The work of Paul Ricœur is animated by an insistent philosophical engagement with the position and orientation of human existence. An integral aspect of Ricœur’s philosophical engagement concerns the relationship between individual existence, as a question of personal identity, and co-existence, as a question of social life. This engagement is shaped by a reflexive interpretation—a hermeneutics—of these aspects of human existence in a manner that has been termed a ‘hermeneutics of the human condition’ [1].

The presence of law within the framework of this reflexive interpretation arises through the question of justice, which situates law in relation to both personal identity and human coexistence. The passage from the individual to human co-existence becomes that of the interconnection between responsibility and justice. In this manner, law becomes a domain or region of reflection in and through its connection to morality, ethics, and politics. Law is a distinct, but neither self-contained nor self-sufficient, domain whose distinctiveness is to be considered through its interconnection with these other domains. The position accorded to law is thus the expression of a wider, reflexive reconfiguration of the interrelationship of all these domains.

The reconfiguration results from an overarching process of reflexive interpretation that involves the selection of, and interpretative orientation to, the texts which form the material or corpus for this overarching process. It is in this selection and interpretation that the distinctive character of Ricœurian hermeneutics is elaborated, the question of justice raised, and the domain of law accorded its particular position.

This initial framework provides the basis and initial orientation for the more specific pathways which the contributions to this special issue trace and develop. These pathways, in their distinct recourse to the corpus of Ricœur’s work, demonstrate the continued pertinence and relevance of its philosophical framework of critical inquiry.

1 The Domain of Law and Rights within Ricœurian Hermeneutical Philosophy

The pathways traced by the contributors to the special issue rest upon a shared understanding of the importance of the theoretical resources of Ricœur’s work for the analysis of law. These analyses, and their recourse to particular works or concepts of Ricœur, are preceded by a presentation (Langford) of the manner in which law and rights become an explicit domain of philosophical reflection for Ricœur.

This presentation provides an analysis of the genesis and development, within Ricœurian hermeneutical philosophy, of this domain of philosophical reflection. From this, it is evident that it is in Ricœur’s later work that law and rights emerge for explicit, sustained philosophical engagement and reflection. It is, however, by returning to, and reconstructing, the emergence of this domain that the character of the Ricœurian approach to the analysis of law and rights is revealed.

The tracing of this genesis and development leads from Ricœur’s textual hermeneutics, arising from his critical exchanges with the narrative semiotics of Greimas, to the elaboration of a theory of narrative identity as the preparatory step, in Oneself as Another [2], to the ethical and moral theory of three of its later chapters. These chapters, which Ricœur designates as his ‘petite éthique’, develop and combine Aristotelian ethics and Kantian morality, as the prelude to a theory of moral judgment in situation. It is in the final chapter of the ‘petite éthique’, that Oneself as Another, in a number of instances, indicates the outlines of its connection to the domain of law and rights.

The explicit Ricœurian engagement with, and reflection upon, the domain of law and rights, is deferred or delayed until the work compiled and published, in the main, in The Just and Reflections on the Just [3, 4]. Here, the encounter between Ricœurian philosophy and law becomes a philosophical engagement with law. In this philosophical engagement, the preceding philosophical framework of Oneself as Another, in particular the ‘petite éthique’, is specifically acknowledged, but now has the status of a preliminary preparation for the further philosophical reflection on law.Footnote 1

The Ricœurian orientation is one which considers law to have an intrinsic relationship to justice. The consideration of this relationship is established through the rejection of a connection between justice and law based upon the social contract tradition.Footnote 2 This is accompanied by a self-criticism of Ricœur’s preceding orientation by “the historical problem of political evil”,Footnote 3 which results in conferring central importance upon the juridical.Footnote 4

The juridical is understood as an essential institutional element of mediation situated between the state and civil society.Footnote 5 The mediation relates to the institutional actualisation or realisation of individual rights which are the juridical expression of a range of capacities of the individual subject. In situations in which individual rights are in conflict, or, an individual, rather than respecting the rights of another, causes an alleged civil wrong or a criminal harm, then the juridical, through the legal process, re-establishes a relationship of just distance between the parties. Hence, the juridical is located in a middle position between conflict and peace, and renders potential conflict juridical, as a non-violent conflict of interests, in order, through judicial decision-making, to re-establish this just distance. The just distance, which is re-established between the individual parties, as an institutional practice of mediation between civil society and the state, has the broader societal effect of re-establishing social peace.

