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Forgiveness
 Probing the Boundaries

Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard
Dr Ken Monteith

Advisory Board

James Arvanitakis Simon Bacon

Katarzyna Bronk Stephen Morris
Jo Chipperfield John Parry
Ann-Marie Cook Karl Spracklen
Peter Mario Kreuter Peter Twohig
S Ram Vemuri Kenneth Wilson

A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/

The Persons Hub

‘Forgiveness’

2013
 Forgiveness:

Philosophy, Psychology and the Arts

Edited by

Timothy McKenry and Charlotte Bruun Thingholm

Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network

for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and
encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and
which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary
publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior
permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

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Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom.
+44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-171-6
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2013. First Edition.
 Table of Contents

Introduction vii
Timothy McKenry and Charlotte Bruun Thingholm

Part 1 Philosophical Perspectives on Forgiveness

Recognising Contingency: A Philosophical Reflection

on Forgiveness 3
Alberto L. Siani

Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology: When

Actions Are Unforgivable 11
Sandy Koll

Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past but Pardoning the

Impossible 19
Cameron Surrey

Imputation and Preserving the Face of the Other: The

Human Economy of Forgiveness 29
Steve Larocco

Part 2 Psychological Perspectives on Forgiveness

Two Kinds of Forgiveness 37

Kerstin Reibold

Forgiveness in Counselling: Client and Practitioner

Issues 45
Christine Ffrench

In Defence of the Self-Respecting Nature of Unconditional

Forgiveness 53
Kimberly M. Goard

Part 3 Forgiveness and Culture

The Pardons of the Hamidian Era: The Petitions and the

State Policy 67
Çiğdem Oğuz
 The Abuse of Forgiveness in Dealing with Legacies of
Violence 77
Urszula Pękala

Tourism: A Step towards Post-War Reconciliation 85

Maria Dorsey

Understanding the Propensity to Forgive in a Society at

War: An Initial Study among the Colombian Population 97
Ricardo Abad Barros-Castro and Luis Arturo Pinzón-Salcedo

Religious Peacebuilding: Forgiveness as a Peacebuilding

Tool within the Five Major World Religions 113
Charlotte Bruun Thingholm and Martin Bak Jørgensen

Part 4 Forgiveness and the Arts

What Do We Mean by ‘Forgiveness?’: Some Answers from

the Ancient Greeks 127
Maria Magoula Adamos and Julia B. Griffin

Redemption of King Lear and Isak Borg: An Analysis of

the Dying Protagonists in Shakespeare’s King Lear
and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries 133
Zhongfeng Huang

Surrender to Social Injustice for the Sake of Personal

Healing? The Ambiguity of Forgiveness in Anita
Desai’s Clear Light of Day 143
Elizabeth Jackson

A Forgiveness Song: The Emergence of an Ethical

Framework Informing Australian Composers’
Interactions with the Music of Indigenous Peoples 153
Timothy McKenry
 Introduction

Timothy McKenry and Charlotte Bruun Thingholm

The fifth annual global conference on Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries
took place at Mansfield College at Oxford University in July 2011. Delegates from
around the world gathered at this three day conference to discuss one common
theme: forgiveness. The diversity of academic disciplines represented at the
conference resulted in genuinely multidisciplinary discussions enriched by a range
of world-views. A representative collection of various academic perspectives on
forgiveness is presented in this publication.

Part 1: Philosophical Perspectives on Forgiveness

Part one explores various dimensions of forgiveness through a consideration of
philosophical ideas drawn from a range of traditions of thought. In the first chapter,
Alberto L. Siani builds on Hegel’s discussion of forgiveness in Phenomenology of
Spirit and goes on to develop a four-fold philosophical reflection which
contextualises forgiveness as a contingent act that conciliates the space between
issues of free will and rational action.
Sandy Koll explores contemporary philosopher Charles Griswold’s exploration
of forgiveness in the second chapter of this section. In addition to analysing
Griswold’s thesis on the topic, Koll builds on Griswold’s work by exploring case
studies that, based on the conditions set out by Griswold, have the capacity to
represent unforgivable acts: acts which warrant virtuous anger. Koll concludes by
critiquing some aspects of Griswold’s ideas suggesting that his neglect of the
intersections between the virtue of forgiveness and the virtue of charity represent a
shortcoming in his work.
Cameron Surrey presents a robust philosophical defence of the ethical
imperative for unconditional forgiveness in the third chapter of this section.
Drawing on the ideas of a range of scholars including Aristotle, Augustine,
Nietzsche and Jankélévitch, Surrey grapples with paradoxes related to time and the
metaphysical problems associated with viewing forgiveness merely as an attempt
to ‘undo’ the past injuries. His conclusion requires a re-examination of the
orientation of the human will and an incorporating of ‘impossible’ misdeeds into
meaningful narratives. For Surrey, forgiveness involves not undoing past actions,
but embracing the possibility of pardon as an imperative arising out of the essential
personhood and humanity of offenders.
The final chapter in this section examines forgiveness in terms of a social
exchange marked by shifting dynamics of power. The author, Steve Larocco,
presents forgiveness as a process involving both an imputation of the offender -
where the offering of forgiveness becomes an indictment on the wrongdoer - and at
the same time constitutes a gift as the party offering forgiveness asserts a
willingness to cancel the ensuing social debt caused by this imputation.
viii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
Forgiveness becomes an exchange within a constructed human economy that
functions to maintain social equilibrium.

Part 2: Psychological Perspectives on Forgiveness

The second part of this volume concerns psychological perspectives of
forgiveness. It contains three chapters, each dealing with different aspects of
forgiveness and the implications it holds for both society at large and the wellbeing
of the individual in relation to both counselling practice and the self-respect of the
victim.
In the first chapter, Kerstin Reibold suggests the need to differentiate between
social and personal forgiveness. Her concept of social forgiveness concerns the re-
integration of the perpetrator into society and the maintenance of social norms. On
the other hand, personal forgiveness deals solely with the two parties: the
perpetrator and the victim. Through personal forgiveness the victim has the power
to set free the perpetrator from an otherwise unpayable debt. Reibold argues that
distinguishing between these two forms of forgiveness has some advantages
regarding the disagreements related to discussion surrounding the process of
forgiveness, such forgiveness granted as a gift versus withholding forgiveness
unduly, and the relationship between criminal prosecution and forgiveness.
Furthermore, Reibold argues that personal forgiveness can never be considered as a
morally wrong act, whereas social forgiveness might. Lastly, distinguishing
between the personal and social concept of forgiveness can make consideration of
specific cases clearer as they sometimes require only one of these two types of
forgiveness.
In chapter two, Christine Ffrench reflects on various aspects of forgiveness in
the context of psychological counselling practice. She argues that even though the
notion of forgiveness is relevant for various types of clients, it remains a complex
concept. In this regard it is highly relevant what meaning and qualitative difference
is granted to the notion of forgiveness during counselling, such as ‘forgetting,’
‘letting go’ or ‘moving on.’ The relationship between survivor and perpetrator is
likewise of great importance as are the steps taken after the offence has taken place
since a range of factors - including whether or not the perpetrator has apologised,
acknowledged the offence, been punished, or is now dead - are relevant to the
operation of forgiveness in a counselling setting. Moreover, the importance granted
to forgiveness by the counselling psychologist is important. Lastly, what makes
dealing with forgiveness in counselling psychology complex is that fact that while
for some survivors, forgiveness can be important; for others it is not a pre-requisite
for healing.
Chapter three contains Kimberly M. Goard’s contribution to the philosophical
discussion concerning the relationship between forgiveness, unconditional
forgiveness and the self-respect of the victim. It is often argued that forgiveness
undermines the victim’s self-respect if the offence has taken place under certain
 Timothy McKenry and Charlotte Bruun Thingholm ix
__________________________________________________________________
circumstances, such as where an offence was grossly excessive, perpetual and
relentless, or if it functions to marginalise or oppress the disadvantaged. Goard’s
chapter asserts the argument that forgiveness always reinforces self-respect and
goes on to analyse possible consequences to the victim where forgiveness is not
granted.

