To forgive when being asked to forgive is not conciliatory in the fullest sense of the word; but it is conciliatory to need to forgive already when the other is perhaps the least thinking of seeking forgiveness.9

After having discussed Kolnai, let me now say a few words about an example offered by Jeffrie Murphy.10 The issue here is not so much the relation of forgiveness and reconciliation as what they involve. Murphy warns against “the dangers of letting one’s forgiveness nudge one toward unwise reconciliation”,11 that is, reconciliation when the offender has not repented. Already this sounds strange: perhaps repentance specifically is not necessary for reconciliation, but still, how could there be reconciliation if both of us are not involved, striving for it? In order to show that one-sided reconciliation is possible, Murphy gives an example of a case in which there is no repentance but, as he puts it, “the offender greatly wants to be forgiven by me”.12 The example concerns a woman Murphy calls Mary. Mary’s father, who had subjected her to repeated sexual abuse when she was a young girl, had recently attempted – after many years of separation – to gain reentry into her life. The father demonstrated no signs of repentance for his past iniquity but simply seemed his old arrogant self  – acting as though, since Mary was his only living child, he had a right to her giving at least the appearance of a conventional father-daughter relationship with him. It seems that he was in part motivated by a desire to look normal and respectable in the eyes of a new wife and family.13

Now, the father might of course have uttered the words “forgive me” or something similar. But does he want to be forgiven? Precisely on account of the example, as described by Murphy, I would definitely answer in the negative, and I do not think that this is just a peculiar thing on my part.

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

Murphy claims that the father wants to be forgiven, but in order to convince those who deny this, he needs something else than the example, for the example does not show this. Does this mean that the whole issue simply boils down to a semantic one, that Murphy has a much wider conception of forgiveness and reconciliation, a conception that includes many bad things, than I do? I do not think so. For Murphy writes that there is a “more basic command” than “the command to forgive,” from which “the command to forgive flows”: “The command that we are to love  – both God and our neighbor.”14 God is mentioned here, of course, but Murphy continues by saying that thinking about this issue in these terms is important no matter whether you are a Christian or not, and he does not question the close relation of love and forgiveness. So what is to be said about Murphy’s example from the perspective of love, from the perspective of the basis of forgiveness as he sees it? Isn’t it then clear that the father’s unwillingness to open his eyes to what he has done to his daughter is a problem? And isn’t it therefore just as clear that his daughter’s love for him would show precisely in her not accepting his unwillingness? And does not love seek togetherness, that is, would her love for him not show in her trying to open his eyes to what he has done and to the possibility of togetherness in truthful love? The father might certainly be able to pressure Mary into saying “I forgive you” and meeting him now and then, but he is not able to make their relationship a good one by means of force. On the contrary, to the extent Mary sees herself as pressured, that only adds to the problems in their relation. This is a good example of something I will come back to now and then throughout the book: that the process of forgiveness involves facing the difficulties that the relationship in question is marred by (abuse, exploitation, power inequality, etc.), and that the unwillingness to do so therefore runs counter to the process of forgiveness, a problem that is especially critical when the word “forgiveness” is used to justify one’s unwillingness to face these problems.

Philosophy I will end this introduction by saying a few words about the understanding of philosophy, specifically of philosophical writing, that informs this book. What I say here is intended as no more than a way into the book: what I do and the way I do it are certainly less evident in what I say about it here than in the doing itself.

10 

H. STRANDBERG

In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein refers to “our craving for generality” and “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” as what makes it difficult to do philosophy in his spirit.15 That contemptuous attitude manifests itself, for example, in objecting to a discussion of some particular cases by pointing to other, dissimilar cases. For that objection only works if one is striving for generality, and it shows a contemptuous attitude towards the particular cases in taking their discussion not to be sufficient in itself. Contrary to common practice, philosophy as pursued in this book consequently does not aim for abstraction and generalisation. If it did, there would be no point in trying to acquire a deeper understanding of a given case, for the facets then disclosed would in any case be abstracted from in the final analysis. Furthermore, incompatibilities between what is unusual and what is common would then require the general theory, based on what is common, either to be delimited or to be made even more abstract, which means that the odd case would then not be supposed to give us a deeper understanding of other cases, for example by means of contrastive comparison. In other words, there are certainly many cases of forgiveness I will not be able to discuss, and those cases are certainly dissimilar to those I discuss in some or many ways (for example, I will not discuss political forgiveness, when a spokesperson for some group of people asks another group’s forgiveness or forgives another group). But that does not make what I do discuss any less important, or it would do that only to the one who craves generality. That said, I think there is one-sidedness in the standard philosophy of forgiveness that is no mere one-sidedness, and I therefore wish to contribute to its correction. Margaret Holmgren sums up the standard discussion in this way (a discussion she is critical of): “The central questions that moral philosophers have raised about forgiveness are whether it is compatible with self-respect, respect for morality, and respect for the wrong-doer as a moral agent.”16 What Holmgren points to, without making it explicit, is no mere one-sidedness, but a specific self-image: the philosopher tends to see him- or herself as the wronged party, not as a wrongdoer, and as someone who risks forgiving too often and too easily, not too seldom and with too much ado. In contrast to this self-image, I will now and then throughout the book think about forgiveness from the point of view of the one asking someone’s forgiveness, not simply because such questions are seldom asked in the standard philosophy of forgiveness, for there are of course many questions that are seldom asked, but because it is morally, that is, philosophically, important to see one’s moral relations to others in

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

a true light, and the above self-image is certainly seriously distorted as regards most of us. With aspirations of generality or not, a philosophical text is in the end no more than a tool for the reader to make use of to understand life better, to deepen her moral understanding, and what I say in this book is hopefully enlightening enough for someone to be able to make such use of it.17 Without readers to bring the text into contact with life, any philosophical text would be dead. In other words, the fundamental point of the philosophical text that lies before you is not to be found in the text itself, but in the use to which it is put, in the moral understanding that you can acquire by means of the text. Discussing forgiveness philosophically need therefore not be to analyse a conceptually determinate phenomenon, for the significance of the discussion does ultimately only depend on whether it sheds light on anything for the reader, not on whether she uses the word “forgiveness” in the same way herself. Since the use to which the text is put is the crucial thing, the activity of the reader is essential: if you do not find a use for a specific hammer, this might indicate that the hammer is badly made, but also that you simply have no use for it but perhaps someone else might, or that you are too unimaginative. Furthermore, however good the hammer might be, it can always be put to a bad use. Ultimately then, the proof of the pudding cannot be anywhere else than in the eating, and not in the ingredients. In other words, the discussion here does not progress: if something I say, especially here in the introduction, seems to you to be unsupported, you might come to see the point of it later on, in the light of a discussion of a partly different issue in a different chapter. (This is why the book starts with the chapter “Being true to oneself, being forgiven”: it presents some of the basic ideas, and the chapters that follow are attempts at shedding light on some of the issues it addresses. The chapters that follow come to forgiveness from different angles, in order for us to see it more clearly.) I could come up with all kinds of explanations of why I take up certain things for discussion and discuss them in the way I do, but in the end such explanations do not matter, however convincing they might be. What matters is whether the reader is able to deepen her understanding of some aspect of life, her moral understanding, by means of the text (and the same thing goes, of course, for its author).

12 

H. STRANDBERG

Writing In The Joy of Being Wrong, James Alison writes: [A]ny understanding of good and evil that exists is not merely a piece of information about an act, but a part of a human social order, as part of the maintenance of that social order. There is no knowledge of good and evil that is not also part of a socially constructed relationality which is either inclusive or exclusive, but never neutral. So the question legitimately arises whether knowing that something is good or evil is known within the framework of accusation (whether of self or others), or within the framework of forgiveness (of others or self). […] any accusatory knowledge of sin has a particular propensity to blindness about complicity and […] only forgiveness enables us to see.18

This is related to something I said previously, that taking moral philosophy seriously means having to deal with your own moral difficulties; specifically, Alison highlights the importance of minding the spirit of one’s writing, not only the truth or falsity, understood in a restricted sense, of what one is saying. What I want to point out now is that this goes for the reader too (in Alison’s terms: whether she reads the text in a spirit of accusation or in a spirit of forgiveness). In other words, if doing moral philosophy is beset with moral difficulties, the only question to ask is not “Is what the text says correct?”, for that question can be asked in the spirit of those moral difficulties that need to be tackled in order for it to be possible to see things clearly in this specific context. This means that the reader, asking the question in such a spirit, will misjudge the merits and errors of the text. Is there anything the author can do about this? However the text is written, there is no guarantee that the reader will ask and answer this question in another spirit, but the author might still try to shake up the reader (and herself) and so create the space for another way of approaching the text. “Is what the text says correct?” is thus not the only question to ask about a text one is reading; “Does the text work, does it do any work?” is another one. This is not a secondary question, but in a way the primary one. There is thus a point to using startling and surprising ways of writing (including, among many other things, choice of words), in order to make something visible by pulling us out of thoughtless and habitual ways of seeing things. Now, I do not think this book is that strange, but it is still true that considerations such as these have been in the back of my mind during the writing of it. In other words, if you find things strange in it, this

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

might certainly be grounds for criticising it, but you can at least rest assured that these strange things are not there be mistake and that there consequently is a point to them. I have especially tried to make the chapters different from each other, in order to come to forgiveness from different angles, and to discuss questions that are not, or not often, discussed in the standard philosophy of forgiveness, and to discuss them in ways that are not often found there. For discussing the usual questions in the usual ways would merely risk remaining in the (philosophical as well as existential) dead ends that it has come to. It is therefore better to try to approach the topic by less well-trodden paths. One example of this is the choice of examples. Philosophers often start their texts on forgiveness by giving a gruesome example, a murder say. This is certainly partly related to the question I discussed in the above paragraph: it is a way of trying to shake up the reader and of trying to give the text existential relevance. But does it work? I am doubtful. For I assume that few readers have personal experience of such things: they have not committed a murder, and they do not have a close friend who has been murdered. This means that the example, which is supposed to bring existential relevance with it, risks leading to its opposite – having a distancing effect. In particular, it risks blinding us to the challenging nature of forgiveness, as the example does not concern me or only concerns me in a theoretical way, that is, it does not challenge me. This does not mean that such examples should never be used – and here and there in the book I touch upon issues such as murder – but that they should be used with caution. Instead, I sometimes use trivial examples, which most people will have no problem relating to. These examples are sometimes rather schematic, which the reader herself must fill with content, something that hence requires the reader’s active involvement. There are of course risks involved in such schematic examples, but to the extent that you as a reader are dissatisfied with them, I hope you see your dissatisfaction as calling you to develop them yourself. That I use examples that most people will have no problem relating to means that many of my examples will be of close relationships. There is an additional point to this: it is a way of avoiding the legalism of many other accounts of forgiveness.19 If one starts in close relationships, and from there moves on to relations between strangers, instead of the other way around, it is harder for legalism to creep in. Legalism is one example of not taking up the challenge of forgiveness; it is an attempt to save moralism from the threat posed by forgiveness.

14 

H. STRANDBERG

In other words, the schematic character of the examples is an attempt at avoiding thinking about forgiveness from a God’s Eye point of view. This might seem to be a strange claim, for is not this risk better tackled in the opposite way, by detailed, socially situated examples? No, I do not think so, for the details do not prevent anyone from thinking about the examples from the outside. In fact, they rather encourage it, because the more detailed the example is, the less likely is it that I, as the author, or you, as a reader, have encountered something similar in our lives, be it as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. Consequently, the way to avoid thinking about forgiveness from a God’s Eye point of view is to take one’s own context with one when reflecting on the issues, for I see something as a moral question only if I see answering it as committing me to something, as involving responsibility, as making a real difference, as mattering. As I do not know anything about you as a reader, and as your life is in many ways different than mine, you will have to bring your own life to the text, in order to see what difference thinking about the issues in one way or the other makes in your life. That is the only way of situating the philosophical discussion. Anyhow, there is no one way of writing about these issues, and I will not stick to one kind of examples, for there is always some risk involved. When the example is more detailed, your task as a reader is therefore harder, because more work is then needed to make the example existentially relevant; without such relevance, the example does not make a real difference and the discussion runs idle.20 However, there is at least one way in which the above considerations have to influence the writing for me to take the text seriously, a way that is, however, not immediately conspicuous: a philosopher who does not make any attempt to avoid philosophical terminology, the technical language of philosophy, leaves us even more stuck in those habitual ways of thinking from which we need to free ourselves. The professionalisation of philosophy, its being turned into normal science, is not philosophically neutral but must, on the contrary, be fought against. This is the problem Heidegger points out – thus rightly, no matter whether one finds his way of dealing with it fruitful or not – when he writes: The tradition which then comes into power primarily and generally makes that which it “hands over” accessible to so low a degree that it rather conceals it. It delivers over the inherited to self-evidence and blocks the access to the original “sources” from which the categories and concepts that have been handed down were drawn in a partly genuine way.21

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

[I]t is in the end the business of philosophy to preserve the force of the most fundamental words, in which the Dasein expresses itself, from being levelled to incomprehensibility by the common understanding22

Using modes of expression conventionally prevalent in philosophy is not a condition for making sense. On the contrary, what makes sense makes sense, there are no preordained conditions for something to make sense, or, as Lars Hertzberg puts it, the sense is where you find it.23 The problem is, however, that the question of sense is not a question without relation to those moral problems we are discussing here. In terms partly taken from the two Heidegger quotations above: from the point of view of the common, culturally handed down moral understanding, something morally fundamental, and the way in which it is expressed, will often be seen as absurd, and by taking things as self-evident it can conceal for itself the fact that these things do not make moral sense. The moral difficulties we are struggling with – difficulties that influence the way we do it, whether we are aware of it or not – form, and are then formed by, habitual ways of thinking: such things that I do not want to take a closer look at are avoided, paths of thinking are created that lead around these things, descriptions are resorted to that present things I cannot avoid in a less disturbing, and thereby false, light. In short, there is no short cut or royal road to moral understanding; the challenge has to be taken up.

Notes 1. For an example, see Hobbes (1968, p. 163): “To have done more hurt to a man, than he can, or is willing to expiate, enclineth the doer to hate the sufferer. For he must expect revenge, or forgivenesse; both which are hatefull.” 2. As Adam Morton puts it (2012, p. 4): “The obvious primary topic is not the concept of forgiveness but the forgiveness territory” 3. As Geoffrey Scarre puts it (2004, p. 25): Forgiveness seems too broad, too varied and too vaguely bounded a phenomenon for its ‘essence’ to be captured in some statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. It would be hard to find any positive claim made by a philosopher about the nature of forgiveness that is not falsified by particular cases. See also Smith 2008, p. 134.

16 

H. STRANDBERG

4. Cf. Bertram 2014, p. 208. 5. All this is especially clear if one understands forgiveness as a family resemblance-­concept (cf. Wittgenstein 2009, §§ 67–71), for then there would be no such thing as coming up with a correct analysis, and the philosophical discussion of forgiveness would need to be pursued in a different spirit. What it means to forgive someone depends on the details of the case; for example, it makes a lot of difference if the one you forgive is alive or dead (an issue I will discuss in Chap. 7). Important differences can also be detected by paying attention to who is using “forgiveness” or related words in a given case, about whom she is talking, and to whom (and it is therefore important for the reader to pay attention to such elements in the examples I describe and discuss); for example, saying to the victim that what I did to her is unforgivable and saying to a third person that what a fourth person did to a fifth person is unforgivable are doing two very different things. Consequently, even if it were possible to find some element common to all cases of forgiveness, the analyses will nonetheless be far richer if we do not stop at having identified such an alleged element. Understanding forgiveness as a family resemblance-concept does not only mean that the word “forgiveness” can be used in many different ways in life, it also means that I, when doing philosophy, can use it in many different ways. As long as this does not cause any misunderstandings, not sticking to one definition might even enrich the discussion. That forgiveness is a family resemblance-concept has sometimes been denied. Charles Griswold initially talks about family resemblance (2007, p. xvii), but claims that there are a countable number of members of the family, five, and later on (2007, pp. 137–138) he seems to say that all of them except one are non-paradigmatic. Similarly, Margaret Urban Walker criticises the idea that forgiveness is one thing, but does not give up the question as such and claims that forgiveness is three things (2006, pp. 151–152). Nicolas Cornell claims (2017, p. 264) that “[t]here must be some deep connection” between the various uses, without explaining why this “must” be so. For some, the assumption that there are such deep connections is part of the description of the philosophical task itself. Kevin Zaragoza writes (2012, 620): What do we want, in the end, from a theory of forgiveness? At a minimum, we should demand an explanation of what happens when we forgive which preserves the place of forgiveness in our moral lives. More aspirationally, we might hope that a theory of forgiveness will provide some measure of guidance on when we ought to forgive and how to go about doing it. And Christopher Bennett writes (2018, p. 211):

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

A fully developed philosophical theory of forgiveness, as well as explaining what goes on when one person forgives another, should shed light on a number of other questions, such as: who is in a position to forgive; what kinds of acts, mental or otherwise (or attitudes – or what combination of the two) are necessary and sufficient for one person to have forgiven another Needless to say, I am not aiming for a theory here, not even a less than “fully developed” one; one difference between what I do and what Zaragoza and Bennett demand of a theory is that I am describing forgiveness from the inside (an inside that includes the bystander, for from a theoretical distance you do not recognise, say, a spirit of forgiveness in the life of two people), the problem being that aiming for a theory would be to fail to let oneself be challenged by forgiveness and would thus misunderstand what the theory claims to be a theory of. Bennett is however aware of the fact that there is a difficulty here, and he writes (2018, pp. 212–213): human cultures are creative entities and are forever taking the basic conceptual ingredients of practices and extending or blending them. It would be surprising, in fact, if something as venerable and as indispensable as the practice of forgiveness were to fit neatly and univocally into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. 6. Dostoevsky 2002, p. 319. 7. As R.J. O’Shaughnessy puts it (1967, p. 344): [A]n enquiry into the concept of forgiveness ought to take the form, not so much of asking what ‘forgiveness’ means, as asking what people mean when they use the expression ‘forgiveness’ and the other expressions related to it. […] Sometimes […] what they say shows us that they are trying to deceive us, or perhaps themselves, representing themselves as having an attitude which, in the light of other things they say or do, it can be seen that they do not really have. (Cf. Wittgenstein 1982, § 121: “Philosophy is not a description of language usage, and yet one can learn it by constantly attending to all the expressions of life in the language.”) O’Shaughnessy does not discuss it, but this means that the one who is doing the enquiry will be involved in the difficulties the enquiry is about and will have to struggle with them as part of the enquiry (and that is so no matter whether she is writing the enquiry or reading it). For the difficulty of seeing whether someone is deceiving herself is related to my own difficulties with that which the deception concerns, and this is of course even more obvious if one pays attention to the fact that it is not only other people who deceive themselves

18 

H. STRANDBERG

but that I do it too, something that will affect the philosophical enquiry greatly. 8. Kolnai 1974, p. 94. For claims similar to Kolnai’s, see Yandell 1998, p. 44; Worthington 1998, p. 129; Smedes 1998, pp. 345–346. 9. Kierkegaard 1963, p. 321. (If the entry in the bibliography is a non-­English text but I quote it in English, the translation is always my own, here and in the following.). What Kierkegaard is talking about here could be understood to be “invitational forgiveness”, as outlined by Trudy Govier and Colin Hirano (2008). My above discussion is related to claims made by other philosophers in this context. See e.g. Joanna North (1987, p. 503): “Forgiveness is a way of healing the damage done to one’s relations to the wrongdoer”; Jean Hampton (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p.  42): “[F]orgiveness should be analyzed as a process involving […] a change of heart towards the wrongdoer […] which is normally accompanied by an offer of reconciliation.”; Robert C. Roberts (1995, p. 294): “[T]he aim of reconciliation is basic to forgiveness […] not that forgiveness is reconciliation, but that it aims at it.”; Eve Garrard and David McNaughton (2003, p. 45): “Forgiveness is closely tied, on many accounts, with reconciliation and the restoration of relationship. How close is that tie? Forgiveness, as a dynamic, outreaching activity, standardly seeks to repair damage to relationships.”; John Milbank (2003, p. 47): In the Middle Ages, the aim of forgiveness was […] reconciliation, where the bond of love is an exchange of infinite love. […] Just because the goal sought was not the private subjective sustaining (with indifference to objects) of a pure and absolute negative commitment to ignore all faults one suffers from others, but rather concrete reconciliation […] forgiveness in this era was not as yet interruptively counterpoised to justice and issues of positive recompense. 10. As influential as Murphy is in the philosophy of forgiveness, I will come back to him now and then throughout the book, so what I say here (or, for that matter, in the book as a whole) should not be understood as a discussion of everything he has to say on the issue. 11. Murphy 2003, p. 80. 12. Murphy 2003, p. 81. 13. Murphy 2003, p. 82. 14. Murphy 2003, p. 96. 15. Wittgenstein 1969, pp. 17–18. 16. Holmgren 1993, p. 342. Another example is Heidi Chamberlin Giannini, who notes (2017, pp.  64–65) that the “standard” approach “in philosophical treatments of forgiveness” has been to “think about forgiveness from the point of view of the person wronged”, not “from the point of

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

view of the person committing the wrong”, that “though there may not be perfect agreement on the details, the philosophical community does seem to be largely concerned with” the former. But curiously enough, she seems to regard this as a good thing. 17. As Murphy puts it (2012, pp. 190–191): All one can really do, in my view, is to put forward one’s own “take” on the issue in the hope that others will find it illuminating in some way – that it will at least advance the conversation by providing something worth reacting to. […] So, if being truly honest, I should probably say that the question my essay seeks to address is this: “Under what circumstances, if any, might I be inclined to forgive” 18. Alison 1998, p. 265. 19. Cf. Howard Wettstein (2010, p. 451): Something I felt to be particularly jarring about what I’m calling Griswold’s moralizing of the situation is Griswold’s (and others) bringing to bear legal terminology on the ethical life. The question is whether concepts like justification, warrant, obligation and moral duty are the pivotal ones in potential forgiveness situations. A really striking example was Griswold’s idea that the moral community cedes to the offended party the moral standing to be the sole purveyor of forgiveness. That, and the role of justification and warrant throughout Griswold’s discussion. Bernard Williams and others have objected to what they call scientism, the (mis) application to various domains of philosophy of modes of thought and explanation that derive from the sciences. Parallel to such scientism is legalism, the imposition of legal categories on the ethical domain. 20. For a more extensive discussion of these issues, see Strandberg 2020. 21. Heidegger 2001, p. 21. 22. Heidegger 2001, p. 220. 23. Hertzberg 2001.

Bibliography Alison, James. 1998. The joy of being wrong: Original sin through Easter eyes. New York: Crossroad. Bennett, Christopher. 2018. The alteration thesis: Forgiveness as a normative power. Philosophy and Public Affairs 46: 207–233. Bertram, Georg W. 2014. Kunst als menschliche Praxis: Eine Ästhetik. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

20 

H. STRANDBERG

Cornell, Nicolas. 2017. The possibility of preemptive forgiving. Philosophical Review 126: 241–272. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2002. The brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. Giannini, Heidi Chamberlin. 2017. Hope as grounds for forgiveness: A Christian argument for universal, unconditional forgiveness. Journal of Religious Ethics 45: 58–82. Govier, Trudy, and Colin Hirano. 2008. A conception of invitational forgiveness. Journal of Social Philosophy 39: 429–444. Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A philosophical exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Hertzberg, Lars. 2001. The sense is where you find it. In Wittgenstein in America, ed. Timothy McCarthy and Sean Stidd, 90–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan. London: Penguin. Holmgren, Margaret R. 1993. Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons. American Philosophical Quarterly 30: 341–352. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1963. Kjerlighedens Gjerningar: Nogre christelige Overveielser i Talers Form. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Kolnai, Aurel. 1974. Forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 91–106. Milbank, John. 2003. Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon. London: Routledge. Morton, Adam. 2012. What is forgiveness? In Ancient forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L.  Griswold and David Konstan, 3–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G. 2003. Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Punishment and the moral emotions: Essays, in law, morality, and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Joanna. 1987. Wrongdoing and forgiveness. Philosophy 62: 499–508. O’Shaughnessy, R.J. 1967. Forgiveness. Philosophy 42: 336–352. Roberts, Robert C. 1995. Forgivingness. American Philosophical Quarterly 32: 289–306. Scarre, Geoffrey. 2004. After evil: Responding to wrongdoing. Aldershot: Ashgate. Smedes, Lewis B. 1998. Stations on the journey from forgiveness to hope. In Dimensions of forgiveness: Psychological research and theological perspectives, ed. Everett L. Worthington, 341–354. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

Smith, Nick. 2008. I was wrong: The meanings of apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strandberg, Hugo. 2020. In search of the context of a question. Sats 21: 199–213. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wettstein, Howard. 2010. Forgiveness and moral reckoning. Philosophia 38: 445–455. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1982. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie: Band I; Last writings on the philosophy of psychology: Volume I. Trans. C.G.  Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophische Untersuchungen; Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S.  Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Worthington, Everett L. 1998. The pyramid model of forgiveness: Some interdisciplinary speculations about unforgiveness and the promotion of forgiveness. In Dimensions of forgiveness: Psychological research and theological perspectives, ed. Everett L.  Worthington, 107–137. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Yandell, Keith E. 1998. The metaphysics and morality of forgiveness. In Exploring forgiveness, ed. Robert D.  Enright and Joanna North, 35–45. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Zaragoza, Kevin. 2012. Forgiveness and standing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84: 604–621.

CHAPTER 2

Being True to Oneself, Being Forgiven

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception was the title of my last book.1 One conception that is close to those I investigated in that book is “being true to oneself”. Let us begin our discussion of forgiveness by examining this notion. One understanding of what being true to oneself means is this2: I have a conception of who I am, a conception I should stand by in my confrontations with others instead of being a turncoat, instead of yielding to others and turning into someone I do not want to be and in fact essentially am not. This conception does not only concern who I am narrowly understood, but concerns just as much principles I believe in, principles I would like to dare to remain true to when others oppose them. When I do this, I am true to myself. Letting others down may be bad, but letting myself down is far worse. In fact, someone might say, letting others down is bad only to the extent that I let myself down by letting them down: being true to oneself is the basic form of all truthfulness.3 This understanding of what being true to oneself means takes for granted that there is no difficulty in being true to myself until I confront others. When I am by myself there is no problem; in such situations I am true to myself as a matter of course. This is, however, what I would like to question in this chapter, and I will question it in a way that is also directed at the whole idea of truthfulness to oneself as a central notion. To the extent that there is something important in this idea, it must be understood in a very different way. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_2

23

24 

H. STRANDBERG

The Unreality of Thoughts The following situation is not unusual, I guess: You are irritated with someone, and your thoughts relentlessly revolve around her. “How stupid and nasty she is,” you think to yourself. But you do not say anything. Why? There might be many reasons for this: cowardice, politeness, tactics. But there is also another one: you realise that you do not really mean the thing you are saying to yourself. What this possibility shows is that there is a specific kind of unreality that marks thoughts. What I say to myself in my thoughts is disconnected from those situations in which the words would make a real difference. Giving vent to my thoughts would make her sad, and this is not what I want, not because making her sad would be impolite or unwise, but simply because I do not want her to be sad. But this does not only concern the consequences of saying it: I am able to have as distorted a picture of her as I have only as long as it merely remains a picture. The difficulty here is not one of daring to say what you are thinking, but a more fundamental one: which of my thoughts are seriously meant, what is my real thought about her and the situation, is she really as bad as I let myself think she is? This real meaning appears when a real relation to the person my thoughts are about is established. Whatever I say in the situation means a very different thing, and has a very different kind of reality, than only thinking it. Consequently, it is not clear whether that which I would like to stay true to is really meant or not as long as I merely think it, as long as I keep it to myself. So what is it I would like to stay true to when wanting to be true to myself?4 This problem becomes especially evident if I have treated her badly. One might think that my realisation that this is so is one thing, that my asking her forgiveness another. Realising that I have treated her badly would then mean that I am truthful to myself, whereas asking her forgiveness would only be externally related to that truthfulness, even though asking her forgiveness may be held to be a good thing. But what I said in the above paragraph should make us wary of this. If I really have realised that I have treated her badly, why do I not ask her forgiveness? Wherein lies the difficulty? Is it not typical that I step back from my realisation as soon as forgiveness becomes an issue for me? “It was not that bad after all, why make a fuss about it?” and “Well, I treated her badly, but she is just as bad as me, so I have nothing to ask forgiveness for” are two things I might tell myself. Another form that such self-deception might take is shame. Phenomenologically speaking, shame is very different than asking

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

25

someone’s forgiveness.5 Whereas the latter is about addressing oneself to the person in question, and so is directed ahead, to our life together, the former is about lowering one’s eyes, hiding, being inhibited, and so is directed back, to what I have done. Shame is hence not an understanding of the gravity of what I have done, for in shame I do not face the one I have done it to; in shame I am stuck in what I have done, instead of approaching the one I have wronged. And the same thing can be said about feelings of guilt.6 Asking her forgiveness is thus not a possible consequence of my realisation of what I have done, but is that in which my realisation of what I have done has its full meaning. When I stand in a relation, how I understand that relation is an aspect of that very relation; facing up to what I have done is therefore not possible in abstraction from facing the one I have done it to. Asking her forgiveness is then an internal aspect of really realising what I have done, and is not about conveying an already existing realisation. Asking her forgiveness is being open about what I have done, also to myself. Asking her forgiveness is indispensable to truthfulness. If this were all there was to it, her response to my asking her forgiveness would not be essential. But to the extent that asking someone’s forgiveness is about recreating our relationship, about not letting that which has happened change it for the worse, about making things good or even better than they once were – and it is in this way that I will use the notion in this book – her negative answer will not be definitive for me. On the contrary, asking her forgiveness will remain an issue until I have been forgiven. The need for forgiveness only vanishes when she has forgiven me. As long as I have not been forgiven, my own truthfulness will hence also remain an issue; when things are good between us (again) there will be no such place for the notion of truthfulness. My life will not be the same again if she does not want to have anything to do with me, and only she is able to recreate that life. If there is a self I would like to be true to, that self must here first be given back to me. The philosophical task that lies before us in this chapter hence concerns understanding what this means: being forgiven. When forgiveness is discussed in philosophy, forgiveness is mostly described from the perspective of the one who does or does not forgive, from the perspective of the one who asks herself whether she should forgive or not, not from the perspective of the one who asks forgiveness. (This is one of the reasons for opening this book with a discussion of this issue: in order to create a healthy distance from those discussions from the start.) When discussing what

26 

H. STRANDBERG

being forgiven means we will of course say something about forgiving too: as a response to someone’s asking forgiveness, that response must be understood if we try to understand what asking forgiveness means. Being forgiven is nevertheless the focus in this chapter, not forgiving, and discussing the latter is relevant only to the extent that it is needed when trying to shed light on the former. In other words, if we had started out from the one doing or not doing the forgiving, other questions would be important to address, questions we will not discuss right now. Having come this far, some readers might object: “Do I always feel the need to be forgiven when I have treated someone badly? If not, the possibilities of being true to oneself on one’s own are far greater than you suggest they are, for then there would be no self that needs to be given back to me in forgiveness.” The one who raises this objection could take her inspiration from Nietzsche, who claims: “[N]ot being able to take even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the mark of strong, full characters”7 But here it should be noted that these strong characters shy away from all human closeness,8 and this abhorrence is not an accidental one but permeates Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole.9 Not feeling the need of being forgiven could thus be described as a reactive attitude; the price of rejecting that need is far higher, and the possibility far less clear, than it initially seemed to be to the one who raised the above objection. Even more important than this observation is, however, the fact that self-­ examination ought to be an essential aspect of all discussions in moral philosophy. If I feel tempted to raise some objection, I must question myself as to the seriousness and meaning of this objection. This self-­ examination is needed, for morality cannot be studied from the outside; not only specific acts but also ways of describing moral phenomena can be described as immoral.10 This self-examination should also be directed at one’s understanding of situations in which I feel or (tell myself that I) do not feel the need of being forgiven. One result of such a self-examination might be this insight: Nietzsche characterises situations in which I feel the need of being forgiven in terms of seriousness, but if such a word should be used, it should not be used in the sense Nietzsche understands it. For him this characterisation means that the situation is essentially marked by feelings of guilt, and I have already explained why asking someone’s forgiveness should not primarily be understood in that way. This also explains why terms such as “strength” and “weakness” are at best misleading: if I understand the situation in terms of feelings of guilt, I understand my own position as one of weakness and the position of the one whose forgiveness

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

27

I need as one of strength, a lack of equality that remains as long as I have not atoned for what I have done or as long as she has not pardoned me. If I were a strong character I would then not be in need of that which she can possibly give me, for I would then never be the subjected party in a relation of inequality. But when asking forgiveness in the sense in which I use the notion in this book, this is done in a very different spirit. One way in which forgiveness is challenging is precisely that it challenges relations of power. In other words, asking someone’s forgiveness is about recreating our togetherness in the only way in which we can recreate it, that is, by recreating it together. In that sense I am dependent on her, and since my life will not be the same again if she does not want to have anything to do with me, she is essential in the recreation of that life. Asking someone’s forgiveness in the sense in which I use the notion in this book is consequently about coming to see that what I myself can do is not enough – realising what I have done, changing my mind, turning myself into a better person – but that I am dependent on her. And the reason for why I am dependent on her is a simple one: however much I change myself, the problem is still there if things are not good between us. Her positive answer to my asking her forgiveness is thus essential: the relation to her is troubled, and these troubles are only gone when both of us see them as gone. By myself I may try as hard as I like to change myself, but still I need her forgiveness; this need means that things are no longer – if they ever were – merely my own business. The difficulty of acknowledging that I have done wrong – acknowledging to her and only thereby to myself – and the difficulty of acknowledging that I have been wrong are therefore very different (even though they are both difficulties that are due merely to my finding it difficult, and not in anything additional to that, and so to say that it is hard to forgive is thus not informative, merely a tautology). They are very different, for in the case of acknowledging that I have been wrong my relations to others need not be much affected, whereas in the case of acknowledging that I have done wrong there is a real difficulty of being “true to oneself,” simply because the issue is not primarily about that but about being true to her, or to us. To the extent that I find it difficult to acknowledge that I have been wrong, this could be said to show that there is in fact a connection between this and doing wrong, a link to my relations to others: pride, vanity. To sum up, I may have all kinds of ideas about who I am, but whether these ideas are really meant or not does not show as long as I keep them to myself. In other words, my encounters with others are not primarily

28 

H. STRANDBERG

what prevents me from being true to myself, but what make a real self to be true to at all possible. And to the extent that I have treated someone badly, this truth is not something I am able to reach on my own. Here her forgiveness means that this truth is recreated, given back to me, and the difficulty of asking her forgiveness shows that the real task is not one of being true to myself, but rather one of being true to her, to us.

Forgiveness and Metaphysics The traditional metaphysical task of the philosopher is one of describing the structural aspects of the totality of being, especially with respect to possibility and impossibility. But what is distinctive about forgiveness is that things are not definite, that the meaning of what has happened is not settled, that the past is still under formation. This means that only that which is not possible to forgive, or that in respect of which talking about forgiveness makes no sense, could be subjected to philosophical description so understood. For sub specie aeternitatis everything is as it is and will never be otherwise, and the description this philosopher would like to arrive at is one that is beyond all change (and the same goes for the scientist who tries to find what is constant in all change, those invariable mathematical formulae determining the variable). But forgiveness means that things are not settled, and therefore this philosopher disregards forgiveness, leaves it out of account. All this becomes especially evident when saying that “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable” (Derrida).11 The metaphysical philosopher wants to find the limits of the possible, but it is precisely such limits that forgiveness transcends. Forgiveness is, one could say, a limit to the endeavour of that kind of philosophy: if one wants to establish rules for what is possible to forgive and for what is not, the existential issue about whether to forgive will address me in its weightiest form precisely in the case of the latter, and the existential need of being forgiven will never be as pressing as in such a case. When something is definitely forgivable, forgiveness is not needed. (Forgiveness is also a limit to the endeavour of the moralist, for forgiveness tries to see to it that evil will not forever be counted and in that respect subverts moral rules.)12 Asking someone’s forgiveness would therefore be a very different thing if being forgiven were something I were entitled to – what I have done is forgivable – or if what I have done would undeniably lie beyond what is forgivable – asking her forgiveness would then make no sense. But being

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

29

forgiven is not something I can count on, which I could possibly do if I were entitled to it. This does not mean, however, that I should take her forgiving me as doubtful. Taking it to be doubtful is close to despairing of it, and longing for forgiveness is a very different thing than that. According to the above philosopher, however, the past is just what it is and the future is simply an object of calculation, which means that forgiveness, if it is not left out of account, is something to count on. As to the notion of being true to oneself, forgiveness could thus be understood as tackling the opposite difficulty, not the one of staying true to oneself, but the one of being liberated from a false self, from that self standing in, and the falseness of which is a result of its being marked by, a damaged relation to the one I have treated badly. This liberation cannot be my own doing, it must be done by someone else, by her. What I need to be liberated from is the past; I need to be liberated from that self that my past constitutes. What I need is a real future, a future that is no longer just an extrapolated past, a future different from the future of the metaphysical philosopher. And the reason why I need this is not because I, understood in isolation, need this, but because our togetherness stands in need of being recreated, the recreation of which carries with it such a liberation from a false self. According to David Hume’s influential account of the self, there is no such thing as a self, if the self is conceived of as something in addition to the impressions, as something having the impressions. For of such a thing there cannot be any impressions, and Hume consequently points out: The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance […] The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.13

Or, in other words, we “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions”.14 This conclusion could be understood as a result of Hume’s exclusively epistemologically oriented perspective, in which the self is understood only as a possible object of cognitive experience, were it not for the fact that in the end such a perspective makes knowledge impossible too. For knowledge is what it is by sometimes being needed, sometimes not, and sometimes being irrelevant; everything could thus not be built up on such

30 

H. STRANDBERG

a basis, for if knowledge were given such a general place in human life, knowledge as a distinct phenomenon would evaporate. Anyhow, another way of approaching the issue of the self than the epistemological one is possible. Emmanuel Levinas writes: To be unable to shirk: this is the I.15 To be an I means […] not to be able to escape responsibility […] The uniqueness of the I is the fact that no one can answer for me.16 the identity of the subject comes from the impossibility of escaping responsibility, from the taking charge of the other.17

(This means that responsibility is at bottom not an object of knowledge, for if so I would essentially bear no responsibility; I would bear responsibility only after having acquired that knowledge. One way of explaining what “ethics as first philosophy”18 means is thus to point out that I am responsible for my life with knowledge.) But if we would rest content with what Levinas here says about the self, we would have a very unforgiving account of it: what I have done I would always bear with me as something to be responsible for. In fact, this account would be a self-centred one, for it starts out exclusively from what rests with me and does not keep in mind what others can do for me: forgive me. By forgiving me, the person who forgives me liberates me from what I have become; after having been forgiven, I need no longer bear what I have done with me. By being forgiven, that which I am on account of my past – say, a thief, a bully or a coward – is no longer what I am. Forgiveness means that there is no ending: what has happened is not the last word, a future different from the past, a real future, is possible. Forgiveness is thus not directed to the past – embitterment is – but to the present and the future. It is directed to the present and the future, for what the past means is not decided by the past alone. In that respect it is not impossible to change it. The possibility of changing the past is due to the fact that only such descriptions that make no reference at all to what happens later on, neither explicitly nor, and here we come to the crux of the matter, implicitly, are impossible to invalidate.19 Whether such descriptions exist or not we do not have to take a stand on. Even if they do exist, they are far less common than might at first appear, and when it comes to human life, it is obvious that many of our ways of describing them are not of that kind.

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

31

The storming of the Winter Palace in November 1917 would have been a very different thing if history had taken another course in, say, 1918 or in 1924; Hamlet is today a very different play than it was in 1616; and what two persons said to each other the first time they met will mean a very different thing if they never see each other again than if they eventually marry. That the past can be changed does, however, not mean that it can always be changed or changed in any way. If and in what way it can be changed depends partly on how you relate to it morally, and believing in the possibility of forgiveness means believing that the meaning of what has happened in your and my life together is not settled, means believing that an infinite weight could be added in comparison to which all that previously has been possible to say about our life together does not count or will count in a very different way than before.20 The religious believer could radicalise all this by saying that believing that the possibility of forgiveness is never exhausted means believing that there is no ending at all. Death is then not the end, for if it were the end, death would put an end to the possibilities of my being forgiven.21 And if life after death means a morally completely whole life, that life is only born when the past is once and for all put aside, that is, in a last judgement and absolute forgiveness after which no need of forgiveness will ever arise again. Furthermore, the religious believer could address the fact that believing in the possibility of forgiveness, in the openness of the future, really believing that, is not something I can decide to do, nor can others make me believe in it, for even though they say they have forgiven me I may take it that there is no forgiveness for someone like me. The religious believer could address this by saying that believing in the possibility of forgiveness is a grace and that believing in the possibility of forgiveness and believing in God’s forgiveness are the same thing. No matter whether you take the path of the religious believer or not, the liberation from the past, the opening up of a real future, must be done by someone else. And the possibility of such a future is nothing that can be theoretically established. For forgiveness concerns specific relations, me and her, and thus the forgiving cannot take place without any of us; a philosophical theory cannot do the forgiving for us. What others say about the situation I am in could of course be important, for they might make me see something I have been blind to, but no one can make our relationship good without us. And believing in the possibility of forgiveness and thus in a possible future is asking her forgiveness; philosophy cannot do that for me.

32 

H. STRANDBERG

When being, or wanting and trying to be, true to myself, I relate myself to a description, to someone I want, or take myself, to be. I relate myself to something more or less determinate that I would like to stay true to. But the opening up of a real future is a very different thing. What I am liberated from is a description of something more or less determinate: that which I have become, that self my past constitutes. The truth that is (re)created when I am liberated from this is rather the opposite, for the liberation does not substitute a new description for the old one. The openness of the future consists in me no longer having to stay “true” to what I have become, it consists in another kind of truth. One way of coming to see this is by examining the contrast between forgiveness and suspicion. Being forgiven could be said to consist in not being met with suspicion. When I am met with suspicion, people try to disclose that real me that I ostensibly try to hide. “What he says and does might look good, but that should not fool you; on the contrary, this should make you wary, for the better the persona he succeeds in creating, the more deceitful he is.” The suspicious one prides herself upon her intelligence and non-naivety, she is not fooled by appearances but sees through them (and the structural similarities between suspicion and metaphysical philosophy are not a coincidence). Forgiveness, in contrast, does not play on the same ground as suspicion. The one who forgives does not claim that if you study the facts even more carefully than the suspicious one does, you will come to another conclusion. The one who forgives rejects this whole way of seeing: forgiving is certainly about removing the masks hiding the true self of the one who is forgiven, but that true self is not seen as something to be described, as a set of properties or facts the suspicious one is only wrong about.22 According to Sartre, the gaze of the other is necessarily objectifying.23 The objectifying gaze of the other robs me of the future (even though it cannot completely annihilate it), for whereas the past is being, the future is nihilation.24 But there is a possibility Sartre does not pay any attention to: that the gaze of the other can be a forgiving – loving – gaze.25 Such a gaze is far more deobjectifying than anything I myself could ever come up with. It is a far greater “betrayal” of the past than my own possible betrayals, and the truth it makes possible is of a very different kind than the description I may try to stay true to. Or, in other words, the truth that forgiveness gives birth to is a future that is not just an extrapolated past. This future given to me by the one who forgives me does not, consequently, consist in anything definite. It is about opening the future: the

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

33

past should no longer weigh us down. Is the past also forgotten? Perhaps in the sense in which you forget to water your flowers: you forget to do it, but if someone reminds you of it, you know very well what he is talking about.26 But the past is not forgotten in the sense in which you have forgotten what you did on some specific and unremarkable day 20 years ago. If what I did and what she has apparently forgiven me for is forgotten in that sense, this would suggest that there is still a problem between us, that we have repressed what has happened because we are not able to talk about it in an untroubled manner. But what to say about the relation of forgiving and forgetting certainly depends on the kind of case you are thinking about. Some things are indeed forgotten in the way some specific and unremarkable day 20 years ago is forgotten. But if I have killed someone and his friend forgives me, this does not mean that she has forgotten it, for you do not forget a dead friend. If she has forgiven me, the past no longer weighs us down, things are good between us, that is what forgiveness is about. Forgiveness removes that which has weighed us down. Forgiveness is something I receive from the other, and what she gives me is a future that is not just an extrapolated past, a true self the truth of which concerns openness and not some content I have to stay true to. But the giving is not one thing and the gift another. If that were so, she would be inessential, she would only be that by means of which I acquire something I could in principle acquire in some other way. But forgiveness is not a means to anything else; forgiveness is what it gives. Forgiveness does not remove the weight of the past so that after this has been done we can start to live together without being weighed down by it; it is already that life. Forgiveness is that encounter that it at the same time makes possible. In forgiveness we meet one another, her and me, and thus both of us are essential. Whatever a theory might teach me, it cannot create that encounter on its own, for then we would not be needed and it would not be us who meet one another. In forgiveness we meet one another, and here I am liberated from that self my past constitutes, from the necessity of staying true to it, but that which I am liberated to – a true self, a very different kind of truth, a truth that is not of the past but of the future, a truth which is not of me in isolation but of you and me together – is not a result of that encounter but is there precisely in it. Or, in other words, I do not ask her forgiveness for my sake, if understood in isolation from our relationship, but for our sake, or, rather, for us.27 Here the threads that have run through this section come together: forgiveness and the poverty of theory,

34 

H. STRANDBERG

forgiveness as liberation from that self my past constitutes, forgiveness as the opening of a future which is not just an extrapolated past, forgiveness as giving birth to a truth that is not about an account possible to give of me, or about living up to such an account, but a truth that is of our relationship. But that this truth is of our relationship means that I can only receive what forgiveness offers if I ask her forgiveness in the same spirit in which she forgives me. Forgiveness is about recreating our relationship, about not letting that which has happened change it for the worse, about making things good. And this means that just as she is essential, so am I: the troubles between us are only gone when we meet one another in the spirit of that goodness we try to recreate. This will be the theme of the next section.

Unconditional Forgiveness? That I can only receive forgiveness if I ask her forgiveness in the same spirit in which she forgives me has important consequences for the issue of whether forgiveness must be unconditional or not. On the one hand it is clear that forgiveness is unconditional. That she says she will forgive me only on condition of this and that is part of the problem, not the solution; it means that she is suspicious of me, that she perceives me in the light of my past, that things are not good between us.28 (And I may relate to myself in the same way: when I do not believe in the possibility of unconditional forgiveness, I could try to prove that I have become another person in order to show others that I am entitled to be forgiven.) On the other hand there really seem to be conditions for the possibility of forgiving someone: is it not clear that unless I have distanced myself from that for which I ask her forgiveness, unless I have pulled myself together and improved myself, she is not able to forgive me, for that which forgiveness tries to recreate would in that case immediately be destroyed again? Asking someone’s forgiveness and feeling remorse are essentially connected, are they not? There could of course be a contradiction here. She may, on the one hand, want, say, compensation and revenge in order not to lose face before that crowd who sees what I have done to her as proof of her weakness, while on the other hand longing for things to be good again. But there need not be a contradiction. Forgiveness is then really unconditional: that she does not set up any conditions for forgiving me shows that she longs

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

35

so much for things to be good that she does not want to stand in the way of their becoming so (and this accentuates the seriousness of what I have done). What might seem to be conditions should then be understood in another way: if I do not ask her forgiveness in the spirit of the forgiveness she gives me, that encounter which forgiveness both is and makes possible would never take place. Both of us are needed: what the one who forgives tries to recreate she cannot recreate on her own; the one who is forgiven is essential too. In that sense forgiveness could be said to be something to stand by when others oppose it. But if I say this, and if I try to dare to stand by it in my confrontations with others, I do not do so because I want to be true to myself. What I want to be true to is rather you, or us. Anyhow, in the case of forgiveness, this truthfulness is not externally related to what forgiveness means; one thing I could come to feel the need of asking someone’s forgiveness for is that I did not mind the fact that she did not ask my forgiveness after treating me badly. I told myself that she is the kind of person who will always be the same and will never improve, I gave up hope of her, I did not openly oppose her. What seems to be implacability can thus be a real belief in forgiveness; words of protest on the part of the oppressed are not an obstacle to forgiveness but often an essential part of the process of forgiveness. And this is so even when truthfulness and that which I would like to stand by are externally related: if I am afraid to tell you my opinion, our relationship is already damaged no matter what the issue is about; this is what the damage is. And this fear of you is also something to ask your forgiveness for.

A Life in Forgiveness, Together This scene is depicted again and again in popular culture: A married couple have been quarrelling, he takes a walk, and when he comes back she has gone to bed. He says, “I’m sorry,” and she says, her face averted, “It’s okay.” The word “forgive” is not used. Things do not become good. You could say that the problem is only put off; “It’s okay” could be understood as a rejection – “I do not want to talk about it” – and they do not meet one another. Even though such a critical analysis has its place, it is however one-sided.29 For on the other hand, the significance of what happens in this scene should not be underestimated, it is not without, or of only negative, importance. What we see is that things do not come to an end: the quarrel is not an ending, their relationship continues, and this

36 

H. STRANDBERG

exchange of words is not an ending either; things go on. So forgiveness is not only that things are good (again). It might also be: we still have problems, but we will not give up, we will go on living together and try to make things better. Forgiveness is thus also – and perhaps above all – when a definite change has not occurred: forgiveness is not there only when our rejection of one another has finally ended, but is there in our life together as what constantly works in the opposite direction, as a movement striving for completion, as a longing for us to finally succeed in eliminating everything standing between us. Think of siblings: there might be millions of reasons for not seeing each other again; nonetheless, these might count for nothing even when they have not been invalidated. Our longing for being together is so strong that it does not wait for the will of rejection having first ceased to exist. In fact, if forgiveness waited for that to happen, forgiveness would never take place; forgiveness is about making forgiveness happen by presuming its conditions of possibility already before they are there. In other words, forgiveness characterises human life in a much deeper way than it would do if it were merely a distinct act, if it could not also be said to be there in the persistence of all togetherness.30 Forgiveness should thus not be seen as one possible solution to a distinct problem, as for instance Arendt sees it.31 For the problem forgiveness addresses is, one could say, unforgivingness; forgiveness is not the solution to a problem that exists independently of it. In that respect, forgiveness could be said to belong to morality from the very start. It is of course correct to point out that the word “forgiveness” has not always existed, but even to us who have it, it is after all not central: you can use the word without having forgiven, and you can come to realise that you have forgiven someone, and that she has received your forgiveness, without the word ever having been used.32 Another side to the pervasiveness of forgiveness is the fact that forgiveness is not only something I need to receive from that person who is immediately affected by what I have done. Or, expressed somewhat differently, the question of who are the immediately affected ones is more complicated than might at first appear.33 If I treat one person badly, not only is my relation to her affected, but my relations to others are also affected. When I treat her badly, I also treat them badly. If two parents are constantly fighting, and even if they are only fighting with one another, this will also mark their relations with their children, a problem that will not generally be solved by treating these issues independently, for what

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

37

distresses the children is, precisely, what the parents are doing to one another.34 Since there are no clear limits to who is affected by what I have done, there is no clear limit to whose forgiveness I feel in need of asking. Forgiveness is not a distinct act only concerning some persons and not others; if there is a place for forgiveness in my life at all, this will not be a distinct place. If I have treated one person badly, my relationships with everyone affected need to be recreated. A third side to the indistinctness and pervasiveness of forgiveness is that forgiveness is not one-sided: we need to forgive each other. Not because each one of us is just as bad as the other – saying so would be trying to determine the extent of our respective sins, and forgiveness is precisely about putting an end to that – but because what is important is not to determine who is to blame – saying that I am to blame could in fact be an attempt at escaping responsibility, for by saying so I may try to draw a sharp line between what I am guilty of and what has nothing to do with me at all – but to re-establish our “between,” that which is neither merely mine nor merely yours. When Hegel, towards the end of the journey of the spirit in the Phenomenology, highlights forgiveness as what finally sublates those divisions he has described in the chapter on objective spirit,35 it is not, as one would perhaps assume, the one who has performed the evil deed who needs to be forgiven, but the one who hardheartedly does not accept his confession. This has certainly to do with the fact that Hegel generally sympathises with those who act and not with those who passively criticise those who act (and dialectically expressed, this passivity is an unstable position, for passivity is always also activity), but in the end and principally his point is another one: reconciliation cannot be a one-sided affair, it is essentially mutual.36 Or more than mutual: your forgiveness of me is my forgiveness of you, and vice versa. If I have thrown suspicion upon someone, pushed him away by calling him evil, I am as much, if not more, an obstacle to reconciliation as he is.37 It is then each other that we need to forgive. Forgiveness is not a thing one person owns and therefore can give to the other. Forgiveness is not something I grant, I do not forgive from on high. Forgiveness takes place when we meet each other on the same level. As Gadamer writes: The one who has brought himself to ask forgiveness has to be received in such a way that he is already forgiven. That is the only forgiveness there is, a word that no longer has to be said, for it has already paved the way from the

38 

H. STRANDBERG

one to the other, for it has already by the gesture of the word overcome the strife, the wrong, consequently everything that has divided us.38

In moral philosophy, there is a risk that one, in wanting to accentuate the seriousness of the topic under discussion, tries to show that what normally goes under the name of goodness in fact does not deserve it. But such an analysis, important as it is, makes phenomena much purer and more distinct than they are. We do not only tend to overestimate the extent to which we, say, forgive each other; we might also underestimate it. And this has to do with the fact that forgiving is better not understood as a distinct act, the frequency of which could be calculated, but rather as an aspect of human life more or less generally.

