Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  But he has an insight that leads in Winnicott’s direction: play is a set of

  stratagems by which the ego grows strong enough to live in a world

  with others. This idea fits with the concept of the Transition: for, I said,

  anger in sane people has a way of laughing itself out of existence. If one

  is already in a frame of mind prepared to take oneself lightly or even to

  laugh at oneself, the Transition is ready to hand.

  What is the point of talking normatively about anger? If it really is a

  deep- seated tendency left over from our evolutionary prehistory, what is

  the possible use of this critique? The use, I believe, is threefold. First, even tendencies that cannot be altered can be bracketed as sources for public

  policy. Thus, behavioral psychology, noting certain quirks of the human

  mind, allows us to see them for what they are, just quirks, and to think

  about more rational ways to make policy. For example, if we understand

  that people have a tendency to what psychologists call the “availabil-

  ity heuristic,” that is, to thinking of a single salient example and judg-

  ing other cases in the light of that, we will see why intuitions about risk

  might need to be balanced by some type of detached cost- benefit analy-

  sis. Or, as I’ve argued concerning disgust, if we see that human beings

  have a strong tendency to subordinate and exclude others by projecting

  disgust- properties (bad smell, animality) onto them, we can be alert to

  the dangers of stigma and subordination in our society and refuse to base

  public policy on an emotion whose normatively defective foundations

  have been laid bare.

  But, second, the tendency to anger appears to be only partly evo-

  lutionary, and at least in part cultural and role- specific. Or rather cul-

  ture makes a difference in the further development and expression of

  the tendency, if such there is. There is considerable variation across

  cultures in the valorization of anger— the Utku lying at one extreme,

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  and the Greeks and Romans a good deal closer to them than modern

  Americans. Within a single culture there is also great variation, as we’ve

  noted with regard to gender. Some subcultures— Stoics, Gandhians—

  may also deviate from a larger cultural pattern. Observing this elastic-

  ity, we can set ourselves to educate children to emulate models we take

  to be good and rational.

  Finally, there is at least some room for self- change, even in an adult.

  Seneca describes the patient self- examination through which he works,

  nightly, on his own anger. If he does not claim complete success, he at

  least makes progress. And perhaps more time for self- examination would

  permit even more progress. Nelson Mandela claims he achieved a great

  deal during his twenty- seven years of imprisonment. Most of us, fortu-

  nately, will not have such lengthy stretches of solitude and inactivity; but

  that does not mean that no progress can be made.

  3

  Forgiveness

  A Genealogy

  Ingemisco tamquam reus;

  Culpa rubet vultus meus:

  Supplicanti parce, Deus.

  I moan like a guilty criminal,

  My face blushes with my fault.

  Spare me, God, your suppliant.

  — Dies Irae, thirteenth- century hymn

  Blinded by his tears and by the light of God’s mercifulness he bent

  his head and heard the grave words of absolution spoken and

  saw the priest’s hand raised above him in token of forgiveness.

  — James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 4

  I. Forgiveness and Genealogy

  Now I turn to my ancillary theme, forgiveness. As with anger, we need

  a working account of forgiveness, and Charles Griswold has admirably

  provided one. Forgiveness, he argues, is a two- person process involving

  a moderation of anger and a cessation of projects of revenge, in response

  to the fulfillment of six conditions. A candidate for forgiveness must

  1. Acknowledge that she was the responsible agent

  2. Repudiate her deeds (by acknowledging their wrongness) and herself

  as their author

  3. Express regret to the injured at having caused this particular

  injury to her

  4. Commit to becoming the sort of person who does not inflict injury

  and show this commitment through deeds as well as words

  5. Show that she understands, from the injured person’s perspective, the

  damage done by the injury

  6. Offer a narrative accounting for how she came to do wrong, how that

  wrongdoing does not express the totality of her person, and how she

  is becoming worthy of approbation.1

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  Anger and Forgiveness

  (I do not defend this as a perfect analysis, but it is good enough to give

  us a place to begin.) Let us call this the classic account, to indicate its centrality and longevity.2 But I shall henceforth refer to it as “transactional

  forgiveness,” in order to contrast it with alternatives that lack this con-

  ditional structure. As we shall see, each of these elements has a long

  Judeo- Christian history, and together they form a familiar package.

  Investigating the history of that group of elements will help us better

  understand their moral role and will also help us see more clearly how

  alternative approaches deviate from this one.

  In the case of anger, my procedure was straightforward: I examined

  the components of anger, discussed their role, and, by investigating a

  variety of cases, argued that it contains hidden defects and irrationalities.

  With forgiveness I feel the need to proceed in a more indirect way, by

  considering the Judeo- Christian history of the concept. Why?