Part 3: Forgiveness and Culture

The third part of this volume examines the way forgiveness and the related
concepts of pardon and reconciliation operates in specific cultural settings. The
five chapters in this section explore these issues using a range of case studies: three
consider reconciliation processes following armed conflict; one examines pardon
as a political tool, and another examines the potential for the world’s five major
religions to be overtly harnessed in international peacebuilding efforts.
Çiğdem Oğuz examines the phenomenon of political pardons in the Ottoman
Empire in the late 19th-century. A controversial period in late-Ottoman history,
Oğuz exposes the power dynamic that underpinned the granting and requesting of
pardons during the Hamidian regime and concludes that pardons functioned to
consolidate the autocratic rule of the Sultan by manufacturing the image of a
beneficent, merciful ruler. Oğuz also explores the way in which the negotiation that
typically preceded a pardon functioned to alleviate political tension by fostering
personal loyalty towards the Sultan.
Urszula Pękala considers the moral hazards that have the potential to arise
when Christian notions of interpersonal forgiveness are transplanted into inter-
governmental processes of reconciliation. Through an exploration of Polish-
German relations in the years since the Second World War, Pękala explores a
range of ways forgiveness can be abused by those both seeking and granting it, and
goes on to examine how issues of corporate memory and cultural identity are
informed and transformed by processes of forgiveness. Pękala also asserts that
memory and identity can problematise the forgiveness process: the communicative,
dynamic process of constructing and reconstructing memory can lead to abuse
where memory misrepresents history, and forgiveness that necessarily involves a
recasting of identity by both victim and offender stumbles when the prospect of
identity change incites defensive and fearful reactions in the minds of both groups.
Conflict resolution, reconciliation and psycho-social healing are considered in
Maria Dorsey’s chapter on tourism as a mechanism to facilitate forgiveness. Using
a qualitative study of the experiences of a group of New Zealand veterans of the
Vietnam War in returning as tourists to the site of the conflict, Dorsey examines
the positive and negative effects of such experiences. While stating that further
research into post-war tourism is needed and acknowledging the complexity of
human responses to such situations, Dorsey suggests that post-war tourism
experiences have the capacity to increase empathy between former enemies.
Columbian society provides the setting for a study into the propensity of a
population with recent experience of violent civil conflict to forgive. In this chapter
x Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
Ricardo Abad Barros-Castro and Luis Arturo Pinzón-Salcedo describe a survey
conducted with individuals randomly selected from streets, parks and other public
spaces in Bogotá that examined how these individuals reacted to a fictional account
of a circumstance featuring a slight or injury, and then asked about a real case in
which the participant had been offended. The survey asked the participants to rate,
on the basis of a range of variables, the likelihood that they would forgive the
offender presented in the fictional case. The results of this survey reveal a range of
differing propensities to forgive based on demographic factors including age,
gender, religious affiliation and socio-economic status and, furthermore, provides a
foundation for the development of strategies to construct a positive model of peace
in Columbian society.
In the final chapter of this section Charlotte Bruun Thingholm and Martin Bak
Jørgensen explore the capacity of religion to be a tool in international
peacebuilding efforts. Using exemplars of religious leaders who advocated
forgiveness and non-violence, as well as examining how forgiveness has the
capacity to operate in five of the world’s major religious, Thingholm and
Jørgensen contend that within any religion lie powerful, transformative tools that
have the potential to foster peace, and that particularly where a population has
entrenched religious sensibilities, eschewing religion in the course of
peacebuilding efforts on the basis of a primarily Western academic notion that
religion is purely a negative phenomenon is a mistake.

Part 4: Forgiveness and the Arts

The fourth and last part concerns the different approaches to dealing with
forgiveness from the perspective of the arts. The artistic disciplines examined in
this part include literature, film and music.
In the first chapter Maria Magoula Adamos and Julia B. Griffin analyse various
ancient literary works with a specific focus on Homer’s The Iliad, Euripides’
Hippolytus, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in an attempt to help clarify
current discussion on the meaning of interpersonal forgiveness. Throughout this
chapter, changes and developments to the concept of interpersonal forgiveness are
examined as well as its relationship with concomitant concepts such as
anger/resentment, hurt, clemency, desert/merit, excuse, etc. During this process of
clarification, the various historical figures are accompanied by a succinct
contextual explanation which makes the chapter accessible to any interested reader,
including those with no extensive knowledge of ancient literature or philosophy.
The second chapter contains Zhongfeng Huang comparative analysis of
Shakespeare’s King Lear and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Huang’s
analysis demonstrates how family alienation can result in painful isolation. This
situation leads the two aging protagonists of King Lear and Wild Strawberries on a
strikingly similar process of re-evaluation of their past actions which leads them to
realise their own errors. This results in the two old men seeking redemption and
 Timothy McKenry and Charlotte Bruun Thingholm xi
__________________________________________________________________
forgiveness from their family members. The suffering both men are forced to
endure leads them on a journey of self re-evaluation which ultimately leads to their
seeking forgiveness. Thus, these similar stories, one a film the other a play, have
three themes at their centre: the portrayal of old age, the gaining self-knowledge,
and the search for redemption. Huang concludes that suffering leads these two old
men to a clearer understanding of love and the essence of life itself.
The third chapter also has a focus on literature with Elizabeth Jackson’s
analyses the concept of forgiveness through an examination of Anita Desai’s novel
Clear Light of Day. In contract of the often perceived reasoning behind the main
character Bim’s decision to forgive, namely that she is defeated by her own
inability to changes the rigid family structures which is the underlying reason for
her grievance. Jackson provides an alternative analysis of her decision to forgive
by claiming that Bim needs to reach a state of forgiveness for her own mental and
psychological well-being. Nevertheless, the decision to forgive does not contribute
to the change of traditional family structures that causes Bim extended suffering
throughout the novel. The central themes of this chapter are thus oppression of
women and gender equalities inherent in traditional societal structures, and the
concept of forgiveness and its implication for the individual, family and societal
levels are also discussed in this chapter.
In the fourth and last chapter Timothy McKenry analyses the use of Indigenous
Australian music by non-Indigenous Australian composers. McKenry charts the
way Australian Indigenous music has been used by these composers to try to create
a distinctly Australian musical idiom, without any thought of the cultural
sensitivities of Indigenous people. Through a historical examination from the
earliest major interactions between aboriginal music and Australian composers, to
contemporary examples of the same, McKenry illustrates how Australian
composers have gradually moved from overt appropriation of Indigenous music
towards ethically-informed collaboration with Indigenous musicians. Such
development could arguably prove to be very important in the process of granting
forgiveness and achieving reconciliation between the relevant parties.
 Part 1

Philosophical Perspectives on Forgiveness

 Recognising Contingency: A Philosophical Reflection
on Forgiveness

Alberto L. Siani
Abstract
Forgiveness has apparently to do with either the individual-psychological sphere or
with a religious/political dimension. It does not seem to be a philosophically
relevant topic and, in fact, there have not been many remarkable philosophical
investigations about it. One of the most significant is made in the last pages of the
Spirit chapter of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where
forgiveness is given a philosophically decisive function. In a first step I sketch the
features and the role of forgiveness in Hegel’s text. However, my aim is not a
faithful reconstruction of Hegel’s argument, but rather, starting from its categories,
the development of an idealistically-inspired and systematically-attractive
philosophical reflection on forgiveness. In a second step I interpret the Hegelian
concepts to work out four main aspects of forgiveness, developing a partial
philosophical definition of it as a) activity, and not simple re-activity or passivity;
b) rehabilitation of the meaningfulness of the linguistic act; c) integral
concreteness; and d) recognition and acceptance of contingency.

Key Words: Forgiveness, Hegel, idealism, modernity, political philosophy,

contingency, language, recognition.

*****

A philosophical reflection on forgiveness may seem to be something

contradictory in itself. Forgiveness is a spontaneous, contingent act, and its very
nature seems to exclude the possibility of a general norm. Philosophy on the other
hand has to do with necessity and the normative power of reason. This is at least
the case for the idealistic approach to philosophy, which is my own. Thus it is quite
astonishing that one of the most fascinating philosophical reflections on
forgiveness is to be found in the most famous work of the most representative of
the idealistic philosophers, namely in the Phenomenology of Spirit of Hegel
(1807). My aim is not, however, a faithful reconstruction of Hegel’s own position,
but rather an autonomous development of the main lines of a philosophical theory
of forgiveness based on a free appropriation of Hegel’s own thoughts. I will go
through two main parts. Firstly I will offer a sketch of Hegel’s conception, and
secondly I will attempt to outline an autonomous reflection.

1. Hegel on Forgiveness
First of all, a couple of words concerning Hegel’s Phenomenology: 1 this is a
unique, extremely obscure and dense philosophical work. Its main subject is the
4 Recognising Contingency
__________________________________________________________________
science of the experience of consciousness, that is the speculative reconstruction of
the historical, cultural and psychological processes that take consciousness (both
individual and collective) from the first immediate stage of sensitive certainty to
absolute knowledge, through a series of stages that develop from each other
dialectically. In this process, which Hegel calls a ‘path of despair,’ 2 consciousness
undergoes the progressive destruction of all its cognitive and practical certainties,
up to the point of absolute knowledge, where consciousness recognises that truth
does not lie in a separate object, but is the very reconciliation of subject and object.
The path is divided into six main stages, or moments, that consist of various
sections. The six moments are: consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit,
religion and absolute knowledge. Hegel deals with forgiveness in the last pages of
Spirit, hence forgiveness represents the passage to Religion. Here Spirit is all the
collective forms of consciousness, hence its historical, ethical, political and cultural
configurations, from the tragic ethical life of Classical Greece to the modern moral
vision of the world contemporary with Hegel. The last section of Spirit has the
title: Conscience. The Beautiful Soul, Evil and Its Forgiveness. Here Hegel deals
with the romantic view of the world, whose principle is the self-determination of
the I and the self-grounding of morality and ethical life. This principle is abstract,
and hence splits into various contradictory figures. More precisely, Hegel
distinguishes two main figures that interact in these pages as characters of a theatre
play: the judging and the acting character. These are two typical figures of modern
life, as Terry Pinkard, an American philosopher and Hegel-interpreter and
translator writes:

1) the judgemental agent becomes the person who does not act
but only prattles on about the “absolute standards” that must be
maintained and is forever moaning about the loss of such
standards; 2) the ironist [that is, the acting figure, ALS] becomes
the kind of casuistical agent who is always invoking the
“complexity” of life to justify his own self-serving actions. 3

