Forgiveness

« Trois traits négatifs de la misericordia dans le second livre du De Clementia de Sénèque »

by Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle

publié dans: Les Études Classiques 74(4), 2006, p. 309-318.

Dans Clem., II, 5-6, Sénèque insiste, plus encore que la tradition stoïcienne, sur les travers de la misericordia. Il... more Dans Clem., II, 5-6, Sénèque insiste, plus encore que la tradition stoïcienne, sur les travers de la misericordia. Il la sépare radicalement de l’attitude honorable en niant qu’elle puisse naître du spectacle que constitue la peine subie par les seules gens qui ne la méritent pas, en refusant d’admettre que le sage peut verser des larmes devant ce spectacle, en l’associant, non plus seulement à l’aegritudo, mais aussi à une forme de metus qui empêche un élan généreux vers autrui. Cet absolu rejet de la misericordia met en valeur la clementia et rend plus nette sa démonstration à l’intention de ceux qui, comme peut-être Néron lui-même, risquent de confondre les deux notions.

« La clementia chez Sénèque, de la Consolation à Polybe au De Clementia : permanence et évolution »

by Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle

publié dans: Latomus 68(4), 2009, p. 959-971.

La Consolation à Polybe et le De Clementia concordent largement sur la place de la clementia dans l’image du prince... more La Consolation à Polybe et le De Clementia concordent largement sur la place de la clementia dans l’image du prince idéal et dans ses devoirs envers ses sujets. Il existe pourtant, dans deux domaines importants, des écarts notables. D’un point de vue théorique, le De Clementia résout un problème laissé sans réelle réponse satisfaisante par la Consolation : celui des rapports précis qu’il convient d’établir entre la clementia et la iustitia. Sur le plan politique, à une clementia conjointement exercée par le prince et le Sénat a succédé une clementia vue comme l’apanage du seul princeps.
Ces nuances procèdent sans doute, pour une bonne part, des différences de perspective existant nécessairement entre deux œuvres qui ne relèvent pas du même genre littéraire, et qui s’adressent à deux empereurs aux conceptions parfois antagonistes en termes de vision du pouvoir, mais elles tiennent certainement aussi à l’évolution de la pensée de Sénèque, et peut-être même à son expérience intime.

« Clementia et raison d’État : l’idéal monarchique dans les Troyennes de Sénèque »

by Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle

publié dans: Classica et Mediaevalia 62, 2011, p. 169-184.

Dans les Troyennes de Sénèque, le bon roi, conformément à la définition qu’on trouve dans le De Ira ou dans le De... more Dans les Troyennes de Sénèque, le bon roi, conformément à la définition qu’on trouve dans le De Ira ou dans le De Clementia, est incarné successivement par deux personnages : d’une part, Agamemnon, qui promeut la clementia contre la dureté de Pyrrhus ; d’autre part, Ulysse, qui défend la seueritas contre la miseratio d’Andromaque. La douceur et la raison d’État sont les deux paramètres essentiels que le bon dirigeant doit envisager au moment de prendre une décision importante.

« Clementia. Étude de vocabulaire (à propos de Sen., Clem., II, 3, 1) »

by Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle

publié dans: Revue des Études Anciennes 113(1), 2011, p. 145-163.

L’article examine les différents degrés de signification des mots de la famille de clementia, à partir de la... more L’article examine les différents degrés de signification des mots de la famille de clementia, à partir de la définition qu’en donne Sénèque, De Clementia, II, 3, 2 : Clementia est […] lenitas superioris aduersus inferiorem in constituendis poenis. Une telle définition est restrictive ; il arrive que les mots (in)clemens, (in)clementer, (in)clementia ne recouvrent qu’une partie des éléments constitutifs de cette définition (douceur / dans relation interpersonnelle / dans une relation supérieur-inférieur / en réparation d’une faute commise).

FORGIVENESS or TRUTH: WHICH IS THE BEST REMEDY? by Carol P. Christ

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published in the Feminism and Religion project

What happened to you really was bad. This should not happen to any child. It should not have happened to you.
more What happened to you really was bad. This should not happen to any child. It should not have happened to you.

In our culture there is often a rush to forgiveness that precedes acknowledging the harm that has been done. When I was a child and my father yelled at me or withheld love, I was told by mother, “He really does love you. He just does not know how to show it.” She sometimes added, “Even though he will never say he is sorry, you should forgive your father, because he did not really mean what he said.”