  When a philosopher proposes to investigate a concept by delving

  into its history, she will immediately be warned of “the genealogical

  fallacy.” Seeking the nature of something by looking to its origins is

  typically thought to be an unreliable way to study something. Often,

  this warning is wise. For example, we can understand some features of

  human psychology by looking at their evolutionary origins, but we had

  better not think that this gives us a complete understanding. In constitu-

  tional law, the idea that we understand the meaning of a provision fully

  by looking at what the framers meant by it is, if believed by some, still

  intensely controversial. Even originalists should not simply presume that

  originalism is correct.

  As Nietzsche understood, however, there are times when historical

  investigation is illuminating, and I shall be using the idea of genealogy

  in Nietzsche’s sense.3 What Nietzsche thinks about morality, and what

  I think about forgiveness, is that there are certain norms that are so hon-

  ored and so central to people’s discourse and daily lives that their precise

  contours are not studied with clarity. An aura of sanctity surrounds them.

  Habit, too, makes them difficult to see. So, I suggest, it is with forgiveness.

  Because we are so used to the idea, we think we don’t need to pause

  to define it precisely and disengage it from various related attitudes.

  Because our culture so re
veres it, we shrink from examining it in a criti-

  cal spirit. Thus we may be slow, for example, to recognize elements of

  aggressiveness, control, and joylessness that lurk within it.

  History defamiliarizes. It reminds us that things could be, and

  indeed sometimes were, otherwise. Here, it reminds us that forgiveness,

  a cherished modern concept, was initially introduced, and persisted for

  millennia, in connection with a range of religious attitudes and practices;

  it got its sense from that embeddedness. We may ultimately conclude

  that the entire conceptual legacy is worthy of our endorsement. We may

  Forgiveness

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  also conclude that some aspects of forgiveness can be detached from this

  network and are to be valued on their own. But we may, by contrast, find

  ourselves noticing that some features that fit naturally in their original

  religious setting are actually not such a good fit if we should reject key

  aspects of that framework. If we notice such a lack of fit, we will be at

  least skeptical of whether we can in fact retain a kernel of forgiveness

  while discarding the traditional husk. We will never get to this point of

  critical seriousness, however, if we continue to feel that forgiveness is as

  natural as the air we breathe, or the water in which, if we were fish, we

  would be swimming around.4 I believe that some aspects of forgiveness

  may survive their separation from a particular framework within which

  the transactional concept developed— but it remains to be seen which

  ones, and with what result.

  Michel Foucault made a similar argument about the modern institu-

  tion of punishment.5 Foucault maintained that we accept certain pieties

  about punishment habitually and without scrutiny. In particular, we like

  to think that the cruel public punishments known in former times have

  now been replaced by a milder set of practices involving incarceration

  and reform. Indeed, we are so enamored of the idea that the reform of

  offenders through prison is a gentle and progressive practice that we

  are slow to recognize the punitive, controlling aspects of even the most

  apparently benign of prisons.6

  In the case of forgiveness, one phenomenon we shall repeatedly

  observe is the tendency to use the word for whatever attitudes one

  thinks good in the management of anger. This tendency confuses, and

  it also makes criticism difficult: “forgiving” is just an all- purpose term

  of commendation in the general neighborhood of dealing with wrong-

  doing. Another tendency we shall observe, to some extent in tension

  with this one, is to drag in a lot of baggage historically associated with

  Judeo- Christian forgiveness as though it must all be part and parcel

  of the vague good thing one has already introduced. Take Desmond

  Tutu’s No Future without Forgiveness, which I shall discuss in detail in chapter 7. Having introduced “forgiveness” in a vague normative

  manner, as whatever the positive generous reconciling attitude might

  be, Tutu then without further argument goes on to associate with it a

  whole panoply of religious attitudes, such as confession, contrition,

  and absolution. Suddenly “forgiveness” becomes Christian transac-

  tional forgiveness, and has an extremely definite content, but the slip-

  page is not noticed because readers are so steeped in these Christian

  attitudes and concepts.

  I shall be arguing that the Judeo- Christian tradition, being com-

  plex, also offers us two alternative attitudes that deserve our attention.

  I will spend much of this chapter on transactional forgiveness, the type

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  of conditional forgiveness that Griswold’s definition well describes.

  Transactional forgiveness is the central theoretical concept in medieval and modern Jewish philosophy (drawing on some biblical texts but ignoring

  others), and it is one of three highly influential attitudes in the Christian tradition, and the one that the organized church tends to prefer and

  codify. But some less codified parts of the Jewish tradition and some

  well- known parts of the Christian tradition also introduce two different

  attitudes. One I shall call unconditional forgiveness; the other I shall call unconditional love and generosity. We shall see that these alternatives, and particularly the latter, have a great deal to offer. And both are prominent

  in biblical texts, in both the Old and New Testaments. Nonetheless, it is

  not possible to avoid the fact that for a great deal of the history of orga-

  nized Judeo- Christian religion, transactional forgiveness has held the center of the stage, with large consequences for both political and personal

  relations.

