![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1. Cherry’s approach is certainly accessible, but sometimes errs on the side of condescension: ‘if your brain hurts from the work it is doing in rethinking forgiveness, it’s going to go into overdrive when it discovers that apologies are not without their problems too’ (59).
2. The dominant mainstream book on forgiveness remains Griswold (Citation2007). Griswold is a conditionalist. That means that legitimate forgiveness requires the victim to wait for the wrongdoer to fulfil relevant conditions – to repent, to apologise, to pay reparations, and to commit to not committing the same wrong again. If the victim does not fulfil the conditions, then any forgiveness is illegitimate in that it risks condoning the wrong and expressing a lack of self-respect. I myself have argued for the ‘unconditionalist’ account: Cowley (Citation2010), but I have been persuaded by Cherry’s pluralism on this.
3. There is a debate in the literature about who has the ‘standing’ to forgive. It could be argued that only Cherry’s mother suffered from the stepfather’s infidelity, and that only she had the standing. However, such is the identification of children with their parents that I would agree with Cherry that both she and her sister had been wronged by the stepfather, and so each faced their own question of whether to forgive.
4. Even if the wrongdoer’s direct motivation is understandable (e.g. he stole from me out of greed), his lack of moral restraint is not understandable.
5. Insofar as someone supports this face-to-face paradigm of forgiveness, there will be a question of whether one can forgive the dead, or the otherwise absent. I think one can forgive the dead, as opposed to merely letting the anger go, if one is careful to ‘orient’ the forgiveness toward the dead wrongdoer and not toward the anger. But the different between the two phenomena will be less clear.
6. As a ‘withholder’, it is striking that Cherry fails to mention Jean Améry (Citation1980). Améry, an Austrian, was working for the Belgian resistance in 1942 when he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and sent to Auschwitz. He survived, and became famous among Holocaust writers for his refusal to forgive, despite the pressures he saw around him in Europe in the 1960s to ignore the Nazi crimes and move forward. On the contrary, he felt it was his duty to ‘nail’ the perpetrators to the ‘moral reality’ of their crimes.
7. Indeed, Bash’s book has one chapter entitled ‘The varieties of forgiveness’, which would seem to support Cherry’s own pluralistic account.
8. Cherry does not mention a famous account of forgiveness, that of Jacques Derrida (Citation2001). Derrida’s account is obscure, but I think he makes this point well: for the wrongdoer to fully understand the wrongdoing, he must accept that it is unforgivable. In parallel to this, if the victim understands the wrongdoing as forgivable in principle, then what results is not forgiveness but some kind of transaction – e.g. the wrongdoer’s repentance in exchange for ‘forgiveness’.
9. It is ironic that Cherry begins the chapter with an interview of Harry and Meghan (98) as an example of family wrongs and resentments, when theirs is such an exceptional family, in so many ways, as to alienate many who would otherwise recognise and sympathise with their accounts of family disagreements.
10. However, there is also the question (that Cherry does not consider) of the age of the wrongdoer. A 20-year-old can be reasonably expected to work on improving his character, and therefore it makes sense to apologise for any unintended harm resulting from his character traits, and commit to improving. It’s not clear that the 50-year-old leopard can commit to changing his spots, however.
11. A curious example of self-forgiveness is the following: ‘A misogynist could forgive himself for allowing his sense of inferiority and his need for control to destroy his valuable relationships’ (160). But there is an ambiguity here. If the man in question has always been a misogynist, he would probably not have had any valuable relationships with women in the first place. Insofar as he did have some (despite his misogyny), then he would certainly not admit now that his misogyny had destroyed them, let alone that he ‘allowed’ it to – he would say the women in question were being ‘unreasonable’ or ‘stupid’, and that ‘he is better off without them’ etc. Either way, he would have nothing to regret and nothing to self-forgive.