Is forgiveness ever possible at all?

In order to get a grip on this extreme and seemingly very general question, it will be handy for us to have to hand a good example or two of situations where forgiveness clearly seems called for.

            [A]   Imagine that you are reading this paper along with somebody else. As you go to turn the page, they rather clumsily knock their coffee over, spilling it all over you, and over the printed page. Imagine something like the following dialogue then following:

They: "Oh I’m terribly sorry; that was clumsy and stupid of me. Here, let me help clean you up; sorry!"

You: "Don’t worry, y’know don’t worry, it’s not that important; I know you didn’t ‘mean it’."

They: "No no, really, it really was very stupid; oh dear ... do please forgive me."

Now, if they, in their agitation and regret really did say this, what would you say then? What would be your response to this request for absolution? In the case of such a trivial event, it’s quite likely that you would soon enough say something like the following:

You: "Don’t worry, don’t be silly, there’s nothing to forgive, really; it’s nothing."

            Let’s ponder that phrase a moment. "There’s nothing to forgive." Let’s for the sake of argument assume that you actually meant what you said (and were not, for example, merely being polite, while deep down you seethed and said to yourself, "That was simply unforgivably clumsy!"). If so, it will be important and unavoidable to pay attention to the way that this piece of language actually works.[1] If we can, prima facie, we should try to save the appearances of any piece of language.[2] We should try to take seriously the use of locutions such as "There’s nothing to forgive", if we can (Perhaps we can’t). It’s only the exception, not the rule, I would suggest, that we -- and our words -- don’t mean what we (they) say.

            So; if we take the string, "There’s nothing to forgive seriously, if then there is really nothing to forgive in the example we have sketched, then quite clearly we haven’t as yet got before us an example where forgiveness is relevant.

            Let’s try another example.

            [B]   Imagine that the person sitting beside you, while the two of you were silently reading, simply picked up the cup of coffee and quite deliberately threw it all over you.

Or

            [C]   Think -- actually think, right now -- of an example -- a real instance -- where you have been deliberately or at least knowingly treated badly / maliciously, in the past. E.g. Think of a betrayal or a serious deception practiced upon you by someone you trusted.

            If we’re thinking of an action like B or C, then the question I think is not, is forgiveness necessary at all here, but rather, how can forgiveness happen at all here?

            Some wrong actions can in a way be undone. For instance, if I accidentally spill coffee over your beloved book, maybe I can buy you another one, just the same as the first. But actions that stand in need of forgiveness are often not like this. Something is broken, that cannot be simply replaced/repaired. If there is to be repair in the relationship, something more is required. Say, repentance and forgiveness?

            But again, how to forgive, even the repentant, in a case like B or C, above? How to forgive, when forgiveness is required? When a breach has been effected, when something undoable has been done?

             Now, it would seem reasonable to suppose that it would be straightforward to answer that question if forgiveness were of the following nature:  If the past actually changed, when forgiveness was sought and granted. If by being asked for forgiveness, and then granting that forgiveness, the past could be altered, the deed undone. Then, I take it, it would be clear why in many cases forgiveness was desirable, why it was engaged in -- and why it was/is wonderful. But this scenario is of course utter fantasy.[3] What actually happens is:

            A harm or wrong is done, it remains a wrong, but yet it gets ... forgiven. This the extraordinary thing, the thing that somehow we have to hang on to: that a wrong that remains a wrong, that is not undone, somehow gets transformed in its felt meaning. It is no longer felt bitterly, and/or acted upon accordingly.

            When we think of an action such as B or C above, and we think of its being forgiven, the whole thing can come to seem more and more bizarre or remarkable. What is this thing called ... forgiveness? What can it mean, for something like -- something called -- ‘forgiving’ to happen?

            Now typically, when philosophers start asking themselves a question like that, they start to try to think of some set of concepts or categories which they might effectively use to explicate, analyse, or at least analogise the troublesome concept in question. So; I’m starting to have some real trouble getting a grip on what forgiveness is, on what ‘forgiveness’ could possibly be said to intelligibly mean -- on how forgiveness is possible.[4] What forgiveness is, how forgiveness is possible at all ... I’m starting to have trouble with that, so I’ll try looking to other concepts which I have less trouble with.

i) CEASING TO PUNISH X / CEASING TO DEMAND THAT X REPAY A DEBT.

            Etymology-fans tend to like this rendition of forgiveness. And more importantly: we know what it means to do one of these things. So these formulations could help us.

