Wikipedia says 'a paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement,
in other words, one that appears to 'follow the rules' but which yields an absurdity. All languages- including formal or mathematical languages- have rules but there are going to permit some statements which appear well-formed but which appear to be both true and false. These 'semantic paradoxes' are easy enough to resolve. Indeed, their presence may suggest a proof for why there must be things within a language of a particular type which have a description within it but which are themselves of wholly outside it. The problem here is that it appears no language, however chastened, and subjected to rigorous discipline will combine the property of being interesting with that of 'naturality' or 'canonicity' or 'non-arbitrariness'. The intensional fallacy is au fond the futility of seeking unanimity in intentionality- at least in linguistic matters.
or one that runs contrary to one's expectation.
Amalgamation problems or problems of multiple realizability (because correlation is a proxy for causation) militate for keeping two or more structural causal models in mind. The bad news is that 'Aumann agreement' is out of the window. Because of Knightian Uncertainty, two people with the same priors should not agree. Indeed, everybody, should be many Bayesian agents rolled into one.
It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.'
Paradoxes arise because of fallacious reasoning. Some implicit assumption is being made which is illicit. For a nominalist- i.e. one who does not ascribe independent existence to concepts- paradoxes arise where an intension- i.e. a property which defines a class- has no fixed extension. Rather, the class changes as our knowledge or our motivation changes. Thus some classes are not sets because the class can belong to itself, whereas a set can not.
Within any type of language- say, the language of the emotions which underlie our personal relationships- there are particular words or concepts which can be used in a wholly different context. Equally, words or concepts from the legalistic or scholarly world can be imported into emotional or commercial discourse. Consider the word 'apology'. It comes from the Greek- apologeisthai "to speak in one's defence' and is legalistic or scholarly. If you hurt the feelings of a friend, you did not offer him an ornate declamation defending and justifying your actions. You express sorrow or simply say 'sorry'. If such sorrow is sincere and expressed spontaneously, so much the better. But if you have to be reminded of your harmful behaviour, you can thank the other person for waking you out of your delusive egotism before going on to express great sorrow at the harm you have caused others. You are on the way to 'metanoia' and are touchingly grateful to the person you injured for putting you on the right path. This would motivate or justify an extravagant act of reparation which however could be directed at the Deity which seeks through the agency of our friends and family to turn our faults and offences into occasions for illumination. This is the paradox of the 'felix culpa' or 'happy fault' which opens the door to redemption. One might say that 'discovery' or exploration may involve unintended consequences of a negative type but a greater good becomes available through such exploration. The trouble is that great good is self-evident good. The paradox of apology- i.e. that of justifying your actions either dogmatically or by showing that you spontaneously make reparation when you over-step the mark- is that it is either otiose or itself a greater offence.
Agnes Callard- the daffy duck of popular philosophy- takes a different view. She writes in 'the Point' of
The Paradox of Apology
as in 'sorry-not-sorry'? Cool!
Or, why everyone believes in miracles
Not cool. Boo!
There is a minor grievance I have been nursing for some time now, against a friend who uninvited me from a party he threw.
Better than holding a grudge is getting even. Uninvite him from an orgy on the grounds that he's got a tiny pecker.
First he invited me, then he changed his mind about the composition of the party—not without reason, I’ll grant—and so he uninvited me.
If this was to spare you annoyance or inconvenience then he was doing you a favour. If not, he owes you an apology for raising your expectations and then disappointing you.
It did not cause a rupture in our friendship; we remain on good terms, except for the rare occasions when it comes up, and I make it clear that I am still a bit annoyed.
You are signalling you want reparation of some sort.
Obviously I’d be better off forgetting about this, but I can’t, not without his help.
You want reparation, not revenge. Better yet, the dude should spontaneously confess that you are as the moon and the stars and all Creation is but a paean to your beauty and your grace.
And I know he’d love to help, because he hates when I bring it up.
He hates your behaviour in that respect, but he does not lurve you nor wishes to please you in all things. That's totes unfair- right?
