Ricoeur on Forgiveness

I love the work of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005). Perhaps the most important thread that runs through all of his writings is his philosophy of the self. Ricoeur follows Kierkegaard in thinking that we never can say that we’ve “arrived” at the self, but the self is always “on the way.” We can never have immediate access to our true selves, rather, the self is always to some extent hidden, mediated by language, interpretation, and most importantly, the Other. We thus need a hermeneutics of the self that guides us into a richer understanding of who we are.  

I’ve recently been reading some essays on Ricoeur’s later works from the book A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, published by Fordham University Press and edited by Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema. A number of these essays investigate Ricoeur’s treatment of the theme of forgiveness at the end of his book Memory, History, and Forgetting. In the epilogue to this text, titled "Difficult Forgiveness," Ricoeur sets the question of forgiveness in relation to an anthropology of the self which he dubs the "capable man" or "capable being." What Ricoeur has in mind is to look into a problem that he sees with traditional notions of forgiveness, namely the problem that forgiveness poses to an ethical and narrative understanding of the self.

He begins by defining forgiveness as that which "unbinds the action from the agent." When I am forgiven, the forgiver in essence removes my wrongful action from me. She says, "I forgive you. I no longer hold that action against you. I have taken that action away from my understanding of who you are."

Venema, in his essay "The Source of Ricoeur's Double Allegiance," puts the problem like this:

"If I am at fault for what I have done, then I am faced with an impossible situation; namely, the separation of action from agency, such that when forgiven my fault or action, it is no longer ascribed to who I am. If this is the case, then as Ricoeur argues, forgiveness might very well be the destruction of selfhood, which for Ricoeur is always a fundamental relation between who I am and what I do, between action and agent" (p.66).

In other words, for Ricoeur,  I cannot understand who I am without reference to what I have done. My actions and my identity are so closely intertwined, that to try to identify myself apart from my deeds is to render my self unrecognizable. And yet, this is just what forgiveness does. Thus, if someone forgives me, I truly accept and put on that forgiveness, I am at a loss as to now understand myself. For I know that I have a fault, but that fault is now thrown far from me. I am told that my action no longer counts toward my identity. And this problem stands in the way of the restoration that forgiveness is supposed to supply.

So, the question I want to ask is this: Is this a true problem for forgiveness? Or is Ricoeur just inventing a pseudo-problem? Next time, we'll look at how he goes about solving the problem of difficult forgiveness.