Doing Justice to Justice

Abstract

Reflections on Just attempts both to complement and to correct the whole dialectic of little that Paul Ricoeur had placed at end of Oneself as Another.1 One of problems identified was that approach Ricoeur had taken there gave rise to the impression of a juxtaposi- tion and of a weakly arbitrated conflict of positions.2 Ricoeur was happier with dialectical idea of justice he had argued for in Just between Legal and Good.3 Francois Dosse's Les sens d'une vie offers an interesting account of circumstances in which he came to deliver that lecture.4 It was 1991-of- ficially designated l'Annee de la justice by Prime Minister Michel Rocard-and Antoine Garapon had recently founded Institut des hautes etudes sur la justice (IHEJ). Ricoeur accepted Garapon's invitation to give inaugural lecture, and two men then worked on text, meeting several times at Ricoeur's home in Châteney-Malabry. Significantly, lecture was written for members of a professional body whose interest in justice was decidedly practical. Looking back on period, in The Just, Ricoeur claims that his work with Garapon's IHEJ al- lowed him to resist a line of thought that strongly encouraged by spirit of our times.5 This line of thought turns its gaze towards philosophy of history, losing sight of philosophy of right. Once happens is drama of war that captures our intellectual energy, at price of an oft repeated confession of incomprehensibility in principle of political evil.6 Ricoeur acknowledges that he is not in any position to deplore what he terms this obstinate return of eminently historical problem of political evil because, in past, he played a part in promoting it.7 But things changed as soon as he collaborated with Garapon and he began, at last, to pay attention to problematic.8 He writes,My work with Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice has been particu- larly influential in that regard. There I encountered question of unjust and just on a level where reflection on juridical ran little risk of being prematurely taken up into a political philosophy, itself snatched up by a phi- losophy of history haunted in turn by pitiless torment arising from and sustained by aporia of political evil.9He claims that once he began to work at more appropriate level he was able to take on task of justice to the question of right and of doing justice to justice.Ricoeur also acknowledges, in The Just, his debt to Ecole nationale de la magistrature, nearby training school for public prosecutors and judges. He recalls that it was there that hemet question of juridical in figure of judiciary, with its writ- ten laws, its tribunals, its judges, its ceremonial processes, and, as a capstone to all this, pronouncement of a sentence where law is stated in circumstances of a trial, an eminently singular affair. In way I was led to believe that juridical, comprehended through features of judiciary, could provide philosophy occasion to reflect upon specificity of right and law, in its proper setting midway between moral philosophy or ethics (the nuance separating these two not being of importance at preliminary stage of my investigation) and politics.10It is significant, I think, that Ricoeur sees a new opportunity for philosophy in his belated discovery of juridical problematic. Philosophy is given time to reflect on distinctiveness of right and law once it finds itself situated between ethics and politics, i.e., on very plane where judiciary is located.Dosse's reading of Just between Legal and Good probably does not give due consideration to opportunity for philosophical reflection that lecture provides. For Dosse, Ricoeur was-certainly in 1990's-the philoso- pher of city who endeavoured to enrich social practices with philosophical theories and insights. …