Conclusion What I have tried to show in this chapter is that as soon as we see that the self I should possibly be true to is implicated in the lives of others, the difficulty of being true to myself will appear very differently. Above all, I have stressed that this difficulty is not one I myself can solve, for to the extent that I need to be forgiven, the self I want to stay true to is one that must be given back to me by the one whose forgiveness I need. And what I in such a case want to stay true to is not primarily myself, but us. But using the phrase “staying true to” may be misleading here, for it is rather that which I need to be liberated from by being forgiven that could be described in this way: what I need to be liberated from is a definite, describable self (which one could thus give a true account of), a self I am forced to stay with unless the other opens up a future for me. The forgiveness I receive should, however, not be seen as merely the other’s creation. Forgiveness is rather between us, and is between us more or less constantly, is there in all human life, though in different forms and in different senses. New acts of forgiveness connect to that forgiveness which is already there; forgiveness is what it brings about. Being forgiven, I might be in forgiveness.

Notes 1. Strandberg 2015a. 2. Those who have read Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception will hopefully be able to formulate a criticism of this understanding based on their reading.

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

39

3. See Countess Terzky in Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein’s Tod, (2005, p. 174 [ll. 600–602]): “[E]very individual character that accords with itself is in the right, there is no other wrong than contradiction.” 4. A closely related contrast to the one between thinking and saying can be found in other contexts: think of the difference between, on the one hand, speaking to a faceless crowd and telling someone something in a letter, and, on the other hand, talking with someone face to face. 5. For an illuminating analysis of shame, see Westerlund 2019. For the relation of shame and forgiveness, compare Charles Cummings, who says that God’s forgiveness should be asked “without depression or shame” (2015, p. 73). A related point is made by Julian of Norwich (2006, pp. 353–355 [73.26–40]): For whan we beginne to hate sinne, and amend us by the ordinance of holy church, yet ther dwelleth a drede that letteth us by the beholding of oureselfe and of oure sinne afore done, and some of us for oure everyday sinnes. For we holde not oure covenants nor kepe not oure clennes that oure lorde setteth us in, but fall oftimes into so moche wrechednes that shame it is to say it. And the beholding of this maketh us so sory and so hevy that unnethes we can see ony comfort. And this drede we take sometime for a mekenes, but it is a foule blindhede and a wekenesse. And we can not dispise it as we do another sinne that we know, for it cometh of enmite and it is againe truth. For of alle the propertees of the blisseful trinite, it is Goddes will that we have most sekernesse and liking in love. For love maketh might and wisdom fulle meke to us. For right as by the curtesy of God he forgeteth oure sinne after the time that we repent us, right so wille he that we forget oure sinne, as anemptes oure unskilfulle hevinesse and oure doughtfulle dredes. Evelyn Underhill makes a similar point, but still uses the word “shame” and therefore turns it into something very different (2003, p. 213): “The truly contrite soul is joyful in its shame: made glad by a confident remembrance of the infinite goodness of the Eternal” 6. Cf. Backström 2019a, pp. 605–606. One cause of the difficulty of getting this point is the failure to see the difference between feelings of guilt, on the one hand, and remorse and bad conscience, on the other hand. 7. Nietzsche 1999d, p. 273 (§ 1.10). 8. See e.g. Nietzsche 1999d, p. 384 (§ 3.18). 9. “I do not like to have the neighbour near me” (Nietzsche 1999b, p. 359). See also e.g. Nietzsche 1999b, p.  632 (§ 379); Nietzsche 1999a, pp. 200–201 (§§ 29–30); Nietzsche 1999c, pp. 275–277 (§ 1.8).

40 

H. STRANDBERG

10. For a discussion of this, as well as the possibility of the above form of “individualism” (be it Nietzschean or of some other kind), see Strandberg 2009, esp. ch. 1 and 8; Strandberg 2011, esp. ch. 3 and 10; Strandberg 2015b, esp. ch. 4, 5 and 11. 11. Derrida 2001, p. 32. However, the paradox only arises when one takes the perspective of unforgivingness by halves, a perspective Derrida never completely abandons (2001, p.  33): “[F]orgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.” In fact, the concept of possibility is not applicable to forgiveness. The difficulty of forgiveness is not external to forgiveness, so the only difficulty there can be is that I find forgiving her impossible. But after having forgiven, the difficulty is not one I can look back to and see that I have overcome: the difficulty no longer exists. Forgiveness is thus not a possibility, forgiving her is not something I can be open to but still choose not to do. This is so even when I vacillate and am split. What Derrida points to is better expressed by K.E. Løgstrup (1991, pp. 235–236): “This is again the paradox of everyday speech that there can only be a question of forgiveness when so-called ‘unforgiveable things’ have been done. For only so-called ‘unforgiveable things’ break the relationship – and forgiveness means precisely to restore a broken relationship.” For a fruitful interpretation of Derrida’s claim, see Cowley 2010, p. 569. 12. Cf. Plato (1900–1907), Laws 757e1–3: “[F]orgiveness [σύγγνωμον], whenever taking place, breaks off pieces from the perfect and exact, against strict justice”; Seneca (2010), Cl. 2.7.1: “Forgiveness is granted to one who ought to be punished; a wise man, however, neither does anything he ought not do nor forgoes doing anything he ought to do. Accordingly, he does not remit a punishment that he ought to exact.”; Diogenes Laertius (1972), 7.123: the wise man “does not forgive anyone [συγγνώμην ἔχειν μηδενί]”. For a more contemporary, and very telling example, see Minas 1975; for criticisms of Minas, see Lewis 1980 and Drabkin 1993. For other contemporary examples, see Kekes 2009 and Thomason 2015. 13. Hume 2000, p. 165. 14. Hume 2000, p. 165. 15. Levinas 1969, p. 245. 16. Levinas 1998a, p. 97. 17. Levinas 1998b, p. 14. 18. See e.g. Levinas 1969, p. 304. 19. Vladimir Jankélévitch writes (2005, p. 45): “We can undo the thing done, but we cannot make it so that the thing that was done never happened.” Very well, but the issue concerns the features of this very thing: what was it that happened, what was the thing done? (For a similar claim to Jankélévitch’s (slightly better but problematic for the same reasons), see

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

41

Griswold 2007, p. 100.) As Paul Ricoeur (1998, pp. 28–29) points out, as a criticism of “the common opinion” according to which “the past can no longer be changed”: “[T]he meaning of what happened is not fixed once and for all; […] forgiveness […] is equivalent to a conversion of the very meaning of the event.” 20. Oscar Wilde writes (2013, p. 128): Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one’s past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms ‘Even the Gods cannot alter the past’. Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Wilde is here alluding to the same possibility that I am trying to point to, but I hope that the reader is by now also able to see the important differences between Wilde’s saying and my description. Hegel (1995, p. 248) makes a similar claim as Wilde: In the field of finitude […] everyone remains what he is; has he done evil then he is evil; evil is in him as his quality. But already in morality, still more in the sphere of religion, spirit is known as free, as affirmative in itself, so that this barrier […], which extends to evil, is nothing for the infinitude of spirit: Spirit can undo what has been done See also Hegel 1986b, pp. 575–581. 21. As we will see in Chap. 7, things are not as simple as that. 22. This is something that Jean Hampton fails to notice, even though her analysis of forgiveness sometimes draws close to such an insight. See Murphy and Hampton 1988, pp. 38, 83–86. 23. See Sartre 1956, e.g. pp.  262–263, 270, 364. Sartre’s description starts out from the phenomenon of shame: the gaze of the other primarily induces shame (1956, pp. 221, 261) and consequently does not liberate. 24. See Sartre 1956, pp. 118, 126, 146–147, 486. In the context of a discussion of forgiveness, Joseph Beatty makes reference to this Sartrean theme when he writes (1970, p.  249): “At the moment when she accuses and rejects him, he is pure past, pure facticity. […] Because she looks back upon him and judges him he feels reduced to an object just as she, in order to accuse and reject him, must feel that she has been reduced to the state of object by him: she feels reduced to one who has been neglected.” According to Beatty however (1970, p.  251), I liberate myself from my past on my own and do not need the other to forgive me for that to hap-

42 

H. STRANDBERG

pen; the other’s forgiveness of me is only the recognition of the fact that the liberation has already taken place. 25. Cf. Sartre 1956, pp.  268, 364, and, furthermore, Sartre’s discussion of love (1956, pp. 366–372). For a discussion of different gazes, in relation to forgiveness, see Gerl-Falkovitz 2013, pp. 155–161. 26. Ricoeur (2000, pp. 145, 155), points out that the liberation the one asking forgiveness is looking for does not concern that the one whose forgiveness he is asking should forget what has happened and what he did but its meaning, the guilt. (The text of this talk by Ricoeur is, as far as I know, only published in German translation.) This also seems to be what Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald is suggesting (2002, pp. 490–491), but his paper is not very clear. 27. This way of putting it is meant to show that forgiveness is not to be understood in instrumental terms. Forgiveness might very well have desirable consequences, but ultimately the good of forgiveness is forgiveness itself, or rather the love it is one expression of. I will now and then use expressions like “for our sake,” and it should then consequently be remembered that this “sake” is not something that exists independently of us: “our” and “sake” are to be read as internally related, not externally. 28. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see Chap. 5. 29. As pointed out by William Neblett (1974), who however fails to discuss the meaning of these “non-ideal” cases. 30. Or, with a different emphasis, as Joanna North puts it (1987, p. 508): “In being an act whereby such personal ties [of trust, affection and mutual sympathy] are enhanced forgiveness may be seen as upholding and furthering the fundamental human values which themselves lie at the heart of moral rules and principles.” 31. Arendt 1998, pp.  237–243. See also Arendt 2005, pp.  57–59; Arendt 1968, p. 248. For a more extensive discussion of Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness, see Chap. 3. 32. Or, phrased somewhat differently, forgiving is not a speech act. See Downie 1965, pp.  131–132; Horsbrugh 1974, p.  270; Neblett 1974, p.  273; Nykänen 2015, pp.  56–57; Backström 2017, p.  268; Garrard and McNaughton 2017, pp. 106–107; Lippitt 2017, p. 21. For an attempt at showing that the words “I forgive you” have illocutionary force no matter in which spirit they are uttered, see Albert W. Dzur and Alan Wertheimer (2002, p. 12): It may be thought that to say “I forgive you” without experiencing the relevant emotions is empty. But that is false. The request for and granting of forgiveness has behavioral consequences. If V says “I forgive you,” V cannot continue to express a desire to see O suffer, or to

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

43

demand additional apologies. If O says, “Please forgive me,” O cannot later say, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Understood in one way, this is surely false  – “cannot”? But “cannot” should here, I take it, be normatively understood, that is, if V (or O) does what they “cannot” do, O (or V) can allegedly blame them for doing so. The problem, however, is that this fails as an account of forgiveness: if someone says to me that she has forgiven me but continues to treat me in an hostile way, there is an obvious problem in our relation however much I want her words of forgiveness to end our falling-out, and this problem will not go away by me insisting on my rights – to the contrary. The need for forgiveness to take place would consequently still be there. This does not mean that words such as “I forgive you” or “Please forgive me” are empty – why would they otherwise be uttered? – but they might, for example, be indicative of self-deception. Furthermore, the contrast to emphasising the words is not necessarily to emphasise the emotions, for they, just as the words, are lacking in significance if not part of a changing relation between us. As Joseph Beatty puts it (1970, p. 246), “She has given her written forgiveness in her letter, but she was what the lover desired, not a piece of paper.” (For less heavy-handed ways of treating forgiveness as a speech act, but problematic for similar reasons, see Pettigrove 2004 and Warmke 2016.) 33. David Owens writes (2012, p.  51): “The wronged party has a right to forgive a wrong committed against them that bystanders lack and which no one has with respects to mere wrongs.” But one could just as well turn this around: if the question whether to forgive arises for me, this means that I see myself as wronged, in some sense of the word (see Kolnai 1974, p. 93). For a discussion of these issues, see Horsbrugh 1974, pp. 274–276, and Pettigrove 2012, ch. 2. 34. As can be seen in the example, the children are affected no matter whether they identify with one of the parents (or with both of them) or not. So the issue should not be understood in terms of identification (for such an approach, see e.g. Griswold 2007, p. 119; Norlock 2009, p. 122). It is not of much help to use the distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary victims either (for that distinction, see Govier 2002, p. 93) – the children are not secondary or tertiary victims, but it is not clear to me what it would mean to claim or deny that they are primary victims. 35. Hegel 1980, ch. 6. 36. See also Beatty 1970, pp. 250–251. 37. Hegel 1980, pp. 358–361. Cf. Hegel 1986a, pp. 350–57. 38. Gadamer 1991, p. 24.

44 

H. STRANDBERG

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. The promise of politics. New York: Schocken. Backström, Joel. 2017. From nonsense to openness: Wittgenstein on moral sense. In Wittgenstein’s moral thought, ed. Edmund Dain and Reshef Agam-Segal, 247–275. London: Routledge. ———. 2019a. Hiding from love: The repressed insight in Freud’s account of morality. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychoanalysis, ed. Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing, 594–616. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beatty, Joseph. 1970. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 7: 246–252. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Patrick. 2002. What should “forgiveness” mean? Journal of Value Inquiry 36: 483–498. Cowley, Christopher. 2010. Why genuine forgiveness must be elective and unconditional. Ethical Perspectives 17: 556–579. Cummings, Charles. 2015. Monastic practices. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. Diogenes Laertius. 1972. Lives of eminent philosophers. Ed. R.D. Hicks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Downie, R.S. 1965. Forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–134. Drabkin, Douglas. 1993. The nature of god’s love and forgiveness. Religious Studies 29: 231–238. Dzur, Albert W., and Alan Wertheimer. 2002. Forgiveness and public deliberation: The practice of restorative justice. Criminal Justice Ethics 21: 3–20. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1991. Lob der Theorie: Reden und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2017. Once more with feeling: Defending the goodwill account of forgiveness. In The moral psychology of forgiveness, ed. Kathryn J. Norlock, 96–116. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara. 2013. Verzeihung der Unverzeihlichen? Ausflüge in Landschaften der Schuld und Vergebung. Dresden: Text & Dialog. Govier, Trudy. 2002. Forgiveness and revenge. London: Routledge. Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A philosophical exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1980. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1986a. Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986b. Jenaer Schriften, 1801–1807. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Teil 3: Die vollendete Religion. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Horsbrugh, H.J.N. 1974. Forgiveness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4: 269–282.

2  BEING TRUE TO ONESELF, BEING FORGIVEN 

45

Hume, David. 2000. A treatise of human nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2005. Forgiveness. Trans. Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Julian of Norwich. 2006. The writings of Julian of Norwich. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kekes, John. 2009. Blames versus forgiveness. The Monist 92: 488–506. Kolnai, Aurel. 1974. Forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 91–106. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998a. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998b. Otherwise than being; or, beyond essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lewis, Meirlys. 1980. On forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 30: 236–245. Lippitt, John. 2017. Forgiveness: A work of love? Parrhesia 28: 19–39. Løgstrup, K.E. 1991. Den etiske fordring. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Minas, Anne C. 1975. God and forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 25: 138–150. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neblett, William R. 1974. Forgiveness and ideals. Mind 83: 269–275. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999a. Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christenthum. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 6, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 165–254. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1999b. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 3, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 343–651. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1999c. Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 6, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 255–374. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1999d. Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 5, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 245–412. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Norlock, Kathryn. 2009. Forgiveness from a feminist perspective. Lanham: Lexington Books. North, Joanna. 1987. Wrongdoing and forgiveness. Philosophy 62: 499–508. Nykänen, Hannes. 2015. Repression and moral reasoning: An outline of a new approach in ethical understanding. Sats 16: 49–66. Owens, David. 2012. Shaping the normative landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, Glen. 2004. The forgiveness we speak: The illocutionary force of forgiving. Southern Journal of Philosophy 42: 371–392. ———. 2012. Forgiveness and love. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

46 

H. STRANDBERG

Plato. 1900–1907. Platonis Opera. Ed. John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. La marque du passé. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 103: 7–31. ———. 2000. Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit: Erinnern  – Vergessen  – Verzeihen. Trans. Andris Breitling and Henrik Richard Lesaar. Göttingen: Wallstein. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Schiller, Friedrich. 2005. Wallenstein. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Seneca. 2010. Anger, Mercy, revenge. Trans. Robert A.  Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strandberg, Hugo. 2009. Escaping my responsibility: Investigations into the nature of morality. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ———. 2011. Love of a god of love: Towards a transformation of the philosophy of religion. London: Continuum. ———. 2015a. Is it possible to sublate religion? Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015: 94–99. ———. 2015b. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomason, Krista K. 2015. Forgiveness or fairness? Philosophical Papers 44: 233–260. Underhill, Evelyn. 2003. Practical mysticism/Abba. New York: Vintage Books. Warmke, Brandon. 2016. The normative significance of forgiveness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94: 687–703. Westerlund, Fredrik. 2019. The see oneself as seen by others: A phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal motives and structures of shame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50: 60–89. Wilde, Oscar. 2013. De Profundis, and other prison writings. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3

Plurality

Hannah Arendt is one of the few philosophers who have given an important role to the concept of forgiveness within the context of their broader philosophical thinking. It is therefore not a bad idea to discuss her understanding of forgiveness early on. In this chapter I will hence give an account of Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness, critically discuss it and show that the concept of forgiveness can be put to greater use than Arendt realises, by relating it to the important Arendtian concept of plurality.

Introduction In The Promise of Politics, Hannah Arendt describes “the relationship between doing and forgiving as a constitutive element of the intercourse between acting men”.1 Forgiveness is consequently an important theme in her philosophy, even though she does not devote many pages to it. Except for passing references, for example the above quotation,2 there are only two extensive discussions of this theme in her works: she discusses it in the first entry of her Denktagebuch, and then in chapter 33 of The Human Condition. The theme could, however, be said to be implicit in many of Arendt’s writings, for example in the preface to her first collection of essays, Sechs Essays, from 1948,3 where she, in light of the fact that it is “almost impossible for us Jews today not to ask any German we happen to meet: What did you do in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945?”,4 says that “it is essential that they [the individuals of all the peoples and all the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_3

47

48 

H. STRANDBERG

nations of the world] learn not to cling frantically any longer to their own national pasts”,5 and towards the end of The Life of the Mind, where she discusses Nietzsche’s derivation of “all human evil – resentment, the thirst for vengeance […], the thirst for the power to dominate others” from the fact “that ‘the Will cannot will backward’; it cannot stop the wheel of time.”6 And to these two examples could be added Arendt’s way of ending Eichmann in Jerusalem: And just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.7

Eichmann’s case could thus be said to be an example of the limits of forgiveness as Arendt sees them,8 and I will discuss what she has to say about such limits in what follows. It should, however, be noted that death does not necessarily put an end to the question of whether to forgive or not, for there is such a thing as struggling to forgive dead people, one’s parents say.9 In this chapter I will however only try to give an account of what Arendt explicitly says about forgiveness. Giving such an account is not a trivial matter, for her conception is quite idiosyncratic (and that is by no means meant as a criticism), and the discussion would be even more complex if I would also discuss the implicit ways in which the topic of forgiveness could be said to be present in Arendt’s writings, especially since analysing the exact respect in which they concern forgiveness is less straightforward than it might perhaps seem to be. Second, I will try to show that the concept of forgiveness, used in a slightly different way than she uses it, can in fact deepen our understanding of the central Arendtian concept of plurality, and this will hence be an example of how the concept of forgiveness can be put to philosophical use, one of the aims of this book.

Forgiveness in the Denktagebuch In the first entry of her Denktagebuch,10 dated June 1950, Arendt discusses the issue of forgiveness. Bearing in mind the diary format, it is not surprising that there are tensions in her discussion. I will try to straighten

3 PLURALITY 

49

them out, at the risk of mischaracterising her thought. For a philosopher, in contrast to a historian, what matters can never be what Arendt, or anyone else, actually said, but what the text in question can help us to understand. In other words, we should not mind being disloyal to the exact wording of the text; we should try to turn it into something that is able to speak to us. In the entry, Arendt makes a distinction between forgiveness, revenge and reconciliation. Forgiveness and revenge she sees as nearly related, whereas reconciliation is an alternative to these to which she, for that reason, wishes to call attention.11 What revenge is, is clear: hurting the perpetrator in the same way as he has hurt me. Tit for tat, in other words. That revenge is problematic goes without saying,12 and Arendt sees the problem primarily in the fact that the one who revenges himself not only distrusts the one on whom he takes revenge but also distrusts himself, for he must see himself as capable of doing things just as horrible as the original perpetrator, otherwise no tit for tat would be possible. The problem of distrust is also part of Arendt’s issue with forgiveness, but this requires some explanation. As Arendt sees it, forgiveness first and foremost amounts to the removal of guilt, and not primarily in a psychological sense – as if forgiveness were a therapeutic move – but in a real one: there is a load on my shoulders that needs to be taken away. This removal of guilt can be brought about in two different ways. Since there is a load on my shoulders, only someone who has the power to lift it off can do that for me, and the first way in which this removal of guilt can be brought about therefore requires someone absolutely superior to me. In childhood: my parents. In all other contexts: only God. The second way in which this removal of guilt can be brought about also refers to religious conceptions: I forgive someone when I realise that I could have done the same thing as he has done, and such a realisation is one expression of the notion of original sin as Arendt understands it. In other words, the guilt is removed by the victim, not from a superior position but rather from the victim’s realising that it is just a coincidence that the roles were not reversed. And this brings us to the problem of distrust I mentioned a moment ago: forgiveness here presupposes a fundamental distrust of yourself, indeed of humanity generally, presupposes that each and every person is capable of the most horrible sins, a distrust Arendt sees as essentially false. At the end of her discussion, Arendt intimates, however, that she does not genuinely believe that it is possible to remove guilt in this way. If so, only God can really bring about the removal of guilt, and in order for

50 

H. STRANDBERG

it to be possible for a human being truly to forgive another, we must thus presuppose that our acts of forgiveness correspond to acts of forgiveness on the part of God, that we are able to act in the name of God. And can this be presupposed? There is, however, a third alternative, in addition to revenge and forgiveness: reconciliation. The “object” of reconciliation is for Arendt primarily not the other person, the perpetrator, but what has happened to me: this is what I become reconciled to. If someone has hurt me, becoming reconciled to this means that I now help the perpetrator to bear the consequences of what he has done – the consequences, however, not the guilt, which is not affected by all this  – and in that respect I am now responsible for them.13 Reconciliation thereby creates a solidarity between people, people understood not as fundamentally corrupted (as, in slightly different ways, in the case of revenge and forgiveness). Furthermore, reconciliation does not preclude the possibility that God can act in ways that do not correspond to what we do (as, again, in the case of revenge and forgiveness). On the other hand, reconciliation is unable to come to grips with that which it is impossible to become reconciled to, that is, evil. This is what Arendt says about forgiveness in the Denktagebuch. One question clearly presents itself: Are there possibilities that Arendt does not pay attention to? Do revenge, forgiveness and reconciliation, as understood by her in this context, exhaust all possibilities? One way of coming to see that there are other possibilities than these three is to ask: why do we sometimes feel the need to become reconciled to what someone has done to us? If one answers that it is only for therapeutic reasons, a similar question presents itself: how is the very need of therapy here to be understood?14 Moreover, does not Arendt’s focus on questions of guilt make us blind to other ways of understanding forgiveness? I will come back to these questions.

Forgiveness in The Human Condition The quotation I opened with, “the relationship between doing and forgiving as a constitutive element of the intercourse between acting men”,15 is nearly related to the way Arendt uses the concept of forgiveness in The Human Condition. Arendt discusses forgiveness in chapter 33 of The Human Condition,16 in the part of that book that deals with the central Arendtian concept of action. It is consequently in that context that her discussion must be read,

3 PLURALITY 

51

and the problem that forgiveness is the solution to is, accordingly, the irreversibility of human action. For forgiveness has the power to undo what has been done. (If this sounds strange, bear in mind that it is action we are talking about here.17 If someone has hit me, the bleeding cannot be undone. The bleeding can only be stopped, stopped by first aid, but first aid is not an action in Arendt’s sense of the term.18 However, the bleeding is not the only problem we have here, and it is this additional problem that must be understood in terms of action and can be undone by means of forgiveness.) The problem that forgiveness is the solution to is the irreversibility of action, I said. The problem is thus not primarily moral, at least not on the face of it. The problem concerns just as much innocent mistakes and the impossibility of foreseeing all consequences; without forgiveness, every single action would trigger off a chain of consequences that would haunt us forever. Forgiveness brings this chain to an end by constituting a “new beginning”,19 an important phrase for Arendt in many contexts. Specifically, this should be contrasted to revenge, which as a reaction to what has been done indeed continues that chain by being a direct reply to it. (Forgiveness thus liberates not only the perpetrator, the one being forgiven, but just as well the victim, the one doing the forgiving, for by forgiving you stop yourself from becoming caught up in such an endless chain of revenge.) Forgiveness, by contrast, does not answer to what has been done, but to the person in question, that is, to who she is, not what she is – a momentous distinction, as we will see.20 In the light of this distinction, the confusing nature of some of the things Arendt says in this context becomes apparent, in particular what she says about what can and cannot be forgiven. According to Arendt, forgiveness does not concern willed evil, only that which is done not knowing what one does. A similar claim is there also in the Denktagebuch, as we have seen, when she says that reconciliation is unable to come to grips with that which it is impossible to become reconciled to, that is, evil. It is possible to claim that Arendt only seems to be saying that forgiveness only concerns that which is done not knowing what one does, and it is possible to find support for such a claim in the text, but for my purposes there are more important points to make. First, the meaning of the phrase “willed evil” is not clear. Eichmann, as described by Arendt, is here a good example of the difficulties there are in applying such a phrase. Eichmann, Arendt writes, “never realized what he was doing. […] He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of

52 

H. STRANDBERG

the greatest criminals of that period.”21 Speaking of the banality of evil is precisely a way of showing that the phrase “willed evil” is not an easy one to apply. Eichmann’s evil is not “non-willed”, but it is not fully willed either, evident in many ways, for example in the self-deception he is involved in.22 And this certainly does not only go for him: it is not clear what it would mean to say that someone is doing evil without deceiving himself at all.23 Second, if one elucidates forgiveness by contrasting it to revenge, as Arendt does – not the only way of considering it, but no doubt a relevant and fruitful one – forgiveness cannot primarily concern what is done by mistake, for revenge is not primarily sought in such situations. Third, and most important, in the light of Arendt’s point that forgiveness is about who the other is, not what she is, it would only be possible to claim that there are acts that cannot be forgiven if one at the same time claimed that the person in question can from now on only be seen for what he is, never again for who he is. In other words, there is no limit of possibility external to forgiveness, which means that whether forgiveness is possible or not does not become clear until I have forgiven. However all this may be, the distinction between who and what is Arendt’s central one in this context, and precisely for that reason the question of guilt is no longer the principal one: [I]n forgiveness a guilt is indeed forgiven, but this guilt is, so to speak, not the centre of the action; the centre is the guilty person himself, for whose sake the forgiving person forgives. Forgiveness only concerns the person and never the thing […] when a wrong is forgiven, it is the one who has done it who is forgiven […] not what has been done, but the person who has done it.24

The distinction between who and what is thus central, but how is it to be described in more detail? The most obvious way is to describe it as a dimension of love. Arendt writes: “For love […] possesses […] an unequalled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who”.25 But here Arendt thinks that she has got into philosophical trouble. For love, as she sees it, is a quite special relation and if we want a more general solution to the problem of the irreversibility of human action we cannot count only on love. In particular, she writes: Love, by reason of its passion for the who of the other, destroys the worldly in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. […] Love, by

3 PLURALITY 

53

its very nature, is not only unworldly but even world-destroying, and for this reason not only apolitical but even antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.26

So what Arendt needs is another source of forgiveness than love. She finds it in “respect”, understood by here as the worldly counterpart to love, distinct from love because it does not involve closeness and intimacy. The account of forgiveness given in The Human Condition is a huge step forward when compared to the account in the Denktagebuch. Specifically, Arendt has managed to free herself from the issue of guilt. The problem, from the point of view of the one asking for forgiveness, is not that there is a load on my shoulders that needs to be taken away, is not that I need to find someone who can lift it off for me. If I understand the problem in that way, my focus of attention would primarily be myself and my own suffering, not the one I have wronged and her suffering. Asking for forgiveness is best understood as an attempt at reaching out to her, is as such to show that I do not wish her any harm any more, that I long for that togetherness disrupted by what I have done, and her positive answer to that question means that she longs for the same thing, ultimately that things are good again or even better than they were. The distinction Arendt makes, between what and who, is here of obvious importance; it is precisely by introducing this distinction that Arendt manages to free herself from the issue of guilt, and this distinction is of course nearly related to the central Arendtian point that a human being is a new beginning,27 hence not defined by its past, a point that plays no role in the passage from the Denktagebuch discussed above. I ended the previous section by asking: why do we sometimes feel the need to become reconciled to what someone has done to us? if one answers that it is only for therapeutic reasons, then a similar question presents itself: how is the very need of therapy here to be understood? These questions find their answer in the distinction between what and who, for what the questions point to is an already present seedling of relating not only to what the perpetrator is but also to who he is. Furthermore, in the light of the distinction between what and who, what Arendt says about the limits of forgiveness is, as we have seen, questionable, and my interpretation is that what she says is primarily motivated by her systematic ambitions – forgiveness as the solution to the problem of the irreversibility of action in general, in which case it is not surprising that innocent mistakes and the impossibility of foreseeing all consequences are given centre stage – rather

54 

H. STRANDBERG

than by an attempt at getting clear about the issue. If I have done the seemingly unforgivable, would that mean that it makes no sense for me to long for forgiveness? Ought a philosopher explain to me that I should give it up? The second thing I would like to question here is Arendt’s claim that respect is a source of forgiveness.28 There are no doubt differences between the case in which I forgive a close friend of mine, on the one hand, and the case in which I forgive a distant acquaintance, someone with whom I have primarily a professional relation, or someone I do not know at all, on the other hand. But how are these differences to be described? Specifically, is it clarifying to describe forgiveness in the latter cases as a matter of “respect”, or does it confuse the issue? Let me distinguish two cases here. In the first, a stranger beat me up on the street one night. Afterwards I do not even remember what he looked like, so my feelings of revengefulness are undirected, which, however, does not make them weaker. After a while, however, I notice that what happened no longer makes me upset. I have forgiven the man who beat me up, I tell myself. When Arendt claims that we need a source of forgiveness distinct from the closeness and intimacy of love, she is presumably not primarily thinking of a case like this. Describing my relation to the man who beat me up in positive terms of whatever kind, be it in terms of respect or in terms of love, seems out of place. Appearances are, however, deceptive here, for reasons I will come to, but still: a case like this does not support Arendt’s claim that we need a less intimate source of forgiveness than love. If anything, this case rather seems to be a case of reconciliation, as Arendt uses the term, than of forgiveness: I am now reconciled with what happened but have not forgiven him. Let us move on to the second case I said that I would describe. At my workplace, there is a man whom I meet now and then, but not very often since he works in a different part of the company than I do. At one meeting we both participate in, he is extremely aggressive and comments condescendingly on everything I say. The next day he comes to see me, says that he is sorry about what happened yesterday and that he does not know what got into him. I reply that I am glad that he has come and said this to me, and that now everything is okay. We part on friendly terms and in the future we meet just as infrequently as before. Is forgiveness here a matter of respect, of love or of something else? Or better: what would it mean to describe the forgiving that takes place here as a matter of, say, respect? If I would use the word “respect” here, I would use it in order to mark the

3 PLURALITY 

55

kind of relation we had to begin with and in the end, that is, we are not close friends but distant colleagues. Still, the word “respect” does not ring true to me even as applied in such a context, for does it not suggest that we keep a distance from one another, in contrast to simply not being very close? No matter what, the word “respect” would only be applied here to what comes before and after the forgiving, not to the forgiving itself. And this is no coincidence: the very fact that he comes to see me in order to talk to me face to face means that in those moments we are far closer to one another than we were before. If I were to describe our conversation as one of respect, would that not indicate that we agree on trying to have a well-functioning, professional relationship despite the conflict, in other words that the forgiving is, if it takes place at all, only a thin one? That I described our parting as “on friendly terms” was neither planned nor a coincidence: we were not close friends, but describing our forgiveful parting as “friendly” is clearly to the point. We were not close friends, we part on friendly terms, but what about the future? What has happened need not lead to our meeting more often than before, but when we do meet, our relation will be different than our relations to the other distant colleagues taking part in the same meeting, and not merely different but closer, the more close the more grave what he did to me was.29 If Arendt wants a less intimate form of forgiveness, she thereby introduces a criterion foreign to the movement of forgiveness itself, which indeed brings people closer to each other. If I forgive him, I relate to who he is, in contrast to what he is, Arendt says, and love and respect are two ways in which I do so. But what does this mean in practice? The most obvious way of explaining the difference between what and who is by pointing to the difference between talking about someone and talking to someone, between the second and the third person, between the vocative and the accusative case.30 But this does not mean that these two distinctions are identical: when I talk about someone, I am still talking about someone, that is, a person to whom it is possible to talk (or was possible, if she is dead), and when I talk to someone, my attention might be diverted by all kinds of thoughts about her. The last point is particularly important in this context, for it shows two things: first, that I do not relate fully to who she is just by talking to her, and, second, that the movement towards doing so to the full is inherent to talking to her and can only be obstructed. This movement will not be seen if we focus on respect, which, by contrast, is a matter of not getting too close to the other (and that distance will thus prevent me from, say, harming her, and

56 

H. STRANDBERG

in this regard the concept is of moral importance). In other words, if forgiveness were merely a matter of not focusing on what the person in question is, there would perhaps be a point to describing what I did as a matter of respect. But according to Arendt, forgiveness is not merely a negative act, primarily it has a positive character, evident in my relating to who he is. The concept of respect is consequently a dead end in this context. On the other hand, the other concept Arendt uses, love, clearly points to the movement I just mentioned. That I do not meet him that often is not as such an objection to such a description, neither does it mean that my relation to him is identical to my relation to, say, my mother, whom I do not meet that often either, but only shows one possibility within the realm of what could be described as neighbourly love. It is now possible to go back to the first case I described above, when I was beaten up by a complete stranger, and see the case with fresh eyes. I said that describing my forgiving relation to the man in positive terms of whatever kind, be it in terms of respect or in terms of love, seems out of place – but is this really so? Telling myself that I have forgiven him, I have noticed that I no longer have feelings of revenge towards him, and not because I have come to see that revenge would be too difficult, or impossible, to carry out, in which case there would be no point in describing what has happened in terms of forgiveness. So what is it that has happened? Is not the degree to which there is a point to describing what has happened in terms of forgiveness the degree to which my understanding of the man in question has changed? Describing this change in terms of respect, as Arendt suggests, would mean describing the change in negative terms, that is, I hold back, as it were, seeing revenge as the crossing of a line that should not be transgressed. However, why should not that line be transgressed? If I answer that question by referring to, say, the negative consequences doing so would have for me, my understanding of the man in question has not changed; if my understanding of the man has changed, if, consequently, there is a point to describing what has happened in terms of forgiveness, the answer to the question must be looked for elsewhere. Where? If describing the change in positive terms, there would be at least one obvious answer: seeing someone in the light of love means seeing him as someone who, even if he has done horrible things to me, should not be harmed. And such a seeing is not impossible just because you do not know who the perpetrator is. Here we have only made use of the possibilities Arendt mentions, namely, respect and love. My point has been mainly negative: referring to

3 PLURALITY 

57

respect will not do. My reason for discussing the issue in this way is that the positive point – forgiveness as based on love – is, in a sense, already made by Arendt, and there is consequently no need for an extensive discussion of the issue in this context. For another word Arendt uses for her contrast to love is friendship, philia,31 and it is clear from the above discussion that I include friendship in the concept of love.32 In other worlds, the substantial difference principally concerns the concept of respect, hence the negative point. When it comes to the more semantic side of the difference, Arendt seems to confuse the issue,33 for her discussion of love centres around the Christian concept of love, and in that context it would be a mistake to exclude friendship from love and restrict the latter concept to erotic passion producing children, as Arendt does,34 for in the Gospels the latter form of love is not the only one, nor even the primary one.35 (Compare the parable of the Good Samaritan as an explicit description of neighbourly – or friendly – love.36). In other words, I have made no attempt at showing that there are no other possibilities than love and respect, even though the criticism of the negativity of respect is relevant also in the case of all other attempts to account for forgiveness in negative terms. Or, phrased somewhat differently: describing forgiveness in terms of love is an attempt at pointing to a dimension in our relations to each other that otherwise might remain unnoticed, is consequently neither meant to be common sense nor a hypothesis but a potentially revelatory description, revelatory to the extent that the direction and depth into which the description turns our attention are places that we do not normally go.

Plurality According to Arendt, the faculty of forgiving depends on plurality, “for no one can forgive himself”.37 This might seem to be a not very interesting claim, for we sometimes talk about forgiving oneself and not being able to do so, which means that Arendt’s point might seem to be only that the kind of forgiveness that is given by others can only be given by others. But what she is saying has more to it than that. Her claim is that “the extent and modes of being forgiven […] determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself […] Only the one who has already been forgiven can forgive himself”38 She explains this claim by referring to the above distinction between who and what:

58 

H. STRANDBERG

[T]he Who, for the sake of which someone is forgiven something, is to be found outside of that which we are able to experience on our own; it is only perceivable by others. If there were no with-world, forgiving us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, we would never be able to forgive ourselves any failing or transgression because we, closed within ourselves, would lack the person who is more than the wrong he committed.39

However this might be, Arendt only discusses the dependence of forgiveness on plurality. But is it not possible that the relation of dependence goes both ways, in other words that forgiveness contributes to the establishment and preservation of plurality?40 If so, forgiveness has a much greater significance for the Arendtian concept of plurality than Arendt herself realises. Understanding life together as based on something we all have in common means understanding it not in terms of plurality but in terms of individuality. It will of course always be possible to find something we all have in common if one wants to, but the question concerns what role such a possible feature is understood to have. If understood as fundamental, life together is taken to be based on those features that do not constitute it as a life in, precisely, togetherness, but on those features that make our life together similar to the solitary individual, the individual understood in abstraction from all togetherness. This is a well-known Arendtian criticism of such conceptions, made also in the above-mentioned chapter of The Human Condition.41 A society based on something we all have in common would moreover be very fragile, for a soon as a rift in that commonality would arise, such a society would disintegrate. So what to do about such rifts? In many contexts they will certainly not be understood as rifts, that is, as something negative, for many forms of diversity will be seen as contributing to the richness of life together, even though it is significant that people are often divided about which forms of diversity have such a positive character. In other words, the question of what to do with negative experiences of diversity remains. Many would, I presume, spontaneously answer such a question by referring to tolerance. The problem, however, is that such an answer would describe the situation in negative terms, as something we have to put up with for the benefit of something else, as the, perhaps necessary, price we have to pay for a greater good. Plurality would in that case be based on my beliefs about what I obtain from such a life together with

3 PLURALITY 

59

others, and tolerance is my attitude towards the costs as long as I do not believe that they exceed the possible gain. And must not the situation be described in negative terms, as it is a negative experience? No, and the concept of forgiveness is helpful in explaining this. Even though Arendt sees a close connection between forgiveness and respect – and respect and tolerance are undoubtedly nearly related – the fundamental term in her description of forgiveness is “who”. As long as it is claimed that negative experiences of plurality should be dealt with by cultivating tolerance, we are in the sphere of “what”: what other people are includes both good and bad things, and the latter ought to be accepted as long as they are outweighed by the former. Focusing on who someone is, by contrast, opens up a very different way of understanding the situation. The negativity of the experiences is not denied, but they are seen against a background of a very different kind: we put up with these experiences not because they are the price we have to pay for a greater good but because of the people in question.42 Society, so understood, is thus not held together by something we all have in common. It is held together by something like forgiveness (a word here undoubtedly used in an extended way,43 but as long as what is said is intelligible and succeeds in pointing out something important, this does not matter). Differences, no matter whether seen as good or bad, are then simply a result of the fact that we here have to do with people who are different, and bad experiences of plurality will not as such count against togetherness, whereas they will always do so as long as we only focus on what people are. Life together with others, seen in such a light, will therefore be much more robust than if understood as held together by, say, a set of common values, the violation of which would in that case mean that that life would disintegrate. With Arendt’s help we have thus arrived at a way of understanding life together that is an alternative both to the idea that society must be held together by a set of common values and to the idea that tolerance is the key binder, the only two alternatives that are usually noticed, for example by Jean-Claude Michéa when he writes that the belief that a human community can function in a coherent and efficient fashion without drawing the least support (other than rhetorical) from shared moral and cultural values, is […] so strange […] that the defenders of this doctrine have generally envisaged a more presentable fall-back position. There is thus an annexe clause that invites us to see the ‘spirit of

60 

H. STRANDBERG

t­olerance’ and ‘refusal to reject the other’ as a kind of substitute ethics, which should be taken as a condition of the liberal system44

One way to explain in more detail what I have been trying to say here would be to refer to A Democratic Theory of Judgment by Linda Zerilli.45 At the end, she sums up the book: For Arendt, to belong to a democratic political community is to have a “common world,” not to share a worldview, and this common world exists only where there is a plurality of worldviews. Our sense of what is common, “the sameness of the object,” can appear only when it is seen from multiple perspectives. Consequently, the loss of competing perspectives results not in a world that is shared but in a loss of what we have in common, that which can be seen only through an encounter with different points of view. The common world is “the space in which things become public.”46

One of the central notions here is “having a common world”. What does this mean? Zerilli quotes Arendt: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it”47 There are at least two points that can be drawn from this, both of which point to forgiveness. The first one is obvious: it is essential here that I do not leave the table, that I take part in the conversation in which different points of view are expressed and in which judgments are made. As Zerilli writes, “judging […] creates and sustains […] the common space in which shared objects of judgment can appear in the first place”,48 for “the capacity to judge is […] the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present”,49 a common space which hence is a matter “of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them”.50 This is certainly closely connected to the distinction between who and what – judging takes place in the space in which I talk to others and they to me, not I about them and they about me – and, as I said, it is essential that the conversion continues also, and above all, when our perspectives on the issue differ considerably. The second point that can be drawn from Zerilli’s discussion specifically concerns “the sameness of the object”. What Zerilli is referring to here is certainly not a physical object, an object we see from different perspectives and for some reason describe to each other. Rather, it is a matter of “an object of common concern”.51 Phrased somewhat differently, a problem is part of

3 PLURALITY 

61

the “common world” if I do not see it as my individual problem but as ours, no matter whether our proposed solutions to it or even our understandings of it differ considerably or not, which means that those I share the problem with are not seen as competitors or rivals but as people with whom I sit in this problem together. Using the concept of forgiveness is then one way of highlighting the importance of understanding that togetherness is not based on unanimity; if unanimity is indispensable, the problem is not ours and forgiveness is not possible.52

Conclusion: Arendt and Lessing The points I have made here go beyond anything Arendt explicitly says in her discussions of forgiveness. In the Denktagebuch she says, as we have seen, that reconciliation creates a solidarity between people, but since the distinction between what and who does not play any role there, her point is different from the one I have made here. Still, she hints at something similar in her discussion of G.E. Lessing in Men in Dark Times,53 which primarily gives an account of Lessing’s thought; to what extent she would endorse these thoughts does not concern us in this context. According to Arendt, Lessing believed that human society incurred “much harm from those who wish to subject all men’s ways of thinking to the yoke of their own.” This [thought of Lessing’s] has very little to do with tolerance in the ordinary sense […] but it has a great deal to do with the gift of friendship, with openness to the world, and finally with genuine love of mankind.54

Note the contrast between tolerance and friendship!55 Furthermore, Arendt points out that, for Lessing, friendship is not a specific principle but, rather, the background against which all such principles must be seen, and the importance of friendship is therefore of a very different and deeper kind: Any doctrine that in principle barred the possibility of friendship between two human beings would have been rejected by his [Lessing’s] untrammeled and unerring conscience. He would instantly have taken the human side and given short shrift to the learned or unlearned discussion in either camp.56

62 

H. STRANDBERG

Forgiveness can thus be said to hold together our life together by being another word for such friendship, friendship not being the result of some form of common agreement but of highlighting who, in contrast to what, each and everyone is.57 In that sense, forgiveness can be said to contribute to the establishment and preservation of plurality.58

Notes 1. Arendt 2005, p. 58. See Arendt 2018, pp. 308, 346. 2. See also e.g. Arendt 1968, p. 248; Arendt 2003, p. 95. 3. Arendt 2019, pp. 9–111. 4. Arendt 1994a, p. 214. 5. Arendt 1994a, p. 215. 6. Arendt 1978, p. 168. 7. Arendt 2006b, p.  279. It is, however, not Arendt who speaks here; the words are those she wished had been spoken by the judges in the Eichmann trial. 8. For an attempt at connecting Arendt’s discussions of forgiveness and the Eichmann trial, see Berkowitz 2011. 9. For a discussion of this issue, see Chap. 7. 10. Arendt 2002, pp. 3–8. 11. Within the realm of reconciliation Arendt makes some distinctions too, and passing over what someone has done to me she sees as closely related to reconciliation but not to be counted as one of its forms. In this context I will not mind all this, since it is not important for my purposes and taking it into account would therefore make things unnecessarily complicated. 12. For a discussion of this, see Chap. 6. 13. This means that reconciliation is, for Arendt, closely connected to the concept of humanity; see Arendt 1994a, p. 131. 14. Cf. ch. 4. 15. Arendt 2005, p. 58. 16. Arendt 1994b, pp. 231–238; Arendt 1998, pp. 236–243. There are differences between the German and the English version of the text  – the German one contains slightly more material – so I will primarily refer to the German version and to the English one in case they correspond closely. 17. Many interpreters of Arendt have had problems with her claim that forgiveness undoes the deeds of the past (see e.g. Schaap 2005, p. 102; La Caze 2014, pp. 209, 212–13). But Arendt’s claim is not so strange when seen in the context of action, as I try to show here.

3 PLURALITY 

63

18. This is related to the fact that work, in Arendt’s sense of the term, can destroy the thing it has produced, whereas action has not that kind of power over its results; hence the need for forgiveness. See Arendt 1998, p. 144. 19. Arendt 1994b, p. 235. See also Arendt 2005, p. 58. 20. This distinction is nearly related to the popular distinction between the sin and the sinner, as far as I know first formulated by Augustine, even though he does not use these particular words in this context: with love of the man and hatred of the faults [cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum]. (Augustine 1902, p. 962 [211.11]) he who lives according to God […] should not hate the man because of the fault, nor should he love the fault because of the man; rather, he should hate the fault but love the man [oderit vitium, amet hominem]. (Augustine 1998, p. 590 [14.6]) when you pass judgment, love the man, hate the sin [dilige hominem, oderis vitium]. Do not love the sin because of the man, nor hate the man because of the sin. The man is your neighbour: sin an enemy to your neighbour. (Augustine 1863, p. 323 [49.5]) (However, Augustine sometimes expresses himself in a way that superficially seems to contradict the above point; see e.g. Augustine 1845, p. 29 [1.xxvii.28].) Arendt does not use the term “sinner” either, for good reason, as “sinner” is still to conceive of the person in terms of what she is (cf. Lauritzen 1987, p. 151). As John Lippitt nicely puts it (2017, p. 28): Note that the literature on forgiveness typically places an obstacle in the path of love’s vision by the very talk of “the wrongdoer” or “the perpetrator”. This is convenient shorthand, and it is hard to avoid. But its convenience comes at a price: those who have wronged us are presented to us under that description. Getting beyond thinking of them as only that – wrongdoers – is thus part of the battle. (A sign of how prevalent the language use that Lippitt takes issue with is, is the fact that Paul Hughes and Brandon Warmke, in their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on forgiveness (2017), write, in the second sentence of that entry: “Forgiveness is […] a dyadic relation involving a wrongdoer and a wronged party”.) According to Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p. 24), “It is, of course, impossible to hate the sin and not the sinner if the sinner is intimately identified with his sin”, but the only possibility he sees as concerns

64 

H. STRANDBERG

disidentification is the wrongdoer’s disidentifying with her wrongdoing in repentance, and forgiveness is thus not the way by which disidentification takes place. As Lucy Allais points out (2008, p. 51): “Murphy sees the possibility of drawing a separation of the agent from his evil act in the way you think about him as the grounds justifying forgiveness […] but I want to argue that this separation is in fact partly constitutive of what forgiveness is” (see also Hampton (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p. 84) and Pacovská 2018). In other words, and as I have tried to show in Chap. 2, an account in the style of Murphy’s fails to understand the need for being forgiven, fails to understand the experience that disidentification is not in my power as a sinner. Such an account also fails to notice that for repentance to do the job Murphy thinks it is doing, I must see the repentance of the wrongdoer as genuine, and this forgiving trust is thus not a result of his repentance. For an account that is similar to Murphy’s in this respect, see Haber 1991, p. 104. The distinction of what and who is related to Trudy Govier’s observation that (1999, p.  65) “Forgiveness is something we extend or do not extend towards persons […] And yet, it is deeds which are said to be unforgivable.” 21. Arendt 2006b, pp. 287–288. 22. See Arendt 2006b, e.g. p. 52. 23. See Strandberg 2016 and Strandberg 2015, ch. 3. For a discussion of this issue in the context of a discussion of Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness, see Pettigrove 2006, p. 487. 24. Arendt 1994b, p. 237. 25. Arendt 1998, p. 242. See Arendt 1994b, p. 237. 26. Arendt 1998, p.  242 (translation expanded with material from Arendt 1994b, pp. 237–238: “In der Leidenschaft, mit der die Liebe nur das Wer des Anderen ergreift, geht der weltliche Zwischenraum, durch den wir mit anderen verbunden und zugleich von ihnen getrennt sind, gleichsam in Flammen auf. […] Die Liebe ist ihrem Wesen nach nicht nur weltlos, sondern sogar weltzerstörend, und daher nicht nur apolitisch, sondern sogar antipolitisch  – vermutlich die mächtigste aller antipolitischen Kräfte.”). 27. See e.g. Arendt 1998, pp.  9, 177–178; Arendt 1994b, pp.  15–16, 166–167. 28. For a supplementary discussion to mine, see Beatty 1970, p. 247. 29. Alluded to by Zoltán Balázs (2000, p. 119). 30. For this way of making the point, cf. Ebner 1963, pp.  87, 187, 264, 772–773. Arendt is pointing in the same direction; see Arendt 1998, p. 178; Arendt 1994b, p. 167. Arendt also discusses the issue in ch. 26 of The Human Condition, but her account there results in the distinction

3 PLURALITY 

65

being partly lost, because who someone is, is – according to Arendt – disclosed in the stories told about her. 31. Arendt 1994b, p. 238; Arendt 1998, p. 243. See also e.g. Arendt 1968, p.  25, Arendt 2002, p.  12. It should be noticed that Arendt sometimes expresses herself in a way that is closer, but not identical, to mine; see Arendt 2002, p. 203. Another word used by Arendt is solidarity (2006c, pp. 78–79); this is however not the place for a discussion of its possibilities and problems. 32. For an excellent discussion of the relation of friendship and love, see Backström 2007. As Backström points out (see 2007, e.g. pp.  55–64), talking about different “forms” of love is misleading: the meaning of, and therefore the relations between, philia, eros and agape – to use a popular distinction – is far more complicated than is often realised. For an Arendt-­ inspired criticism, however very different from mine, of sharp distinctions between different forms of forgiveness, see MacLachlan 2012. 33. By a different route, Tatjana Noemi Tömmel (2013, pp. 290, 306–307) comes to a similar conclusion 34. Arendt 1994b, p. 237; Arendt 1998, p. 242. (Her account of love seems partly to be based on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, as Arendt’s wording sometimes bears striking resemblance to lines in the libretto, which is an additional sign of her confusing erotic passion and neighbourly love.) In this context, Arendt also seems to claim that love is based on likeness and thus runs counter to plurality (Arendt 2002, pp. 37–38), but I see no reason for believing that, especially as Arendt contradicts this claims elsewhere (Arendt 2003, pp. 207–208). 35. In another context (1994b, pp. 66–67; 1998, p. 53), Arendt distinguishes love and love of neighbour (Nächstenliebe, charity), but she claims there that what they have in common is, precisely, worldlessness. Why is love of neighbour worldless? Arendt refers to the Christian belief in the essential perishableness of the world, but such a belief can no doubt take many forms and does not have to lead to indifference to matters of this world. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that love of neighbour is essentially tied to such a belief. Arendt is right in pointing out that love of neighbour is indifferent to worldly glory (1994b, pp.  91–95; 1998, pp. 74–77), but does not the very possibility of love of neighbour show that it is possible to be concerned about matters of this world without being motivated by such glory? 36. Lk 10.25–37. 37. Arendt 1998, p. 237. See Arendt 1994b, p. 232. 38. Arendt 1998, p.  238 (translation expanded with material from Arendt 1994b, p.  233: “wird die Art und Weise, wie jemand erfährt, daß Verzeihungen gewährt […] werden, darüber entscheiden, wie weit er

66 

H. STRANDBERG

imstande ist, sich selbst zu verzeihen […] Nur wem bereits verziehen ist, kann sich selbst verzeihen”). 39. Arendt 1998, p.  243 (translation expanded with material from Arendt 1994b, p.  238: “das Wer, um dessentwillen jemandem etwas verziehen wird, liegt außerhalb der Erfahrungen, die wir mit uns selbst zu machen ­vermögen; es ist überhaupt nur für andere wahrnehmbar. Gäbe es nicht eine Mitwelt, die unsere Schuld vergibt, wie wir unseren Schuldigern vergeben, könnten auch wir uns kein Vergehen und keine Verfehlung verzeihen, weil uns, eingeschlossen in uns selber, die Person mangeln würde, die mehr ist als das Unrecht, das sie beging.”). 40. For a similar idea, but explicated in a different way, see Schaap 2008. 41. See Arendt 1994b, pp. 232–233; Arendt 1998, pp. 237–238. 42. Throughout his Arendt-informed book on political reconciliation, Andrew Schaap claims that reconciliation by itself tends towards closure and that it therefore has to be supplemented by other things to avoid that risk (see Schaap 2005, e.g. pp. 3, 69, 71). But this risk is there only if we conceive of reconciliation in terms of “what”, not if we conceive of it in terms of “who”. 43. My use of the word “forgiveness” here is in one sense quite foreign to Arendt’s use of it, for she sees it in the context of action, whereas what I talk about here is rather a fundamental perspective, the result of the ways in which the presence of other people affects us rather than something having its origin in me. However, as my discussion shows, if it is successful, it is only the use of the word that is foreign, not the philosophical concerns. Another way of showing this could be to connect to concepts such as grace, revelation and Ereignis, as discussed by Rodrigo Chacón in Chacón 2013. 44. Michéa 2009, p. 48. 45. Zerilli 2016. 46. Zerilli 2016, p. 265. Zerilli refers to Arendt 1994a, p. 20. 47. Arendt 1998, p. 52. Quoted by Zerilli (2016, pp. 278–79). 48. Zerilli 2016, p. xiii. 49. Arendt 2006a, pp. 217–218. Quoted by Zerilli (2016, p. 8). 50. Arendt 1998, p. 58. Quoted by Zerilli (2016, p. 298). 51. Zerilli 2016, p. 162. In the case of Arendt however, this is not so clear. She primarily emphasises physical objects (see e.g. 1998, pp. 54–55, 95), but it is more fruitful to read “object” as a broader category than that. 52. It should be noted that my discussion here is not meant to answer normative questions such as “ought we to forgive each other in the political realm to a greater or lesser degree than we usually do?” and “what forms of forgiveness are politically legitimate?”, even though my discussion certainly indirectly contributes, to some extent, to the answering of such questions.

