The Shape and Sense of Forgiveness

FACULTY OF THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS

STUDIES

The Shape and Sense of Forgiveness: A Study on Paul Ricoeur’s “Spirit of Forgiveness”

Athesispresentedinpartialfulfillmentof therequirementsfortheDegreeof AbridgedBachelorofArtsinTheology andReligiousStudies

Promoter by

Prof.Dr.Yves DE MAESENEER

ClydRexJESALVA

Recommended Citation:

Jesalva, Clyd Rex, and Yves De Maeseneer. “The Shape and Sense of Forgiveness: A Study on Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Spirit of Forgiveness.’” KU Leuven. Faculteit Theologie en Religiewetenschappen, 2022.

Abstract: The essay describes, analyzes and synthesizes the ‘spirit’ of Ricoeur’s philosophy of forgiveness. It attempts to articulate, albeit in broad strokes, how Ricoeur accounts for the meaning, dynamics, and dimensions of forgiveness, which he held to be ‘far from being easy but humanly possible nevertheless.’ The first section provides some biographical and intellectual contexts to shed light on crucial background presuppositions at work in his account. The second section offers a sketch of his philosophy based on a close-reading analysis of a selection of fragments on forgiveness. The essay illustrates how the fragments contain three distinct ‘shapes of forgiveness’: (1) a circular shape, which describes “the process-event” of forgiveness the journey and stages of forgiving, which reaches its climax in our hearing of the voice of forgiveness; (2) a triangular shape, which speaks of the various “human acts-works” of forgiveness performed in dialectical tensions between polarities in constant mediation; and, lastly, (3) a quadrilateral shape, which illustrates the larger “existential-eschatological horizon” that reveals and grounds both the gaps between beggar and grantor and that between the “depth of our fault” and the “exalted reality of grace of forgiveness” that calls for receptivity and generosity of the human heart. The third section offers a critical appraisal of his insights, discussing how his account positively or negatively affects our understanding and praxis of forgiveness. The paper frames its points in four Cs: Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness (a) clarifies its elements and anthropological vision, but (b) ‘messifies’ and complexifies our understanding of it through dialectical method, (c) challenges us with difficulties even as it (d) cautions and corrects us about common potential abuses and pathologies inherent in our forgiveness-praxis. The paper concludes with a reflection on Ricoeur’s hopeful message about the promise of a ‘possible though difficult’ forgiveness for wounded and broken selves and human world a togetherness and selfhood to come.

1. Introduction

1.1.

Making Sense of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of the most interesting yet widely misunderstood phenomena. People of different colors, cultures, and creeds have in one way or another grappled with the work of forgiveness at some point in their lifetimes. Recent decades have also witnessed sustained scholarly engagement on the topic by thinkers, theorists, ethicists, professional psychologists, counselors, educators and family therapists, community and religious leaders and even business company administrators. Some may have successfully managed to commit their thoughts and reflections to writing, while most people simply go through and perform it as it confronts them. It may seem widely valued and admired, even romanticized, but it is not necessarily widely practiced, much less examined and interrogated. Considered as a noble and admirable response to moral damage and grave forms of violence and injustice1, and closely associated with guilt arising from acknowledged moral wrongdoings, forgiveness never fails to fascinate, interest, and disturb us.

What does it mean to forgive? What sort of conditions does it impose upon its practitioners, and what sort of sanctions are there for those who resist or refuse to even try enacting it? How should one forgive? Or, better put, is there such a thing as a ‘good’ or ‘right’ way to forgive? These questions may be as old as the question of guilt and, perhaps, of human being and cultures themselves. While there may have been a number of major contemporary philosophers, theologians and scholars who wrote on the “what” of

1 See Joram G. Haber. Forgiveness. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991. esp. 39. Haber conceives of forgiveness as our response to violations of our moral selfhood.

forgiveness, mostly from Jewish, Christian, or secular traditions with religious cultural background2, a few of them have focused their philosophical lens on the “how-why”3 of a core dimension of forgiveness, such as, for example, what Miroslav Volf calls the ethos of “right remembering” 4 which lies at the heart of the event of forgiving.

Extrapolating from various essay fragments of the 20th century French philosopher, Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur (1913-2005), known simply as Paul Ricoeur, the present essay aims to sketch out and articulate his philosophy of forgiveness in response to some of these abiding questions concerning forgiveness. Without implying that his proposed way is necessarily ‘the best’, ‘the right’ or ‘the only’ way of understanding forgiveness, the essay attempts to survey, analyze and schematize Ricoeur’s fragments on forgiveness with the hope of illuminating what forgiving means and entails according to Ricoeur and how his account is adequate and relevant.

1.2. Description: Objectives, Research Question, Scope & Limitations, Thesis & Method

This essay aims at two main objectives: (1) to synthesize and articulate the key insights on forgiveness in Paul Ricoeur’s account as captured in selected fragments, and, (2) to engage in evaluative reflection on the relevance and/or problem, if any, of Ricoeur’s philosophical views.

The essay’s main question is: how does Paul Ricoeur approach and account for the dynamics, dimensions, and conditions of forgiveness? Although focused on the “how-why” aspects, the question inevitably addresses as well the “what”, i.e., the meaning and interpretation attempted by Ricoeur. To guide us in discussion flow, the paper is divided into three sections: (1) the first part discusses the background and general context of the thinker’s philosophical writings on forgiveness, (2) the second part is an attempt at a synthesis of his

2 Some examples of these 20th century scholars and recent thinkers include: Donald W. Shriver, Jr. An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996; Clive S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1996. esp. Ch. 7.; Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness. Trans. Andrew Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Anthony Bash. Forgiveness and Christian Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Charles L. Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Martha Craven Nussbaum. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

3 Scholarships written on “the how” abound in recent decades and tend to come from the field of psychology and psychotherapy. See, for instance: Robert D. Enright and Joanna North. Eds. Exploring Forgiveness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; Michael E. McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, and Carl E. Thoresen. Eds. Forgiveness: Theory, Research and Practice. New York: Guilford Press, 2000; and Everett L. Worthington. Forgiveness: Psychological Theory, Research and Practice New York: Routledge, 2006. From a theological perspective, there is, e.g., Roger Burggraeve. "The Difficult but Possible Path towards Forgiveness and Reconciliation." Louvain Studies 41, no. 1 (2018): 38-63.

4 Cf. Miroslav Volf. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdsmans Publishing Company, 2016.

positions and interpretations on the dynamics and structure of forgiveness, and (3) the third and final section is devoted to a brief critical reflection on the promises and problems in his account of forgiveness.

Using primary texts in dialogue with secondary literature, the essay discusses and schematizes the dynamics and dimensions of Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness. At the heart of our essay is a proposal to synthesize his account using 3 schemes heuristically referred to as ‘shapes’. Such threefold ‘shapes’ embedded and discernible in them offer us a key to approximate and decipher the complex forms of forgiveness, which, in the end, poetically resist the neatly cut descriptions of forgiveness and evokes the messy, poly-formal, and paradoxical meanings of forgiveness. Each of the shapes corresponds to a “sense”, i.e., a message and meaning that clarifies even as it complexifies, challenges, and cautions.

Among the major limitations of the essay are its reliance on a selection of six (6) fragments on forgiveness that vary in length, in depth and in complication, and on the panoramic character of the portrait of Ricoeur’s notion forgiveness. In other words, the essay is simply an approximation and does not and cannot aim to provide detailed and exhaustive descriptions of his biography and historical works, much less of his complex and wideranging philosophy. It also seems tricky and unfair, if not impossible, to associate his ideas and insights with just one or two major works, which one could reasonably presume to provide enough, or complete and exhaustive documentation. As we shall later see, Ricoeur himself openly confessed and embraced the sense of “incompletion” of being, his life and of all that he was, said, done and has written.

1.3. Context and Rationale for Resources: Selected Fragments on Forgiveness

As many Ricoeurian scholars and commentators would admit, surveying Ricoeur’s voluminous and prodigious works can prove to be daunting by reason of their multiplicity, diversity, density, and complexity. Thus, arriving at an accurate and full account of his notions in such a short period and essay-work is impossible. Be that as it may, his discussions and writings display characteristic subtlety and nuance, clarity and ambiguity, complication, charm, and rare creativity. One would notice upon close reading that his insights seem to grow, deepen, sometimes even teasing and receding as in wavy seawater at a sunny shore to hide from our grasp only to return with an even sharper and intensified clarity of insights in the succeeding lines. Such is true in the case of his progressively developing insights on forgiveness, which stand on and can indeed be traced back to his earlier writings like his work on the nature of mystery and paradox in G. Marcel and K. Jaspers, or to his dissertation on the question of the will and the phenomenon of tension between what seems involuntary and that which is voluntary in human acting; or to the Fallible Man and Oneself as Another, which contain core and more developed insights on his philosophical anthropology.5

5 Paul Ricoeur. 1986. Fallible Man (The Philosophy of the Will). Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press; Paul Ricoeur. 1992 [1994]. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. London & Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Below is a brief contextual description of the selected fragments used. Their main titles will be referred to henceforth using italicized capital letters of major terms they contain. The works below are arranged based on the dates of the conference event itself, the French originals, and the English publications.

a) Love and Justice (LJ) [1990]. Originally published in 1990 and 1991 and then republished in 1996, “Love and Justice”6 is one of Ricoeur's seminal articles. In it, he develops critical insights on the meaning of “dialectic” and the two “logics,” namely, the “order of justice” and the “order of love,” understood here in the sense of St. Paul’s notion of “Caritas.”

b) Reflections on the New Ethos for Europe” (NEE) [1992] This English version, translated in 1996 by Eileen Brennan, was published in 1992 under the original French title, ‘Quel éthos nouveau pour l’Europe’. 7 Here, Ricoeur proposes three practical mediations that should be allowed to address European citizens’ ethical and socio-historical imagination, namely, (1) “translation ethos”, which involves double hospitality, i.e., linguistic and narrative hospitalities, respectively, (2) reverential and truthful “exchange of memories” via (re)narration, and (3) a particular “model of forgiveness” which is “touched” and even “motivated” by the “order of charity,” and capable of resisting merely political calculations that remain entrapped within the logic of “reciprocality and justice.”

c) Can Forgiveness Heal? (CFH) [1995]. Written and published in French on MarchApril 1995 and then re-published in 2000 in its English translation, Ricoeur’s “Can Forgiveness Heal?”8 essay is actually a conference lecture delivered at the Temple de l’Etoile, Paris, devoted to the theme “Is God Credible?”

d) The Difficulty of Forgiveness (DF) [1999]. Famously known as the “Donnellan Lecture,” it was delivered by Ricoeur and collated in 1999 for an International Conference at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. “The Difficulty of Forgiveness”9 is

6 Paul Ricoeur. 1996 [1995a]. “Love and Justice” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. Ed. Richard Kearney. London: Sage: 23-39. It appeared in the journal Philosophy & and Social Criticism. Vol. 21, issue 5-6, pages 23-39 (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE). But the much earlier versions are found in: Liebe Und Gerechtigkeit = Amour Et Justice. Ed. Oswal Bayer. Tubingen: Mohr, 1990 and “Love and Justice” In Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion, ed. Werner G. Jeanrond and Jennifer L. Rike, 187-202. Henceforth to be cited as LJ followed by the pagination.

7 Paul Ricoeur. “Reflections on the New Ethos for Europe” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. Ed. Richard Kearney. London: Sage: 3-13. [Paul Ricoeur, ‘Quel éthos nouveau pour l’Europe’ in Imaginer l’Europe, sous la direction de Peter Koslowski (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1992) 107-119]. Henceforth to be cited as NEE followed by pagination.

8 Paul Ricoeur. 2000 [1995b]. “Can Forgiveness Heal?” (Trans. J. De Vriese) in Anckaert, Luc, Jacques De Visscher, Hendrik Opdebeeck, Paul Ricœur, and Jef Van Gerwen. The Foundation and Application of Moral Philosophy: Ricoeur's Ethical Order. Morality and the Meaning of Life 10. Leuven: Peeters, 2000. [French Original: Paul Ricoeur, “Le pardon peut-il guérir?”, in Esprit, n° 210, Mars-Avril, 1995]. Henceforth to be cited as CFH followed by pagination.

9 Paul Ricoeur. 2004a [1999]. “The Difficulty to Forgive”in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Maureen Junker-

considered “the first English text” capturing “a new stage in the relationship between his philosophical and religious thinking.”10 Jürgen Werbick comments that “The Difficulty of Forgiveness” served as Ricoeur’s “prefiguration”11 of his last major work, Memory, History and Forgetting

e) Epilogue in Memory, History and Forgetting (EMHF) [2000]. Initially published in French in 2000 under the title “La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli” and then in English in 2004 under the present title Memory, History and Forgetting12 this Epilogue of that six-hundred-page book is by far the longest fragment containing a sustained elaboration of his philosophy of forgiveness.13

f) Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi (DRA) [2003]. This transcription14 published in 2005 emerged from a transcribed and edited interview in 2003 at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, between Paul Ricoeur, who was at that time nominated as first recipient of Central European University’s honoris causa doctorate award, and the Romanian historianprofessor Sorin Antohi (1957 present) from the same university. The work was transcribed and edited by Mona Antohi and subsequently translated in English by Gil Anidjar.15

1.4. Paul Ricoeur: Brief Remarks on a Long Life, Some Contributions and Notable Works

Kenny and Peter Kenny. Religion, Geschichte, Gesellschaft: Fundamentaltheologische Studien 17. Münster: Lit Verlag: 6:16. This is also known as the “Donnellan Lecture” held at Dublin, Ireland. Henceforth to be cited as DF followed by pagination.

10 Maureen Junker-Kenny’s “Introduction” in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny. Religion, Geschichte, Gesellschaft: Fundamentaltheologische Studien 17. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. 1.

