Discussion Of Forgiveness Research Articles

Joking Around, Seriously: Freud, Derrida, and the Irrepressible Wit of Heinrich Heine

This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play.

Forgiveness and the Repairing of Epistemic Trust

AbstractThe epistemic relevance of forgiveness has been neglected by both the discussion of forgiveness in moral psychology and by social epistemology generally. Moral psychology fails to account for the forgiveness of epistemic wrongs and for the way that wrongs in general have epistemic implications. Social epistemology, for its part, neglects the way that epistemic trust is not only conferred but repaired. In this essay, I show that the repair of epistemic trust through forgiveness is necessary to the economy of knowledge for fallible persons like us. Despite the fact that forgiveness is never included on lists of important intellectual virtues or epistemic activities, it is vital to our lives as social knowers. Likewise, an account of forgiveness that neglects its epistemic dimension is importantly incomplete.

Paul’s Three Paths To Salvation

Paul’s Three Paths To Salvation

Trust, anger, resentment, forgiveness: On blame and its reasons

AbstractA discussion of the scope that exists for the normative assessment of blame. The paper starts from the assumption that blame is to be understood in terms of the reactive attitudes. A particular crux is the question of whether blame can be assessed critically if conditions are in place that render the reactive attitudes apt or warranted. The paper argues that even warranted blame can be managed critically and that this is something we often have reason to do, given the oppositional nature of reactive blame. The point is illustrated through a discussion of forgiveness and hypocrisy. A further claim is that, once reasons for reactive blame are distinguished from distinct reasons for managing it in different ways, space opens up for interesting global challenges to reactive blame, even when it is internally apt or warranted.

Forgiveness and Identification.

Philosophical discussion of forgiveness has mainly focused on cases in which victims and offenders are known to each other. But it commonly happens that a victim brings an offender under a definite description (e.g. ‘the boy who kicked his football through my window’) but does not know to which individual this applies. I explore some of the conceptual and moral issues raised by the phenomenon of forgiveness in circumstances in which identification is incomplete, tentative or even mistaken. Among the conclusions reached are that correct and precise identification of the offending individual is not essential for forgiveness to take place; that an offender can, under certain strict conditions, be said to be forgiven by proxy where the victim has misidentified the offender and ‘forgiven’ the wrong person; and that proxy forgiveness of this sort is not subject to the objections commonly levelled against ‘proxy’ or ‘third-party forgiveness.’

We Wear the Mask

We Wear the Mask Latoya E. Eaves (bio) We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—This debt we pay to human guile;With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise,In counting all our tears and sighs?Nay, let them only see us, whileWe wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our criesTo thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vileBeneath our feet, and long the mile;But let the world dream otherwise,We wear the mask! —Paul Laurence Dunbar For Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Daniel Simmons Jr. and Myra Thompson. Charleston, South Carolina is on a peninsula at the eastern edge of North America, a border zone with the Atlantic Ocean. The massacre of nine people in a church occurred here, at one of the major entry points for the African Diaspora into the Americas. The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, which provides a reminder of the commercial hub built on their backs and with their lives, sits less than one mile from the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Charleston, by its mere existence and geographic history, is a zone of Black death. In this essay, I write about the significance of events that occurred on June 17, 2015, initiated by the massacre of nine Americans who had been worshipping at a mid-week Christian service in Charleston, South Carolina, in relation to the process of forgiveness. This process operates in relation to and is enacted upon the state of everyday violence/everyday state violence that the North American racial landscape has maintained through imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The essay is necessarily embedded in a Black feminist and antiracist standpoint of identity, positionality, and relationality in order to achieve an understanding of place, subjectivity, and temporality. I am particularly interested in critically engaging the role of forgiveness in Black historical memory and in spatial politics that inform Black lives. Finally, I provide current possibilities for moving towards redemption—liberation, racial justice, and healing. [End Page 22] The essay is entitled “We Wear the Mask” after Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1896 poem of the same name. Dunbar communicates through metaphor, in the African diasporic storytelling tradition. Through the poem, he describes the condition of Black life that required a covering of one’s true self—identity, emotions, and abilities—in order to participate in a society that privileged whiteness and upheld white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As I grappled with how to compose this essay, this poem reappeared along with the centrality of forgiveness in the narrative around the Charleston massacre. As such, I use Dunbar’s metaphor to guide my discussion of forgiveness and redemption. on forgiveness In the days that followed the Charleston massacre, intense national attention was paid to the movements and reactions from the nine families affected by the latest act of white supremacist violence. When the families were given the opportunity to address Roof directly at a bond hearing, a refrain of mercy through the suggestion of forgiveness was centralized in media coverage of their interaction. International coverage from CNN, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, ABC, and the Daily Telegraph consistently repeated the families’ words, with an emphasis on the words “I forgive you,” pronounced by Nadine Collier, the daughter of Ethel Lance. President Barack Obama even took to Twitter, retweeting the ABC news story “Dylann Roof Hears Victims’ Families Speak at 1st Court Appearance: ‘I Forgive You,’” with the statement, “In the midst of darkest tragedy, the decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families” (Obama 2015). But forgiveness is at risk of being used as a pacifier rather than for addressing the larger structural problems of white supremacy, racism, and (cis-hetero) patriarchy. The statements from family members must be understood within the broader tropes of power that have long disenfranchised the African diaspora. Given the structural and social ills that form the North American racial landscape, a choice...