3 PLURALITY 

67

For Arendtian discussions of such questions, see Schaap 2008 and MacLachlan 2012. 53. Arendt 1968, pp. 26–30. 54. Arendt 1968, p. 26. Arendt gives no exact source for the Lessing quotation. 55. Not seeing the contrast between tolerance and forgiveness is the basic problem in Tara Smith’s account of forgiveness (Smith 1997). 56. Arendt 1968, pp. 29–30. 57. There is an interesting passage in one of Nietzsche’s letters that addresses these questions (Nietzsche 2003, pp. 6:36–37): [F]or me nothing can for example compensate for the loss of Wagner’s sympathy in the last years. How often do I dream of him, and always in the style of our intimate togetherness of the past! Never was a cruel word spoken between us, not even in my dreams, but very many encouraging and cheerful ones, and I have perhaps not laughed as much with anyone else. This is now gone – and what good is it to be right in many respects against him! As if this lost sympathy could thereby be erased from memory! […] These are the most difficult sacrifices that my way in life and thought has demanded of me – still my whole philosophy falters after one hour of sympathetic conversation with total strangers, it seems to me so foolish to want to be in the right at the cost of love, and not to be able to communicate what is most precious to me for fear that I would lose this sympathy. Nietzsche is right; it is foolish to want to be right at the cost of love, but that does not mean that one should content oneself with a relation in which certain things cannot be talked about. On the contrary, to the extent that there are such things, this is not in line with love but a problem (but, perhaps, not a problem in a relation of “sympathy”). On the other hand, love will also change what you want to say, not because you prefer to keep your words to yourself but rather because you no longer believe in them, no longer see them as “precious”. 58. Björk 2017 has been a source of inspiration for this chapter.

Bibliography Allais, Lucy. 2008. Wiping the slate clean: The heart of forgiveness. Philosophy and Public Affairs 36: 33–68. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1978. The life of the mind: Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1994a. Essays in understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, exile and totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1994b. Vita activa; oder, Vom tätigen Leben. Munich: Piper.

68 

H. STRANDBERG

———. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. Denktagebuch 1950–1973. Munich: Piper. ———. 2003. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken. ———. 2005. The promise of politics. New York: Schocken. ———. 2006a. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. London: Penguin. ———. 2006b. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin. ———. 2006c. On revolution. London: Penguin. ———. 2018. The modern challenge to tradition: Fragmente eines Buches. Göttingen: Wallstein. ———. 2019. Sechs Essays; Die verborgene Tradition. Göttingen: Wallstein. Augustine. 1845. De doctrina christiana. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXIV, 15–122. Paris: Migne. ———. 1863. Sermones. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXVIII, 23–1484. Paris: Migne. ———. 1902. Epistolae. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXIII, 61–1094. Paris: Migne. ———. 1998. The city of god against the pagans. Trans R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Backström, Joel. 2007. The fear of openness: An essay on friendship and the roots of morality. Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press. Balázs, Zoltán. 2000. Forgiveness and repentance. Public Affairs Quarterly 14: 105–127. Beatty, Joseph. 1970. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 7: 246–252. Berkowitz, Roger. 2011. Bearing logs on our shoulders: Reconciliation, non-­ reconciliation, and the building of a common world. Theory & Event 14 (1). Björk, Ulrika. 2017. Försoning, förlåtelse och sörjande. Ikaros 14 (3). Chacón, Rodrigo. 2013. Arendt’s Denktagebuch, 1950–1973: An unwritten ethics for the human condition? History of European Ideas 39: 561–582. Ebner, Ferdinand. 1963. Fragmente Aufsätze Aphorismen: Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes. Munich: Kösel-Verlag. Govier, Trudy. 1999. Forgiveness and the unforgivable. American Philosophical Quarterly 36: 59–75. Haber, Joram Graf. 1991. Forgiveness. Savage: Rowman & Littlefield. La Caze, Marguerite. 2014. Promising and forgiveness. In Hannah Arendt: Key concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden, 209–221. London: Routledge. Lauritzen, Paul. 1987. Forgiveness: Moral prerogative or religious duty? Journal of Religious Ethics 15: 141–154. Lippitt, John. 2017. Forgiveness: A work of love? Parrhesia 28: 19–39.

3 PLURALITY 

69

MacLachlan, Alice. 2012. The philosophical controversy over political forgiveness. In Public forgiveness in post-conflict contexts, ed. Bas van Stokkom, Neelke Doorn, and Paul van Tongeren, 37–64. Cambridge: Intersentia. Michéa, Jean-Claude. 2009. The realm of lesser evil. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Pacovská, Kamila. 2018. Love and the pitfall of moralism. Philosophy 93: 231–249. Pettigrove, Glen. 2006. Hannah Arendt and collective forgiving. Journal of Social Philosophy 37: 483–500. Schaap, Andrew. 2005. Political reconciliation. London: Routledge. ———. 2008. Reconciliation as ideology and politics. Constellations 15: 249–264. Smith, Tara. 1997. Tolerance and forgiveness: Virtue and vices? Journal of Applied Philosophy 14: 31–41. Strandberg, Hugo. 2015. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Is pure evil possible? In The problem of evil: New philosophical directions, ed. Benjamin W.  McCraw and Robert Arp, 23–34. Lanham: Lexington Books. Tömmel, Tatjana Noemi. 2013. Wille und Passion: Der Liebesbegriff bei Heidegger und Arendt. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 2016. A democratic theory of judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 4

Reason

When I started working on this philosophical project concerning forgiveness, one of my ideas was to engage philosophically with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 2002 film Le Fils (The Son), for forgiveness, understood in a wide sense, is one of the themes in it (and perhaps in several of the Dardenne brothers’ films). Or, to be more specific, the reason why I thought that it was a good idea to engage philosophically with this film was not merely because the film is good in a general sense, or because it has to do with this theme, but because it has something important to say about forgiveness. Moral philosophy would be very different if philosophers watched the films of the Dardenne brothers; this was the general conclusion I had drawn. When setting out to write about The Son, I took a look at what had been written about it, by philosophers and others, and the results were disappointing.1 No matter the insights found in these texts in other respects, insights of both a philosophical and cinematographic kind, they did not address what I then saw and still see as the heart of the film, and the general conclusion I had drawn proved to be very naive. This does not make it less important to engage philosophically with The Son, on the contrary, and it is now time to do just that. However, this will not be our only theme in this chapter. After having discussed the film, the rest of the chapter will address some of the questions the film raises, questions about reason-giving, primarily, and about love, in its relation to reason-­giving and to the difficulties of forgiveness. Let us see where the discussion leads us! Before coming to the film, it would however be a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_4

71

72 

H. STRANDBERG

good idea to first give you as a reader some personal background. Or perhaps this is not background but a part of the philosophical discussion. For one thing I would like to draw your attention to here is the importance personal experience often has—and seeing films is one way of experiencing something.

“Background” For many years I was one of those in charge of a film club at the department of philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Every Wednesday evening we saw a film together in one of the auditoriums, and afterwards we went to the pub to discuss what we had seen. This went on for many years, and the audience mainly consisted of the same group of people. This led to our developing something together: specific ideas about what kinds of films are of philosophical interest, and ways of seeing, talking about and discussing films that helped us to learn philosophically from the film we had just seen. From the beginning, most of us were already clear about one thing: that the kind of film that many associate with philosophy—The Matrix is perhaps the most obvious example—is not very interesting. This is of course closely connected to our understanding of what philosophy is all about, an understanding I will not describe explicitly in this context but which, needless to say, shapes my writing implicitly. But what kind of film is of philosophical interest, on the other hand? There is far from only one kind of film that is of such interest, but one example would be the kind of films that the Dardenne brothers are making. Their films are simple in style, but very rich as regards facial expressions, or the lack of them, dialogue, or silence, in short, very rich as regards interaction of all kinds between the protagonists. Most important, however, is that these are films that have something to say. Specifically, they have something to say as films, and consequently tell us something by means of those features I just mentioned. And it is this that makes them of philosophical interest: if what they did were to state theses that would be easy to express without reference to these films, the theses could just as well be found in philosophical texts and there would be no philosophical point in seeing films. The philosophical importance of films lies, among other things, in their difference from philosophical texts. But this might seem to push us into a dilemma. One horn would be what I have just said we should not accept: films understood as stating

4 REASON 

73

theoretical theses, but for that very reason superfluous, since such theses can just as well be stated in a philosophical text. And since we do not accept that horn of the dilemma, we seem to be forced to accept the other one: to the extent that a film has something to say precisely as a film, what it says is impossible to convey in writing or speech and therefore is of no philosophical consequence. In other words, however we understand what films do, they have no bearing upon philosophy. This is, however, a false dilemma, and the best way of explaining why it is false is to pay attention to what it means to watch a film and, specifically, to discuss it. As I said earlier, in the film club we always went to the pub afterwards to discuss the film we had just seen. Why did we do that? Are seeing the film and discussing it two different activities without any deeper connections? Is discussing the film only a way of realising that the film we have just seen did not expand our experience, knowledge and understanding? Certainly not! There is of course such a thing as learning from others: they might make me aware of the importance of some scenes in relation to the film as a whole, a relation I did not get, or of details I have overlooked. That I have been perceptually present—that is, have not fallen asleep or left the auditorium—does not mean that I have seen all there is to see in the film—“see” here used in the deeper sense of the word, in the sense of awareness. And the understanding others might give me is not just, or even primarily, a matter of giving me background knowledge of, say, the historical context, the kind of knowledge I cannot acquire just by watching the film; the understanding others might give me is also, and above all, given solely by reference to what I have indeed seen. Discussing the film is therefore not only external to the experience of watching it, but potentially internal to it; the very experience of watching the film might change as a result of the discussion. There is perhaps an even more radical way of making this point: A discussion is not only an opportunity to learn from others, but also an opportunity to learn from oneself. Knowing that one will discuss the film with others afterwards often makes one more attentive while watching the film, but discussing the film might especially make me aware of important details of the film I would not be aware of if I went home after having seen it, however attentive I have been, and might make me aware of them not by being directed to them by others but by being directed to them by myself. Discussing the film is not only external to the experience of watching it, but also potentially internal to it, for during the course of the discussion I may come to understand what I have seen in a way I did not

74 

H. STRANDBERG

while sitting in the auditorium, and I may come to understand this without having been given any new background knowledge or by having my attention drawn by others to certain features in it. This is the clearest example of how the very experience of watching the film might change as a result of the discussion, that what the discussion does is not only to add something to an experience the nature of which is settled as soon as I leave the auditorium.2

More “Background”: Discussing The Son It is at a point such as this—when being disheartened by the writings about a film you see as especially important—that the question about how to discuss films arises, the question I have just touched upon. In particular, should the film be approached by means of a theory or without one, and if in the latter way, is there something positive to be said about how to go about discussing it?3 A film is especially important to moral philosophy if it is morally challenging, and this is one way in which a film may have something to say. What do I mean by “challenging”? What I am after is certainly not the way in which Triumph des Willens or an extremely violent action movie might be challenging to watch. What I am after is the experience of being called to change. But a change of what? Not primarily one’s opinions, as if the film provided data in the light of which one has to revise one’s theories. I am called to change, I am challenged, not primarily my opinions. In the case of The Son, what Olivier, the main protagonist, goes through in the film challenges him, but it is not primarily his opinions that are challenged, and in many respects my experience as a viewer bears similarities to his. A film is especially important to moral philosophy if it is morally challenging, and the discussion of the film must therefore strive to retain the challenge. It may fail to do so for several reasons, the most important of course being that taking up a challenge is challenging. (One context in which it becomes clear that the discussion is internal to the experience itself, and not a mere addition, is precisely this one, for part of the difficulty is to have the challenge clearly in view and not, say, start to think about other things while watching the film.) The main problem with a theoretical approach to film (or to literature, or to …) is precisely that such an approach precludes the film from challenging your preconceptions and existential deadlocks, from opening up possibilities for you, be it new ones or such you have closed your eyes to. Or, rather, the film is given the

4 REASON 

75

opportunity to challenge you only within those confines that the theory sets up, and to the extent that the film succeeds in challenging also the explicit and implicit assumptions of the theory, it does so despite the theory, not thanks to it. What is and is not challenging is certainly relative; it depends on where you are already standing: what strikes one person from a distance is for another person in line with an understanding she has reached a long time ago. The challenge is, however, not taken on just because you have heard about it, so a film being a challenge is not to be reduced to its conveying information, but still there are no films that are challenging as such, and The Son is in that regard an example of a possibility that confronts other people at other points of existential difficulty. Evidently, this allows for a specific way of approaching films: letting them challenge you, that is, not trying to avoid that challenge. (Of course, avoidance shows that there is a sense in which one is challenged, otherwise one would not try to avoid it; compare the difference between trying to change the topic of conversation when someone brings up something that is painful to you, on the one hand, and trying to listen to what she has to say, on the other hand.) The standard theorist would object here, by claiming that it is impossible to watch a film in an unprejudiced manner and that it is therefore better to explicitly account for one’s preconceptions than to let their influence go unnoticed and be naively received.4 Now, I do not think that this is true—there is a distinction to be made between prejudiced and unprejudiced ways of approaching something— but the most important point is that there is such a thing as the experience of being challenged, of encountering something that does not fit into one’s usual frames of reasoning. And it is of course specifically in the light of such experiences that one’s real prejudices and difficulties of thought become visible and, above all, challenged. The Dardenne brothers’ films, The Son in particular, are not only films that should be approached in this way;5 they are films that thematise these very difficulties, and the make-up of those writings about The Son that I have read is in that regard even more surprising. Let me explain. In contrast to films that more or less explicitly invite a theoretical approach—by, say, referencing philosophers or staging famous thought experiments— The Son throws us into the troubles and difficulties of everyday life, in the same way as Olivier, the main protagonist, suddenly finds himself in a situation that shakes him to the core. We do not get to know much of his thoughts; partly this is a consequence of his not being a very talkative man, but partly it is the Dardenne brothers’ way of preventing us from

76 

H. STRANDBERG

reflecting on his thoughts and so distancing ourselves from the situation he is in, instead of being concerned about what he finds himself concerned about.6 (Our situation is of course not the same as his, the people he faces are not there for us to interact with, and we do not have to live with the consequences of our way of relating to what happens in the film in the way he has to live with his—the abrupt ending of the film evidently marks this. What distinguishes us from him is furthermore our lack of knowledge about the events prior to the first scene of the film; the enigma created by that lack of knowledge tends to preoccupy the first-time viewer, but to the extent that one finds the film even better when watching it again, as I do, one does not see that enigma as central to the film.) For Olivier, stepping back and examining his situation from a theoretical distance is not possible, because if he would make such an attempt, it would very soon be brought to an end: people show up when he does not expect them to (Francis outside the hot-dog place, Magali at the parking lot outside the vocational school) and he again finds himself in the midst of difficulty. And the same goes for us as the audience, for similar reasons. This does not mean that Olivier is, or we as viewers are, thoughtless. Quite the reverse, I imagine him being just as full of spinning and relentless thoughts as I am while watching the film. On the contrary, it is the theoretical approach, as I have explicated it here, that is thoughtless, in two respects. First, and as I pointed out earlier, the theoretical approach exempts one’s theoretical assumptions from critical thought. Someone who has a set theory by means of which he can account for everything is unmistakeably thoughtless. Second, the theoretical distance means that one does not engage with the lived difficulty, at most with a theoretical one, and the lived difficulty is thus approached in a thoughtless way by the theoretician. This latter point is especially important for philosophers to bear in mind, because all too often the philosophical analysis fails to address the real-life situation it purports to discuss: as soon as a theoretical perspective is taken up, the meaning of the problem changes.7 In order really to address it, that meaning must be retained, which means that philosophical thinking cannot be less uncertain, challenging and difficult than the original problem itself. Thus far I have not said much about the kind of difficulty that confronts Olivier in The Son, only that it in some way has to do with forgiveness. Already describing the film in this way is to make a philosophical point. For the word “forgiveness” is never used, and nothing takes place— or is even mentioned—that resembles the stereotypical picture of forgiveness, centred on sayings like “Can you forgive me?” and “I forgive you.”8

4 REASON 

77

Important as such expressions sometimes are, understanding them as central to forgiveness would be a mistake, as I explained in the introduction. For, depending on the specifics of the case in question, it is certainly possible to say that no genuine desire for forgiveness is expressed by the question and no genuine forgiving by the response. What is decisive is obviously the spirit in which they are said. And there is no reason to believe that that spirit is only there when these expressions are used. Moreover, the difficulty of forgiveness is not to be reduced to the uttering of such phrases (even if it is significant that they are often difficult to utter). The difficulty is there long before the words are on the tip of your tongue. The difficulty is of a more general kind; it is a difficulty in relating to the perpetrator (if you are the victim) or to the victim (if you are the perpetrator)—and often both of you are both victim and perpetrator.9 It is often a good idea in philosophy to try to broaden one’s understanding of the specific concept in question, in this sense: instead of focusing on what one takes to be the paradigmatic and central use, pay attention to the wider difficulties surrounding it and without the understanding of which that alleged paradigmatic use would not be seen as what it is. And watching films can help one to arrive at such a broader understanding.

The Son After this (perhaps too) long background, personal and (anti-)theoretical, it is now high time for us to come to film itself. When the film starts, Olivier is teaching carpentry at a vocational school for juvenile delinquents. He took on the job after his small son was murdered by an 11-year-­ old boy five years earlier, having previously worked in his brother’s timber yard. The connection is never made clear in the film, and perhaps it is not clear to Oliver himself either, but it is not impossible to see his job as related to the issue of forgiveness. Indirectly, for his job makes it possible for him to do something to lead young people, more or less similar to the boy who killed his son, into a less destructive form of life. Even if he is somewhat stern and reserved most of the time, Olivier is obviously a committed teacher; we often see him engaged in the problems of his pupils in a way that is not confined to carpentry narrowly understood or to his working hours. That he teaches them carpentry is not insignificant in this context, for to the extent that carpentry is a non-alienated form of work, those aspects of Olivier’s character that clearly shape his sense of what carpentry means, aspects that he transmits to his pupils whether he is

78 

H. STRANDBERG

aware of it or not—meticulousness, orderliness, attention to details and materials, in short, what has often been called the virtues of craftsmanship—would in the context of alienated labour be potential instruments of oppression. It is hence not impossible to see his job as indirectly related to the issue of forgiveness. But also directly, for it is not impossible that the murderer will come to this school after being released from the youth detention centre. And this is precisely what happens. One day, Olivier is asked to take on a new student, Francis, whose connection to him is unknown to everyone, including Francis, but to Olivier himself: Francis is the boy who killed his son. Olivier’s difficulty is of the kind I hinted at earlier: the general difficulty of relating to the perpetrator. In other words, Olivier is inwardly split. On the one hand, he could just refuse to have any dealings with Francis at all, and the difficulty would be gone. And we see him acting in this way now and then throughout the film, in the beginning by not accepting Francis into his workshop, and later, after he has accepted him into his workshop, by trying to keep him at a distance and only relating to him professionally. But, on the other hand, refusing to have any dealings with Francis at all is not possible, for Francis would also preoccupy his thoughts even if Olivier refused to see him. In the beginning of the film this becomes very apparent when Olivier, not accepting Francis into his workshop, is nonetheless driven by the importance the unknown murderer has in his life to try to get a glimpse of him. The first time he manages to get more than a glimpse is when he finds Francis sleeping in the locker room, a significant moment, for seeing a sleeping boy makes it much harder for Olivier to see only a horrible murderer in Francis. Most significant is, however, the fact that as soon as Francis is accepted into the workshop, Olivier’s attempt to keep Francis at a professional distance breaks down: Francis, not knowing who Olivier is, looks up to him (Olivier’s ability to measure by eye), now and then models his behaviour on that of Olivier (his way of removing sawdust from his clothes), seems generally to care about the things Olivier cares about (carpentry), asks him to be his guardian, and even seems to see him as his only friend. (The scene outside the hot-dog place is especially important: Olivier cannot help being dragged into a much closer relation to Francis than he wants to have.) Olivier’s thoughts, as I understand them, more and more come to centre on how to tell Francis who he, Olivier, is. Their trip together to the lumberyard is Olivier’s way of creating an opportunity to approach the topic, and he now and then tries to bring it up in a roundabout way, but

4 REASON 

79

when he ultimately tells Francis that the boy he killed was his son, he says it almost by accident, for the words have been on the tip of his tongue for a long time. Not surprisingly, Francis gets frightened and runs away; Olivier, aware of his responsibility for Francis, runs after him. What follows is as chaotic to the protagonists as to us as audience: chasing, capture, wrestling. Everything calms down and Olivier goes back to his car, to tie up the boards he will take with him to town. After a while Francis comes to help him, and in silence they tie up the boards together. Francis is not afraid anymore, and Olivier does not reject him. An abrupt cut to black, and the film ends.

Moral Theory As is clear from this description of what happens in the film, Olivier is in certain respects passive: the difficulties he struggles with are not of the kind that can be sorted out by means of actions or decisions. (If he would meet his difficulties in that way, it would simply mean that he understood them in a very different way, and then he would hence not have these difficulties). Throughout the film, Francis comes closer to Olivier not by Olivier actively seeking it, when Olivier is active he is active in spite of himself, as it were, and in the forgiveness that takes place at the end it is Francis who is active by coming back to help Olivier with the boards. But it would be false to say that Olivier drifts with the current. On the contrary, the change he goes through unsettles the preconceptions both of himself and of those around him (especially those of his ex-wife, Magali, even though there is a sense in which she seems to know him better than he does and suspects that he is up to something like this). Expressed in traditional philosophical terms, the heteronomy that marks him is at the same time autonomy, because it runs counter to a thoughtless conformism.10 Which only means that these terms fail to address what goes on in the film, and hence are not as morally central as many philosophers believe. This is one philosophical point that could be made with reference to the film, but note that its status is logically secondary: either the point only reformulates an understanding you have already arrived at while watching the film or it points you to certain features in it, possible to pay attention to when watching it again (or when rethinking it) and so arrive at such an understanding, but it does not contain any understanding on its own. This point—about activity and passivity, about autonomy and heteronomy—is, however, not a point that only concerns Olivier, but just as

80 

H. STRANDBERG

well concerns us, for the way the film potentially challenges us, though in many respects different to the way Olivier is challenged by what happens to him, still bears similarities to his situation. Moral experience is not a product of one’s theoretical convictions, does not have the form of theoretical convictions, but has the power to shatter them—and seeing a film is one way of experiencing something. Some might object here, and claim that all this perhaps goes for Olivier, but that things would nevertheless be better if he would be in control of himself, as it were. No doubt we are here leaving the film behind for a while, but that is not a problem as such. If my imaginary interlocutor would only claim that the best thing would be if Oliver and Francis had a friendly relation from the very start, that is of course so. (I would not, however, describe friendship as a matter of being in control of oneself, nor as a matter of not being in control of oneself—for the question of control to arise here, special circumstance would need to be imagined.) But this would simply mean that we imagine a situation in which the very difficulty of forgiveness is not there at all—no murder, no mourning, no hatred. If we, on the other hand, consider Olivier and the situation he is in (or someone like him and something like it), what I described in terms of activity and passivity, of autonomy and heteronomy, is not merely an accidental feature of the development. What would it mean if Olivier, as soon as Francis shows up at the vocational school, instantly changes his way of relating to him, as if the traces of the past would vanish immediately and completely? If I try to conceive of such an occurrence, I conceive of a situation so strange that I simply do not know how I would react: perhaps I would question my previous understanding of Olivier; perhaps he was not struggling with the difficulties I thought he was struggling with? In any case, if this happened regularly, our understanding of forgiveness and its difficulties would be very different. Notice that what would be totally absent in such a case is not only the difficulties of forgiveness, but also forgiveness experienced as liberation, for liberation is the other side of those difficulties. Here I have concentrated on Olivier, for the film revolves around him. But something similar also goes for Francis. When we see him answering questions that relate to the murder by quickly moving on to other things, as if these questions were uninteresting and irrelevant, is that a sign of his being cold and careless? Superficially, this might seem to be the case, but, on the other hand, would not someone who is tormented by guilt behave in precisely the way Francis behaves? To evade questions, to show

4 REASON 

81

indifference—this is one sign of feelings of guilt (and Francis’s insomnia also hints at this). These feelings consequently have nothing to do with what he wants or does not want, with what he concludes is theoretically reasonable or unreasonable; he does not want to talk about the past, it should better be left behind, but this unwillingness is of course an expression of the importance to him of the events to which these questions refer. Feelings of guilt have nothing to do with what one wants or does not want, with what one concludes is theoretically reasonable or unreasonable, and this is the reason why feelings of guilt are repressed, but note that already these feelings themselves share features with their repression. The one who represses feelings of guilt avoids situations that might trigger these feelings; the one who has feelings of guilt avoids, among other things, eye contact with the one whose life she has destroyed. Seeking forgiveness, on the other hand, can be understood as the only way of openly approaching that to which guilt is also a reaction, though a twisted one, namely, the person in question. And it is precisely because they are reactions to a person, not to an idea, that they are not in my control.11 The ending of The Son shows all this very clearly, as perhaps also does the title: Francis asks Olivier to be his guardian, but he does not ask the father of the boy he killed to be his guardian. So even if there is an element of choice here, it is still true that we do not choose our parents, and the same of course goes for Olivier (who sees a “symbolic” connection between Magali’s pregnancy and his meeting with Francis), for we only choose to have children, but we do not choose our children. One of the ways in which The Son thus challenges central philosophical preconceptions is by drawing our attention to the moral strata underlying convictions, theoretical accounts, principles, rules, and the like, which these are at the most a reflection of. What strikes Olivier is not ideas, but people—Francis specifically. People, not the opinions or desires of these people: Francis runs away when Olivier tells him who he is, but that is not the end of the matter. The Son is thus not a rough sketch of a moral theory, as if its moral and philosophical importance would only come to full bloom when expressed in theoretical terms. Our task is to see through these terms, to get at what they at best point to. For to understand in what way it matters morally what I, say, do to others, referring to violations of principles would be seriously misleading; what we have to open our eyes to is whom I do it to. Watching films is one way of doing that. Philosophically discussing forgiveness is another, for forgiveness precisely concerns the point at which principles definitely give way to our attending to people.

82 

H. STRANDBERG

Reasons and Forgiveness As we have seen in the discussion of The Son, what is decisive for Olivier is Francis himself, not some reason he might give for or against a certain course of action.12 (If someone would claim that Francis himself is just another kind of reason, that would still leave us with a distinction between different kinds of reasons, a distinction which then needs to be understood.13) A similar observation was there in Arendt’s distinction between what and who. Let us now turn to this topic—reasons and forgiveness— and discuss it in the light of the insights we have arrived at.14 One aspect is that reasons only outweigh each other, but are not thereby eliminated. For someone for whom there are reasons against forgiveness there is still a problem in the relation; the question whether to forgive is still possible to ask and the problem is still there. The relevant point here is, of course, whether she takes there to be such reasons or not: others may take there to be such reasons, and she might be aware of that, but that is not what is decisive; what is decisive is what counts for her. Making the same point from the perspective of the one asking for forgiveness: when asking for forgiveness, to hear from the one I have wronged that for her my positive sides outweigh the negative ones might be a good thing, but nonetheless this need not answer my question, which is rather about whether she still bears me a grudge, that is, whether what I did to her still counts. Another aspect is this. According to the reason-based account, forgiveness would always have the following structure: “One should forgive anyone who shares this feature [which then would have to be indicated], so I forgive you.” In so doing the account obfuscates the difference, and even more, thereby, the meaning of the difference, between such a saying and when I direct myself directly—that is, not by way of a general principle—to the person in front of me. Let us compare asking somebody’s forgiveness. If I would ask your forgiveness, saying, “One should ask the forgiveness of anyone who shares this feature [which then would have to be indicated, referring to the general category under which you fall on account of what I have done to you], so I ask your forgiveness,” something would be terribly amiss. You would be right if you were to say: “This is not a matter of ‘one’ and ‘anyone’ but of you and me.”15 The same thing goes for forgiving someone. If saying “One should forgive …,” I do not give the other what she is asking for: my forgiveness. Instead of together creating a renewed relation, I approach her in the spirit of a bureaucratic exercise of

4 REASON 

83

power, in the spirit of that kind of well-behaved conduct that is impeccable in collective terms but only shows that I do not care about her. Furthermore, if the principle referred to in saying “One should forgive …” were correct and the only thing the issue concerned, then either the one asking for forgiveness would be asking for something she cannot be given or the one being asked to forgive would be blameworthy if not giving her what she is asking for.16 The reason-based account is consequently indirect in two respects, most obviously as it is not I who does the forgiving, but “anyone”, but the same thing goes for the one being forgiven, which is not you, but “anyone who shares this feature”. But if what you have done to me has damaged our relation, what we need to come back to is that closeness we once had or could have had, and the indirectness of the reason-based account would consequently mean that we are still distant to each other, for we would then relate to one another as “one” and “anyone”. A reason-based account sees morality as basically a matter of principles, rules, and the like. What I am trying to draw your attention to here—and what I claim that The Son draws our attention to—is the possibility of understanding morality in a very different way, which is not to deny that rules and principles can have a relative importance, but an importance that does not originate in these rules and principles themselves. The importance is a relative one, in this case in the sense that reason-based “forgiveness” is a compromise between the call for forgiveness and the desire to avoid forgiveness in its fullness, a compromise resulting in the repelling forces being curbed but our relating to one another in the spirit of the impersonal “one” and “anyone”. Such a compromise is of course not all bad, for one extreme would be far worse, but not all good either, as it is not identical to the other extreme. Whether Olivier and Francis, in their respective ways, are able to come to this other extreme is an open question—the film ends abruptly—but what is essential for us is only to understand what would be lost if they are not. The word “reasonable” thus calls to mind compromises and the middle course; that going “the second mile”17 is unreasonable is consequently true, but that leaves open the possibility that this is all the worse for reasonableness. The reason-based account moreover makes our understanding of forgiveness and its difficulties poor: I may take the reasons for forgiving to be overwhelming, but that does not mean that I have forgiven, and I may know that “objectively” speaking the reasons not to forgive are overwhelming, but may nonetheless have forgiven him.

84 

H. STRANDBERG

All this has important consequences for how the philosophical discussion of forgiveness should be understood. The philosophical discussion does not aim at giving you reasons for or against forgiving someone, and thereby showing that you should, or should not, forgive her. What it aims at is making it clearer what you do when, say, not forgiving someone. Making that clearer will, however, potentially change your ways of relating to forgiveness, so in that regard it could change what you do in a specific situation, but not by showing what you should do. This possibility thus shows that the only way of bringing about a new understanding that changes your way of acting is not via reason-giving. In fact, reason-giving has at the most an indirect relation to understanding: it shows that if I say this, I must say that, but understanding is not to be forced in that way, and even the “must say” is not clear, for, as Lars Hertzberg has pointed out,18 when confronted with the “that” I may respond that this is not what I meant when saying “this” and consequently try to rephrase it.

Why Give Reasons? Let us approach the issue from another angle and ask why someone might insist on reason-giving in this context. One possibility I have already hinted at: reason-based “forgiveness” as a compromise between the call for forgiveness and the desire to avoid forgiveness in its fullness, a compromise resulting in the repelling forces being curbed but our relating to one another in the spirit of the impersonal “one” and “anyone”. But could there be possibilities that do not compromise forgiveness? One idea would be that going against reason or not caring about it would risk our being led into evil: reason is the way we distinguish between good and evil, and without it we could go the one way just as the other.19 But is it really by means of reason-giving that I distinguish between good and evil? Say that a gruesome murder has taken place close to where I live. The tabloid press is writing about the case, and since I know the family of the victim a little, it is possible for me to tell the press what I know about them and send some photos, for which I would be paid a small amount. I feel uneasy about what I am thinking about doing, but tell myself that if I do not do this, someone else will, perhaps the publicity is of help to the police, and I need the money much more than the paper does. When listening to the uneasiness that these reasons aim at relieving, on the other hand, I ask myself: how can I even consider doing such a thing?

4 REASON 

85

Claiming that reasoning is always on the side of the good means disregarding cases such as these. The reasons support the temptation here, and the temptation is not resisted by looking for counter-arguments or arguments for a contrasting point of view. If I, siding with the temptation, ask myself why considering such a thing should be out of the question, that meta-question does not have to be answered, but can be brushed off in the same way as the original temptation. Only if there is a question I take seriously is there an answer that I try to back up with reasons; whether a specific question is one to take seriously or not does therefore not have to be decided by reason-giving, and even though there is in general nothing that prevents one from asking a meta-question of the above kind in a specific situation, the distinction between questions to take seriously and questions not to take seriously cannot generally be made with reference to reasons.20 Someone who insists on reason-giving in this context would however probably say that something is missing in my description of the above example: that there are reasons for not doing what I am tempted to do, reasons referring to, say, the nature of mourning, publicity, etc. What I said above could be repeated here—if these are reasons, they would at the most only outweigh what, according to the temptation, speaks for selling the photos and the information to the press, not eliminate the temptation—but there is more to be said. To whom are these reasons given? To someone who did not know them at all? If by myself to myself, am I reminding myself of something I had completely forgotten? What these questions point to is the fact that the context in which there is most obviously a task for reasons to fulfil is one of stupidity and ignorance; in a context of temptation, by contrast, they only point to that which I knew all along and are thus not steps I need to take to reach a conclusion. In other words, the less the problem is a moral one, the more relevant is reason-giving, and the more the problem is a moral one, the less relevant is reason-giving, or, with a slightly different emphasis, the less is what superficially might seem to be reason-giving a case of reason-giving. Of course, it is possible to say that my above example—in which the reasons support the temptation—should not be described in this way: reason cannot be on the side of the temptation, someone might claim. In that case, it is however not reason that makes it possible for me to distinguish between a temptation and what is not a temptation, but my understanding of the distinction between a temptation and what is not a temptation that helps me to see what is reasonable in this context.

86 

H. STRANDBERG

Another suggestion, not directly claiming that it is by means of reason-­ giving that we distinguish between good and evil, would place its importance in the distinction between coherence and incoherence. There are of course situations in which coherence is of some importance: coherent laws are better than incoherent ones, even if the latter ones compared individually to the former ones would be slightly better, for incoherence opens up to arbitrariness and unpredictability. That there is such a specific importance however suggests that the importance is not a general one. And that is clear: coherent systems can be both good and bad. Or if they cannot be completely bad, this has to do with the reactive nature of evil,21 with the fact that evil will give rise to incoherencies, in the form of self-deception, repression, and the like, incoherencies that are thus not of a formal kind and therefore only become evident by paying attention to what it means to do evil to someone, the meaning described by pointing out, say, that it means to turn one’s back to her, disregard her, close oneself to her, that is, reactive attitudes dependent on what they reject.22 In any case, referring to coherence and incoherence leaves the moral distinctions untouched: the pupil giving the wrong answer to a mathematical problem is not doing anything morally bad, and giving the right answer is not to do good, and to understand why we must consequently refer to other things. Another example where referring to coherence and incoherence would not help us to draw the vital moral distinctions is certain cases of moral or political debate. One of the participants may be very skilled in debating, in contrast to the other one, who may possess next to no such skill at all.23 It may be obvious to the audience and to both of the participants that the skilled debater clearly won the debate. But still it might be clear to the one who lost the debate, as well as to large portions of the audience, that this does not prove anything about the substantial issue, it might be clear that it was the one who lost who tried to defend the good. This does not mean that the one who tries to defend the good has landed up on the right side simply by accident, as if it were a coincidence that her position agrees with the one of the perfect, but as yet nonexistent, arguments, as if she were like the broken watch that tells the right time twice in 24 hours. Not at all: if the sophistic character of what the skilled debater is saying becomes visible to me when I contrast it to what the one who tries to defend the good is doing, then I see moral insights in what the latter is saying, even though neither of us is able to persuade others of their importance. To the extent that reasoning works with premises, everything of moral importance therefore hangs on the premises, or not primarily on them but

4 REASON 

87

on the moral insight of the one doing the reasoning, for what for one person would be seen as a moral lesson derived from the premises would by another person be seen as a reductio of these premises. It is for this reason that thinking, as an attempt at deeper moral understanding, which can really make a difference, should not be reduced to reason-giving: it is a striving to enter deeper into and be more fully permeated by that spirit without which reason-giving would not make a positive moral difference in the first place.

Reason and Explanation Why might someone insist on reason-giving in this context? Let us continue thinking about this question by considering a very different answer to it. This answer would be that reason-giving is the only way of explaining to others, and to oneself, what one is doing, without which my actions would be incomprehensible, and incomprehensibility should by all means be avoided. In The Son, Olivier cannot explain to himself why he is doing what he is doing; a power stronger than himself has taken over, as it were. If incomprehensibility should as such be feared or by all means avoided, his situation would be an easy one: the film would end before it had even started. But incomprehensibility is a part of life, incomprehensibility both to myself and to others. The situation in which I am incomprehensible to myself is a situation with strong similarities to epiphanies or to religious revelation, when I suddenly come to see something that does not fit into my previous categories, and even though such loss of control can no doubt be frightening, it is by virtue of that loss also potentially liberating. Consider the following point, made by Cora Diamond: [O]ne might […] meet George Eliot, and find oneself, during the encounter, recognizing her to be beautiful, but not beautiful as one had understood what beauty was. She, that magnificently ugly woman, gives a totally transformed meaning to ‘beauty’. Beauty itself becomes something entirely new for one, as one comes to see (to one’s own amazement, perhaps) a powerful beauty residing in this woman. She has done something, something that one could not at all have predicted, to the concept of beauty. In such a case, she is not judged by a norm available through the concept of beauty; she shows the concept up24

88 

H. STRANDBERG

As Diamond points out, the new way of using the word “beauty” is not simply a new use added to the former one: the former use is judged, as it were, and seeing the beauty of George Eliot also means that the looks of people previously held to be beautiful will be seen in new ways. Such a revelation, not at all a minor one, might shake one up, and one might become incomprehensible to oneself, even though it is possible that this way of relating to what has happened is partly an attempt to escape the new understanding: I still partly hold on to my previous way of thinking and compare the new one with it, instead of giving myself over to the new one. Just as little as incomprehensibility to myself should incomprehensibility to others be always avoided. Needless to say, the basic problem here is not that others do not understand me, but that they do not understand something important (which I (think I) have seen). If the problem was of the first kind, there would be a simple solution, I could just adapt myself to others; if the problem is of the second kind, adaption is not a solution. The only solution to the felt need of making oneself comprehensible to others is, consequently, to try to make that visible to others which I think that they fail to see. There is not one way of doing this, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed, however it is done. Reason-giving is only one way, and reasons, however good they might seem to be from some perspective, are not bound to convince others; the idea of a super-­convincer would picture giving understanding to others as a form of propaganda. Real understanding, by contrast, cannot just be handed over, but is something that involves the activity of the person acquiring the understanding. If others do not understand what I am doing—how I could forgive a specific person, say—the problem can therefore just as well be their inability to understand—their moral closedness, say—as my inability to explain. Speaking about my explaining myself to others is in other words misleading. Someone giving reason-giving a fundamental, and therefore excessive, role in the context of the alleged importance of making myself comprehensible is Judith Butler. She writes: I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.25

This account is, according to Butler, typically given in the context of explaining my actions, in the context of interrogation.26 That this is the

4 REASON 

89

context in which “I come into being as a reflexive subject” has far-­reaching consequences: [T]he very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told.27 There is the operation of a norm, invariably social, that conditions what will and will not be a recognizable account, exemplified in the fact that I am used by the norm precisely to the degree that I use it. And there can be no account of myself that does not, to some extent, conform to norms that govern the humanly recognizable28

The idea is thus that my very being is inevitably formed, and thereby limited, by such social norms, for I come into being as a reflexive subject by giving an account of myself to others, and such account-giving always has to be done with reference to social norms. That Butler is right about all this is, however, by no means clear, to say the least. There are many questions to be asked: Is it always a problem not being able to give an account to others of what one has done? Is it always a problem if I am unable to account for it even to myself? (Olivier in The Son is one example.) Furthermore, if I try to give an account to someone of what I have done and she does not find what I say intelligible, how is that failure, on her or my part, to be understood? Consider the huge difference between trying to explain a complicated mathematical calculation, where her lack of mathematical skill and knowledge and my pedagogical incompetence make this difficult and give her failure to understand the result I have come to a specific character, and, by contrast, the way in which a moral remark challenging specific “social norms” is met with outrage, ridicule, condescension or cynicism, to name but a few possibilities.29 In none of these cases—neither in the mathematical nor in the moral—is there, however, a social norm that prevents understanding: if I do not understand the mathematical calculation, I might go on trying to figure it out if I have the time, and if not, I would not deny that there is something there to understand, only admit my inability to understand it; and in the second case, the problem is my unwillingness to try to understand, not the social norm, even though that unwillingness is often connected to the fear of being collectively, say, ridiculed, ridiculed with reference to what “any decent and reasonable person would and would not claim”. In other

90 

H. STRANDBERG

words, Butler is far too uncritical of norm-talk, does not notice that it is a way of trying to conceal one’s unwillingness of trying to understand, and thus does not notice—in fact, she explicitly denies it30—that conversations are possible in which I am really trying to understand what the other is trying to say, however strange what he is trying to say might sound at the beginning, a conversation in which we will not understand ourselves to be bound be the “social” meaning of the terms we use, a conversation that of course typically will include not only the process by which I better come to understand the other and what he is trying to say but also the process by which I better come to understand myself and what I am trying to say.31 In the face of unwillingness to try to understand, however, also when that unwillingness is to be found in myself, giving in is not a necessity, even though it is often very hard not to do so, and I may therefore persevere in unintelligibility, also in my unintelligibility to myself, instead of submitting to social intelligibility, not minding that Butler thereby would deny me the status of a “reflexive subject”. When being asked “Why have you forgiven him?” there is thus generally nothing problematic in dismissing this question, by ignoring it or by answering, “I have.” If an answer to it is given, however, this does not mean that there must be something like the reason(s): explaining something to someone is, by contrast, to engage with the concrete difficulties of understanding she has. This presupposes, however, that she really has such difficulties, that her question is serious, and unserious questions are among such questions as can be dismissed. Actually, the very fact that she is asking the question can sometimes be understood as showing that she is not serious, in the moral sense of that word. Trying to explain why I have forgiven him is however not identical to trying to give you reasons for forgiving him. If he has condescendingly made fun of me at a party, someone who was present might ask me why I have forgiven him, but not see herself as addressed by a question whether to forgive him or not. And if she does see herself as addressed—and there is no definite limit to who might see herself as addressed, the question might be there for someone who has only heard about what happened— the question she is addressed by is not identical to the question I am addressed by, most obviously because our relations to what has happened are different (I am the victim of his condescension, she is not, or is a victim of another kind). In the case of love there is something similar, when I try to explain to someone who cannot understand why I have married such a horrible woman—as he sees her—that he is wrong about her: I am not

4 REASON 

91

trying to give him reasons for marrying her, which of course does not mean that I do not want him to love her in the neighbourly and friendly sense of the word. Trying to give such explanations, both in the case of forgiveness and in the case of love, is something we do, and the explanations can turn out to be helpful, but it is important to see that there is a limit to what they can do, a limit I have discussed above in a slightly different context. As long as you take there to be live reasons against love and forgiveness—and explanation is typically sought in the context of such negative reasons—there are problems in your relation to the person in question, problems that certainly do not at all make it impossible to describe the relation as one of love and forgiveness, but are still problems for love and forgiveness, not problems with just an external relation to them. What is needed is hence that these negative reasons stop being reasons at all. This can happen in many ways, most obviously when my previous unforgiving stance proved to be based on a mistake (a possibility referred to in the saying “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner”32). Exclusively emphasising this would, however, mean ruling out the possibility of forgiveness in cases where no mistake was made, and that would be a mistake: forgiveness does not require that the seriousness of what the other did to me is denied, it is on the contrary a way of attending to it. Another way in which a negative reason stops being a reason is when I forget the whole thing (a possibility referred to in the recommendation to “forgive and forget”33). Exclusively emphasising this would, however, mean ruling out the possibility of forgiveness in cases where forgetting would rather be a sign of your being unable to forgive and therefore trying not to think about it.34 Furthermore, not to forget can be morally important when the primary victim is someone other than yourself: both you and the victim may have forgiven the perpetrator, but in order to be able to help the victim with the physical and psychological injuries he might suffer due to what has happened, it is important to know what caused them. And it might be important to remember in order to be able to help the perpetrator when similar, say, temptations manifest themselves again.35 “Forgetting” can, however, mean many things, some of them more closely related to forgiveness than others: forgetting and forgiving are more closely related when “forgetting” means that a specific occurrence is no longer constantly present to me (I am no longer harping on it, for example) but still not forgotten in the sense of my not being able to answer questions about it, should such questions be asked.36

92 

H. STRANDBERG

Forgiveness therefore requires that negative reasons can stop being reasons without these reasons being forgotten or dismissed as mistaken. And even though explanations and reason-giving can play a part in such a transformation, ultimately it is about other things: that it is possible for a reason to lose its force.

The Difficulty of Forgiveness One way of understanding the difficulty of forgiveness is then, in the light of the above discussion, that this difficulty concerns what comes before reasoning.37 The difficulty is precisely that not to forgive him is an alternative for me, even if I say to myself that I should. How does it cease being one? How does holding against him what he did to me become out of the question? How does it become out of the question without my substituting one judgment for another, the old one by, say, “He did not do it” or “It was not as bad as it seemed”? How does the question of forgiveness cease being a question; how does the problem between us cease to exist? In his essay “Moral Integrity”, Peter Winch discusses Tolstoy’s story “Father Sergius”.38 Sergius, a monk, has “a great reputation for saintliness, and crowds visit him, bringing their sick to be healed”. When “a young society woman visits him alone in the night and tries to seduce him […] Sergius takes an axe and chops off one of his fingers” in order to “defend himself against temptation”. A couple of years later Sergius suffers religious doubts, and in a similar situation “he succumbs to the temptation”. Tolstoy, quoted by Winch, writes: “She took his hand and kissed it, and then put her arm round his waist and pressed him to herself. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Marie, you are a devil!’ ‘Oh perhaps. What does it matter?’” Winch comments: I think the point is this. Earlier, Sergius had been able to overcome his lust by chopping off his finger. He could do this because, at that stage, the problem presented to him by his lust was understood by him from the perspective of a genuine religious belief. That is to say it was not then a case of setting the satisfaction of his desire alongside the demands of his religion and choosing between them. The fulfilment of his religious duties was not then for him an object to be achieved. But this is what it had become for him at the time he succumbed to temptation and this indeed is precisely why he succumbed. Marie’s question ‘What does it matter?’ invited a judgment explaining why religious purity is more important than the satisfaction of

4 REASON 

93

lust, a comparison, as it were, between two different objects. And no such judgment was possible. I do not mean that earlier, at the time of his strength, Sergius could have answered the question; the point is that, from the earlier perspective, the question did not arise for him.39

Winch is describing a case where something that once was out of the question becomes a live option—our question concerns a change in the opposite direction, the process by which Sergius could regain his faith, as it were. Such a change might seem harder to understand: how is it possible for the number of alternatives I am aware of to shrink? But that question is misguided: the issue does not concern awareness but which alternatives are live ones for me. Sergius was not only aware of the possibility of sexual temptation the whole time, he even had to struggle with it, but not as an option he seriously considers, only as weakness. Something similar goes for forgiveness: I might not only be aware of the fact that there are others who would never forgive that which I struggle to forgive, I might even be annoyed with someone in a way that I take to be exaggerated, still knowing that if I only pull myself together this will not fundamentally change what I feel for him, how I relate to him, my understanding of our relation. (There are, however, important differences between being unforgiving and being sexually tempted. Above all: unforgivingness means rejecting someone; in the case of sexual temptation such a rejection is at the most indirect.40) The issue does not concern awareness but which alternatives are live ones for me; in other words, forgiveness is ultimately not an option that is chosen over other options. The relevant process is thus the one by means of which the very question of rejection ceases to address itself, even if it has always been answered in the negative. One way of accounting for such a change in my relation to someone who once hurt me is by reference to time and habituation: “time heals all wounds” is a common saying. (In a case similar to that of Sergius, the monk may initially find the new form of life a difficult one and be tempted by other alternatives, but with time this simply becomes his life as he sees it.) There is no doubt something to this—whether all wounds can be healed in this way is a question I will not discuss—but why has time this power, and is it time itself that does the job? If we—the person who hurt me and I—do not see each other anymore after what has happened, and if I one day realise that I no longer hate him, if I realise that holding what he did to me against him is now out of the question, if I realise that I regret that we do not see each other anymore, it is not enough to refer to

94 

H. STRANDBERG

time in order to understand what has happened; his absence is vital, as well as his presence in my thoughts, the memory of what we once had together. If we continue to see each other after he hurt me and if I one day realise that I no longer hate him, if I realise that holding what he did to me against him is now out of the question, it is not enough to refer to time in order to understand what has happened—his presence is vital, as well as the presence in my thoughts of the goodness of our relation (a presence that need not mean that I dwell on that goodness, however, for “presence in thought” can just as well refer to the spirit in which his presence concerns me). The “if” is important here, of course, and many other possible cases could be imagined: one possibility would be the one I have mentioned before, that in which I come to see that his good sides outweigh the bad ones. In such a case, holding what he did to me against him is not out of the question. The relevant metaphor as concerns the problem we are discussing is consequently not one of weights, but rather one in which something is, say, extinguished. For the same reasons, referring to good and bad sides would not do, for that would only be a relative difference; by contrast, between the person himself, on the one hand, and what he once did to me, on the other hand, there is an absolute difference, not a relative one. By the course of time, the second of the two sides of this distinction may recede, and the first side, not being based on specifics and in that sense more basic, is then the one that shines forth, or, rather, the presence of the person (and, mutatis mutandis, the absence) may make that first side shine forth, when what he did to me becomes seen as insignificant against the background of that more basic side of the distinction just referred to. The presence of the person may, however, also make that side overshadowed, when specific personal traits, seen by me as connected to what he once did to me, preserve, or, strengthen, the force of my rejection. Arendt’s distinction between who and what is thus relevant also in this context. As can be seen in the next to last sentence, a sentence that taken in isolation may be misleading, the difficulty of forgiveness will be misunderstood if described in terms of the conceptual pair of activity and passivity, if analysed into elements that are up to me, on the one hand, and elements I suffer, on the other hand. His personal traits preserve the force of my rejection not by themselves, only if understood by me in a specific way, but they are also there, against my will. In short, the difficulty of forgiveness is a difficulty, that is, neither possible to eliminate by means of a decision, nor the result of circumstances that have nothing to do with me. Or,

4 REASON 

95

expressed in other words, the difficulty concerns understanding, and how I understand things is not external to me—very much to the contrary— but is not something I can decide on. That the difficulty concerns understanding should be taken in its full meaning: the very existence of the problem, not only what it means to struggle with it, is a result of my understanding of it (and, consequently, also the existence of the problem goes against an analysis of it in terms of the conceptual pair of activity and passivity). For from the understanding of forgivingness, there is no difficulty: when holding what he did to me against him has become out of the question, the difficulty has not merely been overcome but eliminated. In his discussion of forgiveness, Joseph Butler seems at one point to see the distinction I have tried to call attention to here, but he soon loses it. He writes: [I]n cases of offence and enmity, the whole character and behaviour is considered with an eye to that particular part which has offended us, and the whole man appears monstrous, without any thing right or humane in him: whereas the resentment should surely, at least, be confined to that particular part of the behaviour which gave offence, since the other parts of a man’s life and character stand just the same as they did before.41

Butler starts out well here, contrasting specific characteristics, on the one hand, and “the whole man”, on the other hand. But he immediately retreats to a way of speaking that only leaves room for the good side to outweigh the bad ones, seeing the man to be no more than a collection of parts. The fundamental question, however, concerns the possibility of the spirit of rejection to lose its force completely, even as the badness of what the man did to me is not denied but on the contrary attended to. Our discussion in this section thus far has concerned the formal character of the difficulty of forgiveness, so to speak. But what about the more exact nature of it? Let us consider an example. A friend and I are in disagreement, and we heatedly discuss the issue. After a while, he starts being sarcastic, insulting me. This confronts me with a temptation that I may have been susceptible to before, but since it was not actual then I did not have to struggle with it: the temptation to keep to pride and not to friendship, that is, to answer with the same, or preferably even worse, kind of insults. My hurt pride means that I take myself to have lost some of my personal worth and dignity, which now have to be compensated for by my humiliating him (or rather, I self-deceptively believe that this will restore

96 

H. STRANDBERG

my personal worth even though it is bound to trigger even worse insults from his side). Since the dimensions of the loss are not given—if degrading qualities of what he did to me become present to my mind again a few days later, I am not reminded of an object with set dimensions, for by virtue of its becoming present the loss is greater than it was before, the degrading capacity of the insults now being greater—how to bring about a conclusive repayment is not at all a straightforward matter. In love and friendship, by contrast, there is no personal worth to be lost or regained. What he shouts at me is not at all serious in that respect but in the respect that it shows me that something worrying goes on in him—and perhaps also in me, for it is not at all always the case that I am able to track the conversation in such a way that I can preclude the possibility that I have contributed to a spirit of mutual resentment—something worrying that I need to attend to and confront, for his sake as well as for ours and our relation’s (and analysing this in terms of selfishness or unselfishness would thus be misleading). Crucial for a process of forgiveness to start off here is a change of tone of voice, a change of bearing generally: what is decisive is not primarily what is said, for it is perfectly possible to say that you forgive or to ask for forgiveness in a way that expresses a desire to humiliate. All this consequently goes against the popular saying that you should not “take shit”. The forgiving taking is, however, far from a passive acceptance, for that would mean that I do not care about the other and about our relation of friendship (or, much more likely, that I do care, but that I succumb to moral laziness and cowardice). In other words, the process of forgiveness starts off when I abstain from trying to compensate my hurt pride by returning his insults, and the process continues when he does not make use of the possibility of hurting me with impunity, the possibility that my abstention makes available.42 Furthermore, contrasting forgiveness to pride sheds light on the difficulties of forgiving as well as on the difficulties of asking someone’s forgiveness, which in this respect are not at all dissimilar. The prideful person would rather earn the other’s “forgiveness” by doing something (penance in a broad, and from a religious point of view mistaken, sense of the word), and would rather ask for satisfaction (by means of duelling, but this should also be understood in a very broad sense of the word) than forgive the other; the prideful person retains his personal worth by means of action and therefore sees the togetherness in forgiveness as a threat since here self-sufficiency is not possible.