If I could tell him what it is that he should do or say to erase my irritation, I’m sure he’d do it. But I myself don’t know. It’s possible that a simple “I’m sorry” would do the trick, but one way to definitively disable the power of those words is by instructing someone to say them.
One way to definitively disable the power other people have to make your day by spontaneously coming up to you and saying how beautiful and smart you are is to keep stabbing them in the stomach till they do.
And I have to admit that whenever I imagine him apologizing, I imagine him doing so grudgingly, formulaically, in a “let’s get this over with” spirit that only increases my resentment. Apparently, I want the kind of apology I can’t even conceive of.
But the rest of us can. You want the other guy to think as highly of you as you do yourself. You are grieved that he seems more interested in himself than in the wonderfulness that is you. I can sympathize. There isn't anyone in particular I want an apology from but it would be nice if Terence Tao phoned me up and said I was right, Peano arithmetic does not permit the number 6 to be placed next to the number 9. The thing is obscene. I had to quit Accountancy because of it.
Sometimes you want something from someone, but you cannot see how they could possibly give it to you,
because you are stupid. You don't understand just how much of a narcissist you are.
because there appears to be a conceptual incoherence—something close to a contradiction—in the description you would give of what it is that you want.
There is none. You want the other person to place a much higher value on you than is reasonable or probable. True, if God arranges the Universe so that it really does revolve around you, everybody would be apologizing to you for neglecting to serve you to their uttermost ability.
The word for this phenomenon is: miracle. I need him to perform a miracle.
No. You want the Universe to revolve around you. If the dude can perform miracles, he is Jesus Christ. He can make even an insignificant worm like you feel good about yourself. But he can also raise the dead and harrow Hell.
A miracle is a paradoxical event,
No. It is an event which science can't explain. It violates the laws of nature but in such a manner that we intuit the presence of a supernatural force or entity. But a miracle isn't paradoxical unless it defies its own logic. Suppose Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and then said to him 'Sorry to disturb your dirt-nap, but I just wanted to let you know that there will be no resurrection. You're fucked, mate! Get back in your coffin.' In this case, we might say that it was paradoxical of Lord Jesus to restore life merely to take it away again. This is because, our expectations were defeated. The action seemed illogical, unreasonable, and not in keeping with the character of a miracle-worker. Obviously, the retort might be made that if some are predestined to Hell fire, then there is no paradox here. Rather, what we have is an Augustinian parable.
one whose very description seems to contain an internal tension that would ensure it couldn’t come about, and yet, somehow, inexplicably, it does.
That isn't the case here. It could happen that the dude in question suddenly discovers that Agnes is a truly great philosopher. He regrets not showing her more respect. He makes a fulsome apology for any and every insult or injury he may have offered her. But this is not a miraculous event. It arises out of a change in the dude's knowledge base or incentive matrix.
For example, if an amount of oil that is only enough for one night lasts for eight nights, that is a miracle: the miracle of Hanukkah.
Clearly, a super-natural agency was involved.
Jesus walking on water is a miracle because walking and on water do not go together, at least not for something the size and shape of a human being.
Clearly Jesus was not subject to the laws of nature
If I showed you a square circle, that would be a miracle too.
No. It would be nonsense unless some supernatural purpose was served. A miracle is something wondrous which excites our sense of awe and adoration.
I suppose Agnes may feel she is very special indeed and God should arrange small miracles like guys spontaneously offering apologies in precisely the manner she would herself had found most gratifying to her ego.
A miracle is a species of inexplicable event, one whose inexplicability is internal to the event itself.
Nope. A miracle is easily explicable as being the purposive act of a supernatural force or entity.
By contrast, if we see some flashing lights in the sky and can’t yet explain them, but expect that with more information, we might, that is not yet a miracle. It’s just a mystery.
It would be a miracle if we had just resolved to jump off a cliff unless God sent a sign. We may still ask why God sent us a sign but failed to do so to many others in a similar situation. The answer is that 'God moves in mysterious ways'.
People tend to say that they do not believe in miracles,
more particularly those which have become the basis of a claim to authority by people they don't like or don't wish to obey.
but people can be wrong about what they believe.
