Marc de Graauw - Random Notes

So how does forgiveness come about? Paul van Tongeren mentions the conditions of ‘confession, remorse, atonement’. Which he then dismisses, since forgiveness is not conditional, but unconditional: we do not forgive on the condition of some act or atonement by the other,  and revoke forgiving if the condition is not met: that is bargaining, not forgiving. Paul van Tongeren rightly noted in his talk that just saying: ‘Yes, I did that terrible thing, I don’t understand why, I’m different now’ cannot bring about forgiveness.

Avishai Margalit, whose views I’ve covered in a previous post, quotes Wittgenstein on the Temple Ritual of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), where a goat was sent into the desert to atone for the sins of all. Here atonement is presented as a kind of magic, where our sins are removed by a simple trick. Margalit notes: ‘…the problem is not the actual use of magic, provided the magic … is conceived only as the expression of a wish to be cleansed of sin … but (when the action) is seen as causing purification, it becomes a superstition’ [EM, p. 187]. A codification of sin-cleansing, for the ritual contemplation of sin, is perfectly OK; the same ritual as actual sin-cleansing is not. Forgiveness is not that easily earned. From my own background: saying three Hail Marys and giving a token fee to the church parish cannot, on its own, be considered a true cleansing of sin. Margalit goes on to say ‘remorse offers us a nonmagical way to undo the past’ [EM, p. 199]. Through remorse a sinner does not deny the deed, but shows regret over it, creates a distance between deed and sinner, and this distance makes forgiving possible. Forgiveness is not an entitlement after expressing remorse, but remorse is a precondition for forgiveness, a human precondition, without magic.

I think Margalit misses a point here. Remorse is only a precondition for forgiveness if it is sincere remorse. If I’ve hurt somebody, and just say ‘Yup, I did that, oops, sorry, regret that now, please forgive’, I’m not likely to be forgiven. Remorse must be sincere; to be sincere it must be felt. Remorse must hurt the offender. If I’ve hurt someone, and I realize the pain I’ve done, and feel pain myself because of it, that is sincere remorse. And this reciprocal pain is in fact a form of atonement. Atonement in itself is a reparation of a wrong, maybe a compensation in money for a damage inflicted; or a payment in suffering, as in Ian McEwan’s famous novel, where Briony spends a lifetime trying to atone for a crime committed at thirteen. The second form of atonement, where the perpetrator feels pain, and suffers, is the form of atonement that in inherent in true remorse. So atonement and remorse are no opposites, no ‘magical’ versus ‘nonmagical’ undoing, but atonement is a necessary component of true remorse.

What about the first form of atonement? The payback, the scapegoat. The meaning of forgiveness is overcoming vengeance. And vengeance is certainly one of mankinds curses. Wars, vendetta’s, feuds, relational fights: the ‘I’ll get even’ mechanism can be responsible for perpetual conflict. Atonement as a payback is a codified form of remorse: I’ll pay reparations, I’ll sacrifice a goat: it shows I’m willing to suffer in response to a wrong I’ve done. If the payment is substantial, if it hurts me to give this sum or object, I’m showing that I am willing to suffer in response to the suffering inflicted. This codification of remorse makes it possible to atone, and overcome vengeance, in situations where remorse may not do: the other party is to far removed for remorse to matter. In societies without a well-established penal system, such codifications of remorse are the oil that keeps the machinery of society going, instead of stalling through perpetual reciprocal vengeance.

Immaterial atonement - grief - is a component of remorse, material atonement - sacrifice - is codified remorse. True remorse with emotional atonement is fitting between those close to us: friends, lover, relatives. Atonement as codified remorse is fitting for God, or the villagers on the next hilltop.

[EM] The Ethics of Memory, Avishai Margalit, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2002

Recently I’ve been exploring the notion of ‘forgiveness’. Avishai Margalit has devoted a chapter to it in his book ‘The Ethics of Memory‘. The chapter is titled ‘Forgiving and Forgetting’. In it, Margalit makes a distinction between forgiving as ‘deleting’ (text, as in a text editor) and forgiving as ‘crossing out’ (which leaves the original text visible). Forgiving as deleting means totally forgetting the original misdeed: it restores the original relationship between offender and victim, as if the misdeed had never happened. Forgiving as crossing out leaves the memory of the deed intact. Forgiving here is the intention of the victim not to act out of vengeance, i.e. the offense will be remembered, but the offended person will act as if it had not been committed.

