Phenomenology and Forgiveness

Marguerite La Caze

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786607805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Forgiveness—either needing or wanting to be forgiven, or trying to forgive another—is a near-universal experience and one of endless fascination. This volume mines the work of phenomenologists and the methods of phenomenology to extend and deepen our understanding of these complex experiences. Interest in the phenomenon of forgiveness continues to grow, as the question of forgiveness for past injustices has become a global issue. Phenomenologists have a special contribution to make to the discussion of forgiveness, both because of the capacity to describe and analyse the richness of first-person experiences of forgiving and being forgiven, and because many of the twentieth-century phenomenologists, such as Arendt, Beauvoir, Fanon, Husserl, Levinas, Ricoeur, Sartre, and Stein, experienced first-hand the trials of war, detention, violence, exile and occupation that tested their power to forgive. Phenomenology and Forgiveness addresses questions such as whether it is only ethical to forgive in response to apologies and expressions of remorse or whether forgiveness is a gift, whether some acts are unforgiveable, the role of forgiveness in political life, and whether it is possible to forgive ourselves.

Section 1

EXPERIENCES OF FORGIVENESS

Chapter 1

The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action

Shannon Hoff

At the heart of the phenomenological tradition lies the critical distinction between the terms of experience as it is actually lived and the terms we typically deploy to understand the world when we make it into an object of reflection from a detached position. Crucial to this basic distinction is the phenomenological insight that our original situation is one of involvement with the world, of a primordial intimacy with others and with objective externality or objects, not a reflective detachment from the world and its elements. Insofar as Hegel inaugurated a philosophical method that turns to experience to allow that experience itself to show how it should be understood, to generate its own self-conception, and insofar as the experience he observes in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) always integrates two poles—the “I” that experiences and the situation and objects that it experiences—he is one of the original phenomenologists. Specifically, the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates how the changing forms of the mismatch between our experience as we live it and our experience as we describe it to ourselves, when studied systematically, reveal ever more deeply the rich moral and intersubjective dimensions of human experience.

In fact, the ultimate focus of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the experience of forgiveness, for it is this experience that demonstrates the deepest recognition by an individual—the deepest enactment —of our shared humanity. I will explain and interpret Hegel’s powerful analysis, especially to demonstrate its relevance to contemporary political criticism. I will begin with a short reflection on the details of Hegel’s text before developing a deeper analysis of its significance, in which I will use Hegel’s analysis of action and judgment to defend a notion of political solidarity against a model of moral righteousness. Specifically, Hegel argues that moral action will always be one-sided—it will always be an interpretation of moral principles—and hence inherently subject to critical judgment; the honest assessment of such action therefore cannot proceed without an appreciation of its determinate condition. Since this is so, however, communication between agent and critic is the ultimate medium of our moral interaction, and for this interaction to be undertaken authentically, both agent and judge must be open to education and transformation by the perspective of the other. This mutual education is the ultimate meaning of forgiveness, and it stands as a permanent challenge to the confident sense of self-satisfaction that commonly presents itself as the voice of moral superiority in our interpersonal and especially political engagements.

CONSCIENCE, CONFESSION, AND FORGIVENESS

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit explores living hypotheses about the character of human experience by embodying them in specific kinds of experience and watching them unfold therein. His analysis of forgiveness emerges in his depiction of the experience in which an agent finds herself to be answerable to the good and called to be moral: the agent responds, performing an action she considers good, and a judge, similarly moved by a sense of answerability, judges this action (Hegel 1977M, §§658–71).¹ This drama itself, though, is situated more broadly in Hegel’s analysis of the experience of conscience, and, to understand the drama of forgiveness, we need first to grasp the fundamental meaning of conscience.²

Conscience is the experience of moral answerability.³ More specifically, it is the recognition that the responsibility to do the good can only be discharged in a fallible and singular response to an equally singular situation.⁴ Hegel writes:

Conscience does not split up the circumstances of the case into a variety of duties . . . If it did, then either no action could take place at all, because each concrete case involves . . . a clash of duties—and therefore by the very nature of action one side would be injured, one duty violated; or else, if action did take place, there would be an actual violation of one of the conflicting duties. Conscience is rather . . . simple action in accord with duty, which fulfills not this or that duty, but knows and does what is concretely right. (1977M, §635, italics added)