Or can hold such a belief.
Miracles happen to all of us, and in fact everyone does believe in them. The endurance of the oil, Jesus walking on water—those are divine miracles, which is to say, miracles that are the products of divine intervention in human affairs. Only some people believe in divine miracles. But everyone believes in social miracles.
I suppose things people do may sometimes surprise or amaze us. But, then we could also feel great wonder and amazement at the wit and wisdom of this cretin.
A social miracle is the product of human intervention in human affairs: instead of God making something possible although we cannot see how, it is human beings, working together, who make something possible although we cannot see how.
Only if we don't want to see how. Otherwise, evolution has endowed us with pretty good cognitive 'modules' in this respect.
One example of a social miracle is: the perfect gift.
The miracle here is merely that some people- or perhaps people in love, or those with a strong affectionate tie- have better 'theory of mind' regarding another person than that person might have even with respect to themselves. Equally, one might say that there is something essentially ontologically dysphoric- something not at home in this world- when it comes to certain bonds we make with each other and certain animals- or even plants or the moon.
Economists routinely point out that buying each other gifts is less efficient than gifting cash, and they have a point.
ceteris paribus- sure. But ceteris isn't paribus where the value of the gift is a function of the identity of the giver or else there is an information asymmetry in their favour.
If what’s in box #1 is fixed, whereas you get to select what goes into box #2, and you can choose anything whose cost is no more than what’s in box #1, would it ever make sense to prefer box #1? Yes: when it contains the perfect gift.
Or when it contains a gift from someone of superior station or with better information. A friend of mine was once given a bottle of 'homemade' wine by a neighbour of his. It was a Mouton Rothschild! He didn't dare open it till a suitably grand occasion arose. Having been improperly stored, it tasted like shit. Still, the dinner party was a success because our boss was American. His beverage of choice was Pepsi-Cola but he was always happy to hear about European Aristocrats and their decadent ways.
It is true that most people are satisfied with giving and receiving subpar gifts that fall far short of miraculousness, settling for signaling care and bowing to convention, insisting that it’s the thought that counts. Nonetheless, the few serious and dedicated gift-givers out there are committed to putting something in box #1 that makes you sincerely prefer it to what you yourself deemed best.
There are 'personal shoppers' who add value by choosing better than you could yourself.
When they succeed, they astonish you by giving you something worth more, to you, than the thing you want most.
Then you find out they also gave you herpes.
Trust is another example of a social miracle.
Only in the sense that it is a social miracle that members of the Women's Institute aren't incessantly knifing each other.
When I trust you, I hold beliefs about the future (that you will do what you say, that you will not betray me, that you will be there for me, and so on) that are not grounded purely in the evidence.
There must be some evidence that the other guy is actually the other guy. If you complain that you trusted your wife to post an important letter and, it turns out, you assumed the neighbour's dog must be your wife though there was no evidence to support that supposition, then we would say 'you didn't trust anybody or anything. You just did some crazy shit coz you were off your head on drugs.'
A detached third-party observer will make different predictions from mine, because his are based merely on observations as to how you have behaved in the past, whereas I have a connection to you, I care about you, I believe in you and in the force of your promises.
What you have is a belief in your own charisma or ability to bring out the best in other people. You don't necessarily have any belief about the other person specific to her.
And—this is equally important—I see my belief in you not as overconfident but rather as the right and reasonable one for me to have.
Because you are so very special.
(If I judge that my belief in you is irrational, then I do not trust you. In such a case I might, for example, engage a therapist to disabuse me of the relevant belief.)
Or you may say that this trust is part of your Faith and is a gift from God. Even if you are betrayed, you have played your part in God's mysterious economy.
If you find it hard to say how it can be rational for a belief to outstrip the available evidence,
it is easy. You can always appeal to a 'Pascal's wager' or 'Newcombe problem' type argument. There may be a reward for an unsupported belief which is well enough verified for your purposes.
then you find it hard to explain how trust is so much as possible—but this is far from saying that you trust no one.
