Justifying Justice: Ricoeur’s Words of Wisdom

Remembering the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) and the hermeneutic thoughts that won him worldwide fame, we widely acclaim his love of justice and human vulnerability that made him lash out against injustice. His protest against the conflict of good and evil in contemporary society was interpreted by him in law, medicine, theology, and politics. Ricoeur’s pluralistic, adversarial, and disputatious struggle in those realms was a future-oriented philosophical approach against ignorance, victimization, xenophobia, illness, and other ethical, political, or religious human fears. At the same time, Ricoeur’s precise thinking belonged to the old-style philosophy, in the history-linked sense that he used classical authors as his main sources. Ricoeur’s argumentation is built on Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and George W. F. Hegel and on scientific and intellectual movements as the Enlightenment and Romanticism until present-day philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas). In his Nicomachean Ethics (ca. 350 BC), Aristotle discussed the moral virtue of sophia as theoretical wisdom and phronesis as practical wisdom and Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) facing as it stands for Ricoeur “a dissatisfaction with life over against the prohibition of suicide, personal distress over against the prohibition of false promises, another’s distress against the command to cultivate one’s talents” (128). Aristotle and Kant seem in this book to become Ricoeur’s favorite starting-points in his search for a contemporary ethics and a new capacity to act. Goodness is a duty to speak and to act.

The final collection of lectures and essays, Reflections on The Just is a continuation of The Just (2000). Both volumes hold the same cover image, a shadowy pair of scales figuring a male nude on top of one scale, symbolizing not so much external justice or social legality as inner judgment setting in motion the psychic (and psychosomatic) weighing of good and evil, right and wrong. Ricoeur made the false “shadows” of the image visible, including the “‘secret’ or ‘silence’ regarding the overall sense of his enterprise” (154). The Just, the previous book, totals 161 pages, whereas the Reflections on The Just counts 265 pages. The extensive appendix to the second book should add new material to the first, but the 265 pages are a surplus for an “expansion” or further unfolding. The fifteen essays are preceded by a lengthy introduction (1–41), which in itself is a review of (part of) the essays. Reflections on The Just poses an embarrassing and paralyzing question to this reviewer. Now only is the book a review (re-thinking) of the previous book, but the review of the volume has been turned into a review of a review. Such a reviewed review turns out to be a dissecting strategy, leaving the critical maneuver smashed and stripped of its vital contours. In short, a review must be the personal evidence of a “witness,” but the written attestation should prove valuable as a medium of some “proof.” Writing this review of Reflections on The Just could become a self-reflexive infraction and could degenerate into a penal punishment.

Reflections on The Just has a speculative title—the French original was Le Juste 2 (2001) and the Reflections is supposed to be a secondary addition to the previous The Just. As reported in the OED, a “reflection” notes a critical angle of the “action of bending, turning, or folding back” taken in figurative sense as an “action of turning (back) or fixing of thoughts on some subject; meditation, deep or serious consideration.” Reflections suggests Ricoeur’s self-reflexions in his professorial spirit of self-education passed on to the readers or students, probably legal laymen. The Just is derived from Plato’s Dialogues: the verb “to dikaion (which will also be that of the Latin and German neuter), brought to the level of a substantialized adjective . . . . This return to the properly neutral use of the neuter adjective, turned into a substantive term, authorizes a broad opening to the conceptual field” (1). Ricoeur’s pirouette is an ungrammatical turn, evidenced by...