11 Jürgen Werbick’s “Foreword” in Introduction in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny. Religion, Geschichte, Gesellschaft: Fundamentaltheologische Studien 17. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. ix-x.

12 Paul Ricoeur. 2004b [2000]. Memory, History, and Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago/ London. The University of Chicago Press. [Original French: P. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000]. Henceforth to be cited as EHMF followed by pagination.

13 See similar works devoted to Ricoeur’s work: Maria Duff Paul Ricoeur’s Pedagogy of Pardon: A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting. London and New York: Continuum, 2012; Abdelmajid Hannoum. "Paul Ricoeur On Memory." Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 6 (2005): 123-37; Jonathan Tran. "Emplotting Forgiveness: Narrative, Forgetting and Memory." Literature & Theology 23, no. 2 (2009): 220-33.

14 Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi. 2005 [2003]. Memory, history, forgiveness: A Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 8 (1): 8-25. Henceforth to be cited as DRA followed by pagination.

15 Ibid. DRA, 8.

Gifted with a lifespan of ninety-two years, Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur (1913-2005) became known as one of the most prominent 20th century French continental philosophers.16 Born in 1913 in Valence, France, and taken under the care of his grandparents after being orphaned at an early age, Ricoeur grew up with a strongly Protestant upbringing and a biblically literate family background.17 Before the marriage that would bore him five children, he was trained in the tradition of existentialism and phenomenology at the Sorbonne, Paris, having been inspired and influenced by Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)18. He was then drafted for military service by the late 1930s and became a war prisoner under the German forces in the early years of the Second World War. Biographers and scholars on Ricoeur reveal that his captivity period was creatively spent immersing in German philosophical tradition, particularly in the works of Karl Theodor Jaspers (1883-1969), and eventually after the war in those of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).19 Although influenced by Hegelian-Kantian tradition and insights from Freud and Nietzsche, Ricoeur co-appropriated their legacies with his phenomenologicalexistentialist heritage, wand without ever silencing the background voice of Judeo-Christian thought. The post-WWII period was, for the most part, a time of enormous intellectual creativity for Ricoeur with prestigious academic appointments at various universities in both Western Europe and North America, for instance, at the Le Cahmbon, the Universities of Strasbourg and Paris, the Sorbonne, in Montreal in Canada, the Universities of Louvain, of Chicago and Yale in the United States.20

From the middle to the final quarter of the 20th century and despite the disruptive events in France in May 196821, Ricoeur eventually managed to successfully publish his significant and influential philosophical oeuvre, including his foundational works on Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers on Mystery and Paradox, his thesis on the Philosophy of the Will: The

16 Stephen H. Clark has writtenoneof the earliest anddetailedsurveys of Ricoeur’s works and intellectual biography Cf. Stephen H. Clark. 1990. Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge. 1-12 (Introductory Chapter), esp. 2. For more comprehensive account of the life and contributions of Ricoeur, consult also: Charles E. Reagan. 1996. Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

17 David Pellauer. 2007. Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed. London/ New York: Continuum. 86. Ricoeur’s religious upbringing and commitment as a Protestant Christian have undoubtedly shaped his philosophical options and fundamental attitudes. For example, his resistance to reductive anthropologies from positivistic, materialistic and existentialist origin, and his sense of mystery and transcendence in his philosophical style may arguably be traces of his personal faith, which he could not conceal from his readers or interlocutors, but which, as philosopher, he would not readily and explicitly claim for reason of intellectual honesty.

18 Lowe, Introduction to Fallible Man. Lowe discusses the influence of Marcel on the Ricoeur’s sense of the whole and mystery, the “ambiguities”and “opacity” (Lowe’s words, xi-xii). See also the Introductory chapter by Karl Simms. Paul Ricoeur. 2003. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

19 Ibid. Clark, Paul Ricoeur, 2.

20 Karl Simms. Paul Ricoeur. 2003. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group; See also Prefatory in Paul Ricoeur. 1984. The Reality of the Historical Past. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee. [no pagination indicated for the preface].

21 Pellauer, Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed. 1-4, esp. 3.

Involuntary and the Voluntary22 in 1950s, the Fallible Man and Symbolism of Evil in the 1960s, and then the Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies on Creation of Meaning in Language, Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another and History, Memory and Forgetting between mid-1970s and the late 1990s.23 His intellectual contributions are no doubt vast and wide-ranging. However, he was singularly notable for developing “hermeneutic phenomenology” that dialogically incorporates insights and questions from the triple stream of existentialist, critical, and analytical traditions. Ricoeur’s influence transcended the domain of his field expertise, which extends to biblical exegesis, history, and literary theory and criticism, interpretation and narrative theory, discourse criticism, psychology and psychoanalysis, legal and political theories, metaphor studies and linguistics, inter alia 24 Their nuanced, rigorous quality and fresh relevance for other disciplines are undisputed. Walter J. Lowe, for instance, describes Ricoeur’s works as “rich in texture, expansive in scope and indefatigably exploratory in character” and his philosophy as being resistant to any “tidy summary.”25

Ricoeur’s articulation of forgiveness exhibits traces of philosophical influence from his old intellectual guides and companions, especially from the early years of his professional career. His methodological approach and attitudes are primarily marked by Husserlian analytic fidelity, if one may describe it that way. Although he rejects eclecticism and analyticism in view of their reductive tendencies, he appears to practice a certain fidelity in the reception and reading of other thinkers’ works and ideas, preserving, even liberating, the latent richness and depth of meaning of thoughts and experiences. Another noticeable attitude typified by Ricoeur may be termed Marcelian mysticism since his work on forgiveness, particularly on its relation to self’s identity, strives to practice reverential critique and intellectual homage to the transcendent, the stranger and the mysterious dimension of beings and the whole of reality. Ricoeur may also be described as “a philosopher of paradox” given his suggestion that reality and humanity are thoroughly paradoxical, which is not equivalent to being conflictual, "disjunctive,” or mutually exclusive as in a dilemma-structure.26 Given his immersion in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works and other Greek tragic narratives, his creative rhetorical strategy of using poetic, tragic, and paradoxical language is unsurprising. But what is admirable and uniquely his is how he tempers his philosophical thinking, especially on forgiveness, with these other sources of moral and spiritual energies. Another philosophical influence in his fragments is the Jasperian notion of man’s “on-the-way-ness,” which inclines him to see human beings and

22 Paul Ricoeur. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. Don Ihde and Erazim V. Kohárk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2007. [1966, trans. Erazim Kohárk]

23 Due to limitations in space, Ricoeur’s philosophical works spanning nearly five decades cannot be exhaustively documented and listed herein.

24 Cf. Karl Simms. Paul Ricoeur. 2003. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

25 Walter J. Lowe, “Introduction” in Fallible Man (The Philosophy of the Will). 1986. Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press. vii.

26 EMHF, 493.

human life as a movement itself, suspended in an active ongoing process of becoming, a pilgrimage towards some state or higher and greater aspiration, and the sense of ‘the human’ as at once being mediated and mediating.27

As his works and methodology can attest, Ricoeur’s philosophical approach and attitude may be described as “irenic” and “non-deprecatory,”28 which may hint at the kind of person and scholar he was. Looking at the trajectory, tonality, and dynamics of his argumentations, one can sense his principles and general attitudes, which explain his philosophical options and stances. His signature methodology is stubbornly and unapologetically dialectical. His intellectual attitude may be markedly conciliatory, appreciative rather than arrogant, cynical, or dismissive, a conciliatoriness which makes him no less incisive, critical, and intelligent On the contrary, his is marked by a striving for respectful, fair, and charitable interpretations of other works, avoiding the seductive ease of reductive, unilateral interpretations of experiences, opinions, or theories indeed enacting love, justice, and solicitude in thought and writing. Gifted with rare intellectual creativity, rigor, depth, and patience, his general philosophical approach to forgiveness, as in other themes, may be described as “unwaveringly humanistic”29 given his critical-realistic appraisal of the human condition and being. Lowe suggests that Ricoeur’s humanism may be viewed as a ‘resistance of yes-no ’ : “Saying ‘yes’ to the fullness of the human means pronouncing a resolute ‘no’ to each of the various forms of reductionism, which would constrict or deny the reality of human freedom.”30 In short, it can be described as critical yet creative fidelity to the mysterious, paradoxical, and complex possibilities of human beings and life in their organic integrity and interconnectedness or at least a desire and effort to remain open and responsive to the truth about the human condition, which addresses, attracts, and escapes us.

1.5. ContextofRicoeur’s Thought-Trajectory on Forgiveness

Paul Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness is challenging to chart and neatly map out. It always creates a feeling of either being surprised or lost in an adventure into a thick forest and wilderness. First, from the standpoint of his position on forgiveness, the challenge consists of noticing possible refinements, deepening, subtle corrections, and even recantations in his significant views, given the historical progression of his thought. The fragments are likewise replete with subtle distinctions, nuanced and textured meanings, and

27 Morny Joy, Introduction in Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, xxv.

28 Walter J. Lowe, Introduction in Fallible Man, viii.

29 Walter J. Lowe, Introduction in Fallible Man, viii and ix: LowedescribesRicoeur’sworkasprofoundly humanistic in and through the interpretation of human experience for his search for “notionofbeingwhich is act rather than form, living affirmation, the power of existing and making exist”. See Paul Ricoeur. 1986. Fallible Man (The Philosophy of the Will). Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press.

30 Ibid. Walter J. Lowe, Introduction to Fallible Man, viii; see also ix: “to accomplish a mediation of conflicting viewpoints the philosopher needs to have some anticipatory sense of the whole, some general notion of how the various isolated aspects fit together.”

poetry, sometimes with dry and detailed analytic elaborations that paradoxically clarify and complexify.

Second, from the standpoint of the larger context of this thought namely, the personal, historical, and intellectual aspects, one could also wonder why he thought the way he did and how he arrived at his positions. In the Epilogue of HMF, Ricoeur confessed that his insight into “the eschatological horizon” in relation to his major work on history, memory, narrativity, and identity came as ‘an afterthought of his re-reading.’31 This horizon is undoubtedly one of the clues for understanding his position on forgiveness. Necessary is our attention to several dialectics: the dialectic between his life experience and his faith world, the dialectic between his personal history and the more extensive history of his family, native country, and continent, the debate on his experience of being an accomplished scholar and the ‘incompletion’ and ‘under-progress’ state of his philosophical projects through the years. An appreciation of his insights calls for an appreciation of their multi-layered contexts, not only of the books, which is briefly done above, but also of the person and his struggles.

In this regard, therefore, several contexts could be mentioned as potential aid for approaching his thought without implying these were its causal determinants32: first, one may keep in mind Ricoeur’s experiences of happy, edifying childhood and his grown-up memories of being loved by grandparents, his marriage and raising five children, but also his significant personal tragedies that are entangled with them; for instance, the death of his parents when he was a child, the death of a sibling, losing his child, Olivier, to suicide, and the death of his wife. Such mixture would have intensified his appreciation for good relationships and their value for human selfhood; second, despite such tragedies, his Protestant Christian faith vibrantly witnessed to by his grandparents and family provided some orientation and consolation for him, which might shed light on the potential import of his religious horizon, e.g., the Protestant emphasis on sin, guilt, and grace, on redemption and salvation, or the fundamental goodness of human creature; third, the history of European wars, the role and defeat of the French people during WWII, the memory and legacy of colonization and revolutions all of these most likely served as fertile loci for his own reflections magnifying his evolving interests and deepening reflections on the psychology of the will and decision-making, narrativity and narrative identity, memory, history, and forgetting, the losses and legacies of the historical violence and conflicts marking and marring European memories and the histories of the subjugated; and, fourth, his philosophical commitments, which sometimes led him to disagreements with other theorists on forgiveness, and, lastly, the meaning of being human; for instance, his criticisms on the “autonomous individual” presupposed in Rawlsian political liberalism and his insistence on the inner relational-personal dialectic of the “ipse-identity” and the “idem-identity” within

31 EMHF, 494.

32 Information regarding his personal life mentioned herein can be found in an excellent personal and intellectual biography on Paul Ricoeur by Charles E. Reagan. Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago Press, 1996.

human selfhood, or the case of his proposed alternative conception of a non-market-driven giving that made Derrida’s “aporeticism” on the notion of gift and forgiveness appear unnecessarily radical and reductive; or the positive philosophical influences on him like the Marcelian alertness to “being and mystery”, the Hegelian “dialectical synthesis”, or the Jasperian’ notion of “limit-condition” and human ‘on-the-way-ness.’

Noticing these relevant contexts and persisting in the task of re-reading his texts somehow permits us to imagine and enter into his world and perceive not only the recurrent patterns indicating the general trajectory of his thought on forgiveness but also the critical contexts and horizons in which it was thought, enacted, and suffered, as it were.

1.6. ThreeS’s: Key to Understanding Ricoeur’s“(Hyper)Ethics of Forgiveness”

Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness rests on several presuppositions and fundamental convictions about the human being and the human condition. Although the fragments can only offer us a limited sketch of Ricoeur’s view and his anthropology, and despite our risk of oversimplification here, one could try to discern and approximate the vision underlying his works on forgiveness before delving into the details of his account. We ask: how might we better approach Ricoeur’s view on forgiveness?

Ricoeur’s philosophy of forgiveness embedded and scattered in the selected fragments may be appreciated by looking at the key components he repeatedly mentioned. I propose that one be guided by summarizing them under three S’s: (1) the setting-horizon of forgiveness, (2) the ‘subject(s) of forgiveness,’ and (3) the operative Spirit of forgiveness. This triple-S hopefully can synthesize the anthropological vision underpinning his philosophy of forgiveness.