            But a moment’s reflection makes it evident that these concepts are not going to give us nearly enough resources with which to understand forgiveness. One can decide to forgive a debt, for example, because, hey, it’s only money; or just because it will be really difficult in practical terms to get the money back. But in the latter case, for instance, one may well nevertheless feel considerable bitterness against the debtor.

            There are all sorts of practical reasons why one might cease to demand the repayment of a debt, or cease to punish -- but what forgiveness is, for us, is clearly more than (i). The harm was done, it -- in itself -- can’t be undone; forgiveness is more than (i).

            Unless we are to understand the sense of ‘punish’ or ‘debt’ here in a ‘full’ or ‘deep’ sense. Unless, e.g., we mean by ceasing to punish, something like ‘ceasing to harbour resentment’. But in that case, we have merely re-described the problem. For this is what we want to understand: how can it be possible to cease to harbour resentment, for a wrong that can’t be undone?

ii) UNDERSTANDING

A second candidate: Is understanding sufficient for forgiveness? Is it the case that when one comes to understand why x did y, then that can be tantamount to or at least directly and immediately conducive to forgiveness? If so, then we might be in good shape, because surely we understand what ‘understanding’ is?

            I shall come back to that latter question below. But first, to tackle the question of whether really understanding why x did y can directly yield forgiving. Because I’m not at all sure that it can.

            A slogan perhaps comes to mind: "To understand all is to forgive all." But is that claim actually true? For sure, sometimes one finds that upon closer investigation, having made an effort to understand the ‘forgivee’, one changes one’s view of the incident in question substantively -- one comes to identify with the ‘wrongdoer’, to such an extent that one no longer thinks that any wrong was done, but, thinks that, on the contrary, they acted rightly. And for sure, sometimes one finds that, in the case of an apparent betrayal or deception, the whole thing rested on ... a misunderstanding. There was an equivocation on a word, or a word was misheard or misattributed, for example. The ‘betrayal’ was merely accidental; in other words, non-existent. So, for sure, sometimes -- in both the above kinds of cases -- understanding why someone did something results in its turning out that there’s nothing to forgive. But then we are back to case A, above. And so we do not have here any cases where forgiveness is in question. "To understand all", in these cases,[5] is actually to see that no forgiveness is required.

            If we turn to cases which are within our purview, where forgiveness is ‘required’, then it is much less obvious that ‘understanding all’ will solve the problem. Sometimes one hopes, perhaps desperately, that talking with the person who wronged one will enable one to see their action in quite a new light, but (sometimes) what actually emerges is that they were doing the whole thing more maliciously than one had at first thought, e.g.: "What, you mean actually that this...this affair has been going on for years, and you’ve systematically deceived and betrayed me over this person, even knowing that I was practically bound to find out in the end?!!"

            It seems to me quite evident that there are at least some cases -- important cases -- where understanding is not equal to forgiving, but where in fact the contrary is most likely to be true. (And it seems evident also that, as we saw above, where understanding does apparently lead to forgiveness, what actually happens is that the action is removed from the set of actions that produce a need for forgiveness. Presumably, the following is going to be an unsatisfactory philosophical analysis of forgiveness: That the acts one ‘forgives’ someone for turn out to be acts that precisely do not require or produce a need for forgiveness!)

            And after all, none of this should really much surprise us. Because the idea that to understand all is to forgive all is not really an idea that suggests only a laudable tolerance and empathy, but rather a dubious relativism. There are at least some cases where, even if understanding can be achieved, it is not evident that forgiveness should or could be granted.[6] (And, concomitantly, if there is real forgiveness, it cannot be that the wrong done is in any way changed or lessened -- indeed that would often be a failure, a moral failure, a suspect weakening of moral judgement. Whereas the my sense is that a remarkable feature of true forgiveness is that it involves a kind of moral strengthening.)

            So it seems to me that, for the reasons just given, the concept of understanding offers us very little help at all in the project of understanding forgiveness. For where it most powerfully can appear to offer such help, it only does so by removing actions from the category of ‘wrong’.

            What we want to understand, to say it once again, is actions which are wrong, but -- somehow -- forgiven.

