Engineer-philosophers: thinkers of the future and men of action

The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry has seen a con­sid­er­able change, with an unprece­dent­ed expan­sion of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, which lim­its the claims of tra­di­tion­al phi­los­o­phy to look at all knowl­edge, as Berg­son still did. The sci­ences are becom­ing autonomous, and philo­soph­i­cal spec­u­la­tion is strug­gling to find its place.

But, in con­trast, a new fig­ure is emerg­ing: the engi­neer-philoso­pher. These indi­vid­u­als do not per­son­i­fy a spe­cif­ic of school of thought as such, even if many of them come from the same alma mater – name­ly Ecole Poly­tech­nique. What they have in com­mon, and which is not unre­lat­ed to the ser­vice of the State asso­ci­at­ed with this school, is an acute con­cern for the com­mon good, based on the aware­ness of a respon­si­bil­i­ty. As mem­bers of an elite called upon to lead the nation (or, at the very least, large organ­i­sa­tions), they feel account­able. They are also gen­er­al engi­neers, who embrace a vast field of prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal knowl­edge, and who close­ly observe the tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments that are trans­form­ing our world: it is their duty to enlight­en themselves.

The engi­neer-philoso­pher is a man of action: far from the fig­ure of the cab­i­net man, the dream­er, or the academic.

In this respect, a per­son­al­i­ty like Thier­ry Gaudin is exem­plary. Born in 1940, he is an observ­er and a key play­er in the com­put­er rev­o­lu­tion that took off with his gen­er­a­tion. His start­ing point is a close analy­sis of the trans­for­ma­tions of the tech­ni­cal sys­tem and of the inter­ac­tions between tech­nol­o­gy and soci­ety, to think about con­tem­po­rary changes. In his view, these changes are not sim­ply a result of the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, but rather it must be under­stood as a real civil­i­sa­tion­al change. His grasp of this rup­ture led him to draw up per­spec­tives in works such as 2100, Réc­it du prochain siè­cle (1990) or L’Avenir de l’E­sprit (2021).

They live in an age haunt­ed by crises, and which has been tak­en over by the ancient imag­i­nary of catastrophe:that our future is slip­ping away. This pre­vents them from build new sys­tems as closed, sol­id, pre-ver­i­fied intel­lec­tu­al worlds. They are faced with a prob­lem­at­ic future, which they seek to con­cep­tu­alise with­out lim­it­ing it.

An emblem­at­ic fig­ure here would be Jean-Pierre Dupuy. A thinker of cat­a­stro­phe, he does not allow him­self to be fas­ci­nat­ed by it, and does not play the mys­tic or the “col­lap­sol­o­gists”, but rather devel­ops an “enlight­ened cat­a­strophism”. Announc­ing the inevitabil­i­ty of the worst is a way of pre­vent­ing it from hap­pen­ing. Here we find an eth­ic of respon­si­bil­i­ty (not evad­ing a pos­si­bil­i­ty, even a fright­en­ing one), and that very spe­cial ges­ture of the engi­neer who seeks not so much to cap­ture real­i­ty as to mod­el it, to under­stand and influ­ence it. The chal­lenge is not to flood today’s real­i­ty with cat­a­stroph­ic ideas, but rather to keep a hold on it.

Such an approach is far from the great sys­tems devel­oped by the philoso­phies of his­to­ry which, think of Hegel or Marx, thought of the future from a rup­ture. The engi­neer-philoso­phers are thinkers of the future, but they insist on con­ti­nu­ity. This does not exclude, on the con­trary, think­ing about renew­al, but they do not draw up the escha­to­log­i­cal fig­ure of an ide­al world. Rather, they con­sid­er the betrayed promis­es of the past and apply them­selves to enlight­en and accom­pa­ny the trans­for­ma­tion of our world.

These engi­neer-philoso­phers are men of action: far from the fig­ure of the cab­i­net man, the dream­er, or the aca­d­e­m­ic. They tear them­selves away from the moment, from their careers too, to think. But their think­ing is nour­ished by the test of reality.