Both are hypocrites, though in different ways. The judging character never acts
herself, but claims to be able to judge the other’s action. The acting character
claims to be acting for good aims, and regrets the circumstances that bring her to
actually act only for her own sake. Both boast a purity that exists only in their
words. It seems that there is no way out for consciousness, and that modern moral
life is condemned to be itself empty and contradictory. However, the acting
character, by looking at her own actions through the words of the judging
character, understands the selfish nature of those actions and confesses it to the
other, expecting from her the recognition of her dignity, and hence of their
equality. The judging character does at first refuse the acting character opposing
only silence to her, hence turning in yet another figure, which Hegel calls the ‘hard
 Alberto L. Siani 5
__________________________________________________________________
heart.’ 4 By refusing the confession, the judging character loses all of her value and
truth, and we are once again stuck in a hollow opposition. The evil seems not to be
overcome. Nonetheless the way out of it is already contained in the previous
confession. As a matter of fact, the acting character had recognised that her acting
standard was no universal, but only her particular interest. Likewise, the judging
character understands, thanks to that confession, that her judging standard cannot
be taken as an absolute truth, because there is no truth independently of the other’s
recognition. Hence the judging character also renounces her claim, having
discovered equality with the other conscience.
Right at this point we have the act of forgiveness: the renouncement of the
judging character to her own nature is in itself the act of forgiveness. Both
consciences recognise each other by abandoning their claim of self-identification
with the standard of absolute truth. We hence have a reconciliation where the spirit
comes back to itself from its divisions and the truth is no more a subjective moral
claim, but the plural, spiritual recognition of the self in the other. This
reconciliation is of course based on the previous conflict, but the very fact of the
conflict is not something ultimate and definitive anymore. We can reconsider it and
quit considering it as a motive for our actions. As Hegel writes, ‘the wounds of the
spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable.’ 5
This reconciliation is of course mediated through religion (which is, as mentioned,
is the following moment of the Phenomenology), but it is not simply the result of a
transcendent divine intervention in the human world. It is, on the contrary, the
recognition of the immanent presence of spirit within the human world. With the
closing word of this section, ‘It is God appearing in the midst of those who know
themselves as pure knowledge.’ 6
Even from this very rough exposition it should be clear that Hegel’s reflection
does not constitute a normative theory of forgiveness, but rather a phenomenology
or maybe a genealogy of it. In my view, this means that Hegel offers a good basis
for a philosophical reflection on forgiveness, without removing its characteristic
features by constricting it in a normative dimension.

2. A Theory Sketch: Four Features

In this second part I would like to propose a sketch of a theory drawn from this
phenomenology or genealogy. I distinguish four main features of this theory of
forgiveness, whereby the fourth is the most general and encompasses the former
three. I understand forgiveness as a) activity, and not simple re-activity or
passivity; b) rehabilitation of the meaningfulness of the linguistic act; c) integral
concreteness and d) recognition and acceptance of contingency. I will now briefly
deal with them.
6 Recognising Contingency
__________________________________________________________________
A. Activity, and Not Simple Re-Activity or Passivity
This was already pointed out by Hannah Arendt in her work The Human
Condition, in connection with Kant and not with Hegel. However, I think it is a
good starting point for my sketch. Up to the moment of forgiveness, the moves of
the two characters are simply reactions to pre-existing conditions and to the moves
of each other, and not concretely free, but rather mechanistically determined.
Forgiveness, on the contrary, is not a simple reaction, but a new action that
abstracts from the given conditions and from the developed conflict situation. The
forgiving agent refuses to follow the conflict mechanism and to depend on it and
reveals herself as a free agent. Forgiveness is hence a fully self-determined action,
and not a mere reaction.

B. Rehabilitation of the Meaningfulness of the Linguistic Act

The act of forgiveness and the following reconciliation re-establishes the
meaningfulness and reliability of the speech acts. The very conflict that forgiveness
is called to reconcile has linguistic roots in the first place. In both characters we
witness an escalating failure of correspondence between linguistic enunciation and
act. They both claim to be acting on the basis of universally valid and recognisable
principles, whereas they actually only act for their own sake, or even do not act at
all. The speech act hence gets progressively emptied of its meaning up to the point
of a total incommunicability and obliteration of every linguistic possibility.
Linguistic communication gets hypocritically exploited, and hence turns into its
opposite: silence and solipsism. The only way out is to re-establish its
meaningfulness. However, this seems only to be possible through a new linguistic
act, which has to express a radical inversion. That is, it has to break with the
former hypocrisy and begin anew. This new act entails a moment of weakness and
risk. It is no accident that this new act is one of confession: the person opening
herself to reconciliation takes the chance of being refused and humiliated like
Hegel’s acting character. Should that happen, then only the refusing individual is to
blame, as she thereby explicitly admits the lack of universality, discursivity and
rationality in her own principle. She deliberately enters into an inward
contradiction likely to drive her mad, unless she abandons her standpoint and
becomes open to forgiveness. So, whereas in the previous situation we had
linguistic acts without real content making communication impossible, now we
have real content (the reconciliation) that does not really require a linguistic
confirmation, but that makes communication possible again. Through the act of
forgiveness we are taught something about the ambiguous power of language and
the necessity of taking linguistic acts seriously. Using the terminology of Robert
Brandom (another American philosopher and Hegel-interpreter), in every linguistic
act we should be able to make explicit the reference to the actual content or
concept, and thereby to be committed to it as in the words of forgiveness. If this is
not the case, then we are hypocritically exploiting the ambiguous nature of
 Alberto L. Siani 7
__________________________________________________________________
language and we are not really willing to communicate something we are
committed to: we are thereby still part of the mechanism of arbitrariness, and not
acting freely.

C. Integral Concreteness
Hereby I mean that through the act of forgiving we abandon the unilateral and
abstract view of the person. We are not anymore identifying the individual with her
claim or with her act, rather we recognize that the individual is not her act, is not
the particularity of the this or that and not even the pure abstract universality of a
moral claim, but rather is actually infinite, spontaneous subjectivity and power to
start anew, to set previous conditions aside. This is true both of acting and of
judging characters. The acting one does not identify anymore the judging one with
the claimed universality of her maxims, and the judging one does not identify
anymore the acting one with the claimed particularity and complexity of her action.
Each recognizes the other as a concrete individual, and grasps her own judgment
and action in the same way. They are no more subjects detached from the world,
but individuals concretely operating in a normative context made up of other
judging and acting concrete individuals.

D. Recognition and Acceptance of Contingency

I come now to the last, all-encompassing feature. As I understand it, the main,
general achievement of forgiveness, philosophically considered, is the active
recognition of contingency in the world of human praxes and commitments. By
forgiving, we give up the claim that human activity responds to some pre-fixed,
universally- and eternally-valid maxims. Besides, we abandon a heteronomous
view of the world and we embrace an autonomous one. Actually, we do not let
some assumed principle determine our action or evaluation, rather we freely
commit to a decision that would be illogical if taken to be the result of a deductive
process from a given universal, but that is nonetheless free in a moral sense. As a
matter of fact, not only the forgiven, but also the forgiver is thereby put in a space
of contingency, as she sees her own decision to forgive not as motivated by some
logical-formal reason, but as logically contingent, and not grounded elsewhere but
in her own subjective spontaneity. Nonetheless this contingency is not simple
arbitrariness, but actual freedom. Arbitrariness means following instincts and
desires despite every normative level. On the contrary, forgiveness requires an act
of dissociation from one’s instincts, and, other than subjective arbitrariness, its
contingency is not at odds with intersubjective recognition.
In fact, assuming now a collective and not an individual perspective, it may be
said that forgiveness establishes a community in which the empirical-historical
datum is not simply removed as in a formalistic-dualistic moral position. Forgiving
does not mean forgetting, they are rather incompatible: if I forget I cannot forgive,
and vice versa. At the same time, the empirical-historical datum is not absolutized
8 Recognising Contingency
__________________________________________________________________
either, as in a relativistic world view. To forgive someone does not mean to accept
that every deed is morally or ethically equal. It only means that I, as the offended
person, am free to go over it, not that I take it to be morally indifferent, for in a
pure, relativistic world it would not make much sense to speak of forgiveness. So
when I speak of forgiveness as the recognition of contingency, I must prevent an
obvious misunderstanding. I do not want to exalt the power of forgiveness to put us
in a world of fully gratuitous evaluations, like it was a godly intervention whose
grounds are inaccessible to human understanding. The recognition of contingency
through forgiveness is an act of human freedom that only makes sense within a
given historical and cultural context, where human freedom is the deepest ground
of every praxis and evaluation. In this sense it is a contingent act that does not deny
human rationality, but rather marks its power of dealing with contingency without
referring to transcendent principles.
Forgiveness is a subjective choice and act, whose normative power is not
absolute, but must be embedded in objective forms of recognition, lest it becomes,
against our will, a new, ultimate form of hypocrisy and egoism. The features I
sketched and subsumed under the common denominator of recognising
contingency must be actualised in forms and structures adequate to modern ethical
life. The religious background of forgiveness must, and can be, secularized: the
ethical structure of modern life has the need and the capacity of recognising
contingency within practical and legal objective forms. But the very fact of
forgiveness, its possibility and actuality remains, if philosophically interpreted, not
just an old-fashioned curiosity or a religiously-inspired individual act. It still
marks, on the contrary, the fact of a community where the given empirical-
contingent datum is neither to be removed nor to be absolutised, but rationalised
and recognised within the concreteness of the community itself. This does not
imply a normative-logical character of forgiveness; rather, it shows forgiveness as
a possible form of conciliation between rationality and contingency, and between
freedom and necessity, hence as a characterising expression of modern ethical life.

