Rehearsal

An apology has been rehearsed for eleven days, and the part of it that gets the most attention is the reply. It sits in the right-hand column of a page, three short lines, and it was written by the person who owes the apology.

J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, a version of the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1955, begins from utterances in which to say something is to do it. ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, said while smashing a bottle against the ship, names it, and is, Austin says at first, neither true nor false. Such utterances can still go wrong, and he sorts the ways. In a misfire the act is not achieved at all, because the formula is botched or the speaker is in no position to perform it. In an abuse the act is performed, but insincerely.

Apologising looks like a clear case, since, in the right circumstances, to say ‘I apologise’ is already to apologise. Whatever is wrong with this one, it is not insincerity. The person has been sorry for eleven days, and is sure of nothing else.

P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (1962) contrasts two attitudes we can take to another human being. One is the attitude of involvement or participation in a human relationship, which carries the reactive attitudes: gratitude, resentment and forgiveness among them. The other is the objective attitude, which may see the other person, in Strawson’s words, ‘as an object of social policy’, something ‘to be managed or handled or cured or trained’. We naturally tend to fall into it, he says, where the participant attitudes are inhibited by abnormality or immaturity, and it is available to us in other cases too.

Writing about the upbringing of young children, whose treatment has to be a compromise between the objective attitude and the developed human ones, Strawson says: ‘Rehearsals insensibly modulate towards true performances.’ An apology rehearsed for eleven days may be moving the other way.

Left open

When we ask to be forgiven, what are we asking the other person to be?

How much of what we say to the people we have hurt is said to them?