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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
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- Sprache: Englisch
Whilst research and innovation may allow for increasing efficiency in the pursuit of human ends, they also pose dangers, linked to the unpredictability of their development, which call for unprecedented responsibility. This book contends that the structure of a "process", in the sense of an efficient propensity in the possible that can be actualized by research and innovation, can be intrinsically ethical, that is, it can take into account and preserve the freedom of the actors concerned. This point is explored through a consideration of four processual ethical structures, each of which can constitute a point of reference for the exercise of a responsibility. Ethically Structured Processes questions dualities that are very firmly established in the West, such as "theoretical/practical" and "descriptive/prescriptive", through a detour into historical Chinese traditions of thought. The generality of the thesis concerning ethical processes is tested, in a privileged way, on the case of the "Invisible Hand". Is this notion based on a philosophically and ethically consistent concept of "freedom"?
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Innovation and Responsibility Set
coordinated byRobert Gianni and Bernard Reber
Volume 4
Ethically Structured Processes
Virgil Cristian Lenoir
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Virgil Cristian Lenoir to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933810
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-174-1
Table of Contents
Cover
Foreword
Introduction
PART 1: Ambiguity and Responsibility
1 The Possible and the Necessary
1.1. The formal and the transcendental, or the logical point of view
1.2. Conditions and determinations: a matter of freedom
1.3. The concept of the possible
1.4. The duplicity of contingency
1.5. The concept of the necessary
1.6. Elements of effectiveness and ethical innervation
1.7. A situation, a context and a world
1.8. Efficiency and effectiveness: philosophical freedom
2 Pre-determination Figures
2.1. Modes of objective constraint
2.2. An unorthodox use of “possible worlds”
2.3. Ontological truth and processual effectiveness
2.4. Definitorial point of view and determinism
2.5. The meaning of the definitorial position for the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness
2.6. An ambiguous responsibility
2.7. The ascent into the possible
2.8. Responsibility: a limit to ontological discourse
3 A Processual Effectiveness
3.1. A process of the possible
3.2. The open totalities
3.3. Propensities
3.4. Distinctions (or contingent partitions)
3.5. A drape of the possible
3.6. Ethical innervation
3.7. The viability of the possible
3.8. The circulation of the possible
4 Universality and Responsibility
4.1. Unlike phenomenology
4.2. Measuring gaps from Hegel
4.3. The finite will
4.4. Reconciliation in situation
4.5. Autonomy
4.6. The question of the relevance of the conditions (effectiveness)
4.7. The universal within plurality
4.8. The originarity of language
4.9. An assumption in consciousness (detachment)
4.10. Consciousness and attachment
4.11. Political pluralism and comparability of value systems
Conclusion to Part 1
PART 2: Four Criteria of the Effectiveness of a Process
5 Summary of What was Learned in Part 1 Using the Example of GMOs
5.1. The transcendental: four categories of the definitorial, a test for the thought of the process
6 The Responsibility of a Meeting: China
6.1. The common thread: a project led by INRA in France, between 2001 and 2003
6.2. Four objective criteria of the universal
6.3. Four types of “fall of the drape”
7 Obstacles to an Ethical Consideration of the Drape
7.1. Overcoming the question of a normative nature
7.2. Obstacles related to the concept of a normative nature
7.3. Normativity in thinking about the process
7.4. Another fall of the drape in Europe: the loss of “wisdom”
8 Objectively Ethical Processes
8.1. Practical wisdom
8.2. Ethical knowledge
8.3. Judging
8.4. Christianisms and processes
Conclusion to Part 2
PART 3: Demystifying the Invisible Hand
9 The Limits of the Freedom of Neoliberals
9.1. Myth and ideology
9.2. Teleology and immanence
9.3. Five objections to the Invisible Hand
9.4. Towards a global responsibility
9.5. Note on “genealogy”
9.6. Note on ultra-liberal “freedom”
Conclusion to Part 3
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Foreword
The majority of the books published in the set Innovation and Responsibility (IR)1 are in the field of political and moral philosophy. It is indeed the richness and plasticity of the concept of moral responsibility that must innervate the rising notion of IR. Here we have a book that ventures into the field of metaphysics, and it is welcome. Indeed, many institutional discourses and much academic literature dedicated to the notion of IR often speak of anticipation in an uncertain world, or even of preserving the possible. However, they do not think any further about the modalities of the possible, and with them the responsibilities to be imagined under these conditions. Virgil Cristian Lenoir sees very far and travels back far upstream to investigate the components of this problem, which rests in a particular way with each iteration, demanding creative responsibility. Responsibility requires much more than complying with a clearly identified set of rules or being able to anticipate. The creative possible is a milieu that implies that there is always more to a situation than what we can see, calculate or even predict. In addition, the increasing specialization of researchers whose activities are focused on tabulations of mutually exclusive possibilities contributes to the reduction of the possible.
