Between historial truth and imagination

(Evil, Amnesty, Law, and Reserve Forgiveness)

Abstract

Ricoeur analyzes the role of memory and forgetting in history (i.e., events that have occurred) and in History (research into those events), focusing on the excesses of both with respect to evil, understood as the gratuitous and voluntary aggression (with no hint of social betterment) committed by free human beings. Given that historians present ethical judgments on the past, they exceed their bounds when they suggest that those who initiate changes or institutions know the future. In contrast, they err when they fail to point out the voluntary economic, political and cultural aggressions that have occurred. Historians must go beyond the hatreds that mediate among factions and offer hope for a better future. If they are good, then they convey the hope that the History of terror will not prevail; i.e., that History which feeds nihilism, alienation and the absence of creativity.