Quote:
Ricoeur uses aspects of the biblical tradition to direct our attention to the "strangeness" of the discourse of love. The discourses of love and praise function in a way that are at odds with those discourses that seek univocity at the level of principles. Love is imperative; it commands us, ordering us to have a feeling. What force, what authority, can such a command have? Ricoeur's response is that the authority of the commandment to love is founded upon love itself. The relationship of love, between God and the individual, is foundational to Law and the commandment to love. It is so much more than just a moral obligation. Love, best understood in terms of the power of poetics and metaphorisation, confers a dynamism that is capable of mobilising a wide of affects that we designate by their end states - pleasure vs pain, satisfaction vs discontent etc. This power of poetics and metaphorisation allows love to be capable of signifying more than itself.
Ricoeur contrasts the discourse of love with the discourse of justice, and there are certain aspects where there are clear opposition. What does it mean to be just? By looking at our social practices, he observes that justice is reliant upon argument, confrontation and communicable reason, all of which are foreign to love. He also draws upon the fact that justice, as opposed to love, requires closure - it demands judgment. Many philosophers, from Aristotle to Rawls, have identified justice with distributive justice - assigning roles, tasks, rights and duties based on notions of advantages and disadvantages, of goods and costs. Justice is then tied to equality, where the ideal is an equitable division of rights and goods to the benefit of everyone. From this perspective, society is then seen as a space of confrontation between rivals.
Ricoeur then tries to build a bridge between the discourse of love and the prose of justice - joining the hymn and the formal rule. He found this in Jesus and His teachings. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's gospel and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke's gospel, we have a dramatic contrast between the logic of humanity - the "logic of equality and equivalent" and the logic of God - the "logic of superabundance". Jesus' logic of excess, of disproprtionality, of superabundance and generosity, is made plain in both Sermons.
Love your enemies
Jesus calls forth an extreme response in us by builidng a pattern of commandments that challenges our human logic of equivalence and proportionality.
Ricoeur identifies the same logic of superabundance in Jesus Christ himself: he is the divine excess of generosity, the abundant free gift, the "how much more of God". The clash between the logic of equivalence and the logic of superabundance is on the level of the dialetic of life and death, redemption and fall. On the side of the logic of equivalence - sin, law and death. On the side of the logic of superabundance - justification, grace and life.
However, it is likely that Jesus did not intend to show that love and justice are irreconcible, but rather with the logic of love, he intends to shed a new inflection on the rule of justice. It interprets justice in terms of generosity. Applied in our society, it is to avoid descending into immorality, to uphold social justice. It is only the logic of Love, disproportionality and superabundance, that ultimately secures justice, and the logic of equivalence, from perverse interpretation. The rule of justice then has the potential to be reflected as a recognition of mutual interdependence, or a competitive attempt to secure private advantage within the security of an accepted framework. Thus, Ricouer suggests that our institutions of justice need to always be guarded by the poetics of love - this includes accounting.
Accounting cannot be satisfied only with the logic of equivalence. At present, accounting is not only satisifed with this logic, but it is its guardian. We must be careful with the perversion of this logic. Our modern capitalist society seems to be founded on the logic of "free" and "fair" exchange - again the logic of equivalence - but behind the semblance of market equivalencies is a perverse reality of coercion, force and covert constraint. The market makes exchanges seem equal when in reality, they are unequal and exploitative.
Ricoeur reminds us that the law of exchange and equivalence is not eternal. Before this existed the economy of the gift: men and women compete to be generous.
- Accounting, Love and Justice; McKernan & MacLullich