            It might be objected at this point that I have not considered enough different varieties of ‘understanding’; and that a variety exists according to which the slogan that ‘To understand all is to forgive all’ could be saved. (This returns us to a question with which we began this section; have we to hand an adequate understanding of ‘understanding’?) ‘‘Understanding’ is a family-resemblance concept’, it might be urged -- and I fully agree. ‘You don’t understand what the advocate of (ii) is saying’, it might be urged; ‘They are saying that if you really understand -- fully and deeply -- then you will forgive, or will have forgiven.’ Once again, such a proposal can hardly be objected to -- except to say that once again it merely reproduces our problem. There are indeed some uses of the term ‘understand’ (e.g. in some religious contexts, such as vis-ˆ-vis ‘religious experience’) in which the use of the word ‘understanding’ has the character which the objector here urges. But to understand what it is -- and how it is possible -- to understand in this ‘full’ way is exactly what we need to ... understand. In such a use, we do not yet, I think, adequately understand what ‘understanding’ is. To do so is precisely our task in this paper.

iii) Let us then try another candidate: FORGETTING. Is ‘forgetting’ the key to forgiving? Perhaps another slogan, a popular invocation or instruction, comes to mind, "Forgive and forget".

            Right away we notice that the slogan says "Forgive and forget", suggesting a differentiation. And while I think that there is an important connection between forgiving and forgetting -- indeed, that forgetting is in some cases [7] criterial for forgiving -- it is relatively easy to show that understanding ‘forgetting’ will not enable us to understand forgiving, that there remains a gulf between them. A cute philosopher’s counter-example should be enough to make clear that not just any mode of forgetting will amount to forgiveness:

            Imagine case C again. Soon after the betrayal or whatever, imagine that you suffer an accident -- a serious head injury. You wake up in hospital. Your friend/lover/whoever comes to visit. You act very nicely toward them. They may well think that you have forgiven them, and are quite ready to be reconciled with them, to accept them back into your life and so forth -- but actually, unfortunately, it’s just that you’ve suffered a head injury. You’ve forgotten all about their heinous act...

            Forgetting is obviously not sufficient for forgiveness; but it does offer a clue: There is a serious question about whether forgiveness can survive continual reminiscence. If one continually, or obsessively, remembers, then one surely hasn’t forgiven.

            What we want out of ‘forgiveness’ is for something not to be continually present to one, but for one to be able to look at [8] the person who has done the wrongful act, recognize that it was them who carried it out, and yet somehow overcome resentment.

            ‘Forgetting’ offers a clue -- but no more than that.

iv) One more try, a concept which has already crept into the margins of the paper, and may appear to offer our best last hope: ACCEPTANCE.

            Straightway, we must sub-divide ‘acceptance’ into at least two different kinds, and consider these more or less separately:

ACCEPTING THAT SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED

Is forgiveness that? Again, this concept seems to me to offer a clue -- but to remain less than forgiveness. One can come to accept that a wrong act took place, and not feel that it is literally unbelievable that this horrible thing should have happened -- one can as it were reconcile with oneself that one was betrayed -- and yet resentment against the other may not be overcome.[9]

ACCEPTING AN APOLOGY.

A second variety of acceptance, and the one which will most intensively require our attention. Is forgiveness relevantly analogous to accepting an apology? It would be great if it were, for accepting an apology is, roughly,[10] a speech act. And, after J.L. Austin, many will agree that we -- typically -- understand speech acts.

            If forgiveness can be understood by analogy to or on the model of a speech act, e.g. accepting an apology, then it seems that we will be able to understand it after all. And starting with ‘accepting an apology’ seems particularly promising -- because it suggests the element of ‘contrition’ and dialogic reciprocity which seems likely to be crucial to any wise forgiving.

            But regrettably... no. Forgiveness cannot be well understood as a speech act. Accepting an apology: sure, that can be pretty much understood in classical Austinian fashion, just like promising can be. When I accept an apology, I understand that you are regretful, and sincere in that regret, and I show this. But I may yet regret having to accept the apology, or find it hard to do so. I may, literally or metaphorically, accept an apology through gritted teeth.

            But there cannot, I submit, be any such thing as forgiving through gritted teeth. Uttering the words "I forgive you" with an ugly scowl playing around one’s face -- or simply in one’s mind -- is not forgiving someone. Roughly: if one says "I forgive you" through gritted teeth, one is lying, or at best deceiving oneself.

            So, forgiveness is clearly more than acceptance of an apology.

            But what if someone were to respond to me at this point by saying, ‘Maybe; but nevertheless "I forgive you" is itself a form of words, and its utterance must have some felicity conditions; why should we not understand forgiveness just through understanding the speech act of saying "I forgive you" adequately?

