The standpoint of forgiveness

Pessimistic Hegelian ruminations

Forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting. They're actually different and incompatible attitudes toward time and history. Forgetting is an attitude of indifference toward the past. What was or what took place is nothing to me. It slips away into oblivion, so to speak. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is a determinate attitude toward the past. When I forgive you, I freely dissolve the connection between you and the deed by means of which you wronged me. I literally alter the significance of your action so that you are no longer bound to it in a way such that you are guilty. What the action was, it no longer is. The action itself does not cease to be or to have taken place -- that's the difference with forgetting -- rather, the meaning of it is changed, as is your relationship to it. I freely free you from that action.

But since the action occurred in the past, by forgiving you, I have changed the past. The deed of forgiveness works retroactively, so now you and I have a new history together. (Again, forgetfulness is just the oblivion of history, not the creation of a new history. It is abstract, immediate negation, not determinate negation.) Stuff following from this ability to change the past:

1. Time cannot be an empty container in which things merely move forward in a linear fashion. Past, present, and future exist in dynamic relationship with one another, their significances altered in their being by actions after the fact. History -- the mere concatenation of otherwise unconnected facts -- is itself grounded in "historicity", which is history as lived, significant history, forever alterable retroactively by human actions. It is not mere history but rather the history of the present, the history of my self, what I am in my very being.



2. Whatever the past is, it is not fixed. The past only manifests on the basis of human action in the present, but that action has the power -- at least in the case of forgiveness -- to freely alter the past. This means that, if God exists, and he wishes to know what will happen and what will have been, He has to wait for us to figure it out. This means that humans are more powerful than God. If you believe that God is merely a projection of the human imagination, then it turns out that humans are even more powerful than they themselves imagined. Indeed, nothing is more powerful than forgiveness. Unfortunately, it is difficult to wield.



3. Without God, it is difficult to imagine what there is outside of human beings, the communities they form, and the commitments they make to one another over time. If forgiveness is the highest expression of the power of the human spirit, then the standpoint and power of forgiveness is the standpoint and power of the absolute.



4. Forgiveness, however, is nothing but a special way of relating to the past and of relating other people to it. Therefore, the standpoint of the absolute is a standpoint with respect to history, what has gone before, and what has passed away, and it is a way of recognizing its significance for the present. The absolute standpoint, then, is just a self-conscious community that recognizes itself as a community of the living and of the dead. It is a community that has come to recognize a relationship with the past and with the dead that is now satisfying. It is the community that has learned to properly mourn. It is the community that has learned how to bury the dead rather than just forget the dead.



5. But what's at stake in burying the dead is nothing less than the boundary between human culture and nature. Burial was supposed to be a way of reclaiming the boundary between culture and nature (life and death) as a cultural boundary. In learning to mourn, that boundary is taken up in a way that is finally satisfying. It's the reconciliation within life of the opposition between life and death, between the meaningful and the meaningless. Life can go on after loss and tragedy.



6. This lesson can only be learned by means of loss. The power of loss is the power of the negative. The path of negativity and loss is the path of despair. It is the path along which we tried. We tried very hard to make things work, but they didn't work out. We get to the end of life, and we realize we did the best we could. To be able to reclaim that history of mistakes in a way that is meaningful is tremendously difficult. We either seem to have the pain, or we seem to have the false sense of satisfaction that goes along with thinking that a meaningful life comes from having enough money, the right job, the perfect wife or family, etc. There's an unmediated opposition between the unexamined life and the life so painful that we wish we had never begun to examine it. There's no guarantee that the path of the negative will end with a "Yes", with reconciliation. There's no guarantee that forgiveness will be forthcoming. We may never find release from the things that we've done, and so we have no choice but to walk the Earth like Oedipus, trapped within empty, "Kantian" time.



7. And yet, we still occupy the standpoint of forgiveness. We've not approaching the absolute asymptotically. We're not infinitely striving after it. This is it. We've always been there. We live in absolute knowing, entirely unrestricted by any things in themselves or other bogeymen of the philosophers. It's just not that interesting or great. Philosophy can't teach you how to forgive. It can't tell you what you should do. It can't tell you who you should marry or what kind of life you should live. Knowing is far less interesting than anyone ever imagined. Philosophy is disappointing. It's inherently tragic. It's tragic in the sense that the struggle to discover transcendent or transcendental foundations upon which we can know or upon which we can be certain we're engaging in the right kind of action has a tendency to lead to unbearable disappointment.

The highest point we ever reach -- the standpoint of forgiveness -- is one where you and I reluctantly say "Yes" to one another. We don't even do it enthusiastically. That would probably require us to forget the pain between us. But we can't do that. We can't go back to being children. We can't go back to a time before you and I did these things to one another. We can't go back before the hurt and the damage. So what are we left with? We have to do something constructive with all this damage. We have to philosophize amongst the ruins of a disastrous past, a history of calamity and destruction that makes up the fabric of who we are. We have to rearrange these fragments in a way such that we can go on living, and yet we don't really know how we're supposed to do that. The only way is forward (that is, into the past), but we're making it up as we go along.