【復刻】Apologize you cannot

Apology is something ethical. It has no certain meaning but it surely expresses something. Some nay say it expresses emotions, emotion of the guilt. But apology is almost meaningless when it is merely expressed, and we clearly know that we need somebody healing our words, somebody who has had the same event with us and has the right to receive our apology. It is not merely an expression of feeling (indeed no action is a pure expression of feeling).

Here we have the questions: For what do you apologize, and for whose sake do you apologize?

Although it is almost impossible to answer to these two questions wholly, we seem to be able to give some suggestions. We start from the first one. We may say that we apologize in order to beg a pardon, or a forgiveness. Literally, ‘I’m sorry’ means that I feel sorry, apologetic or pitiful of something. In some cases ‘I’m sorry’ does not indicate apologizing and we do not count them here. When you apologize, you have an ethical emotion that tends to have you beg a forgiveness. For what do you beg a forgiveness? In most cases you’re not aware of your own emotion that moves you, and therefore it is not accurate if we say that you wish to deal with your ethical emotion which makes you feel guilty. You just apologize because you feel like to do so. Ethicality, if we think of its negative aspect, is something restricts your thought. When you are ethical, you are more or less blind, losing the reason why you know you need to do this ethical action. To trace the exact reason is a taboo in an ethical world, and before you start tracing, your feeling causes your actual behavior. You are not aware of your ethical emotion because it is forbidden to trace it, and you have no thinking as such to deal with that emotion.

What is this ethical emotion? The ethical emotion directly relates to your apology, and thus, so far as you do not know what this is, you do not know for what you apologize, for what you beg a forgiveness. Here it is important to notice that, when you ask a forgiveness, you need somebody, not anybody, to hear your asking. You are clearly aware that, whatever your purpose would be, you cannot achieve the purpose by yourself. You have the other (should we say ‘the Other’?), and now we come to the second question: For whose sake do you apologize?

You are apologizing for the other, begging a forgiveness to the other. You might think you are doing something for the other’s sake. According to a naïve way of thinking, your action is always done for and denoted to a higher purpose, and otherwise you do not act. If you act not for yourself but for others, it is nothing but to denote to the others’ sake. Thus, by a sincere apology, you might think you are giving yourself for the other. This is the way in which you get angry and say ‘I am apologizing from the bottom of my heart, but why you fxxx do not forgive me!’

The other might need you and your apology, but it is not necessary in all cases. Ono the other hand, you must need the other in every scene when you apologize. You need the other for your own sake. Are we always selfish? In some sense, yes. However, in the other sense not necessarily so.

You feel that you need to ask a forgiveness, and at the same time you need to compensate for the other. Is this because we think that compensation is the only one way to be forgiven? I am not sure. Anyway, it is true that when you feel sorry for the other you want to compensate for. You have to consider how you can do so for the other. Here you imagine an ideal world in which you can be forgiven by your compensation, and your ethical problem is gone. You wish that this ideal world comes to be real. However, there are two huge differences between the real and the ideal worlds. There may be no way for you to compensate, nothing you can do for the other, and even if you can, you can never judge if your compensation balances with your guilt. Yes, the first point is of great importance, but the second one is more fatal. The equilibrium must be the matter, but you can never know if you’ve succeeded or not.

On the one hand you have the imperative which says the you have to compensate for the other in order to balance with your fault. On the other hand, you are now aware that it is impossible to compensate for. For whose sake do we compensate? When we are just thinking of compensating, we will to do it because it is our duty, the real duty. We do not do for the duty’s sake, but we do without any reason. You may remember that we said that ethicality restricts our thought. When we have a real duty, that does not appear as a duty, but, we dare say, as nothing. We know we have to do because of nothing. And thus, when we have a duty to compensate, we do it, thinking nothing but compensating for the other. Therefore, the action is for the other’s sake, for the other’s purpose. However, we still have to say that the compensation is purely selfish, is done for yourself. And if you are aware that you are begging a forgiveness and trying to compensate for the purposes of yours, is you are aware of your selfishness, you at the same time notice that apology is impossible.

Apologize you cannot. You cannot be sure as to if you are forgiven or not, if you have done something good for the other. The reason why we cannot apologize is clear. Because bad is bad. Once you recognize your fault or guilt as an ethical bad, then you become bad due to it. Now because you are bad, you cannot escape from being bad except for giving upon yourself, which is surely impossible so long as you are you. Apologizing is to rely on somebody else, that is to ask a help to others. But nobody can help you because you are bad, because to help you is to help a bad.

What should we do then? I would like to answer, nothing. If you can change a bad to a good, then that was not a real bad. If it is real you cannot.

To be good is good, but what is worth is to be moral. Morally speaking, you are alone, we are all alone. Once we are aware of this, we can stand in this lonesome world. We can refrain from disappointing of our failure of apologizing. We can stand with our badness. The real apology, the real compensation is nothing but to stand with it.

2019.07.21