As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will (...) examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation. (shrink)

In the general introduction to the first part of his Philosophie de la Volonté, Le volontaire et l’involontaire Paul Ricoeur writes that the phenomenological or ‘pure description […] of the Voluntary and the Involuntary’ is ‘constituted by bracketing’ two things: first the fault, which is essentially a perversion of the pure nature or the essence of human willing; and second ‘Transcendence which hides within it the ultimate origin of subjectivity’. Evil, the condition of brokenness or the reality of the fault, (...) asks for an empirical description of concrete myths and symbols. He will remove this first bracketing in the second part of his Philosophy of the Will and in the long ‘series of detours’ of his hermeneutical writings. The second bracketing, however, will turn out to be much more difficult to remove. It demands a ‘poetics’, which would threaten Ricoeur’s effort to separate his Christian faith from his ‘autonomous’ philosophizing. In this article I argue that Ricoeur eventually did present his poetics, though only in the epilogue to his penultimate book on ‘Difficult Forgiveness’. The article indicates why this epilogue might fulfil the promise of a poetics, explains why this could only be done in an epilogue and gives at least one possible reason why Ricoeur could write at the end of his oeuvre, what he could not at its beginning. (shrink)

This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality (...) of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equivalence without identity', to take a non-hierarchical view of cultures. Third, one must undertake the `task of mourning', to learn to narrate otherwise, to interpret otherwise. (shrink)