            But: a direct speech-act-analysis of "I forgive you" is not -- for reasons already indicated -- going to work, either. We can, for sure, have a fairly effective speech-act-analysis/understanding of ‘accepting an apology’ or, to return to the locus classicus, of ‘promising’. If I say to you, "I promise you that I’ll go to the cinema with you next weekend", and then I don’t go... well, in that case I have broken my promise. There are only some very specific circumstances, delineated by Austin, in which a promise can be shown to be null and void, to have been infelicitously made or otherwise rendered invalid. But in the case of forgiveness, things are very different. You may have said to your betrayer, "I forgive you for y", and a week passes, or a year passes... and it can turn out that you haven’t in fact forgiven them. It can turn out, when one as it were looks within oneself, later, or if one or if others look at one’s actual actions towards the wrong-doer since the declaration of forgiveness ... it can turn out that one hasn’t in fact forgiven them.

            If someone breaks a promise, you can say to them, "You broke your promise! You can’t claim that "It ‘turns out’ that I didn’t promise you anything"!" But I think that there are indefinitely many circumstances in which it can turn out that one hasn’t forgiven another, after all. Circumstances, cases in which it can turn out that re-occurrences of resentment -- in mind or action[11]  -- show this, perhaps much to one’s -- sometimes to everyone’s -- regret. Such re-occurrences can at virtually any time defeat the attempt one has made to forgive. This is how forgivers -- all of us, potentially, not just an unsuccessful or ‘hysterical’ minority -- suffer from reminiscences.

            It seems then that, regrettably, the speech-act-analysis of forgiveness is by no means sufficient,[12] and that the additional component needed to yield a potentially adequate account of forgiveness is perhaps two-fold. On the one hand, we might want to talk about ACCEPTING SOMEONE BACK INTO ONE’S LIFE, about certain kinds of behavioural changes. (But it is dangerous to say that this is in general necessary for forgiveness. There may be circumstances in which we might wish to allow for the possibility of forgiveness -- e.g. a physically or psychologically abused child might forgive -- but not want to insist that the forgiver literally accept the forgivee back into her life, on pain of the forgiveness being otherwise described as fake. It is a common circumstance that one severely wronged will not forgive and so will not accept the wrongdoer back into their life; but I believe that there are cases where forgiveness too can accompany non-acceptance, in the sense currently under discussion.[13] )

            Now: Can one accept someone back into one’s life without having forgiven them? Surely yes, for various imaginable practical purposes. Perhaps not, if the acceptance is deep and full and true... in which case we are just, familiarly now, repeating the mystery, and the explanandum.

            Rather than focussing upon changes in action, we might want to talk about -- to give up-front priority to -- a DEEP ‘INNER’ ACCEPTANCE, to talk about certain crucial kinds of emotional and mental changes, about a change of heart, a change of heart that takes place over time.[14] Maybe such talk is after all the best we can do.

            Is that the best we can do? We might talk about how such a ‘change of heart’ is very often tied to a changed attitude on the part of the wrong-doer.[15] Is this as good as it gets? Is it good enough? Are we really any closer to understanding forgiveness -- what it is, how it is possible -- than we were at the start? Have all the ‘clues’ which I have assembled added up to a full and coherent story, an outline of the explanation or correct philosophical account of forgiveness? Have I told you anything you didn’t already know? Well, perhaps not -- but then perhaps you only needed to be reminded of what you already knew, anyway. Perhaps the best we can do, in philosophy, vis-à-vis forgiveness, is to point up how we play this game, how we -- sometimes, apparently -- do this amazing, ordinary thing. I have tried to emphasize the ‘extraordinariness’ of this ‘ordinary’ thing.

            But in case anyone thinks that any more than that has been achieved, in case one is tempted to think that a distinctive and powerful philosophical understanding of or account of forgiveness has been -- could be? -- achieved, it is worth remarking bluntly that the kinds of things that I have been led to speak of -- a change of heart, an elusive change in one’s way of being-in-the-world -- are so vague, so untheorizable, that I don’t think what I’m saying amounts to anything more than what religious folks have spoken of for centuries, when they’ve said things like, "Forgiveness is only possible through the grace of God", or "She must truly be a saint, to have forgiven them for that." Now, maybe that kind of thing is exactly what we should say; or even, "Only God can truly forgive." Just two points:

 1) It is not at all obvious that such sentiments as these are explanations/analyses, at all, as opposed to cover stories (cover-ups) for a lack of explanation/analysis. (Likewise, it is all the same to me whether one says, "There isn’t any such thing as counting to infinity", or "There’s nothing that would count as counting to infinity’, or "Only God can count to infinity"; only provided that whichever of these one chooses to say, it is said (and heard) in the right spirit...)

