Forgiveness

288 Pages·2009·1.39 MB·English

Edited by

Stephen Bloch-Schulman & David White

Forgiveness:
Probing the Boundaries

Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board

Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Dr Peter Mario Kreuter
Professor Margaret Chatterjee
Martin McGoldrick
Dr Wayne Cristaudo
Revd Stephen Morris
Mira Crouch
Professor John Parry
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons
Paul Reynolds
Professor Asa Kasher
Professor Peter Twohig
Owen Kelly
Professor S Ram Vemuri
Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/

The Persons Hub
‘Forgiveness’

Probing the Boundaries

Forgiveness:
Probing the Boundaries

Edited by

Stephen Bloch-Schulman & David White

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2009
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

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ISBN: 978-1-904710-62-2
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2009. First
Edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction

ix
Stephen Bloch-Schulman and David White

PART I
Conceptual Issues

Forgiveness and Moral Solidarity

3
Alice MacLachlan

Why Self-forgiveness Needs Third-Party
Forgiveness

17
Kathryn J. Norlock

The Conditional Case for Unconditional
Forgiveness

31
Jeremy Watkins

Impossible Forgiveness

39
Paul van Tongeren

PART II
Philosophers and Forgiveness

To Exceed the Scene of Economy:
Derrida’s Forgiveness and Responsibility

51
Niva Arav

Forgiving Derrida: From Terrorism
to Self-Forgiveness

61
Michael Strawser

No Freedom without Forgiveness?
The Problem of Beginning and
Postponement

73

Verena Rauen

The Necessity of Forgiveness for the

Public Realm: On Hannah Arendt’s
Public Conception of Forgiveness

83
Stephen Bloch-Schulman

Blessing Those that Curse You: On

Lonergan, Forgiveness, and the
Problem of Evil

95
Timothy Burns

'To Forgive or Not to Forgive': Ibn
‘Arabi and the Qur’anic Hermeneutic
of Forgiveness

109
Qaiser Shahzad

PART III
Personal Experiences of Forgiveness

Transformative Forgiveness: From
Self-healing to Others-healing

121
Gabriela Mihalache

Exploring the Origins of Forgiveness
in Children: An Experimental Analogue
Study

131
Tomoko Yamaguchi and Ian M. Evans

Ginn Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele –
Two Remarkable South Africans on
a Journey of Forgiveness: A View
Through a Transpersonal Lens

141
David Lipschitz

An Exploration of Forgiveness, Empowerment
and the Journey of Healing

153
Margaret E. Smith

“Women can be Surprisingly Forgiving”:
Coetzee's Disgrace

167
Yael Maurer

PART IV
Experiences of Forgiveness and
Communities

Trauma and Forgiveness: Comparing
Experiences from Turkey and Guatemala

179
Ayşe Betül Çelik and Riva Kantowitz

The Place of Forgiveness in Transitional
Justice Practices

191
Neelke Doorn

Forgiveness: Performing the boundaries:
An Investigation of Staged Acts of
Forgiveness in Maxim Biller’s Harlem
Holocaust and Die Tochter

211
Daphne Seemann

(Women) Civilians After Wars: Any
Nation State Asking for their Forgiveness?
223
Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen

Günter Grass: The Forgiveness of Danzig

231
Cornelia Caseau

The Spiritual and Psychological Impact
of Forgiveness on Victims of Violent Crime
243
Barbara Flood and Christina Tomacic-Niaros

