Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008
Forgiveness and Apology
What, When, Why?
by Charles L. Griswold
Human life teems with temptations, one of which is to think that the people who do grave harm to others are fundamentally different from us. We reserve a special vocabulary for them: "beasts," "monsters," "inhuman." Yet that outlook is a self-protective delusion. As Primo Levi somewhat shockingly remarks of the concentration camp guards at Auschwitz:
"These were not monsters. I didn't see a single monster in my time
in the camp. Instead I saw people like you and I who were acting in
that way because there was Fascism, Nazism in Germany. Were some
form of Fascism or Nazism to return, there would be people, like us,
who would act in the same way, everywhere. And the same goes for the
victims, for the particular behaviour of the victims about which so
much has been said, mostly typically by young Israelis who object
'but we would never act that way'. They're right. They would not act
that way. But if they had been born forty years earlier, they would
have. They would have behaved exactly as the deported Jews—and,
it's worth adding, the deported Russians and Italians and the rest"
("Interview with Primo Levi (1979)," in The Voice of Memory:
Interviews 1961-1987 [New York: The New Press, 2001]).
One must distinguish between degrees of wrongdoing, to be sure. Yet, honesty requires recognizing that Levi's point applies to each of us. The disturbing fact is that even those who commit terrible wrongs are by and large not "beasts," but rather all too human—characteristically and predictably human, one might even argue. Look into your heart and recall the last time you treated another badly. Nearly everyone has wronged another. Remember too your response to the last time you felt mistreated or insulted. Nearly everyone has suffered the bitter injustice of wrongdoing. We have all struggled not to retaliate in kind.
What a struggle it is to resist the cycle of retaliation! Revenge impulsively surges in response to wrong, and becomes perversely delicious to those possessed by it. The agony of our predicament is as ancient as it is well established, and Homer's Achilles articulates it incomparably well:
Why, I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and
mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great
mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's
heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of
honey (Iliad 18.107-110, trans. R Lattimore).
Vengefulness, resentment, and moral hatred cloud judgment but seem sweet to the one they possess, transforming a peaceful character into a connoisseur of violence. Personal and national credos proudly anchor themselves in tales of unfairness and the glories of retaliation. Oceans of blood and mountains of bones are their testament. It is an addictive cycle.
Forgiveness is and should be of intense concern to us in ordinary life, both as individuals and as communities. Not surprisingly, the discussions of forgiveness, apology, and reconciliation in theology, literature, political science, sociology, and psychology are innumerable. In a development of great importance, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have been forging powerful new approaches to ancient conflicts. Groundbreaking work in conflict resolution, international law, the theory of reparations, and political theory pays ever more attention to forgiveness and the related concepts of pardon, excuse, mercy, pity, apology, and reconciliation. Yet, every position taken in theory or practice with regard to these notions assumes that it has understood them accurately. In particular, a defensible analysis of forgiveness in both its interpersonal and political dimension is crucial; for how else are we to know that when we say we forgive, or apologize, or reconcile, we are doing what we claim, and not something else?
At first blush, the answer to the question "what is forgiveness?" seems perfectly straightforward. To forgive is to stop hating the person or persons who have injured you. Notice that even this commits to a criterion: if you still hate someone, you have not forgiven them. But have you forgiven them if you've stopped hating them no matter what the reason? Say you forgot all about them or the injury caused to you (you took the latest bliss drug, or had brain surgery that deleted that part of your memory, or possess a remarkable ability to repress from consciousness emotions you do not like). Since forgiving is not forgetting, it must be the case that it requires remembering; so that too is a criterion. And if you stop hating, while not forgetting, but still take revenge, you haven't forgiven: so revenge too must be forsworn, if forgiveness is to take place.
Resentment or moral hatred may rightly be felt; indeed, we would surely think ill of a person who responded to injustice with indifference. One should feel angry in response to wrongdoing; it can be a warranted emotion that expresses self-respect, a respect for moral principle, and the resolve to defend oneself. Consequently, if forgiveness requires that resentment be forsworn, it cannot be in spite of the fact that the anger is still warranted. It must be because the anger is no longer warranted. And what would provide a reason that makes it no longer warranted?