Guilt and Shame Through Recipients' Eyes: The Moderating Effect of Blame

by Caroline Kamau

Giner-Sorolla, R., Kamau, C.W. & Castano, E. (2010)

Previous research has found that people collectively wronged by an outgroup take insult when its representative offers... more Previous research has found that people collectively wronged by an outgroup take insult when its representative offers compensation, and that an expression of shame but not guilt can lower such insult. This experiment showed a moderating factor: strength of outgroup blame. Black community members were participants, presented with an apology for discriminatory searches of Blacks by the police. The effects – that shame but not guilt reduces insult from compensation – were replicated only among those who strongly blamed outgroup entities. As before, these effects emerged only on insult rather than satisfaction measures, and only when compensation was offered. When blamed by the public, an official body should therefore consider how much its apology conveys shame rather than guilt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Reconciliation and Founding Wounds

by John E. Drabinski

This essay critically examines the notion of reconciliation. I take up the notion of reconciliation in the context of... more This essay critically examines the notion of reconciliation. I take up the notion of reconciliation in the context of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2006), and argue that the commission's project runs up against the limits of reconciliation in places of originary fracture. If the pain of the past is the founding wound of a polity, rather than a break from a prior unity or prior sense of the common, then the rhetoric of reconciliation is misplaced. Prompted by Grant Farred's work on the same, I suggest instead the idea of conciliation: a making of friendship and home "for the first time." This sense of "first friendship" forms an ethical and political response to a history whose first moment (conquest, slavery) is wounding by refusing nihilism, while also recognizing the profound difficulty of imagining another world without a standing model. Without the rhetoric of repair, there is only the rhetoric of building-with...for the first time, always.

Salomon Lerner : Interview

by John E. Drabinski

forthcoming in Humanity (2012)

Interview with Salomon Lerner, lead commissioner of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, translated and... more Interview with Salomon Lerner, lead commissioner of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, translated and introduced. We discussed the nature of the project in Perú, the aims, successes, and failures, with particular attention to how habits of governance - corruption, power, cronyism, etc. - intervene to inhibit (or even just derail) the community work of reconciliation. (Lerner, by the way, is a philosopher. He worked on Nietzsche and Heidegger at Louvain.)

2012 Review of N. Verbin, Divinely Abused: A Philosophical Perspective on Job and his Kin.

by F Rachel Magdalene

Forthcoming/In Press
Citation: Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (forthcoming 2012).

Forgiveness without God?

by Glen Pettigrove

forthcoming in 'Journal of Religious Ethics' 40.3 (September 2012).

Of the many forgiveness-related questions that she takes up in her novels, the one with which Iris Murdoch wrestles... more Of the many forgiveness-related questions that she takes up in her novels, the one with which Iris Murdoch wrestles most often is the question, ‘Is forgiveness possible without God?’  The aim of this paper is to show, in the first instance, why the question Murdoch persistently raises is a question worth asking.  Alongside this primary aim stands a secondary one, which is to consider how one might glean moral insights from the Christian tradition even if one does not (any longer) endorse its theological commitments.

Psychometric and rationalization accounts for the religion-forgiveness discrepancy.

by Jo-Ann Tsang

Co-authored with Michael McCullough and William Hoyt

Forgiveness for intimate partner violence: The influence of victim and offender variables

by Jo-Ann Tsang

Co-authored with Matthew Stanford

The longitudinal association between forgiveness and relationship closeness and commitment.

by Jo-Ann Tsang

Co-authored with Michael McCullough and Frank Fincham

Forgive Everyone in Everyway

by Author Sam Oliver

Forgiveness

Forgive everyone, everyday, and in every way. Each person is doing the best he or she can. No one, absolutely no one... more Forgive everyone, everyday, and in every way. Each person is doing the best he or she can. No one, absolutely no one is perfect. Since no one is perfect, this means that we all need to share more patience and more understanding surrounding all aspects of our interactions with one another. Think of the last time you needed to forgive someone. And, think of the last time you needed to be forgiven. When we need to be forgiven, there is a feeling of lack or something as missing. When we need to forgive, we often feel anger. Anger is a secondary emotion for loss. When we lose something, the need to restore what was lost. This sends us on a search within ourselves for attention in a peace filled direction. If you noticed, to forgive or to be forgiven leads you to the same place. Both paths of awareness lead us on a search. What are you searching for? You are searching to find wholeness. What is wholeness? This is often one's perception of reality created by what one believes to be true. This creation of what one believes to be true is the path of one's soul seeking manifestation in the world of form from the formless.

There is no set way to wholeness. Simply being aware that you have a self-defined understanding of wholeness that is within you is what we simply need to give attention to within us. This continued attention on what we seek the most within us will grow in our awareness until the need to place our attention on forgiveness fades away.

