Resentment and Justice

articulations for an ethics of law from Nietzsche and Ricoeur

Abstract

The thesis faces the problem of justice and resentment in a plural and postmodern society. To deal with such questions, we propose an articulation between Ricouer's ethics, especially in the works The Self as Another and Just I and II, and Nietzsche's philosophy of resentment, especially from the Genealogy of Morals, involving still others. studies. The authors start from their own philosophical challenges and contexts, but, based on the research, we show how the Nietzschean philosophy of law and morals lead to a critique that finds resonance in Ricoeur's ethical philosophy. We found that the Nietzschean critique of modern law provides important elements to understand the intensification of ethical-social differences aggravated in the plural and multicultural scenario of postmodern society. Nietzsche's diagnosis is that modern morality, but also modern law, was constituted as a triumph of reactive affects over active affects, a phenomenon that the author elaborates through the concept of resentment. Such a way of structuring morality implies a practice of law centered, on the one hand, on the norm as a ban on active impulses and, on the other hand, from the victim's perspective, equating justice with a kind of integral reparation for damages and negative freedom guaranteed by the standard. Nietzsche presents, however, a new conception of law as a form of antagonism between forces that meet and, in the legal dispute, elaborate a precarious form of self-preservation. This conception opens a possible bridge to a philosophy of law uncoupled from the strong notion of norm and justice as the integral realization of guaranteed rights. In this way, a possible dialogue is opened for the recovery of ethics from Ricoeur, a space in which a new semantics of the idea of ​​good and the ends of law emerges, in order to complement formal normative reasoning with a broader teleological perspective. The philosophical correlation between Nietzsche's will to power and Ricouer's ethics is made possible by the figure of love and forgiveness, especially from Max Scheler's critique of Nietzsche, in the sense of the possibility of love appearing as an expression of the power of human. Thus, forgiveness, as a possible expression of love between enemies, highlights the connection between the will to power and the ethical notion of the common good, which leads to a new foundation of the norm from alterity and, ultimately, leads to the mutual recognition as a basic operation of justice. The idea of ​​mutual recognition restores the prevalence of the objective idea of ​​rights, through which it becomes possible to understand a right dispossessed of the individual, but as effectively what is recognized to the other as the cost of freedom in a plural life. Through these correlations, we find in Ricouer philosophical material to understand how the insertion of ethics in law responds to the challenge of overcoming resentment. From these correlations, comes the conclusion that overcoming resentment involves replacing the model of law as a norm and the idea of ​​subjective right as a space for negative freedom or non-interference with another model of law, in which the role of institutions of justice is tied to the ethical end of engaging in an economy of mutual recognition. Consequently, there is a redefinition of the ends of the judicial process, which now takes on the meaning of agonistic dispute whose outcome cannot be predetermined, but only guided by tolerance and the search for peaceful coexistence in a plural society.