Answers to this question diverge at the deepest level, but here is mine: the victim's anger at the offender should be forsworn first and foremost because the offender has taken certain steps that render continued anger inappropriate. What are those steps? Ideally, they will include acknowledgment of responsibility for having done the wrong; repudiation in deed and word of oneself as the wrongdoer, and a commitment to become the sort of person who does not do such things; the expression of regret to the victim for the specific wrong done by the offender; and finally, some sort of narrative accounting for how one came to do wrong, how the wrong-doing does not express the totality of one's character, and how one is changing for the better. This last provision will help the victim answer such questions as "who is that person who could injure me thus, that I should trust with my forgiveness, and be reconciled with?"
In the face of such steps taken by the offender, a victim who categorically refused to embark on the road to forgiveness, and thus to forswear moral hatred, would betray an ethical shortcoming of his or her own—assuming, of course, that the wrong is not in principle unforgivable. For the wrongdoer has supplied just the right sorts of reasons for rendering the victim's anger.
To come off fully, however, forgiveness also requires steps on the part of the victim. We have already named several of these: giving up revenge; letting go of moral hatred; and remembering the relevant facts about the injury. Additionally, the victim should re-envision or re-frame his or her view of the offender, such that the latter is no longer conceived of as the monster whose sum and substance is wrong-doing, but instead as one-like-us, as redeemable. Moving past one's vengefulness and anger for reasons such as these will also mean reframing one's view of oneself. For one must begin to see one's injury, terrible though it may have been, as a chapter of one's life, not as defining who one is. So the victim's narrative of self too must change. As anybody knows who has struggled to recover from moral injury, this can be a difficult challenge to meet. And the final step is one we applaud instinctively: the victim, far from withholding the expression of forgiveness, explicitly addresses it to the offender.
Then all that can be done to repair the breach has been accomplished. Importantly, forgiveness has not collapsed into either excuse or condonation, if both parties meet all of these conditions. A theory of forgiveness fails if it cannot distinguish forgiveness from excuse or condonation. To excuse is not to hold the perpetrator responsible, whereas forgiveness does not absolve the offender of responsibility even while—and here is its wonder—somehow allowing both parties to repair their moral relationship. To condone is to sanction (if implicitly) or even to enable continued wrongdoing, just as happens when, say, an abused spouse "forgives" the offender every morning for beating her the night before, thereby encouraging more of the same misbehavior. If that counted as forgiveness, then forgiveness would no longer be a virtue.
In thinking of forgiveness along these lines, my view—though secular—parallels that of the Medieval philosopher Maimonides (consider his discussion of repentance in the opening four chapters of Treatise 5 of The Book of Knowledge, Book I of his Mishneh Torah), and differs from those theories (which I would think of as congenial to a Christian framework) according to which forgiveness is a "gift" and requires no steps at all from the offender. According to theories of the latter sort, the victim undertakes forgiveness for his or her own sake—in particular, to shed the painful and toxic emotion of retributive hatred. Call this the "unconditional" or "unilateral" conception of forgiveness. Its inspiration is the insight that the victim is not dependent on the offender in order to forgive; perhaps the victim depends on the grace of God, but in any case, may forgive without the offender showing the slightest contrition, taking any responsibility, or apologizing. Countless books both in the Christian theological tradition and in the self-help literature talk about the "work" of forgiveness as being purely internal in this sense: it's all about your overcoming moral hatred for the sake of your own spiritual, moral, and psychological well-being. When achieved, forgiveness thus understood often sounds as though it is a gift, or a release from debt, bestowed upon the offender; the offender is presented with it, for the victim's own sake as it were, even though the offender may have done nothing to "earn" it.
As examples of the position I am disagreeing with, consider two relatively recent books. The first is Colin C. Tipping's Radical Forgiveness: Making Room for the Miracle (Global 13 Publications, Inc., 2002). The author's "Four Steps to Forgiveness" program is solely about the victim's moving beyond his or her anger; nowhere in the book are we told that the victim's "radical forgiveness" is dependent on the offender taking any steps. Indeed, on page fifty-four we read: "Radical Forgiveness has no limits whatsoever and is completely unconditional. If Radical Forgiveness cannot forgive Hitler, it can forgive nobody. Like unconditional love, it's all or nothing."
