“Judgment” and “Forgiveness” in Hannah Arendt

In an engaging book “The Human Condition” (1958), Hannah Arendt (1906-75) puts a high value on the power of forgiving and assigns that power as a remedy for the predicament of “irreversibility” resulting from “action.” Judgment, at the same time, is also of great significance for Arendt, who criticizes certain types of forgiveness for spoiling the power of judging or destroying an equal personal relationship. In this article, I intend to indicate what Arendt considers important and difficult points of forgiveness, to clarify that Arendt consistently insists that forgiveness should be compatible with judgment in respect of human dignity and pride and to examine how she divides and relates these two human faculties. In order to solve these problems, I focus on her texts such as The Human Condition, Denktagebuch (1950-73), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Bertolt Brecht (1966), and her argument with Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73), who was a British-born poet who resided in America from 1939. This article elucidates that what Arendt calls forgiveness is conditional, differentiated from charity, closely related to judicial pardon and based on a mutual concern for both the forgiver and the forgiven. It also reveals that on the one hand, for Arendt, judgment takes only acts into account and follows the rule of justice which demands that all be equal, and on the other hand forgiveness takes account of actors and obeys the rule of mercy by claiming inequality, which means that forgiveness pays more attention to “who has done” rather than “what was done”.論文/Article