Isn’t forgiveness different for all who experience it? After all, we are all unique.
Your idea of complete differences for each person who forgives is a philosophy of relativism. Here is a different perspective for your consideration: Aristotle distinguishes between the Essence and the Existence of different phenomena. Essence is the objective reality of what something is. All chairs, for example, share certain commonalities that differ from those of sofas or beds. Existence is how an Essence might be experienced differently. There are many different chair designs, for example, but they all still share a common Essence. It is the same with forgiveness. There is an objective reality across time, cultures, and persons that represents reality. Forgiveness is the motivation, affect, cognition, and behavior to be merciful to those who have been unfair to us. This can be expressed differently by different people and in different cultures, but this does not diminish what forgiveness is in its Essence. If forgiveness were completely different for each person, there could be no science of forgiveness, for example, because we could not devise measures of forgiveness or correlate forgiveness with such interesting variables as hope, self-esteem, and depression. Even in the interpersonal realm, how could we talk about forgiveness with one another if we keep meaning something different from each other?
