Madness of the Impossible versus the Working Through – Forgiveness in Education

Abstract

The text draws attention to the important pedagogical issue, but rarely contemplated. Forgiveness is one of the crucial existential experiences in the development of identity. There is a temptation to make a harm and a revenge the center of identity. The text shows the dialectical tension in Western tradition of forgiveness between the unforgivable and the radical forgiveness of everything; between a requirement of the repentance and an unconditional forgiveness; between a social reconciliation and an individual madness of the impossible, and between a logic of the equivalence and a logic of the excess. Pure forgiveness is the implosion of the evil. And this is one of the most important and most difficult contrivances of transformation of the human personality.