  Let us, then, examine the Judeo- Christian tradition of transactional

  forgiveness in a Nietzschean spirit.

  II. Jewish Teshuvah : Keeping Score of Acts and Omissions

  Jewish teshuvah, or repentance— and its associated attitude of forgiveness—

  has a long and complex history. Many biblical texts, especially in the pro-

  phetic books, discuss and exemplify a wide range of relevant acts and

  attitudes that a later tradition codifies. These texts are not systematic, and they do not form a theory or a canonical set of practices. Ideas of transactional forgiveness are prominent.7 But, as we shall see in section V, they

  coexist, not fully codified, with texts that suggest ideas of unconditional

  forgiveness and unconditional love. Nor is the Talmud systematic, and

  I shall discuss its insights on the topic only later, when I investigate dis-

  sident traditions.8

  A subsequent rabbinic tradition, however, codified these ideas, defin-

  ing authoritatively what teshuvah is and how it should be performed.9

  The leading voices in this tradition are the great twelfth- century thinker

  Maimonides,10 whose Hilchot Teshuvah ( The Laws of Repentance) form part of the first book of his magisterial Mishneh Torah; and the thirteenth- century Yonah of Gerona, whose Shaarei Teshuvah ( The Gates of Repentance) is the most extensive codification of teshuvah.11 Contemporary Jewish theological discussions of teshuvah in such authorities as Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt hew very closely

  to these texts.12

  As one can see from the titles of these works, the organizing concept

  is that of teshuvah or repentance, rather than forgiveness; but forgiveness

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  is the ultimate goal of the process, and it plays a crucial organizing role.

  Initially, however, the accent is on the activity of the wrongdoer, rather

  than the victim. A primary reason for this emphasis is that teshuvah is above all a process undertaken by erring human beings in relation to

  God and God’s anger. Ethical prescriptions are given to the transgressor,

  and not, of course, to God. There is an ancillary account of how teshuvah works in relation to other human beings; as we shall see, human- human

  teshuvah is distinct and unmediated, and one cannot fulfill its obligations simply by repairing one’s relationship with God. Nonetheless, every bad

  act toward a human being is also, and above all, a wrongdoing toward

  God, and the relationship of the wrongdoer to God is given considerably

  greater emphasis, both ritually and textually, than are human- human

  relationships. Yom Ki
ppur is aimed entirely at repairing one’s relation to

  God, although mention is made of the separate need to atone for wrongs

  against humans. The text of Yonah is virtually silent about human- human

  atonement, mentioning it only briefly and toward the end of a four- hun-

  dred- page work. Soloveitchik’s authoritative contemporary account dis-

  cusses human- human teshuvah only fleetingly. Maimonides gives human teshuvah a proportionally greater emphasis— but only because the teshuvah section of his work is very short, since the ethical commandments that occupy most of Yonah’s work occur in other parts of Maimonides’

  great treatise.

  The framework of teshuvah is the very long list of commandments

  that the observant Jew is required to keep. Yonah divides these into

  “positive,” commandments requiring one to do something, and “nega-

  tive,” commandments requiring one not to do something. In other words,

  there are sins of omission, typically lighter, and sins of commission, vary-

  ing in gravity but always grave. These commandments cover the entire

  terrain of life. Some are central moral or religious requirements; others

  are “fences,” commandments whose function is to keep the potential sin-

  ner further away from a possible site of sin. (An example of a “fence”

  is the commandment that a male must not touch a married woman in

  any way at all: this commandment creates distance between the poten-

  tial sinner and the possibility of a serious sexual offense.) Even though

  violation of a “fence” is a lighter transgression than violating the primary

  commandment, however, it is still a violation, for which teshuvah must be undertaken. Moreover, both deliberate and accidental violations require

  teshuvah.13

  The fabric of life is thus suffused with occasions for teshuvah. Constant vigilance is required, and teshuvah itself is certain to be needed very often, given the number of laws and the ease of transgressing. Indeed one might

  say that one function of the entire framework of teshuvah is to fill up the fabric of life with thought about one’s relationship to God. The period

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  between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the Yom Kippur ritual

  itself, are the primary occasions for gathering up all the year’s occasions

  for repentance.14 Still, Maimonides envisages teshuvah taking place all through the year. Yonah remarks that the entire process is like a fortifica-tion, which protects one from future sin.