Accepting or forgiving
On the axis: Relation to the past · a wrong suffered
To stop carrying a wrong one has suffered, is it enough to accept it as a fact of the past, or must one forgive the person who did it, a gesture addressed to someone that acceptance cannot replace?
Justification
Forgiveness answers a difficulty proper to action: it is irreversible and unpredictable. Forgiveness releases from the first, the promise from the second; no one can forgive or bind themselves alone, these are faculties of plurality. She credits Jesus of Nazareth with discovering forgiveness and frees it from its religious frame. She also narrows its range: it bears on everyday trespasses, it remits the deed for the sake of the person who committed it, the passage from Luke she comments on ties it to the wrongdoer's repentance, and it stops short of what she calls radical evil, which can be neither punished nor forgiven. It is this limit that sets against her: for him, forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable.
It is […] 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.The Human Condition, §33
The Human Condition, §33-34 (1958)
The philosophers positioned on the axis “Relation to the past”, over time. Hover a dot to read its name.
This problem's anchors
Anchors: Arendt
leads to: Forgiveness (Undoing the irreparable)