Similarly, in The Process of Forgiveness (Continuum, 1996), Father William A. Meninger argues that, "It is extremely important from the very beginning to understand that the primary consideration and motivation for forgiveness is ourselves. We forgive others, in the first place, for our own sake." Specifically, he writes that we forgive others for "our own happiness." The five stages of forgiveness he delineates in chapters nine through thirteen overwhelmingly assume or emphasize that the power to forgive lies entirely in the hands of the victim (perhaps with the help of God); the offender is not required to take any steps. Thus in speaking of the successful completion of the final stage of the "process," viz. that of "wholeness" or our own "healing," Meninger remarks:
Your injurers are also free—at least, as far as you are concerned.
The perpetrators still have to deal with their part in their
transgression, but they don't owe you anything. You are not
dependent on what someone else does for you just as you are no
longer dependent on what someone else did to you. You can now freely
release them of all personal debts. It is quite another question as
to whether or not you allow them to make amends for their own
personal needs, the requirements of justice, or the promptings of
love.
This in turn is to lead to the recognition that the offender is a "child of God with his/her own sorrows, sins, pains, wounds, regrets, and needs," just as you are qua victim. And we are encouraged to consider initiating "reconciliation" with the offender, perhaps by writing "a forgiving letter," even if the letter is not actually sent, though it might be—again, all this in spite of the absence of the slightest emendatory steps on the part of the offender.
I disagree with the idea of "unconditional forgiveness." To my mind that view collapses forgiveness into either excuse or condonation, precisely because it demands nothing of the offender. While neither of the two texts I've just mentioned deploy the metaphor of gift-giving to characterize the unilateral forgiveness bestowed by the victim on the offender, given that the metaphor seems so natural a way to express the unilateral waiving of the "debt" as well as the one-sided way in which the wrong-doer is released from the victim's vengeful anger, it is worth noting that the metaphor does not perfectly cohere with the view that forgiveness is unilateral. For gifts, too, come with expectations of reciprocity attached.
Putting aside issues of metaphor and theology and returning to the most important point, I argue that the view of forgiveness as unilateral occludes a fundamental feature of the context. The original context was from the start bilateral and, in that way, social, involving at least two people (the offender and victim). The situation to which forgiveness responds represents a rupture of a basic interpersonal moral relationship (even where the parties to it did not previously know one another) and forgiveness inherits the basic features of that situation. Forgiveness is other-directed; except in cases of self-forgiveness, it is another person who is the target of this moral and affective relation. Ideally, forgiveness preserves, rather than dismisses, the relevant features of that original context. My view does that, whereas the rival view that champions the primacy of unilateral and unconditional forgiveness dispenses with it. That competing view is literally ego-centric; by contrast, mine requires reciprocity, and is responsive to moral ideals that the other ignores in part.
I am not arguing, I hasten to add, that absent the conditions for forgiveness, the victim ought to hold onto vengeful anger; there may be self-regarding reasons to give it up, and any number of therapeutic steps or stages may be required to achieve that end. But not every manner of giving up moral anger or revenge counts as forgiveness.
But what, then, of forgiving the dead and the unrepentant? The one cannot and the other will not take the steps I have set out. Is forgiveness therefore impossible under those circumstances? Does this not mean that the victim is doubly injured—first by the original injustice, and second by being unable to forgive since the offender does not take the required steps?
Such non-ideal or imperfect cases of forgiveness may fall below the threshold of what can count as forgiveness, in which case we must, with regret, conclude that forgiveness there is impossible. What is that threshold? Three conditions must be met for it to be crossed: the victim must be willing to lower his or her pitch of resentment to the degree appropriate to the injury, and to forswear revenge; the offender must take minimal steps to qualify for forgiveness, namely to take responsibility and apologize; and the injury must be humanly forgivable. Between that threshold, and perfected forgiveness, lies a spectrum of cases.