The purpose of this book is even more ambitious since Lenoir engages in this reflection in a comparative way, straddling the West and the East. This detour is not a luxury. In this way he does not give in to the projected sirens of an East that would have understood things better than we do, but instead the book attempts to establish a responsible (responsive) encounter, a conversation, between these two worlds at a time when their economies, modes of innovation and related risks have become interdependent. The final part of the book draws practical conclusions from this reorganization of the thinking of possibilities to challenge the vague but prevalent theory of the Invisible Hand in economics. Although neither the author to whom it is attributed, Adam Smith, nor serious economists refer to it much, this metaphor and the belief in the virtues of the market it supports still inspire many decision-makers. In terms of the theses it develops, the book also takes care to review research processes that were intended to be innovative and prefigure the requirements of IR.
Here are some important points that have contributed to this reflection on responsibility, without exhausting the richness of this powerful philosophical work.
First of all, in response to several works in the series that have indicated that responsibility is not conformity, control or mechanical application, Lenoir reminds us that it is not enough to do one's professional duty, to comply with certain moral rules or to apply values, even in a thoughtful way [LOI 18, LEN 15, PEL 16, MAE 17]. Responsibility depends less on the application of a particular norm, rule or value than on the accountability process in a given context. Indeed, since responsibility exposes consciousness to unpredictability due to certain forms of scientific and technological innovation, it must itself be creative. The next step which needs to be considered and taken is therefore to recognize every new context and with it a renewed thought of contingency and therefore of the assumed links between necessity, reality and possibility. This therefore renews the way of thinking about norms or responsibility in context, but also about what we consider to be universally valid. Indeed, the universal is at stake at the level of the characterization of the ethical relevance of effective conditions in situations. The criterion is not that a condition applies to all humans without exception. It is richer in possibility because it concerns the relationship between people in context, at the cost of a new explanation each time. The expected creativity is therefore based on careful use of the term universal.
More fundamentally, it is necessary to recognize the importance of thinking and implementing accountability in general and IR in particular as a process where the possible has its place. However, responsibility is subject to a double paradox. The first is that there is no responsibility without the willingness and commitment of a subject, but to think of action as only being caused by the subject is to prohibit the success of responsible action that is disproportionate to them and that they cannot accomplish without reference to other dimensions involved in the situation. The second is that responsibility is determined by knowledge that must cope with increased unpredictability due to global interrelationships at a human, scientific and technical level. Often the effectiveness of science lies in a defined relationship to the possible. However, the possibility or impossibility of acquring knowledge and the accessibility of the modes of this knowledge make the truth of contingent knowledge dependent insofar as this truth itself depends, for its expression, proof and implementation on a given context, on experimentation and techniques, or even on the language of the research. In some cases, an examination of these sciences, with their laws, the construction of their objects, up to their hypotheses, will have to involve considering and questioning their modal status. It is therefore a question of reconsidering the link between the necessary, the real and the possible. This perspective also contributes to a gradual enrichment of the understanding of freedom. Lenoir's very novel contributions to modal logic can be categorized with work on the meta-principle of precaution [REB 17], one of the eminent forms of IR or political and ethical responsibility. Indeed, even in some of its administrative statements, the latter refers to the ascent to the scientific hypotheses at the origin of the understanding of the phenomena to be avoided.
The issues addressed from the base up by Virgil Cristian Lenoir are equally relevant to innovation. In a new situation, there is often a need to combine knowledge, interests, values and laws. A logical constraint that may have been a solution to a previous situation then arises as an obstacle when the situation changes. This logic which has become routine, often applied mechanically, must be re-examined or even changed. There is a danger of summarizing the possibilities in an exhaustive, given and established list, which would dramatically impoverish the creative possible at work and its resources for taking responsibility. This freezing of conditions, downstream, corresponds to the forgetting of their possibility and to a mechanical, stereotypical application of these conditions, which we believe to be effective because they have been able to work in the past, without a careful return to the new situation we are in. This extends to our understanding of novelty. We must be able to broaden the perspective. There is no longer a single possible world, the one we inhabit, but a plurality of possible worlds. In their plurality, the possible worlds then allow a salutary retreat from the situational constraints at work experienced as an absolute necessity. The possible worlds express various relationships to the contingency at work each time in a situation. They make it possible, through their plurality, to defuse conditions that have become constraining, thus closing down a single plane of intelligibility.
Lenoir invites us to sometimes reject a naive ontological vision that would encourage us to look at a world of objects determined in themselves that we would simply name by trying to match what we say to what we encounter. His point is particularly relevant for the speeches, nowadays we say stories, which cover some emerging technologies [GRU 16]. Research and innovations seem to accelerate history, revealing that the subject and the world do not pre-exist, determined as such and in a fixed way, to their connection. It is a comfort of hurried thinking. The same is true of the possible and the actual. In both cases, it is their interweaving that is first. They only then freeze in the necessary dualities that condition our experience, to the point that we can no longer understand it without going through them. Lenoir invites us not to forget this omission, presented as necessary. He therefore also denounces in his own way the error of Husserl and Heidegger, who believed they had exceeded Hegel by affirming the pre-eminence of the possible over the actual (Wirklich). For Hegel, moreover, the reconciliation (Versöhnung) between “is” and “ought to” in the shared life of humans implies that ”ought to” does not always remain an aspiration disappointed by the facts. Our responsibility is always to make ethical freedom effective. His book therefore also advances reflection on the relationship between responsibility and freedom [GIA 16]. All the works in the IR set of books defend effective liability in their own way.