Notes
1
I quote from the Phenomenology of Spirit using Terry Pinkard’s English
translation draft, which is freely accessible: accessed September 21, 2012,
http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html. On the issue
of forgiveness by Hegel one should read first of all Klaus Brinkmann, ‘Hegel on
Forgiveness’, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays, eds.
Alfred Denker and Michael Vater (Amherst, NY: Humanities books, 2003), 243-
264.
2
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 73.
 Alberto L. Siani 9
__________________________________________________________________

3
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 217.
4
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 594.
5
Ibid., 596.
6
Ibid.

Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998.

Brandom, Robert B. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2009.

Brinkmann, Klaus. ‘Hegel on Forgiveness’. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

New Critical Essays, edited by Alfred Denker, and Michael Vater, 243–264.
Amherst, NY: Humanities books, 2003.

Garelli, Gianluca. Lo Spirito in Figura. Il Tema Dell’estetico nella

«Fenomenologia dello Spirito» di Hegel. Bologna: il Mulino, 2010.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry

Pinkard. Accessed September 21, 2012.
http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html.

Houlgate, Stephen. ‘Religion, Morality and Forgiveness in Hegel’s Philosophy’. In

Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism, edited by William Desmond, Ernst-
Otto Onnasch, and Paul Cruysberghs, 81–110. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2004.

Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Alberto L. Siani is currently a Humboldt-Foundation postdoctoral guest scholar at

the Universität Münster. He is the author of various books and articles, amongst
others on Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Goethe. At the moment he is working on a
reconstruction of Hegel’s idea of modernity and its value for the contemporary
debate on European identity.
 Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology: When Actions
Are Unforgivable

Sandy Koll
Abstract
Charles Griswold defends a conditional account of interpersonal forgiveness as the
expression of a virtue. In this chapter, I attempt to apply Griswold’s account to
some examples of actions that might be thought to be in principle unforgivable.
Griswold does not give conditions for how to determine whether an action or
injury is in principle unforgivable; he says that his account leaves open the
possibility of such cases, but does not necessarily entail that there are such cases. I
describe and consider two different sorts of candidates for unforgivable actions -
one that might be said to be a case of warranted - or virtuous - anger, and one
which might be said to involve an inappropriate apology. Finally, I consider
whether what I have argued would be Griswold’s take on these examples is correct.
I suggest that these examples might show that Griswold’s requirements for
evidence of moral transformation, as well as his insistence on dialogue between the
victim and perpetrator may be too strong. It seems that Griswold has overlooked
the connection between the virtue of forgivingness and the virtue of charity.

Key Words: Forgiveness, unforgivable, Griswold, resentment, apology, virtue,

relationship.

*****

1. Griswold’s Account
Charles Griswold analyses forgiveness as the expression of a virtue. According
to Griswold, virtuous forgiveness is the deliberate lessening of resentment, and is
subject to certain conditions for its justification, and indeed, its possibility. 1
Having presented his conditions for forgiveness, Griswold says that perfect
forgiveness can be achieved only if all twelve of the conditions are met, and if the
wrong is not in principle unforgivable. 2 Griswold says that his account leaves open
the possibility of such cases, but does not entail that there are such cases. 3
According to Griswold, this somewhat uncertain position on the matter is in
keeping with his broadly Aristotelian construal of forgiveness as a virtue. 4 It is my
intention to investigate this possibility in more detail.
Griswold treats acts of forgiveness as expressions of a stable character trait -
forgivingness - which is cultivated through habituation, and which occupies the
mean on a continuum between hard-heartedness and servility. 5 As in the case of
other virtues, determining when forgiveness is appropriate will require a sort of
practical wisdom. 6 Griswold thinks that forgiveness is to be understood as a virtue
in something like the Aristotelian sense of virtue. I say something like the
12 Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology
__________________________________________________________________
Aristotelian sense of virtue because, as Griswold points out, a perfectionist theory
of the sort Aristotle is known for in fact has no place for forgiveness as virtue. The
sort of virtue theory that can accommodate forgiveness as praiseworthy and
admirable must be a theory that is responsive to certain imperfections that
characterise human beings and their relations with one another. Among these
imperfections are the facts that we are dependent on and vulnerable to one another
in various ways, that we are embodied, and that we have obligations to one
another. It is precisely because of these imperfections that the virtue of forgiveness
helps our lives to go well. 7
To ensure that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness will be expressions of a virtue
- something to admire and emulate - Griswold sets out twelve conditions that need
to be met by the offender who seeks forgiveness. The first involves the offender
taking responsibility for the wrong, and acknowledging it as wrong. 8 The second is
that the offender should repudiate the wrong action - she should demonstrate that
though she is the agent who did the wrong, she does not wish to do that sort of
thing again. 9 Third, the offender should experience and express regret at having
caused the specific injury to the victim from whom she seeks forgiveness. 10 The
fourth condition is that the offender should demonstrate a commitment to changing
herself - a commitment to becoming the sort of person who no longer injures others
in the way she has in the past. Demonstration of this commitment involves action
of some sort - some sort of attempt at reparation. 11 Fifth, the offender should
understand the injurious effects of her action on the victim, and feel compassion
for the victim. Griswold says that to this end, the offender should listen to the
victim’s description of the event. 12 Finally, the offender should give an account
(addressed to the victim) of her past actions and motivations, and how she has
subsequently come to view them. 13
The victim of the wrongdoing must also meet six conditions if forgiveness is to
be perfectly successful. First, she should forswear revenge. 14 Second, she should
moderate her resentment of the offender. 15 Third, because the ultimate goal of
forgiveness is the complete eradication of all resentment, the victim should commit
to ridding herself of resentment altogether. 16 Fourth, the victim should undergo a
change in her view of the offender - she should begin to see the offender as more
than simply the author of the wrong she has suffered. 17 Fifth, the victim should
undergo a change in view of herself - she should cease to see herself as in an
important way defined by the past injury. 18 Finally, the victim should explicitly
communicate her forgiveness to the offender. 19
The final element of Griswold’s account that I want to draw attention to is the
role that resentment plays. On Griswold’s account, resentment is understood as a
particular kind of settled, moral anger, with personal and impersonal elements, that
is sometimes a justified and appropriate - even virtuous - response to an injury.
Recall that Griswold sees the virtue of forgivingness as the mean between vices of
excess and deficiency - hard-heartedness and servility. Hard-hearted people
 Sandy Koll 13
__________________________________________________________________
typically experience and are guided in their actions by an excess of resentment;
servile people typically experience and are guided in their actions by a deficiency
of resentment. 20
On Griswold’s view, resentment is a kind of self-defence. One way to
understand this is to see resentment as a form of protest against the wrongness of
an action. 21 There is an impersonal element to resentment in that it is a protest
against something that the moral community at large deems to be unacceptable.
But there is also a personal element to resentment, in that it is a protest against the
wrongful injury to the person who feels resentment. 22 According to Pamela
Hieronymi, to forgive someone is to rid oneself of resentment toward her while
continuing to believe that her action was wrong, that she is a member of the moral
community (and thus that her actions and intentions are worth caring about), and
that one is worthy of better treatment than her actions and intentions exhibited. 23
Importantly, these judgements do not change when one forgives. What changes in
cases of (appropriate) forgiveness is that resentment - as a protest against a threat -
is no longer warranted because the threat no longer exists. 24 According to
Hieronymi (and Griswold), forgiveness is the justified cessation of protest. The
‘threat’ is a threat to the moral community, or to one’s moral worth and others’
perception thereof that is present as a claim in the wrong action and the intentions
behind it. 25 I suggest, then, that we understand Griswold’s conditions as intended
to provide good reasons for the judgement that the threatening claim presented by
the injury and intentions behind it no longer persists.

2. Unforgivable Actions: Two Candidates

Griswold says that ‘… a person who is in principle unforgivable warrants
resentment forever.’ 26 Given the account of resentment and forgiveness presented
above, this would mean that a case of an injury that is unforgivable in principle
would have to be one in which the cessation of protest is never warranted, because
the injury and intention behind it continues to represent a threat. There are two
broad ways that this could be the case: either the wrongdoer is incapable of the sort
of change required to be forgiven, or the wrong action itself is so atrocious that
meeting all of Griswold’s conditions would not be enough to justify giving up
resentment. 27 I also want to highlight two further features that have bearing on
whether an action is unforgivable. The first is the relevance of the context of a
specific relationship in which the wrongdoing occurs. The second is the potential
problem of the availability of evidence that the agent has met the conditions for
forgiveness.

2.1 Michael Ross

Michael Ross was a convicted serial rapist and murderer who requested that a
further death penalty hearing be forgone, and that he instead be put to death
without a further hearing. 28 His reasons for this request, according to him, were to
14 Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology
__________________________________________________________________
avoid putting the families of his victims through another painful hearing, where
they would be forced to relive the horror of their losses in an extremely unpleasant
way. Ross’s view, as he presents it, seems to be that any interaction with the
families and friends of his victims would constitute a further offence because what
he did to them was so atrocious that simply subjecting them to his presence would
be wrong. He says:

I wish I knew how to tell them how sorry I am. But there are no
words to describe what I feel. How do you tell someone you are
sorry when you have stolen something so very precious from
them? How do you tell them you are sorry when those very
words sound so inadequate and you are ashamed to even speak
them in their presence for fear of making things worse? I cannot
even face them, never mind ask for their forgiveness. 29

If Ross is unforgivable, it is not because he is incapable of change. Ross says

that medication reduced his violent urges significantly, and so presumably, with
the help of medication, he would be capable of change in the relevant way. 30
Rather, if Ross is unforgivable for the reason he seems to think he is, would be
because his past actions are instances of wrongdoing of such a magnitude that
nothing can warrant the moderating of resentment that forgiveness involves. So,
this would be a case in which the nature of the magnitude of the wrongdoing is
such that it would be wrong for the perpetrator to approach the victim at all, and
this would seem to block the fulfilment of any of Griswold’s conditions.

