Christel Johanna Fricke

Forgiveness typically becomes an issue where an offender has wronged a victim. What the offender and his victim are concerned with when engaging in a process of asking for and granting forgiveness includes the social relations that previously existed between them. It is against the background of these relations that the question arises whether there can be a duty for a victim to forgive and a right for an offender to be forgiven. I suggest distinguishing between personal and moral relations between people; the latter bind every rational agent to the community of all moral agents, whereas the former are a personal matter. Accordingly, I distinguish between personal and moral forgiveness. And I argue that the offender has a right to be morally forgiven, either by the victim herself or by another member of the community of moral agents; but the victim does not have a duty to forgive the offender personally.

According to Adam Smith, the acquisition of moral conscience is an essential part of a person’s moral education. I argue that moral conscience as conceived by Smith enables a person to intentionally take the role of an impartial spectator. I trace the process of moral education from the child in its family, to interaction with peers to learning and then to a self-evaluation, learning to become one’s own spectator and judge. This is a move from uncritical trust to external guidance to acquiring the faculty of conscience. Smith recommends most people to rely on the ‘common rules of morality’ rather than on sympathetic processes alone. But such reliance represents merely a second best procedure for reaching a properly impartial moral judgment. While the ‘wise and virtuous’ may well improve on the impartiality of the ‘common rules of morality’, even their moral judgments will never be perfectly impartial or certain beyond doubt.

This chapter presents a short biography of Immanuel Kant. It then reviews his particular thoughts on musical philosophy. Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Königsberg. He never married and died in his house on February 12, 1804. He placed the theory of cognition at the beginning of his critical transcendental philosophy, in Critique of Pure Reason. His theory of art was pointed toward identifying the place that the judgment of beautiful objects in nature and art occupies in his system of transcendental philosophy. Kant accorded to music the status of a fine art, whose works engage the cognitive powers in a state of free play. Critique of Judgment occupied a unique position in regard to the reception of Kantian transcendental philosophy. The basis for an understanding of the semiotic character of absolute music was provided by Kant's transcendental philosophy and his cognitivist aesthetics.