4 REASON 

97

This example—a friend of mine sarcastically insults me in a heated discussion—might seem just to be one, and the difficulties of forgiveness might seem to be of very different kinds in other situations. In one sense, this is no doubt true, for every example is different in certain respects. What interests me is, however, if categorically denying that the difficulty of forgiveness in some specific case has anything to do with love and friendship would not be a mistake, even though there is not always a point in drawing attention to them, depending on what kind of task primarily confronts us in the situation in question. So consider a case that does not seem to have much to do with love: when visiting some friends, I meet a friend of theirs whom I have not met before, and he acts towards me in the same way as in the case above. Is not this an example of where the difficulty of forgiveness does not have anything to do with love, for if forgiveness is about getting back to the kind of relation we once had, this would be a relation of indifference? Such a description would, however, blind us to some important features. For this example to work in the way it is intended by my imagined critic, a question of forgiveness must address me here. So what does it mean that it does? It means that my relation to the friend of my friends is not one of total indifference, for in that case I would mind neither him nor what he is saying, nor the future spirit of my relation to him (no matter whether an actual relation or one of memory). Furthermore, not only is my relation to him not one of total indifference, but the call to forgive shows that there are positive aspects to the significance it has. If it had no positive aspects, I would forgive only for my own sake, but even though it is possible to loosely talk about self-therapeutic forms of forgiveness, not even such forms are purely self-therapeutic, are not only for my own sake. For why do I make use of this particular way of dealing with the problem, the problem that I cannot let go what he said? Why not some form of revenge? That would not be possible, some will answer, for revenge is not socially accepted. Now I do not think that this is true—there are socially accepted forms of revenge, even if they often go by other names—but it is indeed important to pay attention to the fact that my relation to the man in the example we are discussing takes place in the context of the relation to our mutual friends, that is, not in the context of the socially acceptable but in the context of friendship. This means that the allegedly self-­ therapeutic form of forgiveness we are discussing here is not purely self-­ therapeutic. However, does this not mean that for me there are still no positive aspects to the significance of the relation to the man I struggle to

98 

H. STRANDBERG

forgive, that the positive aspects exclusively belong to the relation to our mutual friends? Such a question takes for granted a short-sighted understanding of friendship, according to which my friendship with one person does not truly change my relations to others, but I will not pursue this issue here. Instead I would like to return to the question asked a moment ago: why do I make use of this particular way—forgiveness—of dealing with the problem? Why not some other, revenge say? The moral meaning of forgiving the man who has hurt me entails the explicit or implicit recognition that revenge would be to wrong him; if I do not think that revenge would be to wrong him, I have not forgiven him. It would be to wrong him, not something else, a social structure say, and to the extent that not forgiving him would be to wrong someone else, that is still by virtue of wronging him, which hence is what is primary here. In other words, he is not indifferent to me, I do not forgive him only for my sake, and I am not totally caught up in self-therapy. This, of course, is nearly related to my formal description above of the difficulty to forgive, in particular the distinction between the person himself, on the one hand, and what he did to me, on the other hand, and the way in which forgiveness involves a transformed perception in which I no longer see the person in question in the light of his badness, a description that now has received some more content. The call to forgive consequently shows that there are positive aspects to the significance of my relation to the man who hurt me. Another word for this is love,43 bearing in mind what I said in the introduction to this book, that we should not presuppose moral concepts to have an either/or character, as if love were either fully present or totally absent. What all this amounts to, then, is this: The difficulty of forgiveness we have been discussing here concerns the meaning, in contrast to the causal effects, that the past has in our relation, the way in which it is standing between us, preventing me from seeing you in love. The meaning of the past is not always standing between us, and even if it does it does not always prevent such a seeing, but then we have no difficulty of forgiveness to begin with. What complicates the issue is however, that I may repress a problem that I do not dare, or am too indolent, to confront, in which case our relation is troubled by, say, the fact that there are issues we avoid talking to each other about. In such a case, the problem must first come out into the open, which means that the way to forgiveness is here seemingly leading away from forgiveness. Anyway, the difficulty of forgiveness concerns the meaning, in contrast to the causal effects, that the past has in our

4 REASON 

99

relation, the way in which it is standing between us, preventing me from seeing you—in love, for, speaking with Simone Weil, “The belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.”44 And so love is attention to the first side of the distinction I have pointed to in the course of our discussion, the distinction—the absolute difference—between the person himself, on the one hand, and what he did to me (or, with a different kind of emphasis, specific personal traits), on the other hand, a distinction implicitly present when I briefly described what it means to direct myself directly—that is, not by way of a general principle—to the person in front of me. That my relation to someone I have just met is different from my relation to someone I have known my whole life is undoubtedly true but does not change this at all, for, as I have tried to show, this does not make it correct to say that the former relation has nothing to do with love and that a potential problem of forgiveness here has nothing to do with this love. The same goes for the fact that it is undeniably true that I can easily describe people, highlighting their distinctive features, but, again, what matters is not my awareness of these features but the role they have for me. Bearing in mind that whether there is a point or not to refer to love with regard to a particular case depends on what we would like to highlight, and, furthermore, that the important thing is not the word but what it makes us see, we could thus conclude the above discussion in the following way. To forgive someone is to show her love, is to relate to her in a loving, friendly, way.45 When I need to be forgiven, I experience love as forgiveness, and just as little as love consists in uttering words like “I love you” does forgiveness consists in uttering words like “I forgive you”. In such situations in which saying “I forgive you” would sound like an exaggeration of the seriousness of what has happened, non-verbal expressions of tenderness, a hug, say, would thus be a more evident expression of forgiveness. Conversely, to love is, among many other things, to forgive. For example, why love is not for reasons46 becomes clearer when you pay attention to the fact that one way of describing what forgiveness is about is to point out that forgiveness is not to let what the other has done change my relation to him fundamentally, despite its being a reason for doing so. Or not necessarily “despite”, for that would indicate that that reason is still in force. Forgiveness is thus rather when the force of the “despite” is no longer there, or is only there for the onlookers—you might of course uphold a relationship with someone since the pros outweigh the cons, but that would mean that you have not forgiven—in the same way as love does

100 

H. STRANDBERG

not (expect in special cases) go against reason, but is rather found outside of that small domain of human life where we ask for and give reasons.

Conclusion In The Son, Olivier is struck by the reality of Francis, and this is what sets him on the road to forgiveness. Olivier is in many respects an authority figure, not only because he is older than the boys and their teacher, but also in the way he relates to them; the reality of Francis, however, strikes him in a way that cannot be met in an authoritative way and it starts off a chain of events that is beyond his control. Another word for what I am referring to here—Olivier being struck by the reality of Francis—is love, and forgiveness, as the form love takes here, thus unsettles relations of authority and power. Even though his social position is very different, something similar goes for Francis too. His seeing a father and friend in Oliver means that he, without knowing it, comes closer to the father of the child he has killed, and his attempt at avoiding to confront his past thus breaks down. Olivier and Francis are fictive characters, of course, and it is not possible for me to interact with them. Reality makes demands on me, but the fictional reality does not (which is not to deny that fiction could make demands on me in other ways). But a film can draw my attention to the demands of reality, to the fact that the fate of others, to the fact that our fate together, is also in my hands. Discussing films together with others is therefore essential, for in a conversation I encounter other people, and the discussion hence follows on the film in a substantial sense. Olivier is struck by the reality of Francis. This reality is not part of the same game as reason-giving, as if it only had the potential to outweigh reasons against forgiving, reasons that would hence still be in force. The difficulty of forgiveness concerns the meaning that the past has in our relation, and reason-giving is precisely to draw conclusions on the basis of such meanings. Explaining why you have not forgiven this and that person, or giving reasons for why one should not do so, is consequently by no means difficult. Love and forgiveness as responses to the reality of someone, by contrast, do not fix upon other details, leading to different conclusions, but is the liberation from such meaning-generating fixation, and the reason-giving process therefore does not find footholds here. That liberation is the difficulty.

4 REASON 

101

Notes 1. Cooper 2007; Mai 2010; McMahon 2012; Mosley 2013; Rushton 2014; Pippin 2015; Caruana 2016; Cox 2016; Trahair 2016. 2. Cf. Collingwood 1938, pp. 303–304. 3. My discussion here could be read as a contribution to the discussion in which Moi 2017 is a central participant. My contribution is then to explain the need for a non-theoretical approach to art in another, but I believe not incompatible, way than she does. 4. The way in which theories are often introduced in methodological textbooks is telling. One example would be Benshoff 2016, ch. 1–2. 5. Some might object here, by referring to the possibility of pointing out intertextual references in The Son and of analysing the Dardenne brothers’ philosophical influences. For such a project to be meaningful, however, you must first understand what is going on in the film without referring to such things, otherwise you might end up discussing superficial similarities. Above all, you should not rule out the possibility that the film might be philosophically much more insightful than the philosophical texts that have indeed influenced the Dardenne brothers. Furthermore, there is the risk that the reason why you engage in such a “theoretical” project is that you want to avoid the much more challenging task of taking the existential import of the film seriously. 6. Even though Pippin (2015) does not discuss what I understand to be the heart of the film, this observation is close to his analysis of the film. 7. For this point, see Hertzberg 2002. 8. As you will see in a moment, when I describe the film in more detail, Francis is during most of the film unaware of Olivier’s identity, which means that he could not ask his forgiveness. This makes it even more obvious that if we see the topic of forgiveness as central to the film, the stereotypical picture must be abandoned. 9. For a discussion of this point, see Govier 2002, pp. 49–50. 10. Adorno writes (2003, p. 763): “The representative of what is not narrow-­ minded is theory.” In the discussion that follows, Adorno takes it for granted that there is no other form of thinking than theory, and claims that theory is the only way out of conformism, a non-conformism he furthermore equates with autonomy. Although the context of Adorno’s discussion is not the same as mine, my discussion of The Son can be understood as a criticism of what Adorno writes here. 11. For a more detailed discussion of these points, see Strandberg 2015. 12. Although I find Gormley 2014 quite confusing, I believe that one would arrive at this insight if one extrapolated from his paper; this insight is at least an answer to the questions Gormley is asking. Another interesting

102 

H. STRANDBERG

case in point is Cherry 2017. She argues against certain common arguments intended to persuade someone to forgive a perpetrator, but Cherry’s rationalist framework prevents her from noticing that the same objections can be raised concerning the arguments she thinks can be used for persuasion. 13. In other words, if a reason is “a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude” (Milam 2019, p. 242), what is decisive for Olivier is not a reason. In fact Milam is close to realising this. After having stated that “we forgive for reasons”, he continues “but not just any reason will do” (2019, p. 243); when attending to the wrong kind of reason, “Roger [the one who is about to forgive in Milam’s examples] isn’t responding to Martin [the one who is about to be forgiven] at all” (2019, p. 244). But doesn’t this mean that every kind of reason is ruled out, that what is decisive is not considerations but Martin himself? In his subsequent discussion, this point might have become clear if Milam, in his comparison of trust and forgiveness (2019, pp. 244–245), would have taken into account the distinction between trust and reliance (cf. Hertzberg 1988). 14. As frequent as the reference to reason-giving is in philosophy, it is not surprising that it is often given centre stage also in philosophical discussion of forgiveness. Furthermore, two of the most influential contributions to the contemporary discussion structure their accounts on reason-giving (see Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p. 15) and Hieronymi 2001). One problem is certainly that it is not at all clear what reasons and reason-giving are; the importance of my discussion consequently lies in the relation, or absence of relation, between those aspects I take up for discussion and forgiveness, not between “reason” as such, whatever that would mean, and forgiveness. 15. Cf. Nykänen 2015, pp. 53–54. Cf. also Arendt 2002, p. 15. That forgiveness is to be understood from the perspective of what “one” should or should not do is an unquestioned assumption in much philosophical discussion of forgiveness. A clear case is Warmke 2015, in which Warmke makes much use of the claim that there are cases in which one ought (or ought not) to forgive. He (2015, p. 498) backs this up only by some examples in which a friend is saying to a friend, or a father to his son, “You really should forgive” or “You really shouldn’t,” without Warmke’s noticing the difference between “one” and “you”. 16. Since directing myself directly to the person in front of me is not to direct myself to a “case”, that is, neither to a special case nor to an instantiation of the general one, whether or not, say, unforgiving people are generally cold-­hearted is a question that is not affected by what I say here. 17. Mt. 5.41 (NRSV). 18. Hertzberg 2017, sec. 4.

4 REASON 

103

19. An extreme version of this idea is expressed by Peter, one of the characters in Peter Singer’s fictional response to J.  M. Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals”, in his reply to his daughter Naomi (1999, pp. 88–89): “What are you saying—that we could painlessly kill Max, get another puppy to replace him, and everything would be fine? Really, Dad, sometimes you let philosophy carry you away. Too much reasoning, not enough feeling. That’s a horrible thought.” […] “You know very well that I care about Max, so lay off with the ‘You reason, so you don’t feel’ stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel—and at times Costello comes close to that in her lecture—I’m reminded of Göring, who said, ‘I think with my blood.’ See where it led him. 20. This is an important theme in Wittgenstein; see e.g. Wittgenstein 2009, § 217, and Wittgenstein 1974, §§ 122, 458, 625. 21. For a discussion of this, see Strandberg 2016. 22. See Strandberg 2015, ch. 3 and 11. 23. See Strandberg 2011, ch. 10. Cf. Spaemann 2012, pp. 125–126. 24. Diamond 2005, p.  125. For a discussion of this quote, see Strandberg 2011, pp. 59–60, 180. 25. Butler 2005, p. 15. 26. Butler 2005, p. 11: “Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an other—‘Was it you?’—do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings.” 27. Butler 2005, p. 21. 28. Butler 2005, p. 36. 29. Cf. Backström 2019, p. 121. 30. Butler 2005, pp. 25, 30. 31. A mundane example of one form such a conversation might have, which shows that we are not bound by the “social” meaning of the terms we use: A: “John is such a control freak!” B: “What do you mean? He is the most careless and sloppy person I have ever met?” A: “That’s true … but still … have you noticed how he reacts when people do not do what he wants them to do?” B: “You’re right, I had not thought about that. I would still not call him a ‘control freak’, but you have a point there. What kind of need do you think drives him, if you would try to describe it in more detail?” In other words, it is possible to point out something to someone even if you do not agree on the meaning of the words you use; it is because it is possible for us to understand each other that it is possible for us to come to see that we agree or do not agree on the meaning of the words we use.

104 

H. STRANDBERG

32. See e.g. Tolstoy 1952, p. 56. 33. As Lear says: “forget and forgive” (Shakespeare 2016, sc. 21). 34. For a nice example, see O’Shaughnessy 1967, pp. 347–348. 35. See Garrard and McNaughton 2003, p. 49. 36. Seeing forgiving and forgetting as connected risks furthermore to give priority to epistemology, a risk evident in Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of forgiving and forgetting (2000, pp. 593–657). 37. Referring to such a difficulty, I am thereby referring to someone who tries to forgive, but nonetheless cannot forgive, something she sees as a failure. This is certainly not the only way in which the question of forgiveness addresses one. 38. Winch 1972, pp. 187–197. 39. Winch 1972, pp. 188–189. There are things to question in Winch’s interpretation of the story, but I do not think this matters for the way I make use of his discussion. 40. If Winch would have brought up forgiveness for discussion and paid attention to these differences, some of the points he makes in the paper would no longer be possible to make, some would be possible to make more forcefully. Discussing this would, however, lead away from the issues I focus on. 41. Butler 2006, p. 101. 42. Christopher Bennett writes (2003, p. 138): [O]ur muddled view of where our status derives from means that we can be further tempted by the thought that, in order to show that we are worth more than the offender has implied, we have to subjugate the wrongdoer in some way, to prove ourselves his equal in some battle of wills. So resentment expresses itself as a strategy of trying to show that one can beat the wrongdoer, in order to redeem the diminishment of one’s status that one fears the wrongdoing has effected. This is somewhat ambiguous: is the point that one need not fear this, since one’s status and worth are just as high as before the offence, or—the more radical and better point—that status and worth are nothing to worry about in the first place? 43. For an example, in the context of a discussion of forgiveness, of someone who fails to notice this, see Milam, who is only able to conceive of love as “romantic love”, “close friendship” or “a general benevolent attitude” (Milam 2018, p. 581). That the neighbourly love I am talking about cannot be restricted to the former ones is hopefully clear, but it is not of a general kind either: using Arendt’s terms (see my discussion in Chap. 3), a general attitude would be to focus on “what” someone is, not on “who”

4 REASON 

105

he is, or, more concretely, it is he who, not something general that, haunts me in my bad conscience for having taken a bloody revenge on him. 44. Weil 1991, p. 122. 45. For an early development of this thought, see Augustine 1845, ch. 73. 46. For an illuminating discussion, see Kronqvist 2019, pp. 986–988.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Arendt, Hannah. 2002. Denktagebuch 1950–1973. Munich: Piper. Augustine. 1845. Enchiridion ad Laurentium; sive, De fide, spe et charitate. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XL, 231–290. Paris: Migne. Backström, Joel. 2019. Pre-truth life in post-truth times. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8 (special issue): 97–130. Bennett, Christopher. 2003. Personal and redemptive forgiveness. European Journal of Philosophy 11: 127–144. Benshoff, Harry M. 2016. Film and television analysis: An introduction to methods, theories, and approaches. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Joseph. 2006. The works of Bishop Butler. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Caruana, John. 2016. The Dardenne brothers and the invisible ethical drama: Faith without faith. Religions 7 (43): 1–16. Cherry, Myisha. 2017. Forgiveness, exemplars, and the oppressed. In The moral psychology of forgiveness, ed. Kathryn J. Norlock, 55–72. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Sarah. 2007. Mortal ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne brothers. Film-Philosophy 11: 66–87. Cox, Damian. 2016. Moral beauty in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers. Screening the Past 41. Diamond, Cora. 2005. Wittgenstein on religious belief: The gulfs between us. In Religion and Wittgenstein’s legacy, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr, 99–137. Aldershot: Ashgate. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. Gormley, Steven. 2014. The impossible demand of forgiveness. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22: 27–48. Govier, Trudy. 2002. Forgiveness and revenge. London: Routledge. Hertzberg, Lars. 1988. On the attitude of trust. Inquiry 31: 307–322.

106 

H. STRANDBERG

———. 2002. Moral escapism and applied ethics. Philosophical Papers 31: 251–270. ———. 2017. Giving hostages to irrationality? Winch on the philosopher as judge of human thought. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6: 7–30. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2001. Articulating an uncompromising forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62: 529–555. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2019. A personal love of the good. Philosophia 47: 977–994. Mai, Joseph. 2010. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McMahon, Laura. 2012. From homofraternity to hospitality: Deconstructing the political with Derrida and the Dardennes. French Studies 66: 510–524. Milam, Per-Erik. 2018. Against elective forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21: 569–584. ———. 2019. Reasons to forgive. Analysis 79: 242–251. Moi, Toril. 2017. Revolution of the ordinary: Literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mosley, Philip. 2013. The cinema of the Dardenne brothers: Responsible realism. London: Wallflower Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nykänen, Hannes. 2015. Repression and moral reasoning: An outline of a new approach in ethical understanding. Sats 16: 49–66. O’Shaughnessy, R.J. 1967. Forgiveness. Philosophy 42: 336–352. Pippin, Robert. 2015. Psychology degree zero? The representation of action in the films of the Dardenne brothers. Critical Inquiry 41: 757–785. Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Rushton, Richard. 2014. Empathic projection in the films of the Dardenne brothers. Screen 55: 303–316. Shakespeare, William. 2016. King Lear. In The new Oxford Shakespeare: The complete works: Modern critical edition, 2347–2433. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, Peter. 1999. Reflection. In The lives of animals, ed. Amy Gutmann, 85–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spaemann, Robert. 2012. Philosophische Essays. Stuttgart: Reclam. Strandberg, Hugo. 2011. Love of a god of love: Towards a transformation of the philosophy of religion. London: Continuum. ———. 2015. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Is pure evil possible? In The problem of evil: New philosophical directions, ed. Benjamin W.  McCraw and Robert Arp, 23–34. Lanham: Lexington Books. Tolstoy, Leo. 1952. War and peace. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

4 REASON 

107

Trahair, Lisa. 2016. Belief in this world: The Dardenne brothers’ The son and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and trembling. SubStance 45: 98–119. Warmke, Brandon. 2015. Articulate forgiveness and normative constraints. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45: 490–514. Weil, Simone. 1991. La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Paris: Plon. Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Über Gewissheit; On certainty. Trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophische Untersuchungen; Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S.  Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

CHAPTER 5

Conditions

Having discussed the issue of forgiveness and reason, one of the most contentious questions in the standard philosophy of forgiveness is just a short step away: is forgiveness conditional or unconditional?1 Are there conditions in the absence of which you should not forgive? It is now time to discuss these questions. Some will no doubt understand this chapter as answering the question whether forgiveness is unconditional or not in the positive, but my fundamental point is different: that these questions should be questioned, not answered. Someone who is not used to this way of thinking—questioning questions—might therefore find this chapter somewhat complicated. Anyhow, this means that insights are to be found along the course of the discussion rather than only when it has reached its end. So what could it mean to claim that there are conditions for forgiveness? One possibility is “non-normative”: to forgive if the conditions are not fulfilled is not wrong but impossible, for no forgiveness would then take place. I will return to this possibility at the end of the chapter. The possibility that suggests itself more immediately is a “normative” one: one should only forgive if certain conditions are fulfilled. How is this to be understood?2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_5

109

110 

H. STRANDBERG

Conditions for Forgiving? There are many different situations in which someone might say that one should only forgive if certain conditions are fulfilled. I believe that it is important to distinguish between them. For if these situations are not paid attention to, the claim “one should only forgive if certain conditions are fulfilled” will be understood as correct (or not) from a God’s Eye point of view, but the sense it has to say that there are or are not conditions for forgiveness is of course closely bound up with the contexts in which we talk about such things and cannot therefore be disconnected from them if we are to understand what it might mean to say such things. So let us imagine that a friend of mine has forgiven someone, and now I say to her that she should not have done that. (I imagine that I am talking to a friend and that I am talking to the very person who I think has acted wrongly. If the person I am talking about would be a person unknown to me, someone I have only heard others speak about, I might not know what I am talking about, partly because there might be important facts I do not know of, and, more importantly, because forgiveness concerns what has happened to the person in question not only in an outer sense, visible to all, but above all in an inner sense, in what ways it has affected her, and someone who observes the case from a distance will consequently not understand what is going on.) What could it mean to say such a thing? If the man whom my friend has forgiven is someone in relation to whom the question whether to forgive or not is a burning one also for me, the answer is a simple one: what I say about my friend’s forgiving him will in such a case be connected to those difficulties of forgiveness that I have. This is even more obvious if it is myself I am talking to and about, if I say to myself that I should not forgive him. In such a case, there is no way of distinguishing between these difficulties of forgiveness and my way of describing them, for one dimension of the struggle with forgiveness is the struggle to perceive forgiveness in a clear-sighted manner, and there is therefore no separate question about the conditions of forgiveness in such a case. But what about a case where I do not know the man she has forgiven, perhaps have not even met him? That my difficulties with forgiveness are still involved cannot be easily ruled out, for something more or less similar to the thing that has happened to her can have happened to me, with other people involved, or could happen to me in the future, difficulties I

5 CONDITIONS 

111

then anticipate and struggle with already now. Let us see if, and in that case how, such difficulties with forgiveness arise. Why do I say to my friend that she should not have forgiven the man she has forgiven, what kind of fault is it that I claim she has committed? It would of course be possible for me to come up with all sorts of criticism of her—my imagination is the only limit—but for the criticism to be of any real relevance to forgiveness, the criticism must be of a moral kind. What kind of moral fault may there be here? Someone might give us an example such as this: her husband has beaten her, she has forgiven him, and the reason for my criticism of her is my concern for her. But this only sounds convincing when described in this abstract way;3 if we make the imagined situation more concrete the issue becomes less clear. For why should the fact that she has forgiven him make the risk greater that he will beat her again, as compared to if she had not forgiven him?4 Because forgiveness means that you disregard the problem and do not do anything about it? But why should forgiveness mean that? On the contrary, one aspect of turning to someone in a forgiving spirit is that something that was painful to talk about because it could only be talked about in a spirit of bitterness and therefore was often avoided is now possible to talk about directly. Turning to someone in a forgiving spirit is hence rather a way of starting to work at the problem than something that prevents such work. Forgiveness has certainly to do with trust rather than distrust, but even though being afraid that someone might beat one again may be an expression of distrust, saying to that person that one is afraid could be an expression of trust, precisely because I now dare to be open to him about my fear for him and do not feel forced to hide it. The same thing goes for leaving someone: it may be an expression of distrust, but if it is made as one step in the attempt at some day, unknown when, being able to return to one another in a fuller sense than what is possible at present, then it is more forgiving to leave than to stay.5 Furthermore, the question whether to avoid being together with someone is independent of the question whether to forgive him: it can be difficult for me to forgive even if I know that he will never do the same thing again, and I can forgive him even if I am convinced that there is a grave danger that he will do the same thing again. In the latter case, I may avoid being together with him, but the question then concerns in which spirit I avoid it, in which spirit he is present in my thoughts: in the spirit of, say, loving grief or indignant mortification. However, the contrast between these two spirits is too stark, and leaves out other, no less significant cases. One possibility—perhaps the one that

112 

H. STRANDBERG

many would associate with a spirit of loving grief—is that I take his beating me to be the result of mental problems that neither of us is able to do anything about. In such a case, it is certainly of importance if he knows that I have forgiven him despite the fact that I do not dare to be together with him anymore. For forgiveness would be understood in a very restricted way if it would be understood only as my individual struggle against bitterness and not also as a matter of what I convey to him, in other words, and most fundamentally, as something that takes place between us (and forgiveness as something that takes place between us would be even more significant in a case where I never have seen any problems at all, but the other believes that I, say, bear a grudge against him). Another possibility, however, is that I do hold him responsible, but not in a spirit of indignant mortification. If there is at all a difficulty of forgiveness in such a case, the difficulty does not lie in me, but in him, not in the sense, however, as if I lay down conditions that he has to fulfil in order for me to forgive him but in the sense that there are things that have to change in order for our relation to be a good one, in order for forgiveness to take place and prevail. So what about the situation in which I criticise my friend for having forgiven her husband who has beaten her, a criticism I take to be made out of concern for her? The most realistic case seems to me to be this: I make some judgment of her psychology and of the power he has over her, concluding that the only thing that would prevent her from submitting to him again is her resentment, which, accordingly, should not be given up. There is much to be said about this, but in the context of a philosophical discussion of forgiveness, only one thing needs to be pointed out: neither of the two alternatives I see in this imagined case is forgiveness, so this is not a case of forgiveness being conditioned. Neither submissiveness nor resentment is forgiveness, and the one is not closer to forgiveness than the other one. There is certainly nothing that prevents one from calling submissiveness “forgiveness” and therefore being critical of forgiveness in such a situation, but this leads very easily to overlooking the numerous possibilities found in the sphere of what is then seen as unforgiveness, and that blindness also makes us lose the possibility of a deeper understanding of what really constitutes the problem of being “forgiving” in the sense of being submissive. The mistake is hence, one could say, to mistake forgiveness (or reconciliation) for submissiveness.6 How come such a mistake is made, as different as forgiveness (and reconciliation), on the one hand, and

5 CONDITIONS 

113

submissiveness, on the other hand, indeed are? One possibility is that the mistake is a result of our difficulties with forgiveness: we call something less challenging “forgiveness” in order to avoid getting to grips with what is more challenging. As R.S. Downie puts it: “In many cases it is easier to play down the extent of the injury and ignore the nature of the moral offence, and so to condone, than it is to face up to the injury and make the effort to forgive.”7 And to be submissive is less challenging than to forgive: if I am submissive all I have to do is obey, but forgiveness is about meeting one another, together, in our difficulties. The conflicts are not brushed aside but need to be acknowledged; forgiveness is precisely about wanting to clear up these conflicts, about not giving up. This resignation, the contrast to forgiveness, has two forms: on the one hand unforgiveness as it is most often understood, when we abandon each other forever, in a concrete spatial sense or in a spiritual sense (our lives are fundamentally separated, by bitterness etc.), on the other hand submissiveness, in which case resignation takes the shape of the inability to believe that our relation could ever be different than it is right now, and this is also a form of unforgiveness, as we have seen. And it is precisely because not being submissive is sometimes so difficult that I may think that my friend will ultimately succumb to it; hence my criticism of her. I said that forgiveness means that the conflicts are not brushed aside but acknowledged, that forgiveness is about wanting to clear up these conflicts, about not giving up. Here a comment is perhaps needed. For it might seem that this is only true in some cases, not for example when the present repercussions of what has happened only have to do with our memories of it, when there is not anything in the dynamics between us, or in us as individuals, that needs to be changed, when all we have to do is to forget about it and move on. But it is not as simple as that. For if the memory lives on as something painful in our relation—and if the memory is not even painful the question of forgiveness will not arise at all, but as a way for us of making it clear to each other that even if the memory could have been painful it is not painful to us—then this painfulness will show in, say, his bringing it up to torment me or my finding it trying to be reminded of it, no matter his intentions in reminding me of it. He brings it up to torment me: in that case, the present repercussions of what has happened have not primarily to do with our memories of it, for if he would forget about this specific thing he would certainly be able to find other ways of tormenting me, and what forgiveness means would hence be misunderstood if it would only be related to the specific occurrence in the past

114 

H. STRANDBERG

without paying attention to the use of it in the present. I find it trying to be reminded of it: in that case, the present repercussions of what has happened have not primarily to do with our memories of it but with my way of relating to such things whenever they would occur, for if I would not find it trying to be reminded of it I would not strive to forget about it and it could then appear as a topic of conversation just as any other topic (and could then also, just as most other topics, be tedious after a while). In other words, what forgiveness means would be misunderstood if phrased in terms of whether a specific occurrence is present in our conversations or not; what forgiveness means concerns, among other things, how that occurrence is present there, and a problematic “how” might very well remain even if this occurrence is no longer its object. Consequently, forgiveness cannot be separated from the need to acknowledge conflicts and difficulties; forgiveness is about wanting to clear them up, about not giving up. So let us go back to the main thread of our discussion. The example of my criticising a friend of mine for having forgiven her husband who has beaten her might make the discussion of the conditions of forgiveness too one-sided, someone could claim. So let us modify the example somewhat and see what changes this will bring with it. A friend of mine has been assaulted by someone we only know by name and sight, and now she says that she has forgiven him. In such a case the extent to which forgiveness is about mending a damaged relation is less important, for this man has never had a deeper importance for her, even though it is possible to understand forgiveness as partly a matter of a possible future, of how she would react if they happened to meet now and then, in which case this example would however just be a variant of the previous one. So if we imagine forgiveness taking place not within a close relation, and I then say to her that she should not have forgiven him, what could that mean? If it means that she will not report it to the police, then we get a situation partly similar to the one I have already discussed. The role of the police force, the point of criminal punishment, etc., are very different in different countries; it should, however, not be excluded a priori that criminal punishment cannot be understood as also for the sake of the one punished. Not reporting it to the police would then be another example of the relation between submissiveness and disregard for the other. But even if the punishment is not understood in that way, we do not necessarily have a conflict; a conflict is there only if punishment must be understood as an

5 CONDITIONS 

115

expression of unforgivingness, of revenge, and are there any reasons for believing that?8 Let us therefore leave the question about criminal punishment behind and try to see what other possibilities are to be found here. One important feature of the example we are looking for is that it must contain some concrete difference made by her forgiving him in contrast to not forgiving him, a difference that someone might take to be negative. So what difference does it make? If we refer to the absence of, or the attempt at liberating oneself from, feelings of bitterness, it is unclear to me what it would mean to perceive this in a negative light.9 But what about hatred? Someone might perhaps defend hatred by saying that hatred is a driving force behind improvements, of society or of other things. But such a claim only sounds reasonable if the only possible contrast to hatred is supposed to be indifference or the like. Not only is this not the only possible contrast, the claim also misunderstands what forgiveness is about by conceiving of it in terms of indifference. That such a conception conflicts with the one I have given, and am about to give here, is evident: in this context, it is above all important to point to the positive meaning of forgiveness, to which the one who conceives of it in terms of indifference shuts her eyes. It is moreover fundamentally unclear how an improvement of something could be motivated only by hatred, indeed if hatred would be intelligible at all if taken in isolation, that is, without relating it to something positive contrasting to what is hated: why would I otherwise feel hatred? and what would I like to have after having destroyed what I hate? Another possible difference made by forgiving or not forgiving someone is that forgiving means not to take revenge. And there are definitely people who would find abstaining from revenge to be a bad thing. So let us consider a case such as this: the brother of my friend has been severely assaulted, and her abstaining from taking revenge is then a question of the honour of her brother, of the family and of her (that is, not a question of her honour only, which would make the example less critical). What is to be said about this? Here we have, consequently, a possible form of moral (or quasi-moral) criticism of someone who has forgiven. But it is of course self-evident, and fairly uninteresting, that someone who takes revenge to be morally important also takes there to be conditions for forgiveness. We should distinguish here between two different ways of talking about the price of forgiveness. If I, in order to be able to forgive, struggle with my revengefulness, bitterness and the like, forgiveness has a price: it is the result of a

116 

H. STRANDBERG

difficult process, of a struggle. But this certainly does not mean that I see revenge as something of value. For if I did, I would not struggle with it, only compare different valuable things to each other and pick the one that proves to be of most value in this concrete situation, in which case, if it turns out that the value of forgiveness exceeds the value of revenge, forgiveness would have a price, as I would then have to abstain from something of value to attain something of greater value. But, in fact, this description does not make sense. For as long as I perceive things in this way—that revenge is of value, a value that is however sometimes exceeded by the value of forgiveness—I have not forgiven. This does not mean that I have only forgiven a specific person when all vindictiveness against him is gone. What matters is whether I consider it a serious option or not (and even if I do not, I may still, beside myself, carry it out); the remaining vindictiveness only shows that there are things I have to continue working with, that there is a fuller form of forgiveness I have not yet attained. If I am, however, really contemplating avenging myself but come to the conclusion that the price is too high, I have not forgiven. In other words, forgiveness is not a value. If you regard forgiveness as a value, you have already lost it. Someone who lays down conditions for forgiveness by giving some room for the need of avenging oneself has consequently not laid down conditions for forgiveness but rejected it. But it is perhaps still a good idea to consider our example some more: I criticise her for abstaining from revenge, by referring to the honour of her brother and her family. It is evident from the last paragraph that the example, in order to work, cannot be of a case in which I criticise her for not seeing any value in honour. In other words, I must criticise her by saying, for example: “Revenge is perhaps of no importance to you, but it is of importance to your brother and to your family, and therefore you should not forgive.” What could be said about this? The intelligibility that my criticism of her might seem to have is, however, only apparent, a result of, for example, the fact that it appeals to my temptableness, that I am more prone to being enticed by the idea of revenge than I take myself to be. For if I really found revenge and honour to be valueless, I would not see any value that I could give away to someone else. What we are discussing here are not questions of taste, in which case I can serve something to someone because I know that he likes this dish even though I do not. When it comes to questions of taste, I can imagine myself liking what he likes; our differences of taste concern the real, not the imaginable. When it comes to moral questions there is no

5 CONDITIONS 

117

such distinction, here you reject the real and the imaginable as a unity. Another possibility is that my temptableness does not primarily concern revenge but submissiveness: I am more prone to take the easy way out than I think, the course on which I do not have to acknowledge any conflicts and difficulties. “Perhaps that is so, but it does not change the fact that his loss of honour might very well lead to his ruin. Suicide is a grave danger. Could not such considerations create a space for revenge even though one does not see any point in it oneself?” Even if this would be true, that would not mean that my criticism of her would be a matter of course: even if I think that there are live alternatives to her forgiving him, and even if I think that these alternatives are preferable, this does not mean that I have to find what she has done objectionable. Furthermore, in order for the imagined objection above really to work, it has to be more concrete than this, we need to know in what ways this risk manifests itself, above all in what ways it is connected to other aspects of the relation between her and her brother, otherwise it would be unclear what it would mean to do one thing rather than the other, what it would mean to avenge him rather than not doing it. But let the description pass as it is; the more fundamental problem is that the effects of actions, in the form of the reactions of others to them, cannot be controlled, and this is so no matter whether she avenges him or abstains from doing so. If she avenges him, the risk can consequently not be excluded that the effect is the same imagined suicide, as an expression of, say, his anguish over what he has impelled her to do and what he thereby has subjected the victim to. It is not possible for her to calculate the probability of the different outcomes in advance, for the probability of them is, ex hypothesi, contingent on what she will do, and what she does is contingent on which alternatives she conceives of, and the probability of the outcomes is thus contingent on her power of moral imagination. Furthermore, much depends on how she realises the specific alternative, the spirit in which she carries it out, and this means that the number of alternatives and their exact sense are unsurveyable also for that reason. In other words, abstaining from revenge might seem to be merely a negative thing, but if we try to imagine the concrete sense of abstaining from it, we realise that it is far from a uniform thing; it can take the form of both indifferent cowardice and engaging care, expressions that are certainly vague too, for the ways in which care can be engaging can be further specified, for example by pointing to the different possibilities of engaging the brother himself for the cause of abstaining from revenge, possibilities that

118 

H. STRANDBERG

cannot be excluded a priori. If your reason for avenging him is that it has the best effects no matter whether you yourself see any point in it or not, you are consequently taken in by the illusion that it is possible to control the reactions of others to what you are doing, something that is even more illusory in a critical situation such as this one. It is for example not possible to exclude the possibility that the real deathblow is that condescending attitude manifested in seeing his reactions as no more than effects, the probability of which is to be calculated. However, how relevant is what I said in the above paragraph? The question we are discussing is whether there are conditions for forgiveness. That there are such conditions for a consequentialist is self-evident; for a strict consequentialist there will be no need at all of a concept of forgiveness. Someone who claims that the effects of revenge are sometimes better than the effects of every other alternative, and that one therefore should take revenge on the person in question, does not need to be a strict consequentialist, might only argue in that way in some contexts, but the problem is that the conditions for forgiveness are then laid down from the outside. The philosophical endeavour to understand forgiveness better is consequently not at all affected by this rejection; the full- or part-time consequentialism of such a person is only an answer to the general question about what is to be done. Someone who wants to demonstrate that there are such external conditions for forgiveness must therefore discuss concrete cases in detail, and questioning one’s power of moral imagination will be of central importance in such discussions. These considerations, however, still leave open the question of relevance. For the question we are discussing is whether there are conditions for forgiveness, specifically what it would mean to say to a friend that she should not have forgiven the man she says that she has forgiven. And that is always possible to say, and the meaning of it is clear, but that is, in a sense, irrelevant as far as the question whether there are conditions for forgiveness concerns. For since forgiveness is one answer to what someone has done to me, it is always possible, for someone who wants to claim that you should not forgive (ever, or only in this context), to find a reason for that: what the person in question has done to me. That without which there would not be anything to forgive is at the same time the reason for not forgiving. In other words, the one who wants to set limits to forgiveness will always find reasons for doing so. Does this mean that the question whether to forgive or not is a question about which reasons are the weightier ones? (In that case, forgiveness would be unconditional only if

5 CONDITIONS 

119

the reasons for forgiving always were the weightier ones, conditional if they sometimes were weightier and sometimes not.) Let us imagine that I say to a friend of mine that she should not have forgiven the man she says that she has forgiven, and that the reason I present is that she thereby has made light of what he has done to her. It is certainly possible that she answers me by saying that what he did was not as bad as I claim it is, and we get a discussion about reasons for and against describing what he has done in mine or her terms. Another possibility is, however, that she does not deny anything of what I say, but simply says that it is precisely that which I point to that she has forgiven him for. This does not mean that forgiveness is irrational, for saying that would be to still measure it by that which she simply understands in a different way than as a reason against (or, for that matter, for) forgiveness. The difference could be phrased in this way: on the one hand, forgiving only for the sake of reasons (reasons that I claim are lacking, hence my criticism of her), on the other hand, forgiving for someone’s—his—sake, for their—his and her—sake. There is nothing that prevents the bystander from counting the former possibility—she answering me by saying that what he did was not as bad as I claim it is—as a form of forgiveness, but if one does so it is important to notice that she does not use that word and that it is I, who sees what he did to her as worse than she sees it, who introduce the topic of forgiveness (and thereby reject it). The second possibility—that she does not deny anything of what I say—is, however, of greater interest to our discussion, for it shows us a situation in which my criticism of her for having forgiven is intelligible at the same time as this criticism, from the perspective of my friend, is irrelevant. A philosopher who tries to be neutral here would have to say that there both are and are not conditions for forgiveness, or that there neither are nor not are conditions for forgiveness.10 For example: if I would claim that it is wrong to forgive if no reparation has been made by the one who is about to be forgiven, what would I say if my friend says that she has forgiven him precisely for not having made such reparations? Is there something that makes this wrongdoing of his different from all other wrongdoings, wrongdoings that, in contrast to this one, can be forgiven? This difference must be a fundamental one, not only a difference in degree; indeed, the difference must be so fundamental that forgiving in this situation would not even be wrong but impossible— for as long as I only say that it would be wrong to forgive, his wrongdoing is no different from other wrongdoings, wrongdoings that it can also always be said to be wrong to forgive, as we have seen. If so, the

120 

H. STRANDBERG

conditions for forgiveness are no longer normative. What non-normative conditions might be I will come back to later in this chapter. (This thus means that the question of whether there are things the wrongdoer might do that would prevent forgiveness from taking place is still open.) One source of the confusion that is inherent in the question about the conditions for forgiveness is certainly the challenging nature of forgiveness. But there is also a source that is more general and does not only concern forgiveness: the fact that one’s possibilities of moral understanding will be circumscribed if one primarily approaches moral phenomena by means of concepts such as obligation. For forgiveness, and not only forgiveness, is hard to fit into such schemas:11 are there situations where I am obliged to forgive? where I am obliged not to forgive (and consequently prohibited from forgiving)? and what about situations where I can neither be said to be obliged to forgive nor not to forgive, are they without any moral meaning (in that both to forgive and not to forgive is permitted here)?12 In order for me to be obliged to do something, this something must fulfil certain conditions, and there are consequently conditions for forgiveness if we approach the issue in this way. The problem, however, is that this way of reasoning will make it impossible for one to understand anything of an abundant nature, not only forgiveness but also, say, generosity. The problem does, however, not concern specific phenomena in contrast to others, for in order for the question about being obliged to arise for me, I must also come to understand in what way it matters whether the obligation is fulfilled. And the obvious way in which it matters is that it matters to the one whom the obligation concerns, in our case the person forgiven or not forgiven. This does not necessarily mean that that person notices that it matters, that is, asks my forgiveness, only that it is for his sake, and hence at the same time for ours, that I forgive. And, as I said, this is not only so in the case of forgiveness: without this “sake” mattering to me, all obligations would be incomprehensible. The important point is hence that what lies beyond what could be understood in terms of obligation is not a morally meaningless territory, on the contrary. In other words, there is a deeper moral meaning, which, among other things, logically precedes all obligations and is implied by them, and which forgiveness is a direct expression of.13 A very different, but still closely related, example: the bad conscience someone might have for encountering others in the spirit of normal indifference, in contrast to in the spirit of loving care, affects him all the stronger as it is not about giving to others what they are obliged to be given, affects him all the stronger as it is not about

5 CONDITIONS 

121

preserving the normal state of things. And have he not transcended that state already in having a bad conscience, in not being indifferent? Returning to forgiveness: someone who wants to squeeze forgiveness into one of the three boxes above has to say, I guess, that forgiveness belongs to that middle region where both it and its opposite are permitted, but it is clear that this is something one would say only if forced to choose between these three alternatives, for focusing on what is “permitted” is here an irrelevant sidetrack. “‘Permitted’?,” someone who struggles to forgive might say, “however that may be, it would still be very sad if we did not manage to come back to each other.” A deeper understanding of our moral life is not primarily reached by focusing on what is prohibited and permitted but by, among other things, focusing on what is, precisely, sad and joyful. This is particularly so in the case of forgiveness. Up until this point, we have only discussed the case in which I criticise my friend for having forgiven. But what is to be said about the other possible case, when I criticise my friend for not having forgiven?14 In this case it might seem to be obvious that there are some kinds of conditions. There might certainly be people who, as soon as the question about forgiveness arises at all, would criticise someone who does not forgive, other people who would never do so, even if they might wish and hope that she, who right now does not forgive, will later be able to forgive. If there are conditions here, they would thus be present for someone who would criticise only in some situations. But what kind of conditions? There might seem to be conditions of different kinds here: on the one hand, conditions for it being right or wrong to put forward the criticism; on the other hand, conditions for the correctness of the criticism no matter whether it is put forward or not. The question that is of interest to us is of course something in the line of the second kind of conditions, but that does not mean that it is irrelevant what it would mean to actually put forward the criticism to my friend. In isolation from all the differences that my criticism of her makes—the difference it makes when I put it forward to her or to someone else, or the difference my thinking of her in this way makes to my way of relating to her more generally—it will be very unclear what the criticism means. We will therefore also in what follows focus on the case where I talk to her, that is, when I say to her that she did the wrong thing, bearing in mind that the relevant contrast is not to the case where I think that she did the wrong thing but do not say so to her, but to the case where I do not say so to her simply because I do not think that she did the

122 

H. STRANDBERG

wrong thing. In other words: when would I criticise someone for not having forgiven? My ways of relating to the unforgivingness of others are obviously very different depending on what the issue is about. These differences can, however, not be reduced to the difference between criticising and not criticising these people for their unforgivingness. I might see one friend who does not forgive as, say, cold-hearted, another friend as hateful, bitter, condescending, contemptuous, crushed, etc. These possibilities are different, a difference that, among other things, concerns what is in focus—mind the difference between focusing on her and focusing on what has happened to her (“crushed” is the clearest example of the latter possibility)—and we would disregard these differences if we only paid attention to the difference between criticising someone for doing the wrong thing and not criticising her. Let us, however, seize upon one of them, say “cold-hearted”. Is criticising her for doing the wrong thing a direct consequence of seeing her as cold-hearted? No, and not primarily because I can keep the criticism to myself, but because seeing her in that way does not have to result in criticism, neither spoken nor unspoken. To believe that it has to would, I would say, be a superficial understanding of what it means to see someone as cold-hearted. Compare a case of vanity:15 the difficult thing is to catch sight of one’s vanity and, if one has caught sight of some aspect of it, to stop being vain; believing that being vain is something you stop being by deciding not to be is to misunderstand the problem. And the same thing goes for forgiveness: the difficult thing is to catch sight of one’s unforgivingness (cold-heartedness, pride, bitterness, etc.) and, if one has caught sight of some aspect of it, to stop being unforgiving.16 If one believes that the central task is to inform my friend that she has done the wrong thing, one seems to believe that everything is okay except her lacking this piece of information. There are certainly things you can decide to do or not to do, and with regard to such things criticism is more intelligible, for example if I would say to my friend that I think that she should try to talk to the one who hurt her. It is, however, telling that the word I just used was “should”, which indicates advice rather than criticism. Advice and criticism are not the same thing; both are possible, but when doing a philosophical analysis it is important not to conceive of all calling for change as if it were a form of criticism. Moreover, there is a risk that criticism would lead to a misleading emphasis. The problem with being, say, cold-hearted is not that it is wrong in some general sense of the word, as if the contrast to the cold-hearted person would be someone who

5 CONDITIONS 

123

takes the central thing in life to be to avoid doing anything wrong, whatever it might be. Such a person could be said to be cold-hearted! For the problem with cold-heartedness is not that it is wrong but cold-heartedness itself, or, in other words, that being cold-hearted means to turn people away, in this case the one not forgiven. To make the point in a slightly different way: forgiveness, understood as the way of mending what has been torn apart, means that someone who is not striving for forgiveness is not clear-sighted as concerns the fact of its being torn apart, and the one who does not forgive is consequently unforgiving not only as concerns the person not forgiven but with this relates just as much to herself in a cold-­ hearted way, as she forces herself to live with a loss instead of entering into the forgiving attempt to heal what has been torn apart. The distinction between situations where you would be obliged to forgive and situations where you would not be obliged but permitted to forgive should consequently be questioned, and not because unforgivingness is always of the same kind, but because those terms that are part of the description of the distinction are misleading as concerns forgiveness.

Conditions for Asking Someone’s Forgiveness? In this chapter I have only discussed what it would mean to criticise someone who has or could have forgiven. But as is evident from the way I have discussed forgiveness, especially in Chap. 2, I believe that one problem in the standard philosophy of forgiveness is the strong emphasis on the one who forgives or does not forgive, to the detriment of the one who asks someone’s forgiveness. It is therefore high time to say something about the situation of the latter person also in this chapter. For the possible conditions for forgiveness might also be about the conditions for asking someone’s forgiveness. (If there are such conditions, there will also be conditions for forgiving, someone might claim, as one answer to asking someone’s forgiveness is being forgiven.) What is to be said about this issue? A friend of mine has asked someone’s forgiveness, and I criticise her for doing so. What could such a criticism mean? One distinction that should be made here is the distinction between a case in which the answer to her question is positive, on the one hand, and a case in which the answer is negative, no answer has (yet) been given, or the answer, even though it is formally positive, is understood by me as not a genuine one, on the other hand. Let us start with the first possibility.