The audacity of this reflection undoubtedly comes from the detour through Chinese thought that we find in the second part of the book. It is not simply because responsibility has become global that we must radically rethink the way in which different worlds of thought must be mobilized. One of the aims of this book is to bring to light a place where the best of European and Chinese traditions of thought and wisdom meet. The challenge is to stress that the contribution of Chinese thinkers is not limited to the question of inner wisdom, but that it is able to contribute to a political wisdom at the same level as the problems addressed in the first part. Their very rich process-based thinking and the lack of watertight separation between the different fields of knowledge are the two main reasons for a detour to classical China. We will therefore not have a comparison here, but a detailed conceptualization of what makes an effective process ethical, and responsible. Lenoir works, for example, on the notions of sincerity in the face of manifest discordance or injustice, and non-attachment, without indifference and therefore free, in order to assume the conditions responsibly rather than being determined by them.
Bernard REBER
Research Director at the CNRS
Policy Research Centre
Sciences Po Paris
1
First, it was entitled
Responsible Innovation and Research
and included in the
Cognitive Sciences
collection. The series, now entitled
Innovation and Responsibility
, is now part of the
Interdisciplinarity, Science and Humanities
series. It is also co-directed by Robert Gianni.
Introduction
The efficiency of the logics of human action, their ability to achieve defined goals, requires a close relationship to the possible. Without this relationship, they would not be effective. But this possibility can be either opened up to its perpetuation or blocked in a technical set of abstract conditions.
“Process” refers here to the viability of what is possible in each situation. This possibility is always already shared, opening up to an ethical1 interaction between the actors involved in this situation2. If this interaction is not ethical, it is because the logic at work has already deviated from the possible, where it was in its element and was therefore running smoothly. The elucidation of the intrinsically ethical structuring of certain processes is the main issue of this book.
“Responsibility”, as it will be understood here, takes the form of the structural link through which the freedoms of the actors are co-involved. Today, this responsibility must be exercised under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability, largely linked to the gains in precision and efficiency of science and technology achieved through global processes of constant innovation. This increased precision, by the way in which it accounts for reality, masks its contingency. Desiring an ever stronger grip, it intensifies the contingency, and therefore the unpredictability, every time.
RRI (responsible research and innovation) is a powerful attempt to re-think, develop and articulate the normative content of liability in this context of contingency. For the moment, we are lacking a robust concept of responsibility, i.e. a thought that does not pose the action as the act of a “subject”, which would be the “cause” of it through its “will”, but rather sees it (at least in a complementary way) as a process in the possible at work in a situation. In order to justify this move, we must begin by exposing two of the paradoxes to which the classical3 perspective leads us.
The first can be formulated as follows4: a “subject” is responsible to someone on the basis of an unresolved discrepancy between the situation as it is and the same situation as it ought to be. Responsibility in this perspective affects a “willingness”, conscious of one’s duties to others, under given situational provisions. It can be a determined relationship between people (kinship, etc.) or simply a position of strength where the “subject” is, and which engages them. Responsibility forces the “subject” to take into account the interests of others at the same time as, and perhaps even more urgently than, their own. In any case, this implies a gap, at the situational level, between empirical reality and moral requirement, such that an objective requirement pushes the “subject” to work for the transformation of the situation in the latter's direction.
At the same time, the simple effort of an individual will, because of its multiple limitations (weaknesses, biases, partiality, prejudices of all kinds), cannot bring the empirical reality of the situation to the level of its moral requirement. For this is a “reconciliation” that does not ask just for the responsibility of one will or one individual, nor of several, nor, undoubtedly, of all taken one by one. Responsibility does not start with the will and cannot end with it. However, there is no real responsibility without conscience and will. Without a commitment and indignation towards the situational gap between what is and what ought to be, the “subject” cannot be responsible (and it is not said that this “subjective” perspective should or can simply be eliminated). In other words, “Turkish fatalism”, denounced by Leibniz5 has no reason to be. Engagement is a first step, but it must lead to an effective reconciliation, which must be recognized as largely independent of the will of the actors, taken one-by-one or altogether.
How can we expose this paradox? To talk about responsibility, it seems that we have to talk about a “subject”. If not, is it actually “responsibility”? But if responsibility is that of a “subject”, it seems that they are engaging in an enterprise that they will not be able to overcome, since precisely being able to live up to their responsibility is impossible for the “subject”, alone and naked. To think of action only as “caused” by a “subject”6, according to their “will”, is to prohibit the success of responsible action, which is disproportionate to them, and which they cannot accomplish without reference to another dimension. At the same time, we speak of responsibility in everyday language, for a “subject” and a “will” implemented in an action. And, in case of an unexpected or unusual discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, it is the latter that will be held accountable.
A second paradox, also linked to the responsibility of a “subject”, and a second axis of questioning appear from the relationship of the requirement of responsibility to the nature of the knowledge to which it relates7. A relationship with knowledge, which is nowadays a relationship with objectivity, must be involved in the issue at hand. This is because the knowledge specific to the time must become a means at the service of this responsibility. But, as we have noted, the very structure of the knowledge available to us is causing increasing difficulties for this responsibility, since it dangerously accuses contingency by increasing the unpredictability of the new that will emerge from global interrelationships, at the human, scientific and technological level.