 2) Again, I want to understand forgiveness as a human phenomenon, as something that happens between people, which it seems to me is how the term is overwhelmingly used, nowadays (e.g. in quite secular contexts), and it’s just not going to be good enough in relation to that to rely upon concepts of God/divinity.

            But it seems to me that the religious version of forgiveness which I have just -- very schematically -- considered offers, too, a clue. The clue is this: Perhaps we need to accept that there is something truly worth calling mysterious about forgiveness . Not ‘supernatural’, that never helps,[16]  but mysterious nevertheless, by which I mean surprising, perplexing, not open to explication in terms other than its own, certainly not in the terms of any academic discipline. Perhaps we need to accept that there are strict limitations on the extent to which any would-be social scientific or linguistic or philosophical account of certain things that go on between human beings can actually be effective. And if all we can end up saying is (e.g.), "Well, it requires a special kind of change of heart ... and I can’t really tell you in which circumstances that change of heart will or will not take place", then we might as well say, "It’s a mystery, there isn’t going to be any successful account of forgiveness of the kind which one naturally wishes to imagine." [17]

            This that I have just outlined is in fact the kind of stance that I am inclined to take up (and talk up).

            The considerations I have so far adduced might lead someone to conclude that forgiveness is impossible (but just what is it that would then be being said to be impossible?), or that it is through and through paradoxical. They might lead someone to conclude that ‘forgiveness’ is a dead letter in a post-Christian world, as dead as ‘tabu’ or ‘virtue’ have elsewhere been argued to be.

            I myself am strongly inclined rather to look for -- to see -- the order in this human practice, even if its order is far less evident -- and far less account-able [18] -- than is the order of many other practices. I think that we don’t know what we’re saying if we assert that forgiveness is impossible, or literally supernatural. We have incoherent desires with regard to our words; we want those words to function in ways in which they do not function, while continuing to want them to function in enough of the same old way as to make the label (‘forgiveness’) fit at all. We incoherently want to say that there is something-which-we-can-make-no-sense-of which is impossible, or possible through supernatural intervention. But if we can really make no sense of it, then even to say (say) that it is impossible is to say too much  (I will return and explain this thought more fully at the conclusion of this paper.)

            I think we ought to be humble in face of some things that people apparently do, things which we cannot get our heads around. I see forgiveness as a human phenomenon. This language-game is played, and without the dubious theoretical assumptions of certain other would-be language-games (e.g. water-divining, metaphysical philosophy). But some language-games don’t take to any kind of theorisation or analysis of themselves. I don’t say that there is no forgiving, or that the very concept of forgiving is confused; I say that forgiveness is remarkable, and rather mysterious, that it happens if at all in ways which fit quite poorly its ‘surface grammar’ -- and that it is rare.

            Let me turn to a couple of major objections to my line of thought, to my provisional conclusion here, two objections at least which must be responded to:

            ‘A problem with your account -- or non-account -- is that you focus too much on the act of forgiveness -- and on the act to be forgiven, on the betrayal, or whatever. You ought instead to focus on the person doing the forgiving, and on the person to be forgiven. You ought to separate out the act from the person, and understand that forgiveness is indeed something that happens between persons -- not ‘between actions’!’

            There surely is something rather odd or absurd in any account which talks only of acts being forgiven; I very much hope that I have not courted such absurdity. Furthermore, I will not deny that this objection too contains a clue -- the last half of its last sentence is surely right, and important. But I’m unhappy with the first half of that sentence. It seems to me very problematic to rigorously separate act from actor, ‘sin’ from ‘sinner’. If we take this objection seriously, then we must think of the kind of effect it has radically to split act from actor, as for example in cases of diminished responsibility in the courts, or in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder / Multiple Personality Disorder: ‘It wasn’t really you, it was your ‘alter’ personality.’ There may be contexts -- in particular, specific legal and medical contexts -- in which these are the right things to say. But I think that it would be extremely unsatisfactory if our general understanding of forgiveness had to rely upon such notions. I think that what we need always to keep in mind -- and here I follow R.G. Collingwood [19] -- is that forgiveness is supposed to be about a-person-who-did-something-wrong. You’ve got to keep the act and the actor in the frame together. Unless these two are kept as it were internally related, unless you keep a notion of the integrity of the person, unless you can take that seriously, then you’re not going to be talking about forgiveness at all.

