Political Forgiveness, Promise, and the “Understanding Heart” in Hannah Arendt’S Theory

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Hannah Arendt's theorizing of forgiveness has become a frequent reference in conflict resolution literature and has rightly prompted many commentaries by theologians and political theorists. The concept itself is controversial, and this chapter reviews some of the critical comments addressed to Arendt. However, the chapter's main purpose is to offer a theoretical complement to the interpretations of Arendt's contribution to theories of peace-making, and a three-fold empirical illustration of this argument. Most discussions of Arendtian forgiveness fail to take into account the other human capacity that palliates the irreversibility and unpredictability of action: promising. The connection between forgiveness and promising is what endows forgiveness with its political character and secures justice. Moreover, although Arendt was wary of the political impact of self-improvement efforts, she theorized reconciliation as the attempt to understand one's place in the world, a kind of pondering that admits of self-reflection, but is quite unlike forgiveness. This rather idiosyncratic form of reconciliation as a process of understanding, which stimulates political judgment, is crucial to empower the public actor. The “gift of the understanding heart,” as Arendt called it poetically, like the connection between forgiving and promising, has provoked few academic commentaries. To make the most of Arendt’ contribution to the theorizing and practices of conflict resolution requires taking into account her analyses of three key political concepts – forgiving, promising and reconciliation as “understanding” – jointly rather than discretely. The first part of the chapter develops this argument by examining Arendt's theorizing and the critiques leveled especially against her discussion of political forgiveness. The second part discusses three real life examples to illustrate why this theoretical argument matters to politics: Arendt's concepts, taken together, can work as analytical categories to decipher and assess empirical processes of conflict resolution. The chapter examines the role of promising and forgiveness in the launching of the 1952 European Coal and Steel Community and the deficit of understanding; in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the deficit of promising; and the deficit of forgiveness and understanding in some of the early Iraqi and US reconciliatory attempts.