One of the challenges here will be to rethink the concept of “objectivity” in order to remove it from its traditional opposition to “subjectivity”. It is a question of formulating a robust conception of objectivity (in its effectiveness), which is nonetheless non-dual, which escapes traditional dualities (soul-body, intelligible-sensible, etc.), and is nevertheless capable of making its effectiveness intelligible: its relationship to and its possible instrumentalization for an accomplished freedom.
However, it is its articulation with the knowledge available in its current form that alone can enable this study to clarify the implications of responsibility today. If this questioning does not take the form of an epistemology or an ontology, and if it must nevertheless relate to objective knowledge, what could its relationship be to this knowledge, which it must recognize, but also discuss? It cannot reproduce or mimic this knowledge. It does not have to say something that this knowledge could have said, much less something that it already contains. It must question this knowledge. More precisely, it must ask what makes it effective.
Let us suggest, at the outset, a hypothesis. Let us assume that what constitutes this effectiveness is a specific relationship to the possible at work in a situation.
This specific relationship makes this knowledge effective. But what is known is always only the way objects are possible using the formal tools that are wielded in a science. We must also ask how these tools, concepts, axioms, hypotheses and experiences are possible. If the effectiveness of science lies in a defined relationship to the possible, an examination of these sciences, with their hypotheses, laws and constructed objects, intended to clarify this effectiveness, will have to involve reconsidering and questioning their modal status.
If we assume that a “subject” is the “cause” of their actions by their “will”, they will be responsible for seeking, through science, “control” of their actions in their consequences. But this is insufficient, and efficiency itself, not to mention “efficacy”, or efficiency in accordance with an ethical process, cannot be understood in these terms. The sciences will therefore have to be revisited from their roots, in the element of the possible, since responsibility may well, depending on the context, take very different forms.
If the problem is considered on the basis of the two paradoxes we have encountered – necessary but insufficient support from the will; implication of a relationship to objective knowledge and need for a modal questioning of this knowledge – we can immediately open two axes of questioning:
a) First of all,
can we think of responsibility independently of a “will
”, i.e. think of it without reference to a
conatus
that constantly pursues the self-assertion of a “subject”
8
?
b) Secondly, since responsibility must nowadays be assumed in the first place in relation to scientific and technological innovation, which exposes “consciousness” to very broad unpredictability, this responsibility must itself be creative [PEL 16].
What should this creativity of responsibility be? How can it be delineated, not to reduce it to the already known, but to make it possible?
How can this creative disposition be recognized as a responsibility at the same time?
These two axes converge to highlight the contingent context in which responsibility must be exercised today. This contingency gives its own tone to the present time, with its concerns, promises and deadlocks.
c) In one sentence: how can we redefine responsibility in the context of radical contingency? This confirms the option of a modal approach.
Addressing the issue through the modal prism requires a specific method that can be called “regressive”. It is difficult to characterize the term “upstream” as it will be used here. Neither ontological nor spatial, barely temporal, not really energetic, it refers to the ability to grasp a reality while it is still latent. Modally, it is a question of going back from the necessary to the real, and from there to the possible, seeing in this return a gradual enrichment and a freedom9. Opening the possible to its viability, identifying gaps between conditions, also means that possibility and necessity are not separated and side-by-side (as in the classic position of a Leibniz who opposes the necessary truths to the contingent truths). Faced with the apparent need for a univocal set of conditions, we need to go back upstream to understand that this need is conventional (linked to a saturated perspective, but in reality too narrow). Undoing the sets of conditions that are given as necessary means broadening possibilities and therefore cultivating freedoms.
This approach is defined in relation to the “analytical” method, which it certainly does not aim to disqualify or replace, but which it is intended to complement. Under the word “analytical”, it is necessary to read a method based on distinctions, which seeks to deploy the richness of a term by exposing its different aspects, in order to remove ambiguities that could arise and compromise its use10.
An example of the analytical concept of responsibility is provided in a recent book by Sophie Pellé and Bernard Reber. The authors distinguish ten meanings of the word “responsibility”:
1) a cause (in the sense that a tsunami “causes” damage);
2) moral or legal blame (blameworthiness);
3) the obligation of compensation (liability);
4) the accountability injunction;
5) a task or role (the lifeguard, as such, must avoid accidents in their area);
6) authority (e. g. that of a brigade commander);
7) capacity (cognitive, moral, etc.);
8) an obligation (the lifeguard must put in place precautions);
9) the ability to respond (to a problem adequately);
10) virtue (care) (or willingness to act responsibly) [PEL 16, ch. 3].
This is the entire list, which is, to my knowledge, the most complete available in the literature11. The analytical approach gives very fine distinctions, which can help in the effective application of categories. In contrast, a “regressive” method is interested in the implementation of distinctions, as it emerges, upstream. It does not seek to give the multiple meanings of responsibility, but to identify the conditions for its implementation. This is its dimension of effectiveness. Thus a defined perspective is established: responsibility concerns that which, in a deliberation, alone or with others, is neither the application of a procedure nor the result of a will, good or bad, but ethical freedom12, i.e. effectiveness13.