            The second objection turns the focus from the ‘sinner’ more explicitly to the ‘sinned against’:

            ‘Maybe you’re concentrating too much on the act/person to be forgiven. Maybe you need to focus on you, the person betrayed, the would-be-forgiver. Maybe you yourself, the wounded party, is the key here -- for isn’t the ultimate reason to forgive because it will yield private spiritual and personal gain, and healing? The resentment, after all, is almost certainly hurting you more than it hurts the wrongdoer.’

            This kind of view -- that forgiveness is essentially something that you do for yourself -- underlies most of the burgeoning forgiveness-as-self-help literature of the present time. Again, though, this line of objection, while popular, and perhaps potentially healthy in asking and saying what forgiveness can do for you, rather than endlessly only asking what you can do for forgiveness (for God), is highly problematic. To say why, let me turn to Jacques Derrida. Derrida has said virtually nothing about forgiveness, but I want to invoke his powerful deconstruction of the concept of ‘the gift’ here (and see what its morals are for the concept of the ‘forgift’). What Derrida says, in essence, is roughly this:

            ‘If you really look at examples of so-called gift-giving, what you find is that they amount to exchanges, to gifts being ‘given’ simultaneously or interleaved in time. So, for example, is you are giving x a present, but expecting a ‘gift’ in return, at least a gift of gratitude or a sense of ongoing indebtedness, then in what sense is it really a gift that you have given them? Our ethically-imbued perception of what a gift is or should be seems to call out for something beyond that.’ [20]

            A full discussion of these matters would take us too far beyond the present context, into (fascinating) questions of the possibility of altruism, the absurdities and vacuities of psychological hedonism and psychological egoism, the difficult issue of how and when human behaviour can be ‘authentic’, ‘spontaneous’, and/or ‘natural’. But I think that -- without begging too many questions on these weighty matters -- we can say at least this: that what Derrida says of giving can plainly be said, with some real and immediate plausibility, of forgiving. In specific relation to the objection we are considering, how should Derrida’s thought be applied? Well, if forgiveness is a gift that one gives essentially to oneself, this seems to short-circuit the presence of the other person altogether. Derrida would surely say that if you are ‘giving’ the benediction of forgiveness only so as to use the other person to gain something for yourself -- e.g. a new set of feelings of ease and tranquillity -- then you’re not really giving a gift at all.[21]  If you’re forgiving for your own benefit, is that really forgiveness at all?

            This is important enough for it to be worth circling the same terrain with a couple of re-statements: Doesn’t forgiveness have to be as it were essentially other-directed? Doesn’t it have to be ... truly a gift, freely given? If Derrida is right, then surely the objection to my argument which we have been considering fails; and, more generally, support is given to my ‘positive’ characterisation of forgiveness as elusive, mysterious, and rare.

            The objector might yet try again, though, roughly thus: ‘Your Derridean argument is all very well; but there remains an ordinary sense in which there is an ordinary practice / language-game of gift-giving. Surely you cannot square this Derridean move with your general Wittgensteinian orientation. Surely we can and do still talk, quite intelligibly, about giving each other presents at Christmas, for example. That’s how our language-game is.’  And this last point is true. So maybe we shouldn’t put too much weight on the argument from Derrida. But there remains a response that can be given to the objection, a response which will take us back to the structure of my response to the would-be speech-act-analysis of forgiveness:

            Imagine that you’ve been given a Christmas present. The following summer, you somehow find yourself asking the giver, "But have you really given me this present?" What a very bizarre question. Under almost any imaginable circumstances, the answer would probably be something like, "Well of course -- and anyway, what are you talking about, I mean, why are you asking me this, what are you trying to say?"

            So, Derrida notwithstanding, there does remain a straightforward, ordinary sense in which, once a gift is given, then there you have it. But I want to say, once again, that forgiveness isn’t like that. This time, imagine that you were the perpetrator. It can be to the point, if someone made a declaration of forgiveness to you at Christmas-time, say, to ask them, the following summer, perhaps after over-hearing an off-colour remark, or observing an ongoing pattern of behaviour, the following: [22] "But have you really forgiven me for doing y?"

            So, even if Derrida stretches things vis-à-vis ‘the gift’, I think that the morals of his account carry over clearly and plausibly to the ‘forgift’.[23]No good Wittgensteinian should refuse Derrida the gift of acknowledging when he, Derrida, has implicitly made a major philosophical move that calls for acceptance and welcome, rather than forgiveness...