If a person was to believe that forgiveness is something obtained through the human psyche alone, we all would find the journey into such a place within us as something to avoid. In the deepest parts of who we are, we want to connect to what is sacred within us. Therefore, to re-create a past interaction with someone who we feel we harmed or who we feel harmed us is a useless attempt to embrace what cannot be. This is not to say that certain relationships close to us do not need verbal efforts to make up for a past action leading to harm. In fact, a person can find this useful, and even, helpful. The point I want to make is the place one's attention may be at the time such a verbal interaction will become vital in the success of such expressions taking place.

Dying patients remind me that there are countless times in all our lives where the issue of forgiveness was perceived and we become aware of it. There is no way a dying person can retrieve all their past life experiences in physical form, but we can recall these moments in time and visualize how we would have handled them differently. This is our soul seeking to make right a wrong our personality may not allow us to do, or it may no longer be feasible to take place in our current circumstances. People are such a vast array of experiences. There are endless paths of attention within us calling for our attention. Perhaps, the instant we remember who we are and who others are in the deepest parts of our being, we begin to remember the love that brings all our lives together, and into, being. This remembrance of who we are as children of our Creator reminds us of the unconditional spirit reflected within our own selves. The transcendence of flesh and blood inspires us to give our Creator our lives, the lives of others, and our very reason for living into the hands that created us.


Sam Oliver

Perceptions of justice: IDPs and the intervention of the ICC in the LRA conflict, Northern Uganda

by Iris Marchand

Perceptions of justice: IDPs and the intervention of the ICC in the LRA conflict, Northern Uganda

by Iris Marchand

A.Destro - M.Pesce, “Repentance as Forgiveness and the Role of Sacrifices in Jesus”, in A.Destro and M.Pesce (Eds.), Ritual and Ethics. Patterns of Repentance, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Second International Conferente of Mediterraneum, Peeters, Leuven, 2004, 29-54.

by Mauro Pesce

Confronting Death Mother: An interview with Marion Woodman

by Daniela Sieff

Collective Forgiving

by Kelly Hamilton

MA Thesis

Forgiveness is traditionally understood as a personal change of heart, in which an individual victim of a wrongdoing... more Forgiveness is traditionally understood as a personal change of heart, in which an individual victim of a wrongdoing overcomes her resentment towards the perpetrator of that wrongdoing.  Peter  Strawson (1974) famously argued that resentment is a personal participant retributive reactive attitude, and the overcoming of  such an attitude through forgiveness is  itself a personal reactive attitude  – in other words, forgiveness is an affective response to a wrongdoing by an individual victim, that is devoid of a retributive element. Because reactive attitudes are personal, it is argued that collectives – groups of individuals – cannot forgive, since collectives cannot, as collectives, hold reactive attitudes.
I argue against this. I show that it is possible for collectives to hold attitudes in a way  that is not reducible to individuals holding attitudes as individuals,  and yet these attitudes still remain personal. Individuals exist within communities, and are interdependent on one another. Much of an individual‟s beliefs and attitudes depend on the collectives that she is a part of. I argue that an attitude is collective when it is deemed to be the appropriate attitude for members of the collective to hold. Members of the collective will take this attitude on as their own insofar as they identify themselves as members of the collective. Individuals hold the attitude, making the attitude personal, but since the individuals hold the attitude in virtue of their membership to a collective, the attitude is also collective.
Given that forgiveness is itself a reactive attitude, and that collectives can hold attitudes, I argue that it is possible for a collective to forgive. Members of a collective will come to forgive when forgiveness is held up as the appropriate attitude for them, and once enough members have taken on the attitude of forgiveness as their own attitude, a collective can be said to have forgiven.

'Hate the sinner but not the sin': forgiveness and condemnation

by Kelly Hamilton

Published in South African Journal of Philosophy, 2009, 28(2). Proceedings of PSSA 2009.

Forgiveness is traditionally thought of as the forswearing of resentment. Resentment has been argued to be a moral... more Forgiveness is traditionally thought of as the forswearing of resentment. Resentment has been argued to be a moral emotion, tightly interrelated with moral protest against a wrongdoing. This has lead to forgiveness being thought of as the forgetting or condoning of wrongdoing. I will argue for a concept of forgiveness that is ‘uncompromising’ for it does not involve giving up one’s judgements about the wrongdoing. I will argue that resentment should be understood as a type of reactive attitude, and that this means that it is not necessarily connected with moral protest. I will show that forgiveness is better understood as the overcoming of reactive attitudes (which includes resentment, but also indignation, anger, and other similar emotions). This will allow for forgiveness to be compatible with maintaining condemnation of wrongdoing.