2.2 Deep Deception

Meet Anne and Bob. Anne and Bob have been married for twenty-five years.
Their marriage has certainly had its ups and downs, but all in all, it seems to be a
good marriage. One day, Bob is arrested. It comes to light that he has been
embezzling funds from his employers for years. Anne is utterly shocked; she had
no knowledge or suspicion of Bob’s illegal activity, and would never have
expected it of him. Bob apologises to her for his actions and his deception, and
does his best to account for his actions. Some time passes, and he tells her that he
has come to see his previous actions as unacceptable. He explains to her that he is
committed to becoming an honest person, and to that end, tells her of some other
minor deceptions over the years. He also listens to her account of the events, and
shows compassion and remorse for the injuries he caused her. It seems Bob has
met Griswold’s conditions. Is Anne’s resentment towards Bob for this deep
deception warranted, or should she commit to ridding herself of it?
It seems that Anne’s continued resentment might be warranted on the account
of resentment and forgiveness under discussion. Recall that resentment is a kind of
self-defence - specifically, it is a protest against a threatening claim that is present
 Sandy Koll 15
__________________________________________________________________
in the wrongdoing and the intentions behind it. The problem is that it seems that
there is in principle no possible evidence that could justify the cessation of protest
here. Bob can tell Anne anything he likes, indeed he can do anything he likes, to
convince her that he has changed, and no longer wishes to be the sort of person
who injures others in the way he has in the past. But the fact of the deep,
systematic, and long lasting deception that constituted his injury to her casts the
sincerity of anything he says or does now into doubt. In the absence of evidence
that the threat is no longer present, giving up the protest of resentment is
unjustified.
The context of the relationship between Bob and Anne is important. The
magnitude of injury is more severe in this context than it would be in others. It
would probably be much easier to forgive Bob for his deception if you were his
friend than if you were his wife. The magnitude of this kind of wrong, and thus the
appropriate amount of resentment, seems to increase proportionally to the degree
of closeness of the relationship.

3. Does Griswold Get Things Right?

First, consider the Michael Ross case. Suppose one of Ross’s victim’s mothers
decides that she wants to forgive Ross, but she really does not want to engage in
any dialogue with him. Suppose that she is willing to communicate her forgiveness
to him, but is dead set against the dialogue of forgiveness that Griswold sees as
essential - she does not want to hear his story, and does not want to tell him hers.
Would it not count as forgiveness if she were to meet all of Griswold’s conditions
on the victim without wanting Ross to meet the conditions on the perpetrator?
Griswold thinks there is a very strong interdependence of the offender and the
victim for forgiveness. He says:

One of the striking consequences of this interdependence is that

each party holds the other in its power, in this sense: the offender
depends on the victim in order to be forgiven, and the victim
depends on the offender in order to forgive. 31

This seems to be an unfavourable conclusion in this case, and it may indicate

that Griswold’s insistence on dialogue is too strong a requirement. It is important
that the fulfilment of the conditions for forgiveness is blocked for moral reasons.
Ross (logically) can fulfil them, but he (morally) should not because he should not
subject his victims’ loved ones to interaction with him. And if his victims’ loved
ones wanted to forgive him, but did not want him to meet the conditions, it seems
wrong to say that they cannot do so. Griswold’s insistence on dialogue is morally
troubling here.
Second, consider the example of deep deception. As I pointed out in relation to
that example, the context of a relationship can have an impact on the magnitude of
16 Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology
__________________________________________________________________
a wrong. But it seems that the context of a relationship might also bring with it
special obligations that amount to a special obligation to be more forgiving towards
one’s spouse, for example. If Anne forgave Bob, despite the fact that there was in
principle no evidence that he could provide to show that he had changed in the
required ways, might we not want to say that this act of forgiveness was virtuous,
and a testament to the strength of Anne’s love for and commitment to Bob?
Bob has done much to convince Anne that he has changed in the required ways,
and we can even stipulate that he has done all he possibly could to convince her of
this. The worry is that the nature of the wrong (the deep, long lasting and
systematic deception) casts the sincerity of all of this into doubt. It looks like
Griswold may be forced to say that Anne’s forgiveness in this case would be
irrational and unjustified. It seems to me that what is left out of the account in this
regard is the relationship between the virtue of forgivingness and the virtue of
charity. In particular, the requirements for evidence in Griswold’s account seem to
be in tension with a connection that seems to hold between forgiveness and charity.

4. Conclusion
Griswold’s stringent conditions for the justification of giving up the protest of
resentment seem to leave out an important feature of forgiveness - that it is
generous and charitable, and sometimes seems to be admirable precisely because it
involves treating the offender in a way that might be better than she strictly
deserves. Relatedly, Griswold’s account seems to place undue pressure on the
victim of wrongdoing with his insistence on dialogue. As I see it, what we need in
an account of the virtue of forgivingness will include something like Griswold’s
conditions, but the conditions should be weakened somewhat, specifically in light
of the connection between forgiveness and charity. Charity, like forgiveness, is a
virtue that would be at home in Griswold’s account of the virtues as dispositions to
respond well to the inherent imperfections that characterise the human condition,
since, like forgiveness, it is precisely these imperfections that charity is responsive
to.

Notes
1
Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2
Griswold, Forgiveness, 59.
3
Ibid., 92.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid., 18.
6
Ibid., 17.
7
Ibid., 14-15.
 Sandy Koll 17
__________________________________________________________________

8
Ibid., 49.
9
Ibid., 49-50.
10
Ibid., 50.
11
Ibid., 50-51.
12
Ibid., 51.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 54.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 58.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 18.
21
Ibid., 45. See also Pamela Hieronymi, ‘Articulating an Uncompromising
Forgiveness’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXII (2001): 529-555.
22
Griswold, Forgiveness, 45.
23
Hieronymi, ‘Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness’, 530.
24
Ibid., 546.
25
Ibid.
26
Griswold, Forgiveness, 93.
27
Ibid., 93-94.
28
See Michael Ross’s homepage at the CCADP website, accessed May 14, 2012,
http://www.ccadp.org/michaelross.htm.
29
Michael Ross, ‘It’s Time for Me to Die: An Inside Look at Death Row’,
accessed May 14, 2012, http://www.ccadp.org/michaelross-timeforme.htm.
30
Ibid.
31
Griswold, Forgiveness, 49.

Bibliography
Allais, Lucy. ‘Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness’. Philosophy and
Public Affairs 23 (2008): 33–68.

—––. ‘Elective Forgiveness’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies

(forthcoming 2012).

Butler, Joseph. Sermon VIII ‘Upon Resentment’ and Sermon IX ‘Upon

Forgiveness of Injuries’. In The Works of Joseph Butler, Vol. 2, edited by W. E.
Gladstone, 136–167. London: Clarendon Press, 1896.
18 Virtuous Anger and Inappropriate Apology
__________________________________________________________________

Fricke, Christel. ‘What We Cannot Do to Each Other: On Forgiveness and Moral

Vulnerability’. In The Ethics of Forgiveness, edited by Christel Fricke, 51–68.
New York: Routledge, 2011.

Garcia, Ernesto V. ‘Bishop Butler on Forgiveness and Resentment’. Philosophers’

Imprint 11 (2011): 1–19.

Griswold, Charles. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Hieronymi, Pamela. ‘Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness’. Philosophy

and Phenomenological Research LXII (2001): 529–555.

Kolnai, Aurel. ‘Forgiveness’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973):

91–106.

Murphy, Jeffrie, and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Richards, Norvin. ‘Forgiveness’. Ethics 99 (1995): 77–97.

Roberts, Robert C. ‘Forgivingness’. American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995):

289–306.

Ross, Michael. ‘It’s Time for Me to Die: An Inside Look at Death Row’. Accessed
May 14, 2012. http://www.ccadp.org/michaelross-timeforme.htm.

—––. ‘Why I Choose Death Rather Than to Fight for Life’. Accessed May 14,
2012. http://www.ccadp.org/michaelross-whyichoose.htm.

Tutu, Desmond. No Future without Forgiveness. New York: Random House, 1999.

Wiesenthal. Simon. The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.

New York: Schocken Books, 1997.

Sandy Koll is a graduate student in philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University.

Her research interests include forgiveness, the emotions, the virtues, the ethics of
relationships, feminism, and the history of philosophy.
 Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past But Pardoning
the Impossible

Cameron Surrey
Abstract
Forgiveness is concerned with past offences. We speak of turning back time, of
setting right past wrongs, but as plain experience shows, there is no way of altering
or even accessing the past, nor, aside from deception or wishful thinking, of
making a past evil into something good. In this chapter I will argue that the
impossibility of turning back time does not present an impasse for forgiveness.
Rather, on closer inspection this metaphysical problem gives way to an ethical one:
the seeming impossibility of the misdeed itself. The real problem is not the
impossibility of turning back time but the impossibility of making sense of the
seemingly unprovoked attack, the crime without a motive, or the utter reversal of
values. Memories of such absurd events resist explanation and refuse to be
integrated into a meaningful narrative. This shift from the problem of time to the
apparent impossibility of the misdeed itself raises the question of radical evil. Is
evil merely a privation of the good or is it a principle in itself? Is the human being
capable of willing evil for its own sake? The claim that every offence can be
forgiven implies that even in the worst of wrongs there is some good at which the
wrongdoer aims, as distorted as it may be. I will argue that forgiveness
presupposes the orientation of the human will to the good. Discovering this
remnant of the good which allows, not a full, but a partial explanation of the
misdeed is a crucial step for the victim who seeks to forgive.

