Robert Enright is locked in an existential battle with a dead, but very influential, German philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche equated forgiveness with weakness, calling it “sublimated resentment.” That way of thinking persists today in our culture, where power and winning are celebrated, and showing mercy to those who have done us wrong is seen as condoning their crimes. But that thinking is quite the opposite of what drives Enright, a UW–Madison professor of educational psychology.