First, the setting horizon consists of the field, the backdrop, and the situation in which the subjects of forgiveness find and perceive themselves. The setting here is not necessarily construed as place-time, but in the sense of placement-situation and horizon, that field and condition that human beings did not create themselves and cannot abolish, escape nor renounce, but in which they are everyday confronted with their existential and personal condition. This 'placement-situation’, if we may describe it in this way, serves as “givens and limitations”33. In his text-fragments, Ricoeur affirms many of these settings-placementsituations which serve as horizons, including existence, temporality, historicity, embodiment, narrativity, relationality, fallibility, fragility and compositeness, mystery and paradoxicality, life and death, the transcendent, the other and that which is to come (the eschatological). These conditions given and limiting as they are for us enfold us, rendering us ‘powerless’ or ‘in-capable,’ and thus, creating the sense of the impossible, a negation of possibilities, at least for the beings that we are. This “setting-horizon”, which he names at the start of his Epilogue of MHF: Difficult Forgiveness, is described as “receding” given its seeming resistance to human grasp, calculation, management, and control. They

33 EMHF, 458. On this point, Paul Ricoeur follows Jean Nabert’s category of the existential “givens” and Karl Jaspers’ category of the “boundary-situation”.

can neither be done nor undone since they are not within or subject to human freedom and prerogative. They are simply there to be acknowledged as present and available, confronting, addressing, resisting, approaching, and defying us, even as they embrace, inhabit, shock, and support us.

Second, ‘the subject(s) of forgiveness’34, that is, the human persons that are enacting (working through) and ‘suffering’ (going through) forgiveness. The subject is enfolded and embedded in the first S just described, i.e., the placement-situation-condition. This subject is not an object or a lifeless thing but a self-conscious being that is embedded and conditioned. Ricoeur can be described as a “philosopher of action and possibility” because of his emphasis and confidence in human possibilities and action. For Ricoeur, following Aristotle’s metaphysics, human selfhood may be affirmed as fundamentally constituted by “act-potency,” which he creatively appropriates by construing it in a dialectical dynamic like being and becoming in a constant pendulum-like movement of interplay or exchange 35 This dialectic, for Ricoeur, is not only epistemically operative but is ontologically, and thus, ethically and politically manifested. It is the principle of change and development, and thus of the ‘convertibility’36 which Ricoeur never explicitly speaks about but is nevertheless implied in his discourse on the human person as a “capable-incapable” and “active-passive” being. The human being is designated as a being characterized and conditioned by actingsuffering, desiring, conscious-intending, remembering-forgetting, thinking and understanding, willing and feeling, imagining, believing, hoping, loving, speaking, listening, mourning, narrating, interpreting and meaning (taken as a verb), responding, promising, giving-receiving, suffering and relating. Ricoeur recognizes and takes seriously many of these in his works, but we must name and see them as intimately identified with, even predicated of, human persons. When Ricoeur describes forgiveness as “personal” rather than institutional, he also suggests that all these “capabilities and incapabilities” are similarly affirmed, albeit implicitly, because they all get into the very dynamic of forgiveness.

All these instances of human ‘possibilities-activities’ found in the fragments are entailed in the event of forgiveness. Unless we grasp this constitutive reality of the human subject, the dialectical self, his philosophy of forgiveness would not make much sense. Without affirming and attending to them, one would not be able to understand Ricoeur’s ‘forgiveness philosophy,’37 which espouses an image of the human being as dialectically and relationally constituted. This means that the human being is marked through and through by an inescapable dialectical tension between polarities into which they cannot be reduced simply without losing their own being and identity. This tension makes the human being capable because of the dialectic of act and potentiality operative in the person. At the summit of it all, Ricoeur affirms forgiveness because forgiveness is a sign of our relationality our

34 Stephen H. Clark. 1990. Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge. 31. Clark notes how Ricoeur prefers to focus on the subject, that is, the subject, rather than the object, that is, the act.

35 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 91.

36 This aspect of human convertibility (capable for conversion) deserves further exploration.

37 One could also argue that it is ‘spirituality’ and not mere philosophy.

constitutive relationality and the relationality that we express in our relationships with others. Richard Kearney describes Ricoeur’s anthropology of action in terms of “detours, " that the self may only come to itself “in and through an-other self”.38 In Oneself as Another, commenting on conscience as ‘dialectic of self-other’39 and the dialectic relation of “SelfOther,” Ricoeur argues that the self and the other are polysemic and irreducible, such that the self is not merely the self and the other is not simply the other person.40

The third S is the “Spirit of Forgiveness,” the mysterious, strange other. Ricoeur sometimes speaks as if he is personalizing or anthropomorphizing forgiveness by referring to “it” as “Spirit”41 endowed with agency and voice. Ricoeur presents Spirit only through its “presence,” which is its “act” and its “work” (e.g., work of forgiveness). Using “work” more often to refer to the dynamics of forgiveness, Ricoeur appears to invoke it in the Arendtian sense of “work,” as contrasted with “act” and “labor,”42 in order to highlight the “presencial” character of work that is, begging for forgiveness in the now, which is also the moment when the Spirit of Forgiveness addresses us.

If the “setting-horizon” and the “Spirit of forgiveness” are not at all dependent on our own power-action, and if, even our own subject with all its conflictive-dialecticalpersonalities that escape our self-grasp and self-mastery, it all makes sense to settle with the optative mood as the fitting language and mode of discourse for forgiveness and no longer with the imperative mood which commands and orders, but in the subjunctive-optative mood which says: “I wish, I desire”—or much better, “I beg.” It is likewise in this sense that Ricoeur recognizes selfhood as being structured as a wish itself.43 I am a wish myself, the wish and desire that I am. In this regard, in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur even speaks of friendship as “the wish to live well with and for others.”44 I am a “wish”, a “desire-to-be”45 ,

38 Richard Kearney explains the “central conviction of Ricoeur in his Introduction in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, 1-2, esp. 1: “The shortest route from self to self is through the other”; “…the self is never enough, is never sufficient unto itself, but constantly seeks out signs and signals of meaning in theother”(1). Kearneywrites,“Noapproachtomeaningcandispense with detour. […]This“hermeneutic detour” is pursued in“fidelityto ontology” which “must always remaintruncated—provisional, tentative, a task rather than a fait accompli, a wager rather than a possession” (1). Kearney calls to mind Ricoeur’s image of “promised land” which can be “glimpsed before dying”; “The way of “appropriation must always go through the way of “disappropriation”, “belonging” “through distanciation”, ‘self-retrieval through the exodus of oneself-as-another’ (1). “This return to self (moi) to itself (soi-même) also carries with it an additional charge: a call to action” and “summons” that are both “poetic responsibility to the alterity of sense” and “an ethical responsibility to other sufferers and supplicants” (1-2). For Kearney, Ricoeur’s “desire to be (exist)” (désir à être) consists in “ontology of action” (ontologie d’agir) by the subject (2).

39 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 296.

40 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 317-318.

41 Ricoeur usesthis name, likeHegel’s “Absolute Spirit”, butwithout conceiving itin logical, conceptualtheological or explicitly religious sense.

42 Cf. Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958.

43 EMFH, 496. Ricoeur writes, “…[T]he reflexive moment of memory culminates in the recognition of oneself in the form of a wish.”

44 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 183.

45 EMFH, 491. Ricoeur calls this “desire to be” or “to exist”.

a longing, a “plea” or ‘song’46. It is striking to note, however, that optative mood also bears the language of hope, of prayer, as in “May you”, “I hope…”. It is precisely because of this sense of not being completely capable and of being confronted with the reality of that which we cannot program according to our preferences, designs, or desires that Ricoeur prefers to speak of forgiveness in a wishing modality, which is also a praying mode, strikingly enough.

2. The Shape and Sense of Ricoeur’s “Spirit of Forgiveness”: Schematic Approximations

The following section describes the “overall spirit” of Ricoeur’s philosophy of forgiveness. ‘Shape’ refers to its emerging form based on the elements involved in its dynamic process, while ‘sense’ refers to its meaning based on Ricoeur’s texts. The task of catching a spirit and seeking to contain it in a small bottle, as it were, has always proven to be tricky and daunting. The fragments seem to work like a lego puzzle that one needs to carefully examine and synthesize without needing to suppress the unique angles, voices and concerns in each fragment. Our analysis of the six fragments, however, provides us with a crucial observation that also serves as necessary caution. Reducing Ricoeur’s views from one fragment into the other is difficult and potentially distortive of both the original shapes that have taken form in individual fragments and, thus, distortive of the general Spirit of Ricoeur’s approach to forgiveness. Although they contain recurrent and redundant elements when compared with one another, they also seem to contain significant differences, which explains the impression of polyformity i.e., the shapes. His key ideas have sharpened over the years in terms of depth and breadth of concerns concerning the problem of forgiveness. Although they contain certain variations, they converge and coincide in their general “spirit” and even mutually clarify and complement each other.

Yet despite the risks noted, the essay proceeds to synthesize his evolving visions of forgiveness by using the heuristics of shape, since Ricoeur’s scattered insights and complex discussions may somehow be brought together, more or less reconciled and translated into visualizable shapes that capture its sense and dynamics. Thus, the essay proposes to imagine Ricoeur’s “spirit of forgiveness” as consisting of distinct shapes.47 Individual fragments appear to contain unique forms, highlighting one or more aspects of the dialectical dynamics of forgiveness. Thus, they are not to be understood as being mutually exclusive nor are they different types of forgiveness; rather, they are ways of imagining the one and the same act and event of forgiveness.

46 See also Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, 351. Ricoeur speaks of “the voice of conscience” no longer as the “commander” or the “imperator”, but the “plea” of a singer, a “cantor” which appeals, invites and draws us closer without resorting to force.

47 These multiple forms are not readily apparent in texts considered, although Ricoeur mentioned triangularity or circle in completely different context. The quadrilateral shape was never mentioned, but may be discernible for those familiar with the fragments. This last shape highlights the horizontal and vertical exchange in forgiveness.

The first shape is based on the “double itinerary” of “sailing out” and “sailing back” journey of forgiveness in the searches for an “appeasement of memory” and the freedom from the guilt and the fruit of becoming through graced struggle of forgiveness; the second shape is based on ‘dialecticities’ and ‘sub-tensionalities’ in his philosophy, while the third shape emerges from the cross-point of two irreducible movements and directions representing the “horizontal” and “vertical” polarities.

Furthermore, each of these shapes represents an aspect of forgiveness central to Ricoeur’s understanding: (1) The circle describes “forgiveness as a process-event” in which the self (the guilty aggressor or resentful, wounded victim) goes through stages; (2) the triangular shape describes the actions, specifically requires for confrontation and performance in the act of forgiveness; and (3) the quadrilateral shape describes the intersecting planes and existential-eschatological horizons of the act and event of forgiveness namely, the vertical difference between fault’s gravity and the elevation of the gift of forgiveness and the horizontal distance between beggar-grantor of forgiveness. Below, I discuss in detail the threefold shape of forgiveness in Ricoeur.

2.1. The Circularity of Forgiveness

The circular shape of forgiveness largely explains Ricoeur’s metaphorical images of “route,” “travail,” and “sailing” describing forgiveness. The images richly connote a sense of adventure, uncertainty, and risks, the double movements of “embarking-returning” and “going-arriving,” seeking, confrontation, and surprise. Ricoeur’s shorter essay, The Difficulty of Forgiveness, and the longest fragment, the Epilogue from History, Memory and Forgetting, inspires the circular movement of forgivenes Ricoeur’s account emphasizes forgiveness as an event that one participates in and a process one goes through (hence, suffers). The circle shape consists of the “two routes” (“itineraries” or directions), each one being the reversal of the other (see Schema 1. Ricoeur: Circle of Forgiveness). However, it is projected and imagined like a terrain existing outside of the human self who “wishes” and “begs for forgiveness”48; it actually describes what transpires

48 Ricoeur speaks of “begging” as his preferred posture in forgiveness. It indicates his modest anthropology insofar as it asserts more on the incapability of the human self to bring about forgiveness on one’s own initiative, powers and interior resources. A beggar is vulnerable, dependent, but is endowed with a range of capabilities and competencies.

within the selfhood. In self-recognition, this inner terrain is situated in the setting of one’s memory, historical-temporality, fallibility or, rather, fallenness given the guilt and fault, and of a sense of dialectical-tensional-relationality of oneself. In this interior journey, five ports are identified: (1) “remembering,” (2) “forgetting,” (3) “guilt,” (4) “being together,” and (5) “historical violence.”49 The first and second routes of the journey go through these five “successive stopping-points,” which Ricoeur also describes as “way through obstacles”50 or “stages,”51 albeit in reverse order. The self is delivered to these ports for a work of selfconfrontation, five hurdles through which the self must go and endure in the search and wish for possible forgiveness.

In this first route in the interior adventure, Ricoeur first points to the givenness of oneself, who takes on the “posture of asking for forgiveness.”52 Forgiveness is described as an “event,” but Ricoeur also affirms it as a “personal act,” which is also ‘addressed as a request to another.’53 The self is ridden with the “burden of debt,” a sense of guilt that prods one to “wish for forgiveness.”54 The beggar-self begins to ‘embark’ on a sailing journey in this first route, a departure from one’s secure land. Overwhelmed by a strong sense of “impossibility of forgiveness” on account of the gravity and “depth of one’s fault” and guilt, the beggarself moves out and suffers through a series of “stopping stations”, which are said to be “continuous and discontinuous” and, paradoxically enough potentially helpful and obstructive.

In the first stage, the person engages in the difficult “work of remembering,” which involves “full recognition of the past and of ourselves.”55 Here, Ricoeur discusses a certain tensive dialectic of “mneme” (remembering) and “anamnesis” (recollection), which then complicates the dynamics of remembering. The work of forgiveness requires not only partial or selective retrieval of “lost memories” (anamnesis), but an active workout or exercise of “active remembering”, that is, a work of “recognizing” the truth of the past and of oneself.

