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<p>The article examines how metaphor structures the conceptualization of human rights in modern European and Chinese legal and political thought, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s account of metaphor as semantic innovation and hermeneutic refiguration. In European jurisprudence, rights are predominantly articulated through property and boundary metaphors—possession, scope, core, margin—while constitutional theory simultaneously deploys a generative register in which dignity and personhood function as grounding sources from which rights derive. In modern Chinese discourse, rights-language entered through translation and neologism, yet was progressively refigured through indigenous metaphorical constellations, most notably arboreal and hydrological imagery in which&#xa0;<i>renge</i>&#xa0;(人格, personality) appears as root or source and rights as branches or flows. The article argues that these metaphors are not just rhetorical ornaments but symbolic mediations that disclose distinct normative orientations: bounded protection, correlativity, and adjudicability on the European side; developmental growth, relational embeddedness, and ethical cultivation in the Chinese context. Through a Ricoeurian analysis of distanciation, recontextualization, and surplus of meaning, the paper aims to show how rights-language detaches from its original configuration and is re-inscribed within new cultural horizons. The resulting differences do not entail incommensurability but exemplify transformative appropriation. Human rights thus emerge as a concept capable of cultural refiguration while retaining sufficient semantic continuity to sustain claims to universal articulation.</p>

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Roots and Boundaries: Metaphor and the Refiguration of Human Rights in Modern European and Chinese Legal and Political Thought

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月28日

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  • Anna Irene Baka

摘要

The article examines how metaphor structures the conceptualization of human rights in modern European and Chinese legal and political thought, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s account of metaphor as semantic innovation and hermeneutic refiguration. In European jurisprudence, rights are predominantly articulated through property and boundary metaphors—possession, scope, core, margin—while constitutional theory simultaneously deploys a generative register in which dignity and personhood function as grounding sources from which rights derive. In modern Chinese discourse, rights-language entered through translation and neologism, yet was progressively refigured through indigenous metaphorical constellations, most notably arboreal and hydrological imagery in which renge (人格, personality) appears as root or source and rights as branches or flows. The article argues that these metaphors are not just rhetorical ornaments but symbolic mediations that disclose distinct normative orientations: bounded protection, correlativity, and adjudicability on the European side; developmental growth, relational embeddedness, and ethical cultivation in the Chinese context. Through a Ricoeurian analysis of distanciation, recontextualization, and surplus of meaning, the paper aims to show how rights-language detaches from its original configuration and is re-inscribed within new cultural horizons. The resulting differences do not entail incommensurability but exemplify transformative appropriation. Human rights thus emerge as a concept capable of cultural refiguration while retaining sufficient semantic continuity to sustain claims to universal articulation.