124 

H. STRANDBERG

What would an intelligible form of criticism be in this case? I might say to her that she should not have asked his forgiveness but he hers, for he has wronged her, not she him. But in this case it is not her asking as such that I criticise but her understanding of what has happened. Even if we take that into account the point of the criticism is not clear, however. That he is responsible for the fact that what is between them—their relation— has been damaged does not exclude the possibility that she is also responsible, and the very fact that she asks his forgiveness shows that she sees herself as responsible in some sense, perhaps only in being unforgiving. The issue thus hangs on whether she asks his forgiveness for something specific, and if so, what that is. If she does not ask his forgiveness for anything specific, her asking is an expression of the fact that they have been estranged from one another, that she longs to bridge the distance between them, and that she does not see him as the sole cause of that estrangement. If her understanding of the situation is wide of the mark, however, then we have to ask how: is it just a trivial mistake, or is there something she shuts her eyes to, in which case there is in fact a problem in their relation, a problem she could ask his forgiveness for, though a problem of a different kind than the one she does ask his forgiveness for? Furthermore, the kind of criticism of her we are discussing here presupposes that her asking his forgiveness competes with, indeed excludes, his asking her forgiveness. But is there any reason to believe that they compete with or exclude each other? Expressions such as “forgive me” can certainly be used to sweep something under the carpet—she might make use of such an utterance in order to, say, spare herself the trouble of confronting him, and he might use her asking his forgiveness as a way of sparing himself the trouble of going to the bottom of his bad conscience—but this cannot be referred to in order to criticise forgiveness, for sweeping problems under the carpet is not in line with forgiveness but prevents forgiveness from taking place. One source of the belief that his forgiving her excludes her forgiving him is the conception of forgiveness in terms of guilt. Guilt does not have to be understood as something that should, or even can, be distributed, as if my realising that my responsibility for what has happened between us is greater than I had previously taken it to be necessarily means that I take your responsibility to be lesser than I had previously taken it to be, so this is not the problem. The problem with seeing forgiveness in terms of guilt is rather a problem of to what attention is directed. If being forgiven is primarily a question of being relieved of the burden of guilt, then the attention of the one asking someone’s forgiveness is directed to herself,

5 CONDITIONS 

125

not to the one whose forgiveness she is asking nor to the problem in her relation to him, and the attention of the one whose forgiveness she is asking might also thereby become skewed, which means that the problem in their relation is at best seen as unrelated to the process of forgiveness, at worst overshadowed by the question of guilt. It is, however, worth mentioning that these two issues are not unrelated, for if things are good between them, that is, if forgiveness as I use the word has taken place, then there will not be any guilt burdening anyone; if it is still burdening her, this is an expression of the fact that everything is not good, and this is then the problem that has to be dealt with and thereby, only thereby, the guilt burdening her. That said, there might be questions to ask even after the problem in their relation is gone, for the problem in their relation might also be a problem in relation to other people. The other possibility in the distinction I made above was that his answer to her asking his forgiveness is negative, that no answer has (yet) been given, or that the answer, even though it is formally positive, is understood by me as not a genuine one. One variant here is that I anticipate such a negative answer, and this is then the reason for my believing that she should not ask his forgiveness. What is to be said about this? What we are dealing with here is not a banal question that receives a negative answer; in that case the criticism would be very hard to understand. Furthermore, the alleged wrongness of the question cannot be of a general kind, for if the person whose forgiveness she is asking appreciates her asking it, we are back in the possibility I discussed in the paragraph above. What all this means is that the criticism has to concern the possible fact that the question might be painful, in some sense of the word, to the one it is put to. Why might it be painful? There are some different possibilities here. One is that it is not the topic of forgiveness that is painful; the problem is instead that the question reminds him of old wounds that he has managed to forget, old wounds that are now reopened. But how is this to be understood in more detail? My friend, whom I criticise, might be the cause of a wound that exists independently of her. Physical wounds are like that, but if you have one it does not matter much if someone reminds you of it or not. If my friend has killed his child (I am here thinking of a case like Olivier and Francis), the loss exists independently of her, but on the other hand it is hard to imagine his forgetting this loss to such a degree that it would be painful to be reminded of the fact that his child is no longer alive. There might be cases of different kinds here, but still I think that approaching the issue in

126 

H. STRANDBERG

this way is a dead end. For much closer at hand is to understand the reopened wound as one to which my friend is not external but internal. For example: if my friend, an old bully, turns up again and asks the forgiveness of one of her old victims, this is not painful to him because the bullying took something external away from him, the loss of which he is now reminded of, but because the violation itself is brought to life when they meet (and the same could be said for the physical wound and the murdered child, that is, what is brought to life is not the physical wound nor the fact that the child is dead, but rather it is her presence itself, as the one who inflicted the wound and killed the child, that is painful). It is important to remember that what we are discussing here are cases where the question of forgiveness is painful to the one to whom it is put, not cases where the answer to the question is, say, that he finds it difficult to forgive her but that he does not see the question as inappropriate, even perhaps as making him happy. For the same reason we must distinguish between the cases we are discussing here and cases where the question is painful and makes him happy, perhaps makes him happy precisely because it is painful, in that the question helps him to go where he would not have the strength to go on his own. In other words, the cases we are discussing here are cases where the criticism of the asking of the question refers to the kind of pain that I have sketchily described in the above paragraph, that is, the pain arising when the question of forgiveness is not seen as contrasting to the wrongdoing it refers to but as more or less in line with it. “Seen as,” I just wrote. For it is clear that there are cases where the asking is indeed a continuation of the violation it formally distances itself from, but such cases are of no interest in this context, as the one who asks the question in such a spirit does not want the forgiveness the question refers to. (It is certainly often difficult to be clear about one’s own motives, about what I want when asking someone’s forgiveness—lovelessness, great or small, will mask itself in some way, for example as care for the other— but the criticism then concerns that lack of self-knowledge and what has occasioned it, not primarily my asking someone’s forgiveness.) This is another context where the conception of forgiveness in terms of guilt might enter, for if guilt is everything the question concerns, the one who asks someone’s forgiveness only wants something for her own part, and the pain this question might occasion in others—no matter exactly how that pain should be understood—will be the price they would have to pay for her sake. I guess that those who voice strong criticism against her asking his forgiveness sees her question in that light, and my criticism of that

5 CONDITIONS 

127

conception could be repeated here. But even if her asking his forgiveness is not motivated by her wanting to be relieved of guilt, he might still understand her question in that way. He might not be able to take her question seriously, even if everyone else takes the question to be a genuine one. And this is an important insight as concerns forgiveness: a moment ago I mentioned the case where the answer to the question of forgiveness is that he finds it difficult to forgive her but that he does not see the question as inappropriate, even perhaps as making him happy, but another form the difficulty of forgiving someone has is the one where the difficulty affects my understanding of the question itself, at bottom my understanding of her. He sees her in the light of what she has done to him, hence also her asking his forgiveness in the light of what she has done to him, and this asking will therefore be taken as just an additional expression of the same, say, scorn as he saw in what she did to him initially, in fact now even worse as this scorn is given the appearance of friendliness. If I suspect that he will react in this way I might advise her against asking his forgiveness, and if I see him reacting in such a way I might criticise her for having asked his forgiveness. But what status does such advice and such a criticism have? For him and her to be able to get out of the mess in which they are now stuck, forgiveness must take place. This does not have to include the utterance of specific words, for example her asking his forgiveness explicitly, but no matter what it is a process that has to involve both of them, that is, it is not the result of what one of them does in isolation from the other one. My advice and my criticism thus mean that I claim that forgiveness will not take place (ever or right now). Why do I believe that? One might think that this is simply a matter of psychological prediction, but it is not as simple as that. Predicting that no forgiveness will take place contrasts to the hopefulness of forgiveness and is thus an expression of hopelessness, for the belief that the future will not bring with it anything new. For prediction is based on the idea of continuity: the future can be predicted to the extent that what is to come is a direct consequence of the past. But this means excluding the possibility of something making a rupture in the imagined continuity, the possibility of creation, of that which transcends the given and brings forth something that has not previously existed. Forgiveness is one example of such creation. Someone seeking forgiveness can hence agree with everything the critic is saying, might agree that the one whose forgiveness she wants to ask will probably react negatively to it, but nonetheless say that she must still try to open his eyes to another possibility, the possibility of love, for his sake, for their sake. When criticising

128 

H. STRANDBERG

her I certainly find my criticism legitimate, but if she does not shut her eyes to anything I point to, what more is to be said? Here we have thus arrived at the limit of the extent to which it is meaningful to approach forgiveness with the idea that it might be “wrong”. This is even more evident if we refer to a possibility I mentioned above without saying anything about it, a possibility that only occasioned a discussion of other possibilities: that it is the topic of forgiveness as such that is painful. This possibility is certainly not without connections to the one I just have discussed, the possibility that the question of forgiveness reminds the one to whom it is put of old wounds that he has managed to forget, old wounds that are now reopened. But the possibility I refer to now concerns something partly different: that the question seems to force the one to whom it is put to concern himself with something he does not want to deal with, something he finds challenging and troublesome. And it is true that a question that has been asked changes things for the one to whom it is put: to act as if nothing has happened is marked by that “as if” and will hence be a matter of ignoring her and her question, something that not doing anything would not be if the question had not been asked. And it is true that forgiveness is often not a simple and nice thing, is such a thing only in those cases where he just needs to inform her of a change that took place a long time ago. The possibility I am discussing here is thus the corresponding one to the case where the question is painful and makes him happy, makes him happy precisely because the question is painful, in that the question helps him to go where he would not have the strength to go on his own. If I criticise her, referring to the fact that asking his forgiveness means making illegitimate demands upon him, I disregard a distinction that is central to her, however, central to the extent that her question is a genuine one: forcing him to answer in a specific way would not mean having made things good between them, such an answer would be of interest only to someone who just wants to hear a specific thing being said, not to the one who wants forgiveness to take place. If she really wants forgiveness to take place, she does not see asking his forgiveness as making demands on him. I, as a critic, might see her question in that unforgiving light; generally speaking, it is important to be aware of the fact that my criticism may be occasioned by my own difficulties with forgiveness. The one to whom the question is put might also see it in that light. But here we have again arrived at the limit of the extent to which it is meaningful to approach forgiveness with the idea that it might be “wrong”. For that the one to whom the question is put sees it in that light

5 CONDITIONS 

129

is not external to his difficulties with forgiveness but is just one form those difficulties take. From her perspective, the fact that he sees the question in that light is thus not a reason against asking his forgiveness but a reason for doing so: to ask his forgiveness is to want forgiveness to take place, that is, among other things, to want him to be liberated from his difficulties with forgiveness. Someone seeking forgiveness can hence agree with everything the critic is saying, but nonetheless, indeed precisely for that reason, say that she must try to open his eyes to another possibility, the possibility of love, for his sake, for their sake. If she does not shut her eyes to anything I point to when criticising her, what more is to be said? As I critic, I might point to all kinds of aggravating circumstances, but she might see the same circumstances as making her question all the more important. Let us now, at the end of our discussion about asking someone’s forgiveness, ask what is to be said about someone not asking the forgiveness of those she has wronged. Why does she not do so? In many cases, the fact that she does not ask that question is just the other side of what she has done, of what she does not ask his forgiveness for, the other side of the same cruelty, selfishness, pettiness or what have you, and the criticism of her for not asking his forgiveness just the other side of the criticism of her for having done these things and for doing them. In order for there to be a separate criticism of her for not asking his forgiveness, that criticism must hence be about a situation in which she has recognised the full meaning of what she has done but still does not ask his forgiveness. Again: why does she not do so? One possibility is that she thinks that it is unnecessary: why make a fuss about something that was only a trifle? She might of course be right, and in that case asking his forgiveness would rather suggest that there is something generally problematic in the relation between them— for why would a trifle otherwise potentially ruin their relationship, or why would she otherwise believe that a trifle might ruin their relationship?— and this would be so also in the case where it was not a trifle but forgiveness has taken place without any explicit words having been uttered, in which case to ask his forgiveness would suggest that she doubts whether the forgiveness that has taken place is lasting, a doubt that certainly has to be dealt with if it is there but that the question put to him does not solve by itself. But let us imagine a case where I as a critic do not see things in that way, where I do not see it as a trifle or as something that has already been settled. In other words, when she says that she finds asking his forgiveness to be unnecessary, I take that to mean that she diminishes the

130 

H. STRANDBERG

importance of what she has done and that she does not recognise the full meaning of what she has done, for forgiveness as the way of mending what has been broken means that someone who does not strive for forgiveness to take place is not clear-sighted as regards the brokenness. But that would mean that this first possibility is after all just another version of the case where her not asking his forgiveness is just the other side of what she has done to him. So let us move on to a second possibility. In this case, the reason for her not asking his forgiveness is that she cannot bring herself to do so: he will reject her and her question, it will not make a difference, he will only take offence, it will only be degrading for and painful to both of them, she says to me and to herself. This second possibility might just be another version of the first one, in that these are things she persuades herself (and perhaps others) to believe in order to diminish the importance of what she has done in a less striking way. But I do not believe that this is the only way her words have to be taken; the more immediate meaning is that she doubts the possibilities of forgiveness, a doubt that will be the more desperate the better she understands the full meaning of what she has done. (And, as we have seen, I too might suffer from this kind of despair, suffer from the hopelessness involved in not seeing any possibilities for something radically new, for something that makes a rupture in that in which they are now stuck.) Is that despair “wrong”? It is certainly possible to claim that she has an erroneous picture of him, that she is wrong in saying that he will reject her, and even if she claims, when he greets her happily at an occasion when they happen to meet, that the welcoming spirit in which he responds to her is not genuine and that the inner rejection is there just as before, it could be evident to everyone but her that she is wrong. But the more interesting case is when the conflict between the belief in the possibility of forgiveness and the absence of such a belief cannot be evaluated by seeing which predictions come true and which do not, as if the belief in the possibility of forgiveness had to weaken when the longed-for forgiveness is not given (for such a “mistake” could just as well make the belief and the longing stronger). I might hence hope, for her sake and for theirs—and in a way also for mine—that she will gain that belief, that she will come to see that asking his forgiveness is not a meaningless thing, and I might try to open her eyes to this meaningfulness, but conceiving of such a hope and such an endeavour as a form of criticism would be strange, for however evident it is that her picture of him is

5 CONDITIONS 

131

erroneous, that error is not the result of stupidity or of something that can easily be changed. Generally speaking, there are at least three risks involved in having concepts such as right and wrong as one’s main moral focus: it makes our understanding shallow (in this case, by ignoring concepts such as hopelessness and despair); it risks modelling the description of the inner difficulty, the struggle with oneself, after outer difficulties (say, cognitive difficulties); and it makes us conceive of the problem as if it were a general problem of getting things right, in contrast to a problem of how I respond to a specific person.

Non-normative Conditions There is a very different way of approaching the issue of conditions for forgiveness than the one I have made use of thus far. This different approach concerns the distinction between forgiveness having and not having taken place. What are the conditions for forgiveness taking place? In the normative case, the question concerns whether you should go for a specific possible form of forgiveness or not; in the non-normative case, the question concerns what this possibility is about in the first place. If these conditions are not fulfilled, to forgive is not wrong but impossible. How is this to be understood? That there are such conditions might seem to be a trivial fact, but there are important philosophical points to be found here if one looks more closely at the issue. So let us start by considering the corresponding opposite statement to the above one: not to forgive when these conditions are fulfilled is not wrong but impossible. If there is any sense in such a statement, the conditions must include the understanding the persons involved have of the issue, otherwise it would be possible to be convinced that you have not forgiven someone you have in fact forgiven. Even though it is possible to imagine situations in which you might say such a thing about someone, this is still a peculiar situation, for to the extent that someone is convinced he has not forgiven someone, that conviction means that there is still a problem in their relation, and the process of forgiveness has thus not come to an end. And this remark is far from unimportant when it comes to understanding the conditions for forgiveness, for the remark means that talking about conditions here is potentially misleading, as if it were possible to forgive by performing a number of actions stated on a piece of paper, when what is needed is a change of heart, away from,

132 

H. STRANDBERG

among other things, such an impersonal attitude that the list of actions to perform indicates, towards—a turning towards—the person to be forgiven herself. I just described forgiveness as a process. Such a description affects how to understand the issue we are discussing, the issue of conditions. For, on the one hand, you can consider the process from the point of view of its ending, and hence describe everything that precedes that ending as forms (of the relation between us) that do not satisfy all the conditions for it to be possible to say that forgiveness has taken place; on the other hand, you can compare every point in the process of forgiveness to what precedes it, and then forgiveness can be said to have taken place even if the process has not come to its end. That it is a process also means that these two ways of considering forgiveness are closely connected, the first one to the second one in the trivial sense that the end is reached through these intermediate stages, the second one to the first one in a more interesting way, for these preceding points cannot be understood in isolation from the movement they are part of, towards that end, cannot be understood in isolation from the longing they bear. There are hence no objections to be made to describing the attainment of some kind of modus vivendi as forgiveness; the objection becomes relevant if the process of forgiveness is thereby said to have come to its end, which is either a false description of the case or an expression of an unforgiving spirit prevalent in the relation between the persons in question. That longing is an integral element of the process also means that a forgiving spirit can exist and a process of forgiveness get off the ground even when the one who has wronged me has shown no remorse at all.17 A strong emphasis on the word “end” could, however, be misleading too. For what we are talking about here is life, a life together in forgiveness. Or, better expressed: a life in love. For what we need to attend to in our discussion here is the spirit that forgiveness is an expression of, a spirit that can be there also when the topic of forgiveness is not relevant. And one word for this spirit is love. Forgiveness would then be what love is in those situations that call for forgiveness,18 and the same spirit will accordingly permeate the relation also after the process of forgiveness has come to its end. This end is thus only an end as long as we fix our gaze upon the specific problem that the process of forgiveness has concerned in this specific case. In other words, forgiveness is no mere return, partly because it cannot be presupposed that our life together before the wrongdoing was

5 CONDITIONS 

133

a life in such a spirit, partly because that life together is, precisely, a life, that is, not a fixed thing but movement. These two themes—process and love—are especially important to pay attention to as concerns the possibility of a form of forgiveness that only involves one of the parties, that is, when I forgive someone who has not asked my forgiveness, who does not seem to care whether I forgive him or not, who might not even know if I have forgiven him or not. For this should be understood as a part of the process, not as its having come to its end. Just as is the case with love, where his response to me, whether a loving or an unloving one, although not a condition for me to be able to love him, is nonetheless essential for whether the relation of love is a full one or only exists by halves, so it is with forgiveness: the end, towards which the process moves, is a forgiveness lived together, and if this togetherness is absent something essential is lacking.19 Thereby, in the discussion in the last paragraphs, the answer to the question about the conditions for forgiveness taking place has been given: forgiveness is there when a life together in the spirit of forgiveness, the spirit of love, is there. Forgiveness can also be said to take place in the very striving for such a life, in the process by means of which we approach it, however slowly. All potential criticisms of forgiving or not forgiving someone—referring to what has been the theme of the greatest part of this chapter—must in the end be carried by the same striving in order to be true to forgiveness itself.

Conclusion One way of summing up what I have been trying to show here is to say that the question of conditions is not a pure one. The question whether, say, forgiving someone is sometimes wrong is mixed up with other problems and difficulties, and the question that we actually encounter is therefore not a question of conditions. In the case where I struggle with the question whether to forgive, this is obvious, for the question of conditions is then not independent of the question I struggle with. In the case where I am a potential critic of someone else, I am standing in a relation to the one I criticise, which means that our relation is part of the issue. (Without such a relation, the question would not be a moral question, for answering it in one way or the other would then not make a real difference and the question would consequently not commit me to anything.) In this chapter, I have therefore imagined that I am talking to a friend of mine. In

134 

H. STRANDBERG

other words, our relation is just as central as her relation to the man she has or has not forgiven. It is certainly possible to address a stranger, but by doing so I would come closer to him, and my possible criticism would therefore establish a relation between us. Let me end this chapter by a small twist to these various examples. It is obviously possible for me to pressure my friend or talk her into doing or not doing certain things. (Philosophers should be especially attentive to the dangers of their argumentative skills.) But forgiving and not forgiving are not symmetrical in this respect. While the hard stance my friend takes against the man who has wronged her is there also if I have pressured her to do so, their relationship is still troubled by what he did to her if I have pressured her to, say, utter certain words or meet him more often than before; indeed, the pressure adds further troubles to it. This means that my possible opinions about the case—about say, the relevant conditions— does not differ only as to content, but primarily as to form. Most importantly, new questions about forgiveness might now arise, concerning the relation between me and my friend, if I, say, pressured her or deserted her when she needed my advice and help. One reason forgiveness is a challenging topic is because as soon as I believe that I have managed to get a firm grip on forgiveness by laying down conditions for it, forgiveness slips out of my hands and addresses me with questions about what I am doing, about the way in which what I am doing affects my relations to other people. That also goes for my relation to you, as the reader of this book, and yours to me.

Notes 1. See Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p.  24); Garrard and McNaughton 2003. Similar, but not identical distinctions are the ones between elective and non-elective forgiveness (Calhoun 1992), personal and redemptive forgiveness (Bennett 2003) and bilateral and unilateral forgiveness (Govier 2002, pp. 45, 62). 2. The distinction between normative and non-normative conditions, but not these terms, can be found in Cowley 2010, pp. 560, 576. A similar distinction is also to be found in Benn 1996, p. 374. 3. For an example of such an abstract description, see Snow 1993, pp. 77–78. 4. Many take for granted, without any arguments, that there is such a risk. Milam (2018, p. 575), for example, talks about the risk that the one who forgives someone “is encouraging further mistreatment and implying to others that she condones his behaviour”. For objections, see Calhoun

5 CONDITIONS 

135

1992, p. 85: “by forgiving him, he may come to see that he is harming real people, people he might like. As a point about human moral psychology, the idea that resentment, protest, and punishment best effect moral improvement is surely misguided.” (For a similar point, see Holmgren 1993, p. 348.) In Hieronymi 2001, pp. 539–541, we seem to be given an explanation of why there is such a risk, an explanation that, however, takes for granted that anger and forgiveness are opposites of each other, something I will question in Chap. 6. 5. As Thomas Talbott puts it (1993, p. 164): “Just because she does forgive her husband and continues to love him, she may refuse to continue in a dishonest relationship.” 6. For some examples, see Norlock and Rumsay 2009, pp.  105–106. For some examples and a critical discussion, see Govier and Hirano 2008, pp. 439–440. A clear case is Verbin (2010, p. 620), who in his very critical discussion of reconciliation claims that those who aim at reconciliation see reconciliation “as overriding their concern for their own well-being and safety”. A similar claim is made by Geoffrey Scarre (2016, p. 934), who takes issue with reconciliation because the one who seeks it “wish[es] to resume any kind [sic!] of relations with the offender”. Especially instructive in this context are the ambiguities found in a paper by Anca Gheaus (2010). Basically, she sees forgiveness as a moral compromise resorted to in order to maintain a relationship with someone. Forgiveness is, therefore, conditional, just as all compromises are, for some relationships are too harmful, but forgiveness is still often necessary, because, as care ethicists point out, human relatedness is on the whole a good thing. In other words, Gheaus wants to give some room to what she sees as the opposite to forgiveness—anger, resentment, vindictiveness, vengefulness—but not too much. However, at this point the whole thing strikes me as very peculiar. Whereas vengefulness and vindictiveness are clearly destructive, anger, when it is directed at what is harmful in and destructive of a relationship, is an expression of care and of the desire to maintain and restore the relationship. Moral compromise and submissiveness thus come out on the same side as vengefulness and vindictiveness, whereas caring for a spirit of love to remain in and return to the relationship in question—and forgiveness is one aspect of such a spirit—goes against submissiveness. The interesting fact is, however, that Gheaus is not blind to this, as her discussion shows, hence the ambiguities. (As to the relation of harmful relationships and forgiveness, I believe that David Tombs gets it right when he writes [2008, pp. 591–592]: “In such cases […] it is not the offer of forgiveness per se that is the problem; rather, it is the lack of necessary protective action that accompany it. […] The issue of

136 

H. STRANDBERG

safety and protection needs to be […] considered quite separately from […] the offer of forgiveness”.) 7. Downie 1965, p. 131. 8. For good points regarding this issue, see Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988, pp.  21–22); Novitz 1998, p.  304; Card 2002, p.  178; Murphy 2003, pp.  14, 101–106; Garrard and McNaughton 2003, p.  48; Allais 2008, p. 50; Garrard and McNaughton 2010, pp. 92–95. See especially Collingwood 1916, pp. 179–180: “Punishment and forgiveness are thus not only compatible but identical”; and Talbott 1993, p. 163: “[J]ustice requires forgiveness.” 9. Kekes writes (2009, p. 489): “[E]vil ought to ‘be remembered bitterly and resentfully.’ Any recommendation to the contrary is a dangerous and sentimental falsification of the dark aspects of moral life.” Now the issue does not concern recommendations—in a conversation with a friend I may try to make her see things in a different light, but that is not to recommend anything to her, let alone to recommend anything to everyone—but how to understand evil. Must not evil, if it is to be seen clear-sightedly, be understood in the spirit of its opposite? And what would it mean that say that bitterness is that opposite? 10. As Christopher Cowley nicely puts it (2010, p. 574): Within the third-personal perspective, the decision to forgive the unforgivable (including the unrepentant) can then only appear ‘mad’ or ‘illogical’ (Derrida), or inappropriate (Griswold). The victim cannot explain the decision to forgive, cannot give full reasons for it, for this would be to bring the decision and the act into the third-personal space of reasons. This also entails that the victim’s decision is not subject to moral praise and blame, to encouragement or discouragement, in accordance with Griswold’s understanding of the electivity requirement. Viewed third-­personally, the forgiveness will simply become a fact, as immune to subsequent moral judgements as a natural disaster. See also Norlock and Rumsay 2009, p. 120. 11. According to Berel Lang (1994, p. 105), this is one reason why philosophers have written relatively little on forgiveness. 12. One way of taking all this into account within the standard parameters of analytic moral philosophy is to describe forgiveness as “supererogatory”; see Gamlund 2010. As can be seen from the above paragraph, however, this way of describing it would still be misleading. 13. For a somewhat similar point, made in the discussion of forgiveness, see Murphy 2003, p. 62. 14. Cf. Milam 2018, p.  570: “[F]orgiveness is […] sometimes required—as you’d expect of any moral practice.”

5 CONDITIONS 

137

15. See Backström 2014. 16. This fact also goes for the prospective critic. The difficulty of catching sight of my own unforgivingness makes it difficult for me to catch sight of the unforgivingness of others; the kind of unforgivingness that it is easy for me to catch sight of is that kind that has no close similarity to mine. And what alternatives I am able to imagine when it comes to the question what to do about the unforgivingness (of others or of myself) I do catch sight of, and what I then in fact do—all this is closely connected to my own moral difficulties, as it is about our life together. 17. As Kierkegaard points out (1963, p. 321): “[T]he loving one who suffered wrong […] needs to forgive […] it is conciliatory to need to forgive already when the other is perhaps the least thinking of seeking forgiveness.” Christopher Bennett fails to notice this when he writes (2018, p. 220): [I]t is only appropriate to exercise it [the power to forgive] when the offender has discharged their own secondary obligations or at least is making decisive efforts to do so: otherwise the forgiver would be open to the criticism that they are not taking the secondary obligations—and hence the wrongdoing—seriously Here one might say that the person Kierkegaard is talking about does not care about what is appropriate or not appropriate—and that is all the worse for appropriateness. (The same point could be made with reference to the criticism of others.) But the more fundamental issue concerns Bennett’s way of isolating what he calls forgiveness from the longing to forgive that Kierkegaard is talking about. 18. Cf. Glen Pettigrove’s initial version of a Humean take on forgiveness (2007, p. 450): “[F]orgiveness begins to look like a special kind of compassion or love. It is love with a history, a history marked by harm or injury.” 19. This therefore means that there is a sense in which repentance is a condition for forgiveness (as rightly, but in misleading terms, pointed out by John Wilson, with reference to the fact that forgiveness is ultimately not unilateral [1988, pp.  534–535]), but not as if it were wrong to forgive someone who is unrepentant—that would be a normative condition. However, saying that repentance is a condition would not be correct if that would mean that forgiveness is conditional upon, say, some specific act; forgiveness in its full form takes place when we meet each other in the spirit of forgiveness, and spirit is not a specific act. There is such a thing as forgiving the unrepentant, just as there is such a thing as unrequited love, but in both cases something essential is lacking. (As Donald Shriver expresses the point [1995, p. 210]: “[T]he two sides of forgiveness must never be lost to sight: forgiveness is interdependent with repentance. Absent the latter, the

138 

H. STRANDBERG

former remains incomplete, conditional, in a posture of waiting.”) But insofar as one understands forgiveness to refer to, say, everything that I can do to make our relation good (again), there is nothing that prevents me from forgiving the unrepentant except the fact that “everything” will never have been done. As David Tombs expresses the point (2008, pp. 592–593): [A]lthough it is possible for a victim or survivor to offer forgiveness for an offense that the offender does not repent of, or even acknowledge, an important asymmetry needs to be noted between victim and perpetrator here. In order for offenders to accept forgiveness, there is a condition. They must acknowledge the offense, at least inwardly to themselves, or there is no logical possibility of accepting the forgiveness that is offered. […] Accepting forgiveness is logically dependent on acknowledging a wrongdoing, but there is no logical necessity that the wrongdoer repent. […] In terms of the offer of forgiveness, there are no external pre-­conditions or constraints governing the offer of forgiveness, beyond what the offended party is psychologically ready to do.

Bibliography Allais, Lucy. 2008. Wiping the slate clean: The heart of forgiveness. Philosophy and Public Affairs 36: 33–68. Backström, Joel. 2014. Touchy subjects: Wittgenstein’s ‘Freudianism’ and the moral dynamics of repression. European Journal of Psychoanalysis (2). Benn, Piers. 1996. Forgiveness and loyalty. Philosophy 71: 369–383. Bennett, Christopher. 2003. Personal and redemptive forgiveness. European Journal of Philosophy 11: 127–144. ———. 2018. The alteration thesis: Forgiveness as a normative power. Philosophy and Public Affairs 46: 207–233. Calhoun, Cheshire. 1992. Changing one’s heart. Ethics 103: 79–96. Card, Claudia. 2002. The atrocity paradigm: A theory of evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1916. Religion and philosophy. London: Macmillan. Cowley, Christopher. 2010. Why genuine forgiveness must be elective and unconditional. Ethical Perspectives 17: 556–579. Downie, R.S. 1965. Forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–134. Gamlund, Espen. 2010. Supererogatory forgiveness. Inquiry 53: 540–564. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. ———. 2010. Forgiveness. Durham: Acumen.

5 CONDITIONS 

139

Gheaus, Anca. 2010. Is unconditional forgiveness ever good? In New topics in feminist philosophy of religion: Contestations and transcendence incarnate, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson, 51–68. Dordrecht: Springer. Govier, Trudy. 2002. Forgiveness and revenge. London: Routledge. Govier, Trudy, and Colin Hirano. 2008. A conception of invitational forgiveness. Journal of Social Philosophy 39: 429–444. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2001. Articulating an uncompromising forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62: 529–555. Holmgren, Margaret R. 1993. Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons. American Philosophical Quarterly 30: 341–352. Kekes, John. 2009. Blames versus forgiveness. The Monist 92: 488–506. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1963. Kjerlighedens Gjerningar: Nogre christelige Overveielser i Talers Form. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Lang, Berel. 1994. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 31: 105–117. Milam, Per-Erik. 2018. Against elective forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21: 569–584. Murphy, Jeffrie G. 2003. Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norlock, Kathryn J., and Jean Rumsay. 2009. The limits of forgiveness. Hypatia 24: 100–122. Novitz, David. 1998. Forgiveness and self-respect. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Pettigrove, Glen. 2007. Hume on forgiveness and the unforgivable. Utilitas 19: 447–465. Scarre, Geoffrey. 2016. On taking back forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19: 931–944. Shriver, Donald W. 1995. An ethic for enemies: Forgiveness in politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snow, Nancy E. 1993. Self-forgiveness. Journal of Value Inquiry 27: 75–80. Talbott, Thomas. 1993. Punishment, forgiveness, and divine justice. Religious Studies 29: 151–168. Tombs, David. 2008. The offer of forgiveness. Journal of Religious Ethics 36: 587–593. Verbin, N. 2010. Forgiveness and hatred. Ethical Perspectives 14: 603–625. Wilson, John. 1988. Why forgiveness requires repentance. Philosophy 63: 534–535.

CHAPTER 6

Virtue

Is it a virtue to forgive?1 (Or, phrased somewhat differently, is being forgiving a virtue?) I will answer this question in the negative: it is not a virtue to forgive. Such an answer can however be understood in two ways, either as a criticism of the moral significance of forgiveness or as a criticism of the moral significance of the concept of virtue. It is in the latter way that my answer should be understood. In other words, this chapter is an additional part of one of the main themes of this book: that forgiveness is a challenge to moral philosophy. The concept of virtue is, however, not used in only one, uniform way, so saying that it is or is not a virtue to forgive does not mean much until one has explained in more detail what one means when saying such a thing. What do I mean by “virtue”? In this chapter I will refer to some of the main features of Aristotle’s way of using the concept. The question I asked above thus concerns the relation between forgiveness and the most salient features of ἀρετή in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. That I refer to Aristotle is not only due to his immense importance in the history of moral philosophy as concerns the understanding of virtue, but also to the fact that he actually has something to say about forgiveness. What I will try to show is that it is not a coincidence that there are possibilities that Aristotle does not mention when describing forgiveness, for these possibilities would tear apart the conceptual net he makes in his moral philosophy. This means that it is not possible to meet my critical discussion by referring to difficulties of translation. Even if συγγνώμη is best translated as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_6

141

142 

H. STRANDBERG

“forgiveness”—and that is not self-evident, “excuse” is another possibility2—this does not mean that they overlap each other perfectly; but it is still true, if I am right, that there are possibilities that would change the discussion fundamentally if they were taken into account, whichever words you use. This chapter could thus be read as a contribution to the critique of Aristotle’s moral philosophy generally, although my ambitions are limited and only concern forgiveness as a possible virtue.

Aristotle on Forgiveness What does Aristotle, then, have to say about forgiveness? In the context of his account of “mildness” (πραότης), a virtue of character, Aristotle says: “[T]he mild person is not revengeful, but rather forgiving.”3 Mildness is a typical example of a virtue. Aristoteles starts his discussion of mildness by saying that “mildness is the mean as concerns anger”,4 and continues: The person who is angry at the right things and with the right people, further in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time, is praised. This person would be mild […] For the mild person will be undisturbed and not led away by feelings, but angry at the things and for the length of time that reason prescribes.5

The mean is thus found by means of judgment; since it concerns individual cases, the judgment cannot be captured by a formula, however, a fact that Aristotle emphasises also in this context.6 The word “mildness” might perhaps be a little misleading, as Aristotle points out, for it easily suggests too little anger rather than the mean, but, on the other hand, this could be a pedagogical advantage, for exaggerated anger is, according to Aristotle, far more common than insufficient anger.7 The mean can therefore also be described with reference to the opposite of anger, as a question of providing enough space for the opposite of anger. According to Aristotle, this opposite is forgiveness. Also in the case of forgiveness, it is hence possible to go too far: Deficiency [of anger …] is blamed. For people who do not get angry at the right things are considered foolish, also those who do not get angry in the right way, at the right time and with the right people. […] To put up with being humiliated […] is slavish.8

6 VIRTUE 

143

For this reason, one should get angry and revenge oneself when the situation really calls for it, in other words not forgive: “For revenge puts an end to anger, since it produces pleasure in place of pain.”9 And, in another context: “Let anger be desire […] for apparent vengeance because of an apparent contempt directed against oneself or against anyone near to one. […] all anger is followed by some pleasure, from the hope of getting vengeance.”10

Judgment As we have seen, Aristotle contrasts forgiveness and anger: either you are angry or you forgive. But such a description disregards another possibility, that it is precisely the one I am angry with whom I can forgive, that anger and forgiveness are often conceptually dependent. In such a case, forgiveness does not mean that I realise that my anger was not called for; on the contrary, forgiveness is here a response to a situation in which anger cannot be said to be a mistake. Anger could even be an expression of love, for the more I care about someone, the more troubled I will be by the, say, spite that she displays, spite destroying her and us.11 It is when I really think that I have been mistreated that I forgive. (If one takes anger and forgiveness to be incompatible, one is perhaps struck by the strangeness of saying that someone bursting with anger has forgiven the one she is angry with. But if that is a strange thing to say, this does not mean that she has not forgiven him; it might only mean that the topic of forgiveness will not arise here at all.12 And if it has arisen, it will not do to point to her anger if one is to understand the difficulty of forgiving.)13,14 Aristotle’s take on forgiveness, that it is the opposite of anger, is not unique to him but can be found in many contemporary discussions of forgiveness.15 A reason given for why we ought to abstain from forgiving is precisely that the one who forgives lets himself be humiliated and does not stand up against evil, a reason clearly related to Aristotle’s above discussion. One example is Jeffrie Murphy, who writes: [F]orgiveness is the foreswearing of resentment – where resentment is a negative feeling (anger […] It is simply unacceptable in the mental life of a rational person to have feelings that are inappropriate or unfitting to their objects […] a too ready tendency to forgive may be a sign that one lacks self-respect […] When we are willing to be doormats for others, we have […] “morbid dependency.” […] a failure to resent moral injuries done to me is

144 

H. STRANDBERG

[…] a failure to care about the very rules of morality. […] If it is proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel indignation when I see third parties morally wronged, must it not be equally proper (perhaps even sometimes mandatory) to feel resentment when I experience moral wrong done to myself?16

If you want to use the word “forgiveness” in that way, you can of course do so; to what extent forgiveness, so understood, is a good thing or not is a question that then needs to be asked. But precisely if you use the word “forgiveness” in that way is it vital to see that there are possibilities that transcend that setup. Is the question how I should relate to the person I am angry with really settled just because I see my anger as justified? Is there only one way of relating to someone you are angry with? Is Aristotle really right when taking it for granted that revenge is the only way of living your anger? Of course, the anger I feel after having been mistreated need not be of a revengeful kind, but that only makes it all the more important to ask, when it is of a revengeful kind, if things are settled just because this is how I feel.17 This is not an accidental oversight on Aristotle’s part. It is connected to his emphasis on moral judgment, the first feature of Aristotle’s way of using the concept of virtue that I will discuss here in relation to forgiveness.18 If you claim that forgiveness is out of place unless it can be described as the result of a judgment, a judgment about what is the right response to the situation you are in, you disregard another possibility. This possibility will become more visible if we refer to another concept, pardon, a concept that might seem to be distantly related to the concept of forgiveness.19 Whereas the precise sentence is the result of a judgment—and here Aristotle reminds us of the fact that the rule does not apply itself, that good judgment is needed to be able to see the implications of the rule in the particular situation20—this is not so when it comes to pardon. The one who is pardoned has no right to be pardoned, as if there existed some rule she could refer to in order to show that she ought to be pardoned; pardon is a manifestation of the will of the one who pardons, a decision.21 Whereas pardoning underlines the power of the one who pardons over the one who is pardoned—the latter is subject to the discretion of the former—forgiveness, understood in the way I explicate it in this book, is about making our relation into something better than it is at present, the present state of our relation deeply formed by the wound you inflicted on me, and consequently cannot be a question of exercising power. But judgments are just

6 VIRTUE 

145

as alien in such a case. When being on the point of forgiving I might in fact present my forgiving as the result of a judgment, by saying that anyone would forgive in this situation, that forgiving is right and a matter of course, present it in that way to others and to myself in order to avoid the personal dimension of forgiveness; as I said, forgiveness is about mending our personal relation, a relation damaged by what you have done to me, so if I want to avoid the personal commitment involved in forgiveness without appearing unforgiving, to others and to myself, I must relate to the question as to a question that does not involve me. But forgiveness is not a question about what the situation calls for, it is about us. Forgiveness being about mending our relation, it is not the opposite of anger. If I realise that my anger was unjustified there is no need of mending a damaged relation; if there is anyone who is in need of forgiveness in such a situation it is I, because of my wrongful anger. It is when the other has really hurt me that the question of forgiveness arises. Contrasting forgiveness and anger can be understood as another way of avoiding the personal dimension of forgiveness: if there would be such a conflict, the only way to come together again would be to determine who is right, and if I am the one who is right the entire task of mending our relation lies with the other, who now must realise that her anger was unjustified. That there is no such conflict means that the relation is just as much about me. To forgive can be said to be, in spite of what she has done, not seeing her as characterised by it. If so, forgiveness is not a judgment. There is a more general criticism to be made of every account in moral philosophy that sees judgments as fundamental. A judgment requires some sort of basis to start out from, which means that there are more fundamental questions to ask, questions about how I understand the situation I am in, an understanding on the basis of which I then can make some judgment or other. In other words, forgiveness can be said to be a new understanding, not a new judgment on the basis of the same understanding as before.22

The Golden Mean The second feature of Aristotle’s description of forgiveness I would like to discuss is that he says that we should follow the middle course as regards forgiveness.23 There are simply two faults you can commit, you can forgive too much or forgive too little. This feature of his description is clearly connected to the first one, forgiveness as judgment. An erroneous judgment

146 

H. STRANDBERG

can be erroneous in two different ways, first if you think that something is not called for even though it is (which would be to forgive too little), second if you think that something is called for even though it is not (which would be to forgive too much). As is clear by now, describing forgiveness in such terms is very misleading, I think, but it is not hard to find examples of cases that remind one of the first kind of fault. But what about the second kind? Is it possible to go too far as regards forgiveness? If one, like Aristotle, sees forgiveness and anger as opposed to one another, it is not hard to claim that one can go too far as regards forgiveness, for that would simply mean that one feels too little anger. But if one has rejected such an opposition and sees anger and forgiveness as nearly related, it is much less clear what it would mean to go too far as regards forgiveness and much less clear how forgiveness can be made to fit into the Aristotelian framework. Someone might claim that an example of exaggerated forgiveness would be a case in which I forgive someone, after which she does the same thing again to me, the very thing I just forgave her for having done. But is not the problem here that she does the same thing again, not that I have forgiven her? Would not blaming me (or myself) be partly to excuse her? For the cruelty in doing the same thing again consists among other things in its being a violation of the goodwill manifested in forgiveness. Furthermore, the fact that she has done the same thing again gives rise to a new question, whether to forgive her again or not, and if such a question is at all intelligible, the meaning of what has happened is not settled, as if it were now evident that no more forgiving is possible. If this were an example of exaggerated forgiveness, it would also mean that it was wrong of her to ask my forgiveness—but was it really wrong? In order to say something about this issue, the abstract phrase “does the same thing again” is clearly insufficient. So think of a parent, losing her temper and scolding her child, after which she asks its forgiveness. Both the parent and the child might know that she will in all likelihood lose her temper again in the future and act in the same way, but their relation would certainly be much worse if she never asked the child’s forgiveness. The words themselves can be uttered in many different spirits, of course, but if we imagine them uttered lovingly, they create a background against which the lost temper, now or in the future, will be understood by the child in a very different way than without that specific background.24 If we approach the issue from the other side instead, not as a description of forgiveness that has already taken place (forgiveness that is hence allegedly possibly faulty), but as a description of what it means to struggle

6 VIRTUE 

147

with the question whether to forgive or not, what do we see then? It is certainly possible for me to say to myself that I should not forgive this and that person, but this only shows that the question whether to forgive or not is a live question for me, the more live the more insistently I claim that I should not forgive her. In other words, the claim that I should not forgive her is not a definitive, final conclusion, whereas forgiveness, on the other hand, can be understood as what ends our falling-out. Describing the question I struggle with when I ask myself whether to forgive or not as a question about finding the middle course between two extremes would hence not do justice to it. The risk of going too far as regards forgiveness is not part of what characterises my difficulty. Finally, saying that forgiveness is the middle course between two extremes is not a pertinent description if we are trying to describe the very event of forgiving. For there is something exuberant about forgiving someone: think about the joy involved in finding one’s way back to the other after having hurt one another, a joy the character of which is not grasped if you describe it as the middle course between too little and too much. This fact becomes clear also in situations where I do not forgive someone, for the very difficulty has to do with her not being indifferent to me; if she were, not seeing her anymore would not be a problem and, furthermore, I would not be disappointed in her for what she has done nor feel sorrow for what has been lost. As is clear by now, the point I have tried to make here is that if its being the middle course between two extremes is a feature of the concept of virtue, then forgiveness is not a virtue. That Aristotle points out that virtue described in one particular way is an extreme—“in respect of the best and the good [virtue is] an extreme […] the middle is in one way an extreme”25—is not an answer to my criticism. Aristotle’s point here is that what one is describing will or will not be an extreme depending on what one compares it with, but what I have done is not to compare forgiveness to other things than those Aristotle compares it with. This becomes even more obvious if we take a closer look at what Aristotle says about revenge. As we have seen, he seems to think that revenge is the only way of living one’s anger, which means that one should get angry and revenge oneself when the situation really calls for it: “For revenge puts an end to anger, since it produces pleasure in place of pain.”26 There is an obvious difficulty here. If you and I agree that you were in the wrong, you can compensate me for my loss; such an action can appease my anger, but presupposes that we agree, hence takes place only in the wider context of forgiveness. If we,

148 

H. STRANDBERG

however, do not agree and I, revenging myself, try to obtain some sort of compensation by force, you will perceive what I do as wrongful, and if you react in the same way as I do you will get angry and revengeful, and if you carry out the revenge this will give rise to anger and revengefulness on my part, and so on. When the Aristotelian tries to make a judgment about what kind of revenge is the reasonable one in the specific situation, she consequently cannot leave out of consideration how the other person understands the issue if the Aristotelian is really trying to put an end to anger. And that would mean that we have left the sphere of revenge for the sphere or forgiveness. Revenge is a matter of retaliation, that is a middle course where too much or too little revenge does not bring about the intended levelling, but it is also possible to leave something behind not by comparing two things and finding them of equal worth, but by giving up counting. And that is one way of understanding what forgiveness is about. It should furthermore be noted that in many contexts compensation is not even possible, and even when it is, it is possible only in relation to some dimensions of the problem, not to all of them, which means that if you want to find a real, definitive solution, forgiveness is the only possible one. If you have stolen some money from me, you could give it back, and you could pay me some more to compensate for the problems I ran into when not having any money on me. But what about the fact that what has happened is not analogous to my losing my wallet and then finding it again? In one respect, retaliation relates to that issue: the weakness manifested in being fooled can be compensated by the strength manifested in revenge (destroying some property of yours, beating you up). Such a reaction is thus conditioned by the idea that being fooled is seen as a sign of weakness, and by the idea that it is important to show strength and not weakness, but even apart from that fact it is clear that there are many dimensions of the problem that will not be met by retaliating. What about the damage to our friendship? What would compensation be here? Forgiveness, by contrast, is the way of restoring that friendship, and if one would like to use the word “compensation”, forgiveness itself is the compensation: the damage to friendship is compensated by an act of friendship, forgiveness.27

6 VIRTUE 

149

Training The third feature I would like to discuss is not to be found in Aristotle’s description of forgiveness but is an important feature of his concept of virtue generally. Virtue is the result of training, habituation, cultivation; virtue is to be good at something.28 To what extent does such a description fit forgiveness? Is forgiveness a virtue in this respect? Even without giving an in-depth description of the difficulty to forgive, it is possible to realise how different that difficulty is from the difficulty of being brave, where Aristotle’s concept of virtue is not irrelevant. I would like to be more brave than I am, and by confronting dangers I might gradually learn to control the fear I feel. But in the case of forgiveness the conflict goes all through my will; when I find it difficult to forgive neither can I be said to unambiguously want to forgive nor to unambiguously not want to forgive. This is a kind of difficulty that Aristotle disregards—it is neither a case of ἀκρασία nor of ἀκολασία29—and since the difficulty is not sufficiently independent of me, it is hard to see how it could be overcome by putting myself in a situation confronting me with a weaker form of the difficulty in order for me gradually to become capable of dealing with harder forms of it. Furthermore, when it comes to courage the difficulty of overcoming cowardice can be compared to the advantages of courage, and the result of the comparison might be that the difficulty proves to be so great that doing something about it is not worthwhile (no matter whether that would mean that I fall behind in comparison to others or not when it comes to courage). In the context of the difficulty to forgive, however, such a conclusion can never be drawn in a clear-sighted way, for the difficulty to forgive and how I understand its importance cannot be separated. It is not impossible to see an act of cowardice as a thing of the past—depending on what the act concerned, how I relate to what it concerns, and so on—but if I am not able to forgive someone that will mark our relation, since it is precisely forgiveness that would make it possible for us to see what I did as a thing of the past. There is, however, also another criticism that can be directed at conceiving of forgiveness as a cultivated ability. If one sees forgiveness and anger as opposed to one another, one could claim that there is an ability central in this context, the ability not to be offended by what other people do to you, and that this ability can be learned by training.30 As I have pointed out here, there is a sense in which such a person has no need of forgiving anyone—it is someone you are angry with whom you

150 

H. STRANDBERG

forgive—but others could certainly say that he is a forgiving person. However, even if I am not offended by what other people do to me, that does not mean that everything is fine. Only if I do not care about the other and our relation to one another would I not mind what she does to me. Forgiveness does not only concern coming to terms with my own emotions; on the contrary, forgiveness concerns our relation in its entirety, a relation that is formed by what she does to me irrespective of whether I am offended by it or not.31 Above all: forgiveness concerns us, and that is the primary reason why my own abilities are not the central issue here.32 If forgiveness is about our finding our way back to one another again, forgiveness is something we are in together, not something carried out by each of us on his or her own with the other person as a mere object of the action. (The difficulty to forgive is, however, not about us two in isolation, for if there is a problem in my relation to you, this problem is there, potentially, in my relations to anyone.) When I forgive, I am attending to the person I forgive, for forgiveness is that in which we meet one another again, not to myself or to what I do. When I forgive, I forgive for our sake, not for a sake that is merely my own; forgiveness can be said to be the reestablishment of such a life together, a life the detection of which the difficulty to forgive, among other things, can be said to consist in.

Answers to an Objection When presenting these thoughts to various audiences, one objection has often been raised: before Christ, forgiveness was not even an unknown thing—if “unknown” suggests that it could be known but is not—but something that people would not even have understood if it had been described to them, for their conceptual resources did not have any space for it. In other words, it is not possible to criticise Aristotle by referring to forgiveness.33 There are many things I find strange in such an objection. First, even if most of it were correct, would it be at all relevant? What I try to do here is certainly not to convince Aristotle of anything. Having been dead for more than 2000 years, it is not just an empirical contingency that he will never read this book. The exact audience of a philosophical text is in many respects unclear, so primarily I am trying to deepen my own understanding of the issues and by doing so in writing I will hopefully also be able to help many of those who pick up the book to do the same, even if I do not

6 VIRTUE 

151

know exactly who they will be. What I do know is, however, that Aristotle will not read the book, nor any of his contemporaries either, and I will be very surprised if anyone would read the book who had not heard the word “forgiveness” before picking it up. But if that would happen, can we really say beforehand that such a reading and the thinking of her own that the reading will involve cannot possibly give rise to such a new understanding? In other words, even if most of the above objection would be correct, it would not be relevant. Second, how could it ever be shown that people would not have understood something if it were described to them, that their conceptual resources did not have any space for it?34 To begin with, we would have to try to describe it to them, to see what would happen if we did. And we are not in the position to carry out such an experiment when it comes to Aristotle and his contemporaries. But if we were, and if they did not understand the thing even after having had it described to them, there are many possible explanations: that our description is not very good, that they do not have the patience to listen attentively, that they do not see the point of our description but would not be dumbfounded if someone acted in real life in a way that corresponds to the description, that the description reminds them of possibilities they find disturbing and therefore shut their ears to, and many others. What would show that the most likely explanation is that their conceptual resources do not have any space for it? Third, as concerns the Greeks in particular, the objection seems to me to be mistaken. This is already clear from the fact that Aristotle discuss a concept—συγγνώμη—that would be close to forgiveness even if you would stress difficulties of translating it into English. And there are certainly other texts to refer to; see, for example, this passage from Plutarch’s Lives: He [Alcibiades] once gave Hipponicus a blow with his fist – Hipponicus, the father of Callias, a man of great reputation and influence owing to his wealth and family – not that he had any quarrel with him, or was a prey to anger, but simply for the joke of the thing, on a wager with some companions. The wanton deed was soon noised about the city, and everybody was indignant, as was natural. Early the next morning Alcibiades went to the house of Hipponicus, knocked at his door, and on being shown into his presence, laid off the cloak he wore and bade Hipponicus scourge and chastise him as he would. But Hipponicus put away his wrath and forgave [συνέγνω] him35

152 

H. STRANDBERG

Fourth, and most important, however, is to call into question the (mis) understanding of forgiveness that makes it possible to conceive of it as possibly unknown or unintelligible.36 If I were asked to give an example of a concept that might be unintelligible in another cultural and historical context, I would come up with, say, “nuclear site licence”, which is a concept that presupposes specific juridical institutions and specific scientific discoveries. But “forgiveness” is not similar to “nuclear site licence”: there are no juridical institutions and scientific discoveries making up a necessary background for its meaning. The way I have explicated forgiveness in this chapter (and in this book as a whole) makes forgiveness resist all analyses that turn it into an application of concepts on things, on people or on phenomena. When forgiving someone, I do not see her as a murderer, a coward or a swine, even if these concepts were to be formally applicable, and when forgiving someone I do not replace such concepts with other concepts; when forgiving someone, I do not relate to forgiveness, but to her. Therefore forgiveness is not something that presupposes specific conceptual resources, allegedly possibly absent. That said, the social context makes an important difference, but not as regards intelligibility. In a hierarchical society, if you ask forgiveness of someone under you, this will be seen as a threat to the social order, and the difficulty of asking her forgiveness is then not only the difficulty that would be there in any society but also the difficulty of daring to challenge this order. By contrast, in a group of friends, forgiving and asking someone’s forgiveness will be far easier, not only because of the absence of hierarchies, but also because the others will carry you, so to speak, when setting out on the process of forgiveness, as unguarded as it sometimes is, both to the one asking forgiveness and to the one forgiving.37 (Furthermore, there is the minor, but sometimes important fact that certain possibilities will be more present to me if others remind me of them.) The most intriguing case is certainly one where there is a social pressure to forgive and ask forgiveness. From the way I have discussed forgiveness in this book, it should by now be clear that such a social context is, if anything, detrimental to forgiveness. I would then not ask forgiveness because I want to be forgiven, but in order to, say, please others, and what I would receive would not be her friendly turning to me, but certain words and a certain comportment that she feels forced to present. The forms of this social pressure will often be deceptive, and superficially it might appear as a spirit of forgiveness, but this does not make the distinction I am pointing to less important: to the extent such force is involved, our relation is still

6 VIRTUE 

153

marked by what I did to her and my longing for forgiveness to takes place to the full still makes sense.