The regressive method “goes up” the slope, not towards the complex meaning of a word but towards the possible involved in this complexity and at work in the situation where the reader is involved. Generally speaking, it is a question of going back upstream from the apparently necessary determination in order to restore it to its contingency and to its conventionality. The conditions are therefore not simply “objective”, nor are they met as already constituted. They define each other in a relationship lived within the context.
Since, in a book, you have to start with words, we will start by developing some terms. The categories take the sense explained here each time they are used. The meaning they take with other philosophers only comes into play when expressly stated.
The method used and the decision adopted on modal reform are therefore closely linked. The method goes back, from the knowledge we have of various objects, considered as acquired and definitive, to an increasingly conventional dimension of reality of these objects, until we recognize their radical contingency. Conventional does not oppose “objective” but redefines an objectivity too naively taken in a simple dualism with the “subjective”.
Can a thought of responsibility assume effective responsibility? I suggest that this can be tested on the very topical issue of a thoughtful meeting between Europe, North America and China.
A meeting can be both a mutual enrichment and a relationship of alienation in one way or another. The place of the meeting is decisive in this respect. If we could identify a suitable speculative place for a fruitful meeting, the achievements relating to the question of responsibility could be validated. The methodological precautions relating to this second moment will be developed in the introduction to Part Two. We will limit ourselves here to stressing that the meeting could be based on the concept of a process. This will require many precautions that will be discussed in detail. The challenge, which interests Europe as well as North America and China, is to stress that China's contribution is not limited to the question of “inner wisdom”. Indeed, its thinkers can also offer political wisdom, oriented towards engagement in the world, which speaks to us today. This is true even if they “also” include this dimension of a meditative interiority, which finds its way into a speculative development.
Since the notion of the process has been particularly central to the development of China's traditions of thought, this will be an opportunity to discuss some aspects of them, in a test of the generality of what has been advanced here [JUL 07]. It may also be an opportunity to distinguish between several types of ethical structures in a process.
All this encourages the thinker to turn to China. But the main argument in favor of this detour is the absence, in classical China, of a watertight partitioning between disciplines (which was only adopted in China in the 20th Century14). This implies the absence of a clear separation between “domains” of knowledge, each science being responsible for its own. Understanding the order of Heaven and learning to behave, and therefore to respect this order, are not two separate studies. This is in stark contrast to the watertight separation of the domains of knowledge already strongly expressed in Aristotle, and which triumphed in the Kantian revolution. How can we think of a non-separation of the theoretical and the practical, thus a mutual enrichment of one another, and a progressive enlargement achieved by their reconciliation?
What is particularly interesting for the theme before us is that this distant context thus makes it possible to reconsider the relationship between ethics and knowledge, and therefore between prescription and description. It is not a question of comparative reading, which would bring texts from both worlds face to face in order to seek differences and convergences. Starting from an internal reading, on the Chinese side, we want to see how the registers of upright behavior and knowledge of Heaven-Earth interact. Once they are no longer separated, but closely interrelated, the two themes can be questioned, upstream of a whole series of determinations that locked them in a non-relationship. But all this will be specified in the introduction to the second part of this book, where this reflection will take place.
The very rich thinking of the process and the absence of a tight separation between the different fields of knowledge are therefore the two reasons why a detour to classical China is required.
The third part of the book will aim to test the scope of the conclusions reached in the first two. It will do so in relation to an expression that today is often more of a slogan, ideology or myth than a patiently developed concept. It is the “Invisible Hand”, which is proudly traced back to Adam Smith, even if the expression appears only three times in his entire work and is not, by any means, elucidated as a concept.
This expression condenses much of the legitimacy of what can be called neoliberalism: that is, economic liberalism engaged in a phase of expansion, through the transposition of its methods into other fields of action, for example in the field of public15 governance.
Can we, on the basis of the categories introduced and developed here, involved in ethical thinking about the process, demystify the “Invisible Hand” and examine its theoretical core in order to test its normative dimension? After all, it does play a normative role in the discourse of neoliberals, since obstacles to competition are often presented as obstacles to the “freedom” of actors.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bernard Reber and Robert Gianni for their comments and Nicolas Bouleau for reviewing the beginning of Part 3.
1
A distinction must be made between ethics and morality. Ethics is a freedom that is effectively shared by all actors involved in the situation in which we find ourselves. As such, “my” freedom requires the freedom of others, as far as I can act to achieve it. “Morality” is respect for and reference to a series of articulate and relevant “values”, “rules”, “principles” or “rights” for the situation in which “I” find myself.
2
Elsewhere, I call it the “creative possible” and the “ethical innervation” it deploys. I would like to refer to my book [LEN 16]. This book will attempt, among other things, to clarify and elucidate these terms.