Forgiveness in the political realm is another, related matter. "Political forgiveness," as it is often called, is not so much a kind of forgiveness as it is part of the same family of notions. It shares some characteristics in common with forgiveness, but not others. For that reason, I would denominate it "political apology," a phrase that refers to the offering and receiving of apology in a political context. What is the difference between political apology and forgiveness? First, one or both of the parties concerned may be corporate or state entities, rather than individuals. This means that some, or the entirety, of the moral transaction is conducted by representation or substitution: so-and-so, speaking for entity X (say, the United States government, or a corporation), apologizes to so-and-so, speaking for Y (say, another nation, or consumers in a particular state).
For example, consider the U.S. government's apology to Japanese Americans for their internment during the Second World War. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 explicitly apologizes for the government's wrongdoing. It specifies what the wrongs were and to whom they were done, citing the documentary work of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians—in effect, a sort of Truth Commission (its report is entitled Personal Justice Denied). The Act explains that, "For these fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these individuals of Japanese ancestry, the Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation," and details further steps to be taken, including restitution (the amounts to be determined subsequently) and the funding of a public education program. Interestingly, it also declares as one of its purposes "to make more credible and sincere any declaration of concern by the United States over violations of human rights committed by other nations." In signing the bill into law, President Reagan is quoted as saying "Yet no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong." President Clinton's letter of some five years letter, accompanying reparation payments, also was explicit, succinct, and unambiguous in its apology.
This is an example of a successful political apology in the political realm. Notice that the forswearing of revenge and violence is certainly a precondition of the transaction, but not the forswearing of any particular person's resentment, especially not by those involved in the current discursive exchange. Neither the spokesperson for the relevant body (in this case, the U.S. government), nor for the recipient(s) of the apology, may have any personal feelings about the harm involved; the apology or receipt thereof does not require them to do so; and the individuals offering the apology may bear no responsibility, personally, for the wrongs. Not all those receiving the apology, furthermore, may have themselves suffered the wrong for which the apology is offered; they may accept the apology on behalf of someone else. In the context of political apology, that is, the exchange requires to one degree or another a fair amount of symbolism and representation.
This is not to say that the exchange is morally vacuous—on the contrary. Genuine apology in the political realm, while neither the same as forgiveness nor a modulation thereof, embodies substantive moral ideals. These include the ideals of truth telling; the taking of responsibility; the call to address others respectfully; the possibility of a future that does not simply reiterate the past; and the importance of promoting peace. The reconciliation that successful apology brings about—consisting in respectful non-interference and the willingness to cooperate with each other, for example—may seem to be a superficial achievement in comparison with reconciliation understood as deep reunion, love, and harmony. But compared to ongoing violent conflict and ferocious retaliation, it is heaven on earth. Furthermore, the reconciling ideals of political apology are substantive and noble, even though they are not intended to satisfy the soul's deepest yearnings. I would not argue that political apology is the magic key that unlocks the secrets of reconciliation at the political level. And yet, the part that political apology may play in civic reconciliation is neither trivial nor dispensable, and a community in which it is commended and practiced is an accomplishment as difficult as it is rare.
But what of self-forgiveness? Of forgiveness by God, or indeed, of forgiving God? Or of such notions as amnesty, pity, mercy, clemency, pardon? Are they imperfect forms of forgiveness or, like political apology, simply part of the same family of concepts? I attempt to answer these complicated questions in my book on forgiveness (from which the present essay is drawn). But by way of conclusion we may briefly consider this further question: why forgiveness? What makes it morally good?
Utilitarian considerations provide a first answer: without forgiveness, human life is worse off. Egoist considerations provide a second answer: without forgiveness, my life is worse off. But there is a third reason, one that cuts deeper: forgiveness is a virtue, and expresses a commendable trait of character. And what makes that characteristic itself valuable? The answer brings us back to the ideals that articulate the moral good, namely those of truth-telling, responsibility-taking, spiritual and moral growth, reconciliation, and love. Given the moral imperfection endemic to the world as we have it, these may seem to be merely ideal, abstract, and irrelevant in practice. But that is not so. We necessarily measure our actions according to some conception of the good. Our success or failure, both in discerning accurately the nature of the good, and in living up to that conception, decisively mold the moral character of our lives. These are practical ideals, and we ignore them at our peril.
Charles L. Griswold is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. His recent publications include Forgiveness: a Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Source Citation
Griswold, Charles L. 2008. Forgiveness and apology: What, when why? Tikkun 23(2):21.