We have high trust in transaction networks which punish bad actors.
You are willing to engage in this practice even though its workings are mysterious to you, even though it is not under your control, even though “just deciding” to trust someone whom you distrust is about as reasonable a proposition as “just deciding” to walk on water.
No very serious or lasting damage is caused if you try to walk on the water in a puddle- or even a swimming pool. You may say you are doing 'discovery' of what it is like to do a stupid thing.
The one thing you can never do with miracles is expect them to take place.
Which is why there aren't millions of people all over the world praying for a miracle right now.
Miracles, almost by definition, have got to come as a surprise.
There are plenty of Churches where miracle-working is part of Divine Service. Demons are cast out, cripples throw down their crutches, homosexuals claim to now feel attraction for vaginas. We may have our doubts as to the sincerity of such claims but what would surprise us is the Preacher failed to deliver value for our money.
This makes apology especially miraculous, as it is a miracle tasked with invoking a second miracle.
If Callard finds apology miraculous what must she think of a tender and compassionating fart?
Even when you know that you are the one who is in the wrong, and that you mistreated someone you’re close to, and that you’d really like to repair the relationship, it often feels as though there is some psychological block standing between you and the step you know you need to take toward reconciliation.
That psychological block involves loss of face or a reversal in the power gradient in the relationship.
Faced with your victim, you struggle to push the apologetic words out of your own mouth. What blocks apology? The standard answer is that we are selfishly reluctant to own up to wrongdoing. I think that is not right. What blocks the would-be apologizer is something different from egoism or stubbornness.
Please Miss, is the answer 'Miracle'?
Consider: I say something that hurts my friend’s feelings, she calls me out on it, and I—defensive and dismissive—refuse to apologize.
You feel you don't deserve to lose face or power in the relationship. On the other hand, maybe if she dresses up as a dominatrix and makes you wear an Easter Bunny suit and beats you till you confess to being a bad bad bunny, then- if she gives you a ten per cent discount- you might be prepared to apologize because honour has been satisfied. I'm not saying anything like this has happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
It is entirely imaginable that immediately after our acrimonious parting, I call up my sister and the confession tumbles out of me: “I had a hard day, I was impatient and stressed all day long, and I ended up hurting someone’s feelings. I refused to take responsibility for it, too, though I should have—in short, I was a jerk.”
'Actually, darling, I too have been a jerk. I'm not really your sister. I'm your mother. I just didn't want people to feel sorry for me because I have an ugly daughter. Also, it's nice being the young, pretty, one in the family.'
In the presence of my sister, I am not only ready to own up to what I did, I jump at the opportunity to do so. So the first question that must be asked about apology is: Why is it so much easier to “own up” to what I did when the person I wronged is not there to hear it?
Because Miracle was taking a shit when you acted like a jerk. Thus it was unable to make you confess. Miracle finished taking a shit and then joined you just in time to get you to tell your sister the whole story.
The key is that I am not seeking forgiveness from my sister,
Nor were you seeking forgiveness from the friend whose feelings were hurt. Thus, the key must be something else- viz. the fact that Miracle was taking a dump.
and that means she is not going to be scrutinizing what I tell her:
she isn't going to be listening either.
she is not in the business of assessing whether the contrition I am expressing strikes her as “genuine” sorrow, she does not harbor a suspicion that I might be papering over my misdeed, she is not inclined to wonder whether I “truly” understand that I did something wrong, or whether I am “really” taking responsibility, or “fully” committed to not acting in that way again.
she knows you are a boring narcissist. What is happening here is she is pretending to listen as you natter on to yourself. It is only when you say, 'honestly, I haven't felt this bad since that time I fucked your husband', that her ears perk up.
When I am talking to my sister, I do not need to worry about whether I am “coming across” as sincere.
She really isn't listening to you. As for your sleeping with her husband, the joke is on you. The bloke was just some random dude she pimped you out to.
Apologizing is not like having a conversation with someone—it is like taking a test.
This is only true of one-sided conversations where the other party isn't really listening.
