forgiveness

After World War II many questions were raised by the „generation of sons” to their fathers regarding the war. There was an urgent need to cope with the past somehow. In this past elaboration the voice of the victims was worth to listen to and forgiveness of the aggressors became a major question of the society. This article was born from a study of western forgiveness-discussions and presents the Hungarian forgiveness-ethos after the end of the Great War and the big changes of 1989.

This paper concludes that within the moral philosophy of Jankélévitch, the problem of forgiveness is ambiguous; or rather the author has an ambiguous attitude towards forgiveness. His point of view also has shortcomings that are due to the deficiencies of his metaphysics, his anthropology, his image of God and his interpretation of death. The God of Jankélévitch is creative energy, eternal acting goodness and love, but it is not a person and does not personally know its creations.

This paper concludes that within the moral philosophy of Jankélévitch, the problem of forgiveness is ambiguous; or rather the author has an ambiguous attitude towards forgiveness.His point of view also has shortcomings that are due to the deficiencies of his metaphysics, his anthropology, his image of God and his interpretation of death. The God of Jankélévitch is creative energy, eternal acting goodness and love, but it is not a person and does not personally know its creations.

This paper examines the issue of absolution by Vladimir Jankélévitch. The absolving party’s role is to discover the cause external to man, deep down beneath human malice, which motivates the criminal actions. With an investigator’s zeal, an answer is sought to the question of “unde malum”? The old answer comes from dualism: the negative transcendent force, Satan, is the source of all sins. If there is an explanation, sin is mitigated and rage is attenuated, therefore explanations must be found. So one needs to explain – and this absolves one from all obligations of forgiveness.