49 DF, 6.

50 DF, 6.

51 DF, 15.

52 DRA, 9. This posture of “begging” (beggar) is confirmed and explained in Antohi’s interview with Ricoeur, who clarifies that his approach to forgiveness in his Epilogue, is not the referring to posture of “forgiving others” but to “asking for forgiveness”, a more modest, humble and vulnerable position to accept and assume. Begging suggests deep desire and longing for something if not desperation. See also another fragment CFH, 35-36: “begging for forgiveness” and the Epilogue itself in HMF, 478.

53 DRA, 9. This can mean several points: only persons can beg for forgiveness, and institutions cannot, in principle, seek or bestow forgiveness, since it is not a subject of memory, guilt, fallibility and relationalagency. Institutions and structures merely derive their ‘personal’ dimension from the persons they are intended to serve and mediate. See also, EMHF, 487: Forgiveness is always done in the presence of others, in a “plurality”.

54 EMHF, 346. Ricoeur prefers to describe forgiveness not as a command or a moral obligation, but in the optative mood of a “wish”, a desire expressed without any sense of guarantee or assurance of its fulfillment or a consoling and liberating response. Incidentally, this mood also seems to include prayer, which is subtly different from begging, asking, requesting, because of its sense of un-assuredness and open-endedness.

55 DF, 7

Thus, the truth is the first source of challenge for forgiveness. Ricoeur acknowledges the possibility of ‘manipulating memories’, of “using” and “abusing” them, especially when individuals refuse to remember more fully and truthfully. For Ricoeur, genuine remembering involves double-operation of right “remembering and mourning”56, which should resist repression, denial, and obsessive repetitions, which, in reality, fail to lead us on further in the journey. For Ricoeur, remembering should be accompanied by what he calls “work of mourning”, or grieving, described as “strenuous process of negotiating with the loss of the so-called objects of love”.57 This is challenging since one cannot remember without at the same time getting stricken once more by loneliness, or hurt, which explains the inability or rather, the unwillingness of many wounded selves to even get past this stage. Yet, for Ricoeur, an honest and courageous recognition, i.e., fair, honest acceptance and ownership of the past memory, however hurtful, is non-negligible and non-negotiable component of forgiveness. Forgiveness, if at all possible, does not work to manipulate or by-pass the truth to shield or insulate oneself from the stings of existential and personal guilt. On the contrary, it stands on the truth of the past and of ourselves recounted and admitted in a certain way. In other words, the first stage of forgiveness is truth-confronting, truth-telling, and memoryhonoring stage, whereby the injustice done is recognized, admitted, and named as part of one’s story and identity, and where truth can become liberating. The spontaneous breaking of a graced memory begins to heal the faulty memory.

The second station is the zone of forgetting. Admitting the “ambiguous” character of oblivion, Ricoeur notes some ways of construing “forgetting”, such as the “destruction of the traces”, or an attempt to “select” memories and stories to acknowledge and tell others out of a naturally “self-defensive” attitude from hurtful or unpleasant memories of the past.58 In the end, forgetting becomes a form of strategic evasion of wounded or haunting memories that actually call not only for recognition but also for a conscious working-out. What Ricoeur seeks to communicate is that the possibility of forgiveness necessitates a certain mode of interpretation and praxis of forgetting, which honors and preserves the truth of the past recovered in the first stage. In another fragment, he speaks of this in terms of injunction, a “duty to remember” (devoir de memoire).59 To forget is not to delete or deny, but to intentionally make sense of the memories in a different light and through a different lens. Truth grounds justice, and the duty to seek truth precedes our duty to remember. Ricoeur even warns of the forfeiture of forgiveness in the practice of amnesty, which is ‘moral amnesia’, involving systematic and institutionalized forgetting and dispensation from truth and moral acknowledgment and “judgment on evil done and suffered”.60

The third station is the difficult and heavy confrontation with one’s guilt, in which the beggar of forgiveness, finds himself or herself. For Ricoeur, guilt is intimately part of who

56 DF, 7.

57 DF, 7.

58 DF, 8.

59 DRA, 18 and 19.

60 DRA, 10.

we are, such that it remains indissoluble and indissociable from us.61 It is precisely in this “guilty conscience” that we experience the weight of the “debt” and “woundedness”, which forgiving targets to heal in the first place. For Ricoeur, guilt is the “wound at the core of selfesteem”.62 Guilt prevents us from becoming peacefully at ease with who we are. Ricoeur even points out that it is not the “illness of memory” that one wishes to eliminate, but the nagging sense of guilt after the fault has been committed, recognized and admitted.63

The fourth station is the site and sight of a broken bond, a shattered “being-together” (“mitsein”). For Ricoeur, since we are thoroughly and ontologically relational, guilt is the sign of “evil” manifested in the form of “harm” or “injury” inflicted upon our relationships with others.64 Although Ricoeur recognizes that harm may be totally inevitable because we are “condemned”, so to speak, to act and to being acted upon, he warns us of more insidious form of harm, that is, the deliberate “offending [of] the self-esteem of others”. 65 Ricoeur complexifies the situation by pointing to the question of inflicting harm on a guilty-other as a form of penalty to be done in the name of “justice”, which, Ricoeur suspects, needs to be disentangled from vengeance and must be “humanized”66. Strikingly enough, Ricoeur does not attempt to resolve this dilemma (although elsewhere he simply pleads for what might be called his “ethics of consideration”67 for the guilty one as part of the ‘humanization of justice’68). He simply argues that punitive logic is in apparent collision with logic of forgiving.

The fifth station is the confrontation with historical violence brought about by the “enemy”, real or imagined. Ricoeur cautions us to beware of “culture of death” generated by “friend-enemy” thought-dynamics and fueled by “unforgetting of wounded and haunted memories” 69 Certain communities are challenged by memories of the ‘unforgivable’ and rule out the live option of forgiveness. Some people and nations can exhibit stubborn resistance to break-free from bifurcation of “glory-humiliation”70. They only see themselves

61 DF, 8. Ricoeur writes, “The link between guilt and selfhood is so tight that it is not seen as possible to tear out guilt without destroying selfhood”.

62 DF, 8.

63 DF, 8.

64 DF, 8. In OAA, Ricoeur holds this “self-esteem” as central to the dynamic of friendship, solicitude, and justice.

65 DF, 9.

66 DRA, 9. Here, Ricoeur warns of tendency to over-penalize, or to reduce justice to mere retributivism, or the logic of retaliation, which is also marked by reciprocity and exchange.

67 EMHF, 457. Thisethics of“consideration”isnotquiteelaboratedupon, butisrecurrentinthefragments examined. This notion of consideration bearsclose resonances with careor “solicitude” foundin the latter Chapters of the Oneself and Another. Interestingly, Ricoeur considers this “consideration” as an “incognito of forgiveness”, a breaking in of the Spirit of forgiveness in the administration of ‘just’ penalties. In fact, for Ricoeur, forgiveness-seeking requires not only openness to forgiveness being denied, but also openness to just penalties being exacted.

68 Cf. DRA, 9. Ricoeur speaks of “consideration” for a perpetrator to be exercised in administering acts of justice.

69 DF, 9

70 DF, 11.

in “victor-loser” terms and frame of understanding. One could imagine the case of intergenerational or communal transmission process of stories and memories that replicates and amplifies pain, suffering, hatred and prejudice, which hampers the fragile journey of this possible forgiveness.

The Hight-Turning-Point: In-breaking of Sense of Hope from the Spirit of Forgiveness. At the most tensive end and summit of the first route, Ricoeur recognizes that there is “a foreign voice” announcing: “Nevertheless…”.71 The mid-point which is also the high-point72 and turning-point of the journey is precisely this experience of the discreet, gentle “low-key voice”73 announcing the ‘strange there-ness’74 and the availability of forgiveness. The fallible, guilty and suffering self that wishes and begs for “forgiveness” is finally addressed by the “voice of forgiveness”. He describes this “non-mute voice” that disturbs and breaks into our guilt-ridden and hatefulselfhood.Taking the formof “hymn,praise and celebration” and without indicating the agent behind the voice, it addresses the guilty self with the consoling news proclaiming the availability of forgiveness: “…there is forgiveness” (“Il y a le pardon”).75 Resolutely declining to engage the dialectic of “forgiveness-repentance”, Ricoeur simply notes how one should ‘not polemicize the paradoxical’ in the theological affirmation of “the unconditionality” of forgiveness and of the “response” requisite in the form of repentance.76 To refuse to ‘polemicize the paradox’ is to preserve the tension between the unconditional gift of forgiveness and the “response of repentance”. He also merely floats the tricky question on repentance being a possible precondition or a possible effect of forgiveness without resolving it: does (should) it precede or follow forgiveness? It is here at this stage that the other fragment, the Epilogue, could point out how the “height” or “altitude” corresponds to love seen as ‘condition’ of a possible forgiveness. Ricoeur sees forgiveness as a gift made possible by love.77 Sparingly and merely

71 DF, 10.

72 In this fragment, DF, there is no explicit mention of the elevation or “Height of Forgiveness”, which in the Epilogue, is identified with the “Order of Charity” (468), hence, “Height of Love”.

73 DF, 17.

74 DF, 10. See also an illuminating comparative analysis and discussion on Ricoeur’s Lecture “The Difficulty to Forgive” by Maureen Junker-Kenny. In a book chapter article titled “Memory and Forgiveness—Two Itineraries” in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur (2004a), Junker-Kenny describes this voice, this “illété” in Ricoeur’s Epilogue, which means “originating from elsewhere” (40).

75 EMHF, 467; DF, 10. The reason Ricoeur does not bother indicating the “agent” behind the voice or the affirmation of forgiveness is the possible diversity and multiplicity of sources of forgiveness. It can come from any person, or from God. For him, the question of the “subject behind the granting of forgiveness, is secondary.

76 DF, 10. Ricoeur writes: “…to preserve from a polemical stance the highly problematic side of the following paradox: on the one hand, forgiveness is unconditional: it comes before any expectation, any petition. It is a gracious gift, a gift without return, an undeserved and unreserved gift. On the other hand, forgiveness calls for response, for which it is useless and may be harmful to wonder whether it precedes or follows forgiveness, which like love, “remains”. This response has been called techouva in Hebrew, metanoia in Greek, “repentance” in our western culture which speaks Hebrew, Greek and Latin.”

77 Ricoeur’s response to Derridean aporeticism andidea of“impossible gift”and“impossible forgiveness” is this Christian (Pauline) notion of charity. As James Voiss notes, Derrida tends to highlight the “object”

suggestively, Ricoeur speaks of “the order of charity” which overcomes and “excuses all things”.78 This reluctant but subtle appeal to the ‘strangeness and otherness of Love’ is what seems unique in this account of forgiveness, despite the fact that he never wishes to speak theology, dogma or religion in his philosophical reflections. In fact, if we return to Ricoeur’s other and much earlier text, Love and Justice (LJ), although it does not treat of forgiveness per se, one discovers there that Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness points to the order of charity, which is described as “logic of superabundance, generosity, excess, and extravagance” and the impetus “motivating”79 not only justice but also forgiveness. In this sense, that forgiveness is the ‘incognito of love, precisely.

The Return Route: The perception, the conviction, and indeed, the hope and wish for possible forgiveness embolden the subject of guilt to persist and endure in the journey of return-route. Ricoeur then announces the other-half of the journey, the “sailing back”80 route through the same series of stations towards a “possible forgiveness”.

From station five, the self proceeds in the reverse order backwards, but retaining the same sequence of the stations from the fifth back to the first, where one has departed. After encountering the “voice” announcing the possibility of forgiveness, the beggar reconfronts the same reality of historical injustice, but this time with the hope and consolation that comes from recognizing and perceiving the “hymn of forgiveness”. 81 The self continues to persist in the wish and desire for a possible forgiveness. Here, Ricoeur speaks of “normalization” of relationship, sundered, wounded and broken by the fault, but which is now manifesting as an undercover, or as he calls it, an “incognito of forgiveness”.82 Although Ricoeur leaves this “incognito of forgiveness” under-elaborated, he seems to imply that a certain quiet event of returning to ‘normal relations’ likely takes place which effects a “reversal of the logic of death” and chooses the “wish to win together”.83 Although the repentance that ushers in relational normalization may not be compelled, Ricoeur affirms that people who are ethically

or “act” of forgiving, which still remains the standpoint of powerful grantor or dispenser of forgiveness, while Ricoeur shifts into the subject of forgiveness, particularly, the beggar. For a discussion on this difference between Derrida and Ricoeur’s forgiveness notions; see James Voiss, SJ, Rethinking Christian Forgiveness, pp. 14-27, esp. 18-26. See also comments from Richard Kearney “Forgiveness at the Limit: Impossible or Possible?” in What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in 20th Century: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair McIntyre. Ed. Fran O’ Rouke. Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2013. esp. 305: “…thereis no way for Derridato transmitor translate between the conditionaland the unconditional. There are no criteria, mediations, [or] orientations. Pardon is at best a leap in the dark, a form of insane guesswork or indiscriminate decision.”

78 EMHF, 468-469. Ricoeur follows St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13).

79 LJ, 28. Love is seen even as ‘affecting’, ‘organizing, moving, and commanding’ the order of justice, the realm of reciprocity, calculation, exchange of equivalence. See also NEE, 11: ‘motivational, daring momentum’.

80 DF, 11. Ricoeur calls it “second sailing.”

81 DF, 11.

82 DF, 11.

83 DF, 11. Ricoeur describes the “incognito” of forgiveness as its trace or manifestation, “the only available approximation of forgiveness.”

oriented towards the “good life” naturally might aspire for some form of ‘normalization’ after violent-conflicts from the past.84

The “hymn of forgiveness” also impacts the Fourth Station, with the sense of human bond and relationship that was broken and wounded. For Ricoeur, to forgive is to never forget the “evil suffered or committed”, to narrate one’s story without the tone and trace of hatred, resentment or anger in the direction of an “appeasement of memory”.85 Since the work of dialectic of memory, mourning and forgetting still remain in force, Ricoeur points out the challenge posed by a “punitive logic” that feeds on anger, which is the mother of resentment, “retaliation and revenge”.86 Thus, for Ricoeur, the evident sign of forgiveness is the effort at ‘dissociation of justice from feelings of anger-driven vengefulness’.87 When successful, this de-coupling could usher in already the Spirit of forgiveness within the justice-agent that would determine and administer the penalty. Such pardon could also promote civic harmony and “care for the good health of the city” and its political life.88 Thus, it is clear that Ricoeur does not in principle reject the ethically legitimate instrumentalization and calculation for the common good of human community.