Three Ways to Fail at Forgiveness

Abstract The characters in O'Neill's late plays, especially in Long Day's Journey Into Night, fail to forgive each other for a variety of reasons, which can be elucidated by examining failures at forgiveness in the works of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller. The framework for the discussion of forgiveness here, including the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, is provided by insights into ethics and philosophy of mind from Bernhard Schlink, William James, Stanley Cavell, Daniel Kahneman, and Jonathan Haidt. Ultimately, O'Neill's characters' failure to forgive is attributed to a kind of narcissism, and narcissism is explored as an underlying theme in the plays O'Neill wrote at Tao House in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Difficult Forgiveness? Engaging Paul Ricoeur on Public Forgiveness within the Context of Social Change in South Africa

In the context of public discourse in South Africa, this article engages Paul Ricoeur’s influential and thought-provoking work on forgiveness, also as it intersects with the work of Jacques Derrida. The article argues that Ricoeur’s discussion of ‘difficult forgiveness’ provides important conceptual clarification in the search for responsible discourse on forgiveness, and offers some brief remarks regarding the promise and pitfalls of using the notion of ‘difficult forgiveness’ in post-conflict situations marked by historical injustice, such as South Africa. It is argued that Ricoeur’s discussion of forgiveness helpfully demonstrates the complexities involved in forgiving in a way that resists cheap forgiveness, and that his nuanced attempt to make room for the spirit of forgiveness to touch institutions enriches the discourse on public forgiveness and its role in the humanization of polarized societies. Given the eschatological tone of Ricoeur’s discussion of forgiveness, the article also points towards the need for future-orientated memory to deal with historical injustices.

Forgiveness, Forgetting, and Resentment

INTRODUCTION Dean Martha Minow’s lecture is so careful and eloquent that I aim here to supplement rather than challenge her discussion of forgiveness. Dean Minow’s proposals for law’s role in cultivating forgiveness are powerfully suggestive but intentionally ambivalent. As she recognizes, urging that victims forgive can mean forgoing the protections of justice for the weak, ultimately rendering the vulnerable yet more vulnerable. Dean Minow’s ambivalence about forgiveness’s possibilities is correct: although she does not say so directly, the idea that law can foster forgiveness is deeply puzzling, not because forgiveness cannot be fostered but because we usually think that when law intervenes in conflict, it leaves a residue of bitterness and pain in its wake. Criminal law, when it convicts, adds the pain of punishment to the victim’s original pain even as it brings satisfaction to victims and the public. Tort law, when it holds liable, shifts pain to a recalcitrant defendant without necessarily making the plaintiff whole. Bankruptcy law may give some creditors more than they expect, but all get less than they like or deserve. Thus, the very idea that law in action could aid a project of forgiveness, when it creates new liabilities, should seem strange to us. It is one of the great merits of Dean Minow’s essay that this proposition seems a little less strange by its end.

