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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.
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.
Introduction: Marguerite La Caze, Situating Forgiveness Within
Phenomenology
Part I: Experiences of Forgiveness
1.Shannon Hoff, The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession,
Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action
2.Nicolas de Warren, For the Love of the World: Redemption and
Forgiveness in Arendt
3.Simone Drichel, “A Forgiveness that Remakes the World”: Trauma,
Vulnerability and Forgiveness in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas
4.Peter Banki, Hyper-Ethical Forgiveness and the Inexpiable
Part II: Paradoxes of Forgiveness
5.Gaëlle Fiasse, Forgiveness in Ricœur
6.Jennifer Ang, Self-Forgiveness in the Gray Zone
7.Antonio Calcagno, Can a Community Forgive? Edith Stein on the
Lived Experience of Communal Forgiveness
8.Geoffrey Adelsberg, Collective Forgiveness in the Context of
Ongoing Harms
Part III: Ethics and Politics of Forgiveness
9.Matthew Sharpe, Camus and Forgiveness: After the Fall
10.Daniel Brennan, Václav Havel's Call for Forgiveness
11.Karen Pagani, Toward a Heideggerian Approach to the Problem of
Political Forgiveness, or The Dignity of a Question
12.Ann V. Murphy, Phenomenology, Crisis, and Repair
Marguerite La Caze is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her publications include Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics, (2013) The Analytic Imaginary (2002), Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (2003) and articles on a range of European philosophers.
The diverse essays comprising Phenomenology and Forgiveness
together form a rich resource for anyone who wants to explore the
intellectual and moral challenges encapsulated in the idea of
forgiveness, whether they are committed to phenomenology or not. At
the same time, as Ann V. Murphy argues in the book's final chapter,
there is a kind of synergy between forgiveness and phenomenology.
It is on this basis that one can also say that the book shows the
potential phenomenology still harbors for remaking the world.
*Robert Bernasconi, Pennsylvania State University*
At its best, philosophy enables us to understand basic dynamics of
human existence in a new way. Such is the contribution of these
essays, which show how problems of forgiveness are fundamentally
embedded in interpersonal relations, in the possibilities and
challenges for education, recognition, respect and solidarity. This
timely volume engages with phenomenological reflections on the
experience of harms and the possibility of forgiveness in concrete
historical situations, including the extreme violence of the
Holocaust, colonialism, and totalitarianism. In exploring the
experiences, paradoxes, ethics and politics of forgiveness, these
essays provide an excellent overview of phenomenological and
existential philosophy, including recent discussions of critical
phenomenology as a practice of liberation.
*Robin May Schott, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for
International Studies*
Phenomenology is often falsely accused of detailed abstraction
detached from critical social engagement. This book demonstrates
the opposite, as its pages are ripe with seasoned insight that
forces the steady hand of philosophical engagement back into the
messy reality of the everyday. Yet it reaches as deep as it does
wide into the well of phenomenological reflection, retrieving for
its readers innumerable insights into some contemporary matrixes of
opposition germane to the topic of forgiveness: exile and amnesty,
alienation and solidarity, trauma and grace, impunity and
punishment, shame and innocence, justice and permissiveness, truth
and moral ambiguity. With careful engagements in the lives of
especially 20th century thinkers steeped in times of atrocious
wars, the book leads its readers to see that phenomenology's
struggles with death and rebirth, and with the hope for new
beginnings in the plasticity of consciousness, are in a certain
sense also struggles with the courage, ambivalence, or rejection of
forgiveness itself.
*Jason Alvis, Research Fellow, External Lecturer, Institute for
Philosophy, University of Vienna*
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