And it is a really hard test. In order to apologize, you have to avow the offending action as your own, otherwise you’d have nothing to apologize for; but you also have to disavow it, otherwise you wouldn’t be apologizing.
No. You avow an action but disavow an intention which might reasonably be imputed to that action. Thus when I apologize for fucking your goat, I admit bestiality but disavow any intention to damage or deceive you or to contribute to the breakdown of your marriage.
You have to present the action as something you saw fit to do, which is to say, something that didn’t just arise accidentally in conjunction with your behavior but showed up as choice-worthy to your mind’s eye—and then also to insist that you don’t see that action from your mind’s eye, but instead from the victim’s perspective, as an unacceptable object of choice.
This just means saying you were thoughtless, impulsive and are sorry for not seeing how your behaviour would affect a person dear to you or to whom you owed a duty of care.
What you feel about it is not the eagerness of the agent that you are but the genuine sorrow and regret born from channeling the mindset of the victim that you are not.
We may feel such sorrow for an actor on the stage.
The fact that we are often apologizing for what we did in the past
as opposed to stuff we did in the future
does not resolve this tension. If your past self were truly past, if you found her point of view truly alien—for instance, you couldn’t even remember doing it—you couldn’t apologize.
I suppose Callard means you can't 'sincerely' apologize but that's not true. I am very willing to believe that I may have wrecked many a virginal vagina, though I've no memory of ever doing any such thing, and, what's more, apologize profusely to women I meet just in case they too had been ruined for other men by a brief encounter which I can no longer recall.
You can only apologize to the extent that you can inhabit the point of view of the self that chose to do that action.
This is an arbitrary stipulation. It is also an impossible one because time travel is not possible. Also no one knows what their true 'point of view'- which is like a 'light cone'- is relative to any other.
You must see the world through her eyes—but then also, at the same time, not.
Painters look at the tree they are painting and then back at the canvass so as to reproduce some detail of what they just saw.
When apologies fail, it’s because they can’t square this circle.
No. Apologies, in my experience, fail because a sequence of farts can't express the sort of remorse you are expected to show when in the dock on charges of aggravated assault.
People express sorrow and empathy without taking responsibility: “It’s terrible what you’re going through.”
Or just 'sucks to be you!'
Or they take responsibility but they don’t seem to feel bad enough to suggest that they really disavow what they did.
Also there seems to be something oddly furtive in the manner in which they glance around and sniff each other's bottoms.
Or there is an element of contrition and an element of accountability, but over the course of the apology the two items become detached from one another: I’m sorry you underwent Y, and it is true that I did X, but it’s not my fault that X led to Y. When I detach the object of my responsibility from the object of my regret, that is called “making excuses for myself.”
Which is almost as bad as having a dick but refusing to undergo gender reassignment surgery just because the operation would be performed by a Black Dobermann. There may be people who feel I owe them an apology but I feel only pity for them because they know, deep down, that not letting rabid dogs perform gender reassignment surgery on them is a far worse crime against humanity than my vomiting on their wedding dress.
You are right to feel as bad as you do but I was also right to act as I did; what I avow and what I disavow are two different things. The characteristic ingredients of successful apology—explicit acknowledgment of fault and wrongdoing, sincere contrition, offers of compensation that reflect the severity of the deed, credible commitments to turning over a new leaf—are all ways of trying to perform this alchemy of mixing avowal with disavowal.
Actually, there are protocols for this sort of thing. In 'thymotic' networks- e.g. the officer corps- there are rules about how to apologize and how to graciously accept an apology. Callard & Co. however may prefer to simmer in their own rich juices of rancour and resentment.
And yet this task, for all its difficulty, is nothing more than a prelude, because forgiveness is a second, distinct miracle over and above the miracle of apology.
Only in the sense that taking a shit is a third, distinct miracle, over and above the miracle of apologizing for what you are about to do on your boss's desk.
In order to forgive me—as opposed to excusing my behavior, or brushing away the slight aside as insignificant—you have to both hold me responsible and absolve me of responsibility.
