The Spirit of Hope

by Byung-Chul Han

In the face of this unavoidable guilt, Arendt introduces ‘forgiveness’ into her argument. Forgiveness pardons the guilt inherent in action. It ensures that we can mutually acquit one another for the consequences of our actions. For Arendt, forgiveness is a ‘remedy’ for the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process set in train by action, for the fact that we cannot undo what we have done.27 Only the faculty of forgiveness can put us in a position to ‘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’.28 Forgiveness relates to the past by undoing what happened and thus creating free space for a new beginning. But we act into an uncertain future. This contingency, owed to the futurity within every act, forgiveness cannot control. The unreliability and inscrutability of the human heart creates a fog of uncertainty. The unforeseeability of the future is the context in which Arendt introduces the idea of the ‘promise’. Promises are ‘isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty’.29 They allow us ‘to dispose of the future as though it were the present’.30 A promise thus makes the future predictable and disposable. Arendt quotes Nietzsche, who referred to the ‘awareness of power and freedom’ gained by the one ‘who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he is strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even “in the fa...