Key Words: Forgiveness, time, the past, the impossible, radical evil, privation, the
good.

*****

1. Turning Back Time

When somebody does something wrong and that wrongdoing harms me, to
forgive means that I, by some process or other, come to regard and to treat her as if
the wrongdoing and the harm never took place. My relations with her are not
marked by bitterness any longer. We can now be friends. We might call this a
common sense view of forgiveness. The difficulty here is how I am able to attain
this forgiveness without forgetting the misdeed on the one hand or deceiving
myself on the other, for no such ‘psychological adjustment’ could amount to
forgiveness. But it seems that we have not the power to do anything else. The bad
effects of a past action can be undone, its moral value can be retrospectively
justified, its memory can be left to fade, but the fact that it was done, the fact of the
malicious intention, as fleeting as it might have been, the fact that my blood was
20 Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past But Pardoning the Impossible
__________________________________________________________________
found on her hands, can never be erased. It remains and endures forever. This is
because unlike the effects, the scars, or the disorder occasioned by his act, the fact
that it happened is not accessible. 1 It is lost and gone forever, yet stands as a
witness. It is the ghost that no earthly weapon can drive away.

“It was” - that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and mostly

lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been
done, the will is an angry spectator in all things past ... . It is
sullenly wrathful that time does not run back. 2

The bitterness that results from this powerlessness

... nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.
Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that
the event be undone ... it desires two impossible things:
regression into the past and nullification of what happened. 3

And so we arrive at the problem of time. It seems that there can be no forgiveness
because the very thing that forgiveness demands, the turning back of time and the
undoing of what was done, is impossible.

2. Some Responses to the Problem

In response to this paradox Vladimir Jankélévitch proposes a second paradox.
Forgiveness, he says, is a miracle that accomplishes the impossible.

[T]he accursed stain of the having-done is indelible, and no

amount of polishing will wash it away. And nevertheless, in
another truly pneumatic and incomprehensible sense, it is the
very miracle of forgiveness that in a burst of joy annihilates the
having-been and the having-done. By the grace of forgiveness,
the thing that had been done has not been done ... And since the
two forces are equally all-powerful, we can say: the infinite force
of forgiveness is stronger than the infinite force of the fact of
something’s having-done, and reciprocally. 4

What is immediately apparent to us is that Jankélévitch’s paradox makes no

attempt to describe how forgiveness overcomes the problem of time. This, to be
fair, is hardly a criticism, for it is the very mark of a miracle, that it cannot be
demonstrated. It does not disclose to us the ‘how,’ but conceals it and leads us
instead to the agent. Who did this, and by what power? Who is the source of this
miracle, this force, this grace of forgiveness? By describing forgiveness as a
 Cameron Surrey 21
__________________________________________________________________
miracle Jankélévitch implicitly redirects us away from the question of how to a
consideration of the mysterious and incomprehensible workings of love.
Another response to the problem of time is offered by Paul Ricoeur. For him
forgiveness is something ‘poetic,’ exceeding the order of morality just as, at the
level of verbal expression, song exceeds mere talk.

Its “poetic” power consists in shattering the law of the

irreversibility of time by changing the past, not as a record of all
that has happened but in terms of its meaning for us today. It
does this by lifting the burden of guilt which paralyses the
relations between individuals who are acting out and suffering
their own history. It does not abolish the debt insofar as we are
and remain the inheritors of the past, but it lifts the pain of the
debt. 5

This appeal to the ‘poetic’ offers a different light on how the problem of time is
overcome. The past fact is not changed but takes on a new meaning. The misdeed
is still remembered but the guilt is lifted. The debt remains but is emptied of pain.
There is a transformation involved in forgiveness that is not simply an ‘undoing’ of
past events. Rather, the change is something that takes place in the present. The
impossibility of turning back time remains, but within Ricoeur’s view this
impossibility presents no problem or limitation when it comes to forgiveness. What
is called for is a change in the meaning of the past event, a re-evaluation of its
significance. This same idea is developed by Pamela Hieronymi.

If your spouse leaves you, your attitude towards your marriage

vows will likely change dramatically. What is more, your attitude
can change without requiring any revision in your understanding
of your spouse’s intentions at the time. Analogously, various
intervening events (apologies, restitutions, punishments) can
change the significance of a wrongdoing. Further, it can do so
without requiring any revision in one’s understanding of what the
person who authored the event meant at the time. 6

We have an interesting distinction here. We are to view the past misdeed in a

new way, but it does not require any change in the way we view what the offender
intended at the time of the offence. In other words, the whole past episode is left
intact and is free of any manipulation. Forgiveness seems to require, not a change
in what took place (for that is impossible), nor a change in our memory of what
took place (for that is a form of self-deception), but a change in our attitude
towards the event. Forgiveness is a change in one’s present attitude towards the
past.
22 Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past But Pardoning the Impossible
__________________________________________________________________
3. Reframing the Problem: The Impossible Offence
In his book on resentment, inspired by the work of Holocaust survivor Jean
Améry, Thomas Brudholm briefly mentions an observation that could allow us to
radically reconsider the aporia of time.

The wish and the demand inherent to the kind of ressentiment

delimited by Améry are absurd or impossible. However, they
protest against another kind of ethical impossibility: testimonies
on the Holocaust often dwell on the “impossible” indifference
with which people can witness other people being transported to
death. 7

This suggests another way in which, like Jankélévitch, Ricoeur and Hieronymi,
we could resituate the problem of time in relation to forgiveness. Instead of
focusing on the metaphysical impossibility, the impossibility of undoing what was
done, we can re-interpret the problem on an ethical level. It is the misdeed itself
that appears to be impossible. How could it have happened? How could anyone
have chosen to do that? These questions strike at the heart of what resentment
struggles with. For example, how could a man have stood by and watched while
his Jewish neighbours were arrested and taken off to a death camp? Or, what could
have possessed this stranger to approach and strike me without my slightest
provocation? Or again, how could you spread these lies about me when I never did
anything to offend you? What we struggle with most is not the impossibility of
turning back time, but the impossibility of how anyone could have committed such
a deed. The wound of the victim continues to fester because she remains trapped in
that moment of initial shock. The offence against her remains utterly absurd,
unexplained and seemingly unexplainable.

Ressentiment not just keeps the past alive. In the mind and will of
the person trapped in it, it keeps the past open or unfinished
insofar as the victim cannot accept that what happened,
happened. 8

Let us return to another passage from Jankélévitch in which he is not only

dealing with the problem of time but also seems to suggest this shift to the ethical
plane. The past misdeed, he says,

does not allow itself, in the manner of any new experience (the
recollection of a voyage, for example), to be integrated or
totalised in a higher synthesis. Subsequent good actions,
following upon the bad one, are juxtaposed with it, but without
 Cameron Surrey 23
__________________________________________________________________
absorbing it or without transfiguring it from the inside... it
remains in our history as a foreign body. 9

It is this last phrase especially that interests us here. The indestructible fact of
the misdeed having been done ‘remains in our history as a foreign body.’ Our
contention is that the ghostlike durability is not what bothers us most about a past
having-been-done. It is rather its foreignness that is the main issue. How is it
foreign? It is foreign to the otherwise meaningful narrative of our life. It does not
permit of explanation. It is like a splinter that will not dissolve and become one
with the flesh in which it is so firmly embedded. It remains as an absurdity
amongst the otherwise reasonable fabric of our past memories. The evil appears to
the victim as something radical. It seems like nothing good, not even the slightest
trace of goodness, has motivated the action. The evil path was not naively mistaken
for a good one - it was chosen because it was evil. This is the way it will appear to
the victim of the ‘impossible’ offence.

4. The Presentism of Augustine

Can the human will incline to evil for its own sake and not for the sake of some
good? Is there such a thing as an unforgivable offence? St. Augustine’s reflections
on time, eternity and evil in his Confessions suggest a negative response to both
these questions.
For Augustine, eternity is where nothing passes away, but the whole is
simultaneously present. 10

Time, on the other hand, is never all present at once. The past is
always driven on by the future, the future always follows on the
heels of the past, and both the past and the future have their
beginning and their end in the eternal present. 11

The present, then, is a fleeting next-to-nothingness between the future that is

nothing more than present expectation of what is not yet, and the past that is
reduced to present memory of what is no longer. What secures this precarious next-
to-nothingness against slipping into the abyss is that it originates in and is oriented
to eternity. Augustine’s position on time and eternity underpins the move we have
made from the impossibility of turning back time to the seeming impossibility of
the offence. It is, after all, in relegating past time to the realm of memory that the
demand of forgiveness to undo the offence is made redundant and replaced by the
need to re-evaluate it. Moreover, by placing time within the backdrop of eternity
there is an ultimate divine perspective against which any such re-evaluation can in
the end be measured.
Just as time is to be understood in relation to eternity, the time-bound creature
stands in a radical relation of dependence to the eternal Creator. This affirmation is
24 Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past But Pardoning the Impossible
__________________________________________________________________
crystallised in that oft-quoted prayer, ‘you have made us for yourself, and our
hearts find no rest until they rest in you.’ 12 In this light Augustine formulates his
position on evil.