2 Reaffirming the Relationship Between Narrative Identity and the Legal Subject

The initial presentation of the manner in which law and rights become an explicit domain of philosophical reflection for Ricœur is transformed into the background for the specific pathways traced by the contributions that follow. The first of these pathways returns to concentrate upon the relationship between narrative identity and the legal subject. From the perspective of Ricœur’s philosophical trajectory, traced in the opening contribution, it returns to the point of transition between narrative identity and the petite éthique in Oneself as Another.

At this point of transition, the contribution of Wojciechowski and Cern turns both to the earlier texts, principally those formed by the trilogy of Time and Narrative [6,7,8], and to Ricœur’s final major work, The Course of Recognition [9].Footnote 6 This enables a renewed emphasis upon the distinctive Ricœurian conception of narrative identity—the essential relationship between narrative and lived experience—in which the interconnection between narrative and lived experience preserves the autonomous character of both narrative and life [11].

Within this distinctive Ricœurian conception of narrative identity, Wojciechowski and Cern, emphasise, in particular, the central position of Aristotle’s Poetics and the Aristotelian concept of catharsis. This Aristotelian concept is generalised and extended beyond its strictly Aristotelian designation, in the Poetics, as the particular effect of the dramatic form of Greek tragedy upon the individual spectator in the audience. The simultaneously provocative and purgative effect, which Ricœur attributes to the cathartic effect of Greek tragedy, in Time and Narrative [6],Footnote 7 becomes, in Ricœur’s subsequent work, an integral part of a broader conception of narrative identity [12]. In this broader conception, catharsis operates both as the discordant concordance of the narrative plot and as the “purgative virtue” which Ricœur attributes to effect upon the reader of “the thought experiments offered by literature”.Footnote 8

In particular, it is those thought experiments of literature in which the discordant concordance of the plot is such as to place into question the reader’s sense of identity that, for Ricœur, fully express this purgative virtue.Footnote 9 For it is here that the effect of narrative on lived experience is exemplified. The placing into question is not the negation of the self, its self-dissolution into nothingness, but, rather, the initiation of a process of self-interpretation. In this process of self-interpretation, initiated by this effect upon the reader, it is the element of sameness—idem—of the self which is placed into question. This leaves unaffected, and animates, the element of ipse—the question of who the self is: “[w]hat cannot be effaced is the question itself: who am I?”.Footnote 10

It is the element of ipse, and the dynamic, rather than static, identity of the self, revealed by the Ricœurian conception of narrative identity, which Wojciechowski and Cern then consider to be preserved and extended in Ricœur’s The Course of Recognition. The preservation and extension are also the renewal of the connection between narrative identity and the legal subject.

The legal subject, within the development of Ricoeur’s philosophical analyses in The Course of Recognition, is situated, at a distinct, juridical level of recognition. At this level, which is itself placed between the levels of love and of social esteem, the legal subject is constituted through two elements. The recognition of the validity of the legal norm and the recognition of other person as a legal subject: the identification of “each person as free and equal to every other person”.Footnote 11 The legal subject, within the framework of the juridical level of recognition, has both its rights legally defined and guaranteed; and it is a level which can continually expand to recognise, define and guarantee new or further legal rights.

The connection between narrative identity and the legal subject derives, for Wojciechowski and Cern, from the position of those who are currently excluded from the full and free enjoyment of their rights: their non-recognition as a legal subject who is free and equal to every other person. This experience of non-recognition is, for Wojciechowski and Cern, an experience of Ricœurian catharsis which places the identity of the self into question. It is from this experience of non-recognition that these individuals then reconfigure their identity and develop an alternative form of mutual recognition. This, in turn, may become an identity which is subsequently encompassed by expansion in the subjective legal rights at the judicial level of recognition. Thus, narrative identity, and the experience of catharsis which it contains, operates as necessary supplement to the existing limits of the judicial level of recognition of the legal subject.

