Recognizing contingency. A philosophical reflection on forgiveness

Forgiveness has apparently to do with either the individual-psychological sphere or with a religious/political dimension. It does not seem to be a philosophically relevant topic and, in fact, there have not been many remarkable philosophical investigations about it. One of the most significant is made in the last pages of the Spirit chapter of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where forgiveness is given a philosophically decisive function. In a first step I sketch the features and the role of forgiveness in Hegel’s text. However, my aim is not a faithful reconstruction of Hegel’s argument, but rather, starting from its categories, the development of an idealistically-inspired and systematically-attractive philosophical reflection on forgiveness. In a second step I interpret the Hegelian concepts to work out four main aspects of forgiveness, developing a partial philosophical definition of it as a) activity, and not simple re-activity or passivity; b) rehabilitation of the meaningfulness of the linguistic act; c) integral concreteness; and d) recognition and acceptance of contingency.