Forgiveness: Hindu and Western Perspectives

This paper compares Hindu and Christian beliefs on forgiveness: it argues that forgiveness is an important element within the Hindu religious world-view, even if less explicitly so than within the Christian tradition. Before the late 1980s, discussion of forgiveness in the West was for the most part confined to Christian communities, seldom reaching mainstream publications in other areas. The situation has now changed dramatically. Since the 1990s, scholars from different disciplines have written dozens of books and journal articles on forgiveness, which also featured in numerous popular essays, exhibitions, websites, and other media. There are four major areas for forgiveness research in the West: religion, philosophy, psychology and, perhaps surprisingly at first sight, politics. However, relatively little analysis of forgiveness in other faiths, except Judaism, has appeared.

Law, Right, and Forgiveness

In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the identification of the singular individual with the universal is initially expressed by means of the concepts of law and right. Developed by Hegel in ethical life and state of right,' law and right enable a particular kind of being, self-knowledge, and interaction for their respective consciousnesses. These legal categories, however, virtually disappear in the remainder of the text, and whereas Hegel's critique of law in these sections is important in its own right, attempts to bring it to bear on contemporary legal theory risk anachronism. What I will argue in this essay, however, is that the problem of law re-enters the text in Hegel's discussion of forgiveness, and that we can look there for a modern resolution to the problematic dependence on law exhibited by the very different legal frameworks of ethical life and state of right. The ascendancy of forgiveness as a fundamental organizational principle results in a radical circumscription of the role of law. It also represents the enduring force of Antigone's political legacy, or so I will argue-both for Hegel and for us modern readers still grappling with her role in the Phenomenology. In addition to developing the import of these legal insights for interpretation of the Phenomenology, I will also suggest that forgiveness's resolution of the failed legal frameworks is helpful in the context of the contemporary skepticism (exhibited by feminist, race-theorist, queer, communitarian, and democratic perspectives, among others) regarding the purported critical efficacy and neutrality of legalism and the connection of legal advocacy with the "natural" aspects of human identity. Hegel's theory of forgiveness provides a strategy for exposing the inequalities in access to power that the liberal protection of freedom and equality has been accused of concealing. His view of its priority over law can be used to transform law into an expression of a relationship between universal and individual that is neither composed prior to the production of that relationship, nor constituted by an assertion of power by defenders of the status quo, who deny the impact of difference on the law's operation. I will argue that Hegel's theory of forgiveness is productive in this context because it construes individual action as central to the universels that regulate our interaction and provides a critical way of thinking and representing the social "we" holistically. In order to construct the ground upon which to show the relevance of Hegel's theory of forgiveness to his theory of law, I will discuss: a) the forms of social life in the Phenomenology that are organized according to law and right; b) forgiveness' resolution of the difficulties they confront; and c) the critical transformation of law that Hegel's account of forgiveness suggests. For the present I will limit myself to the internal logic of the Phenomenology and to the importance of forgiveness as a social-structural principle therein, and thus not address the more immediately practical resonance of forgiveness's as an alternative to contemporary legal thinking. The Law-Based Societies of the Phenomenology. Ethical life and state of right are the only social forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology that are based specifically on law and right, and both are for Hegel inadequate expressions of spirit. The characters of ethical life identify immediately with their respective laws (Creon with human and Antigone with divine law); the positive aspect of this identification is their implication and agency in the laws and forms of social interaction that structure their political life, in whose production they are thus immediately engaged. The immediacy of this identification, however, precludes any recognition and expression of their particularity. Ethical characters are submerged in the universal ethical substance, such that the role of their particularity in it is concealed until the "unsuppressable" assertion of the singular self renders ethical substance unsustainable. …

The Atrocity Paradigm Revisited

This essay reflects on issues raised by commentators regarding my book, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford 2002). They are (1)Robin Schott's observation of the tension between my discussion of forgiveness and of castration fantasies; (2) Bat-Ami Bar On's questions regarding whether evil is ethical, political, or both; (3) Adam Morton's queries regarding the relative seriousness of evils and injustices; and (4) María Pía Lara's concerns regarding what is valuable in Kant's ethics.