And when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was
not a substance but perversion of the will when it turns aside
from you, O God, who are the supreme substance, and veers
towards things of the lower order. 13

Thus, evil is viewed by Augustine as a privation of the good and not as a thing
or principle in itself. Indeed, in our moral dealings with others we tend to carry the
very deep Aristotelian assumption that ‘every action and decision seems to seek
some good.’ 14 The offence is not the choice of something evil, but the preferring of
a lesser good over a greater one. Can this formulation of evil do justice to an
extreme historical horror like the Holocaust? Milbank argues that it most certainly
can, and furthermore, to grant an ontological status to evil in the wake of such
events is to falsely glamorise it, absolutise it, to grant it ‘a demonic status
equivalent to divinity,’ and to keep alive its terror, ‘since what is unredeemed
remains in force.’ 15

5. Final Reflections: Reason amidst Absurdity

If evil were to be granted an ontological status, what implications would this
have for forgiveness? It would seem that the offence done out of pure malice - evil
for evil’s sake - must leave any possibility of forgiveness in doubt. This is so for
two reasons. On the side of the offender, it is doubtful whether there could be any
way of coming back from such an action. Indeed, pure malice is perhaps the
converse of love offered for its own sake, because like that love, it promises to
endure forever. It is unclear how any remorse could come from a will that had
knowingly chosen the evil path for its own sake. For, in repentance there is always
a ‘coming to one’s senses’ which implies that at the time of the misdeed, one did
not know the full import of what one was doing, and that if one had known, one
would not have acted so.
On the side of the victim of an act of pure malice there appears to be no
motivation for the offer of forgiveness. Why would the victim want to restore any
kind of relationship with such a wrongdoer? The offender whose will is capable of
orienting itself towards evil does not have enough in common with the victim to
ever be her friend. There is nothing to motivate the move towards reconciliation.
There is no desire to be reconciled with this ‘freak.’ A deficiency can be forgiven,
but what is radically evil has to be left well alone, since there is no redeeming what
is rotten to the core. 16
Now, if pure malice and utter absurdity preclude the possibility of forgiveness,
does this mean that the offence and the offender have to be understood before
 Cameron Surrey 25
__________________________________________________________________
forgiveness can take place? The answer cannot be as simple as that, for no misdeed
can be given a full explanation. Rather, if it can be shown to be completely
reasonable then it is clearly not a misdeed at all. Perhaps, however, in order for
there to be forgiveness, the victim needs to be able to find a scrap of good, even the
tiniest of traces, in what motivated the bad deed. The offence will never be entirely
comprehended, not even by the offender, but to understand something of it would
seem to be essential. This will enable the victim to see that the ‘impossible’
misdeed was not impossible after all; that the foreign body is actually capable of
being integrated into a meaningful narrative. All it truly requires is that we come to
recognise in it a trace of good amongst the bad, a touch of goodwill amidst the
malice, or a shred of reason behind the absurdity. For, we are not looking to excuse
the act, only to discover in it the marks of a human act - that something in what it
aimed for was good. Only then can we identify with the offender.

I could have done as you did; maybe I will do as you did. I am

like you, weak, fallible, and miserable. There is a principle of
pride in the ruthless rigour of the person who does not forgive: to
refuse to forgive is to reject all resemblance to, all brotherhood
with, the sinner. 17

When a son murders his father for the inheritance money, something of the
‘why’ is visible. It remains obscure how he could value the money more than the
life of his father, but we who have never murdered may still identify with his
greed. The deed was heinous but not impossible.

Notes
1
Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 45-47.
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London:
Penguin Books, 1969), 161.
3
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz
and Its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta Books,
1999), 68-69.
4
Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 164.
5
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’, in Paul Ricoeur: The
Hermeneutics of Action, ed. R. Kearney (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 10.
6
Pamela Hieronymi, ‘Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness’, Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 3 (2001): 547.
7
Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 110.
26 Forgiveness in Not Undoing the Past But Pardoning the Impossible
__________________________________________________________________

8
Ibid., 109.
9
Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 46-47.
10
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books,
1961), 263.
11
Ibid., 261-262.
12
Ibid., 21.
13
Ibid., 150.
14
Aristotle, Nichomichean Ethics 1094a, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1999), 1.
15
John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge,
2003), 54.
16
Milbank, Being Reconciled, 51-52.
17
Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 161.

Bibliography
Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and
Its Realities. Translated by S. Rosenfeld, and S. P. Rosenfeld. London: Granta
Books, 1999.

Aristotle. Nichomichean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing, 1999.

Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin

Books, 1961.

Benziman, Yotam. ‘Forgiveness and Remembrance of Things Past’. Azure 5769

(2009): 84–115.

Brudholm, Thomas. Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.

Hieronymi, Pamela. ‘Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness’. Philosophy

and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001): 529–555.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Milbank, John. Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. London: Routledge,

2003.
 Cameron Surrey 27
__________________________________________________________________

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.

London: Penguin Books, 1969.

Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’. In Paul Ricoeur: The
Hermeneutics of Action, edited by R. Kearney, 3–14. London: Sage Publications,
1996.

Cameron Surrey is a doctoral student at the University of Otago. Philosophy and

Christian theology are among his main interests, particularly where they touch on
questions of morality and the good.
 Imputation and Preserving the Face of the Other: The Human
Economy of Forgiveness

Steve Larocco
Abstract
Forgiveness entails two aspects: first, it involves an act of imputation, an assertion
that an other has committed an offence and is culpable for it, and which thereby
establishes a social debt; and second, an act of release, which involves a sacrifice
of social debt and a gift to the other of revalidated social standing. This gift
attempts to repair or preserve the face of the other, which potentially had been
damaged in the act of offence. Although the offender is not the primary victim of
the offensive or injurious action, s/he often is injured socially and/or
interpersonally by the affects of that offense, particularly the guiltiness that stems
from acknowledged or imputed culpability. Both aspects are crucial to forgiveness.
Imputation gives the offended some measure of power in registering the other’s
guilt, granting the situation of offense meaning that validates the experience of the
offended. Imputation in this sense is an act of contained aggression and symbolic
violence. But is does not function alone. If it is to refashion the social relations
breached by the offense, it also must release the offender from the stigma of
imputation, containing the exposure of the other to social and interpersonal forms
of rancor and stigma due to guilt. In forgiveness, the offended takes on the
responsibility of preserving the face of the other, the offended. He or she does so
by foreclosing the power of the offense to define the offender and his or her
position in the social field. As such, it is a sacrifice and a gift.

Key Words: Forgiveness, human economy, gift, sacrifice, imputation, release,

face, guilt, culpability, debt.