3
I take the liberty of not beginning by reviewing the meanings and etymologies of the word and related terms since this has been done very well elsewhere. See in particular [OWE 13]. See also [ROB 15] for an analysis of the expression of the concept in Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
4
This entry will remind philosophers of a classic opposition, transposed to responsibility, between Kant and Hegel. The first affirms the moral requirement (which poses, in the face of what is, what should be according to moral law [i.e. Kant as seen by Hegel, although Hegel saw quite well]) and the second the reconciliation (a central concept in Hegel, but also particularly problematic. The whole of this book can be interpreted as seeking to translate and achieve this reconciliation in a radically different context).
5
[LEI 99], where he denounces the “
Fatum mahometanum
”
(sic
), or “Turkish fatalism”, that is: “Since God has planned everything for the best, why deliberate and get involved?”
6
It is not a question of discussing at this stage whether “there is” something like a “subject”. For the time being, it is sufficient to note that, conventionally, people agree that everyone is a subject endowed with will. At this conventional level, no one is questioning it. But responsibility goes beyond the conventional and leads to the possibility of usually hidden dimensions, on the background of which only a “subject” could be responsible. It is the internal positions of Mahayana Buddhism rather than postmodern writings that motivate this note.
7
For Levinas, for example, this relationship to knowledge was not indifferent. It would be hard to explain why he took so much care to define it if it had no implications for the relationship to the other [LEV 06].
8
One might think that it would be in the nature of things to start with the question of the “possibility” of liability. Here again, a distinction should be made between the possibility of the operational concept and that of the effective implementation of the various responsibilities, not to mention that of their relationship. But to think about the possible in itself would be to make it something abstract. This would indeed mean something like “rendering the possible such that it is viable (in what is the exercise of a responsibility) when it had fallen back into the need for a (discontinuous) technical set of conditions, that is possible”. But we can see that either we are talking, in both cases, about the same “possible”, so that we are saying the same thing twice (it is possible that the possible is viable, therefore viability is possible, and the possible is possible); or one of the two possibles is an abstraction, which is given as the simple “determination” of a principle, a rule or a law, in short, a “condition”. If responsibility consists in opening up certain possibilities, it is legitimized by the possible, wherever it is deployed, in its viability, and does not need a deduction for its possibility. A viable, smooth possibility is given or not given. There is no meta-level of the possible, but action: “to enable” the “possible” then means to ensure a circulation, a viability between the defined conditions, which may close on their determination, downstream, forgetting that they have themselves been made possible, both by other conditions and by the possible as an “element” (see
Chapter 1
).
9
It should be stressed at the outset that this is not simply an avatar of the inversion of priority between the actual and the possible operated by Husserl and Heidegger in relation to metaphysical traditions. See the following.
10
Bernard Reber points out to me that the challenge of the analytical approach is not only to remove ambiguities but also to pose problems better, in particular by giving space to ethical innovation. He argues that my approach is itself often analytical.
11
Nicole Vincent distinguished six meanings and Ibo Van de Poel eight [VIN 02].
12
By “ethical freedom” we must understand a viability of the ethical process in which the freedom of others is always intimately linked to mine. However, this does not constitute servitude but the freedom of the other people involved in the situation in which I find myself, and in which, therefore, I can act for them, is intimately linked to my freedom. If there is a conflict, it is in view of this freedom, and against conceptions of freedom that are too narrow, sometimes simply selfish.
13
Let us emphasize: this does not call into question the analytical approach, but seeks to complement it by highlighting the dangers associated with an application of these distinctions that would only be mechanical or technical. However fine they may be, the distinctions, by their very univocity, are likely to carry, in a situation that is in itself contingent and therefore not pre-determined, an ambiguity that they were precisely intended to clarify.
14
For this, we refer exclusively to Chinese traditions as developed before 1900.
15
This triumph of the conception of
homo œconomicus
is only one of the late branches of what can be called “liberalism” in the broad sense [SUP 15a].
PART 1Ambiguity and Responsibility
1The Possible and the Necessary
To proceed by “withdrawal” means to go back upstream from objects that are given as fixed structures and to restore them to the possible where they are constantly formed in open processes. We do not encounter fixed objects, nor do we define them once and for all. But in the encounter the conventionality of what is encountered takes on meaning. This restitution of objects to their contingency, to their very possibility, which provides continuity for an efficient process, is a responsibility. But such an attitude requires a distance from any “ontological” approach. It requires thinking about the possible and the necessary outside ontology, otherwise it will fall back into the trap of irreconcilable theoretical/practical duality. This attitude only becomes intelligible and relevant, as such, through prior theoretical marking. But this marking must be a theoretical thought that undoes a univocal consistency of the theoretical, which too often separates it from ethics. It is therefore appropriate to start by setting up some definitions in this mode.
1.1. The formal and the transcendental, or the logical point of view
A “logic” links, in a coherent way and according to their structure, “terms”, or defined units of meaning that can be stated. Or, a logic is the articulation and setting in motion of a given set of conditions for effective purposes: to achieve a desired result, theoretical or practical. These terms, or conditions, each constitute the resources of a specific language for expressing a specific aspect of an encounter: what converges in the exteriority and is transformed in this encounter, the latter becoming knowledge. A formal logic links terms that are defined as “tools”1 with a view to their technical use. A transcendental logic articulates terms as “categories”, i.e. conditions of possibility of our relationship to the world2. The word “condition” will generally refer to both “tools” and “categories”.