In station three en route to selfhood, the self confronts guilt with the question of a possible forgiveness. Then returns the question of the ineradicable guilt, which marks the fragile self. On this region, Ricoeur simply re-asserts the ‘faith in the human capability’, the possibility of “conversion” in which a guilty person strives to become a better person. Concerned with the unconditionality of forgiveness, he also affirms that the same unconditionality should be extended to the question of repentance, since it is “not at all a condition of forgiveness”. Ricoeur points out that, repentance, after all, “is not tied up to an instant, to suddenness” but constitutes the “meaning of a whole life with its ups-and-downs, itscrises but also itsquiet display.”89 Ricoeur recognizesthe “mysterious”and “paradoxical” character of repentance, which can be a “cause” or “effect” that strangely corresponds to forgiveness, although he reminds us of the ineradicability of “guilt”, which no repentance, however sincere, can extinguish, and the eradicability of debt when lifted in the work of forgiveness.90

Ricoeur complicates this stage by further citing two constraints confronting the work of forgiveness, which are imposed by the temporality on our human action, namely, “irreversiblity” and “unpredictability” 91 The irreversibility of acts pertains to the fact that

84 DF, 11.

85 DRA, 11.

86 DF, 12.

87 DF, 12.

88 DF, 12.

89 DF, 13. Ricoeur writes: “If there is forgiveness, then it remains, that is, it allows no before and no after. It is our response which occurs in time; but if we assume the paradoxical nature of the correlation, repentance also is not tied to an instant, to suddenness; it is the meaning of a whole life with its ups and downs, its crises but also its quiet display.”

90 DF, 13-14. Ricoeur speaks of a “shattering [of] the debt”.

91 DF, 14.

what we have done cannot be undone.92 Yet Ricoeur also points to the possibility of conversion of the “meaning of debt” without seeking to undo the action that generated it. In this context, forgiving has two tasks at hand that concerns the past liberative and (re)interpretative. In the context of interpersonal forgiveness, according to Ricoeur, forgiveness would thus mean not only relieving the other from the onus of debt from the past, but also ‘re-interpretation of its meaning’.93 For forgiveness also is concerned with futurity in its promise-structure: the task of commitment whereby one “binds oneself in a promise”. It is a promise and re-commitment to goodness. Ricoeur then points out what emerges as simultaneous tasks of “un-tying and tying”, “unbinding and binding” in the work of forgiveness.94 Forgiving another is enabling the other person to make promises again to regain one’s capability for being and becoming, for meaningful action and relationships.

The Second Station en route to selfhood concerns the question on the forgetting, now understood in the context of dialectical relation of remembering-forgetting-forgiving. Aware of the abiding need to counter the temptations of indifference and apathy, denial, flight, complacency, neglect, pretense, or blindness, Ricoeur again introduces an inner dialectic within forgetting that guards it against the perversions of oblivion. Ricoeur argues that forgiving does not exclude forgetting, but requires a certain form, or rather, an interpretation of forgetting within the work of forgiveness, which he even calls “art” of “good oblivion” that complements “good remembering”.95 Such interpretation of forgetting concerns the question of imputability, whereby forgiving now means conscious refusal to conduct and calculate by “addition and subtraction” and by “accounting, counting and reckoning”.96 The faults are duly preserved, recognized and accepted, but never calculated. The more one calculates the number or measures the gravity of fault, the more likely one becomes indisposed and unable to forgive oneself or others. In his characteristically existentialist language, Ricoeur beautifully puts it, thus: forgiving engenders “lightness of existence, and divine freedom from worry.”97 He also speaks of “memory as care”, which he describes as being “open to the past”98, to the expectation of the future, and the attentiveness to the present.

Ricoeur then finally arrives at the point of departure which he describes in terms of possible “homecoming”—the First Station. The work of remembering has now been touched by the “hymn” and “voice” of forgiveness—a task made possible, available, difficult but interminable. Ricoeur reiterates the “inner resistance” ineradicably and unavoidably contained in the dynamics of memory itself.99 Hence, Ricoeur speaks of “re-memoration” or

92 DF, 14.

93 DF, 14.

94 DF, 14. Here, he speaks of “binding-unbinding work in forgiveness”.

95 DF, 14.

96 DF, 15.

97 DF, 15.

98 EMHF, 505.

99 DF, 15.

“work of memory” signifying active present-ness and immediate-ness of the task to remember the “truthfulness” of “the past, especially of the victims”.100 Since our memory cannot be programmed, compelled, or totally directed, there is always a work of “mourning over the loss of the claim to constructing a story of our life without lacks nor gaps.”101 For this reason, Ricoeur acknowledges the “inextractable” and the “irreparable” in human life and the endless triangular task of remembering, mourning, and forgiving.

The Irruptive “Extra-Factor: Grace”. Towards the end of the long journey, Ricoeur, above all, adds one crucial element to the triple task of forgiveness: the “grace” of “cheerfulness, gaeity”.102 Throughout this long journey of forgiveness, grace is present. This grace breaking into one’s guilty selfhood and life, however, still belongs to the realm of the other, the eschatological and the strangely Other, as further clarified by Ricoeur’s Epilogue. Forgiveness, even at this stage, is not yet and not at all a result of the self’s mastery and decision-making, but remains to be a constant “wish for a happy and peaceful memory” 103 Ricoeur speaks of the possibility of “reconciliation with ourselves”104 an affirmation of who we are as relational agents, how we were and what we are capable of becoming. In this circle of forgiveness, at the end of the long, winding journey, we may find ourselves possibly “coming home” to ourselves, becoming at peace and at home with time, with our stories and identity, and with others.

Ricoeur, clearly, does not wish to leave the impression that forgiveness in the end dependsonthehumanperson’sefforts. Ultimately, and despite our efforts and wishing, there remains no guarantee in its arrival. The grace of forgiveness arrives and comes to us in its own terms and time. As Ricoeur notes, we may be “capable” but we are not “masters of time”, and certainly not sovereign “masters even of our actions”105 In the end, his discourse on forgiveness ends on the note of otherness, on a sense of “unease” and “undecidability”106 , which almost appears mystical because of his discourse on the “eschatology of memory”107 in relation to forgiveness. There is something that “slips away from our grasp” rendering our journey and work of forgiveness incomplete, pending, but open and ever possible.108

2.2. The Triangularity of Forgiveness

Ricoeur speaks of forgiveness in “triangular terms”, that is, in dialectical terms. He explains forgiveness dynamics in terms of a creative tension between two polarities that are

100 DF, 15

101 DF, 15.

102 DF, 15.

103 EMHF, 459; 494, 496 and 500. Ricoeur even speaks ofa“happy oblivion” whichis akindof forgetting that is does not imply effacement, but allowing oneself to have changed disposition and attitude towards the fault and one’s guilty state.

104 DF, 16.

105 EMHF, 488-489.

106 EMHF, 501.

107 EMHF, 459.

108 EMHF, 457.

both conflictual and relational.109 According to two scholars on Ricoeur, Walter Lowe and Morny Joy, Ricoeur approaches dialectics as more than merely teasing out conflicts and leaving uncovered antagonisms in contradiction and discordance. It introduces a higher mediating position between conflicting poles in a way that honors and retains the creative tension and pressure with each other rather than suspending any further deepening and development.110 Describing dialectic as a “hallmark of Ricoeur’smethodology”and thought, Don Ihde describes dialectic in Ricoeur as the ‘opposition of polarities that is limited by a third term’.111

Ricoeur, for example, is described as philosopher of “faith” and “suspicion”.112 To believe and to doubt seem contradictory for us; yet Ricoeur would dialectically correlate them and mediate the two with a third element, which could be personal experience, or open communication between two persons whose relationship has been disrupted. His emphasis on dialectic is understandable, given the danger of lack of open communication, relation and critical opposition and creative tensions. Ricoeur rejects eclecticism, which he considers an “enemy of dialectic”,113 since it does away with potentially fertile tension and with the task of conciliation.

The set of dialectical pairings below are not exhaustive, as Ricoeur’s fragments are replete with dialectical pairs, which cannot be mentioned all at once. However, we focus on those that are at work at the heart of the process (event) and act of forgiveness.

109 John Wall. 2005. Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 9 Ricoeur scholar John Wall describes tensionality as “productive tension”.

110 Morny Joy, Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, xxv. Joy describes Ricoeur’s attitude to conflict, which he takes to be defining of human condition: “Ricoeur is a mediator who strives to elicit constructive insights by placing disparate views in conversation. This dialectical interplay is not in the service of an ultimate solution (as with Hegel) but seeks a position that incorporates both the conservative and innovative forces he discerns at work in such exchanges.” See also Walter J. Lowe, Introduction to Fallible Man, in which he also contends that to understand Ricoeur, one needs to know the “rule”, thatis, “to watch for the way in which he construes his chosen question interms of an apparent conflict between two contrasting aspects or poles and then proceeds to mediate between them: drawing the contrasting aspects together while preserving a certain productive tension or dialectic”.

111 Lowe’s Introduction, p. xxiviii, n. 35 refers to Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 16.

112 Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur, 1-5, esp. 2. Scholar Karl Simms describes Ricoeur as a “philosopher of faith and suspicion”, a “philosopher of life and reading” and of ‘story-telling’ (2).

113 Ibid. Lowe, Introduction, ix.

a) Dialectic of Self-Identity and Narrativity

Forgiveness becomes possible by way of opening oneself to “narration-exchange” and “memory-exchange” between persons.114 Our narratives can imprison us and our futures. They can also be our home which allows us to remain stable in place while becoming open to others. Narratives can create and open up new possibilities. This is the genius of “narratological ethics”, which is premised on the belief that the self cannot be understood outside of stories, in which we find ourselves “entangled”115 not only in the events of life, but also in our personal identities and the processes involved in it. In Ricoeur’s anthropology, the self, which is in itself affirmed as a dialectic of relation of ‘self and an-other’116, is also constituted by “narrative identity”. The self’s identity is said to be “narratively constituted”117, since it is constructed on the basis of the stories we make and accept with others about ourselves and our world. In other words, I recognize myself in the stories I tell others: self-recognition in narration. Narratological ethics also suggests that we come together in “mutual recognition” as we remember together, ‘exchange memories and narratives’, or even “mourn over loss” or “unkept promises of the past”. 118 It is premised on a basic belief that the past is not simply past, unchangeable, but that past is in a certain way “redeemable” via dialectical and life-giving re-narration and re-interpretation of the same unchangeable facts.119 Ricoeur suggests that although facts as historical events cannot be altered, their ‘meanings are not forever fixed’.120 Ricoeur puts it more clearly in an interview transcript, “An event cannot be undone, but its meaning can be changed”.121 Through storytelling, the past can be liberated from its ‘moral burdens’ that paralyze the present and forfeit the “futurity” of relationships.122 Richard Kearney describes this as “cathartic narration”123 through which we confront our own memories and the stories we formulate about them, to see how we might reframe or appreciate them from new vantage points and with a new way of relating to the same memories. We do not turn them off as we cannot shut down memories however painful. We relate with them in new ways instead.

114 NEE, 9. See also David Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 97-98: Kaplan speaks of the prospect of ‘mutual healing via ‘listening, understanding and re-interpreting’.

115 NEE, 6.

116 Kaplan, 83 and 89ff. Kaplan discusses this nuanced theme on the dialectic of “idem-ipse”or“selfhoodsameness” and idea of “narrative identity” in Ricoeur.

117 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 89-90 (“self as defined by capacities”) and 114-115 (“narratological structure of self”); see also David Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 83: “…narratively constituted analogical identity…”

118 NEE, 6 and 7: See the “crossroads of memories”

119 NEE, 8.

120 CFH, 33.

121 See Ricoeur’s response to a question posed by an interlocutor about the theological significance of ‘unchangeability and irrevocability of the past’. Cf. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny (eds.). 2004a. Memory Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Münster: Lit Verlag. 6:16. esp. page 18.

122 NEE, 8.

123 Richard Kearney, Forgiveness at the Limit, 318.

However, since stories are liable to abuse and can be instrumentalized, forgotten, or denied, there has to be what Ricoeur calls “critical submission of stories” and “critical exchange of memory” in which we ‘recognize, re-evaluate, discern’124 the past and how it has been interpreted and which enables us to remain in mutual openness and “hospitality” in that process.125 It involves the shared “will-to-share” “symbolically and respectfully”126 our memories articulated in language and stories about ourselves, sometimes in order to seek for forgiveness or healing by closure or clarity, or healing simply via recognition, recovery and restoration of one’s lost or damaged sense of esteem. In the context of interpersonal forgiveness, narrative ethics is central. Ricoeur, in fact, explains how it might entail “long and patient travail of “narrating otherwise” and “differently.” In the context of this dialectic of narrativity, forgiveness might require an “ethics of consideration”127 and a “stubborn will to understand” even our perceived “enemies”, thus, permitting the work of a difficult “recounting otherwise” 128 Without implying historical revisionism129, Ricoeur argues that “narrating otherwise” does not consist in abolishing or denying the past but remaining stubbornly open to “possibility of re-visioning”, that is, “recounting differently.”130 It implies not only the need for ‘perspectival-shift’ from “glories to sufferings of others” and to woundedness, but also a “compassionate, empathic imagination” and “affective expressions of solidarity.”131 This process needs to be done under the conditions of plurality, diversity and mutual reverence, and even charity the generosity to listen and to graciously but fairly retell and interpret the stories that might alienate, hurt or disillusion people. For instance, a person might seem spiritually or morally bankrupt but desires conversion will need a starting capital a fundamentally enabling resource that is not even material in nature to help him or her start afresh. Thus, forgiveness can be seen as a loan without interest or a priori conditions. The non-condition paradoxically becomes the condition.132

b) Dialectic

of Love and Justice

Although this specific fragment contains no discussion on forgiveness, it nevertheless enjoyed frequent allusions in other fragments. Love and Justice develops the notion of the dialectical relation between the two first-order norms. Ricoeur distinguishes two orders of moral values and discourses marked by “disproportionality”, discordance and mutual irreducibility, namely: the order of justice and the order of love.133 The “prose of justice” is

124 NEE, 7.

125 NEE, 6-7.

126 Paul Ricoeur: Philosophy, Ethics and Politics, 44-45.

127 EMHF, 475-477. Ricoeur again speaks of “consideration” as “incognito” of forgiveness.

128 EMHF, 477.

129 Historical revisionism would violate the first condition of fairness which is truth.

130 NEE, 9. This does not equate with “irresponsiveness and liquification of solid facts of history.

131 NEE, 9-10.

132 The idea that the unconditional is what guarantees the conditional finds resonance in Roger Burggraeve’s “Difficult but Possible Path towards Forgiveness and Reconciliation”, 38-63, esp. 42 and 54. Burggraeve speaks of “paradoxical character of forgives” after discussing all the ‘human conditions’ of forgiveness (54).

