Shouldn’t we agree with Nietzsche who thought forgiveness doesn’t break the cycle of revenge but rather perpetuates it (quotation?). Nietzsche’s ethics of heroic, generous, managnimous gift-giving would be better. Though this gift-giving looks like another version of ancient philanthropy (or the modern version, with its trickle down counterpart)? For Nietzsche, forgiving is a tool of the weak to have their turn at the levers of power and perpetuate their weakness (they are non-heroes). A contemptible, weasely trick. The weak are not in a position to forgive actually, are they? Doesn’t one need to be in power in order to forgive? All of these are questions I’d like to discuss tomorrow.
Below are a few notes I took when thinking about the way forgiveness works, at least in interpersonal relationships. A very good book on the topic is Vladimir Jankélévitch’s forgiveness (Chicago, 2005).
What forgiveness is not: the hope that the trickling of time, drop by drop, will wear out or efface the fault or offense, as if it were sand and not very consistent. Would that forgetfulness would erode the fault with the memory of it! People will be quick to say, “Time heals” or, “after all, this is how history works…” Id est, violence, injustice, etc., lose their capacity to hurt and be recognized as something that may happen to oneself and become part of the machinery or unfolding of history. Perhaps, as in a misunderstood concept developed by Adam Smith, history too, or the somnolence of time, like the global market, would correct things magically, with the wave of an invisible hand. No anamnesis here, or painful effort to recognize something or someone and at least mark a possible ground for forgiveness. No, rather forgetfulness and a naturalizing of history, that is, the suffering of others, long buried, or to whom one may be indifferent (not recognized).
What forgiveness is not either, to continue with Jankélévitch: an effort to understand all the dimensions and causality of an act, however wicked or offensive, because “tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner” (to understand is to forgive everything). It was a question of knowledge or lack thereof, after all, or simple ignorance. Proper knowledge would have set things right.
Finally, it is not a resetting of accounts either, or an attempt to set the counter back to zero, in a seemingly magnanimous gesture of “letting go”. So for instance the powerful forces behind the ethics/market/psychologizing ways of smoothing personal difficulties in proclaiming a “move on” attitude. No consignment to silence of this kind.
What is forgiveness then? the opposite of this weak hope of “wearing things out”. A confrontation done with some urgency, and a painful remembering, with another person (a person one can hurt, that is essential—see below), not an image or reconstruction of it. It cannot excuse on “rational” grounds. It is irrational to forgive, or must feel so. The gratuity or grace of the act, surely this is a waste, when rationality is about balance, measure, reciprocity, calculations of one’s due. One’s due: no forgiveness without a strong sense of justice, and even without the capacity to inflict punishment, at least on the horizon. No forgiveness if one cannot hurt the other party. On the other side of forgiveness, the recognition that the transformed landscape is as it should be, a new rationality.