3 The Legal Subject and the Hermeneutics of the Self: Foucault and Ricœur

The reflection on the legal subject and its identity, beyond that facilitated by Ricœur’s work itself, can be one which involves a comparative approach. Here, Ricœur’s work and broader philosophical orientation is brought into connection with the work of another thinker. It is through this comparison, a process of revealing the affinities and divergences between Ricœur and the body of the other thinker’s work, that further, distinct insights into the legal subject are revealed in both their work.

The process of comparison itself is shaped by the manner in which the initial connection or affinity is established. The character of this affinity, the basis upon which the comparative analysis is initiated, is dependent upon the degree of apparent divergence between the work of Ricœur and the thinker with whom he is sought to be compared. The contribution of Fernandes undertakes the comparative approach, engaging in a reflection upon the legal subject and its identity, through the comparison of the work of Ricœur and Foucault. It is, as Fernandes explicitly acknowledges, the significant, apparent divergence between their work, combined with their absence of engagement with each other’s work, which makes the task of establishing the initial connection or affinity one of sustained preliminary consideration.

Here, the initial affinity, the comparative bridge facilitating the passage between their work, is provided by Fernandes’s formulation of the concept of the para-legal. This concept designates the necessary conditions for the legal subject to emerge as both the subject of law and subject to law. This conceptual bridge then enables the divergent sources from which Ricœur and Foucault draw to become complementary perspectives upon this legal subject.Footnote 12 The complementarity is one in which the Foucauldian perspective operates as an interrogatory supplement to that of Ricœur thereby extending the critical reflection upon the legal subject.

The extension of critical reflection, facilitated by this process of comparative reflection, centres, in particular, upon the differentiation of the self and the legal subject, through the legal process. It is the truth of the legal subject, resulting from, and generated by, the procedure of the legal process, which is considered in relation to the self. In this consideration, there is a hermeneutics of the self, which is itself differentiated by the Ricœurian and the Foucauldian distinctions between the self and the legal subject.

4 Reflections upon the Ricœurian Concepts of Love, Justice, Forgiveness and the Promise

From the pathway of the comparative analysis of Ricœurian and Foucauldian approaches to the relationship between the self and legal judgment, generated from the notion of the para-legal, the form of analysis returns to concentrate upon a number of central Ricœurian concepts. This pathway through Ricœurian philosophy focuses upon those concepts, in Ricœur’s work, which concern central aspects of human interaction and co-existence. The analyses which develop along this pathway, divide into two separate pathways, and concern the relationship between love and justice (Regier) and the relationship between justice, forgiveness and the promise (Kumorek). These pathways are developed from what can be considered Ricœur’s underlying post-positivist approach to law: law cannot be understood in the absence of its connection to morality and ethics, but this connection can no longer be the simple, unreflective recourse to classical and modern theories of natural law. The Ricœurian approach is to acknowledge and reflect upon other ethico-moral forms of non-juridical relationship and then to extend this reflection to their relationship with justice and law.

Within this Ricœurian framework, the contribution of Regier centres upon the relationship between love and justice. It offers an extended consideration of this relationship commencing from Ricœur’s, ‘Love and Justice’ [22], in which love and justice are both acknowledged in their distinctness and relatedness. This complex relationship is one in which neither can be subsumed by the other nor can love or justice fully exist in their distinctness without the other. It is a relationship of complementarity in which love supplements and reanimates, through its logic of superabundance, a justice always prone, through its logic of equivalence, to determinacy, closure and detachment.

The initial parameters of the relationship, established in ‘Love and Justice’, are then considered through the analysis of love and ethics in Oneself as Another. This situates love as an integral element in the relationship between self and others. This ethical relationship is at the level of direct immediacy between a particular self and a concrete other. It is only with justice, that the self can extend an ethical relationship to all others beyond the level of love. However, in this extension, justice has, in its generalisation, to formalise the ethical relationship, and in this formalisation to operate with a logic of equivalence. It is then love which remains the critical supplement in the transposition of ethics to the level of justice. For it preserves and resists, at the level of justice, the potential reduction, of the entirely of the relationship between self and other to an abstract formalism.

The pathway through this Ricœurian framework of the contribution of Kumorek focuses upon the interrelationship between justice, forgiveness, and promising.Footnote 13 The forms of human interaction of forgiveness and promising are situated in relation to the legal system and considered as ethical supplements to the justice which results from the operation of law and its juridical institutions. Forgiveness and promising are essentially non-juridical forms, whose ethical character results, respectively, from a logic of the gift and a logic of trust. These two distinct logics are held to exist within a broader symbolic economy of the gift which is irreducible to the juridical.