In experiencing moral responsibility, one encounters a finite situation that is singular and that does not admit of perfect subsumption underneath a moral law, and the insight, experience, and understanding that the agent must bring to this situation are similarly finite and limited; indeed, her knowledge of the situation will always be partial, and she thus must act in the absence of perfect knowledge, invoking her insight as it stands so as to respond to the situations unfolding around her as she understands them. In the experience of conscience, the moral agent recognizes that, despite these limitations and opacities, she is nevertheless required to act, to do something, or else be condemned by the good as someone who refuses even to acknowledge its existence and its claim upon her. She is confronted by a situation of need and must respond, even if it is by not doing anything; this inaction is itself a response. Even though she may simply want to follow a moral law or an accepted custom, she will nevertheless have to interpret for herself how to enact the law or custom, how it applies to her situation, and what specific thing it requires. She must discern on her own what the moral principle—the Kantian duty to pursue the happiness of others, for instance, or the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor—might require specifically in a situation in which she has to balance care for her sickly father, for instance, with care for her child and effective leadership of her employees. Thus, Kant argues that the duty to be beneficent is a matter of “wide obligation”—that is, a duty for which “no rational principle prescribes specifically how” one should fulfill it.⁵ The good, in short, always requires interpretation. The experience of conscience is the implicit recognition that partial, one-sided, not fully cognizant action is the only site for the actualization of what is good, of moral principle, and thus that finite, individual action has dignity as the unique site for the enactment of the good. Moral demands unfold only within situations, and moral responsibility is a matter of singularity and not generality.⁶

In Hegel’s dramatization of the experience of forgiveness, the conscientious actor acts out of this partiality, and the moral judge scorns the action on the basis of its one-sidedness, condemning the actor for acting not for the sake of the good but on the basis of her own interests and knowledge. The judge asserts—correctly—that, in relying on her own judgment to arrive at an action, the agent is not taking herself out of the equation, as an abstract sense of morality would seem to require; her action, rather, reflects her own priorities, pursuits, and sense of things. The judge condemns the agent on the grounds that the putatively moral action is thus fundamentally contaminated and impure, that the individual actor has inserted her own self between the good and the action. The judge in turn does not himself act, but believes he has earned his moral credentials by judging from this stance of purity (1977M, §664).

The actor’s response reveals the meaning of the judge’s judgment: the actor recognizes and confesses her one-sidedness, acknowledging the truth of the judgment; the judge has brought the actor to a correct recognition of her own fallibility, as well as a recognition of the fact that an essential aspect of action that is genuinely moral is that it can be confirmed as moral by others. Her failure to find affirmation in the judge, that is, is not irrelevant from the point of view of morality, since others are of moral significance and their well-being is of moral concern.⁷ The actor expects, however, to find solidarity in the judge, insofar as he is similarly afflicted by this one-sidedness in his very judgment. That is, the actor implicitly claims, in expectation of identification, that purity is not possible for anyone. While dignified by her task, the actor reveals here her understanding that she cannot possibly do justice to the good and recognizes the persistent moral impurity of her attempts to realize the good. In her confession to another and her expectation of understanding, she posits their commonality, which entails a recognition that the necessary one-sidedness of action and nonetheless its dignity is a reality for everyone.

The judge, however, rejects the possibility of identification, refusing to forgive the actor. In so doing he reveals himself as a consciousness, as Hegel writes, “which is forsaken by and which itself denies spirit” (1997M, §667). This is because, in the domain of one-sided action and judgment in which human beings always live, the authority that is most meaningful and morally weighty is that of other people, since they are affected negatively or positively by immoral or moral action, and since they are similarly caught between a responsibility to the good and the necessary fallible singularity of their responses and are thus in principle capable of understanding this situation. It is in identification and communication with each other that the judge and the actor could find guidance: others, like us, can recognize and work through both the sense of answerability and the necessarily singular ways in which we discharge this sense of answerability. Further, if singular insight and action are the necessary media by which the good is accomplished in the world, then it is incumbent on us to try to understand how and why we are doing the things we are doing; because specific actions are done for reasons and reasons do not make themselves visibly manifest in physical reality, they require the supplement of explanation. Thus, we can come to see the meaning of each other’s action only through communication about it, which requires a context for shared communicative effort.

In the continuation of Hegel’s dramatized scenario, the judge, confronted by the actor’s surprise at the absence of identification, comes to see that his refusal to forgive is wrong, and that the actor...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Situating Forgiveness within Phenomenology
• SECTION 1: EXPERIENCES OF FORGIVENESS
• SECTION 2: PARADOXES OF FORGIVENESS
• SECTION 3: ETHICS AND POLITICS OF FORGIVENESS
• Index
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors