by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising en-
acted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify
no more than a role played before one's self.
Since these faculties correspond so closely to the human condi-
tion of plurality, their role in politics establishes a diametrically
different set of guiding principles from the "moral" standards in-
herent in the Platonic notion of rule. For Platonic rulership, whose
legitimacy rested upon the domination of the self, draws its guiding
principles—those which at the same time justify and limit power
over others—from a relationship established between me and my-
self, so that the right and wrong of relationships with others are
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The Human Condition
determined by attitudes toward one's self, until the whole of the
public realm is seen in the image of "man writ large," of the right
order between man's individual capacities of mind, soul, and body.
The moral code, on the other hand, inferred from the faculties of
forgiving and of. making promises, rests on experiences which no-
body could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary, are
entirely based on the presence of others. And just as the extent and
modes of self-rule justify and determine rule over others—how one
rules himself, he will rule others—thus the extent and modes of
being forgiven and being promised determine the extent and modes
in which one may be able to forgive himself or keep promises
concerned only with himself.
Because the remedies against the enormous strength and resili-
ency inherent in action processes can function only under the con-
dition of plurality, it is very dangerous to use this faculty in any
but the realm of human affairs. Modern natural science and tech-
nology, which no longer observe or take material from or imitate
processes of nature but seem actually to act into it, seem, by the
same token, to have carried irreversibility and human unpredicta-
bility into the natural realm, where no remedy can be found to
undo what has been done. Similarly, it seems that one of the great
dangers of acting in the mode of making and within its categorical
framework of means and ends lies in the concomitant self-depriva-
tion of the remedies inherent only in action, so that one is bound
not only to do with the means of violence necessary for all fabrica-
tion, but also to undo what he has done as he undoes an unsuccessful
object, by means of destruction. Nothing appears more manifest in
these attempts than the greatness of human power, whose source
lies in the capacity to act, and which without action's inherent
remedies inevitably begins to overpower and destroy not man
himself but the conditions under which life was given to him.
The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human
affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery
in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no
reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense. It has
been in the nature of our tradition of political thought (and for
reasons we cannot explore here) to be highly selective and to ex-
clude from articulate conceptualization a great variety of authentic
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Action
political experiences, among which we need not be surprised to
find some of an even elementary nature. Certain aspects of the
teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which are not primarily related to
the Christian religious message but sprang from experiences in the
small and closely knit community of his followers, bent on chal-
lenging the public authorities in Israel, certainly belong among
them, even though they have been neglected because of their al-
legedly exclusively religious nature. The only rudimentary sign of
an awareness that forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for
the inevitable damages resulting from action may be seen in the
Roman principle to spare the vanquished (parcere subiectis)—a wis-
dom entirely unknown to the Greeks—or in the right to commute
the death sentence, probably also of Roman origin, which is the
prerogative of nearly all Western heads of state.
It is decisive in our context that Jesus maintains against the
"scribes and pharisees" first that it is not true that only God has
the power to forgive,76 and second that this power does not derive
from God—as though God, not men, would forgive through the
medium of human beings—but on the contrary must be mobilized
by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by
Crod also. Jesus' formulation is even more radical. Man in the
gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and he
must do "likewise," but "if ye from your hearts forgive," God
shall do "likewise."77 The reason for the insistence on a duty to
forgive is clearly "for they know not what they do" and it does
not apply to the extremity of crime and willed evil, for then it
would not have been necessary to teach: "And if he trespass
76. This is seated emphatically in Luke 5:21-24 (cf. Matt. 9:4—6 or Mark
12:7-10), where Jesus performs a miracle to prove that "the Son of man hath
power upon earth to forgive sins," the emphasis being on "upon earth." It is his insistence on the "power to forgive," even more than his performance of miracles, that shocks the people, so that "they that sat at meat with him began to say
within themselves, Who is this that forgives sins also?" (Luke 7:49).
77. Matt. 18:35; cf. Mark 11;25; "And when ye stand praying, forgive, . . .
that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses." Or:
"If ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses" (Matt. 6:14-15). In all these instances, the power to forgive is primarily a human power: God forgives "us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
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The Human Condition
against thee seven times a day, and seven times in a day turn again
to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him."78 Crime and
willed evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than good deeds; according
to Jesus, they will be taken care of by God in the Last Judgment,
which plays no role whatsoever in life on earth, and the Last Judg-
ment is not characterized by forgiveness but by just retribution
(apodounai) ,79 But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in
the very nature of action's constant establishment of new relation-
ships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing,
in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing
men from what they have done unknowingly.80 Only through this
constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free
agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and
start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to
begin something new.
