Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice

This book addresses the thought of Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), paying particular attention to the creative tension between love and justice as principle themes in his work. Dealing with these issues chiefly in his writings on religion, Ricoeur explored the tension between the biblical ideals of the golden rule—the religious formulation of a principle of justice—and the love command. Author W. David Hall shows how these ideals continually speak to each other in Ricoeur’s work, how they operate creatively on each other, and how each serves as a corrective to the perversions of the other. Hall maintains that although issues of love and justice became prominent comparatively late in Ricoeur’s corpus, they provide a sustained trajectory throughout his work and are an important interpretive key for understanding Ricoeur’s intellectual project as a whole.