We live in a culture of apology and forgiveness. But while there are a few thinkers who are critical of forgiveness as being too supine, and extol the virtues of retribution and 'getting even,' philosopher and intellectual Martha C. Nussbaum criticizes forgiveness from the other side: that in the realm of personal relations, forgiveness is at its heart inquisitorial and disciplinary.
In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Nussbaum paints a startling new portrait that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals. The relationship between a wronged human and another is, she says, based on this primary God-human relationship. Nussbaum agrees with Nietzsche in seeing in forgiveness a displaced vindictiveness and a concealed resentment that are ungenerous and unhelpful in human relations. She says forgiveness can give aid and comfort to a certain narcissism of resentment that a loving and generous person should eschew-in favor of a generosity that gets ahead of forgiveness and prevents its procedural thoughts from taking place.
With a wide range of literary and classical references as background, Nussbaum pursues her penetrating and wide-ranging exploration of anger and forgiveness from the personal realm into the political, as well as into a so-called middle realm where we interact with people and groups who are not our close friends or family. A great deal of resentment toward others is in this middle realm, and she argues that the Stoics were right-we should try and understand how petty most slights are, and avoid anger to begin with.
Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School, the Philosophy Department, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Author of OUP titles Love's Knowledge, Sex and Social Justice, Philosophical Interventions; others; as well as Not for Profit (Princeton 2010), Upheavals of Thought (CUP 2003), Creatin...
- "We feel calm toward those who humble themselves before us and do not talk back. For they seem to acknowledge that they are our inferiors. ... That our anger ceases toward those who hum- ble themselves before us is shown even by dogs, who do not bite people when they sit down. —Aristotle, Rhetoric 13"
- "莫汉达斯·甘地和马丁·路德·金的革命不愤怒，不是一个遥远的希望， 而是一项直接的任务，在与不公正的对抗中被接受。它最终涉及到一套心 理和行为实践，需要被运动的成员接受和深度内化。但因为它不是个人心 理治疗，而是一种大规模培养的形式，它需要伴随着一个明确的理论，这 样运动中的每个人都能意识到自己的目标，并向新人传授态度和实践。这 是我们的好运：甘地和金都给我们留下了大量的理论，描述和证明，非愤 怒的情感和行为方面。曼德拉给我们留下了一组非凡的非正式观察，从中 可以提取出不愤怒的令人信服的论点。我认为甘地和金在争论中留下了一 个空白，他们充满了引起共鸣的宗教意象，激发了许多追随者，但这并不 能回答"
- "Anger and Forgiveness III. Revolutionary Non-Anger: Theory and Practice The revolutionary non-anger of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., is proposed not as a distant hope but as an immediate task, to be embraced here and now in the confrontation with injustice. It involves, ultimately, a "
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The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax (Oxford Handbooks)
The Fasces
The Primacy of Doubt
Landscape and Space
Future Morality
Figurines