*****

Forgiveness is a social action that aims to redress or repair the agitation and
turmoil generated in interpersonal relations by an act of injury or offence. Even if
forgiveness is never bestowed publicly, even if forgiveness entails only the silent
release of rancor by someone who has been offended, it remains a social act, since
forgiveness means that the offended will behave (or strive to behave) as if the
offence no longer impacts the relation between the offender and the offended. It is
as if the social disturbance created by the offence has been annulled; while the
offence may not have been fully expunged - it may still linger in memory - both the
affective and interpersonal force of the offence has been quelled. In that sense,
forgiveness exerts a powerful influence on relations of power and the distribution
of dignity, of recognised personhood, in a given social order. It alters what social
life is for all those affected by an act of offence or injury, including those who are
30 Imputation and Preserving the Face of the Other
__________________________________________________________________
made by the event into victims, perpetrators and witnesses, and it helps determine
what kind of social life all affected parties will experience as time moves forward.
Forgiveness achieves this alteration of social life through a double gesture: on
the one hand, it imputes guilt, which establishes the forgiver as actually holding a
debt wrought by the offense. This power of imputation redistributes power in some
ways between the offended and the offender. Rather than the offended being
simply a victim by assuming the power to impute guilt, the forgiver presents
herself in the social field as having a claim to social standing that the offense has
not erased or negated. On the other hand, forgiveness also makes the offended
assume the burden of preserving the face of the other in that very exposure of guilt,
which is at once an empowerment and a sacrifice. The offended assumes some
power by taking on the role of bestowing back on the offended a repaired,
revalidated form of social standing and thereby social life; however, that very act
of empowerment occasions a sacrifice. Specifically, it entails the social gift of
giving up resentment or rancor and of releasing one’s claim to justice, to a socially-
adjudicated rebalancing of power. In forgiveness, one assumes the burden of
restoring or holding the face of the other, in spite of, and, more paradoxically,
because of the other’s act of offence. One gives precisely what the other, according
to the logic of justice, does not deserve. But this act facilitates a redress of social
turbulence that justice often cannot, caught up as justice is with notions of equity
(however socially defined). Forgiveness recalibrates dignity beyond justice,
providing a crucial means to redistribute, restore and/or re-allocate social ‘face’
after trauma or disruption.
As a social instrument that intervenes in situations of social turbulence,
forgiveness operates as part of what David Graeber has called ‘human economies,’
that is, the social mechanisms that affect or control ‘the creation, destruction and
rearranging of human beings.’ 1 Graeber is drawing a contrast between human
economies, which fashion and allocate social relations, and market or commercial
economies, which structure the circulation of commodities of various types. In
human economies, for example, one has obligations to the other, which are
comprised of a network of social relations, whereas in a market economy one has
debt, which is a quantifiable value extracted from social relations. In human
economies, the crucial issue is not simply how goods are circulated, or the logic of
abstraction that undergirds such circulation (the reduction of a things value to a
price), 2 but rather how people are constructed in relation to others through systems
of duties, obligations, exchanges, gifts, sacrifices, etc. Forgiveness, as a specific
mechanism within the broader functioning of human economies, works to adjust
and rehabilitate interpersonal disruptions or breakdowns (however individuated or
collective). Its aim is to restore the parties involved to the kind of social relation
they had prior to the offence itself. But because the offence itself has created a
novel situation of disparity in the relation between the two parties, framing them as
offender and offended or, more starkly, as perpetrator and victim, forgiveness will,
 Steve Larocco 31
__________________________________________________________________
in some fashion, seek to negate this disparity through some form of offering,
whether explicit or implicit. It is this offering - social, interpersonal, unquantifiable
- that specifies forgiveness as entailing a kind of exchange, placing it within the
domain of human economies.
However, even in the act of presenting itself as an offering, forgiveness
simultaneously registers as an act of imputation. In the act of forgiveness, the
forgiver attributes to the targeted party guilt, culpability, and fault for the offence.
Since the targeted party may not accept that culpability and reject the imputation,
forgiveness paradoxically contains within it a possibility of aggression, its own
possibility of offense. By forgiving you, I make you guilty and claim for myself the
social standing to impute such guilt. The act of imputing guilt or fault, not merely
as an emotional response but as a social judgment, entails assuming a moral
position in social life, one that is, insofar as it pertains to the situation of offence,
superior to that of the offender, at least in the moral order.
One can, of course, forgive out of weakness, as a capitulation to the power
imbalance registered in the offense itself, but such capitulation can only occur if
the offender already accepts fault, or if the forgiveness itself begins in self-
effacement or intellectual rationalisation, in excuse. What such forgiveness avoids
or skirts around is the recognition of the offender as fully an offender. As Vladimir
Jankélévitch has argued, forgiveness is not really forgiveness if it functions more
as an excusing of the offender (one might say as a release without imputation)
rather than as a full confrontation with the offender’s guilt. 3
Imputation of fault, however, allows forgiveness to register the significance of
the offence from the subject-position of the offended. This assertion of the
offended’s subject-position entails the offended’s claim of full social standing,
something that an offense itself often compromises or debases. The power of
imputation depends, however, not only on the offended subject’s assertion of it, or
on the offender’s response, but also, when the imputation is public, as it needs to
be to have maximal effect, on the social context in which such an imputation
occurs and on its social reception. Imputation works to repair the social being of
the offended when the social matrices (persons and groups of persons) in which
both offender and offended are embedded recognise the legitimacy of the
imputation. For when that occurs, the offender must feel the social weight of the
imputation, its own possibility of aggression or offense. Forgiveness that is
asserted in a social field that recognises the merits of such forgiveness, and which
thereby registers the guilt of the offender as well as the social standing of the
forgiver, empowers the offended through the act of imputation. Again, one can
imagine a social world in which an offended party is pressured to forgive even
though there is little recognition of the significance of the offender’s guilt from the
subject-position of the offended, and such coerced forgiveness can actually further
erode the social dignity of the offended, but such forgiveness actually masks the
power that forgiveness holds in potential to reconfigure social relations through
32 Imputation and Preserving the Face of the Other
__________________________________________________________________
imputation. Imputation is the means by which forgiveness empowers the offended
to publicly affirm that the offender’s guilt has meaning, and that the social release
of that guilt depends, in part, on the subject-position chosen by the offended. In
imputation, always implicit in genuine forgiveness, the offended is empowered,
paradoxically, to return aggression, but in a form of rectified and rectifying
exchange that is socially and interpersonally admissible (at least when forgiveness
is accepted).
The possibility of offense in imputation, however, is counterbalanced or
outweighed by forgiveness’s more paramount constitution as an offering, as a
means of holding or preserving the face of the offender even in the ascription of
guilt. In all situations in which forgiveness arises as a concern, situations in which
forgiveness seems necessary as a response to some form of social and interpersonal
turmoil caused by offense, forgiveness responds to the diminishment (or potential
diminishment) of the social standing or dignity of both parties, the offender and the
offended. In the case of the offender, the fact that forgiveness has become a
concern or necessity suggests some attribution of guilt (beyond the structural
imputation generated by forgiveness itself), which involves some loss of social
face. Even the possibility of imputation alters the face of the hypothesised offender,
as it raises the question of the purported offender’s moral standing, her relation to
the moral economy of social relations. The offense itself also typically impugns, to
a greater or lesser degree and in different ways, the social face or standing of the
offended. The offense itself is a violation of some aspect of the offended’s social
face, which is why forgiveness is considered as a possible response (as opposed to
revenge or withdrawal or acquiescent humiliation). Consequently, if forgiveness is
to restore the human economies that had been disrupted by the offense, if it is to
rehabilitate breached human relations and repair the tear, however large or obscure,
in the social net itself, with its continual fashioning and refashioning of persons, it
must find a means to restore the social face of both parties.
Forgiveness achieves this restoration by having the offended take on the
responsibility for preserving the face of the offender by releasing the offender from
the social stigma of the offense, which also is a means to restore the social face of
the offended. If offense exerts its own particular power over any human economy
by instituting and/or manifesting lines of hostility and enmity, modifying the field
of social relations and hindering the smooth circulation of social energy as well as
specific relations between persons, it also exposes the vulnerability of all parties
within the social sphere. The offense first of all has exposed the offended to injury
and perhaps to social humiliation due to his or her susceptibility to injury or
violation. Because s/he has been injured by the offense, s/he also has to some
degree been socially damaged. The offence also exposes the offender to potential
social judgment or opprobrium for having committed the offense; s/he is exposed
as the kind of person who injures others and distresses social relations. Finally, the
offence exposes onlookers to the vicarious menace of discharged antagonism or
 Steve Larocco 33
__________________________________________________________________
extemporaneous injury, possibilities that haunt all social relations and perturb
human economies. I might add here that not all violence registers as an offense, as
something in need of forgiveness. Where violence or discharged antagonism,
whether physical and symbolic, has become conventionalised by the social order
itself, it ceases to trouble the human economy of which it has become a structural
part. 4 Nonetheless, when an offense occurs, almost anyone involved is exposed in
his/her vulnerability, and forgiveness is one means human economies use to
mitigate or allay this exposure and thereby facilitate the recomposing of social
relations. In this sense, it allows social life to surpass rancor with its disruptions of
human interaction. Forgiveness attempts to restore disrupted social life to its prior
dynamic equilibrium by offering to release the face of the other from exposure. If
imputation is the exposure of the flaws in the face of the other wrought by offense,
then forgiveness as offering is the gift of sheltering or loosing that face from the
potentially rancorous gaze of the victim and the social order. In this sense
forgiveness is an offering but not an exchange, for it is a unilateral act in which the
offended takes on the burden of restoring the social standing of the face of the
other from its troubling exposure as being at fault, as guilty. Without this shame,
the offender can return to social life as other, not as perpetrator.
For the offended, forgiveness also relieves exposure. By offering the offender a
release from the offense itself and the matrix of social imbalance it generates,
forgiveness allows the victim to be freed from his/her exposure as victim. It
restores the social face of the offended, which, in the act of forgiveness, forecloses
the power of the offense to define the relation between the offender, the offended,
interested others and the social field itself. By ending the force of the offense in
social life, forgiveness releases (at least to some degree) the offended from
exposure to that force, and thereby allows the offender’s social face to appear
without the vulnerability of perceived defencelessness (on on-going residual effect
of the offended’s manifested susceptibility to violation by the offender). The
offended, through forgiveness, works to restore the micro-environmentally specific
balance of forces of antagonism, attachment and cooperation, a balance which is
precisely what a given human economy seeks to produce and reproduce. The
homeostasis thereby recovered is one where the social vulnerability of all parties
touched by an offense is no longer exposed. Instead, one returns to a version of
social life in which social relation supersedes social exposure. In this
transformation, the emotions of social disturbance - rancour, shame, malice, rage -
dissipate because the offering of forgiveness compensates for the effects and
aftereffects of injury and social diminishment conjured and distributed by the
offence itself, and by the vulnerability of exposure that the offence thrusts into the
local human economy.
Forgiveness, then, works paradoxically by provoking exposure through
imputation, and by simultaneously mitigating exposure by offering to preserve or
sustain the face of the other in the aftermath of offence. It works as at once an
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manufacturers; together with an extensive selection of Etruscan,
Italian, and other vases, modelled and executed by the most able
artists at Messrs. Wedgwood’s works, at Etruria, including his
celebrated chef-d’œuvre copy of the largest Etruscan vase in the
British Museum, the Portland vase, &c. Printed lists, with sketches,
may be had on application.

SMITH’S PATENT DOUBLE AND SINGLE ACTION DOOR-

SPRINGS are warranted to be the cheapest and best.
Patent weather-tight Fastenings and Cill bars for French
casements, which render the French windows perfectly dry, and
make a secure, cheap, and invisible fastening. Improved cramps for
laying floors.
Manufactory for Iron and Brass work of every description. Depôt
for the Patent Wire, Rope, and Sash Line, 69, Princes-street,
Leicester-square.
London:—Printed by Messrs. J. L. Cox & Sons, 75, Great Queen-
street, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields; and published by Francis Newton,
at the Office, 2, York-street, Covent-garden, where all Letters
and Communications for the Editor are to be addressed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BUILDER,
NO. 1, DECEMBER 31, 1842 ***

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