In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance,
which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing,
whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first
misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the
chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered
78. Luke 17 : 3^4. It is important to keep in mind that the three key words of
the text— aphienai, metanoein, and hamartanein—carry certain connotations even in New Testament Greek which the translations fail to render fully. The original
meaning of aphienai is "dismiss" and "release" rather than "forgive"; metanoein means "change of mind" and—since it serves also to render the Hebrew shuv—
"return," "trace back one's steps," rather than "repentance" with its psychological emotional overtones; what is required is: change your mind and "sin no
more," which is almost the opposite of doing penance. Hamartanein, finally, is indeed very well rendered by "trespassing" in so far as it means rather "to miss,"
"fail and go astray," than "to sin" (see Heinrich Ebeling, Griechisch-deutsches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testamente [1923]). The verse which I quote in the standard translation could also be rendered as follows: "And if he trespass against
thee . . . and . . . turn again to thee, saying, / changed my mind; thou shalt release him."
79. Matt. 16:27.
80. This interpretation seems justified by the context (Luke 17:1-5): Jesus
introduces his words by pointing to the inevitability of "offenses" (skandala) which are unforgivable, at least on earth; for "woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
cast into the sea"; and then continues by teaching forgiveness for "trespassing"
(hamartanein).
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Action
course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic re-
action to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of
the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of
forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in
an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, some-
thing of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words,
is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and
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. The freedom contained in Jesus' teach-
ings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses
both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action
process, which by itself need never come to an end.
The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is
punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an
end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.
It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of
human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot
punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be
unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of 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 offenses and that they therefore transcend
the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power,
both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their
appearance. Here, where the deed itself dispossesses us of all
power, we can indeed only repeat with Jesus: "It were better for
him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into
the sea."
Perhaps the most plausible argument that forgiving and acting
are as closely connected as destroying and making comes from that
aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems
to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. Forgiving
and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal
(though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what
was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was
clearly recognized by Jesus ("Her sins which are many are for-
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The Human Condition
given; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the
same loveth little"), and it is the reason for the current conviction
that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one
of the rarest occurrences in human lives,81 indeed possesses an
unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of
vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is uncon-
cerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved per-
son may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with
his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of
its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and sepa-
rates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between
which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own
product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are
related and which they hold in common, is representative of the
world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they
will insert a new world into the existing world.82 Through the
child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which
their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the pos-
sible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is,
in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners
anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason
rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical,
perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.
If it were true, therefore, as Chrsitianity assumed, that only love
can forgive because only love is fully receptive to who somebody
81. The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due
to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable
experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
82. This world-creating faculty of love is not the same as fertility, upon which
most creation myths are based. The following mythological tale, on the contrary,
draws its imagery clearly from the experience of love: the sky is seen as a gigantic goddess who still bends down upon the earth god, from whom she is being separated by the air god who was born between them and is now lifting her up. Thus
a world space composed of air comes into being and inserts itself between earth
and sky. See H. A. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man
(Chicago, 1946), p. 18, and Mircea Eliade, Traite d'Histoire des Religions (Paris, 1953), p. 212.
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Action
is, to the point of being always willing to forgive him whatever he
may have done, forgiving would have to remain altogether outside
our considerations. Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circum-
scribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs.
Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, is a kind of
"friendship" without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard
for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts
between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we
may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem.
Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that re-
spect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear
symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social
life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is
quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the
sake of the person. But the fact that the same who, revealed in
action and speech, remains also the subject of forgiving is the deep-
est reason why nobody can forgive himself; here, as in action and
speech generally, we are dependent upon others, to whom we ap-
pear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive.
Closed within ourselves, we would never be able to forgive our-
selves any failing or transgression because we would lack the ex-
perience of the person for the sake of whom one can forgive.
34
U N P R E D I C T A B I L I T Y
AND T H E
P O W E R O F P R O M I S E
In contrast to forgiving, which—perhaps because of its religious
context, perhaps because of the connection with love attending its
discovery—has always been deemed unrealistic and inadmissible
in the public realm, the power of stabilization inherent in the fac-
ulty of making promises has been known throughout our tradition.
We may trace it back to the Roman legal system, the inviolability
of agreements and treaties (pacta sunt servanda); or we may see its
discoverer in Abraham, the man from Ur, whose whole story, as
the Bible tells it, shows such a passionate drive toward making
covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no
other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the
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The Human Condition
wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to
make a Covenant with him. At any rate, the great variety of con-
tract theories since the Romans attests to the fact that the power of
making promises has occupied the center of political thought over
the centuries.
