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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Are Sustainability and Governance Grounded in any World?

Résumé

The need to act in networks and to function in a society where we relate in complex fashions has fostered the use of data in accordance with distributed models. In a big data context, the individual is often overcome with the sentiment that one's life does not matter, nor does it make a difference. What are sought are trends, and since there is no detached observer, those change things as much as they measure them. Where can we find a vantage point, this 'topsight' that Gelernter deemed necessary before the conception of any program? One could seek it in the direction of a collective figure, somewhat like the Leviathan of Hobbes, made up in its gigantism of smaller figures. Those that have been schooled in the classical tradition, or philosophia perennis, might think that we are abandoning solid realism, which seeks a conformation of statements, propositions, and language to what there is. They might criticize the reign of opinion. But what we entered into is not, upon closer inspection, some overarching paradigm of truth as success. It is rather a rationality of the likely, and it requires assessing the truths that can seem distributed between alternating or competing positions. But then, to seek decisions despite this, is to erase from our world this 'esprit de finesse' which Pascal deemed necessary to balance the illusions of a procedural mathematical rationality claiming that its end-products are simply in correspondence with reality. Some of the challenges are going to be centered around the development of signposts, flags, and warnings if we are not to end-up with a 'governing machine' (Dominique Dubarle's expression). We will even at times hear that persons are transparent right through if one would capture them as information, which we could deem even to constitute a 'common body.' Yet, such a trivialisation of Shannon's model leaves behind the algorithmic informational understanding. It seems that a common body, alongside a common intellect, is some gnostic and self-defeating notion, that calls to mind medieval monopsychistic positions. There is at the same time a ‘new cave’ that has made its appearance. It often masquerades as truth seeking, but it in fact rests on prejudices assumed to be true without discussion. To counter it, we look at science as bearing means of enlightenment,–and it does–, but this does not imply that it knows the answers any more than common sense in situations of uncertainty. When we gather information, we frame it within an ontology for classification purposes, but this does not import with itself the immanence of this information as endogenous power to harmonise and give form. Feeling, as Whitehead construed it, seeks to take within it a receptivity to the world in order to turn it into an internalised representation. For this, it needs to be possible for a part of the world to reflect on itself the whole. Yet, this reflection is not a totalisation in an immaterial data range, it is rather a groun-ding in the mystery of the flesh, which is found here as a signpost on the way, if we are to heal dreams of complete mastery.
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Dates et versions

hal-04135470 , version 1 (20-06-2023)

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Domaine public

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  • HAL Id : hal-04135470 , version 1

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Philippe Gagnon. Are Sustainability and Governance Grounded in any World?. Global Sustainability – Science and Religion in Dialogue, European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, May 2022, Ålesund, Norway. ⟨hal-04135470⟩

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