It is this very irreducibility of forgiveness and the promise which, in turn, constitute their capacity to renew and restore the always fragile relationship between the self and the other. They are distinct forms of ethical relationship which, in those instances where the juridical reaches its limit or otherwise fails, can furnish a complementary relationship of mutuality between self and other.

5 Ricœur in the Anthropocene: Against Anthropocide

The preceding contributions have focused upon the central importance of justice in Ricœurian philosophy, the manner in which it is defined and determined, and its relationship to the other forms of human co-existence, interaction and belonging delineated in Ricœur’s philosophical analyses.

Ricœur explicitly acknowledges, as an integral part of these analyses, the fragility of both the effects and continued existence of justice, and these other forms to which it is related. Justice, and these other forms, are constantly reproduced against the continual possibility of their subversion, non-realisation or perversion. The presence of, and response to the negative, in Ricœurian philosophy is one which is presented as productive rather than entirely destructive.

With the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene [24, 25] and its subsequent dissemination, interpretation and contestation [26,27,28], a period of human existence is proposed in which the cumulative effect of human action on the global environment has led a progressively increasing and significantly deleterious effect upon the conditions of human existence. Thus, that the continued, unmodified effect of human activity on the global environment will lead, through the destruction of the global environment, to the eventual extinction of the human being itself.

It is this challenge—the self-negation of humanity or anthropocide—to which the contribution of Grčki responds and elaborates a Ricœurian response. The response is one of both justification—through Ricœur’s philosophy, of the possibility for human action as environmental justice—and application—the use of these philosophical insights in order to facilitate the ethical re-reading of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The level of justification, formed through a particular combination of Ricœurian narrative identity, responsibility, and justice, drawn from Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature [29], Time and Narrative Volume I and Oneself as Another, articulates a reflective ethical theory for human action.Footnote 14 It is a reflective ethical theory, an eco-hermeneutic phenomenology of responsibility to the global environment, arising from the presupposition of the human being’s dependence upon that global environment. This renders global environmental responsibility as one which relates both to the self and to others and, in this manner, is a reflexive environmental justice.

This ethical framework, and the reflexive environmental justice with which it orientates human action, then becomes the basis for the transition to the level of application. The primacy of ethics in this reflexive environmental justice facilitates the approach of ethical re-reading of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In this re-reading, the agreement at the basis of the Convention becomes a promise, in the Ricœurian sense of one creating a primary obligation to others—the promisees—rather than to that of self which promises. From this, the other relationships between the parties to the agreement and to the global environment created by the framework of the Convention are transformed into ones of ethics: solicitude for other more vulnerable state parties and the ethically coherent narrative identity of each state party in relation to its response to climate change.

6 Ricœur and the Digital: Ricœurian Reflections on Algorithms and Law

The presence of technology, as an explicit domain of philosophical reflection within the thought of Paul Ricœur, appears as early as 1958, in a presentation to the Congress of Christianisme social [37]. Ricœur’s philosophical reflection and critique are centred upon the effect of technological progress, as a global or planetary phenomenon, upon the relationship between human beings and the world and the internal relationship of the human being with itself. The Ricœurian reflection and critique develop a position situated between unreflective identification with technology and an unqualified, total rejection.Footnote 15 Rather, for Ricœur, the philosophical reflection, and the critique which develops from it, should commence from the consideration of the technological as that which has become determinant for human life. Here, determinant is, for Ricœur, when technology and its associated technicity have become part of the definition of the human being.Footnote 16 It this “new awareness”, holding technology as an element in the human being’s “definition” and “destination”,Footnote 17 which marks the transition to a “technological civilisation”.Footnote 18

It is this affinity with this aspect of the Ricœurian approach to the presence of technology, within human existence, which is further developed and extended, each in their distinctive manner, by the contributions of Makouar and Holzem and Blandino. Their common affinity and difference from Ricœur relate to the retention of an underlying notion of a technological civilisation combined with its further development from the industrial to the digital. It is the further development to the digital which, in turn, leads to a concentration upon, and interpretation of Ricœur’s later work, as the basis for the critical reflection upon a digital technological civilisation. Within the framework of the special issue, their critical reflections relate to elements of the relationship between digital technological civilisation and law.