Conclusion Aristotle’s concept of virtue—with three main features: judgment, middle course, cultivated ability—disregards a number of possibilities as regards forgiveness, and to an even higher degree this goes for what he explicitly says about forgiveness. In other words, it is not a virtue to forgive, and that is all the worse for virtue.

Notes 1. Howard McGary writes (1989, p. 343): “Is forgiveness a moral virtue? I am inclined to think it is” According to Jeffrie Murphy, “conventional Christian wisdom” takes forgiveness to be a virtue (1982, p.  503). According to R.S.  Downie, “readiness to forgive is a virtue” (1965, p.  128). According to Margaret Holmgren, “the person who habitually works towards a state of genuine forgiveness exhibits an important virtue” (1993, p. 341). Robert C. Roberts coins the term “forgivingness” for this alleged virtue, in order “to distinguish it from the act or process of forgiveness in which this virtue is typically exemplified” (1995, p.  289). And David Novitz writes (1998, p. 299), “I contend […] that […] forgiveness may be considered a virtue in the Aristotelian sense of this word.” In most of the above cases, the meaning of the word “virtue” is quite thin; one of the few who actually makes an attempt at showing that forgiveness is a virtue in the Aristotelian sense is Griswold (2007, pp. 17–18). 2. See e.g. Aristotle 1894, 1136a5–9. However, it is clear, especially from 1143a20–24, that not one English word corresponds to συγγνώμη, and that then also goes for 1136a5–9 in comparison to 1126a2–3. For discussions about the translation of the word, see Griswold 2007, pp.  2–12; Phillips-­Garrett 2017. My take on the difference between these interpreters, in line with my claim above that not one English word corresponds to συγγνώμη, is that the difference is to a large extent due to which sentences in Aristotle the interpreters refer to; Phillips-Garrett, who criticises translating συγγνώμη as “forgiveness” does not refer to any of those passages I am discussing here. 3. Aristotle 1894, 1126a2–3. 4. Aristotle 1894, 1125b26. 5. Aristotle 1894, 1125b31–1126a1. 6. Aristotle 1894, 1126a31–1126b4.

154 

H. STRANDBERG

7. Aristotle 1894, 1126a29–30. 8. Aristotle 1894, 1126a3–8. 9. Aristotle 1894, 1126a21–22. 10. Aristotle 1959, 1378a31–32, 1378b1–2. This might seem to be only a definition, but from the discussion that follows in that chapter of the Rhetoric it is clear that Aristotle wants to say something substantial about the way people react in specific situations. 11. See Garrard and McNaughton 2003, p. 47. In her Anger and Forgiveness (2016), Martha Nussbaum claims, in contrast, that “anger involves, conceptually, a wish for things to go badly, somehow, for the offender, in a way that is envisaged, somehow, however vaguely, as a payback for the offense” (p. 23), that anger is “a retaliatory and hopeful outward movement that seeks the pain of the offender because of and as a way of assuaging or compensating for one’s own pain” (p.  24). It is of course possible to define anger in this way, but as a conceptual claim it only shows the limits of conceptual analysis: her claim just strikes me as very strange, but what it would mean to speak about rightness and wrongness here I do not know. What matters is what one’s use of words makes it possible for one to see, by, for example, making important distinctions available or unavailable. In this regard, it is clear that Nussbaum’s take on anger is detrimental to her discussion in the book as a whole. For anger, as she sees it, is intimately connected to a wish for payback, and she therefore rejects it wholesale. What is she then left with? The only alternative she sees is what she calls “Transition-Anger” (which, however, she says is “a borderline species” [p. 261], “quasi-anger” [p. 35], in contrast to “genuine anger” [p. 229]). Just as “genuine anger”, it is goal-oriented, not however to payback but to seeing to it that the thing for which one is angry will not happen again. But these are obviously not the only alternatives. If I meet someone who constantly speaks ill of others, I need not wish for payback (in the form of, say, speaking ill of him), but is there anything I can do to see to it that he will not be able to say such things in the future? I may muzzle him, of course, or become an active member of an association for the moral improvement of our society. But such far-­fetched ideas would only strike someone who wants to find “solutions”. Talking to him, by contrast, is not a way of bringing about a state of affairs. And must not such words of protest be emotionally charged? The emotion in which I speak shows (that is, is not the means of showing) how my words are to be taken, indeed if I mean them at all. Emotions are thus not fundamentally goal-oriented, as Nussbaum seems to presuppose, but, among other things, forms of understanding (see Strandberg 2015b, pp. 149–153). There are certainly many ways in which such words of protest could be uttered, but angrily is one. If Nussbaum does not want to use the word “angrily” here, she would still

6 VIRTUE 

155

need a word for this emotion, for this way of meaning words of protest, because talking angrily to someone is not n ­ ecessarily a way of achieving anything, be it payback or a change of society. (If his understanding of what he has done changes, emotions will in its turn be involved in that change, remorse say; if he feels remorse, that is as such a change, and its import will show in the future, but it is not as such goal-­directed.) This problem goes through Nussbaum’s book as a whole, for she does see that “acknowledgment of wrongdoing and its seriousness” is “necessary” and “essential” (p. 238), but she has a hard time fitting this insight into her general take on things, which does not allow for anything else than goaldirectedness: “forward-looking thinking is everything” (p. 158). 12. As pointed out by Novitz (1998, p. 303). 13. I do not believe there is one emotion that is relevant here—as if we should simply substitute some other emotion for anger and thereby arrive at a correct analysis—nor do I believe that a clear-sighted understanding of forgiveness is to be had by focusing strongly on emotions. But it is clear that, say, hatred and contempt are much more central in this context than is anger; what is decisive are not the emotions themselves but the way in which they separate us from each other, drive a wedge between us, as pointed out by Macalester Bell in a discussion of resentment (2008, p. 629): “The reason why overcoming resentment is a paradigmatic case of forgiveness is because resentment functions as a barrier between persons. If I resent you, I will resist spending time in your company, I will not openly engage with you, or sympathize with your plight.” See also Hampton (Murphy and Hampton 1988, pp. 36–37). Murphy (2003, p. 16) defines “forgiveness as the overcoming, on moral grounds, of […] the vindictive passions”, which is also promising if one would see emotions as central, but curiously enough he lists anger as one of these vindictive passions. 14. “Does this mean that anger is never a problem? Is not ira one of the seven deadly sins?” As Aristotle sees it, anger as such seems to be neutral: it is a good or bad thing depending on, among other things, what one is angry at. This does, however, mean that for him the potential problem is only a matter of mistaken anger. What my imagined interlocutor is referring to is however its destructiveness (something that could be included, if one wants to, in Aristotle’s reference to “in the right way”), and this problem is of a different kind than the problem of being mistaken (as pointed out already by Joseph Butler [2006, p. 99]). In order not to reject Aristotle’s account from the very start, the destructiveness cannot be a necessary component of anger—that would be wrath or rage, or, in one sense of the word, hatred—which means that anger as such is not the problem, but destructiveness.

156 

H. STRANDBERG

15. One example is the influential paper by Hieronymi 2001. A very telling example is Richards 1988, in which it becomes clear where you end up if you take that view, oblivious as he is of the distinctions I make in this ­chapter, distinctions within what he would refer to as not forgiving the one who has wronged you. 16. Murphy 1982, pp. 504–505. 17. The same kind of issue can be raised with reference to Kekes, who claims (2009, p. 495): “If it is reasonable to blame an action, then it is reasonable to blame the agent whose action it is. […] if it is reasonable to blame an agent for that action, then it is unreasonable to forgive the agent for that action.” You can of course define forgiveness in this way, but that only means that you have to ask yourself questions of the above kind: is the question how I should relate to the person I blame really settled just because I see my blame as justified? (The issues discussed in Pacovská 2019 are relevant here.) Consequently, the issue is not a mere semantic one (two different definitions of “forgiveness”), for although Kekes is not unaware of such questions, he does not discuss what is involved in struggling with them. 18. For central formulations in Aristotle of this feature of the concept of virtue, see e.g. Aristotle 1894, 1106b21–23, 1106b36–1107a2. 19. For a discussion of the relation, see Twambley 1976. 20. Aristotle 1894, 1104a5–10. 21. Cf. Schmitt 2009, pp. 36–39, 44; Foucault 1975, pp. 56–57. 22. For another kind of criticism of understanding forgiveness as judgment, see Westlund 2009, p. 533. 23. Cf. Blustein 2014, p. 131: “Forgiveness […] is a virtue that involves hitting the mean between deficiency and excess: between an obdurate refusal to forgive on the one hand and, on the other hand, an excessive readiness to forgive” 24. I will come back to this in Chap. 9. 25. Aristotle 1894, 1107a7–8, 23. 26. Aristotle 1894, 1126a21–22. 27. For other kinds of criticism of understanding forgiveness as a mean, see Westlund 2009, pp. 521, 523; Corlett 2006, p. 28. Thomason 2015 can also, indirectly, be read as such a criticism. 28. For central formulations in Aristotle of this feature of the concept of virtue, see Aristotle 1894, 1098a15, 1103a14–1103b22. 29. See Aristotle 1894, 1150b29–1151a14, in particular 1151a6–7. 30. Cf. Epictetus 1916, Diatribai 3.12.10 and Enchiridion 20. 31. The problems Minas runs into in her 1975 are precisely caused by such an individualist view of forgiveness.

6 VIRTUE 

157

32. Cf. Schönherr 2019, p. 528: “Forgiving, at its core, is not about a single moral agent’s moral excellence; rather, it is about repairing an impaired relationship.” 33. Interestingly enough, I have not been able to find anyone claiming this in writing, but the objection is still so common that it needs to be addressed. The closest written instance I have found is this claim of Julia Kristeva’s (2002, p. 281): “[T]he term [‘forgiveness’] comes from a perspective that is essentially religious […] it is a practice that took hold in the Western world through Judaism […] and in Christianity.” Arendt, to whom Kristeva refers, claims more loosely (1998, p. 238): “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.” (In her book on Arendt [2001], Kristeva’s above claim is not to be found.) At first, it might seem as if David Konstan is making an even more daring claim, when he claims that forgiveness “is of relatively recent vintage as a moral idea and has its roots in large part in the revolution in ethical thinking heralded by Immanuel Kant” (2010, p. 165), but the claim becomes far less interesting when one bears in mind that he is working with Griswold’s account of what forgiveness is, a by no means uncontroversial starting point, and Konstan’s book as a whole can thus be read as an unintended criticism of Griswold. 34. Someone who claims, by reference to some kind of historical knowledge, that the conceptual resources of some people in the past lacked such a space, in fact fails to take into account the historical nature of understanding. It is only when conceived of as a dead thing, as unchangeable, that such a thing can be said; as a living thing one’s understanding changes in one’s encounters with others, and there are thus no limits to it that can be laid down in advance. This is one thing that can be learned from Hegel’s saying that “the owl of Minerva does not begin its flight until dusk” (Hegel 1986b, p. 28) and that “Spirit is […] absolute restlessness, pure activity” (Hegel 1986a, § 378 Z.); for a discussion, see Strandberg 2015a. 35. Plutarch 1916–1926, Alc. 8.1–2. For more examples, see Dover 1974, pp.  191–200. For a discussion of the issue, see Griswold 2007, ch. 1; Konstan 2012; Bash 2013. 36. After having read the book as a whole, the points I make in this paragraph will hopefully be even clearer to you, for the possibility of forgiveness being unknown or unintelligible is dependent on a specific picture of what forgiveness is, and the book as a whole, being about forgiveness, is an attempt to undermine that picture. The last chapter of it is particularly important here, a chapter that could be read as an attempt at showing that a life without forgiveness is hard to conceive of. Cf. Murphy (Murphy and Hampton 1988, p. 17): “The person who cannot forgive is the person who cannot have friends or lovers.”; Lang 1994, p. 115: “It is possible […] to imagine

158 

H. STRANDBERG

a world without forgiveness […] But that world would, it seems to me, be either more than human (that is, one in which no wrongs are committed or suffered) or less than human—one where resentment and vengeance would not only have their day, but would also continue to have it, day after day after day.”; Szablowinski 2010, p.  474: “Without it [forgiveness], there will be no fellowship of trusting life together.” 37. The difference that religious faith makes could advantageously be discussed with reference to such issues; for examples, see Lauritzen 1987; Murphy 2003, pp. 91–92.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1894. Ethica Nicomachea. Ed. I.  Bywater. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1959. Ars rhetorica. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bash, Anthony. 2013. Did Jesus discover forgiveness? Journal of Religious Ethics 41: 382–399. Bell, Macalester. 2008. Forgiving someone for who they are (and not just what they’ve done). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77: 625–658. Blustein, Jeffrey M. 2014. Forgiveness and remembrance: Remembering wrongdoing in personal and public life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Joseph. 2006. The works of Bishop Butler. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Corlett, J.  Angelo. 2006. Forgiveness, apology, and retributive punishment. American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 25–42. Dover, K.J. 1974. Greek popular morality, in the time of Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Downie, R.S. 1965. Forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–134. Epictetus. 1916. Dissertationes. Ed. H. Schenkl. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A philosophical exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1986a. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986b. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts; oder, Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2001. Articulating an uncompromising forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62: 529–555.

6 VIRTUE 

159

Holmgren, Margaret R. 1993. Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons. American Philosophical Quarterly 30: 341–352. Kekes, John. 2009. Blames versus forgiveness. The Monist 92: 488–506. Konstan, David. 2010. Before forgiveness: The origins of a moral idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Assuaging rage: Remorse, repentance, and forgiveness in the classical world. In Ancient forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L.  Griswold and David Konstan, 17–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2002. Forgiveness. PMLA 117 (2): 278–295. Lang, Berel. 1994. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 31: 105–117. Lauritzen, Paul. 1987. Forgiveness: Moral prerogative or religious duty? Journal of Religious Ethics 15: 141–154. McGary, Howard. 1989. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 26: 343–351. Murphy, Jeffrie G. 1982. Forgiveness and resentment. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7: 503–516. ———. 2003. Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novitz, David. 1998. Forgiveness and self-respect. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and forgiveness: Resentment, generosity, justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pacovská, Kamila. 2019. Moral character and the significance of action: The case of Dmitri Karamazov. Philosophical Investigations 42: 333–349. Phillips-Garrett, Carissa. 2017. Sungnom ̄ e ̄ in Aristotle. Apeiron 50: 311–333. Plutarch. 1916–1926. Lives. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. London: William Heinemann. Richards, Norvin. 1988. Forgiveness. Ethics 99: 77–97. Roberts, Robert C. 1995. Forgivingness. American Philosophical Quarterly 32: 289–306. Schmitt, Carl. 2009. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränitet. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Schönherr, Julius. 2019. When forgiveness comes easy. Journal of Value Inquiry 53: 513–528. Strandberg, Hugo. 2015a. Is it possible to sublate religion? Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015: 94–99. ———. 2015b. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

160 

H. STRANDBERG

Szablowinski, Zenon. 2010. Between forgiveness and unforgiveness. Heythrop Journal 51: 471–482. Thomason, Krista K. 2015. Forgiveness or fairness? Philosophical Papers 44: 233–260. Twambley, P. 1976. Mercy and forgiveness. Analysis 36: 84–90. Westlund, Andrea C. 2009. Anger, faith, and forgiveness. The Monist 92: 507–536.

CHAPTER 7

Death

The understanding of forgiveness I am working with in this book sees it as the way of restoring a damaged relation, as something that takes place not in an isolated individual but between people. This might seem to imply that forgiveness as regards dead people is impossible, for here only one of the poles of the relation remains.1 The murderer would then impossibly find forgiveness,2 and one would never be able to forgive dead parents.3 There are at least two ways of meeting such a conclusion. One would be to accept it, but add that there are other conceptions of forgiveness and that these conceptions might instead be the relevant ones in this context. In other words, there is a sense in which the murderer cannot find forgiveness, but there is also a sense in which she could. The philosophical task would then be to investigate these alternative conceptions. Another way of meeting the above conclusion would be to point out that we in fact have relations to dead people. There are no doubt differences between these relations and relations to living people—and here this way of meeting the above conclusion touches on the first one—but it would be false to say that we have no relations at all to them. The philosophical task is, then, to describe the character of these relations, specifically with regard to the possibilities and difficulties of forgiveness. This way of meeting the above conclusion will be my starting point in this chapter. Having come this far, it might seem as if we have to make a choice: should this issue be approached in a religious way or not? For must not the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_7

161

162 

H. STRANDBERG

character of our relations to dead people be understood in fundamentally different ways by the religious believer and by the non-believer? Now, I do not think that this is as obvious as it might seem to be. For such a fundamental difference to exist, religion has to be understood as an external addition to understandings of life and death it does not have any deeper connections to. Another possibility, hence blurring the distinction between the believer and the non-believer, would be that religious understandings of life and death connect to, develop and perhaps deepen experiences that are there also for someone who does not make any explicit connections to religious thought. Bearing in mind the great diversity of religious approaches to death, also within one and the same religious tradition, diversities not only and not primarily manifesting themselves in theological accounts but even more fundamentally in different existential orientations, makes this point even more obvious. In short, I do not think it is wise to presuppose that it is already settled what a religious understanding of life and death is, and thereby in what ways it differs from a non-religious one; referring to concepts like “the supernatural” or “transcendence”, as is common in philosophical discussions of religion, does not make anything clearer, for these concepts are no more clear than what they are supposed to clarify. Describing the character of our relations to the dead without explicitly mentioning religion can just as well be understood as a contribution to the phenomenological investigation of religious concepts.4 More generally put, thinking about forgiveness might be a way of deepen one’s understanding of life and death—no matter whether than understanding will in the end be a religious one or not—rather than vice versa. This would then be another example of one of the main themes of this book: how thinking about forgiveness might deepen our moral understanding, “moral” here used in a broad sense of the word.

Being Forgiven by a Dead Person Let us start with the case in which someone comes to understand herself as forgiven by a dead person.5 The question is most pressing in the case of the murderer, mentioned above: here what I want forgiveness for is precisely what prevents me from receiving it. The question is, however: prevents me from receiving it at all, or only in the way I receive it from living people? One answer to the question whether it is possible to be forgiven by a dead person would be the simple remark that such experiences exist. This

7 DEATH 

163

might not seem to be much of an answer, and it certainly gives rise to many questions, questions that I will discuss in what follows. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it. If it is not completely unintelligible what someone who says that he has experienced such a thing is saying—and if I do not understand it, the task is to see whether it is possible to come to understand it—there is no objection on grounds of principle to be made, even though every single instance can certainly be questioned. One question here concerns the relation between this experience and forgiving oneself. If they would be identical, there might seem to be no specific point in talking about being forgiven by a dead person. Furthermore, a moral criticism could be raised in such a case: why claim that it is the dead person who forgives, if it is you who forgive? isn’t this an additional act of violence, claiming to be able to be speak for the victim? The difficulty here consequently concerns just as much coming to an understanding of what it means to forgive oneself as coming to an understanding of what it means to be forgiven by a dead person. What follows, which might seem to be a digression, is accordingly part of the overall discussion. Forgiving Oneself So, what does it mean to forgive oneself?6 This might seem to be even more obscure than being forgiven by a dead person, for if the problem in the latter case is that she is no more, she still once was a person to relate to, but in the case of forgiving myself, there is no, and has never been, a second person to relate to, to part from and to find one’s way back to. The relation between victim and perpetrator, the two persons whose relation is renewed and restored in the process of forgiveness, is without direct parallel in the case of the individual. Of course, seeing some form of inner division, of self-deception, of inner enmity, as fundamental to the difficulty of forgiving oneself is a potentially fruitful point of departure, but the question is then how that division should be understood.7 So let us look more closely at some examples of the difficulty of forgiving oneself. The example is deliberately trivial. A friend calls me and asks me out for a beer. I am tired and would most of all like to be alone, sitting at home doing nothing. But this is not what I say to him; instead I tell him that I have work to do and that I unfortunately cannot join him. A few days later I tell him the truth, and he says that I should have told him that I was too tired, that it is completely understandable. Now the whole issue

164 

H. STRANDBERG

is over and done with, except for the fact that I do not forgive myself. How is that to be understood? In a case such as this, the description that presents itself immediately— there are certainly other ones, and in a minute I will come to a second possibility, but I certainly do not aim at exhausting all possibilities—is that I want to stay true to a principle of truth-telling, and that it therefore does not matter much that my friend does not bear me a grudge. This does not mean that our relation is perfectly fine, however, that my difficulty is purely inner, for my difficulty will manifest itself in various ways, for example in my acting in a restrained way in his presence or in my not believing him when he says that he does not bear me a grudge. The difference between the case in which it is the other person who does not forgive me and the case in which it is I who do not forgive myself is thus not clear-cut from my perspective, only from his. How is the difficulty of not forgiving myself to be met in this case? One possibility is that I modify the principle I have wanted to stay true to, the principle of truth-telling, and according to this new (version of the) principle, what I did is no longer that problematic. This would, however, only mean that I have changed my mind, and in the context of being forgiven by someone else, my change of mind would only mean that I would not ask her forgiveness, his change of mind only that I did nothing wrong and is therefore not in need of forgiveness. (Furthermore, why do I change my mind? Is it just an easy way out, a way of avoiding a painful conversation with my friend, which would mean that I have only persuaded myself that I have changed my mind, but not really done so?) The modification of the principle was one way in which the difficulty of not forgiving myself could be met. Another possibility is that the principle is not modified but is no longer the focus of attention (and this shift has more or less radical forms). The focus of attention is not on another principle, but on my friend and our ongoing relation. I thus forgive myself when I no longer see myself and our relation in the light of what I have done as reflected by the principle. This does, however, not mean that no questions remain just because there is not anything pressing between us (or between everyone concerned), for what I did might point to a problematic tendency, in which case it is of moral importance to work against it, but such work need not be done in a spirit of unforgivingness. Another possibility is that my not forgiving myself has not much to do with principles, but rather with shame. My friend has said to me that he does not bear me a grudge, but I still feel bad and am ashamed of myself. The judgmental gaze I see as directed at me I might perceive as coming

7 DEATH 

165

from him—in other words, I distrust his forgiveness, now or, if I suspect that ill feelings will turn up in him later on, for the future8—but it might especially be perceived as coming from an indeterminate source. If I perceive it as coming from an indeterminate source, there is no one in particular I see as looking at me in a judgmental way, but it is nevertheless true that the shame I feel is experienced as a matter of being seen. It is not the particular individuals I meet on the street in relation to whom I feel shame, but still such a walk is very painful for the one who suffers from intense shame (which would, however, be hard to understand in a trivial case such as this one, when I have lied to my friend asking me out for a beer). No matter whether the source is indeterminate or determinate, the difficulty of forgiving oneself could here in principle be met by a change in the composition of that source, in analogy with the case in which I modify the principle I want to stay true to, and if so my discussion of that situation could be more or less be repeated here. Accordingly, another possibility is a change of attention: the focus of attention is no longer myself and what I have done as seen by the judgmental gaze, but rather my friend and our ongoing relation.9 If the problem of forgiving myself is understood as a question of overcoming an inner enmity, of making friends with myself, this friendship is then the result of attending friendly to my friend and our relation of friendship, in contrast to principles or to myself as seen by the judgmental gaze. One thing has become clear in the above discussion, I believe: that forgiving oneself is better not understand as something I do, but rather as something that happens to me. The change of attention I have pointed to is not a result of a decision, of willpower or of anything similar. What I do and how I relate to the difficulty is important, but I cannot just bring about the change. Forgiving Oneself and Being Forgiven Forgiving oneself and being forgiven by someone is not the same thing, for reasons I will come to in a minute, but the above discussion shows that there are connections: forgiving myself is not something I do but something that happens to me, and that change can therefore be experienced as something I receive from the outside. Someone might become able to love herself by the love she receives from others; in becoming able to love myself, I become aware of the love of others for me that I have been

166 

H. STRANDBERG

unaware of before and that I might now realise has been crucial for that change. In relation to the dead, it is therefore not at all surprising if the one who is now able to forgive herself for something she has done to someone who is no longer alive experiences this change as emanating from the dead person. Somewhat similar to the case of shame, in which the judgmental gaze can belong to a dead person and the judgmental stance then not communicated to me in any standard sense, love and forgiveness can be experienced as emanating from the dead person, hence without standard forms of communication being involved. Nevertheless, that there are connections between forgiving oneself and being forgiven by someone does not mean that they are identical. However much someone has said to me and showed me that he has forgiven me, and even if I consciously believe him, I might still not be able to forgive myself (even though, as I pointed out above, my inability to forgive myself often manifests itself in my distrusting others when they say they have forgiven me, and unconsciously this may be so to an even greater degree). And that inability means that our relation is still troubled. And what about the situation in which I have forgiven myself, but he has not forgiven me? It is not hard to come up with examples in which such a situation is the result of my not caring about him: at first I felt bad when I saw that my cruel jokes about him made him sad, but then I brushed it off and said to myself that a real man should be able to take such jokes, and if he is still sad that only shows that he is even more weak. What we need here is not such examples, however, examples in which such a situation is the result of my callousness. To come up with other kinds of examples might seem easy: just replace the word “cruel” above with “harmless” or the like (and that the distinction between what is cruel and what is harmless is self-deceptively easily blurred does not matter in the context of this discussion). But such a solution is far too hasty. I might certainly find someone far too touchy, but if what I said made him sad, I cannot just brush that off by saying that it is his problem, not mine. To help him see his touchiness may of course be very difficult, and perhaps I give it up for that reason, but ultimately this is the only way of getting to the bottom of the problem between us (and when setting out to reach that bottom, I might realise that my understanding of what that bottom is was seriously mistaken). But where does forgiving myself come in here? If this question arises, I do not see the issue as simply about his touchiness but also about, say, some shortcoming of mine. And then my forgiving of myself and his forgiving of me are much more closely entwined. The

7 DEATH 

167

distinction between them is emphasised more in a situation where the troubles between us have led to a parting of the ways. In such a situation, I might say to myself that I have forgiven myself: I have put it behind me, I no longer think that much about it, or I think much about it but in a very different spirit than before. Whether you have done so or not I do not know. But that we do not meet one another anymore means that something is lost, so even if there is no objection to be made to saying that I have forgiven myself and that it is possible that he has not forgiven me, there is still a problem between us that is not just his fault. A further, joint process of forgiveness is therefore possible. The loving person does not say to herself that she has done her part of the job, and does not leave it to the other to solve the difficulty; she tries to bring the other to love through her own love. Being Forgiven by a Dead Person Where does all this leave us when it comes to being forgiven by a dead person? The idea that such experiences are necessarily self-deceptive can now be answered: this would only necessarily be so if the difficulty of forgiving oneself did not exist. In one (but not in every) respect, forgiving oneself must be more difficult than being forgiven by someone else, for receiving something is difficult only to the extent that I do not see myself as, say, worthy of receiving it, that is, it is difficult precisely to the extent that I am not able to forgive myself. Not being able to forgive oneself means to be in a state of inner conflict, hence a state of difficulty; the difficulty is there as long as I have not been able to forgive myself. I can ask somebody’s forgiveness, but in the end it is she who forgives or does not do so, and that process towards being able to forgive is not a difficulty I have to go through, at least not in the same sense as she has to go through it. But might not my forgiving of myself come too easily? Is there therefore not the risk that I persuade myself that I have been forgiven by the dead person after I have forgiven myself in this all too easy manner? These questions can be answered in the affirmative. But they can also be answered in the negative, by pointing to the distinction between shrugging one’s shoulders at what one has done and forgiving oneself for it. Forgiveness in the morally important sense of the word is then about coming closer to one another in the spirit of goodness. To experience that the dead person has forgiven me is in its best meaning to experience that my own loving

168 

H. STRANDBERG

attention has been awakened precisely by the dead person, by her loving attention to me, which means that in such a case it would be a mistake to describe the experience as just a dimension of my will. If it were just a dimension of my will, there would be no surprise or challenge. One aspect of my loving attention being awakened is, precisely, such surprise and challenge—surprise because it is an experience of liberation, challenge because it is an experience of other-directedness, of love. That the dead person is dead changes things, of course, but not necessarily in the sense that her loving attention to me is experienced as being more distant. It could just as well be experienced as being closer. In relation to a living person, I may experience his loving attention also when he is not present, but still there is a relevant distinction to be made between absence and presence. In relation to the dead person, by contrast, there is no such distinction to be made: she is present all the time, in the sense that a dead person can be experienced as present.10 However, in one respect the fact that the dead person is not present in the sense in which a living person can be present is of obvious importance: asking for someone’s forgiveness and receiving a direct answer has a much less clear sense, if any at all, in the relation to a dead person. This is a difference, and it should not be denied, but its importance can easily be exaggerated. For asking someone’s forgiveness and receiving a direct answer is not the central dimension of forgiveness: that we say such things to each other sometimes has a role to play in the restoration of the relation we once had, but they are neither sufficient nor necessary for such a restoration to come about. At the beginning of this chapter, I voiced a possible moral criticism of the idea that you could be forgiven by the dead: why claim that it is the dead person who forgives, if it is you who forgive? isn’t this an additional act of violence, claiming to be able to be speak for the victim? By what has been said, this criticism has been answered: the experience is an experience of being brought to forgive oneself by the forgiveness of the dead person, not an experience of doing something oneself, and it is not necessarily an act of violence but possibly one of love. The problem is consequently not there from the perspective of the one who understands himself as being forgiven. Of course, he might later on come to say that he fooled himself, but he need not. If there is a problem, the problem is there from the perspective of others, the relatives of the dead person, say. A conflict could thus, but need not, arise here—what to say about it? One thing that should be noted is that this question only arises if others know that he sees himself as forgiven by the dead victim. How do they

7 DEATH 

169

know? Presumably because he has told them. But why should he tell them? What I am referring to here is not the possibility that he keeps it a secret, by lying or avoiding certain issues in conversations with others; what I am referring to is the fact that, except for special cases, there seems not to be any reasons for him to tell, say, the relatives of the dead person his experience. Of course, his experience will show in his way of being, but it will not show in a generally untroubled comportment, for in order for a conflict to arise, his relation to the other party of the conflict must be troubled. In other words, the situation of conflict is a quite special one, but the question still remains—what to say about it? One’s view of whether the dead person has forgiven the perpetrator or not is certainly closely connected to whether one has forgiven the perpetrator or not. So if I say that the dead person has not forgiven the perpetrator, that saying is indicative of my own attitude towards him, and the process by means of which I come to forgive him is bound up with the process by means of which my understanding of how the victim relates to the perpetrator changes (or would relate, if I do not find my feet in such expressions). But they need not coincide. This is most obvious in the case where I have difficulties in forgiving the perpetrator, but know that the victim would have forgiven him, for I know what kind of person she was. The inverted case might seem to be just as likely—I have forgiven the perpetrator, but I know that the victim would not have forgiven him, for I know what kind of person she was—but is in fact much less clear. Why? If I say about myself that I will never forgive this and that person, I am in most cases not making an empirical prediction but emphatically expressing my unforgiving stance. And if I would be making an empirical prediction, such a prediction will of course be doubtful, and will anyhow also in such a case express my stance towards the other person. If I say about myself that I have not forgiven this and that person (in contrast to saying that I never will), such a saying can be understood in roughly the same way as the one above, but can also be understood as expressing the processual character of forgiveness: I have not yet forgiven him, but I know that where I am at the moment is not a stable position and that I am moving in the direction of forgiveness. What I say about someone else’s capacity for forgiveness will, if it is to be understood as a prediction, be no less doubtful than what I could say about my own, and will not be a pure prediction but will express my way of relating to her (and, indirectly, my way of relating to the perpetrator). And just as in the case where I talk about myself, what I say can also, and above all, be understood as expressing the

170 

H. STRANDBERG

processual character of forgiveness: she has not yet forgiven him, but where she is at the moment is not a stable position and she is moving in the direction of forgiveness. If the person I am speaking about is dead, however, what I will say about her and what not, as well as the meaning of what I will say, will be notably different. For example, even though it is not impossible to think that the dead person undergoes changes also when dead—purgatory is an example of one such idea, but it is significant that purgatory is only about changes for the better, not for the worse—it is nonetheless clear that time has only a marginal role in the contents of thoughts about the dead. This is, in fact, one way to explain the distinction between being alive and being dead: if the dead would change just as the living do, they would not be dead. This means that the inverted case mentioned above—I have forgiven the perpetrator, but I know that the victim would not have forgiven him, for I know what kind of person she was—is much less clear than the case it is an inversion of. The clear possibilities there are, are either to say about the dead person that she has forgiven the perpetrator (a possibility that thus includes the process in which someone is on the way to forgiveness, for in my thoughts about the dead person that end point is already seen as completed or as forestalled, as we have seen), or to say that she would not even begin to do so. Someone can certainly claim about this victim that she would not even begin to do so, but such a claim is not just an empirical prediction, for someone else might understand the same unforgiving stance as a beginning, by claiming that this victim would not even be unforgiving if another way of relating to the perpetrator was not a live option for her. What all this means is that a potential conflict between people who relate differently to a dead person, as concerns the question whether she might have forgiven this and that person or not, cannot be considered in isolation from their relations to each other and to the perpetrator. New questions about forgiveness will thus arise, and these questions will be no less easy to handle than the question about forgiveness in the relation between the original victim and the original perpetrator; great risks are obviously involved here. The one who says that the dead person has forgiven him does not have to be in the wrong in such a conflict, and to call into question that he has to be in the wrong need not be to say that the other party, those who are in conflict with him, is wrong. The question about who is right and who is wrong only exists in this form if I am a bystander, and from my perspective no one needs to be wrong or, rather, the question need not even arise, for it is primarily they who struggle with

7 DEATH 

171

their relations to each other. Of course, I might interfere, but then I am no longer a bystander. Conflict is, however, not the only possibility. It is also possible that it is precisely through the forgiveness that I receive from the living that my being changes, and so my relation to the dead person. In particular, through the forgiveness I receive, without my having been open to the possibility of such forgiveness, I may become able to recognise the possibility of forgiveness also in relations to other people; or, to the extent that I trust in the forgiveness I receive, the change that being forgiven means to me cannot be confined just to the relation to one person. As I have pointed out, there are many connections between forgiving oneself, being forgiven by a living person and being forgiven by a dead person. That there are such connections, and that these connections are central to the understanding of what forgiveness means here, does not mean that they are one and the same. The most important reason why they are not one and the same concerns the focus of attention: the one who sees himself as forgiven by a dead person attends to her in the light of that forgiveness. He will certainly not say that in those moments he is not thinking about her, the forgiveness is gone, but the experience of forgiveness is internally related to such attention. In the case of the living, by contrast, the experience of being forgiven has many forms, not all of which concerns attention or thinking. To sum up this discussion: To a dead person I cannot again have the relation I had to her when she was alive—to claim otherwise would be to deny the distinction between life and death—but there is not anything that definitely prevents me from coming to have as good a relation to her as it is possible to have to any dead person. Phrasing it in this way might be too rosy, however, for it should be noted that the goodness is closely connected to mourning; the goodness of the relation is the form mourning here takes. Furthermore, the forgiveness of the dead person, even though it changes things for me generally (on account of her “omnipresence”), does not solve my problems in my relations to the living, and might even intensify these problems.

Forgiving a Dead Person Let us now move on to the other case I said that I would discuss: forgiving a dead person. This might seem to be a much less troublesome thing, for if I have no ill feelings towards the dead person anymore, does this not

172 

H. STRANDBERG

mean that I have forgiven her? Is there anything more that forgiving a dead person could possibly be? If not, nothing is lacking, and the problem is solved. Meeting the problem in this way is certainly not totally off the mark, but objections could be raised. For example, and returning to the example I hinted at in the beginning: does it not matter in any way if I forgive a dead parent already when she is alive or not until she has died? is not one important difference that forgiveness has only a therapeutic significance in the latter case, whereas in the former case it is just as much for her sake, or, rather, for ours, that forgiveness takes place? Even if such objections would be rejected, there is much more to be said about the problem, especially since dwelling upon it a bit longer may make it possible for us to gain some additional insights. The example of a troubled relation to one’s parents is a good one in this context, both since such relations make certain kinds of difficulties strongly present (though by no means inevitable)—difficulties connected to the transition from childhood dependence to adulthood independence, among other things—and since it is to be expected that my parents will die before I do. The former aspect is important to pay attention to here in order to understand what forgiveness is about in this context. To be sure, forgiveness might here concern specific occurrences, separate and enumerable, but much more likely is that forgiveness here concerns neither one nor many occurrences but a more indeterminately bad relationship. The problem is not that my mother has, say, scolded me a number of times, as if everything would be fine if we just managed to come to terms with these incidents. Furthermore, I might understand the problem as not simply a problem of her in isolation but as also a problem of me. If so, it is even more clear that the problem is not about specific occurrences but about the dynamics between us. And if the problem is about the dynamics between us, it cannot even be reduced to specific occurrences, even though the problem can be exemplified by reference to them. What this shows is that one should not always content oneself with saying that the problem is solved just because I do not have any ill feelings to the dead person anymore. We need to come together again, and hence the question about how to be forgiven by the dead person returns, the question discussed above. The case in which I only understand the problem as being about my mother is also more complex than my initial description suggested. Understanding forgiveness as just about the absence of something—ill

7 DEATH 

173

feelings, say—would be a far too restricted understanding. Forgiveness also involves the presence of, among other things, a longing for conveying to her the vanishing of these ill feelings. And what would conveying this be if she is dead? One possibility in such a case is that I feel remorse for not having forgiven her until now. In that case we return to the question discussed above: I too need to be forgiven. In any case, the difficulty of forgiving a person is in many respects similar to the difficulty of being forgiven by her: in both cases, the problem concerns coming together again. We thus return to my conclusion above: to a dead person I cannot again have the relation I had to her when she was alive—to claim otherwise would be to deny the distinction between life and death—but there is not anything that definitely prevents me from coming to have as good a relation to my dead mother as it is possible to have to any dead person, the goodness of the relation being the form mourning here takes. When it comes to forgiving the other, her live presence possibly makes a difference, a difference we need to say a few words about. Her live presence may make forgiveness easier, if her love and longing feeds my love and longing. Her live presence may make forgiveness more difficult11 if it draws my attention to things that have, say, annoyed me, and my annoyance may very well have become tied to things that are not at all things to be annoyed by (the sound of her feet, etc.). Such aspects need not be entirely absent if she is dead—my relation to a dead person is not identical to my relation to an absent living one—but it is not surprising if they are not as prevalent. To what extent this is a problem is, however, not clear. That her live presence may feed my love and longing makes forgiveness more difficult to the extent that I do not experience her presence when she is dead, but this also means that the forgiveness may instead have to be the result of working through the difficulties to an extent otherwise not needed, which sometimes will make it more solid. That her live presence may draw my attention to things that have annoyed me makes forgiveness easier to the extent that my attention is not drawn to these things when she is dead, but if this only means that my forgiveness is the result of absentmindedness, then there is still a much more full form of forgiveness to be had. Furthermore, when she is dead, she will not ask my forgiveness, or, to the extent that I feel addressed by such a question when she is dead, I do so in a different way than when she was alive. The importance such a question has is, among other things, due to the way in which she thereby

174 

H. STRANDBERG

shows that we are in this together. On the other hand, in a case such as the one I referred to above—the difficult dynamics of our relation—it would be very odd if she were totally unaware of the fact that she is part of the problem (and she may express this in a roundabout way, still blaming me, by saying that she must have failed as a parent, when her son turned out such a horrible person). It is certainly possible that the only thing she says is that I am the trying one, but is it really possible for me to believe that she wholeheartedly believes that? If I did believe that, my attitude to her could be said to be an unforgiving one, believing that she is definitely lost, a hopeless case. In other words, everything does not depend on whether she asks my forgiveness or not; the absence of such a question does not mean the question about how to understand her relation to me is closed. Finally, one of the most evident changes brought about by forgiving a dead person concerns mourning. As long as I have not forgiven her, mourning is partly blocked, by, say, bitterness; forgiving her thus opens me to mourning. The loss will be informed by everything I am no longer able to talk to her about, among other things my change of heart. That there is not anything that definitely prevents me from coming to have as good a relation to her as it is possible to have to any dead person does not mean that there will be no pain; on the contrary, pain, in the sense of loving longing, will be intensified by forgiveness, and the goodness of the relation will be this pain. That is the difference between a relation to a living person and a relation to a dead person.

Conclusion It is possible to forgive and be forgiven by a dead person; we do and experience such things. But there are important differences between our relations to the living and to the dead, some of which I have described. These differences sometimes make forgiveness in relation to the dead easier than in relation to the living, sometimes more difficult, but most often just different. As I said previously, to a dead person I cannot again have the relation I had to her when she was alive—to claim otherwise would be to deny the distinction between life and death—but there is not anything that definitely prevents me from coming to have as good a relation to her as it is possible to have to any dead person. In fact, the context of forgiveness is one of the clearest examples of a context in which we have strong and changing relations to the dead.

7 DEATH 

175

One thing to learn from these discussions, important to bear in mind when it comes to forgiveness generally, is how intertwined different difficulties of forgiveness often are—the difficulty of forgiving myself, the difficulty of asking her forgiveness, the difficulty of trusting her when she says that she has forgiven me, the difficulty of forgiving her, etc.—a fact that is not surprising, since forgiveness concerns our relations to each other, but still easily neglected in philosophical discussions of forgiveness.

Notes 1. Smith 1997, p. 37: “We […] sometimes forgive the dead, though obviously without prospects of continuing relationships with them.” Cowley 2000, n. 14: “Clearly such reconciliation will be impossible in the event of an estranged or dead wrongdoer.” Garrard and McNaughton 2003, p. 45: “[T]he wrongdoer must still be alive for restoration of relationship to be effected.” Pettigrove 2007, p. 431: “[O]ne can forgive someone who has died but one cannot be reconciled with the deceased because their death prevents the relationship from being restored.” 2. For the claim that this is so, see Benn 1996, pp. 374, 383 (Benn does not deny that we have any relations to the dead, however, as seen on pp.  380–381); Prager 1997, p.  217; Corlett 2006, pp.  36–37. Murphy writes (2012, p. 183): “[If someone] is dead, he cannot forgive; and thus we can perhaps see here one possible sense of the concept of the unforgivable.” (As can be seen from the rest of Murphy’s essay, the second part of this sentence is not as simple as that; hence “perhaps”.) See also Govier and Verwoerd 2002, pp. 108–109. 3. Atkins 2002, pp. 111–112: “In this paper I will argue for a conception of forgiveness as the outcome of a process of mutuality rather than something brought about solely by the action of an individual. […] One implication of my view is that it does not seem to be possible to forgive the dead” The idea that “only living wrongdoers can be forgiven” Paul Hughes calls “the consensus view” in the philosophy of forgiveness, an idea he then seeks to question (2016, p. 369). Therefore it is somewhat surprising that the other side of the consensus view, “that dead people cannot forgive those who wrong or harm them”, is not questioned by Hughes but said to be “obvious” (p. 369). 4. One example of this is the paragraph on death and forgiveness in Chap. 2. 5. One of the few who mentions this possibility is Griswold (2007, pp. 123–124), but he does not discuss it in detail.

176 

H. STRANDBERG

6. My discussion here can partly be read as an answer to accounts of forgiving oneself found in Downie 1965, p. 129; O’Shaughnessy 1967, pp. 349–350; Horsbrugh 1974, pp. 276–278. 7. Cf. Seneca 2010, 6.7: “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” For a discussion of this quotation, see Strandberg 2015, p. 24. 8. Owens writes (2012, p. 51): “Once the wrongdoer has been forgiven in the relevant sense, it is no longer apt for them to feel guilty” In other words, talking about what is “apt” is seriously misleading; to the extent that there is something to what Owens writes here, the point is simply that if I still feel guilty, it means that I somehow do not see myself as forgiven. 9. Indirectly, what I have said here is a criticism of Bernard Williams’ discussion of shame (2008, e.g. pp. 93–95, 222–223). Williams only sees two possibilities, shame and a principle-based understanding of morality. But forgiveness, as explicated above, takes place in the context of an understanding that is far from identical to either of them. 10. As D.Z.  Phillips puts it (1970, p.  69): “He subjects his own desires to those of the family [most of whom are dead], does what he thinks would be pleasing in their eyes, and so on. He cannot compromise with them, for they are dead. One can argue with the will of the living, but one cannot argue with the will of the dead.” 11. As pointed out by Walker 2006, pp. 159–160.

Bibliography Atkins, Kim. 2002. Friendship, trust and forgiveness. Philosophia 29: 111–132. Benn, Piers. 1996. Forgiveness and loyalty. Philosophy 71: 369–383. Corlett, J.  Angelo. 2006. Forgiveness, apology, and retributive punishment. American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 25–42. Cowley, Christopher. 2000. Forgiving the unrepentant. Etica & Politica 2 (1). Downie, R.S. 1965. Forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–134. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. Govier, Trudy, and Wilhelm Verwoerd. 2002. Forgiveness: The victim’s prerogative. South African Journal of Philosophy 21: 97–111. Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A philosophical exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horsbrugh, H.J.N. 1974. Forgiveness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4: 269–282. Hughes, Paul M. 2016. Two cheers for forgiveness (and even fewer for revenge). Philosophia 44: 361–380. Murphy, Jeffrie G. 2012. Punishment and the moral emotions: Essays, in law, morality, and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Shaughnessy, R.J. 1967. Forgiveness. Philosophy 42: 336–352.

7 DEATH 

177

Owens, David. 2012. Shaping the normative landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, Glen. 2007. Forgiveness and interpretation. Journal of Religious Ethics 35: 429–452. Phillips, D.Z. 1970. Death and immortality. London: Macmillan. Prager, Dennis. 1997. Response. In The sunflower: On the possibilities and limits of forgiveness, ed. Harry James Cargas and Bonny V. Fetterman. New York: Schocken. Seneca. 2010. Selected letters. Trans. Elaine Fantham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Tara. 1997. Tolerance and forgiveness: Virtue and vices? Journal of Applied Philosophy 14: 31–41. Strandberg, Hugo. 2015. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

While He Was Still Far off

Earlier in this book I briefly discussed the idea that the conceptual resources of the Greeks, or any people unrelated to Christianity, had no space for forgiveness.1 My criticism of that idea means that it might be possible to read an explicitly religious text, belonging to the Christian tradition, as a phenomenological description of forgiveness. Doing so would furthermore be an additional part of the methodological experimentation that is an important aspect of the writing of this book: in order to understand forgiveness better, and in order to understand life better by means of a discussion of forgiveness, it is vital not to take part in the standard “philosophy of forgiveness”, at most to make only an indirect contribution to it, for discussing the usual questions would merely risk keeping up the (philosophical as well as existential) deadlocks that it has come to. It is therefore better to try to approach the topic by less well-trodden paths. Reading a religious text in the context of moral philosophy might, however, run the risk of reducing its religious content to moral phenomenology. One answer to such a risk would be a simple remark: the fact that the text in question has something important to say about certain issues does not mean that it does not have anything to say about other issues. But there are also other, potentially deeper answers to the reductionist risk, focusing on the exact relation between morality and religion. The reductionist sees the religious content as just morality expressed in a more, say, colourful way, whereas the one coming up with the above answer to the reductionist risk sees them as two separate things. (It should be noted, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_8

179

180 

H. STRANDBERG

however, that the reductionist has to allow for some difference between the two phenomena (in this case, the difference of “colourfulness”), otherwise there would be no point to the reduction, which means that the question of how to understand that difference still remains (in this case, not even a mere difference of “colourfulness” needs to be inessential).) But there are of course other possibilities. One would be that a religious understanding potentially grows out of taking the moral issues seriously, which would mean that they are neither identical nor separate. Whether that is so or not, whether it is at all possible to determine whether that is so or not, and if so how, are, however, questions I will not discuss. A necessary prerequisite to any attempt at answering these questions is to find out what can be done with a religious text from the point of view of moral philosophy, and this is what I set out to do here. The question of the relation between the religious content and moral phenomenology is, however, even more complex. Describing moral phenomena is much more difficult than is often realised: the difficulties are not only such as pertain to the description of anything; there is of course also a moral difficulty, the difficulty of overcoming self-deception, the difficulty of opening one’s eyes to possibilities one would not like to attend to. This means that a religious text that seems to present a hitherto unheard of moral understanding of, say, forgiveness might in fact only draw the attention of many readers to things they would not like to be reminded of. Or, to be more exact, the difference between these two possible ways in which a text can have an impact on someone is in most respects not evident at all, is only evident in the respect that concerns the nature of the difficulty of opening oneself to the moral possibility in question, but also here the difference will be blurry, for one strategy of self-­ deception is precisely to cloud one’s understanding of that very difference. In other words, reading a religious text in the context of moral philosophy should not be taken to mean either that it is just a colourful expression of a moral understanding easily acquired without it, or that its message is a totally new one and therefore of no relevance when trying to understand the moral life of those who have not heard of it. In this chapter I will connect to two religious texts. Neither is a theological text; such a text would be too close to philosophy and would therefore be of less interest for us. The first one concerns a religious notion I have briefly touched upon earlier, the notion of purgatory, a notion that is related to questions of forgiveness but at the same time does not concern such questions directly, which might create a fruitful space for discussion.

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

181

The text I have chosen is “Purgation and Purgatory” (Trattato del purgatorio) by the fifteenth-century mystic Catherine of Genoa. The second text is the parable of the prodigal and his brother, perhaps the most famous of Jesus’s sayings as concerns forgiveness. When it comes to this text, the methodological remarks above are not really relevant: if it were not for its being found in the Bible, the parable would not go for a religious text. As the reflections above show, however, this does not mean that it does not have a (fundamentally) religious content, but disclosing this content would take an interpretative change of focus in the opposite direction to the one suggested above as concerns “Purgation and Purgatory”.