No. Forgiveness is like Apology- something given to another for which they may feel grateful or, at any rate, more inclined to cooperate going forward.
Those are feats that you have to perform; I cannot perform them for you, no matter how well I apologize. Apology cannot produce the forgiveness at which it aims, which means that apology is a miracle that serves only to set the stage for a second and independent miracle.
In which case farting is a miracle and, if the farting leads to shitting, then a second miracle has occurred.
Apologizing is like trying execute an alley-oop with a player who refuses to get anywhere near you. It’s no wonder the words stick in your throat.
Sometimes, you can only fart though you want to shit. It's no wonder that lack of miracles is causing shit to stick in your colon.
But is apology always paradoxical?
One might say there is a class of situations where, paradoxically, what heals relationships is the injured party apologizing to the offender. This can be considered a matter of 'giving Face'. It is big in Japan. Sadly, it has nothing to do with 'giving Head' which is why Biden's overtures to Kishida are going nowhere.
Is forgiveness always a feat?
It is a miracle like the fact that we have feet which this means we can go shoe shopping.
Consider two imaginary scenarios.
1. Subway Stomp: You are on a crowded subway car. The train lurches. You step—hard!—on someone’s foot. You see them wince in pain and immediately blurt out: “I’m sorry!” You are not just empathizing with the fact that their foot got stepped on, as you might do if you were a spectator to the interaction. You feel bad that it was you who did the stepping, and you express this feeling readily, directly, immediately. But what about the fact that it wasn’t your fault the car was crowded, or that it lurched, or that you hadn’t intended to step on anyone’s foot? Neither you nor the stompee is drawn to worry about these questions. You are eager to apologize, your victim is eager to forgive, and everyone moves on with their lives.
Tit for tat, regardless of intent to harm, is a sound enough rule. There may be an appeasement mechanism- e.g. a wolf baring its neck in submission to a stronger wolf it has antagonized- which is ethologically hardwired or culturally indoctrinated. But that is a game theoretic, not a philosophic, matter. In this case, there is a hazard associated with riding the subway. The foot-stomp is a tort for which the subway is responsible. But we need the subway. This also means subway passengers must be forbearing, if not forgiving, to each other.
Is this a real apology? The stomper is not so much “taking responsibility for wrongdoing” as making it clear that no harm was meant, and the stompee is not offering forgiveness so much as reassurance: “I didn’t interpret your stomp as an act of hostility.” The parties are merely clarifying the absence of ill will, which is why the exchange runs so much more smoothly than those tasked with dispelling it. But while all those points are correct, they focus on the wrong place. The important question is this one: Why do we clarify the absence of ill will by going through the motions of the ritual by which we usually exorcise its presence?
For the same reason animals have appeasement mechanisms. Evolution has pretty much baked them in by way of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. You may encounter a sociopath who can't be appeased. But you yourself may be a sociopath with superior killing instincts. This means that where appeasement fails there is attrition of that phenotype. Its percentage of the population remains stable.
2. Party Stomp: You and I have never liked each other, but we’ve suppressed our animosity for the sake of our mutual friend Paul—until today. He’s invited us both to his party, we’ve drunk too much, and the tensions between us boil over. We start hurling insults, and at some point during our heated exchange I spitefully stomp on your foot. A hush falls over the crowd, and Paul appears. He is distraught by what has happened in his own house, and both of us feel genuinely bad about ruining the party. For Paul’s sake, I apologize to you for stomping on your foot; for Paul’s sake, you forgive me. For the rest of the party we mostly avoid each other. Life goes on.
Unlike the Subway Stomp, the apology in Party Stomp meets the avowal condition easily: there is no question that I intended to hurt you. My action was not an accident; it was directly attributable to my ill will towards you. I am responsible. The problem here is the disavowal condition. Was I actually upset that I had upset you? Probably not, and neither I nor the stompee is under that impresssion. If someone were to say, “You two are only going through this ritual for Paul’s sake,” we’d each say, “Obviously!” There is no doubt that everyone just wanted to move past the unpleasant outburst.