The contribution of Makouar and Holzem centres upon a critical examination of the relationship between legal decision-making, as a specifically juridical form of symbolic mediation between the individual and society, and the effect upon it of digitisation. In place of the Ricœurian recourse in the 1958 article to a critique informed by biblical hermeneutics, the foundation for the analysis of Makouar and Holzem is derived from another, later aspect of Ricœur’s work.

This foundation or foundational orientation results from the reconstruction of the effect of the structural approach to anthropology of Levi-Strauss upon Ricœur’s work, and subsequent engagement with the work of Geertz.Footnote 19 From this reconstruction, the emphasis is placed upon the centrality of symbolic mediation as that which creates, facilitates and shapes the relationship between the individual and the social world. An exemplary institutionalisation of symbolic mediation is the legal system and, more particularly, the process of legal decision-making.

Here, based upon detailed analysis of the legal judgment of a French appeal court, the process by which the formulation of legal judgment, from the particular legal situation with which the court is required to determine, involves the enactment of symbolic mediation. Hence, that in place of an approach to legal judgment which would confine it to the process of subsumption of a particular situation under a general norm, the legal judgment is a process of modal transformation: an operation of symbolic mediation between the individual and the social or society.

The process of symbolic mediation revealed by this detailed analysis leads to its affinity with, and support from, the Ricœurian approach to law, the trial and legal judgment, in The Just and Reflections on the Just. This affinity also involves a further inflection by setting this understanding of legal practice within the broader framework of theories of enaction and their transposition into the social systems theory of Niklas Luhumann. The purpose of this inflection is to demonstrate that the operation of symbolic mediation, through the legal system, is the corollary of the insistence upon the centrality of lived experience to the understanding of behaviour and knowledge.

It is both this operation of symbolic mediation and its broader theoretical framework which are significantly affected by the introduction of the digital into the trial process. For the digital rests upon the alternative conceptions of cognitive science and neuroscience. This introduction is considered to represent a profound transformation in which digital justice cannot be understood as a justice merely assisted and complemented by technology. Digital justice represents the dissolution of the operation of symbolic mediation of the legal system.Footnote 20

The contribution of Blandino also diverges from the Ricœurian critique informed by biblical hermeneutics, and the focus of its examination is a different aspect of the relationship between the digital and law. The analysis concerns the particular challenge to the established categories of private or civil law (domestic and international) of the digital phenomena of crypto assets and blockchain networks. This derives from the immaterial and de-territorialised—digital—character of these assets and networks and the consequent challenge, for civil law, of jurisdiction and regulation. The challenge—the difficulties of the relationship of law to these digital phenomena—becomes the focus for a response of reconfiguration. It seeks to re-establish a coherent relationship between civil law and these digital phenomena informed by Ricœur’s work on narrative and justice [8, 45].Footnote 21

The coherence is re-established by emphasising that the relationship between civil law and these digital phenomena should be understood as that of the interpretation of narrative. This understanding is developed through the comprehension of these digital phenomena as narrative objects, namely, that their internal coherence is a narrative coherence. This, in turn, entails, following Ricœur, that they are objects with a dynamic coherence, in place of their conventional designation as static representations of value.

From this narrative reconfiguration of the understanding of these digital phenomena, the legal pole of the relationship, composed of the categories of civil law and their application, is also held to be capable of reconfiguration as a narrative. In relation to the legal pole, it is by understanding legal interpretation—the application of existing legal categories to new phenomena or situations—as an inherently creative process. The creativity of legal interpretation is held to be analogous to that of the general relationship between text and reader characterised by the passage through the mimetic stages of prefiguration, configuration, reconfiguration.

In this manner, the relationship between these digital phenomena and civil law becomes comprehensible as the interweaving of a narrative relationship between law and the digital. The dynamic narrative coherence of these digital phenomena is acknowledged and comprehended through an equally dynamic operation of legal interpretation. The passage between the digital and law and, in this passage, the generation of this mutual interweaving or mediation, draws upon the Ricœurian concept of emplotment.