Catherine of Genoa: “Purgation and Purgatory” After having read the whole of “Purgation and Purgatory”—it is just about 20 pages long—one might be left with the impression that it contains quite a few inconsistencies. To what extent that is so is, however, not clear; it depends on how you read it, and the question of reading is best dealt with right away. (As we will see, the question of reading is in this case not only a methodological but also a substantial one, and it will therefore lead us into the text itself.) As Catherine writes, in the middle of the text: “I am more confused than satisfied with the words I have used to express myself.”2 That it is not clear where figurative language starts and ends is a matter of course,3 and the very distinction between figurative and non-­ figurative language is not self-evident in any context in which you are struggling to put something into words. It is consequently easy to press Catherine’s words and make the text inconsistent, but it is also possible to read the text and focus on what you can learn from it, which means that it is then more fruitful to make use of anything you find, say, philosophically constructive in the text than to dismiss it as being (really or apparently) inconsistent. It is this second way of reading the text that corresponds to my way of approaching it. And since Catherine’s writings have a religious purpose, they are not meant to be read in a detached way, so even though reading “Purgation and Purgatory” for philosophical purposes, as I do, might be foreign to the kind of text it belongs to, my style of reading it is not. One apparent contradiction in the text is, however, only apparent, for it concerns the phenomenon itself, as I hinted above. Catherine writes: “[I]n purgatory great joy and great suffering do not exclude one another.”4

182 

H. STRANDBERG

Why is that? Central here is the idea that hell and purgatory are, strictly speaking, not punishments (nor, for that matter, is paradise a reward): At the moment of death […] the soul goes to its appointed place with no other guide for it but the nature of its sins; […] the soul of its own volition flings itself into its proper place.5 As for paradise, God has placed no doors there. Whoever wishes to enter, does so. All-merciful God stands there with His arms open, waiting to receive us into His glory.6

Every soul thus gets what it wants, but it is precisely this fact that creates tensions as regards the soul in purgatory, for it is not in harmony with itself, such harmony being the final result of the time in purgatory. As we have seen, Catherine writes that “in purgatory great joy and great suffering do not exclude one another.”7 Paradise, as Catherine sees it, is about “joy in God’s will, in His pleasure”,8 about “participation in God and His love”,9 about “see[ing] into God […], oneness with Him”,10 and the souls there are “immersed in charity, incapable of deviating from it, they can only will or desire pure love”.11 These expressions should not be understood as referring to different things, I take it, but rather as different ways of describing one and the same thing, and it is evident from Catherine’s account that she does not understand purgatory and paradise as two different places, but as two different ways in which God’s love is experienced.12 The difference concerns the soul’s openness to joy and love. It is precisely this lack of openness that constitutes the conflict within the soul in purgatory, the conflict that manifests itself in, among other things, suffering and joy. The soul in purgatory is partly open to the above-­mentioned joy, but partly it closes itself to it. That conflict is experienced as pain—in two different ways, as we will see—and feeling pain is to be split. For anything that is experienced as something to get away from—in this case, pain—is experienced in contrast to something of a positive kind, more or less distinct, and my understanding is then also participating in that which contrasts to the pain. (This is not the case as regards positivity, by contrast, for in such a situation there need not be anything, present to my understanding, that I would like to stay away from or get to.) In the case of sin, by Catherine understood as “distance between the soul and God”,13 that distance, if experienced remorsefully (that is, with primary focus on that distance) or in terms of longing (that is, with primary focus on God), is

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

183

thereby on the way to being bridged. For, when experiencing the distance in these ways, I am not only distant to God but at the same time partaking of that which I regard myself as distant to, remorse and longing being the forms love of God takes in this context, and this love is hence neither fully present nor fully absent. The apparent contradiction or tension—between, among other things, suffering and joy—is the result of this not being a case of atemporal logic but of instability and transformation.14 For remorse and longing consist of two poles. In this context, the first pole consists of that which I long for and that in the light of which my closedness is something to feel remorse for, and it is hence this first pole that is the dynamic force, providing the transformation with a direction. The second pole consists of my present state understood in contrast to the first one, but that should not be taken to mean that my present state would be stable by itself, for this second pole is, if taken in isolation, just a theoretical construction, and the analysis of it might furthermore reveal even more instability, and it cannot be taken for granted that such an analysis will ultimately arrive at stable constituents. This instability means transformation, away from closedness, towards joy and love, away from what I feel remorse for, towards openness, towards what I long for. Catherine writes: “As it [the rust of sin] is consumed the soul is more and more open to God’s love.”15 This is painful in two respects. Obviously, in such a case of inner division liberation will be experienced both as joy and as pain, joy because I open myself to joy, pain because doing so means confronting, say, my fear of that openness.16 Catherine writes: “Were a soul to appear in the presence of God with one hour of purgation still due, […] it could not endure the […] pure goodness of God,”17 and the souls could not endure it because of “the resistance they feel in themselves against the will of God, against His intense and pure love”.18 But liberation is also painful in a second and more important respect. Longing for openness means partaking of such openness while at the same time shying away from it to a greater or lesser extent. That longing is hence constituted by both joy and suffering, suffering because there is something I lack (“the closer they come to this bread, the more they are aware that they do not as yet have it. Their yearning increases, because that is their joy. […] As the soul grows in its perfection, so does it suffer more because of what impedes the final consummation”19), joy because longing is infused by the spirit of what is longed for (and hence Catherine writes: “There is no joy save that in paradise to be compared to the joy of

184 

H. STRANDBERG

the souls in purgatory. This joy increases day by day because of the way in which the love of God corresponds to that of the soul, since the impediment to that love is worn away daily.”20). Joy and suffering are hence in this respect not experienced by different sides of me, as above, but are two sides of the same thing: “[I]ts [the soul’s] ardor in transforming itself into God is its purgatory”.21 Joy would be there by itself only when there is no more longing anymore, when I am in full contact with what I longed for. And this also means, returning to the first kind of pain above, that that kind of pain is willingly submitted to by the soul in purgatory, for it knows that there is no other way to joy in its fullness than confronting the things it fears: “[T]he soul […] aware that the impediment it faces cannot be removed in any other way, hurls itself into purgatory. […] compared with God’s love the suffering of purgatory is a small matter. […] that suffering is of no importance compared to the removal of the impediment of sin.”22 The process, as Catherine describes it, is a process in which God tugs at it [the soul] with a glance, draws it […] to Himself with a fiery love […] In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love […] As it is being drawn upwards, the soul feels itself melting in the fire of that love of its sweet God23

Two things are especially important to notice in this process, already touched upon briefly above. First, means and end are identical. The process by means of which the transformation comes about is not of a different kind than the result of that transformation. The end is powerful enough in itself and does not need to make use of anything else. After the transformation has come to its end, there is not an additional step to be taken in order to reach the final end. For this to be so, that which resists the transformation cannot have a power of its own, necessary to meet on its own terms, in which case the only possible strategy would be an economical one (in a broad sense of the word): the transformation would make use of the same strategy as that which counters it, only to a greater degree, or, alternatively, the transformation could never be fully successful, for there would always be something it is unable to meet. If this sounds obscure, compare the relation between, say, the longing to be together with someone, on the one hand, and shyness, on the other hand. Shyness is not overcome by giving it its due, nor would it necessarily always taint the relation to someone just because it was there in the beginning of that

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

185

relationship. It is overcome, from the side of the one suffering from shyness, by giving oneself over to that longing, from the side of the one encountering the shy person, by anticipating the workings of that longing. (And in most cases these will not be different sides, for the problems other people have I often recognise in myself too.) The identity of means and ends here is the reason Catherine can say that when the process of purification has come to its end, the fire that once partly brought suffering does no longer do so, for it has all the time been “the flames of divine love”.24 The fire of God’s love is thus strictly speaking not the cause of any suffering, only of joy; the cause of the suffering is that which hinders that love from running its full course. Or, to be more exact, the relations between sin, suffering, goodness, love and joy are not external but internal ones (in a positive or a negative sense, of course). The second thing that is especially important to notice in this process is that “love […] does its work without man’s doing”.25 As Catherine said above: “He [God] tugs at it [the soul] with a glance […] He continues to draw it up into His fiery love”.26 But this should not be mistaken for passivity. Rather, we are here talking about something concerning which the very distinction between activity and passivity does not seem to be meaningful. Catherine uses words such as ardour and yearning, and it would hence be misleading to describe the soul in purgatory as passive. For the same reason it would be misleading to describe it as active, for ardour and yearning are secondary with respect to that which they are responses to, something that hence tugs at and draws the soul up to itself, to use the words Catherine uses.27 In this context there is, moreover, a more substantial way of explaining this. Since the change the soul goes through is one of opening itself to love, the process is precisely one in which the soul comes to see that it is not self-sufficient.28 In other words, the soul would go wrong if it thought that it could change itself all by itself (and so emphasise activity) or took itself to have no needs (and so emphasise passivity). Are there any limitations to forgiveness, according to Catherine? Yes, she says that “those in hell […] cannot be forgiven”.29 But this is not for some “normative” reason, but rather is due to the fact that “the will of those in hell […] can no longer change”.30 Does this mean that Catherine takes remorse to be a condition for forgiveness to be possible? Not really, as if remorse came first and then forgiveness. Forgiveness is rather the whole process in which God’s love draws the soul up into itself. The condition is hence not remorse but whether the soul responds at all to the

186 

H. STRANDBERG

tugging. Undoubtedly it sometimes sounds as if Catherine conceives of two separate things, for example when she says that “It is this sorrow over their sins that makes God forgive them”,31 two things that would be connected as cause to effect or as reason to action, but even the local surroundings of that quotation suggest that Catherine is here talking about two aspects of the same thing. Discussion What can be learnt from all this, in the context of what I am trying to do in this book? God’s forgiveness is certainly something to think about, no matter whether you are a believer or not, and if one wishes to do so one can use Catherine’s “Purgation and Purgatory” or my above analysis of it as a point of departure. What I focus on in this book is, however, the forgiveness that takes place between human beings. What Catherine is saying is therefore not directly applicable. Such differences might, however, be philosophically enlightening, in the negative sense. One obvious difference is that there is no difficulty of forgiving in Catherine’s case: God is doing the forgiving, so the entire question concerns the way in which the one who needs to be forgiven relates to the possibility of being forgiven, relates to forgiveness in its fullness. This difference becomes evident in a case where someone doubts that God will forgive him: that doubt means that I see myself as irretrievably lost, whereas when I doubt someone else’s forgiveness, this may just as well be an expression of my taking her to be hard-hearted. In the first case I doubt myself, in the second case her. (What concerns us here is certainly not every possible conception of a god, in which case such a contrast would not be possible to make, but Catherine’s understanding of God or one close to hers.) This means, furthermore, that whereas forgiveness in the relation to God only goes in one direction, this is often not the case in the relations between human beings: we need to forgive each other. I may, for example, realise that my having had a hard time forgiving someone was part of the problem between us. Such differences notwithstanding, what Catherine is talking about can still be said to be present in any case of forgiveness, as the spirit informing it. So what can be learnt from all this? As I see it, and that is consequently what I mostly have focused on in my analysis of it, what is most interesting in Catherine’s text is her emphasis on transformation and her description of the dynamics involved. The only difficulty is not that the other person

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

187

might not forgive me. The difficulty is also to bring oneself to ask her forgiveness, a difficulty that will, however, not be properly understood until seen in the light of a broader difficulty, a difficulty that may very well remain even after having asked the other person’s forgiveness and even after having heard her say that she forgives me: the difficulty of fully believing in the possibility of forgiveness, the difficulty of opening oneself to it. This difficulty might seem to be one I have to solve all by myself, but that is not so, for being forgiven by the other could help me come to believe in the possibility of it. (Compare the ways in which being forgiven by someone and forgiving oneself are connected, an issue discussed in the last chapter.) Asking someone’s forgiveness thus takes place in the context of the process of a changing relationship between us, and forgiveness is thus not simply to ask a question and receive an answer, but a change in the relationship between us, a change that must continue also after I have received such an answer. Furthermore, if the options confronting the one about to ask somebody’s forgiveness were independent of each other— either ask for forgiveness or not ask—we would just have the possibility of making various sorts of mistakes, not a struggle. If we, however, want to understand the nature of such struggles, the question itself will not be the central thing but the moral dynamics within and between us, manifesting themselves in the difficulties of asking such a question but present also if the question is not asked and when it has been asked, dynamics bringing about the transformation and themselves transforming by means of it. Catherine’s “Purgation and Purgatory” can thus be read as a contribution to the better understanding of that process. So what is involved in it? When I said that the options are not independent of each other, I had in mind the difference between, on the one hand, the alternative answers to a question in a quiz, and, on the other hand, the case we are now discussing. So let us imagine a case in which I am struggling with asking someone’s forgiveness. Why do I want to ask her forgiveness? There might seem to be many possible reasons: I know that this is expected of me, I know that I will appear brutal if I do not ask her forgiveness, I know that she will feel better if I ask her forgiveness. If these are my reasons, or something similar to them, we would have a case of akrasia, and I could solve the difficulty either by persuading myself that what I took myself to know is wrong or doubtful (and so not ask her forgiveness) or by means of willpower subjecting myself to the objective (and so ask her forgiveness despite my unease). But the situation is very different if I long for togetherness, the togetherness between us that has been damaged by what I did to her,

188 

H. STRANDBERG

that is, if I am in need of being forgiven, if the question is not the central thing for me but her answer. In such a case there is a struggle, as long as I do not give myself over to what I long for or the longing has not vanished completely. That I long for togetherness means that what sets me in motion in the direction of asking her forgiveness is not an opinion or something I want to acquire, but the hopefully forgiving person herself, herself, not what she has said to me, for in the case under discussion I struggle with asking her forgiveness and no words of forgiveness have hence been expressed; I may not even have met her ever since I did what I now want to be forgiven for. And if words have been uttered, these may be unforgiving words, and this need not make my longing weaker, on the contrary. The difficulty of asking her forgiveness is thus one aspect of the way in which the relation between us has been damaged, that I am not able to open my heart to her, and asking her forgiveness is therefore as such an important aspect of the overcoming of that separation. Indeed, the very difficulty of asking her forgiveness would not be there at all if I had not imaginatively tried to do it and failed, which means that the longing that such an attempt is the emanation of is an integral element of the difficulty. The struggle is thus the result of, on the one hand, the presence—be it physically or imaginatively, in the light of the possibility of togetherness— of the one the relation to whom I have damaged by what I have done to her, and, on the other hand, shame, pride, etc. Shame and pride might seem to be opposed, but are two different forms of the same phenomenon: the prideful person sees it as degrading and shameful to admit a wrong; the one who feels shame for what he has done does not dare to meet the person before whom he is ashamed and thus takes his own identity to be of greater significance than the relation to that person. (Words such as “sees” and “takes” are important in this context, for it would be mistaken to describe the prideful person or the one who is ashamed as, say, intellectually convinced of the correctness of the content of his feelings.) This situation gives rise to the dynamics Catherine describes: on the one hand longing, the endeavour to open up to the other, of drawing closer to her, on the other hand the hardness that protects me from humiliation, a risk that is, however, only there as long as I take that opening up to be (potentially) humiliating. From the point of view of togetherness, the pain is thus both real and illusory, and the tension between the real and the illusory is one important dynamic force in the process of forgiveness. How that process will unfold certainly depends on how the person whose

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

189

forgiveness I ask responds to my partial opening of myself to her. In the trustful unprotectedness of asking someone’s forgiveness the answer is in a sense anticipated,32 and that makes such a question, from the point of view of the one to whom it is put, both challenging and joyful, challenging because that trust must now be responded to, fulfilling the trust or frustrating it, joyful because the recreation of the damaged relation is now under way. And not only recreation: the aim is not to attain some kind of static relation, for that would be to miss out on the perpetually creative dimension of love (a creative dimension clearly implicit in Catherine’s description of the love of God). To sum up: Catherine describes the process of forgiveness as one of coming ever closer to the one whose forgiveness she is asking, God, and the difficulties in that process, the pain but also the joy, are a result of the presence of that person, the change in me occasioned by that presence. When the one whose forgiveness I am asking is not God but a human being (or a human being as well as God), the difficulty may seem to have an “objective” component, since a human being, in contrast to God, is not pure love. Even though it is true, of course, that when I am trying to find my way to someone, she may make that way longer or endless by drawing back from me (physically, emotionally, violently, etc.); this only shows that the process of forgiveness will be continual, that the relation itself must be a relation of forgiveness. The end point is not one of compromise and resignation, in which we content ourselves with a life marred by our and each other’s moral shortcomings, for already to use terms such as “compromise”, “resignation” and “shortcomings” means that I have transcended them in understanding and am thus not fully content. The continual process of forgiveness will be a process of working at these shortcomings, frailties and failings, and working at them precisely by striving to have such a forgiving relation. What I need to be forgiven for, on the one hand, and the difficulties of asking for forgiveness and of forgiving, on the other hand, are not independent of each other, they both concern, in various ways, the ways in which I avoid someone, turn my back to her, disregard her. And therefore opening oneself to the possibility of forgiveness is opening oneself to her, and vice versa.

190 

H. STRANDBERG

The Prodigal Son The second text I said I would discuss in this chapter is the parable of the prodigal and his brother. Since it is not long, I can just as well begin by quoting it in full: There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’33

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

191

What we are here presented with is a possibility. This raises methodological questions: Why are possibilities philosophically important? Is not truth the aim? Well, if moral difficulties were fundamentally epistemological problems, then truth would be the solution: we would already be morally clear-sighted, would already want the good fully and truly, but would for some reason not know, in this specific situation, what the good thing to do is, and hence truth should be the aim of our moral reflections. Here I will not try to show that this is a false picture of our moral predicament; in a sense, this book as a whole is a contribution to such an endeavour.34 At this moment it is enough only to be somewhat doubtful about the epistemological take on morality. When in such doubts, one has come to see that there might be moral possibilities the existence of which, and the more exact nature of which, we are only dimly aware of, look away from or cloud for ourselves. Reading a text in which a moral possibility is presented—a possibility that the individual reader may or may not have a clear view of, depending on the precise nature of her moral standing—is one way of opening one’s eyes to such possibilities. Reading it: a text describing a moral possibility does not inform you of the existence of that possibility, which means that some effort is needed in order for the text to make a difference. This is always the case when something is of real existential importance, for the decisive thing is then the meaning of the possibility, which has to be imaginatively brought to life by the reader. In order for the text to be able to tell you something, you must hence creatively listen to it, which means that what the text tells you is neither equivalent to what you would have been able to tell yourself without it, nor to be found in the text as the thesis might be in a theoretical treatise. What I will set out to do here is therefore to read the parable, without reference to, say, other Gospel texts, with the simple intention of trying to bring to life the possibility of forgiveness described in it. First a few words about the context. The passage in the Gospel of Luke in which the parable is found begins in this way: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable”.35 The parable that follows is not the parable of the prodigal son, but the parable of the lost sheep, which is directly followed by the parable of the lost coin, which is then directly followed by our parable. In other words, the parable that we are about to read is presented as Jesus’s answer to the criticism directed against him, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” For this to be an

192 

H. STRANDBERG

answer, Jesus must think that sin is always a matter of turning away from togetherness with others, otherwise it would be possible for the Pharisees and the scribes to object: “The son in your parable left his father—that was the sin he committed—and then turned back, and if that is the case it is certainly a good idea to welcome him again, but there are other types of sin that are not at all like that, and hence you have still not justified your welcoming and eating with such people.” However, there are ways of showing that the case described in the parable is not an odd one. The first one is negative. There might seem to be cases where it is not goodness but evil that is about togetherness: mind the strong ties of loyalty in the mafia, say. On closer inspection, however, it is clear that this is not so. For the loyalty is defined by there being people who are not included; it is precisely for this reason that loyalty is seen as important. And this affects the relations also between those who are included, for it means that I am included only on condition that I never take sides with someone who is not included. As we will see, this issue is actually touched upon in the parable itself: the elder son obviously takes loyalty to be a virtue and therefore asks the father to choose between him and the younger son, whereas the father does not see such a conflict and hence rejects loyalty, and rejects it not only for himself but generally, for the fact that the elder son, out of loyalty to the father, refuses to meet the younger son not only means that things are not as they should be in the relation between the two brothers but also that things are not as they should be in the relation between the father and the elder son. The second way of showing that the case described in the parable is not an odd one is positive, but perhaps a bit vague. The point is then that in the very idea of forgiveness the understanding is found of sin as a matter of turning away from, and of forgiveness as a matter of turning to, each other. The imagined objection to the parable would then be the objection that there are cases of sin that not merely should not be forgiven but could not be forgiven, because forgiveness in such cases would make no sense. And how is that to be understood? But it is now high time to start reading the parable. “‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ […] A few days later the younger son […] traveled to a distant country”. For a precise historical understanding of what is going on here, one would of course need to know something about, say, the standard inheritance procedures in those days. But for us that is not really needed. For, in any case, we would have to enter into the changes of the personal relations between the people involved that the occurrences described in the beginning of the

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

193

parable are the result of and bring with them: the son puts an end to the togetherness with his father both economically (which is here not to be reduced to “financially”, but concerns the oneness of the household (working together, eating together, etc.)) and spatially (which means that they will not see each other again in the foreseeable future). “When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need.” It might seem that the point of the parable becomes less impressive by the fact that things turn bad for the son, as if the point were simply that you should not believe that you know better than your father, or as if the son is just interested in his own well-­ being and only therefore changes his ways. But it is also possible to read the parable with a different focus: the fact that the son does not change his ways until all the money is gone, and is nonetheless accepted unquestioningly by the father, shows that the father does not have any self-respect that would prevent him from welcoming the son before having put the son’s change of heart to the test,36 shows that the father is not inhibited by pride. The father only cares about the son’s being back; that it would be possible for him to accuse the son of only being interested in not having an empty stomach does not strike him. “[H]e came to himself” (εἰς ἑαυτὸν […] ἐλθὼν). The expression suggests that the son in some sense was spellbound, did not think clearly, was beyond himself, and that the difficult situation he now finds himself in makes him see in a new light the whole period of time that has passed since he left his father. It is a turning point, and what he does in what follows is not to be understood as only a new kind of strategic move in the game he played before; mind the difference between saying to oneself, “Yes, it would be a good idea to visit my father, it is probably easy to get some money from him”, and really wanting to be with him. That the son “came to himself” also suggests that the parable does not mind the alleged possibility of total corruption. “‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” The son does not seem to believe in the possibility of forgiveness, for he does not take into account the possibility of being brought back to his former life together with his father. He only wants to be employed by him. And since the father forgives him, that is, brings him back to such a life, the father does not take such a belief in the possibility of forgiveness to be a condition for forgiveness to be possible. The son sees the problem in terms of worthiness: what he has done has lowered his worthiness irretrievably,

194 

H. STRANDBERG

he thinks. The father, however, does not answer by saying that the son is in fact worthy, all things considered, but answers in a much more radical way, by not seeing their relation in terms of worthiness at all. Or expressed in slightly different terms: the son sees his relation to his father in terms of power, as a relation of subordination, but the father rejects this way of thinking and being altogether. “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”37 The father forgives his son before the son has said anything to him, before he has said anything to his son, before they have even met. If there is a specific moment in which the forgiveness takes place, it is the moment when the father starts to run. Of course, the longing that the father has probably felt for a long time, perhaps from the very beginning, is, in a sense, his forgiveness, but the running is more clearly a sign of the restoration of their relation. Furthermore, even if the longing has been there for a long time it is obvious that something happens when the father catches sight of the son: he feels a pang, both of joy and of even more intense longing than before, perhaps that kind of longing which is so strong that it hurts, despite, or precisely because of, the fact that what he longs for soon will come true, the longing which he puts into action, so to speak, by running to fulfil it as soon as possible. As it is written: he “was filled with compassion” (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη). In other words, it would be a mistake to claim that there are only two possibilities: either what he is experiencing around the moment in which he meets the son is irrelevant as concerns forgiveness, or that moment must be understood as a transition from the absence of forgiveness to its presence. Perhaps this is the way to put it: by running to meet him, the father anticipates the forgiveness before it has taken place, whether verbally (in words of forgiveness) or physically (as in this case: hugging and kissing). Words of forgiveness are hence not needed; here running, hugging, kissing are the central elements. (In fact, the word “forgiveness” or similar ones are not to be found anywhere in the parable, but nonetheless it is clear that forgiveness is one of its central themes.) Artistic depictions of the parable often have the son kneeling in front of the father, as in, for example, Rembrandt’s famous painting. But this is not easy to square with the parable as it is written, and corresponds to a more conventional and less radical understanding of forgiveness than the one found in the text: the father runs to meet the son before he has got the chance to kneel down, and even if other possibilities are conceivable, the hugging and kissing must in all likelihood be pictured as taking place between two

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

195

persons on roughly the same level, horizontally. It is not difficult to imagine that the son had wanted to kneel down before his father, of course, but the father is too eager to be together with him again to let him do so. As is evident from such artistic depictions, there is thus a strong tendency to see forgiveness in terms of power, in terms of subordination and superiority. Such depictions are not false, because they capture how we often relate to each other, especially when someone has hurt someone else, but they fail to capture the way in which the parable—and the father in the parable—rejects this approach to forgiveness, to other people and to oneself. “Then the son said to him”. The son does not seem to fully believe in the possibility of forgiveness, to fully believe in his father’s running, hugging, kissing. It could perhaps be said that what the son is saying here has nothing to do with whether he believes in the possibility of forgiveness or not, but should be understood as some kind of formal requirement that the son has to satisfy in order for the forgiveness to come into force. But if that is the case, the son is not aligned to his father’s way of thinking, for there is nothing that suggests that the father is thinking on such formal lines, and the son hence does not take that possibility into account after all. If there is a way of bringing what the son is saying here closer to his father’s way of thinking, that would be to claim that the son is saying it precisely because he wants to hear his father’s loving rejection of such submissiveness. “But the father said to his slaves”. The father does not answer his son, he completely ignores what the son is saying, does not say, “You are worthy to be called my son” or “I forgive you.” Saying such things—or their opposite—would be to talk from the perspective of the son, but the father instead shows his son a fundamentally different way of being: by immediately starting to prepare for a party. Or you could say that the father is so busy, so impatient, that he does not have the time to deal with the irrelevant issues brought up by his son, instead he eagerly throws himself into the really important things. “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.” If one wants a specific moment in which the forgiveness takes place, this one is also a possibility. The new clothes certainly have a concrete significance, as an answer to the son’s poverty, but also a symbolic one: he becomes a new man, or the one he once was, and the ring could be taken to tie him to his father and is in that case a sign of togetherness. Once again this shows the falsity of focusing

196 

H. STRANDBERG

on the alleged moment in which the son is kneeling down: forgiveness is not about being pressed down but about being lifted up. “[L]et us eat and celebrate”. A celebration has two sides: it is a celebration of something (that has happened, say), but it also has a point here and now, the joy of being together, of eating, drinking, talking, singing, or what have you. Even if it is not incorrect to describe the forgiveness here taking place as a matter of the homecoming of the son, the celebration shows the limitations of such a description. For the son and the father are not back in the place they started from as if nothing has happened, they are not back in the place they started from with painful memories, they are in the midst of something of an overflowing nature and hence more than a mere return: they are having a party. In other words, the forgiveness here taking place is not to be described in negative terms, as if it were a matter of, say, assuaging feelings of bitterness, but in positive ones. It is part of the new, festive life together. “[F]or this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” This is the only explanation the father gives of what he is doing, his only expression of his understanding of what is happening. The first contrast—between life and death—is the stronger one, for if something is lost, it is in most cases not at all strange that you find it again, sometimes even to be expected, but if someone is dead it takes a miracle to bring her back to life again.38 On the other hand, in the second contrast—between lost and found—the personal meaning for the father of what has happened is more clearly marked, for whereas death is not always a problem, you would not say that you have lost something, in contrast to, say, having thrown it away or just left it somewhere, if you would not like to have it close to you, could imagine someone who would, or the like. But found in which sense? If I have lost something, I might search for it, actively and systematically. But it is also possible not to do anything, and eventually the lost thing just turns up. If this contrast, the one of lost and found, is read together with the first one, the one of life and death, the second way in which something can be found is the relevant one. Is it not true by definition that I could only raise an apparently dead person to life, never a dead one, however skilled I might be? If that is so, saying that someone was raised to life always marks it as something that happens, though not necessarily independently of my doings, nevertheless not as a result of them. The thing I have lost is thus here found not as the result of my skill in searching for it, but as something that eventually turns up. In other words, the father’s exclamation expresses his joy at something that is beyond his

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

197

control. Or perhaps better: at something to which the distinction between control and uncontrol is not applicable. In any case, the joy that forgiveness means is here not a joy at what I have achieved, as if forgiveness were an action in that sense; the joy is a response to the homecoming of the son, a homecoming to be welcomed in joy or rejected in anger, as in the case of the elder son. What the father is saying here is, moreover, not only his only explanation of what he is doing, his only expression of his understanding of what is happening, but is also his only expression of his understanding of what the son has done. The father does not use words such as guilt, only “dead” and “lost”. The other side of his only using such terms is therefore that he does not ask for appropriate feelings of guilt or for penance on the side of the son as conditions for his forgiving him—if not the son’s willingness to join the party is the appropriate feeling and his taking part in it his doing penance. The contrast to “dead” and “lost” is simply “alive” and “found”, and “alive” and “found” simply means the son’s being there. What matters is only that the son is not there by chance but for good; what will happen in the future thus certainly matters, but there is no indication that the father makes a judgment of probability concerning this future.39 “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on.” The attitude of the elder son, even more evident in what follows, is expressed already here. When there is a party he is not filled with joy, going there as fast as possible not to miss out on it. In contrast to the father’s running, he is much more cautious. He does not want to come too close to the party, he does not want to have a look for himself, but instead calls one of the slaves. His attitude to the younger son, which surfaces in what follows, is not without relation to his attitude to life more generally, parts of which we get to know already here. “[H]e has got him back safe and sound.” This is said by one of the slaves, not by the father, but it is easy to see its connections to the father’s sayings and doings as we have already met them. What is central is then the father’s worries about the younger son, not reprimands or hurt feelings. “Then he became angry and refused to go in.” The elder son is here even more clearly contrasted to the father: he does not run, but refuses to go in; he is not happy, but angry. An unforgiving stance is contrasted to the father’s forgiveness. The elder son does not let himself by guided by the younger son’s homecoming seen in the light of love; he might see the

198 

H. STRANDBERG

homecoming as a positive thing, but that positive thing is overshadowed by something he takes to have a much greater importance, as seen in what follows. “His father came out and began to plead with him.” This can be read as analogous to the father’s running to meet the younger son. He wants both of them to be there at the party, together with him and together with one another. The two forms of togetherness are in fact not two forms, but two sides of the same thing, for if the elder son would only join the father when the younger son is away, which he certainly will be now and then also in the future, there is a problem, and not an insignificant one, in the relation between the father and the elder son. That problem is not about time, as if it would be less significant if the younger son was away more often, but about, among other things, what they would not be able to talk about, that there are things they would feel forced to keep silent about when together. In order to be able to be fully together with the father, the elder son must be together also with the younger son. “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” This is the explanation the elder son gives of his anger, of his refusing to join the party. Several things are noteworthy here. First, it is evident that he does not find any joy in the work he is doing. He does not work with his father but for him, as if he is forced to do so. The father must be blind if he has not already noticed this. We do not know anything about it, but it is certainly tempting to start speculating about the more exact nature of the relation between them. Second, the elder son seems to envy the younger son, more or less unconsciously. He would like to do, or to have done, what the younger son did: leave his life (and work) together with the father, or, as he puts it, for the father. Bearing in mind that the younger son has returned, and moreover has probably thought about returning for some time, the elder son is not only lost too, and not only lost still, but even more lost than the younger son. From the point of view of the elder son, there is, however, an important difference between them: obedience and disobedience. Only if he is liberated from that frame of mind will he consequently understand things in the way the father does, will he understand what the younger son did to the father as the father understands it (that is, not in terms of disobedience), and, most of all, will he understand what he is doing to the father

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

199

as the father understands it (that is, not in terms of obedience). This is obviously related to what I said about power above: the frame of mind he needs to be liberated from is a frame of mind that focuses on issues of power. Third, the envy he feels is also visible in his comparing himself with the younger son, in his wanting some kind of credit for being better than he is. This is nearly related to his unforgiving stance: he does not want the difference he sees between them, the difference of obedience and disobedience, to be erased, forgotten or seen as irrelevant. Furthermore, a comparison is always made, and the result of the comparison, conditional on the comparison having been made, is therefore never self-evident, even if the result might seem to be self-evident after the comparison has been made. Fourth, the elder son claims that he has never been given the opportunity to arrange a party. Whether this is true or not I will come back to later, but already now it is possible to notice something strange about that claim. For if he really wants to have a party, he has the chance right now, he just has to join it, and if he wants his friends to be part of it, he could ask his father whether he may invite them. In fact, since he has not entered the house yet, he does not know who the guests are, perhaps his friends are already there. So the real issue for him seems to be another one: he wants a private party, without this younger brother, or he wants a party in his own honour (and if that is the case, it might be occasioned by his mistaking the present party for a party in his younger brother’s honour, in contrast to its being a party in the joy at his homecoming). The elder son is preoccupied by thoughts of honour, whereas the logic of the father’s thoughts is more like this: his younger son has been unwell, and now the father is arranging a party in celebration of his recovery, and since his elder son has never been unwell, there has not been any reason to have a party in celebration of his recovery, and he does not see any reason for the elder son to miss out on the party they are now having. Fifth, the elder son calls the younger son “this son of yours”. It is of course possible that they are, say, half-brothers, but however that may be it is nonetheless clear that the elder son dissociates himself from him, only sees the younger son as associated with the father, for that relation would be much harder to deny. Sixth, he says that the younger son “has devoured your property with prostitutes”. There is no reason to doubt that he is right about this in some sense of the word, but compared to the narrator, who only said that the younger son “squandered his property in dissolute living”, he is much more specific, and hence wants to rub in the details. Another difference between the two accounts is that the elder son talks about “your

200 

H. STRANDBERG

property” whereas the narrator uses “his property”, and this means two different takes on what he did: the elder son wants to portray it as an offence against his father, the narrator as self-destruction. In other words, the elder son tries to tear up the father’s forgiveness by making the father feel hurt. And that means that he has now sunk even deeper into those waters from which the younger son has just emerged. “‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” The father answers his elder son by underlining a theme that runs through the parable as a whole: being with one another. The radicality of that togetherness means that the elder son is wrong, the father says. It is not true that he has not been given the opportunity to arrange a party, for “all that is mine is yours”. The elder son is thus lost, just as the younger one was, for he has not understood this “with me”, this “all that is mine is yours”. Why not? It is of course possible that it has something to do with the father’s way of relating to him in the past, but we do not know anything about that issue. What we have got to know, however, is the way in which the elder son expresses himself, and especially telling in that regard is the way in which he expresses his relation to his work and his emphasis on his obedience. As long as his frame of mind is shaped in that way, it will not be possible for him to celebrate spontaneously; he will only be able to celebrate if his father invites him to a party. In other words, it is not possible for him to relate to the world in joy; if there is a joy possible for him, that would only be the joy it is possible to have privately, no matter the father’s inviting him to it or not. And to what extent is that possible?

Conclusion One way of ending our discussion of the parable, summing up some of the themes we have gone into, is then this: the parable portrays the forgiving life as a life beyond the oscillation between obedience and disobedience, between squandering and stinginess, between feelings of worthiness and unworthiness, as a life that is not about relations of power, as a life that is not isolated and closed, but a life in joyful togetherness with others. In such a life, the loss of a son, whether it is the younger or the elder one, will not be an indifferent thing, and his coming back will not be met hesitantly, in self-respect and pride, but eagerly and festively welcomed. The parable presents us with this understanding of forgiveness, nothing more and

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

201

nothing less. Nothing more: there are no arguments for this understanding or against other ones. Nothing less: the presentation is the argument, one could say. In this chapter, both in my discussion of Catherine of Genoa and in my discussion of the parable, I have tried to stay true to this form of reflection, thereby, hopefully, showing that there are philosophical insights to be made just by trying to come to a better understanding of things that at first seems to be mere possibilities.

Notes 1. See Chap. 6. 2. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 78. Similar phrases are to be found at several places in “Purgation and Purgatory”. 3. Cf. Hertzberg 2011. 4. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 82. 5. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 77. 6. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 78 7. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 82. 8. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 71. 9. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 73. 10. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 76. 11. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 72. 12. See Catherine of Genoa 1979, e.g. p. 80. 13. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 73. 14. This is a central point in Hegel’s philosophy: “[A] thing is not as such damaged, defective or faulty, as it were, just because a contradiction can be pointed out in it,” for the aspects of a thing “do not become mobile and alive against each other until they have been driven to the peak of contradiction and acquire in that contradiction the negativity that is the inherent pulsation of self-movement and life” (Hegel 1978, pp. 289, 288). 15. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 72. 16. As we have seen, Catherine herself speaks about openness, but the exact phrase “fear of openness” is taken from Backström 2007. 17. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 83. 18. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 79. 19. Catherine of Genoa 1979, pp. 76, 82. This pain is nearly related to, albeit not identical to, the pain of remorse, which is of course also present here (p. 78): “The greatest suffering of the souls in purgatory, it seems to me, is their awareness that something in them displeases God […] In a state of grace, these souls fully grasp the meaning of what blocks them on their way to God.”

202 

H. STRANDBERG

20. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 72. 21. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 81. 22. Catherine of Genoa 1979, pp. 77–78. This thought can fruitfully be compared to Collingwood’s, in 1916, pp. 177–180. 23. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 79. 24. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 80. 25. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 81. 26. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 79. 27. The same dynamics are described by Augustine when he writes (1902, p. 1608 [26.4]): “No one comes to me, except whom the Father draws.” Do not think that you are drawn against your will: the mind is also drawn by love. […] it is not enough to be drawn by the will, you are also drawn by pleasure. [… Each one is drawn] not by necessity, but pleasure; not obligation, but delight […] Give me one who loves, and he feels what I say. Give me one who longs […] But if I speak to a cold one, he does not know what I am speaking about. Augustine’s quotation is from Jn 6.44. 28. Cf. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 82. 29. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 74. 30. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 74. 31. Catherine of Genoa 1979, p. 75. 32. Even though she is talking about the one who forgives, not about the one who asks someone’s forgiveness, North makes a similar point when she writes (1987, p. 505): If I am to forgive I must risk extending my trust and affection, with no guarantee that they will not be flung back in my face or forfeited again in the future. One might even say that forgiveness is an unconditional response to the wrongdoer, for there is something unforgiving in the demand for guarantees. 33. Lk 15.11–32 (NRSV). 34. See also Strandberg 2015; Strandberg 2016. 35. Lk 15.1–2 (NRSV). 36. Although the concerns of those who stresses the importance of self-­respect are sometimes real ones, expressing these concerns in terms of self-­respect should be questioned. (As Pettigrove points out [2012, p.  113]: “The claim that in some circumstances forgiveness might involve a lack of selfrespect has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception in much of the recent philosophical literature on forgiveness.”) It is one thing that damaged self-­respect or lack of self-respect is a problem, another thing whether the opposite

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

203

state should be understood in positive terms or not. Is it not better to say that, for someone who does not have these problems, the question does not even arise? Furthermore, since there are no doubt situations in which too much self-respect would be a problem, the right solution is not to find the right balance but to see whether there is another way of approaching the issue—in the light of love, for example. As I see it, it is an important part of philosophy to reject certain concepts, that is, not to employ them at all, neither in a positive nor in a negative way: the father in the parable neither has nor lacks self-respect. The concerns are better answered by pointing out the important differences between forgiveness and submissiveness (being antithetical to love), as I did in Chap. 5. The tone for much of the contemporary philosophical discussion of forgiveness was set by Murphy’s stress on self-respect; see Murphy and Hampton 1988, e.g. p. 16. Hampton’s response (Murphy and Hampton 1988, pp. 35–87) to Murphy’s paper is in this respect of great interest, for although her analysis contains good points concerning how unforgivingness is related to issues of value, worth, rank and esteem, she still holds on to them in the positive part of the analysis. For someone who sees the issue of self-respect as the central one, see Dillon 2001, esp. p. 74; for a critical discussion, see Eve Garrard and David McNaughton 2011, pp. 100–101. 37. In his reading of the parable, Alan Torrance rightly stresses the importance of this verse for an understanding of forgiveness (2006, pp. 56–57). 38. According to one, fairly obvious interpretation of the parable, the father is God, but this does not mean that it makes sense to read everything the father says and does as something God might say or do. The Christian God, master of life and death, cannot express his joy by comparing it to the miracle of someone supposedly dead being brought to life. An allegory should not be pressed too much, as we all know. The context of the parable makes it clear that Jesus likens himself to the father (and in his encounter with Zacchaeus (Lk 19.1–10), Jesus can be said to put the parable into practice), but on the other hand we have Jesus resurrecting the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’s daughter, and Lazarus from the dead (Lk 7.11–15; Mt. 9.18–26, Mk 5.22–43, Lk 8.40–56; Jn 11.1–44). 39. The parable of the prodigal son is not often mentioned in the philosophical discussion about forgiveness, but one of the few who has referred to it is North (1987). While her paper is generally of great importance, what she says about the parable is however seriously misleading (p. 507): [A]lthough the forgiver is morally superior, at least in this instance, and although this fact is recognized by the wrongdoer in the very act of asking for forgiveness, the knowledge should be implicitly shared and not openly displayed. […] As we saw in the example of the Prodigal Son it

204 

H. STRANDBERG

is part of the act of forgiveness itself that the son is treated with honour and respect by the very person who surpasses him in moral worth. Not only are the words “honour” and “respect” understatements, indeed wide of the mark, as descriptions of the father’s joy at the son’s homecoming and love of him, there are above all no signs in the parable that the father sees himself as morally superior and keeps silent about that fact (as if the elder son was right and was only wrong in not keeping that knowledge hidden). On the contrary, the impression you get of him is rather that he does not make any such comparisons at all, that the question of who is the morally superior one does not arise at all for him and thus has no answer. And if the father does not make any such comparisons, why should we? In other words, who would say that the father “surpasses him [the son] in moral worth” and to whom? Nussbaum makes a similar point in her discussion of the parable (2016, pp. 79–81), but draws for that very reason the conclusion that if the parable has anything at all to say about forgiveness, it is only that forgiveness is a bad thing, because forgiveness, as she sees it, is closely connected to “a hierarchical assumption of moral superiority” (p. 106). At some points in her book, she concedes that people who talk about forgiveness sometimes refer to something very different, to something she sees as definitely good (p. 112: “if she wants to call this forgiveness, fine”), but her tone is mostly unyielding, claiming that this is a misleading use of words (see e.g. p. 12). Now, I believe that there is another way of dealing with this problem: asking oneself what becomes visible or invisible if one defines forgiveness in a specific way. And here I believe that there are things Nussbaum will not be able to see as long as she uses the word “forgiveness” in the way she does. First, her take on forgiveness is extremely individualistic, seeing it as a change that occurs in the victim. Since the father of the prodigal son does not feel any resentment in the first place, he cannot choose to give it up, and there is then no forgiveness. But from the point of view of the son, things are certainly different: something of great importance happens when the father comes to meet him. Nussbaum’s book is thus a very good example of a general problem in the philosophical discussion about forgiveness, that the one who wants to be forgiven is all too often forgotten, and that what happens between the people involved is thereby lost to sight. Second, Nussbaum’s take on forgiveness will make it hard for her to understand change, the process of forgiveness. Let us imagine someone who forgives in Nussbaum’s sense of the word: confronting the wrongdoer, humiliatingly demanding acts of contrition and apology, after such forms of payback triumphantly forgiving her (see e.g. p.  12). One thing that might happen later on is that he comes to regret this attitude of his, and now seeks to meet her in a spirit more akin to the spirit of the father in the

8  WHILE HE WAS STILL FAR OFF 

205

parable. Nussbaum would d ­ efinitely see this as a change to the good, but she would only be able to conceive of it as a transition from one thing to a fundamentally different one. But is it not possible that he understands the change as partly a matter of freeing himself from self-deception, that he sees what he now seeks as the true form of what he previously only took himself to be doing, that he now understands what he preciously did as only a way of giving a nice coating to his unforgivingness? The last word is not a mistake here, but is one way of highlighting the more or less unconscious relations between what he did then and what he seeks now, relations that Nussbaum fails to notice, at least partly as a result of her choice of words. For two other discussions of the parable of the prodigal son in the context of the philosophical discussion about forgiveness, see Drabkin 1993, pp. 234–235, and Garrard and David McNaughton 2010, pp. 13–16.

Bibliography Augustine. 1902. In Ioannis Evangelium tractatus CXXIV. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXV, 1379–1976. Paris: Migne. Backström, Joel. 2007. The fear of openness: An essay on friendship and the roots of morality. Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press. Catherine of Genoa. 1979. Purgation and purgatory / The spiritual dialogue. Trans. Serge Hughes. Mahwah: Paulist Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1916. Religion and philosophy. London: Macmillan. Dillon, Robin S. 2001. Self-forgiveness and self-respect. Ethics 112: 53–83. Drabkin, Douglas. 1993. The nature of god’s love and forgiveness. Religious Studies 29: 231–238. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2010. Forgiveness. Durham: Acumen. ———. 2011. Conditional unconditional forgiveness. In The ethics of forgiveness, ed. Christel Fricke, 97–106. London: Routledge. Hegel, G.W.F. 1978. Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objektive Logik (1812/13). Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Hertzberg, Lars. 2011. It says what it says. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85: 589–603. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Joanna. 1987. Wrongdoing and forgiveness. Philosophy 62: 499–508. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and forgiveness: Resentment, generosity, justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettigrove, Glen. 2012. Forgiveness and love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strandberg, Hugo. 2015. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

206 

H. STRANDBERG

———. 2016. Is pure evil possible? In The problem of evil: New philosophical directions, ed. Benjamin W.  McCraw and Robert Arp, 23–34. Lanham: Lexington Books. Torrance, Alan J. 2006. The theological grounds for advocating forgiveness and reconciliation in the sociopolitical realm. In The politics of past evil: Religion, reconciliation and the dilemmas of transitional justice, ed. Daniel Philpott, 45–86. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

CHAPTER 9

Forgiveness and Morality

“I’m not good at anything, how will someone ever come to like me?” “Perhaps if I put things straight in my room and clean it really carefully, they will become fond of me …” “What should I do, I clumsily spilled some milk!!”

In literary depictions of children who live in orphanages and of foster children, one common theme is the extremely well-behaved child. In order to get noticed by prospective foster parents and, later on, not to anger the couple who have decided to take it, the child follows all prescriptions meticulously and tries to make a favourable impression by doing small good deeds. Morality becomes a way of coping with an insecure situation.1 What superficially looks like morally ideal behaviour—and according to some philosophical accounts of morality would be one—might, on the contrary, thus be indicative of a serious problem. “I’m not good at anything, how will someone ever come to like me?” At first glance, the problem here seems to be the one that is explicitly stated: I am not good at anything. In that case, the problem would be solved by learning some skills and tricks. But this solution would be a precarious one. “What if they don’t like piano playing? And what if I make a mistake when playing? Now and then that is bound to happen!” That the question with which I opened this paragraph is even asked means that I take it to be important whether I am good at anything or not. It is consequently possible to understand the problem as a more fundamental one: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8_9

207

208 

H. STRANDBERG

that I take this to be important. Or, rather, that I understand the importance in one specific way, as the way to make people take a liking to me (for some importance many things no doubt have, an importance that must be examined from case to case). Also here it is possible to go deeper: that I want the (prospective) foster parents to like me already hints at the problem I am circling around at the moment, for if that is my goal, the means here chosen are not out of place. Of course, the foster child who I am trying to give a voice to does not ultimately want the parents just to take a liking to it, but finding and acquiring skills that are most likely appreciated is not beyond my power. The problem consequently concerns that which is beyond my power, that which is not a matter of power at all: I have no one, or do not believe I have anyone, whose love is a matter of course. “Perhaps if I put things straight in my room and clean it really carefully, they will become fond of me …”. To the extent that there is an attitude on the part of the parents corresponding to the child’s thoughts—a correspondence that need not be exact, for since the expectations of the parents need not be very specific, it is possible for the child to set out fulfilling expectations the parents did not know that they had, as it were—the parents say to each other things like: “He better not cause too much trouble. That would be too tiresome. Hopefully he knows how to behave.” To the extent that this is the basic form of the way the parents relate to the child, the child is seen as substitutable, for however unique the performance of the child is, another child who does the same things even better is always imaginable. The child is up for judgment, and although these parents need not see getting rid of it as a real alternative in practice, saying that another child would be a better one to have is one form such judgments take: “This was a mistake, but we have to live with it. The Joneses were lucky, the child they picked is so nice.” The child is not an inalienable part of their life, is seen as an in-­principle variable factor, as a temporary arrangement, even though that time might never come to an end. They do not want the child, they want a child who behaves in a specific way. The problem I have discussed here could be described as u ­ nforgivingness, on the part of the parents, and disbelief in the possibility of forgiveness, on the part of the child. This description might sound slightly misplaced: thus far I have not mentioned any moral wrongdoings or possible reactions to them. Such a criticism has its place; however, I think that my discussion here at the end of the book benefits from, for a moment, not having a

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

209

restricted view of what should be seen as belonging to the phenomenon of “the moral”. Specifically, when using the word “well-­behaved,” as I did at the beginning, you are typically talking about a form of comportment that straddles the boundary of the moral and the non-­moral. The virtues of the well-behaved child are such as helpfulness and kindness, but interpreted in a way that includes both moral and non-moral aspects (a stereotypical example of the latter: being quiet). And being well-­behaved also stereotypically includes aspects that have very little to do with any virtues in the moral sense of the word—a well-groomed appearance, say. More positively expressed, forgiveness, in this broad sense of the word, is not only a way of relating to someone who has mistreated you, but just as well about not minding, or even noticing, things that someone else may find, say, irritating. The most important point is, however, that the problem of unforgivingness I am discussing here cannot be solved on the distinctively moral side only. The problem would still be there if the foster parents were to become forgiving as regards moral matters but as harsh as before in all other respects, and that such a combination is hard to imagine shows that we are not dealing here with two independent issues.2 “What should I do, I clumsily spilled some milk!!” This clumsiness may certainly be occasioned by the same kind of insecurity as it, on its parts, feeds: the equivocalness of the word “self-­conscious” is telling here, and it is connected to the inhibitions brought about by that control over one’s appearances that I touched upon a moment ago.3 All this points to a more general issue. The spilled milk has an importance far transcending the practical problem, indeed overriding it: what has happened will have its effect on how the parents will see me. “Perhaps it is possible to hide the milk under some plates, then they will hopefully fail to notice the accident.” Since the problem is for me primarily not a practical one but a problem concerning how the parents will see me, it is more important for me to see to it that the accident will not be discovered than actually putting things right again. In other words, my understanding of what I am doing, of its effects and of the relation between me and my actions takes a special form. This form, and what contrasts to it, needs to be reflected upon. One might be inclined to believe that there are no vital distinctions to make here. The same action can simply serve different ends—in the case above of putting things straight in my room: making things easier to find, or making my foster parents fond of me—but basically there is the same means/ends structure in both cases. The only question to ask would then

210 

H. STRANDBERG

be whether the possible gain is worth the cost; I may certainly wish for a world in which it were possible to obtain what I want without as much effort, but that is all. Such an analysis would, however, be misguided. This is easier seen if we bring in an additional action into the discussion: doing something in order to make someone I love happy (cleaning may seem too trivial to be an example of this, but given the right context it may certainly be one, if they see it as a burden and I relieve them of it, say). What I do is here not one thing, the love another, but a dimension of it. Not a necessary dimension, of course, as if love would require this specific act, but still something without which love would not be what it is: loving someone means, among many other things, to take pleasure in doing things that make him or her happy. In other words, the action is here not a means to an end, is not something that you could wish yourself to be spared, imagining the world to be such that as much effort would not be needed.4 This said, it is now possible to return to the two cases of putting things straight in my room. It is certainly possible to do such chores without having some specific attitude towards them—this may be a result of learning how the world works in this particular respect—but if what I do is restoring the room to its former state, the end result is imaginable without the means, and in this regard I may see what I do as a burden.5 Correspondingly, if it is I who have brought about the mess I am now tidying up, that could also contribute to my seeing what I am doing as something that could have been avoided, that is, as ultimately not a necessity: “Why do I have to be so clumsy? Now I have to clean up again!!!” When such a dimension enters—connected to questions of, say, disappointment—the respect in which this case is similar to, but above all different from, the other one (putting things straight in my room in order to make my foster parents fond of me) becomes clearer. If I am disappointed with myself for having made such a mess that I have to do some cleaning, that is simply an aspect of what it means to reflect on my own doings in general, and even though such reflection can take many different forms, its complete absence would mean that I do not understand what I am and have been doing, that I do not understand what effects what I do or refrain from doing will have. If I, however, try to make my foster parents fond of me, the way in which I reflect upon what I am doing to impress them does not concern merely my doings, it concerns above all what the parents are and are not doing and how I relate to that. That they demand that I behave in a certain way, or that I understand them to demand this of me, is consequently not something I have to take as an aspect of the way in which the world works.