While under Paul's roof- sure. You are welcome to fight each other later on at some other location.
Once again, the question we should be asking is: Why do we move past unpleasant outbursts by apologizing?
In this case- there was no 'moving past'. On the other hand, if at some future point there is a large mutual benefit from cooperation, some actual 'moving past' may occur. In splitting the proceeds of the joint operation, the foot stomper might say 'tell you what, I'll pay for a celebratory dinner from my share.' Later, during the course of a boozy farewell, you say 'feel terrible about...you know' and the other replies 'least said, soonest mended. Get home safe, you hear me?'
If the apologies I’ve described in Subway Stomp and Party Stomp are very far from the Platonic Ideal of Perfect Apology, that’s not because I’ve chosen strange examples. Those are in fact perfectly ordinary and familiar contexts for apologizing. What’s strange is apologizing itself. Avowing and disavowing are like oil and water; we can posit that they are perfectly mixed in the Platonic Ideal of Perfect Apology,
Why not? Socrates spoke of the 'palinode'. In establishing 'methexis' or 'participation' in the Ideal, one may go too far one way and then course correct and similarly overshoot. So long as the overshooting or hubris diminishes, there is convergence to the ideal.
but it is not clear how often we meet with the relevant mixture out in the wild. So the question we ought to be asking is: Why is it that we so often find ourselves invoking this otherworldly ideal in the conduct of everyday life?
Because elements of our ethos are ontologically dysphoric- i.e. not at home in this world.
Apologizing feels like a test because it is one: unlike my sister, my victim hears what I say in the light of the Platonic Ideal of Perfect Apology. That is why it is always possible for her, if she is not feeling up to forgiving, to pick out some way in which I have fallen short. Perhaps I didn’t do quite enough to convey the depth of my contrition and regret, or, contrarily, perhaps I failed to emphasize my own causal role in what occurred—the better I do one of those things, the worse I tend to do the other one.
Or maybe you are just shit at apologizing because you are shit at communicating or have a brain full of shit.
Most gifts don’t do more than keep the hope of the Perfect Gift alive; the same is true for most ordinary apologies, and that is why we don’t generally worry about how, if push came to shove, I’d manage to avow and disavow, or how you’d manage to condemn and absolve.
Actually, in commercial contexts, legal advise is taken before any avowal or disavowal, or apology, or absolution is given.
We can think of apologies in cases like Subway Stomp and Party Stomp as a kind of handshake in which two people both affirm their commitment to believing that a certain kind of miracle—or rather, a certain pair of miracles—is possible.
An atheist can shake hands and do a deal with a theist who firmly believes that Moses parted the Red sea. No miracle is involved.
And even this handshake can be tricky to pull off. Because apologizing is a ritual, a kind of performance, the conditions of successful uptake are complex.
Uptake is irrelevant when it comes to ritual. You say you prayers even if you think Joe Biden assassinated God by his cruel refusal to undergo gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday afternoon.
Something in my tone, my word choice, my facial expression, my affect, might lead you to think: “Apology is not on the table for us. All she’ll ever do is empathize, she’ll never take responsibility.”
More particularly if this would mean a legal liability to pay damages
Or the other way around. The development of an intimate relationship usually involves becoming adept at interpreting one another’s idiolects of apology and forgiveness, so that apologies come off without a hitch.
Or appeasement rituals end in a mutually satisfying display of affection.
But every once in a while, the element of the test comes to the fore: you do something really bad—infidelity is the classic example—and now the question is, can you pull it off?
Not if the nature of the relationship has changed. I thought I had married a chaste woman. I discover she sucks off hobos. She apologizes for this habit of hers. Can we go back to playing happy families? Not if there is a long queue of hobos knocking at the front door.
Can you apologize? The question is not only a question about the sincerity of your commitment to change, or the depth of your contrition, or my generosity of spirit. It’s a question about whether you, in apologizing, can succeed in gesturing at Apology, about whether I, in forgiving, can evoke Forgiveness.
