Nietzsche's Ethics of Forgiving and Forgetting

Bibliographic Data

ID3970611
AuthorsZeynep Talay Turner (0000-0002-3967-6142, Istanbul Bilgi University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume30
Issue2
Pages187-202
Publication date2025-02-17
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe European Legacy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10848770.2025.2450910
OpenAlexW4406619827
LanguageEN
References cited25

This article focuses on Nietzsche’s critique of the moral ideal of forgiveness and explores the idea of active forgetting as a possible alternative to this ideal. It situates Nietzsche’s critique against the background of a substantial body of work which has grown around the more general question of unconditional and conditional forgiving. I examine Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874) and in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). In both texts Nietzsche addresses the question of how nations and individuals relate to their past and argues that a healthy psyche, of nations as of individuals, requires the ability to relieve ourselves of the burden of the past. I suggest that, while what Nietzsche calls active forgetting is a natural endowment of the human being, albeit suppressed by the abundance of memory, it can also be thought of as an ethical principle in its own right

Engineering ethics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Forgetting · Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Engineering · Forgiveness and Related Behaviors · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology

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