Justice as a spiritual quest

ABSTRACT

This essay is based on the assumption that retributive justice fails to capture the immense riches of the human condition. Exploring the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), it argues that restorative justice must be seen as complementary to the retributive and other conceptions of justice. Restorative justice is presented here as a spiritual journey, one that is best grasped through the prism of Benjamin’s spiritual elements of class struggles. Nelson Mandela understood, like Georg Friedrich Hegel, that even the Absolute Spirit, powerful as it is, achieves its goal through cunning. Spiritual quest is, however, much more than the cunning of the spirit; it is also love and human flourishing understood as inclusive projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Restorative justice
• Reconciliation
• Nelson Mandela
• South Africa

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chielozona Eze

Chielozona Eze is a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, where he is Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor. He is also Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is the author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans (Routledge, 2021).