Margalit notes aptly that forgiving as deleting is contradictory. It means forgetting the misdeed; and forgetting is something we cannot do intentionally. Margalit compares this to voluntary muscles, such as those in legs and arms, which we can exercise at will, and involuntary muscles such as the heart muscle, which we cannot stop and start at will. Like voluntary and involuntary muscles, there are voluntary and involuntary mental acts, and forgetting is not voluntary. We can strive towards it, try not to think of something, and in due time we may indeed forget it, but we cannot decide to forget.  (I skip the remarks Margalit makes on religion and forgiveness, and the special role of God in religious views on forgiveness - for this I heartily recommend his book.) Like Paul van Tongeren, Margalit notes that forgiving actually entails not forgetting: ‘…forgiveness, which is voluntary, should not be tied to forgetting, which is involuntary’ [EM, p. 203].

Margalit further distinguishes between forgiving as a decision, a policy adopted by us not to act out of vengeance, and forgiveness, as the mental state of having overcome resentment and anger: ‘…forgiveness denotes both a process and an achievement, just as the word work denotes both the process of working and the work that is accomplished’ [EM. p. 205]. This conception of forgiveness as a state of non-resentful inner calm and peace is why we forgive on behalf of ourselves as well as the other, as Margalit concludes.

Next, I’ll explore Margalit’s views on atonement and remorse.

[EM] The Ethics of Memory, Avishai Margalit, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2002

Friday (April 17, 2009) I attended Avishai Margalit’s lecture ‘Comprise and Rotten Compromise’ at the Amsterdam ‘Nacht van de Filosofie‘ (Night of Philosphy). Margalit, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the most interesting living philosophers, so this lecture was a must-see.

Margalit argues that compromise in politics in general is a good thing - even, in his own words, ’shabby, sodden compromises’ can be good because they avoid a worse outcome. Yet not all compromises are good - the exemplar of course is the Munich agreement, in which Chamberlain’s Britain, France and Italy allowed Hitler to annex the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, in return for promises for peace. Why, Margalit asks, are some compromises never good - or, rotten. His answer lies in the nature of the other party. Hitler was evil, and therefore any compromise with him would be a rotten compromise. Hitler in 1938 was not the Hitler of 1945, but still, the nature of Hitler’s Third Reich was clear. If the other party’s regime is inhuman, a compromise with the other party will be rotten. Rotten compromises, according to Margalit, should not be agreed to, ‘come what may’.

If we look at the Munich agreement, of course the dictum ‘rotten compromises must be rejected, come what may’ easily holds. If Britain had rejected the Munich agreement, the Second World War would have started earlier, and since the military build-up of the Third Reich had not been completed at the time, the Second World War probably would have ended sooner, with less casualties and suffering. And even if not, the War would have come anyway. But what if we look at the Yalta agreement, where the Allied powers split up Europe in a Western and Eastern sphere of influence? Stalin, the other party in this compromise, was clearly running an inhuman regime - an evil one. So this must have constituted a rotten compromise. But what was the alternative to the Western powers? Should they have rejected the compromise, and marched on to Moscow and Stalingrad in 1945, unleashing another devastating war on already war-torn Eastern Europe? To phrase it differently, doesn’t the rejection of any compromise, rotten or not, presuppose a reasonable alternative?

I posed this question to Margalit after his lecture. Margalit qualified it ‘a very good question’ and noted he took three chapters in his upcoming book to answer this very question. So, he said, he wouldn’t be able to fully answer it in this session, without summarizing his entire book. Yet he did provide ‘a short answer’. There he used the acute metaphor of a cockroach in the soup - if there is one, we do not take it out and say ‘the cockroach was bad, but the soup is still good’. If, on the other hand, there is a fly in the ointment, we can take out the fly and say ‘the ointment is still good’. At Yalta, according to Margalit, there was ‘a very big cockroach in the soup’.

Still, though this may settle Yalta, I’m looking forward to the larger answer in his book to the general question: doesn’t the rejection of any compromise presuppose a reasonable alternative? Generalizing from compromises, this boils down to question whether politics should take a pragmatic or idealistic stance. Margalit’s outright denunciation of rotten compromises is an idealistic component in a pragmatic political framework. I’m curious whether his book will answer whether this is still tenable when a reasonable alternative is not on the horizon.

Update: Margalit’s lecture is online now. My question is at the end of the interview with him.