Callard seems to be getting at the notion that repentance or forgiveness can do, as Oscar Wilde said, what even the God of Aristotle could not- viz. change the past. This is possible. You now realize you were always married to a girl who likes sucking off hobos. If you liked her then, you may as well like her now. That's the sort of woman you really like. If not her, you'd end up with an even uglier hag who insisted on taking it up the arse from every alkie in the vicinity.
These performances are fraught and dangerous, and we never know what will come of them. Even if all goes well, and the whole thing comes off, and we move on, we will forever remember those moments when it was touch and go, because each was waiting on the other to perform their miracle.
But if this concurrency or 'hold out' problem isn't solved, perhaps that would be the even bigger miracle. Indeed, God's greatest miracle might be that He resists the temptation to ruin creation by interfering with it.
It is worth distinguishing social miracles from social mysteries. Once I was the only person to show up to a yoga class, and I was pleased at the prospect of a private instruction, only to discover that my limbs seemed to be made of lead. Easy poses were difficult, hard ones were impossible. I assumed I was coming down with a cold and forgot the whole experience—until a few months later, when, during my next solo class, history repeated itself. And that is how I learned that for all the years I have been doing yoga, a bunch of strangers have, without ever touching me, been helping me lift my arms and legs. I have no idea how they do this. The power of group exercise is a social mystery.
Something similar happened to me in Math class. When I was with the other kids, copying down the answers they wrote, I was good at math. But when I tried to do sums on my own, my brain melted and oozed out through my nostrils.
Another example is movie theaters. Because I run movie events, I am now regularly in the habit of watching a movie on my own the night before watching it in the theater, and I have done this enough times to be skeptical of claims that there is a special kind of movie you have to watch on the big screen. Every movie is that kind of movie. The theater utterly transforms the moviegoing experience, no matter how quiet or contemplative the movie is. I won’t say that I enjoy the worst movie in a theater more than the best movie on my computer, but the truth is not far from that. How can people I don’t know, who I don’t talk to, who I’m not even looking at, change the way I take in images on the screen?
Callard is speaking of a participation mystique or mimetic effects or crowd psychology or Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance or something of that sort.
If I knew more about psychology, or evolution, or the chemistry of my brain, I’d have the solution to these social mysteries.
When with others, you 'outsource' some cognitive functions and this amplifies signals- for some people. That's why if a whole bunch of people expect to see the apparition of the Blessed Virgin, some in that crowd will indeed do so.
This is what makes them mysteries and not miracles. But no amount of scientific prowess could demystify the duet between the one who feels angry and hurt and suspicious and the one who is guilty and ashamed and defensive about making her feel that way.
Science can't demystify what isn't a mystery. Game theory can capture many aspects of that 'duet'.
At bottom, the person who apologizes and the person who forgives say the very same thing: “Even if things got much worse between us than they are now, so bad that we couldn’t imagine saying these very words, we would still say them.”
No. For the duration of an offer of apology and a granting of forgiveness there is a gradient of status or dignity. 'Face' is lost though if the relationship is to remain mutually beneficial, some reparative step must be taken so 'Face' is regained. There is an alternative. One may turn to the 'Loaf-Lord' or Redeemer of Boddhisattva who, in a sense, nets out transgressions. Here penitence is offered to the Lord without loss of Face and forgiveness, though from the Lord, is routed through the injured party. But, though the Lord is univocal, what is said is not.
There is no way to orchestrate this performance. No one can really believe in an apology until after it happens. That’s the telltale mark of a miracle.
The Eucharist is both a miracle and a ritual. Yet the ceremony of Mass is highly orchestrated. It is not the case that the Catholic doesn't believe in transubstantiation till she tastes of Christ's flesh and blood.
It is a separate matter that for highly wrought people- more particularly those who have studied stupid shite at Uni- everything might seem impossibly difficult. How on earth can Biden call himself a Democrat and yet refuse to undergo gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday afternoon? There is no way to explain why voting for Biden is better than voting for Trump save by accepting, once we ourselves have done so, that what has happened is a miracle of the Transcendental Transgender Jesus Mohammad formerly known as Honeytits Cumbucket.
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