33 -- I R R E V E
R S I B I L I T Y A N D T H E
P O W E R T O F O R G I V E
We have seen that
the animal laborans could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in
the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being forever subject to the
necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another
human capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo
faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but
also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained
by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore
that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the
"devaluation of all values," and the impossibility of finding valid
standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through
the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful
stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects. If it were not
outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of
thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to "think
itself" out of the predicaments which the very activity of thinking
engenders. What in each of these instances saves man—man qua animal laborans,
qua homo faber, qua thinker— is something altogether different; it comes from
the outside—not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside of each of the
respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborans, it is like a
miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabits a world; from the
viewpoint of homo faber, it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity,
that meaning should have a place in this world.
The case of action
and action's predicaments is altogether different. Here, the remedy against the
irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not
arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the
potentialities of action itself. The possible redemption from the predicament
of irreversibility—of being unable to undo what one has done though one did
not, and could not, have known what he was doing—is the faculty of forgiving.
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is
contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong
together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the
past, whose "sins" hang like Damocles' sword over every new
generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up
in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security
without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be
possible in the relationships between men.
Without 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 magic formula to break the spell.
Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to
keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without
direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its
contradictions and equivocalities —a darkness which only the light shed over
the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity
between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel. Both
faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of
others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can fed bound by a promise
made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation
remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's
self.
Since these
faculties correspond so closely to the human condition of plurality, their role
in politics establishes a diametrically different set of guiding principles
from the "moral" standards inherent in the Platonic notion of rule.
For Platonic rulership, whose legitimacy rested upon the domination of the
self, draws its guiding principles—those which at the same time justify and
limit power over others—from a relationship established between me and myself,
so that the right and wrong of relationships with others are determined by
attitudes toward one's self, until the whole of the public realm is seen in the
image of "man writ large," of the right order between man's
individual capacities of mind, soul, and body. The moral code, on the other
hand, inferred from the faculties of forgiving and of making promises, rests on
experiences which nobody could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary,
are entirely based on the presence of others. And just as the extent and modes
of self-rule justify and determine rule over others—how one rules himself, he
will rule others—thus the extent and modes of being forgiven and being promised
determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself or
keep promises concerned only with himself.
Because the
remedies against the enormous strength and resiliency inherent in action processes
can function only under the condition of plurality, it is very dangerous to use
this faculty in any but the realm of human affairs. Modern natural science and
technology, which no longer observe or take material from or imitate processes
of nature but seem actually to act into it, seem, by the same token, to have
carried irreversibility and human unpredictability into the natural realm,
where no remedy can be found to undo what has been done. Similarly, it seems
that one of the great dangers of acting in the mode of making and within its
categorical framework of means and ends lies in the concomitant
self-deprivation of the remedies inherent only in action, so that one is bound
not only to do with the means of violence necessary for all fabrication, but
also to undo what he has done as he undoes an unsuccessful object, by means of
destruction. Nothing appears more manifest in these attempts than the greatness
of human power, whose source lies in the capacity to act, and which without
action's inherent remedies inevitably begins to overpower and destroy not man
himself but the conditions under which life was given to him.
The discoverer of
the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.
The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it
in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly
secular sense. It has been in the nature of our tradition of political thought
(and for reasons we cannot explore here) to be highly selective and to exclude
from articulate conceptualization a great variety of authentic political
experiences, among which we need not be surprised to find some of an even
elementary nature. Certain aspects of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which
are not primarily related to the Christian religious message but sprang from
experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers, bent on
challenging the public authorities in Israel, certainly belong among them, even
though they have been neglected because of their allegedly exclusively
religious nature. The only rudimentary sign of an awareness that forgiveness
may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from
action may be seen in the Roman principle to spare the vanquished (parcere
subiectis)—a wisdom entirely unknown to the Greeks—or in the right to commute
the death sentence, probably also of Roman origin, which is the prerogative of
nearly all Western heads of state….
Crime and willed
evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than good deeds… But trespassing is an
everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action's constant
establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs
forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by
constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through
this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only
by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be
trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new. In this respect,
forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of
re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to
the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process,
permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered
course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to
transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process
can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be
predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus
retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of
action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely
re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked
it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and
the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus' teachings of
forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which encloses both doer and
sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself
need never come to an end.
The alternative to
forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in
common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference
could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element
in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot
punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.
This is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call
"radical evil" and about whose nature so little is known, even to us
who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All
we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they
therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human
power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their
appearance. Here, where the deed itself dispossesses us of all power, we can
indeed only repeat with Jesus: "It were better for him that a millstone
were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea."
Perhaps the most
plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as closely connected as
destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing
of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed
itself. Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently
personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what
was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it…. [L]ove, although it is one of
the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of
self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who,
precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with
what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than
with his achievements, failings, and transgressions…. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia
politike, is a kind of "friendship" without intimacy and without
closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of
the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we
may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. Thus, the modern loss
of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire
or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of
public and social life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the
person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the
sake of the person. But the fact that the same who, revealed in action and
speech, remains also the subject of forgiving is the deepest reason why nobody
can forgive himself; here, as in action and speech generally, we are dependent
upon others, to whom we appear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable
to perceive.
Closed within
ourselves, we would never be able to forgive ourselves any failing or
transgression because we would lack the experience of the person for the sake
of whom one can forgive.