            What, in sum, do I want say about forgiveness? Let me return you to the first things I did in this paper. I asked you to imagine a wrong done to you -- a deception or betrayal, or even ‘just’ a deliberate spillage of coffee over you. I didn’t ask you to imagine a rape or murder, or a brutalizing deep-set institutionalised racism, still less an extermination. But even in the case only of a coffee being spilt over you, or of a deception by a friend, we have found it near-impossible to understand intellectually / philosophically how one could forgive, and what it could mean to do so. I think that most wrongs done to people, not just the most extreme wrongs, are not forgiven. They are unforgiven, or they are simply forgotten. Years pass, and one forgets the innumerable petty wrongs that remain wrongs that were done to one (and that one did) -- usually. And in some rare cases, a wrong is remembered, and yet forgiven.

            How does forgiveness happen? My suggestion is that, in all but a tiny minority of cases, it does not. Either because it is not required, or because it is sidelined by something else happening (e.g. a forgetting, or a practical decision) -- or because it just does not. And often, in a relatively short amount of time there is no one left who could do the forgiving. (Who, now, is well-placed to forgive perpetrators of the major genocides of the first half of the twentieth century? It takes enough temerity to fancy oneself well-placed even to forgive those who have harmed just one of those nearest and dearest to one.) We are left, perhaps, just wishing desperately that things had been different. But they weren’t; they aren’t.

            And with that thought, we need to return to another moment early in this paper. I wrote earlier that it would seemingly be straightforward to understand how forgiveness can happen at all, if forgiveness were of the following nature:  If the past actually changed, if the deed were literally undone, when forgiveness was sought and granted. Then, I took it, it would be clear why forgiveness was desirable, why it was engaged in -- and why it was wonderful. But the scenario I have just sketched is utter fantasy. By which I mean: I don’t think we have any clear idea of what it would be even to understand such a ‘scenario’. What sense can we make, for example, of sentences which speak of the past as subject to change? If the past could be changed, would it any longer be anything we would properly wish to call ‘the past’? We have all seen sci-film films involving ‘time travel’ ‘back’ ‘into the past’ -- how many of us, seriously, think we are doing anything other than engaging with a charming illusion of sense -- imagining that we imagine something, ‘picturing’ what is through and through an illusion -- when we entertain ourselves by means of such mind-boggling ‘scenarios’ (e.g. the utterly absurd scenario of the powerful and highly entertaining ‘Terminator 2’)? Indeed, isn’t much of the entertainment derived precisely from the utter boggle we experience in watching such films?

            We very easily find ourselves with incoherent desires with regard to our words, when we speak of forgiveness, as when we speak of time. These incoherent desires lead us to say (incoherent) things like "Forgiveness is impossible", or "Forgiveness is incoherent", or "Forgiveness would be possible if only time travel were possible", or "You can only travel forward in time", or "Why shouldn’t we be able to travel backwards in time?"

            What we ought to say, I think, is that there is no way that we can think ourselves into a ‘superior’ position for comprehending what forgiveness is and how it is possible. And again, let the language here not mislead us -- this is not because of an incapacity on our parts. To say "God alone understands forgiveness; and we forgive through God alone" is, outside perhaps of some very specific religious context(s) where it may have its sense, to say as much and as little as saying "Forgiveness is simply incomprehensible." But what we must also say, if we are to say anything, it seems, is "Forgiveness (sometimes) occurs." This language-game -- this interweaving of actions and words -- is ‘simply’, sometimes, played. And most of those times will not end up being times in which, without taking up a controversial political or ethical stance, we can say that the game transparently should not be played, and/or is obfuscatory or dangerous.

            But perhaps, nevertheless such a stance is appropriate more often than one might like to think. Especially if one is a contemporary liberal Westerner. For I want to close this paper by connecting my thought that, very often, forgiveness of wrong-doers just does not happen (they are unforgiven, or their acts simply forgotten, etc.) ... with my thought that the game of forgiving, and especially the trying to get others to play the game, is frequently dangerous. I want to make the connection via one final more concrete example.