Where the formal expresses the useful, usable side of knowledge, the transcendental expresses the conditions of possibility of the “encounter” that makes up this knowledge. The transcendental alone is structuring, the formal being structured. This does not mean that the transcendental is a “necessary” or “universal” pre-determination, as will be explained below. A formal expression is, strictly speaking, only a set of operations rigorously defined in their uses, reducible to the definition of their roles in the expression. As such, it is the expression of relationships, each term being itself a relationship, and a relationship of relationships. The formal proceeds by articulation, a sequence obeying entirely explicit rules, while the transcendental is a presupposition. The formal gives a coherent ordering of “conditions”3; the transcendental provides the conditions of possibility, and therefore of production, of knowledge, in its objective constitution. However, the conditions, in both directions, should not be seen as purely limiting. At the same time, they constitute opportunities to further develop knowledge in the encounter with the outside world. A condition has a more or less strong constraint dimension. Constraint is exerted on the situation in which it is thought, known, and where it therefore intervenes in a structuring way. But this condition also has a value of opening possibilities: those of new conditions to be discovered, but also of a viable circulation of the possible itself4, thought of as an element.
In other words, a category makes it possible to come across a situation, i.e. a recorded experience in that situation, for which it “explains” an aspect. This category can be a general law or knowledge of how things work, or an exact experimental measurement inscribed in a scientific5 theory, to which it provides an anchor in the facts. Each time it is “knowledge” of what is being encountered. A formal tool, on the other hand, is a useful, manipulable and transposable instrument, which is not necessarily semantically charged, or whose semantic charge is subject to redefinition. It should be noted that the same condition can sometimes be a tool, sometimes a category6. Categories therefore change and redefine themselves according to the contexts and theories available, and it would be futile to draw up a definitive “list” of them.
Moreover, one cannot simply speak of “space” or “time” in general7 but rather of a punctual arrangement of the intuitive faculty, which expresses the way in which various complexes of conditions are known in a particular context and in relation to a defined activity. In a Galilean world, on the one hand, and within the framework of general relativity on the other, space-(and)time do not respond to the same intuitions (notably through their mutual relationship). But intuition itself is formed and educated to the point of espousing the theories that express a specific state of knowledge8. Even in terms of space and time, there is no definitive list of intuitions whose disposition gives them meaning.
As for distinguishing the possibility of a specific experiment from that of a general experiment, which would offer a limited and therefore countable number of categories, it would also be futile. For who can say, exposed to a specific experiment, how it fits into what makes the general experiment, and how it is distinctive? It is often posterity alone that decides this. Actually, the conditions of the experiment in general may have to be redefined, following an unforeseen discovery, from what was previously considered to be limited to a specific experiment.
We call a perspective “definitorial” according to which a condition can only be made possible by another condition (or other conditions). This can be done at the formal level, but also at the transcendental level. The categories would then contain every possibility of formal condition, downstream, as they would offer every possibility in the way we become aware of what we encounter.
In what follows, we will argue against this definitorial perspective. The regressive aspect of the method will consist in going back from a condition to its possibility, that it takes from other conditions, but also from a creative element of possibility which permeates the situation9. When we return to the situation, the elemental dimension of the possible becomes significant. This leads to relativizing the transcendental categories and thinking about their possible revision according to periods. At the same time, it opens up a strict distinction between the terms “a priori”, “necessary” and “universal”10.
1.2. Conditions and determinations: a matter of freedom
If the term “condition” covers both aspects, tool and category, it can also refer to a mutual relationship between consciousness and terms in general. The distinction is then made between “condition” and “determination”. A determination bites into the consciousness, which it renders partial. A condition is assumed in consciousness. But both are the linguistic or symbolic expressions of a knowledge that can be integrated into the exposure of a mode of occurrence, functioning or interaction of a certain group of factual data, which can be found, gathered and distinguished by this knowledge. It is only the relationship to consciousness, alienated in one case (determination), free in the other (condition), that makes the difference. What is at stake is therefore the correct understanding of the concept of freedom, for the purpose of its realization.
A condition has an active dimension, often unnoticed by the consciousness, of opening and closing of possibilities. Together, the conditions are what surrounds us as it is known to us, that is, brought to the level of intuitive thinking. They are “what” surrounds us and, in the same movement and in an inseparable way, the “meaning” of what surrounds us. Each time it is an expressed knowledge, so not only of language, but also of a linguistic expression of a lived relationship to a context. We must reject from now on a naive ontological vision that would have us face a world of objects determined in themselves, that we would be content to meet and name and that we would talk about while trying to “match” what we say to what we encounter. It must also be denied that our categories, and therefore the transcendental, constitute the objects we encounter through and through.