It is true that this phase of moder­ni­ty, with its vision of Man “as mas­ter and pos­ses­sor of nature”, seems to be behind us. Human­i­ty is dou­bly remind­ed of its nat­ur­al con­di­tion. First­ly, through the renewed link with ani­mal­i­ty, from Dar­win to con­tem­po­rary pri­ma­tol­ogy, and sec­ond­ly, through the notion of the envi­ron­ment, which is catch­ing up with us at great speed. Mod­ern phi­los­o­phy did not ask the ques­tion of the envi­ron­ment; on the con­trary, it devel­oped by evad­ing it. But the engi­neer-philoso­phers are in no way stuck in this impasse.

I will take as an exam­ple Olivi­er Rey, who belongs to the next gen­er­a­tion, born in the 1960s. His work is char­ac­ter­is­tic of a cri­tique of moder­ni­ty, which points out the embed­ding of num­bers and rais­es the ques­tion of human scale; the lim­its and dis­pro­por­tions between the prod­ucts of tech­nol­o­gy (cities, com­pa­nies, sys­tems) and our abil­i­ty to live in soci­ety. Final­ly, he tack­les tran­shu­man­ism, the ulti­mate form of this mod­ern claim to dom­i­nate nature. 

Inno­va­tion thrives today in the ruins of progress: it has come to terms with nature, instead of seek­ing to dom­i­nate it.

In an essay such as Repair­ing the Water, he explains that mod­ern sci­ence was built by repu­di­at­ing sen­sa­tions, imme­di­ate impres­sions, in favour of rea­son and mea­sure­ment. Our rela­tion­ship with the world has been turned upside down: it has been “clar­i­fied in many respects, impov­er­ished in oth­ers”. This for­mu­la pre­cise­ly cap­tures the think­ing of the philoso­pher-engi­neer, who does not repu­di­ate sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy, but ques­tions its impass­es, what is lost in what is gained. Such think­ing is in line with Gün­ther Anders’ reflec­tions on the “Promethean shift”, insep­a­ra­ble from the advent of the atom­ic age and its mas­sive means of destruction.

No, it is not so much a renun­ci­a­tion as an attempt to explore oth­er paths, with­out aban­don­ing the ambi­tion to act, to have a hold on the world. In two ways, as mod­ellers and as philoso­phers, engi­neer-philoso­phers are marked by the imag­i­nary of the ide­al city – a ges­ture that has inhab­it­ed Euro­pean thought since the Greeks. But this mod­el­ling is impos­si­ble today, because in order to mod­el, one must iso­late. But in the glob­alised world, where every­thing is inter­con­nect­ed, noth­ing can be iso­lat­ed. Not to men­tion the fact that there is lit­tle faith in the future. 

In the eyes of this new gen­er­a­tion of engi­neer-philoso­phers, action changes in mean­ing: it is no longer a ques­tion of act­ing on, exer­cis­ing sov­er­eign pow­er over nature or things. Rather, it is a mat­ter of crack­ing the exist­ing, in order to reopen up pos­si­bil­i­ties – here I am using the words of François Jul­lien. Crack­ing is a more mod­est ges­ture than trans­form­ing. Inno­va­tion thrives today in the ruins of progress: it comes to terms with nature, instead of seek­ing to dom­i­nate it.

This vision, which insists on the inser­tion of human action into an envi­ron­ment, is, in the true sense of the word, eco­log­i­cal. But to the two poles of rad­i­cal ecol­o­gy – one that con­sid­ers Man as an inva­sive species that nature could do with­out, the oth­er re-enact­ing the trag­ic farce of total­i­tar­i­an­ism, intru­sive and full of pro­hi­bi­tions – engi­neer-philoso­phers oppose a vision of human action marked by both lim­its and respon­si­bil­i­ty. A cau­tious, respect­ful vision that val­ues tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence with­out ever iso­lat­ing it from its effects.

Richard Robert