Forgiveness and Disclosure Scandals
in Romania

257
Adriana Mica

Introduction

This volume is a collection of papers that were first presented at
Inter-Disciplinary.Net's 1st Global Conference on Forgiveness. The
conference was held in Salzburg, Austria over the course of three days in
March 2008. The conference and this publication are part of a broader
Probing the Boundaries project to explore the various aspects of the nature of
Persons and their experiences. The conference was successful in drawing
academics from a wide range of disciplines as well as several people working
outside academia with a professional interest in the subject of forgiveness.
The diversity of the participants was not limited to their area of expertise, as
they also came to the conference from countries in five different continents,
making it a truly global inter-disciplinary event. The topics that these authors
explored similarly reflect the diversity of significant issues that arise when
considering the topic of forgiveness. We are proud to be able to present their
work in this volume.
In the first part of this book the focus is on various considerations
concerning the nature of the concept of forgiveness itself. Before trying to
look at particular experiences of forgiveness, cases where questions of
whether or not forgiveness should be offered, or the consequences of offering
it, it might be useful to get a better understanding of just what forgiveness
involves, who is entitled to offer forgiveness, and under what circumstances.
In the first paper Alice MacLachlan examines the question of whether or not
third parties - people who are neither victims nor wrongdoers - can be
forgivers. Her argument that they can, is expanded upon by Kathryn Norlock
in the second paper, as she argues that we need to accept the legitimacy of
third-party forgiveness in order to make sense of our ideas of self-
forgiveness. In the third paper, Jeremy Watkins asks whether forgiveness
must always be conditional on certain requirements that the wrongdoer must
meet or whether it is legitimate to at least sometimes offer forgiveness
unconditionally. All three authors reach similar conclusions, each arguing
that third-party forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and unconditional forgiveness
are both possible and sometimes desirable while recognizing that there is
potential for abuse in each case. Part one concludes with a paper by Paul van
Tongeren, in which he considers the provocative idea that forgiveness might
actually be impossible for anyone to grant.

Expanding on and furthering many of the questions that were asked
in the first section, in the second section, authors look at specific
philosophers to ask how they view forgiveness, its possibilities, its meanings,
and its limits. The section begins with Niva Arav’s and Michael Strawser’s
explorations of the aporetic view of forgiveness that Jacques Derrida
proffers. In Arav’s work, the goal is to gain some clarity about Derrida’s
view, which defies much of the conventional meanings of forgiveness (and

Introduction

______________________________________________________________

x

much conventional thinking about meaning). Strawser follows by taking
Derrida to task for his silence after 9/11 on issues about terrorism and his
failure to ask about the relationship between terrorism and forgiveness, and
does so by asking whether we should forgive Derrida this omission. Many of
the questions Arav and Strawser raise, particularly in thinking through the
relationship between forgiveness and the Other, are taken up in the next essay
by Verena Rauen. In her paper, she thematizes these questions, in particular,
by thinking about the time elements of forgiveness, contrasting the
commencement conception offered by Paul Ricœur and Hannah Arendt -
who highlight the role of forgiveness in breaking the logic of revenge - with
the recommencement model of Emmanuel Levinas, who sees forgiveness not
as a break from revenge, but as an infinite postponement of it. Stephen
Bloch-Schulman further examines Arendt’s conception of forgiveness,
placing it squarely in the realm of the political, in a nice contrast to the
hyperbolic view Derrida offers. Arendt, as Bloch-Schulman shows, also links
forgiveness to questions of evil, specifically by asking about what acts are
unforgiveable and how they become so. Timothy Burns looks more deeply at
the relationship between evil and forgiveness from a Lonerganian
perspective, arguing that forgiveness is not necessary for physical evil -
which is merely a misunderstanding on our part because we lack God’s
greater understanding - and that forgiveness is one way that we can remain
hopeful in the face of the evil that humans are responsible for. The question
of the relationship between human forgiveness and the divine is the focus of
the next paper, by Qaiser Shahzad. In his paper, Shahzad argues that the
Qur’anic conception of forgiveness is ambivalent, and he sets out to offer a
plausible and humane interpretation via the writings of the Medieval mystic
and philosopher Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, one that advocates for forgiveness
rather than vengeance as the appropriate response for wrong action, including
for non-believers. Shahzad’s reading of Ibn ‘Arabi is exceptionally timely.
The third part begins with a transition piece, linking Derrida’s
understanding of forgiveness with personal accounts of forgiveness. By
examining the stories of thirteen people who have been victims of seemingly
unforgiveable acts and comparing their stories to Derrida’s account of
forgiveness, Gabriela Mihalache highlights the transformative and non-
calculative nature of forgiveness; she shows how these people have moved
from the passion of suffering to a limitless compassion through an expansion
of consciousness, an opening up, which affects the one who forgives wholly
and sacredly. Tomoko Yamaguchi and Ian Evans examine the nature of our
conception of forgiveness by looking at the question of how children learn to
understand what forgiveness is and how they learn when to forgive and when
not to. David Lipschitz sets out to determine the difference between healthy
and unhealthy forgiveness in his piece by examining the stories of Ginn
Fourie and Letlapa Mphahlele through a transpersonal developmental lens.

