ABSTRACT
This chapter recognises that opening spaces for complexity and the emergence of the radically new can be problematic. What emerges may be seen as undesirable, further raising the question of who gets to decide what is desirable. The chapter also recognises that what is heralded as ‘new’ could have existed for millennia in Indigenous and other non-dominant cultures. However, encouraging emergence is necessary to avoid ‘colonisation’ of the future by ideas of the present to address the problematic issue of sustainability.
The chapter explores how Arendt’s two-fold concept of forgiveness and mutual promising provides ways to approach the risks and ethical issues which emergence generates. It draws on Topolski to argue that in her immanent approach to ethics Arendt, writing in an intellectually rich space between Jewish (Hebraic) religious thinking and Hellenic/Western philosophy, builds on the dynamic sense of turning from past wrong-doing inherent in the Hebraic process of teshuva. The chapter also makes links to posthuman and posthumanist thinking and feminist ethics of care.