            This time, I have in mind not the self-help literature on and ‘practice’ of  but the human rights literature on and ‘practice’ of forgiveness. Specifically, I have in mind the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. I’m thinking for instance of certain moments in the proceedings of that Commission when certain perpetrators of violence seeking (or granted) amnesty would look for physical signs or tokens of forgiveness/reconciliation from the parents etc. of victims. I felt very uncomfortable witnessing any such moments. I might sum up why, again perhaps following Derrida,[24] by saying this: I don’t think that forgiveness is something which can be forced. Still less, institutionalised.[25] 

            This is perhaps the cash-value of what might seem to some the mere paradox-mongering which I have engaged in here, in this paper. If what I am saying here is right, then I think that one has to have pretty serious qualms about the quasi-injunction which emerges not just from forgiveness-as-self-help, and from much contemporary religion, but also from the contemporary ‘human rights culture’, as manifested for example in the TRC. This human rights culture, which has risen to greater and greater prominence in the last 10-20 years, perhaps not coincidentally with ‘the fall of Communism’, is something which it is terribly hard to oppose. South Africa’s TRC, for instance, seems so noble; and anyway, what other options -- practical political possibilities -- are there for countries trying to repair themselves, and which have given up on goals of revolutionary transformation? Well, my qualms can be put thus: I worry that philosophers, among others, may be being enlisted to try to force forgiveness -- this rare, obscure, remarkable thing -- and perhaps thus to short-circuit certain necessary processes of justice, of reparation, of politics, of reckoning. If forgiveness is, as I have argued, at best partially explicable, and uncommonplace, then we ought to be wary of trying to replace retributive and/or reparative justice with ‘restorative justice’ (the ideal of the TRC) -- not least, because if I am right then what the TRC (e.g.) is trying to do is very unlikely to actually work.

            My own belief is that an alternative to the deliberate search for the ‘restoration’ of humanity and community through forgiveness and reconciliation is at least partially available, and that it is taken to be politically and economically impossible only at the cost of a terrible socio-political -- and, one might say, philosophical -- gamble. The alternative I have in mind is massive reparations, e.g. punitive taxes on those who profited from apartheid. That might be a true token of repentance -- with any luck, it might even led to some forgiveness!

            In supporting such an alternative, even now, I follow one of the TRC’s subtlest critics, Mahmood Mamdani: "By reducing apartheid to its worst perpetrators is not the TRC turning into a rescue operation for [apartheid’s] beneficiaries? The alternative I suggest to you, is not to victimise the beneficiaries this time round for that would be revenge, but there is an alternative other than revenge. There is a form of justice other than victor’s justice. That alternative is to begin with to get beneficiaries to see their own social responsibility...". If the Commission were altered thus, then

"...It would be a commission whose purpose would be to teach beneficiaries not only of the abuses for which they bear no personal responsibility but also of the structural injustice of which they have been direct beneficiaries, and therefore bear direct responsibility to redress. And it would be a commission, which would now forefront the notion of justice, not as criminal but as social justice, as the only morally acceptable way of living with a morally unacceptable truth." [26]

What Mamdani’s proposal would surely do is yield some real sense of justice. Whereas the call to forgive, whether from Mother Teresa or Desmond Tutu or even Mandela, always risks functioning as a call to preserve the status quo, and as a cover-up for the preservation of injustice. Those who have suffered, not unreasonably, want more than to love their ex-enemies; they want a promise of a genuinely juster future, and they want those promises to be delivered on. As Robert Meister asks,[27] can we say that an evil is truly past, if its beneficiaries are still plainly benefiting from it?

            Now of course, the rich and powerful are right to sense -- and this again follows from my argument, that forgiveness is a tenuous achievement -- that no matter how much they democratize or redistribute, there is no guarantee that they will be (or stay) forgiven by those who have suffered. But the cash-value of philosophising about forgiveness remains, I think, this: a stronger sense of the ethical and political risks that are run by the attempted institutionalisation and generalisation of something less explicable than (say) promising, and rarer even than (‘say’) love. We might then try using a form of words such as the following: That forgiveness, where possible and appropriate, is a great ethical act in its own right; it is a renewal of the possibility for life to go on well, it is even a reparation of a tear in existence. An act of true forgiveness adds something to life; we give something to life with this act.

            But if words such as these don’t satisfy you, then all the philosophizing in the world will add nothing further. And nor even will examples more literary than those I have woven this essay through with, not even great works such as 'The Satanic Verses' or 'The Iliad'. [28] The greatest example I know of the literature of forgiveness, Antje Krog's 'The country of my skull', may take us further than these great works of unforgivability. But where it takes us I think, is to ethics and politics -- as something that must be lived, and will never be 'fully understood', and will never be philosophised into submission.[29]