Introduction

______________________________________________________________

xi

Writing as a White South African, he finds in these two - one, the mother of a
victim of violence, the other, the man who planned the violence that killed
her daughter - exemplars worth considering and emulating. Margaret Smith is
also concerned about a victim’s development, and is focused on what she
calls the “third injury,” which she understands as the “survivors’ dilemma
about how to think about and behave towards those who harmed them.”
Smith ultimately asks whether forgiveness empowers the victim or, rather,
that those victims who become empowered are able to forgive and thus that
the “third injury” requires empowerment rather than forgiveness to heal the
victim. Yael Maurer offers a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, taking up
the question about the possibility that art can allow for forgiveness or
redemption, where it would not otherwise be possible. She shows that, in the
novel, it is possible, but in rather unexpected and “strange” ways.
In the fourth part, the question turns to forgiveness at the community
and national scale. The first article, co-authored by Ayşe Betül Çelik and
Riva Kantowitz, draws conclusions through a comparative analysis of
forgiveness and reconciliation as a response to violence in the Guatemalan
and Turkish contexts. These authors highlight differences in the two cases -
e.g., the way external power has impacted these nations, the importance of
political legitimacy in moving past these acts of violence - as well as
similarities, e.g., in the relationship between the government and military and
how it led to more violence in both cases and how the perception that the
perpetrators acted out of their own volition affects the ability of others to
forgive. Neelke Doorn is also focused on the possibility for former victims
and perpetrators to learn to live with each other, and she does so by rejecting
forgiveness
as
an
appropriate
political
aim,
advocating,
instead,
reconciliation built on engagement and relational wholeness and which
therefore, she argues, requires structural justice. Taking up questions about
the lingering trauma of the Holocaust, Daphne Seemann uses the work of
Maxim Biller to examine the complex symptomology that is passed down to
the children and grandchildren of both perpetrators and victims. This offers
her a lens through which to examine the expectation of forgiveness and the
guilt that continues to haunt, even generations after the violence has ended. In
her article, Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen gives voice to the survivors of the
US war in Vietnam to show how the violence, never apologized for,
continues to haunt and traumatize, arguing that “war atrocities are too
disabling to be let go of without proper processes of assessment and healing.”
Cornelia Caseau turns our attention away from what is not apologized for and
what is not forgiven to the case of Günter Grass, who apologized and, Caseau
argues, received forgiveness in the enacting of an eightieth birthday party
held for the author by the city of his birth, Danzig. Barbara Flood and
Christina Tomacic-Niaros show the importance of communities and
community rituals for forgiveness by examining communities within the

Introduction

______________________________________________________________

xii

United States that have undergone category-shattering violence, including the
shootings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. Even as they find
that forgiveness is a personal act, they see the way the community can foster
the personal change that is forgiveness. Finally, Adriana Mica examines
disclosure, lustration, and decommunization in post-Communist Romania,
paying particular attention to political parties and to the Romanian Orthodox
Church in order to examine how communities try to face up to – and try to
avoid facing up to - the past.
Adriana Mica's paper concludes this volume, but it is not the end of
the examination of the subject of forgiveness. The success of the 1st Global
Conference on Forgiveness and the fact that there are still many more
dimensions of the subject of forgiveness to explore led to the decision to
make this conference an annual event. In future years we are hopeful that
gatherings like the one in March 2008 will be similarly successful by
broadening the discussion of forgiveness and deepening the discussions that
have already begun. We are also optimistic that such events will lead to
future publications so that this volume will eventually be the first in a long
series of publications on the subject of forgiveness. We are therefore proud to
present this volume as the first installment in that series.

Stephen Bloch-Schulman

David White

PART I Conceptual Issues