133 LJ, 25.

characterized in the language and relations of obligation, reciprocity and transactionality, circular exchange, calculus of interests, benefits, gains134 and the logics of reversibility and of equivalence.135 In contrast, the “poetry of charity” belongs to a strange domain that transcends the logics and discourses of moral or legal equivalence. Ricoeur calls it “poetic imperative” which is dialectically opposed and related to the “moral imperative”.136 He locates charity within the “economy of gift” and “generosity” which alone is capable of rising above and breaking and purifying the possible perversions of circular, transactional dynamics of justice.137 Ricoeur argues that the two logics, which correspond to two disproportional realms of “ethics” and “hyper(bolic) ethics”—that of superabundance and that of equivalence could be better understood when brought into dialectical contact.138 Given the potential perversions of our conceptions of justice, Ricoeur forcefully argues that our ethical sense of justice should not be surrendered to certain forms of pragmatism and utilitarianism, but must be “touched” by “poetics of superabundance and generosity of love”.139 In this way, “justice” may serve as a “medium of love” in the world, which breaks into the domain of morality by ‘manifesting as justice’140, which Ellen van Stichel, describes even further in terms of “care” understood precisely as “incarnation of love for each person”.141 As Ricoeur puts it best, the hyper(bolic)-ethics of Biblical charity does not “disorient”, bypass nor minimize the ethical. On the contrary, its disorienting effect is meant to “reorient” and “rectify” distorted sense of justice. This does not imply, however, that love or charity, as conceived in human discourse, is in no way liable to misinterpretations or misappropriation. When reduced into the merely pragmatic and utilitarian transaction and calculation, love, understood as charity, ceases to be. It is in this context that one might understand the meaning and dynamics of forgiveness in terms of the dialectically tensive interplay between the incompatible but corresponsive “logic of equivalence” and the “logic of superabundance”.142 Forgiving means ensuring that one is given what he or she is due,

134 LJ, 27, 28. Ricoeur cites “distributivism”, since justice is also defined as “giving what is due to the other”

135 LJ, 35-36. One may even add “equality” (31).

136 LJ, 33, 34 and 28.

137 LJ, 28.

138 LJ, 33-34, 35-36. See also: “…contradiction between this section of the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule…” “To sum up, the logic of overabundance undercuts the logic of reciprocity. Justice, as the rule of equivalence, does not completely break with the law of the talion: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” To separate the love for one’s enemies from the rule of reciprocity is to enter into “the economy of the gift.” The difficulty is to integrate this into institutions! The economy of the gift cannot be institutionalized. […] We can introduce into our institutions merely a homeopathic dose of this economy of the gift.” (Paul Ricoeur: Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Ed. Catherine Goldenstein. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge and Medford: Polity, 2020. [1997, 2017]. 85.

139 LJ, 36

140 LJ, 37.

141 Cf. Van Stichel, Ellen. "Love and Justice’s Dialectical Relationship: Ricoeur’s Contribution on the Relationship between Care and Justice within Care Ethics." Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 17, no. 4 (2014): 499-508.

142 In Love and Justice (LJ), Ricoeur refers to them as “the logic of superabundance” and “the logic of equivalence”, respectively.

beyond the terms and logic of retributivism or punitive revenge. It must be added, however, that even in the gift of forgiveness, justice is and should not be abolished. On the contrary, Ricoeur clarifies this point in another fragment insisting that “[j]ustice must be done” and “[p]ardon cannot substitute for justice.”143 In this way, the inner working of love and justice within forgiveness dynamics is hinted at.144

c) Dialectic of Gift

For Ricoeur, in the case of morally disrupted interpersonal relations, forgiveness poses a question and a challenge. Here, Ricoeur understands forgiveness as certain form of “giving” in contrast with the other forms of giving that remain caught up within the dynamics of logic of equivalence, reciprocal exchange and calculation of self-interests, gains and benefits, and the instrumentalization of the so-called “disinterested generosity” that conceals ulterior agenda.145 This is qualitatively different from what Ricoeur proposes as an alternative paradigm to Jacques Derrida’s “impossible gift”146. Ricoeur holds that there exists a form of giving that is not governed by the logic of reciprocity, one that is non-market-based giving, marked by asymmetry and non-reciprocal exchange of simple “giving-receiving.”147 Because of the “irreparable” and the “abyss” between the “depth of the fault and the altitude of forgiveness, forgiveness is approached as a non-circular dynamic. This means that a person may wish for it and the other may or may not grant it.148 But there is no governing morality of obligations that prescribes one to give back or to expect something more, for nothing and no one can generate the obligation to give likewise than the non-replicable gift of forgiveness itself. In short, Ricoeur posits that giving likewise is awakened by the gift itself. But since forgiveness dynamics is only from giver to an intended recipient, the givingdynamic involved in forgiveness is always asymmetric and disproportionate, even in the case of a mutual forgiving.

d) Dialectic of Critical Memory

‘To forgive is to forget’—thus runs the cliché. Against this equation of forgiveness with forgetfulness, Ricoeur proposes a notion of forgiveness that resists just this dangerous tendency towards reductionism and conflation of forgiveness and forgetting. For Ricoeur, they are not only quite distinct, but they need to be seen together in tensive relation, or ‘mutual challenge,’ as Abdelmajid Hannoum notes.149 Whether forgiveness is individually or collectively understood, Ricoeur proposes that we understand it as well as creative-tensive

143 EMHF, 473.

144 This theme of inner dialectics of love and justice in forgiveness deserves further thought.

145 EMHF, 480, 481.

146 Jacques Derrida. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Routledge: London, 2001. 25-60. Here Derrida discusses the category of the unforgivable” which is the actual object of forgiveness.

147 Here, forgiveness is unilaterally understood as “giving-receiving”.

148 CFH, 35. Ricoeur speaks of ‘readiness for refusal’: “requestfor forgiveness”must recognize the“open possibility of the unforgivable.”

149 Abdelmajid Hannoum. “Paul Ricoeur on Memory.” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no.6 (2005): 12337.

dialectical tension between “right remembering” and “right oblivion”.150 He speaks of “critical use of memory” which entails “rereading and retelling” and remembering. 151 He cites certain “illness” and vulnerabilities of memories due to problems of immoderation the ‘excesses’ and ‘deficits’ in relation to memory and forgetting.152 The healthy balance between these two extremes as applied to memory and forgetting is crucial especially for wounded or dysfunctional memories, like those of trauma victims.153 This discerning disposition is a virtue for both the work of remembering and forgetting. He also alerts us to certain pathological tendencies, like rumination, and other strategies seeking to annul the ground of guilt and forgiveness, such as denial, revisionism, selective manipulation of memories or interpretations, or the willful refusal to know, or remain in ignorance of facts and information one should otherwise know.154 Such refusal on the part of the aggressor is clearly a strategy of self-insulation from the guilt, but also from the burden of accountability and responsibility. The denial or aversion on the victim’s side is also a strategy to disentangle oneself from undesirable memories. Ricoeur says, however, that “[o]ne can only forgive what one has not […] forgotten” 155

What is moving in Ricoeur’s dialectic of critical memory is the component of the “work of mourning”. According to him, “mourning” workout is an exercise directed at some “loss”156, a sense of not being able [and of being required] to repossess everything valued and valuable especially persons, lives, things, opportunities and relationships that have been lost in the past, since the historical fault that ruptured the relational bond of persons and bringing about the irreparable This sense of loss arises out of perceived or felt “inability

150 CFH, 33-34. See also EMHF, 505: The ‘right memory-oblivion’ seems to be correlated to ‘happy memory-oblivion.’ Ricoeur speaks of “2 arts”: the ars memoriae, which is “abandonment to remembering”and to “spontaneous irruptions” of memories, and the ars oblivionis, which is a “forgetting to forget”.

151 CFH, 32-33.

152 CFH, 31-32.

153 CFH, 31. Finding this right balance, however, is easier said than done, given the varying complexity and gravity of people’s experiences of fault, evil, or guilt.

154 CFH, 34.

155 CFH, 35. On this point, Ricoeur recalls Freud’s phrase—“progressive detachment”. According to Ricoeur, this process involves owning up of memories, but also an art of distancing, detachment and bracketing out.

156 DRA, 24. Ricoeur even speaks of the “silence” in relation to “mourning over” some loss.

to obtain something—that which will never be obtained”.157 As opposed to the “caricatures of forgiveness” which skips, mimics, and cheapens the gift in forgiveness, a real work of forgiveness involves a work of remembering that is also and at the same time a work of ‘mourning over’ one’s significant loss. When sealed with final acceptance of truth of what cannot be undone, unsaid, or unfelt, the work of mourning could lead to a readiness to let go and let be, a release that could lead closer to healing of memories. One should not forget that for Ricoeur, the human self “desires to be well and whole” 158 All efforts expended in this process are directed to this end to obtain a sense of wellness and fullness in the life of our being.

e) Dialectic of Forgiveness and Promise

Ricoeur also argues that forgiveness is a double-work of “unbinding and binding”. 159 He explains this in the context of double-limitation imposed by temporality on what human subjects could and can do, namely, the irreversible character of past human action, and its unpredictable character of future ones. As discussed above, Ricoeur takes “forgiveness” and “promise” as the dialectical remedies to the problem of undoability of all actions committed to the past, and all actions entrusted to the future.160 Ricoeur speaks of a “miracle of speech” because the spirit of forgiveness, which is also at work in the language of forgiveness, can somehow bridge the seeming ‘disproportion and incommensurability’ between the ‘gravity and depth of the fault’ and the elevation of forgiveness. After all, our words are free, and, as Ricoeur’s narrative dynamics implies, words can contain worlds insofar as they can potentially be creative of new possibilities. In this context, to forgive is to pronounce the words of “unbinding” to the concerned other that could liberate him or her from his or her boundedness to “unfulfilled promises” in the past. In short, to forgive others is to see them no longer in terms of the shortfall but in terms of moral possibilities. In this way, the other person is restored to his or her original stature as an equally “capable being” and “other”— capable of acting for the good. On the other hand, the concern over the “unpredictability” of a person’s acting is addressed by one’s restored capacity to perform and pronounce words of “binding”, that is, to make a promise of life-affirmation of and orientation to the good of the other.161 Ricoeur describes the radical effect of this word of forgiveness on the process of “relieving”, of liberation of the guilty self or other precisely as the “uncoupling” and “intimate dissociation” of the who [person] from the what [action done].162 According to Ricoeur, there are speech-acts involved in this dialectical event between forgiving and promising. The word of forgiveness construed as “liberating utterance” is not exclusively

157 DRA, 24.

158 EMHF, 462.

159 EMHF, 486.

160 EMHF, 487.

161 EMHF, 487. Ricoeur phrases his description aptly: promising resists and defies the “intermittences of the heart” and the “complexity of the chains of consequences of our actions”.

162 EMHF, 490.

formulated as: “I forgive you”, but also as: “You are better than your fault.”163 Although in this promising, there is no asking for absolute guarantee, and this is a question of another gift to be endowed a priori: trust which now comes as a form of emotional, relational and spiritual capital. Ricoeur, however, does not dwell much on trust and the vulnerability it creates. Forgiveness, in this sense, stands as our solemn and verbalized refusal to reduce the person to his past actions. Here, there is not only a “restored capacity” but also an emergence of renewed trust, the fundamental basis of any personal relationship, thereby making relationality active and interpersonal relationship possible once more: “Youcanstartagain— “You can be and act again.”164 With this restored capability for acting meaningfully and ethically, there emerges new possibilities for identity for oneself and for another.

2.3. The Quadrilateral Forgiveness

The third and final shape of forgiveness in Ricoeur is the quadrilateral, which in many ways summarizes Ricoeur’s main contentions. It refers to the square shape formed and the cruciformal shape generated by the intersections of the horizontal and the vertical movements of forgiveness (see Schema 4: “The Height and Depth in Forgiveness”). This image of forgiveness can be discerned from the discussion on forgiveness in Ricoeur’s Epilogue. The quadrilateral shape reveals the tension points and the larger existential and eschatological horizons in which the event and act of forgiveness take place.