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

211

I may hence be angry with them in a way I would not be angry with my room for needing cleaning: “It was not my fault! Can’t they see that it is difficult to keep an eye on everything the whole time? They ought to help me cleaning up, it should not only be my business but theirs as well!” The extent to which I obey them, even submit to them, is the extent to which I may rebel against them—“I don’t give a shit, now I will pour out the whole glass, it will be fun to see how ridiculously upset they will be!”—but the sense in which I might be said to be submitting to or rebelling against the nature of things is a very different one. There is simply a moral relation here that does not exist between me and the room. The means/ends analysis only focuses on my doings, but by doing so it leaves out of account the fact that in a moral relation I do not only take a stand on what I do and do not do, but also on what the one I stand in such a relation to is and is not doing. If the sole focus of what I am doing is the appreciation of others it could give me, I hence close myself to the enjoyment it might be possible for me to find in what I do. Forgiveness, as I have used the term thus far in this chapter, frees me from such a sole focus, for in trusting the forgiveness of others I no longer worry about who I will be in their eyes, and forgiveness thereby changes my relation to what I am doing. Such enjoyment is one possible result of discovering the specificities of things that previously only served as means, without any importance in themselves. In other words, forgiveness has a close connection to learning. In the same way, what needs to be seen aright are the dimensions of the problem in question. The spilled milk is an example of that, but also of the complex notion of rightness I am referring to here: what it takes for me as a foster child to see the dimensions of the problem is not to correct an intellectual mistake I made, but that the relation between me and the parents does not have such a form that obscuring layers are added. Forgiveness thereby liberates me from a distinct form of self-centredness: the focus of what I do is no longer what change it might bring about with respect to how others perceive me, and the problem, when I have spilled some milk, is no longer me but the milk on the table. (Compare the attitude I mentioned a moment ago, when the parents see the child as substitutable: if seen in that way, the child as such is seen as the problem; if not seen in that way, the problem is understood in other ways, with reference to what in that case is seen as variable.) In the case of moral wrongdoing, the liberation from self-centredness is of crucial moral import. If I live with someone whom I trust to forgive me, my first thought when having injured her will

212 

H. STRANDBERG

not be “What will she think of me?” but “How is she, what can I do for her?” and one way of putting these questions into practice is by asking her forgiveness. This is only apparently paradoxical, for asking someone’s forgiveness does not have to be done out of uncertainty about the answer, but is better understood as an action that has a significance no matter what follows: by asking her forgiveness I give something to her, as it were, and it is then not primarily a way for me to get what I want, although what I give to others will ultimately be ours. Trusting her to forgive me thus makes genuine remorse possible, for the problem, as I now see it, is not that I suffer, is not the feelings of guilt occasioned by my having contravened a moral rule. The problem is that she suffers, and it is that suffering I must attend to. This is so even if her suffering is unfounded, if it is the result of her being touchy or having misunderstood what has happened: our relation is then still marred by a problem, and I must take that problem seriously even if not in the way she takes it. The unforgiving parents see the child as such as the problem, I said. Excusing the child, referring to its immaturity, is hence possible to place on the same side of the divide as unforgivingness, with forgiveness on the other side. In both cases, what the child has done is seen as something to be expected: “Well, what he did was not a good thing, but you should not expect too much of a child of that age and background,” “Again!! He always does things like this. That’s so typical of him. He really is a rascal.” (What the child has done is however seen as something to be expected in two different ways, for unforgivingness ties the child to what it has done, whereas excusing it disavows the child’s possibility of being connected to what it does). Thereby the space in this context for the concept of responsibility is restricted; that excusing the child means saying that there is a sense in which it is not responsible for what it has done is clear, but the same thing actually goes for being unforgiving towards it,6 for if one does not see anything else in someone than what she has done, it becomes unclear in what sense she could be said to have had it in her to do anything else than what she did.7 One expression of seeing the child in the light of forgiveness is, by contrast, to say, “This is not really him.” Such a statement is one way of trying to retain a notion of responsibility in this context, not restricting it by seeing the relation of the child to what it has done in any of the above two ways. Saying that what the child has done does not correspond to its real self, as it were, is not an empirical statement, as if the one who is unforgiving and the one who forgives necessarily disagree about how often the child has done things like this. In a certain

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

213

sense there might be a disagreement about the future, for what the above statement could be understood as expressing is hope, assurance of the possibility of change, but that hope is then not refuted if the unforgiving one (for the time being) turns out to be right, is, if anything, only given up. The one who excuses the child may believe in the possibility of such change, but also may not, and forgiveness is in that respect very different: in the above expression of forgiveness such a belief is shown.

The Moral Influence of the Parents on the Child As I said at the beginning of this chapter, what superficially looks like morally ideal behaviour might, on the contrary, be indicative of a serious problem. What problem? Disbelief in the possibility of forgiveness, one could say. This need not mean that the child is in doubt that were it to ask its parents’ forgiveness, they would say that they forgive it—this need not affect the problem in any away, however, but might even make it worse. (A central point in the understanding of forgiveness: saying that one forgives is often a move in the power game that forgiveness, as I use the term, is the termination of.8) And the child need not think about its relation to the parents in terms of forgiveness, or the lack of it, for it to be possible for us to deepen our understanding of the problem by using such terms. The contrasting belief in forgiveness becomes tangible—without a concept of forgiveness being used at all—in the child who wants to be comforted by the very parent who, being angry with it for something it has done, has made it sad.9 The foster child, by contrast, sees the foster parents as strangers precisely to the extent that it does not relate to them in this or similar ways. And vice versa for the parents in relation to the child. In my three opening sentences in this chapter, we only got the perspective of the child. In the following discussion, I now and then gave voice to the corresponding attitude on the part of the parents. To some degree it is possible to imagine a situation in which no such correspondence is there, in which the (prospective) foster parents are as forgiving as can be; a relation in which the two persons relate to one another in different, though perhaps not radically different, ways, without deeply affecting one another or being deeply affected by one another, is conceivable. But what interests me is when things are different: if there is such a phenomenon as a relation, that is, if the relation is not understood by accounting for its relata in isolation, then we have to take a closer look at the different forms such influence takes. For sure, the child might affect the parents—the joyful girl

214 

H. STRANDBERG

who thaws grumpy old people is another common literary theme (Heidi, Pollyanna)10—but what interests me here is the way in which the parents may affect the child. (Seeing the influence as only one-way is, however, a simplification—later on I will briefly touch upon this.) Let me contrast two extreme cases. The first case is the one I have already referred to: the parents who through their strictness make the child into a well-behaved one. The child has here no relation of its own to what it does, it behaves in the way it does in order to uphold a relation of a specific kind to its parents, that is, in order to be liked, in order not to be rejected, etc. It seeks the praise of the parents, even basks in it when it receives some, and vice versa when it comes to blame and criticism. (See my three opening sentences and the discussion that followed.) On further consideration, as we have seen, it actually has a relation of its own to what it does, however, but what it does is not what it superficially might seem to be doing: it might seem to be cleaning its room, but in fact it is trying to make an impression on its parents. To the extent that feelings of insecurity, perhaps fear, go with this, it shows that this way of acting is, however, not whole-hearted, that the child would indeed like to have a relation to the parents of another kind. These feelings of dissatisfaction might give rise to the apparent opposite of the above good behaviour: pointless acts of self-destruction. (Only apparent, for mind the relation between submission and rebellion I hinted at above.) But perhaps not so pointless after all: such acts of self-destruction would provoke some response of care, although not of the form that the child ultimately wants. The second, contrasting case is where forgiveness, as I have used the term in this chapter, has a home, the point being that whatever the child does, that does not fundamentally change its relation to the parents. Superficially this might then seem to be the morally more indulgent case, but there are at least two things one overlooks if describing it in this way. First, in the above case, the child’s relation to what it does was always mediated, for to the extent that its way of acting is shaped by the parents’ strictness, what the child aims for is the appreciation of the parents, and the point of what it does thereby does not derive from the doing itself, nor from its love of the parents. (Indirectly, what it does could however be said to derive from its love of the parents, for the insecurity generated by a relation based on appreciation, no matter whether only sought or also found, is indicative of a half-heartedness that expresses the desire for a relation of another kind, as I hinted at above). But, in this second case, the

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

215

contrasting unmediatedness, a relation of one’s own to what one is doing, could certainly be there or develop. (The distinction between mediatedness and unmediatedness comes out in many ways; one is in the distinction I have referred to here: between fear and joy.) Second, in this second case the parents show something of moral importance, and this is perhaps the most significant aspect to bear in mind. Let me expand. Such a simple thing as saying “yes” can mean many things. As an answer to a question, its meaning depends on which question it is an answer to, of course. But its meaning also depends on the relation between the one asking the question and the one answering it, on what has gone on in their life together before the question was asked. “Shall we have lunch together?” and the positive answer mean different things if the two of them have never had one together before, if this happens every other day or if they have been estranged from each other for a while. Saying “yes” also means different things depending on how it is said, with what tone of voice, immediately after the question has been asked or after a few seconds of silence, etc. All this cannot be made fully explicit, first since there is no definite limit to what would have to be mentioned, second since the meaning of such an attempt at explication also depends on the context, on the personal relations in which it takes place and which it shapes, on the spirit in which it is done, etc. What someone superficially seems to be saying, and even believes herself to be saying, may therefore very well be the exact opposite of what any perceptive listener will hear. Saying “I am not sour” in a sour tone of voice is the example that readily comes to mind, but in the context of my discussion, the distinction to be observed is the one between, on the one hand, criticising someone’s unfriendliness and being right in some trivial sense of the word, but in doing so expressing an unfriendliness that makes what has been said false in the more crucial sense, and, on the other hand, the friendliness displayed in forgiveness, a friendliness that hence is the deeper moral meaning of the act despite the moral indulgence it might superficially seem to convey. There are thus two very different ways in which parents influence children morally. The first one is about inculcating a specific moral code (something that only takes place in the first of my two extreme cases, and which is therefore not a necessity), while the second one concerns how what the parents are actually doing draws the child’s attention to something the possibility of which it was hardly unknowing of, but which becomes all the more manifest to it to the extent that its parents display forgiveness in their relation to it.

216 

H. STRANDBERG

“The way in which the parents influence the child morally”, I said. But this phrase is ambiguous—this goes for the word “influence”, but above all “morally”—and here I would like to say a few words about that ambiguity. As regards “influence”: the strict parents make the child behave in a specific way, thus they influence it morally in that sense of the word. But the child who takes forgiveness to heart does not “behave in a specific way”, for the life in forgiveness is closely connected to having a relation of one’s own to what one is doing, in contrast to the foster child whose behaviour is mediated by the appreciation sought. As regards “morally”: the child who does not play with children its parents say are unsuitable company is “good” (in the sense that it behaves well, is well-mannered),11 but its obedience is not an attempt at doing good (as if the only possible criticism would be that it has mistaken what it does for goodness and thus only lacks a specific piece of information). Again, by paying attention to the distinction between mediatedness and unmediatedness we see what makes the child who takes forgiveness to heart significantly different. But to this distinction what I pointed out above needs to be added: forgiveness liberates me from a distinct form of self-centredness. These two points are closely connected: the mediation presupposes the self-centredness. Forgiveness thus opens for me a genuine form of care, in that I no longer see the potential moral significance of what I have done as a matter of how it will affect me. These distinctions are also possible to make in terms of remorse. The strict parents influence the child morally by drawing its attention to itself, making it feel bad, at best to the object of that feeling, to the thing the child feels bad for having done, but other-directed remorse requires that the child’s attention is given to the person(s) whom what it has done concerns, and forgiveness opens for that by avoiding to excite such feelings in the child and by exciting them drawing its attention to itself. Of course, it only opens for such a genuine form of care and remorse and does not bring it about, for the fact that I no longer worry about my own standing need not mean that my attention instead is directed to others. But the two are not without connection: what the parents show me is not only that I am forgiven, but that forgiveness is a possibility, that is, that it is possible to care primarily not about how what someone has done or not done affects me but about how she fears that it has affected her in the eyes of others. Forgiveness thus not only opens for care, it shows care, or, using another word for the same thing, love. Being aware of all this is not only of importance as regards forgiveness, narrowly understood, but is crucial for the philosophical analysis of

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

217

morality generally. In order to come to a clearer understanding of the moral meaning of what goes on in a given case, focusing only on actions will not do: you have to look into the relations in which they take place and which they take part in forming even if the direct object is something very different. (A simple example would be being condescending towards someone, an act that already, if described in this way, takes into account more than the words uttered, and above all has an important impact also on the relations between me and those I do not address but who hear what I am saying.) In the case of forgiveness, this means that the question whether someone has forgiven someone cannot be reduced to a question concerning which words have been uttered or which actions have been performed (in the isolated sense of “action”, that is, say, a handshake), but ultimately concerns how the underlying ground has been transformed. This underlying ground is hence that without which there would be no such thing as moral utterances or distinct moral actions, is in other words not brought into being by means of them, only transformed, for those moral relations we already stand in to each other are the background against which such utterances and actions are to be understood. This certainly does not mean that I already know someone I meet for the first time, only that the way in which I understand the relation to this person I am now talking with is not without connection to my understanding of human relationships in general, as what I, say, am afraid of or long for. In other words, this encounter is not independent of the moral difficulties I have.

Moral Development As is evident, the moral development I have discussed here is not about the transformation of one state where morality is totally absent to one where it is present, is not about the alleged absolute origin of morality in the psychological development of the individual, the absoluteness of which is taken for granted in Freud’s account of moral development: “The child is absolutely egoistic […] we may expect that already within the period of life that we count to childhood the altruistic impulses and morality will awake in the little egoist”.12 Freud is certainly here discussing an age group I have not touched upon at all, but that is not the main difference. The question I have been discussing concerns how morality flowers and withers, processes that do not require an absolute starting point and are not one-off affairs. Even though my main example has been a child, what I

218 

H. STRANDBERG

have been discussing has not been child development specifically; the same concerns are there in the life of grown-ups as well, although not in the exact same way, and my discussion has therefore a much broader bearing. The question about the alleged absolute origin of morality, on the other hand, takes for granted that there is an initial state where morality is totally absent, and not only is that question thereby dependent on unexamined presuppositions, it also gives rise to peculiar problems: how is it possible to go from nothing to something, how can morality be the result of extra-­ moral factors? In particular, the question about the absolute origin of morality seems to presuppose a sharp fact/value dichotomy; with such a dichotomy, growing in knowledge about how the world works—coming to see, say, that this and that brings pain to others—will only have moral significance when combined with the learning of some moral values, but without such a dichotomy, the moral significance of what you have now come to see does not require any such values, for such learning takes place in the context of already existing moral relations between people. In other words, the belief that moral understanding only comes into existence relatively late is the result of a narrow conception of what such understanding must consist in: the fact that the child is not an object of the parents’ concern but responds to them, not only in sounds and with its eyes but in its very being, is not seen as morally significant. Without such responses there would however not be any possibilities for the parents to “influence the child morally” in the first place. In Freud’s account of the origin of morality, which I alluded to above and which I will not discuss in detail here,13 the concept of identification plays a central role: the little boy identifies with his father and wants to be like him.14 This might seem to have some similarities to what I said above: that the parents, through what they do, show the child the possibility of forgiveness. But there is an important difference. What Freud explains is, at most, imitative behaviour. This means, however, that moral understanding is left out of account. Imitating someone is one thing, doing something because you understand the point of it—in this case a moral point—is a very different thing. Specifically: forgiving someone because you want to be as great, and therefore as forgiving, as your paternal role model is one thing, forgiving someone because of (the relation to) her is a very different thing. The possibility that the child is not imitating, but has caught sight of something important, which it for that reason is moved by to make its own, is hence overlooked. Phrases like “catching sight of”, “having one’s eyes opened to” and “having one’s attention drawn to”, to mention but a

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

219

few examples, mark how something I may have been only dimly aware of becomes present to me, but without presupposing some initial total absence of moral understanding.

Feeling at Home Another route by which it is possible to approach these issues is focusing on notions such as “feeling at home”, on the one hand, and “feeling like a stranger”, on the other hand. The child does not arrive in the world as a stranger or as a nobody, as if it only gradually and from nothing found a home in it. Phrased somewhat differently: realising or saying that I feel at home with someone does not have to mean that that feeling arose at that specific moment but could just as well mean that it dawns upon me that that feeling has been there for a long time, that it has no clear beginning at all. “Perhaps if I put things straight in my room and clean it really carefully, they will become fond of me …” The foster child I have been trying to give voice to, by contrast, feels like a stranger, and one aspect of this absence of homeliness is precisely that forgiveness is lacking: the child feels like it is there on probation, as it were. The contrast is, of course, when you do not feel that your relation to the other would be shaken to the core by your mistakes, frailties and bad qualities. A world in which forgiveness were totally absent would thus be a world in which we would always be strangers to each other, in which we would be strangers to all others. Such a world is hardly imaginable, which shows how fundamental forgiveness is, understood in this way. Still, are we not strangers to most people most of the time? In fact, however, even in situations where the question of forgiveness seems not to be an issue, tensions can be seen, the analysis of which shows forgiveness as one of their forces. Take the role of etiquette in intercourse with people you do not know, in contrast to people you do know, where etiquette is not needed—how is this to be understood? In the relation to someone you know, misunderstandings can be sorted out, and even if forgiving someone is not an easy thing,15 the personal character of your relation means that there is already a space for forgiveness here. In relation to people you do not know, by contrast, a situation that calls for forgiveness will be much more taxing since it will, if only for a brief moment, make your relation to this person into a personal one.16 One function of etiquette is therefore to prevent such situations from arising by regulating social life, which however shows that we are not oblivious to such a calling, even in relation to unknown

220 

H. STRANDBERG

people. There is consequently a sense in which I do not feel like a complete stranger even in relation to such people. Another social institution with such a function is money. As a middle term in social relations it prevents situations of the foster child-type from arising: since you have paid for yourself, the one who is doing something for you has not by doing so been morally connected to you, which however shows that we are not oblivious to such connections even when they concern people we do not know, in which case there could be no need of preventing them from arising. A world in which forgiveness were totally absent would thus be a world in which etiquette and money would have no such function. Feeling at home in the sense discussed here is obviously antithetical to individualism; a pure individualist, if such a being is at all conceivable, would be someone who is a stranger to everyone without at all seeing a problem in that, and her world would hence be devoid of forgiveness. Feeling at home is antithetical to individualism, but that does not mean that this homeliness is based on shared values, that is, is a form of collectivism.17 For forgiveness takes place precisely when there is a rupture in that sharing, and, as we saw above in the discussion of etiquette, one function of such shared values is to regulate social life in such a way that forgiveness would, ideally, not be needed. This is, I believe, one of the things that Simone Weil points to, without perhaps being aware of it herself, when she contrasts grace, on the one hand, to individualism and collectivism, on the other hand, collectivism being the more dangerous of the two since it could superficially be mistaken for grace. She writes: “Only one thing here below can be taken as an end, for it possesses a kind of transcendence with regard to the human person: it is the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry […] The state of conformity is an imitation of grace.”18 Collectivity could be mistaken for grace since, as seen in the above quotation, it seems to make it possible for the individual to transcend herself. As Weil puts it elsewhere: “Not only is collectivity foreign to the sacred, but it misleads by providing a false imitation of it.”19 The main aspect of the falseness, of the only apparent transcendence, concerns the fact that collectivity is still egoism, only a collective form of it.20 But, in the context of forgiveness and homeliness, there is another way of making this point: when my relations to others are mediated by values, these relations are precarious, for they would then be disrupted as soon as these values are infringed, no matter whether deliberately or by accident. Collectivity is therefore not a radical contrast to the isolation of individualism; the radical

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

221

contrast is, speaking with Weil, grace, and the love she sees as a close synonym.21 In other words, as long as we stay on the level of concord and discord, trying to make up our mind whether we should celebrate the one or the other, or finding some suitable combination of the two, we fail to notice something more fundamental, the togetherness that is independent of them and, in one sense, forms the basis of both of them. Homeliness, as I have analysed it, consists in that togetherness. Forgiveness is therefore not a one-directional thing: the homeliness that forgiveness creates is togetherness. Living that togetherness can certainly not be the task of one person in contrast to others. It is therefore not only the foster child who needs the forgiveness of the foster parents, but also the foster parents who need the child’s forgiveness, when they, say, are unforgiving. And this of course also goes for me in my relations to all of them.

Notes 1. See e.g. some scenes in Das Gemeindekind by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1985), Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1985), Nässlorna blomma by Harry Martinson (1935), or, for that matter, early Supergirl comics. 2. When using the concept of forgiveness to describe the problem, the concept could be said to be used as a tool by means of which it is possible to shed some light on a complex situation. But this does not mean that we do not learn anything about forgiveness when doing this—“the examination is not only an examination of the known, but also of its measure”, as Hegel puts it (1980, p. 60). 3. As Netochka says in Dostoevsky’s novel Netochka Nezvanova (1985, in ch. 5, when she is a foster child): “I could not bear to feel that I was displeasing to anyone. Immediately I began to feel gloomy, and as my spirits sank I lost the strength to smooth over my mistakes or to improve on the poor impression I had made. In short, I was in a hopeless position” 4. A very different example, also questioning the means/ends analysis, is playing a musical instrument: the effort playing takes is only a burden if what drives me is, say, the pursuit of fame, but not so if it is making music I enjoy (although I may drop one instrument for another due to physical limitations, of course). 5. Although there is much confusion in the way Arendt puts it—for her, there is no “may see” but only “essential worldly futility” (1998, p. 131)—her

222 

H. STRANDBERG

concept of labour could be understood as an attempt at giving expression to what I am calling attention to here. See Arendt 1998, part 3, esp. pp. 100–101. 6. Cf. Wolfendale 2005, pp. 357–358: “Believing someone to be unforgivable […] involves confusion about the status of the offender as a moral agent […] Ironically, therefore, it is the unforgiving outlook – not forgiveness – that is incompatible with continuing to blame the wrongdoer and holding them responsible” 7. Accordingly, to the extent that you are unforgiving towards someone because you are disappointed in her, that unforgivingness is only half-­ hearted, for the disappointment also shows that the person in question is for you not wholly coloured by what she has done, in which case the requisite tension would not be there for disappointment to arise. 8. In a short autobiographical text (“Min mors dagböcker avslöjar vem hon var”), Ingmar Bergman writes (2018a, p.  221): “Nothing made me as ready to ask forgiveness for anything or got me to confess any crime as a few hours in the dark wardrobe beside the stairs to the attic. […] The word ‘forgive me’ was sent or provoked forth only in one direction: to my parents.” Two things are especially noteworthy here. First, if the uttering of the words is the result of force, they are not meant and the uttering of them is thus not part of a process of making things good (again). But the very fact that the parents wanted to hear precisely these words shows that they had a moral meaning for them, a meaning the full attention to which would mean that they could no longer make use of such force. Second, in terms of force the parents were obviously in the advantageous position (they could make him say “forgive me,” not he them), but in terms of forgiveness they were not, for as long as they occupy the position of force they cannot allow themselves to show any sign of what is by them perceived as weakness, cannot ask his forgiveness and thus can only try to repress their bad conscience. If you have seen Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, the above will remind you of some scenes in the film. The point is made even more clear there: Bishop Edvard Vergérus forces Alexander, his stepson, to ask forgiveness, while at the same time now and then showing that he is aware that a real coming together in forgiveness cannot be forced. For example, he tells Alexander that he will talk to him “as one adult to another” (Bergman 2018b, p. 106), thus showing that he is aware that forgiveness cannot be given from on high, that force must be abandoned and that the primary problem in their relation is not what Alexander might have done but his fear of Edvard. Alexander, too, is aware of this problem. In a later scene, Edvard refers back to this scene, describing it as a “conversation”, a description Alexander does not accept, since “The Bishop talked and

9  FORGIVENESS AND MORALITY 

223

Alexander was silent” (p.  152), an utterance that is telling also because Alexander does not use words such as “you” and “I”. The whole thing is even more paradoxical if one bears in mind what it is Alexander is supposed to ask forgiveness for: having told a lie. For it is clear to everyone that his asking forgiveness after having been beaten by Edvard is much more of a lie, and Edvard’s insistence on the importance of truthfulness (e.g. p. 153) is thus his way of camouflaging his desire for power, a desire he cannot will whole-heartedly, otherwise he would not have camouflaged it from himself. 9. Cf. Tolokonnikova 2018, p. 232. 10. Spyri 2012; Porter 2011. 11. This is hence part of the “conceptual capacities,” the “historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what,” which this child has been “initiated” into (McDowell 1996, pp. 84, 126). What McDowell succeeds in giving an account of is hence at the most concepts such as “unsuitable company”; one of my aims is to point to that which is not to be described in that way. 12. Freud 2001, pp.  255–56. See also e.g. Freud 2009a, p.  42; Freud 2009b, p. 248. 13. See e.g. Strandberg 2017. 14. See e.g. Freud 2009a, p. 98; Freud 2010 pp. 296–306. 15. As I pointed out already in Chap. 2 (n. 11), this is a far more paradoxically saying than might at first be realised. 16. See Chap. 3. 17. See Chap. 3. 18. Weil 1991, pp. 247–248, 251. 19. Weil 2019, p. 217. 20. See esp. Weil 2016, p. 38. 21. Weil 1991, p. 248.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bergman, Ingmar. 2018a. Artiklar essäer föredrag. Stockholm: Norstedts. ———. 2018b. Fanny and Alexander. Stockholm: Norstedts. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1985. Netochka Nezvanova. Trans. Jane Kentish. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Die Traumdeutung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2009a. Fragen der Gesellschaft, Ursprünge der Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2009b. Sexualleben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2010. Psychologie des Unbewußten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Hegel, G.W.F. 1980. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

224 

H. STRANDBERG

Martinson, Harry. 1935. Nässlorna blomma. Stockholm: Bonnier. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Porter, Eleanor H. 2011. Pollyanna; Pollyanna grows up. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Spyri, Johanna. 2012. Heidi. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Strandberg, Hugo. 2017. Identifikationsmoral och fundamentalism. Divan: 1–2. Tolokonnikova, Nadya. 2018. Read & riot: A pussy riot guide to activism. San Francisco: HarperOne. von Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie. 1985. Das Gemeindekind. Stuttgart: Reclam. Weil, Simone. 1991. La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Paris: Plon. ———. 2016. Attente de Dieu. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2019. Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses. Paris: Gallimard. Wolfendale, Jessica. 2005. The hardened heart: The moral dangers of not forgiving. Journal of Social Philosophy 36: 344–363.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Alison, James. 1998. The joy of being wrong: Original sin through Easter eyes. New York: Crossroad. Allais, Lucy. 2008. Wiping the slate clean: The heart of forgiveness. Philosophy and Public Affairs 36: 33–68. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1978. The life of the mind: Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1994a. Essays in understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, exile and totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1994b. Vita activa; oder, Vom tätigen Leben. Munich: Piper. ———. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. Denktagebuch 1950–1973. Munich: Piper. ———. 2003. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken. ———. 2005. The promise of politics. New York: Schocken. ———. 2006a. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. London: Penguin. ———. 2006b. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. London: Penguin. ———. 2006c. On revolution. London: Penguin. ———. 2018. The modern challenge to tradition: Fragmente eines Buches. Göttingen: Wallstein. ———. 2019. Sechs Essays; Die verborgene Tradition. Göttingen: Wallstein.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8

225

226 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 1894. Ethica Nicomachea. Ed. I.  Bywater. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1959. Ars rhetorica. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Atkins, Kim. 2002. Friendship, trust and forgiveness. Philosophia 29: 111–132. Augustine. 1845a. De doctrina christiana. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXIV, 15–122. Paris: Migne. ———. 1845b. Enchiridion ad Laurentium; sive, De fide, spe et charitate. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XL, 231–290. Paris: Migne. ———. 1863. Sermones. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXVIII, 23–1484. Paris: Migne. ———. 1864. De civitate Dei. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XLI, 13–804. Paris: Migne. ———. 1902a. Epistolae. In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXIII, 61–1094. Paris: Migne. ———. 1902b. In Ioannis Evangelium tractatus CXXIV.  In Patrologia Latina: Tomus XXXV, 1379–1976. Paris: Migne. ———. 1998. The city of god against the pagans. Trans R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Backström, Joel. 2007. The fear of openness: An essay on friendship and the roots of morality. Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press. ———. 2014. Touchy subjects: Wittgenstein’s ‘Freudianism’ and the moral dynamics of repression. European Journal of Psychoanalysis (2). ———. 2017. From nonsense to openness: Wittgenstein on moral sense. In Wittgenstein’s moral thought, ed. Edmund Dain and Reshef Agam-Segal, 247–275. London: Routledge. ———. 2019a. Hiding from love: The repressed insight in Freud’s account of morality. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychoanalysis, ed. Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing, 594–616. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019b. Pre-truth life in post-truth times. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 8 (special issue): 97–130. Balázs, Zoltán. 2000. Forgiveness and repentance. Public Affairs Quarterly 14: 105–127. Bash, Anthony. 2013. Did Jesus discover forgiveness? Journal of Religious Ethics 41: 382–399. Beatty, Joseph. 1970. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 7: 246–252. Bell, Macalester. 2008. Forgiving someone for who they are (and not just what they’ve done). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77: 625–658. Benn, Piers. 1996. Forgiveness and loyalty. Philosophy 71: 369–383. Bennett, Christopher. 2003. Personal and redemptive forgiveness. European Journal of Philosophy 11: 127–144. ———. 2018. The alteration thesis: Forgiveness as a normative power. Philosophy and Public Affairs 46: 207–233.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

227

Benshoff, Harry M. 2016. Film and television analysis: An introduction to methods, theories, and approaches. London: Routledge. Bergman, Ingmar. 2018a. Artiklar essäer föredrag. Stockholm: Norstedts. ———. 2018b. Fanny and Alexander. Stockholm: Norstedts. Berkowitz, Roger. 2011. Bearing logs on our shoulders: Reconciliation, non-­ reconciliation, and the building of a common world. Theory & Event 14 (1). Bertram, Georg W. 2014. Kunst als menschliche Praxis: Eine Ästhetik. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Björk, Ulrika. 2017. Försoning, förlåtelse och sörjande. Ikaros 14 (3). Blustein, Jeffrey M. 2014. Forgiveness and remembrance: Remembering wrongdoing in personal and public life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Patrick. 2002. What should “forgiveness” mean? Journal of Value Inquiry 36: 483–498. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Joseph. 2006. The works of Bishop Butler. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Calhoun, Cheshire. 1992. Changing one’s heart. Ethics 103: 79–96. Card, Claudia. 2002. The atrocity paradigm: A theory of evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruana, John. 2016. The Dardenne brothers and the invisible ethical drama: Faith without faith. Religions 7 (43): 1–16. Catherine of Genoa. 1979. Purgation and purgatory / The spiritual dialogue. Trans. Serge Hughes. Mahwah: Paulist Press. Chacón, Rodrigo. 2013. Arendt’s Denktagebuch, 1950–1973: An unwritten ethics for the human condition? History of European Ideas 39: 561–582. Cherry, Myisha. 2017. Forgiveness, exemplars, and the oppressed. In The moral psychology of forgiveness, ed. Kathryn J. Norlock, 55–72. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Collingwood, R.G. 1916. Religion and philosophy. London: Macmillan. ———. 1938. The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Sarah. 2007. Mortal ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne brothers. Film-Philosophy 11: 66–87. Corlett, J.  Angelo. 2006. Forgiveness, apology, and retributive punishment. American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 25–42. Cornell, Nicolas. 2017. The possibility of preemptive forgiving. Philosophical Review 126: 241–272. Cowley, Christopher. 2000. Forgiving the unrepentant. Etica & Politica 2 (1). ———. 2010. Why genuine forgiveness must be elective and unconditional. Ethical Perspectives 17: 556–579. Cox, Damian. 2016. Moral beauty in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers. Screening the Past 41.

228 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cummings, Charles. 2015. Monastic practices. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. Diamond, Cora. 2005. Wittgenstein on religious belief: The gulfs between us. In Religion and Wittgenstein’s legacy, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr, 99–137. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dillon, Robin S. 2001. Self-forgiveness and self-respect. Ethics 112: 53–83. Diogenes Laertius. 1972. Lives of eminent philosophers. Ed. R.D. Hicks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1985. Netochka Nezvanova. Trans. Jane Kentish. London: Penguin. ———. 2002. The brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dover, K.J. 1974. Greek popular morality, in the time of Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Downie, R.S. 1965. Forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 15: 128–134. Drabkin, Douglas. 1993. The nature of god’s love and forgiveness. Religious Studies 29: 231–238. Dzur, Albert W., and Alan Wertheimer. 2002. Forgiveness and public deliberation: The practice of restorative justice. Criminal Justice Ethics 21: 3–20. Ebner, Ferdinand. 1963. Fragmente Aufsätze Aphorismen: Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes. Munich: Kösel-Verlag. Epictetus. 1916. Dissertationes. Ed. H. Schenkl. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Die Traumdeutung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2009a. Fragen der Gesellschaft, Ursprünge der Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2009b. Sexualleben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2010. Psychologie des Unbewußten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1991. Lob der Theorie: Reden und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gamlund, Espen. 2010. Supererogatory forgiveness. Inquiry 53: 540–564. Garrard, Eve, and David McNaughton. 2003. In defence of unconditional forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 39–60. ———. 2010. Forgiveness. Durham: Acumen. ———. 2011. Conditional unconditional forgiveness. In The ethics of forgiveness, ed. Christel Fricke, 97–106. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Once more with feeling: Defending the goodwill account of forgiveness. In The moral psychology of forgiveness, ed. Kathryn J. Norlock, 96–116. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara. 2013. Verzeihung der Unverzeihlichen? Ausflüge in Landschaften der Schuld und Vergebung. Dresden: Text & Dialog.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

229

Gheaus, Anca. 2010. Is unconditional forgiveness ever good? In New topics in feminist philosophy of religion: Contestations and transcendence incarnate, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson, 51–68. Dordrecht: Springer. Giannini, Heidi Chamberlin. 2017. Hope as grounds for forgiveness: A Christian argument for universal, unconditional forgiveness. Journal of Religious Ethics 45: 58–82. Gormley, Steven. 2014. The impossible demand of forgiveness. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22: 27–48. Govier, Trudy. 1999. Forgiveness and the unforgivable. American Philosophical Quarterly 36: 59–75. ———. 2002. Forgiveness and revenge. London: Routledge. Govier, Trudy, and Colin Hirano. 2008. A conception of invitational forgiveness. Journal of Social Philosophy 39: 429–444. Govier, Trudy, and Wilhelm Verwoerd. 2002. Forgiveness: The victim’s prerogative. South African Journal of Philosophy 21: 97–111. Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A philosophical exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haber, Joram Graf. 1991. Forgiveness. Savage: Rowman & Littlefield. Hegel, G.W.F. 1978. Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objektive Logik (1812/13). Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1980. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1986a. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986b. Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986c. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts; oder, Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986d. Jenaer Schriften, 1801–1807. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Teil 3: Die vollendete Religion. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Hertzberg, Lars. 1988. On the attitude of trust. Inquiry 31: 307–322. ———. 2001. The sense is where you find it. In Wittgenstein in America, ed. Timothy McCarthy and Sean Stidd, 90–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. Moral escapism and applied ethics. Philosophical Papers 31: 251–270. ———. 2011. It says what it says. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85: 589–603. ———. 2017. Giving hostages to irrationality? Winch on the philosopher as judge of human thought. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6: 7–30. Hieronymi, Pamela. 2001. Articulating an uncompromising forgiveness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62: 529–555. Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan. London: Penguin.

230 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holmgren, Margaret R. 1993. Forgiveness and the intrinsic value of persons. American Philosophical Quarterly 30: 341–352. Horsbrugh, H.J.N. 1974. Forgiveness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4: 269–282. Hughes, Paul M. 2016. Two cheers for forgiveness (and even fewer for revenge). Philosophia 44: 361–380. Hughes, Paul M., and Brandon Warmke. 2017. Forgiveness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/ entries/forgiveness. Accessed 9 Dec 2020. Hume, David. 2000. A treatise of human nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2005. Forgiveness. Trans. Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Julian of Norwich. 2006. The writings of Julian of Norwich. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kekes, John. 2009. Blames versus forgiveness. The Monist 92: 488–506. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1963. Kjerlighedens Gjerningar: Nogre christelige Overveielser i Talers Form. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Kolnai, Aurel. 1974. Forgiveness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 91–106. Konstan, David. 2010. Before forgiveness: The origins of a moral idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Assuaging rage: Remorse, repentance, and forgiveness in the classical world. In Ancient forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L.  Griswold and David Konstan, 17–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2002. Forgiveness. PMLA 117 (2): 278–295. Kronqvist, Camilla. 2019. A personal love of the good. Philosophia 47: 977–994. La Caze, Marguerite. 2014. Promising and forgiveness. In Hannah Arendt: Key concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden, 209–221. London: Routledge. Lang, Berel. 1994. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 31: 105–117. Lauritzen, Paul. 1987. Forgiveness: Moral prerogative or religious duty? Journal of Religious Ethics 15: 141–154. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998a. Collected philosophical papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998b. Otherwise than being; or, beyond essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lewis, Meirlys. 1980. On forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 30: 236–245. Lippitt, John. 2017. Forgiveness: A work of love? Parrhesia 28: 19–39. Løgstrup, K.E. 1991. Den etiske fordring. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

231

MacLachlan, Alice. 2012. The philosophical controversy over political forgiveness. In Public forgiveness in post-conflict contexts, ed. Bas van Stokkom, Neelke Doorn, and Paul van Tongeren, 37–64. Cambridge: Intersentia. Mai, Joseph. 2010. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Martinson, Harry. 1935. Nässlorna blomma. Stockholm: Bonnier. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McGary, Howard. 1989. Forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 26: 343–351. McMahon, Laura. 2012. From homofraternity to hospitality: Deconstructing the political with Derrida and the Dardennes. French Studies 66: 510–524. Michéa, Jean-Claude. 2009. The realm of lesser evil. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Milam, Per-Erik. 2018. Against elective forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21: 569–584. ———. 2019. Reasons to forgive. Analysis 79: 242–251. Milbank, John. 2003. Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon. London: Routledge. Minas, Anne C. 1975. God and forgiveness. The Philosophical Quarterly 25: 138–150. Moi, Toril. 2017. Revolution of the ordinary: Literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morton, Adam. 2012. What is forgiveness? In Ancient forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, ed. Charles L.  Griswold and David Konstan, 3–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mosley, Philip. 2013. The cinema of the Dardenne brothers: Responsible realism. London: Wallflower Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G. 1982. Forgiveness and resentment. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7: 503–516. ———. 2003. Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Punishment and the moral emotions: Essays, in law, morality, and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G., and Jean Hampton. 1988. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neblett, William R. 1974. Forgiveness and ideals. Mind 83: 269–275. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999a. Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christenthum. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 6, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 165–254. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1999b. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 3, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 343–651. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1999c. Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 6, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 255–374. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

232 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. 1999d. Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. In Kritische Studienausgabe; Band 5, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, 245–412. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2003. Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Norlock, Kathryn. 2009. Forgiveness from a feminist perspective. Lanham: Lexington Books. Norlock, Kathryn J., and Jean Rumsay. 2009. The limits of forgiveness. Hypatia 24: 100–122. North, Joanna. 1987. Wrongdoing and forgiveness. Philosophy 62: 499–508. Novitz, David. 1998. Forgiveness and self-respect. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 299–315. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and forgiveness: Resentment, generosity, justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nykänen, Hannes. 2015. Repression and moral reasoning: An outline of a new approach in ethical understanding. Sats 16: 49–66. O’Shaughnessy, R.J. 1967. Forgiveness. Philosophy 42: 336–352. Owens, David. 2012. Shaping the normative landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pacovská, Kamila. 2018. Love and the pitfall of moralism. Philosophy 93: 231–249. ———. 2019. Moral character and the significance of action: The case of Dmitri Karamazov. Philosophical Investigations 42: 333–349. Pettigrove, Glen. 2004. The forgiveness we speak: The illocutionary force of forgiving. Southern Journal of Philosophy 42: 371–392. ———. 2006. Hannah Arendt and collective forgiving. Journal of Social Philosophy 37: 483–500. ———. 2007a. Forgiveness and interpretation. Journal of Religious Ethics 35: 429–452. ———. 2007b. Hume on forgiveness and the unforgivable. Utilitas 19: 447–465. ———. 2012. Forgiveness and love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, D.Z. 1970. Death and immortality. London: Macmillan. Phillips-Garrett, Carissa. 2017. Sungnom ̄ e ̄ in Aristotle. Apeiron 50: 311–333. Pippin, Robert. 2015. Psychology degree zero? The representation of action in the films of the Dardenne brothers. Critical Inquiry 41: 757–785. Plato. 1900–1907. Platonis Opera. Ed. John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plutarch. 1916–1926. Lives. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. London: William Heinemann. Porter, Eleanor H. 2011. Pollyanna; Pollyanna grows up. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Prager, Dennis. 1997. Response. In The sunflower: On the possibilities and limits of forgiveness, ed. Harry James Cargas and Bonny V. Fetterman. New York: Schocken. Richards, Norvin. 1988. Forgiveness. Ethics 99: 77–97.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

233

Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. La marque du passé. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 103: 7–31. ———. 2000a. Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit: Erinnern  – Vergessen  – Verzeihen. Trans. Andris Breitling and Henrik Richard Lesaar. Göttingen: Wallstein. ———. 2000b. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Roberts, Robert C. 1995. Forgivingness. American Philosophical Quarterly 32: 289–306. Rushton, Richard. 2014. Empathic projection in the films of the Dardenne brothers. Screen 55: 303–316. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Scarre, Geoffrey. 2004. After evil: Responding to wrongdoing. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2016. On taking back forgiveness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19: 931–944. Schaap, Andrew. 2005. Political reconciliation. London: Routledge. ———. 2008. Reconciliation as ideology and politics. Constellations 15: 249–264. Schiller, Friedrich. 2005. Wallenstein. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Schmitt, Carl. 2009. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränitet. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Schönherr, Julius. 2019. When forgiveness comes easy. Journal of Value Inquiry 53: 513–528. Seneca. 2010a. Anger, Mercy, revenge. Trans. Robert A.  Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010b. Selected letters. Trans. Elaine Fantham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2016. King Lear. In The new Oxford Shakespeare: The complete works: Modern critical edition, 2347–2433. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shriver, Donald W. 1995. An ethic for enemies: Forgiveness in politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, Peter. 1999. Reflection. In The lives of animals, ed. Amy Gutmann, 85–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smedes, Lewis B. 1998. Stations on the journey from forgiveness to hope. In Dimensions of forgiveness: Psychological research and theological perspectives, ed. Everett L. Worthington, 341–354. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Smith, Tara. 1997. Tolerance and forgiveness: Virtue and vices? Journal of Applied Philosophy 14: 31–41. Smith, Nick. 2008. I was wrong: The meanings of apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snow, Nancy E. 1993. Self-forgiveness. Journal of Value Inquiry 27: 75–80. Spaemann, Robert. 2012. Philosophische Essays. Stuttgart: Reclam.

234 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Spyri, Johanna. 2012. Heidi. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Strandberg, Hugo. 2009. Escaping my responsibility: Investigations into the nature of morality. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ———. 2011. Love of a god of love: Towards a transformation of the philosophy of religion. London: Continuum. ———. 2015a. Is it possible to sublate religion? Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015: 94–99. ———. 2015b. Self-knowledge and self-deception. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Is pure evil possible? In The problem of evil: New philosophical directions, ed. Benjamin W.  McCraw and Robert Arp, 23–34. Lanham: Lexington Books. ———. 2017. Identifikationsmoral och fundamentalism. Divan: 1–2. ———. 2020. In search of the context of a question. Sats 21: 199–213. Szablowinski, Zenon. 2010. Between forgiveness and unforgiveness. Heythrop Journal 51: 471–482. Talbott, Thomas. 1993. Punishment, forgiveness, and divine justice. Religious Studies 29: 151–168. Thomason, Krista K. 2015. Forgiveness or fairness? Philosophical Papers 44: 233–260. Tolokonnikova, Nadya. 2018. Read & riot: A pussy riot guide to activism. San Francisco: HarperOne. Tolstoy, Leo. 1952. War and peace. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tombs, David. 2008. The offer of forgiveness. Journal of Religious Ethics 36: 587–593. Tömmel, Tatjana Noemi. 2013. Wille und Passion: Der Liebesbegriff bei Heidegger und Arendt. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Torrance, Alan J. 2006. The theological grounds for advocating forgiveness and reconciliation in the sociopolitical realm. In The politics of past evil: Religion, reconciliation and the dilemmas of transitional justice, ed. Daniel Philpott, 45–86. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Trahair, Lisa. 2016. Belief in this world: The Dardenne brothers’ The son and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and trembling. SubStance 45: 98–119. Twambley, P. 1976. Mercy and forgiveness. Analysis 36: 84–90. Underhill, Evelyn. 2003. Practical mysticism/Abba. New York: Vintage Books. Verbin, N. 2010. Forgiveness and hatred. Ethical Perspectives 14: 603–625. von Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie. 1985. Das Gemeindekind. Stuttgart: Reclam. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warmke, Brandon. 2015. Articulate forgiveness and normative constraints. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45: 490–514. ———. 2016. The normative significance of forgiveness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94: 687–703.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

235

Weil, Simone. 1991. La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Paris: Plon. ———. 2016. Attente de Dieu. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2019. Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses. Paris: Gallimard. Westerlund, Fredrik. 2019. The see oneself as seen by others: A phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal motives and structures of shame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50: 60–89. Westlund, Andrea C. 2009. Anger, faith, and forgiveness. The Monist 92: 507–536. Wettstein, Howard. 2010. Forgiveness and moral reckoning. Philosophia 38: 445–455. Wilde, Oscar. 2013. De Profundis, and other prison writings. London: Penguin. Williams, Bernard. 2008. Shame and necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, John. 1988. Why forgiveness requires repentance. Philosophy 63: 534–535. Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1974. Über Gewissheit; On certainty. Trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1982. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie: Band I; Last writings on the philosophy of psychology: Volume I. Trans. C.G.  Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 2009. Philosophische Untersuchungen; Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S.  Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Wolfendale, Jessica. 2005. The hardened heart: The moral dangers of not forgiving. Journal of Social Philosophy 36: 344–363. Worthington, Everett L. 1998. The pyramid model of forgiveness: Some interdisciplinary speculations about unforgiveness and the promotion of forgiveness. In Dimensions of forgiveness: Psychological research and theological perspectives, ed. Everett L.  Worthington, 107–137. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Yandell, Keith E. 1998. The metaphysics and morality of forgiveness. In Exploring forgiveness, ed. Robert D.  Enright and Joanna North, 35–45. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Zaragoza, Kevin. 2012. Forgiveness and standing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84: 604–621. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 2016. A democratic theory of judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index1

A Adorno, Theodor W., 101n10 Alison, James, 12 Allais, Lucy, 64n20 Anger, 135n6, 142–149, 151, 154n11, 155n14, 211 Arendt, Hannah, 36, 47–62, 62n7, 62n11, 62n13, 63n18, 64n30, 65n31, 65n34, 65n35, 66n51, 157n33, 221n5 Aristotle, 141–153 Atkins, Kim, 175n3 Augustine, 63n20, 202n27 B Backström, Joel, 65n32 Beatty, Joseph, 41n24, 43n32 Bell, Macalester, 155n13

Bennett, Christopher, 16n5, 17n5, 104n42, 137n17 Bergman, Ingmar, 222n8 Blustein, Jeffrey, 156n23 Butler, Joseph, 95 Butler, Judith, 88–90, 103n26 C Calhoun, Cheshire, 134n4 Catherine of Genoa, 181–189, 201 Cherry, Myisha, 102n12 Christianity, 9, 41n20, 57, 65n35, 150, 153n1, 157n33, 179, 203n38 Collingwood, R.G., 136n8 Conditions, 34–36, 109–134 Cornell, Nicolas, 16n5 Cowley, Christopher, 136n10, 175n1 Cummings, Charles, 39n5

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Strandberg, Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73174-8

237

238 

INDEX

D Dardenne, Jean-Pierre, 71, 72, 75, 101n5 Dardenne, Luc, 71, 72, 75, 101n5 Death, 31, 161–175, 175n1, 175n3, 176n10, 182, 196, 203n38 Derrida, Jacques, 28, 40n11, 136n10 Diamond, Cora, 87, 88 Diogenes Laertius, 40n12 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3, 221n3 Downie, R.S., 113, 153n1 Dzur, Albert W., 42n32

H Hampton, Jean, 18n9, 41n22, 203n36 Hegel, G.W.F., 37, 41n20, 157n34, 201n14, 221n2 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 15 Hertzberg, Lars, 15, 84 Hobbes, Thomas, 15n1 Holmgren, Margaret, 10, 153n1 Honour, 95, 96, 104n42, 115–117, 167, 193, 194, 199, 200, 203n36, 204n39 Hughes, Paul, 63n20, 175n3 Hume, David, 29

E Explanation, 87–92, 100

I Inequality, 7, 9, 27, 37, 152, 222n8

F Family resemblance, 16n5 Forgetting, 33, 39n5, 91 Freud, Sigmund, 217, 218 Future, 29–34, 38, 127, 213

J Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 40n19 Jesus, 181, 191, 192, 203n38 Julian of Norwich, 39n5

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 37 Garrard, Eve, 18n9, 175n1 Gheaus, Anca, 135n6 Giannini, Heidi Chamberlin, 18n16 God, 9, 14, 31, 39n5, 49, 50, 63n20, 110, 182–186, 189, 201n19, 203n38 Govier, Trudy, 18n9, 64n20 Griswold, Charles, 16n5, 19n19, 136n10, 157n33 Guilt, 25, 26, 49, 50, 52, 53, 80, 81, 124–127, 197

K Kekes, John, 136n9, 156n17 Kierkegaard, Søren, 8, 137n17 Kolnai, Aurel, 7, 8 Konstan, David, 157n33 Kristeva, Julia, 157n33 L Lang, Berel, 157n36 Legalism, 13, 19n19 Lessing, G.E., 61 Levinas, Emmanuel, 30 Lippitt, John, 63n20 Løgstrup, K.E., 40n11

 INDEX 

Love, 5, 7–9, 18n9, 39n5, 52–57, 61, 63n20, 65n32, 65n34, 65n35, 67n57, 71, 90, 91, 96–100, 104n43, 120, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135n5, 135n6, 137n18, 137n19, 143, 146, 165–168, 173, 182–185, 189, 195, 197, 202n27, 203n36, 204n39, 210, 214, 216, 221 Loyalty, 192 M McDowell, John, 223n11 McGary, Howard, 153n1 McNaughton, David, 18n9, 175n1 Metaphysics, 28, 29, 32 Michéa, Jean-Claude, 59 Milam, Per-Erik, 102n13, 104n43, 134n4, 136n14 Milbank, John, 18n9 Moralism, 13, 28 Morton, Adam, 15n2 Mourning, 171, 173, 174 Murphy, Jeffrie, 8, 9, 19n17, 63–64n20, 143, 153n1, 155n13, 157n36, 175n2 N Neblett, William, 42n29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 39n9, 48, 67n57 North, Joanna, 18n9, 42n30, 202n32, 203n39 Novitz, David, 153n1 Nussbaum, Martha, 154n11, 155n11, 204–205n39 O O’Shaughnessy, R.J., 17n7 Owens, David, 43n33, 176n8

239

P Passivity, 37, 79, 80, 94–96, 165, 185, 196, 197 Past, 28–34, 41n19, 41n20, 41n24, 53, 81, 98, 100, 127 Pettigrove, Glen, 137n18, 175n1, 202n36 Phillips, D.Z., 176n10 Plato, 40n12 Plurality, 47, 48, 57–60, 62, 65n34 Plutarch, 151 Possibility, 28, 30, 36, 40n11, 52 Power, 9, 27, 78, 83, 100, 112, 134, 144, 148, 152, 194, 195, 199, 200, 204n39, 222–223n8 Prodigal son, 181, 190–201, 203–204n39 Protest, 35, 154–155n11 Punishment, 40n12, 114, 136n8 Purgatory, 170, 180, 182–185, 201n19 R Reason-giving, 71, 82–92, 99, 100, 102n13, 102n14, 118, 119, 136n10 Reconciliation, 6–9, 18n9, 37, 49–51, 53, 54, 61, 62n11, 62n13, 66n42, 135n6, 137n17, 175n1 Religion, 31, 41n20, 49, 87, 92, 157n33, 158n37, 161, 162, 179–181 Repentance, 8, 64n20, 137–138n19 Respect, 53–57, 59, 204n39 Revenge, 15n1, 34, 48–52, 54, 56, 97, 98, 115–118, 135n6, 142–144, 147, 148, 154–155n11, 155n13, 204n39 Ricoeur, Paul, 41n19, 42n26 Roberts, Robert C., 18n9, 153n1

240 

INDEX

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 32, 41n23 Scarre, Geoffrey, 15n3, 135n6 Schaap, Andrew, 66n42 Schiller, Friedrich, 39n3 Schönherr, Julius, 157n32 Self-respect, 10, 143, 193, 200, 202–203n36 Seneca, 40n12, 176n7 Shame, 24, 25, 39n5, 41n23, 164–166, 176n9, 188 Shriver, Donald, 137n19 Singer, Peter, 103n19 Smith, Tara, 175n1 The Son, 71, 74–81, 83, 87, 100 Speech act, 42n32 Submissiveness, 90, 112–114, 117, 135n6, 195, 203n36, 211, 214 Suspicion, 32, 37, 111, 165, 212 Szablowinski, Zenon, 158n36 T Talbott, Thomas, 135n5, 136n8 Tolerance, 58–61 Tombs, David, 135n6, 138n19 Truth, 25, 28, 29, 32–35, 38

U Underhill, Evelyn, 39n5 V Value, 59, 116, 218, 220 Verbin, N., 135n6 Virtue, 141–153, 153n1, 156n23 W Walker, Margaret Urban, 16n5 Warmke, Brandon, 63n20, 102n15 Weil, Simone, 99, 220, 221 Wertheimer, Alan, 42n32 Wettstein, Howard, 19n19 Who, 51–53, 55–62, 66n42, 81, 82, 94, 104n43 Wilde, Oscar, 41n20 Williams, Bernard, 19n19, 176n9 Winch, Peter, 92, 93, 104n39, 104n40 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 17n7 Wolfendale, Jessica, 222n6 Z Zaragoza, Kevin, 16n5, 17n5 Zerilli, Linda, 60