The restlessness of the good life between recognition, love and justice

The possibility of leading a good life, with the other and for the other within just institutions. It is in this ideal that we find the profound nature of Paul Ricoeur's ethical vision. A sentence as limpid and vibrant as a verse. A phrase that shows the horizon of his practical philosophy in its essential elements: the good life, the relationship with the other, the love that in institutions becomes justice. It is here, in the tension between the desire for happiness and the demand for justice, that the possibility of an embodied, hospitable ethics, capable of responding to the wounds of the world without losing hope, is at stake.

The self in its subjectivity is never isolated. This is the starting point of his ethical and political reflection. The self is made and constituted in a relationship, in a narrative, in the promise we make with the other. A subjectivity therefore that cannot exist closed within itself, but which by its very nature necessarily opens up to the other from itself. This openness is only possible, however, from a self that is already constituted in its own self-recognition, in a formed personal identity, a 'hypseity'. We become what we are by telling ourselves to ourselves. By developing the fabric of our existence by holding together discontinuity and coherence, memory and history. It is a process that first and foremost exposes us to confrontation with "internal otherness", the unconscious and error. This narrative provides meaning to 'who we are' by going beyond mere knowledge of 'what we are'. But such knowledge is not an end in itself. The constitution of hypseity would risk remaining unconcluded if it did not open up to the encounter with the other. The epistemic dimension of self-recognition becomes an ethical dimension in the recognition of the other. Recognising the other as other-than-self implies the ability to empathise, to share the suffering and joy of others, in an attitude of 'solicitude'. Picking up on the Heideggerian 'Fürsorge', by virtue of which the being-being thinks of itself in relation to others and cares for other beings, 'solicitude' is for Ricoeur the expression of reciprocity between love of self and love of other. It is not pure unilateral altruism, but a relationship in which the other is recognised as a person worthy of respect, capable of speech and, like us, vulnerable. Taking up the lesson of Lévinas and his idea of responsibility for the face of the other who challenges us, Ricoeur sells solicitude as a response to human suffering and fragility. Solicitude, in this sense, is what mediates between the self and the other, allowing for a relational, egocentric ethics. It is thus transformed into the relational form of self-esteem. It is a form of recognition that is based on reciprocity, but not on equivalence: the other is never reducible to me. The relationship is always asymmetrical. Analysing the 'golden rule' - 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' - which underlies all great moral codes, Ricoeur emphasises precisely its asymmetrical nature. "The most remarkable thing about the formulation of this rule," he writes in Self as Another (Jaca Book, 1993), "is that the reciprocity required stands out against the background of the assumption of an initial asymmetry between the protagonists of the action - an asymmetry that places one in the position of agent and the other in that of patient. This absence of symmetry has its grammatical projection in the opposition between the active form of 'do' and the passive form of 'let it be done to you', and thus of undergoing'. The transition from solicitude to the norm is closely linked to this basic asymmetry, insofar as all the evil drifts of interaction, from influence to murder, are grafted onto it'. Can then the 'golden rule' ground not only solicitude but also justice, Ricoeur asks? We must first ask ourselves who is this 'other' who challenges us? The one to whom we must do what we would like to be done to us. Is it our neighbour? The friend? That specific person, an individual he or she? Of course it is! As with the Samaritan in the Gospel parable, the man robbed and beaten by robbers is first and foremost 'that' particular individual, wounded and suffering. But it is not only that. The other is the "other from us", the most distant, the most different, the one with whom there is no affinity. Let us remember that the 'neighbour' of the parable, in fact, is neither the Levite nor the priest - ethnically and culturally close to the victim of the robbers - but the Samaritan, the most distant, a suspect, almost an enemy. This is why, for Ricouer, the Samaritan represents the figure of 'genuine solicitude', that which makes us respond to the other as the other, without calculation, out of pure compassion. If it is true, then, that love, in its purest form of agape, pushes us towards the exception, the exclusivity, the irreducible singularity of the other, it is equally true that justice must generalise, depersonalise, it must establish rules, norms, fair distributions. And it is precisely here - we saw this a few weeks ago - that the tension arises, the restless heart of Ricoeur's philosophy. A heart that does not feel compelled to choose as in front of an aut-aut, but chooses to inhabit the space between the dialectical poles. Love alone risks becoming blind, partial, invasive; justice alone risks becoming cold, anonymous, ruthless. Their relationship is fragile, yet fruitful: it is in this intermediate space that the construction of a shared ethics can be attempted. We thus arrive at the third stage of recognition: after that of the self and the other, a form of recognition emerges that is institutional in nature and has to do with law, justice and dignity. This is the properly political and legal level: the recognition operated by institutions towards individuals who are the object of justice not only as beneficiaries of fair treatment but, above all, as subjects of a public recognition of their dignity as persons and members of a group that identifies them as bearers of rights. In this sense, the 'politics of recognition' cannot be understood merely as the, albeit legitimate, management of power. From politics we must demand the construction of symbolic and legal spaces in which subjects can see their dignity, their voice, their memory recognised. Think of the issues of minorities, the oppressed, the colonised. Institutions are not, so much and only, discredited bureaucratic apparatuses, they are the place where ethics becomes stable, visible, operational. They are not simply the 'place of the rule', writes Ricoeur, but that of the 'promise kept'. They hold the memory of our social promises, the possibility of mediated trust, the visible form of care.

Let us think of the public school. It is not just an educational institution: it is a promise made to every child, even the frailest and most distant, that knowledge is a common good, and that no one should be excluded from it. Or consider the hospital: a place where the vulnerability of the body meets care in the form of technical knowledge (cure) and in that of physical and emotional contact (care). There too, every protocol, every healthcare practice, every ethical decision, is placed in the tension between the universality of the right to health and the singularity of the patient's face. Let us imagine a judge. He has before him a young defendant, a confessed offender. The law is clear: the penalty must be enforced. But the judge, in pronouncing the sentence, knows that he has not only a case before him. He has a life. Ricoeur does not ask that the judge disregard the law. He asks that, in his act, justice does not forget solicitude.

Justice, in this sense, is not the blindfolded gaze or the aseptic balance of the scales. It is, rather, the ability to accommodate the other's story within a shared framework of rights and duties. A frame that must be continually questioned, transformed, made more just by those who participate in it.

A fundamental piece in this mosaic of institutional recognition is the relationship with the past, with an awareness of history. Only through a work of memory and prospective justice is it, in fact, possible to constitute a collective identity that does not deny the pain endured nor the pain inflicted. The recurring debate on the feast of 25 April shows how even today in our country such memory has not been pacified and the process of mutual recognition is far from complete. But fortunately the stories of reconciliation are not all so ambiguous and unfinished. One of the most significant examples is what happened in South Africa in the aftermath of the end of apartheid. The question running through the country was tremendous: how to patch up a nation torn apart by decades of violence and segregation? Punish or forgive? To forget or to remember? Guided by figures such as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, the institutions chose a different path, inspired by an ante litteram Ricoeurian vision: the path of truth as the foundation of justice, memory as a place of mutual recognition, and forgiveness as an overcoming of the logic of revenge. Ricoeur offers us the categories to understand this epochal process because in his perspective forgiveness is the hidden face of justice and its highest manifestation. There was not in that choice of people a rejection of justice, but an attempt to rewrite it in the light of the recognition of the enemy as part of the same tragic history.