Ricoeur has three concerns: (1) the predominance of the transactional forgiveness; (2) the declining sense of disequilibrium between the vertical and the horizontal movements; and (3) the need for liberation and restoration of capabilities of those who lost them for having committed faults in their lives.165 The typical understanding of forgiveness is patterned on the “horizontal exchange”, that is, the request and bestowal dynamics between two agents and subjects, the guilty aggressor and the wounded victim. For Ricoeur, however, the merely horizontal conception of forgiveness which coincides with the justice-based reciprocity between persons fails to adequately appreciate the “gift-character” of forgiveness. It reduces forgiveness exclusively into the

163 EMHF, 492. This is a significant message on forgiveness, which can powerfully change a person for the rest of his or her life. The respect for the whole person, beyond the parts and accidentals, is made possible. This is an instance of forgiveness restoring not only the possibility of fairness in a relationship, but more fundamentally, the “recognition” of personhood of the other, as Ricoeur points out.

164 EMHF, 490.

165 EMHF, 459.

interhuman mechanism and system of exchange patterned according to political and economic calculations, and the circulation of reciprocity driven by utilitarian-pragmatic calculus of benefits and gains. Ricoeur draws attention to the neglected “forgiveness equation” which also consists in the vertical polarity plotted out through a distancedifferential between the “height of forgiveness” and the “depth of the fault”.166 For Ricoeur, there is an “unbridgeable gap” between the “generosity of forgiveness” and the “fault-line”. The ‘height of forgiveness’ corresponds to what Ricoeur, in another fragment, refers to as “voice of forgiveness” which interrupts the wanderings of the guilty self.167 In the illusion of facile and manageable forgiving in the horizontal exchange, we forget that there is a “fault” that makes us guilty, and which we have forgotten because of our desire to reduce the fragility and beauty of the gift of forgiveness into something we can master and manage to solve. As a result of the negligence of the vertical distance, we forget the basic incommensurability of the height of forgiveness and the depth of our fault. We forget how to say mea culpa and how to beg for forgiveness which we cannot demand by right each time. We no longer see it as gift but as a commodity, a useable and exchangeable item.

It is this image of the vertical polarity that we seem to have lost. Forgiveness now seems to be felt as manageable according to the economy of exchange, but not to that of the gift. It is not felt as a gift from the stranger, from the other whose freedom I am not able to manipulate or control. It comes in its own time and in its own way. And yet moments come when forgiveness strikes us as difficult and “senseless” because we do not completely comprehend how it is possible for us to be mistaken and to seek for forgiveness. 168 It is difficult to catch a spirit and place it in a small bottle. Indeed, the verticality of forgiveness should intersect with the horizontal, if only to purify, correct or complement our appropriations of forgiveness. The Spirit of forgiveness should be allowed to break in to make us realize that, on our own, we cannot forgive the depth of the fault, nor pluck ourselves out from our state of guilt.

This “vertical polarity” of forgiveness is precisely what makes it difficult, but not impossible. From the onset, Ricoeur situates forgiveness within the horizon of the eschatological, a kind of “world”, a field of “possibilities” that serve as a kind of “dwelling environment”.169 Ricoeur explains this “eschatology” as “horizon of another world, the

166 EMHF, 477

167 DF, 6. “a strange familiar voice” in “praise for forgiveness” or “hymn of forgiveness”.

168 On this ‘senselessness’ of forgiveness, Kearney writes: “Pardon is something that makes little sense before we give it, but much sense when we do. Before it occurs, it seems impossible, unpredictable, incalculable in terms of economy of exchange. There is no science of forgiveness” (Forgiveness at the Limit, 317-318).

169 Cf. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination Mario J. Valdéz (ed). Toronto & Buffalo, University ofTorontoPress, 1991. See Ricoeur’s Poetry and Possibility on 448-462, esp. 453:“The world is where we dwell. The capacity to dwell and to exchange experiences”. Horizon is “something which recedes when we approach it, and therefore, which has an inexhaustible capacity. In each experience, there is something there but also something which is only potential. And all potentialities of all our experiences constitute, so to say, a world.”

promise of a new life”.170 Eschatology is a field of tensional realities, since it represents the temporal and ontological tension between our past and future through the mediation of our fragile present, where the historically, embodied subjects of forgiveness find themselves. Richard Kearney argues that Ricoeur has committed himself not only to the “anthropology of capable being” but to a certain “eschatology of memory”, which makes forgiveness possible insofar as it is as construed in terms of the “act of unbinding—an act that goes beyond the limits of law and prescription, crime and punishment, fault and reparation”171 , but also beyond the here and now.

3. Critical Appraisal of Ricoeur’s Account of Forgiveness

From the foregoing, we have seen some key contours of Ricoeur’s account on forgiveness. I propose to present some observations in 4 C’s: Ricoeur’s account (1) clarifies for us what forgiveness might mean and entail, and (2) he does it by complexifying it through a relentless and unapologetic application of dialectical approach; (3) yet it also generates some challenges for further reflections, (4) and, happily enough, serves as a much-needed caution and correction for us

First: Clarity: Ricoeur’s account has clarified both the meaning of forgiveness but even more so the meaning of being a person acting and suffering forgiveness. As we have seen, Ricoeur’s understanding of forgiveness is deeply grounded in his fundamental beliefs and assumptions about what human beings are and are capable and incapable of. It gives us some aspects of the humanum central to forgiveness. Several affirmations about the human being emerge:

First, the human person is a living paradox. Absolutely crucial in Ricoeur’s discourse on forgiveness is his philosophical commitment to honor and preserve the mystery and paradoxicality of the humanum in its integrity, composite unity and essential incompletion.172 Ricoeur is alert to paradoxes hidden in our experiences, in our action, identity and human condition. This alertness is what makes him resistant to easy solutions proposed in binaries of disjoint and dilemma, which only bifurcates: either A or B, and it cannot be both; and neither can it be open to possibility of C or D. He is not a dualist, precisely because of his emphasis on creative tension and relation between polarities. This orientation and attitude towards the paradoxical are a crucial context in reading Ricoeur’s works, especially on forgiveness.

170 Ricoeur, Poetry and Possibility in A Ricoeur Reader, 455: “What makes the difference between poetry and religious kerygma is that poetry opens ways for my imagination to my ways of thinking, ways of seeing the world under the rule of play that is to say, I am not committed. I have only to open my imagination.”

171 Ibid. Richard M. Kearney. 2013. Forgiveness at the Limit: Impossible or Possible? in What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in 20th Century: Philosophical Essays in Honors of Alasdair McIntyre. Ed. Fran O’Rourke. Indiana: University of Notre Dame. 306.

172 Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 99. Kaplan explains that Ricoeur’s anthropology grounds the latter’s “practical wisdom.”

Second, the human person is multi-dimensionality. For Ricouer, the human person is multi-dimensional. David Kaplan writes, “Selfhood is a complicated matter. We are many things.”173 Despite the complications and ambiguities, Ricoeur holds on to essential dimensions of the human person affirming them in their organic, mutual-belongingness and unity. We are not just thinking beings, but also bodies, memories and identities, stories and meanings which may have sedimented through the years, but we have not been cemented; we are a “plurality of detours”174 and “life interpreting itself” 175

Third, the human person is a unity of composition of possibility-actuality, power-act, capability and realization. Standing on the tradition of Aristotle, but further nuancing his metaphysics of act and potency, Ricoeur affirms that the human person is a unity, but it is a composite unity ontologically composed of potency and act, power and action.176 For Ricoeur, the human person is a being that is tensional because of his being in-between potential and actual. Additionally, this is also the ontological root of human convertibility.

Fourth, the human person is fragile, fallible, and given unto fault. Ricoeur speaks of fragility and “anthropology of the fallible man”.177 This makes us beings of mixture, marked by “fragility”, which is an “ability to fail”—fallibility178, that is, the sense of being breakable that inclines one to bringing about breakings in the world, so to speak. Since fallibility constitutes the “occasion for evil”, not its cause or origin, the human person is called to remain vigilant and ‘resistant’ to the occasion of evil that is always abiding in his or her own being-fragile by doing good and meaningful action.179 In Fallible Man, Ricoeur acknowledges that the very possibility of moral evil resides in the very being of the human person.180 But he clarifies that while evil may be “radical” since it touches upon our

173 Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 83.

174 Richard Kearney, “Ricoeur” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Eds. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. 443-451, esp. 449.

175 Kearney, “Ricoeur” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, 443.

176 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 140. Ricoeur speaks of humanity as mixedness, a composite being, which constitutes his fragility as a being, that is, “human fragility as limitation”. Ricoeur writes, “This limitation is man himself. I do not think man directly, but I think him through composition, as the “mixture of originating affirmation and existential negation. Man is the Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite” (140). [Italics originally Ricoeur’s]. Ricoeur continues, “This “mixture has appeared to us as the progressive manifestation of the fault that makes a man, mediator of the reality outside of himself, a fragile mediation for himself. […] In himself, and for himself man remains torn” (140-141).

177 WalterJ. Lowe’s Introduction in Paul Ricoeur. 1986. Fallible Man (The Philosophy of the Will). Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press. vii.

178 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 141. Ricoeur describes “fragility as capacity to fail”. He considers fragility not as the origin of evil in itself, but as an “occasion” and “capacity” for evil: “fallibility designates the occasion, the point of least resistance through which evil can enter into man; the fragile mediation appears then as the mere space of the appearance of evil. Man, center of reality, man, reconciler of the extreme poles of the real, man, microcosm, is also the weak link of the real.”

179 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 143 and 46: “Fallibility is only the possibility of evil: it indicates the region and structure of the reality that, through its point of least resistance, offers a “locus” to evil”. Ricoeur understands evil as made possible by “disproportion” between “perfection and destitution” (143).

180 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 133, the concluding chapter of the book which discusses the concept of fallibility”: “What is meant by calling man fallible? Essentially this: that the possibility of moral evil is inherentin man’sconstitution.” See also Ricoeur’s statements on 145: “The concept of fallibilityincludes

condition, it is said to be “non-originary”. Ontologically, the human person does not resonate with it; nor is one drawn to it. Fallibility also constitutes human weakness and the sense of being our own limitations, our own opposition.181 In this regard, the human person is also seen as liable to evil. Fallibility becomes the zone in which the emergence of evil becomes possible even before the commission of some “fault”. Charles Kelbley explains that Ricoeur intends to evoke the “existential meaning” of the originary geological sense of the “fault” as expressed in the French faille, which means “break, breach, fault”, faillibilité, and écart, which means some kind of “gap, di-gression”, fêlure which denotes “rift” and déchirement, which means “tearing” or “torn”.182 The notion of fault, for Ricoeur, sharpens and intensifies “guilt”, seen already as a human condition because of its being an abiding potentiality in the human. The fault designates the commission or enactment of evil, a movement towards nonbeing and non-existence, indeed, into non-selfhood. In this sense, it can be understood as unbeing and thus unbecoming. Evil then is not simply metaphysically understood but existentially approached, and it implies an experience of breaking or being broken, and state of fragmentation of the being of the humanum. But as Kearney writes, “Radical evil calls for a response of a radical good…” and that ‘evil can be resisted’ since ‘the self is capable’.183

Fifth, the human person is homo capax a capable being. Ricoeur is likewise noted for his anthropology of the homo capax, the capable man, an anthropology, which Kearney describes as “engrafted onto philosophy of religion”.184 In an anthology dedicated to honor Ricoeur’s achievements titled Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, Ricoeur responds to the organizers with a note of gratitude and encouragement for the board and the contributing scholars. Written in French and translated in English by Ricoeur’s student, David Pellauer, Ricoeur’s response-note contains a confession about his philosophical commitment. He professes his faith in the “homo capax” which, he identifies as the core assertion at the heart of his emblematic work, Oneself as Another, and a unifying thematic threadheusestoevokeand“bringtogetherthosediversecapacitiesand incapacities that make human beings acting and suffering beings”.

185 For Ricoeur, therefore, the human person is not simply a being that is susceptible to fall and fail, and incur personal guilt, given his fragile ontological and existential condition. The human person is, above all, a capable being, a being of possibilities, a creature with a stubborn will-to-hope.

the possibility of evil in still more positive sense: man’s disproportion is a power to fail, in the sense that it makes man capable of failing.”

181 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 146: “Fragility is not merely the“locus”, the point of insertion ofevil, nor even the “origin” starting from which man falls; it is the “capacity” for evil. To say that man is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to a being who does not coincide with himself is a primordial weakness from which evil arises. And yet evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited. This last paradox will be at the center of the symbolics of evil.”

182 Walter J. Lowe cites Charles Kelbley’s comment and explanation of Ricoeur’s usage of the word “fault” on page xxiii.

183 Kearney, Forgiveness at the Limit, 317.

184 Kearney, Forgiveness at the Limit, 306.

185 Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Ed. Morny Joy. Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1997. xxxix-xliv, esp. xxxiv.

Sixth, the human person is a desire to be to exist. The sense of being a combination of actuality and potentiality gives rise to desire, to be and to become. That is why, the self is seen as an “unfinished ego”186 that is to be constantly realized. In Ricoeur’s view, evil on the level of ontology is the “state or possibility of non-being”.187 We are defined by such potential and predisposition to being to the good, the true, the beautiful and relationality. We are drawn to possibilities of a happy memory and a fuller life.

Seventh, and lastly, the human person is constitutive of tensive dialecticality. A person is conflict-relation. For Ricoeur, the human person is paradoxically enough both a site of inner “rift” and “conflict”188, that is, an “opposition”189, but also a “reconciler of extreme poles of the real”190, that is, a relationality. In other words, for Ricoeur, the human being is essentially dialectic by ontology191. Rather than locate this conflict-uality and relationality primarily outside the self, that is, between oneself and another self or the world (interpersonal, inter-being), Ricoeur radicalizes the claim on the relational character of human being by locating it at the heart of selfhood. The affirmation therefore can be formulated as: the human self is a conflict of polarities that are both in tensive yet creative relation. This magnificently reasserts Ricoeur’s claim about the paradoxicality of the human person itself. Conflict and relationship, and indeed, paradox, effectively appear to be humanly inescapable. These affirmations are central to Ricoeur’s rethinking of forgiveness.