The unpredictability which the act of making promises at least
partially dispels is of a twofold nature: it arises simultaneously out
of the "darkness of the human heart," that is, the basic unreliability
of men who never can guarantee today who they will be tomorrow,
and out of the impossibility of foretelling the consequences of an
act within a community of equals where everybody has the same
capacity to act. Man's inability to rely upon himself or to have
complete faith in himself (which is the same thing) is the price
human beings pay for freedom; and the impossibility of remaining
unique masters of what they do, of knowing its consequences and
relying upon the future, is the price they pay for plurality and
reality, for the joy of inhabiting together with others a world
whose reality is guaranteed for each by the presence of all.
The function of the faculty of promising is to master this two-
fold darkness of human affairs and is, as such, the only alternative
to a mastery which relies on domination of one's self and rule over
others; it corresponds exactly to the existence of a freedom which
was given under the condition of non-sovereignty. The danger and
the advantage inherent in all bodies politic that rely on contracts
and treaties is that they, unlike those that rely on rule and sov-
ereignty, leave the unpredictability of human affairs and the unre-
liability of men as they are, using them merely as the medium, as
it were, into which certain islands of predictability are thrown and
in which certain guideposts of reliability are erected. The moment
promises lose their character as isolated islands of certainty in an
ocean of uncertainty, that is, when this faculty is misused to cover
the whole ground of the future and to map out a path secured in all
directions, they lose their binding power and the whole enterprise
becomes self-defeating.
We mentioned before the power generated when people gather
together and "act in concert," which disappears the moment they
depart. The force that keeps them together, as distinguished from
the space of appearances in which they gather and the power which
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Action
keeps this public space in existence, is the force of mutual promise
or contract. Sovereignty, which is always spurious if claimed by an
isolated single entity, be it the individual entity of the person or the
collective entity of a nation, assumes, in the case of many men
mutually bound by promises, a certain limited reality. The sov-
ereignty resides in the resulting, limited independence from the
incalculability of the future, and its limits are the same as those
inherent in the faculty itself of making and keeping promises. The
sovereignty of a body of people bound and kept together, not by an
identical will which somehow magically inspires them all, but by
an agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and bind-
ing, shows itself quite clearly in its unquestioned superiority over
those who are completely free, unbound by any promises and
unkept by any purpose. This superiority derives from the capacity
to dispose of the future as though it were the present, that is, the
enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension
in which power can be effective. Nietzsche, in his extraordinary
sensibility to moral phenomena, and despite his modern prejudice
to see the source of all power in the will power of the isolated indi-
vidual, saw in the faculty of promises (the "memory of the will," as
he called it) the very distinction which marks off human from ani-
mal life.83 If sovereignty is in the realm of action and human affairs
what mastership is in the realm of making and the world of things,
then their chief distinction is that the one can only be achieved by
the many bound together, whereas the other is conceivable only in
isolation.
In so far as morality is more than the sum total of mores, of cus-
toms and standards of behavior solidified through tradition and
valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with
time, it has, at least politically, no more to support itself than the
good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to
forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them.
83. Nietzsche saw with unequaled clarity the connection between human
sovereignty and the faculty of making promises, which led him to a unique insight
into the relatedness of human pride and human conscience. Unfortunately, both
insights remained unrelated with and without effect upon his chief concept, the
"will to power," and therefore are frequently overlooked even by Nietzsche scholars. They are to be found in the first two aphorisms of the second treatise in
Zur Genealogie der Moral.
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The Human Condition
These moral precepts are the only ones that are not applied to ac-
tion from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from
experiences outside action's own reach. They arise, on the con-
trary, directly out of the will to live together with others in the
mode of acting and speaking, and thus they are like control mecha-
nisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending proc-
esses. If without action and speech, without the articulation of
natality, we would be doomed to swing forever in the ever-recur-
ring cycle of becoming, then without the faculty to undo what we
have done and to control at least partially the processes we have
let loose, we would be the victims of an automatic necessity bear-
ing all the marks of the inexorable laws which, according to the
natural sciences before our time, were supposed to constitute the
outstanding characteristic of natural processes. We have seen be-
fore that to mortal beings this natural fatality, though it swings in
itself and may be eternal, can only spell doom. If it were true that
fatality is the inalienable mark of historical processes, then it
would indeed be equally true that everything done in history is
doomed.
And to a certain extent this is true. If left to themselves, human
affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most cer-
tain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and
death. It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law be-
cause it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life,
which in its turn, as we saw, interrupted and interfered with the
cycle of the biological life process. The life span of man running