The knowledge encounter, which will be discussed below, starting from the specific characteristics of a language, expresses specific aspects of what surrounds us. It is a specific consistency of the situation in which we find ourselves and reaches, upstream, more general determinations. It is not a question of accounting for everything that exists. This would be an ontological approach. There is no “separation” between proposals and beings. Knowledge, made possible by a term or a particularity of the language in which it is expressed, and which it may have invented for this language, expresses complexes of relationships where it may involve beings. This does not mean that they are determined as such independently of this knowledge. The entities or beings that we distinguish around us (trees, swans, neighbors, etc.) are, as far as we know, conditions for a full and open relationship with the world. Not that conditional knowledge “constitutes” beings – which would then be reducible to it, or which would be an image, a fleeting reflection, of it – but beings and conditions redefine themselves mutually, one through the other, at each stage of the process. There is no pre-determination of the being in the categories, nor is there an “abstraction” of the categories in relation to the beings around us. There is, each time, entanglement and interrelation. This point will become very important when it is linked to the question of the possible.
Determinations and conditions are expressions of a living relationship of knowledge, and can manifest themselves as hypotheses, axioms, factual measures, rules of language use, definitions, values, principles, etc. A logic will be a coherent articulation of the relevant conditions (or determinations) in accordance with their own structures, and in relation to the knowledge in question.
The difference is that a “determination” bites into and conditions the consciousness, which then only has the illusion of freedom, while a “condition” is taken up and assumed freely in the consciousness. What is at issue is therefore the relationship to the knowing consciousness. A formal “tool” or “category” can be, at a given time, a determination, and a condition to another, and for another, person.
One of the challenges in defining “conditions” is to neutralize the opposition between facts and values. While keeping a distinction between the two, which is extended to the downstream distinction between epistemic values and ethical values, etc., this definition avoids reducing the latter to what would be a subjective matter of opinions or desires.
It is also a question of moving the lines in relation to a questioning that may have become bogged down in an opposition between “moral properties”11 which would make an object, a value or an action “good” and would be accessible to a moral intuition alongside the properties discovered by the sciences. According to this vision, there are both natural and unnatural properties. If the moral terms refer exclusively to the former, moral knowledge would be reducible to that of the natural sciences, which is clearly inaccurate. If they refer to the latter, the status of the intuition that gives us access to it becomes problematic, and threatens to sink into subjectivism or psychologism.
On the contrary, in the problematic field that is outlined here, the distinction concerns the relationship of conditions to consciousness. It passes between the “suffered” conditions, which “determine” the consciousness of the actors, and the freely “assumed” conditions. The debate is therefore moved to the field of a radically redefined philosophical concept of “freedom”. Freedom is the responsible “assumption” of conditions that are “known” in a certain context. This means that it “knows” the status of the knowledge of these conditions. Knowledge may relate to determinations or conditions. In the second case, we know what makes its exact status as knowledge. We therefore mobilize a distinction between two truths.12 Ultimate knowledge (as freedom) is knowledge of the status of conventional (discursive) truth in its conventionality. To this extent, it is able to “assume” conventional truth, in its “effectiveness” (as an immanent relationship of conditions, and no longer only as an external set of determinations), and to affirm a freedom that is “responsibility” (assumption of effective conditions).
It is difficult to give an example, as this can affect the generality of the argument. However, let us consider the theoretical tool “Gauss’s Law”, the “Normal Law” or the “bell curve”. Quetelet used it to represent the normal distribution of observed measures (the size of conscripts) at the social level. Francis Galton took it up again by inserting it into a eugenicist theory, claiming to represent the distribution in society of a so-called “civic value” [GAL 09]. It can be said that Galton allowed himself to be “determined” by this unequal requirement, which is of course to the benefit of the class to which he himself belongs. Determination is exercised on the consciousness, which therefore tends to use this theoretical tool (the “Normal Law”) as representing (and therefore aggravating) an inequality, therefore a “bias”. This does not mean that the same theoretical tool cannot be used to work towards greater equality (and therefore towards greater impartiality) by being taken up and assumed as revealing differentiated needs within society, for example.
1.3. The concept of the possible
a) The “possible” is first of all a tendency of the world as it is related to itself, and in so far as it is opened by the categories, therefore by the transcendental, as conditions of possibility of this relationship. These are then considered as the most upstream conditions, on which all the other conditions depend, i.e. all our knowledge of the world, wrapped in our general relationship to the world, or our experience of the world, whose knowledge is an expression of an essential aspect. The possibility of experience is, in a given context, opened up by these categories (for which it would be futile to try to give a canonical or exhaustive list, for reasons that we have already begun to explain, and which, we hope, will be even clearer later).
Let us consider the possibility that there may be a world “for us”. This possibility does not imply that it would be possible that there would be no world for us once we are there. But it is contingent that we are there. Therefore the world, and our knowledge of the world, expressing its singular relationship to itself, is not necessary. Not only is it not necessary for there to be a world, but it is not necessary for there to possibly be a world, as long as we do not presuppose the spectator. But there is no need for this presupposition. The contingency of categories expresses that of our existence, and of the singular relationship to the world in which we live. In reality, even if we presuppose the spectator, his or her relationship to the world could be opened by different lists of categories. And it is therefore not impossible that, over the course of the history of human knowledge, and of humans’ relationship to their world, these categories may change or transform. This may be due to a change in the world that would not be the same for all people, according to contextual structures specific to a particular era; or it could be due to a change in fundamental decisions, in knowledge options, in the choice of categories that affects accessible knowledge, and therefore in the possible relationships to the world.