Second: Complexification. Through the lens of dialectics that holds on to double affirmation of “both-and” and resisting reductionism of “either-or”. He maintains the tensions that kept his thoughts creative and incisive. He affirms forgiveness not only as act but also as an event and process, not only as conditional but also unconditional on certain

186 Ricouer, Poetry and Possibility in A Ricoeur Reader, 454.

187 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 218 and 220. Ricouer speaks of evil in a relevant sense as “destruction” or “diminishment” of capability-to-do”, but at the extreme, a “destruction of self-esteem”, that is, “selfrespect” and that “gaze of appraisal of oneself and others”. His notion of evil appears to be analogical and there is no single definition he employs in all his works.

188 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 132: “conflict is a function of man’s most primordial constitution; the object is snynthesis; the self is conflict. The human duality outruns itself intentionally in the synthesis of the object and interiorizes itself affectively in the conflict of subjectivity.” He speaks of inner conflict: “as “disproportion of feeling” occurring in “mediation of the heart” (thumos) (132), and “disproportion of bios and logos, of living and thinking, of which our “heart” suffers the primordial discord.” (132)

189 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 142: Ricoeur also speaks of man as site of conflict, and opposition, and indeed a tension in himself. He speaks of “the difficult path of practical conciliation that threads its way between opposed abysses, represented by the diverse, disconnected forms of acting” (140-141). The human person feels this ‘inner tension’ and conflict: “It is this secret rift, this non-coincidence of the self to self that feeling reveals. Feeling is conflict and reveals man as primordial conflict. It shows that mediation or limitation is only intentional, aimed at in a thing, or in a task, and that for himself man suffers disunion. But this discord that man lives and suffers approaches the truth of language only at the end of a concrete dialectic that discloses the fragile synthesis of man as the becoming of an opposition: the opposition of originating affirmation and of existential difference” (141).

190 Ricouer, Fallible Man, 141.

191 Kaplan, Ricoeur’s Critical Theory, 99: “Selfhood” as “embodied, mediated by narrative, dialogical […] The self and others are dialectically related…”

levels, as a work of creative freedom and as work of grace, as work in the here and now but also as something that should be seen as that which arrives and that which is to come. Thus, forgiveness is not absolute, neat resolution or elimination of conflicts and tensions. It is learning to navigate to live and profit from the meanings and creativity of these tensions

Third: Challenge. Ricoeur’s views also raised some difficulties. First, his descriptions on forgiveness does not clarify the position or posture of the subject of forgiveness. It is not clear when his description is applied to the one begging for it, or the one granting it. The perspectives of victim-aggressor are different standpoints that call for different approaches. Second, he was also vague on the differences of forgiveness dynamics in a micro-level (person-to-person) and in a macro-level (societal, political levels). Third, he also does not give adequate attention to the affective dispositions that come into play in the dynamics of forgiveness; some emotions can help or hinder forgiveness. Fourth is the ambiguity on the question of agency in the self’s wish-structure: it is not clear whether the “spirit” act or work as human subjects do. Wishes are not necessarily addressed to anyone. To ask presupposes the ability of receiving a response to the request. And fifth, the role of love was simply lightly discussed: what link is there between love and forgiveness, and how does justice interact with them in forgiveness-dynamic? These are matters that can only be raised at this point, but cannot be expounded further in this work.

Fourth: Caution and Correction. Lastly, forgiveness, like all other moral concepts is ambivalent and is susceptible to both innocent but sometimes fatal misappropriation. As Ricoeur notes, it can be abused and misused and reduced to what it is not, like a “defense mechanism” or “psychologism”, or ‘amnesia’, or a political strategy for power-maintenance or even domination. It can be rashly institutionalized and mechanized, ‘threatricalized, banalized, transactionalized’, and instrumentalized for certain malicious ends. In certain cases, forgiveness turns out to be unjust, or manipulated in order to lead to some “cheap exoneration”192 (a cheap forgiveness), which is not only possible but easy. What is needed is what Ricoeur calls “semantic vigilance”, that is, a “critical appropriation and usage of forgiveness-discourse”193 we have inherited from others. Kearney describes Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of action as dialectic of “critique and innovation”, of “suspicion and affirmation”. It is a philosophy that remains “open to surplus of meaning” (surcroit de sens), which is always and already an “invitation to create”.194

Finally, his account of forgiveness is marked by dialectical realism, which strives to keep the critical tensions and balance between optimism and pessimism. His account is optimistic enough to hold on to the real possibility of forgiveness, honest and realistic enough to recognize the difficulty and complications it involves, but modest enough to allow for the possibility of failing in the process and to surrender to the ‘grace from somewhere

192 EMHF, 477.

193 EMHF, 469.

194 Kearney, “Ricoeur” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, 449-450.

else other and strange’ that nevertheless breaks into the journey of a difficult but potentially liberating forgiveness.

Conclusion

The essay aims to describe and synthesize the ‘spirit’ of Ricoeur’s philosophy of forgiveness. It attempts to articulate, albeit in broad strokes, how Ricoeur accounts for the meaning, dynamics, and dimensions of forgiveness, which he held to be far from being easy but humanly possible nevertheless. The first section provides some biographical and intellectual contexts to shed some light on key background presuppositions at work in his account. The second section offers a sketch of his philosophy on the basis of a close-reading analysis of a selection of fragments on forgiveness. The essay illustrates how the fragments contain three distinct ‘shapes of forgiveness’: (1) a circular shape, which describes “the process-event” offorgiveness—the journey and stages of forgiving, which reaches its climax in our hearing of the voice of forgiveness; (2) a triangular shape, which speaks of the various “human act” of forgiveness is performed in dialectical tensions between polarities in constant mediation; and, lastly, (3) a quadrilateral shape, which illustrates more the larger “existential-eschatological horizon” that reveals both the gaps between beggar-grantor and the gap between the “depth of our fault” and the “exalted reality of grace of forgiveness” that calls for receptivity and generosity of the human heart. The third section offers a critical appraisal of his philosophy affirming how his account positively or negatively affects our understanding of forgiveness. Generally, the paper frames its points of appraisal in four Cs: Ricoeur’s account of forgiveness: a) clarifies its elements and anthropological vision, but b) ‘mess-ifies’ and complexifies our understanding of it through its dialectical method, c) challenges us with difficulties even as it, d) cautions us about common potential abuses and pathologies inherent in forgiveness-praxis. The paper concludes with a reflection on Ricoeur’s message about ‘possible though difficult’ forgiveness for wounded and broken selves and human world.

Forgiveness in Ricoeur turns out to be a personal, poetic reply to the tragic incompletion of being, of all life, including his own, and of what one can do, or undo in a lifetime. The three key terms of History, Memory and Forgetting and the last few lines of its Epilogue provide us with a clue. Although Ricoeur was neither primarily nor chronically concerned with the ‘forgiveness-question’, he was, however, deeply concerned with questions about human selfhood. These questions sharpened even further his signature alertness to the tragic, the paradoxical and the mysterious, the possible and the strangely other, and the poetic in human life. The discourse on forgiveness we have just examined finally figured even more prominently in his confrontation with the more personal and existential questions enfolding us all guilt, mortality, fallibility, the desire for ‘the good, happy life’ , grace and the promise of the life-to-come. His ‘forgiveness discourse’ seems to be his final personal statement on the problematics and paradoxicalities of the human condition. By Ricoeur’s own admission,

the Epilogue: Difficult Forgiveness was written, precisely as “an afterthought”195, an honest, humbling and liberating admission, not of his self-accomplishment, but of his own sense of incompletion sealing all his works, thoughts, and life itself.

Be that as it may, there can in principle be no doubt about Ricoeur’s general position on the question of forgiveness: ‘neither easy nor impossible.’196 Forgiveness is and remains ‘possible but difficult’—or, to put it in a more positive, poetical and hopeful tone, ‘difficult although possible’. Ricoeur invites us to see how our sense of radical possibilities grounds our will-to-hope.197 In this regard, Ricoeur echoes the sighs of countless people who realize how difficulty comes with what is noble, desirable, and beautiful. English novelist and Christian apologist Clive S. Lewis (1898-1963) famously writes, “Everyone thinks that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something [or someone] to forgive”.198 Plato, likewise, took notice from a long time ago:“The Proverb says:“What is fine is hard”.199 What is beautiful is difficult: words of caution but also of encouragement for anyone who wishes, seeks, and begs for forgiveness. Like love, joy and forgiveness, that which is beautiful and noble, certainly comes not without a cost, a price or a sacrifice. Ricoeur tells us: there is forgiveness; we can forgive, but not without a graced acting, remembering, narrating, believing, and hoping. As Jonathan Tran aptly puts it, “Like love, or better yet as love, the sheer alterity of forgiveness reveals another world, its absurd appearance in time presages hope beyond hope”.200

The “Spirit of forgiveness”, which works as undercover of Love, speaks finally of our ontological relationality our being-in, being-for, and being-with-others. Forgiveness is a work of a promise of togetherness that is to come. The Spirit of Forgiveness itself seeks to affirm our calling to an even greater life. We are begging for what leads us to happy memories, a happy life “with and for others” in love.

Ricoeur’s eschatologically oriented philosophy of forgiveness may be fragmentary, shapeshifting and labyrinthine, tensive and unapologetically paradoxical. But in our present world, perennially confronted with wounded memories and broken identities, his account of forgiveness addresses us as a longed-for word of hope, encouragement, and consolation afforded to us today by a certain faith and a stubborn hope in a togetherness and a selfhood to come.

195 EMHF, 506.

196 EMHF, 457.

197 This recurrent echo in Ricoeur’s ‘capability philosophy ’ resonates with Gabriel Marcel, who is known for his philosophy of hope.

198 Clive S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1996. Chapter 7, esp. 104.

199 Plato, Hippias Major, 304e lines 7-9, esp. 9. See Plato: Hippias Major. Trans. Paul Woodruff: Basil, Blackwell, Oxford: 1982. 31. Cf. footnote no. 200 and explanation on p. 89, Woodruff states that “scholiasts attributed [it] to [a figure named] Solon” and that it was invoked in other works by Plato as well, namely, in Republic 435c8 and 497d10 and in Cratylus 384b1.

200 Jonathan Tran. "Emplotting Forgiveness: Narrative, Forgetting and Memory." Literature & Theology 23, no. 2 (2009): 220-33, esp. 223. This sense of hope that permeates the work of Paul Ricoeur on forgiveness is another key-context that sheds light on his preferred positions on forgiveness fragments. [Italics by Tran.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Main Sources: Paul Ricoeur’s Fragments on Forgiveness

Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. ‘Quel éthos nouveau pour l’Europe’ in Imaginer l’Europe, sous la direction de Peter Koslowski (Paris: Editions du Cerf).

Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. “Le pardon peut-il guérir?”, in Esprit, n° 210, Mars-Avril.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1996a [1992]. “Reflections on the New Ethos for Europe”. Trans. Eileen Brennan. in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. Ed. Richard Kearney. London: Sage.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1996b [1995]. “Love and Justice” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. Ed. Richard Kearney. London: Sage: 23-39.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2000 [1995],“Can Forgiveness Heal?” in Anckaert, Luc, Jacques De Visscher, Hendrik Opdebeeck, Paul Ricœur, and Jef Van Gerwen. The Foundation and Application of Moral Philosophy: Ricoeur's Ethical Order. Morality and the Meaning of Life 10. Leuven: Peeters, 2000.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1995d. "Love and Justice." Trans. David Pellauer. Philosophy & Social Criticism 21, no. 5-6: 23-39.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2004a [1999]. “The Difficulty to Forgive” in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny. Religion, Geschichte, Gesellschaft: Fundamentaltheologische Studien 17. Münster: Lit Verlag. 6-16.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2004b [2000]. Memory, History, and Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago/ London. The University of Chicago Press. [Original French: P. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000]

Ricoeur, Paul and Sorin Antohi. 2005 [2003]. Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 8 (1): 8-25.

Other Texts by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. The Reality of the Historical Past (The Aquinas Lecture 1984) Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Fallible Man (The Philosophy of the Will). Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1992 [1994]. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. London/ Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2007a. Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology. Trans. John Bowden. London / New York: Continuum.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2007b. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. Don

Ricoeur, Paul. 2020. Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. Ed. Catherine Goldstein. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge / Medford: Polity Press.

Secondary Texts

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bash, Anthony. 2007. Forgiveness and Christian Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Burggraeve, Roger. 2018. "The Difficult but Possible Path towards Forgiveness and Reconciliation." Louvain Studies 41, no. 1: 38-63.

Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge.

Duff, Maria. 2012. Paul Ricoeur’s Pedagogy of Pardon: A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting. London and New York: Continuum.

Clark, Stephen Hedley. 1990. Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge.

Deckard, Michael Funk, and Mindy Makant. 2017. "The Fault of Forgiveness: Fragility and Memory of Evil in Volf and Ricoeur." In Evil, Fallenness, and Finitude, 185-201. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Enright, Robert D., and Joanna North. Eds. 1998. Exploring Forgiveness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fiasse, Gaelle. 2014. "Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of the Self: On the In-between of the Involuntary and the Voluntary, and Narrative Identity." Philosophy Today (Celina) 58, no. 1: 39-51.

Griswold, Charles L. 2007. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haber, Joram G. 1991. Forgiveness. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hall, David W. 2007. Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice. SUNY Series in Theology and Continental Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hannoum, Abdelmajid. 2005. "Paul Ricoeur On Memory." Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 6: 123-37.

Heaps, Jonathan R. 2017. "Traversing Forgiveness." American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 1: 53-72.

Ihde, Don. 1971. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2005. Forgiveness. Trans. Andrew Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Junker-Kenny, Maureen. 2004. “Introduction” and “Memory and Forgiveness—Two Itineraries” in Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny. Religion, Geschichte, Gesellschaft: Fundamentaltheologische Studien 17. Münster: Lit Verlag.

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