Arendt, forgiveness, accountability and punishment

Much confusion reigns when it comes to Hannah Arendt’s position on the relationship between forgiveness and punishment. The reason why this confusion warrants clarification has much to do with our post-conflict context in which the question of forgiveness keeps coming up along with questions of vengeance, the right to punish as well as the need for accountability. Factor into this the prominence of Arendt’s work in the ever growing literature on the question of what is to be done in the aftermath of the destructions of totalitarianism and a clarification of her position on these issues becomes important. I will not, in this entry, refer to any secondary sources that have tried to come to terms with this topic in Arendt’s work. Instead, I am interested in reading afresh what Arendt herself has to say.

One of the phrases in Arendt’s work that troubles post-conflict commentators with a penchant for the power of forgiveness most, is this one (from The Human Condition): “Men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and […] they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable” (241). Commentators understand this phrase as an indication that Arendt had a very limited notion of forgiveness in mind — one that is intimately bounded up with punishment. However, in order to understand this phrase better, we need to note two things: first, Arendt’s understanding of the unforgivable (which is, given her understanding of the relationship between forgiveness and punishment, inseparable from the concept of punishment) and second, Arendt’s understanding of punishment.

As regards the first, Arendt describes the unforgivable as “those offenses which, since Kant, we call ‘radical evil’ and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offences and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs” (my emphasis) (241). Clearly, Arendt is writing here about the Holocaust and perhaps, more generally, the emergence of a new form of crime — the crime against humanity. Arendt says that this crime is unpunishable and therefore unforgivable. Why is the crime against humanity unpunishable? Clearly, Arendt says it is unpunishable because it falls outside of the realm of human affairs. In order to better grasp what this in fact means, we need to consider Arendt’s conception of punishment.

Arendt conceives of punishment narrowly. When she says that “forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance” (240) we can see that her notion of punishment strictly accords with the talio or eye for an eye principle — vengeance or revenge — which, she says is the “automatic reaction to transgression” to be “expected and calculated”. Against the background of this conceptualisation of punishment, the crime against humanity is indeed a radically unpunishable crime — it is not possible in the realm of human affairs to exact vengeance for a crime in which millions died as a result of the diabolical banality of evil, precisely because such vengeance would require yet another crime against humanity — a crime against the realm of human affairs itself. For this reason, the crime against humanity is not forgivable — it exceeds the realm of humanity in which forgiveness takes place. This does not mean that specific crimes and violations committed during the course of the perpetration of the crime against humanity, cannot be forgiven — such specific offenses are punishable in the realm of human affairs in accordance with the strict notion of punishment and can therefore be forgiven. But Arendt warns that forgiveness for such offences cannot be predicted: “It is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely react [like vengeance does], but acts anew, unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.” (241) Forgiveness in Arendt then, amounts to a relinquishment of the right to exact proportionate vengeance. The logical consequence of this is that it is indeed possible to forgive and to exact a form of punishment that does not amount to proportionate vengeance, for example the rehabilitative forms of punishment that have emerged in our time.

The fact that the crime against humanity is neither punishable nor forgivable does not mean that its perpetrators are not accountable (in the sense that we can always call upon them or even force them to account for their deeds) — on Arendt’s account, one with which I agree, it means only that even if these perpetrators were punished by way of death as they were at Nuremberg and later in Israel, that the crime itself (as a crime against humanity) would still not have been punished. Inversely, even if all the perpetrators were forgiven, the crime itself would still not have been forgiven.