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PDF FormatDespite my immense respect for Benziman’s insights into the nature of forgiveness, I do have some misgivings about his approach. Perhaps my discomfort stems from the fact that Benziman’s argument is not balanced in the Aristotelian sense I cited above—and philosophical imbalance, as we have seen, can lead to distortions in both the meaning and expression of the virtues. In particular, Benziman’s discussion of the Nazis and whether to offer them forgiveness—he is unequivocally opposed to the idea—seems to me unbalanced. Moreover, I believe that his argument against forgiving the Nazis is inconsistent with the rest of his essay. Inconsistency, of course, is not a philosophical problem if it is simply a matter of changing one’s mind over time. It is a problem, however, if two premises are in contradiction. Unfortunately, it seems to me that Benziman’s argument features two such contradictory premises, and I wish to address them through the questions below.
1. Who is my neighbor? If neighbor (re’a) includes associates,and if all human beings are associated because we are all made in the image and likeness of God, then it follows (whether we like it or not) that the Nazis are also made in the image of God and are, by definition, our associates. This is a painful conclusion but an inescapable one.
2. Is the nature of forgiveness being confused? If forgiveness is a moral virtue, and if all moral virtues, at their core, are unconditional (i.e., no one can prevent, morally, a person from expressing a moral virtue) then any person may, if he so chooses, forgive any Nazi, despite what that Nazi has done. This forgiveness, of course, is not to condone the Nazi’s actions in any way. Likewise, because forgiveness is morally different from justice (forgiveness is not demanded by society, while justice is, at least in some respects), anyone who does not wish to forgive the Nazis need not do so as well. But to say, as does Benziman, that we cannot or must not forgive them on account of their evil actions, and that, further, by means of those actions the Nazis have become—in the words of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry—“antimen,” appears to express a misunderstanding of what forgiveness is.
As we established, to grant or not to grant forgiveness is not contingent on another person’s behavior. Forgiveness can be offered unconditionally, whenever the forgiver wishes to do so. While there is a Jewish tradition of granting forgiveness when someone asks for it, this does not mean that such a request is a necessary conditionfor forgiveness; while it may be a sufficient condition, if we are to remain true to the definition of moral virtue and to the meaning of the Joseph narrative, it cannot be a necessary condition. Otherwise, forgiveness would be the only moral virtue that requires a contingency for its expression. Even if one were to argue that this is, in fact, the case, and that forgiveness, unique among all the moral virtues, is conditional, this would simply present another dilemma: Now the freedom of the forgiver is restricted, and he is placed at the mercy of the wrongdoer, who does not or will not request forgiveness.
3. Is the essence of forgiveness being confused with its purpose? Here we must be careful not to confuse the essence of forgiveness (i.e., what it is at its core) with the purpose of forgiveness (i.e., what we are striving toward when we forgive). We can bear the pain of being wronged (an essence of forgiveness), even if we do so alone (an imperfect end). The ideal purpose is to forgive as perfectly as we can, with the offender genuinely seeking and receiving forgiveness from us, so that we can reconcile with each other. However, we do not need any guarantees that this purpose will be fulfilled in order to play our part in the essence of forgiving, namely, the bearing of the pain of the wrongdoing as best we can, in the recognition of the other as made in the image and likeness of God. Benziman seems to disagree with this.
4. Is the essence of forgiveness confused? If we confuse essence with purpose, we invariably distort the former. In this case, we risk confusing the meaning of forgiveness itself. For example, if we cannot fulfill the purpose of forgiveness (reconciliation), we may conclude that we similarly cannot exercise the essence of forgiveness (bearing pain, exercising goodness toward the offender). This approach restricts our individual freedom to forgive and reduces forgiveness to a conditionalaction, thus distorting its meaning. After all, if we express goodness when the supposed moral law of conditionality tells us we cannot, then our goodness cannot be seen as goodness.
5. Are the purposes of forgiveness confused? If we confuse essences, then we confuse purposes, and our thinking about and expression of the virtues may become imbalanced. For example, suppose we are made to see forgiveness as being dominated by another person (a distortion of essence). The result will no doubt be fear, as well as a commitment to embrace our resentment rather than our scars (a distortion of purpose) and to shun all possibility of practicing forgiveness or receiving it from the offender (another distorted purpose). From a psychological perspective, such deep and long-lasting resentment can only be self-destructive.
6. Are there contradictory premises? Benziman makes an important statement when he says of all offenders, “We know the wrongdoer is human.” When we forgive, he says, we do not forget the humanity of the other. Near the essay’s end, however, Benziman begins to argue the exact opposite point of view: Whereas at first he takes it as self-evident that we do not diminish the humanity of the other prior to forgiving him, when assessing the humanity of the Nazis, he throws up a contradiction, calling them both human and at the same time “antimen.” Now, the use of the prefix “anti” could indicate that the term means “a person who is against men.” It could also, however, mean “someone who is the opposite of a man.” Which of the two definitions is used here? The answer, I think, is contained in the statement by Améry that Benziman quotes at length: “When they led [the SS man] to the place of execution, the antiman had once again become a fellow man.” Clearly, then, Benziman uses the term to refer to what he is, not what he is for or against. We thus have a dilemma: Benziman calls the Nazis both human and anti(hu)man, but one cannot, by definition, be both. If a philosopher states that actions play a part in defining a person, and that a person can thus be defined as an “antiman” because of his actions, then said person, because of his actions, is no longer truly (or perhaps completely) human in the eyes of that philosopher. So, too, if we follow Benziman’s argument to its logical conclusion, we see that his own “forgetting” about the Nazis’ humanity appears to nullify his earlier claim that we cannot forget the essence of the offender’s humanity. Even if Benziman were to argue that he did not mean to imply a complete cancellation of the wrongdoer’s humanity, it is obvious (because of the prefix “anti”) that he at least means a reduction in some (undefined) aspect of his humanity. Either way, it is clear he does not think the Nazis have the same status as others defined as human.