Forgiveness and Subjectivity

To forgive is as infinite as it is repetitive. . . Julia Kristeva1 Hannah Arendt predicts that being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, [as it were,] be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the formula to break the spell (1959 213). To conceive of forgiveness as a magic formula to break the spell requires thinking beyond our everyday conceptions of forgiveness and guilt. Philosophers of forgiveness, Hegel, Arendt, and more recently Derrida and Kristeva, have in various ways made forgiveness a threshold of humanity : To be human is to forgive. If forgiveness is essential to human life, more specifically to human subjectivity and agency, then conversely, we might conclude that the absence of forgiveness undermines humanity, subjectivity, and agency. Here, moving from Hegel's phenomenology of the role of forgiveness and confession in the dialectic of mutual recognition, through Kristeva's psychoanalytic notion of forgiveness as a support for sublimation and psychic life, to Derrida's hyperbolic ethics with its postulation of the impossibility of pure forgiveness, we will develop a theory of forgiveness as a definitive feature of subjectivity and agency. Re-reading Hegel's account of forgiveness in Phenomenology of Spirit with and against Derrida and Kristeva, gives us a sense of the role of forgiveness in constituting the subject as both individual and as belonging to a community. Going beyond Hegel's dialectical conception of individual and community, Derrida's analysis of forgiveness shows us the importance of thinking forgiveness outside of an economy of property and sovereignty. By supplementing both Hegelian and Derridean theory with a notion of the unconscious, however, only a psychoanalytic approach to the role of forgiveness in subjectivity allows us to imagine forgiveness without sovereignty, thereby moving outside of an economy of property. Using Kristeva's suggestions about the role of forgiveness in psychoanalysis, we can postulate that the sublimation and revolt necessary to psychic life presupposes forgiveness, not forgiveness from a sovereign agent who forgives, but rather forgiveness as a social dynamic that enables and creates both sovereignty and agency. Still, hyperbolic ethics is necessary in order to bring the psychoanalytic notion of forgiveness into social theory by insisting on ethical responsibility even for that over which we are not sovereign. And, only a notion of the unconscious can make that responsibility radical enough by holding ourselves responsible not only for our actions and beliefs but also for our unconscious desires and fears. As we will see, by not accounting for the role of the unconscious, even Derrida's discourse of purity and contamination threatens to put forgiveness back into an economy of property. Hegel's discussion of confession and forgiveness in Phenomenology of Spirit is a first step in understanding the relationship between subjectivity and forgiveness. For Hegel, forgiveness and confession are necessary for the constitution of the subject as an individual connected to the community. The dialectic of forgiveness and confession produces a subject who transgresses the community in order to become an individual and through that process realizes the necessity of belonging to the very community that s/he transgresses. For Hegel, consciousness becomes individuated-that is to say we become subjects-through forgiveness and reconciliation, a reconciliation that, as we will see, Derrida rejects. Hegel concludes the Spirit section of Phenomenology of Spirit with a discussion of forgiveness and confession that (again, temporarily) reconciles action and judgment, the Particular and the Universal, the unconscious and the conscious, which began in this section as the opposition between woman (Antigone) and man (Creon) that gave rise to the ethical order. …

The Individuality in the Deed: Hegel on Forgiveness and Reconciliation

The topic of forgiveness and reconciliation is one of the areas in Hegel's philosophy in which an uneasy tension between philosophy and religion, logic and existence, is most obvious. My goal in this paper is to illuminate Hegel's discussion of forgiveness and reconciliation in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion by examining his treatment of the same topic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Previous commentators have discussed the political and social aspects of reconciliation, but paid little attention to its religious aspects. Similarly, commentators who have addressed the psychological and social aspects of reconciliation in the Phenomenology, have too seldom turned their attention to Hegel's full discussion of the religious aspect of reconciliation in the Lectures. In bringing these two texts together, I hope to make a contribution to the larger project of showing the relevance of the Phenomenology to Hegel's later works. Finally, I will suggest some limitations in Hegel's analysis of forgiveness and reconciliation.Part III of the Lectures delineates three levels of rupture and reconciliation: within the individual consciousness, among individuals of the community, and between the individual and God (215-251 ). This last level of reconciliation is the religious aspect and presupposes the earlier levels. To help understand the individual's reconciliation within himself and with others, which will be my main area of concern in this paper, we will now look at the relevant passage of Phenomenology of Spirit.