What if Exercising “Full Responsibility” Proved to Be Transdisciplinary in Nature, and if Ethical Reflection Should Henceforth Include Artistic Perception

p. 35

Section: SCIENCE, ETHIQUE ET ART¹ / SCIENCE, ETHICS AND ART¹

Among the finest flowers of the expression of the human mind, the principle of invention is undoubtedly one of the nuggets — perhaps even “the” nugget — best able to define the measure of the species and to reveal its essence as well as its limits, to point to its aspirations, sometimes its greatness, sometimes its naivety, sometimes, again, its cruelty…

No doubt one could define man by his biological characteristics, but a view of the whole of his creative productions, concrete as well as abstract, perhaps remains the best way of approaching him in an attempt to identify him in his potentialities and to measure his competences and aptitudes — for as long, at least, as evolution continues to endow him with creative capacities.

“Creativity”, “invention”: two magic words if ever there were, to which we already owe everything we include under the generic term of humanity’s cultural heritage — that great catalogue recording, at the time, everything that showed some originality, only to retain in the end a part of it that frays with time, so as later to provide the happy visualisation of a preserved memory of invention, as men have safeguarded it through history, through the ages, through their nostalgia too, if not their regrets.

But to speak of creativity and invention is implicitly to evoke the transfer and migration of knowledge — knowledge by which each person, by chance and according to the course of life and the specific features of his cultural matrix, may or may not be enriched and from which he may or may not benefit. And to speak in turn of the transfer of knowledge may also imply the exercise of a responsibility regarding this knowledge “exported” from one culture to another, from one institution to another or from one head to another — and to what ends.

So, if at first the question of the production of knowledge was, and certainly remains, important, the question of the management of the production of this knowledge might be even more so, and the “responsible” exercise of this management might prove to be

p. 36

the place where the true measure of Man is tested, in that the exercise of this management — today — holds the fate of the whole of humanity as well as the destiny of the living world in its entirety.

If we return to the notion of Knowledge, we see that among the different forms it may take, particular domains of creativity stand out: “scientific creativity”, “artistic creativity”, “revealed creativity” — so many fields representative of human creativity contributing to the edifice of Knowledge.

To take the argument that follows further, it is useful here to specify what these domains of knowledge are by means of a diagram which, while necessarily reductive — and therefore inevitably unsatisfactory — nonetheless has the merit of helping to shed light on a complex situation.

Thus one may in fact accept — drawing on Wagensberg’s analysis, and also completing it — that the knowledge, not genetically transmissible, which each human being will enjoy in the course of his life proceeds from four sources of knowledge of quite distinct natures, namely: knowledge of a “local consensual” type, knowledge of a “scientific” type, knowledge of an “artistic” type and knowledge of a “revealed” type.

From this perspective, by “local consensual knowledge” we shall understand all forms of knowledge ensuring the coherence of the social fabric through the sharing and tacit acceptance of rules and values, written or unwritten: such as law, legislation, justice — even when dispensed beneath the oak tree — political responsibility, philosophy too...

By “scientific knowledge” we shall understand everything that proceeds from objective experimentation, from observations and measurements, and from the deductions that follow from them. This form of knowledge may thus encompass the recipes for making knapped flint as much as the laws of gravitation or, again, the map of the genome...

By “artistic knowledge” we shall understand everything that proceeds from a unique and disconcerting principle according to which certain infinite and not necessarily intelligible complexities can be transmitted by means of a finite representation: a painting, a musical score, a poem ...so many strange alchemical means capable of sowing images that visit the mind, or sounds that herald “other” spaces...

Finally, by “revealed knowledge” we shall understand any knowledge, likewise transmissible, arising from two effective principles long present in the history of all human societies, principles according to which there exists (or would exist) a “being” possessing knowledge of all reality, which “being” would sometimes deign to reveal (part of) its knowledge to us through an intermediary: such as religion, intuition, superstition, the sayings and doings of the village sorcerer...

Depending on place, then, and on period, it is plainly evident that the relative importance and the subtle or massive impregnation of these four different forms of knowledge in each of us will have been, are, or will be highly variable. Only yesterday, and today as well, depending on whether one belongs to a tribe of Australian Aborigines, to an African village or to a technocultural society… the quantitative distribution of these different forms of knowledge is highly differentiated, and the mental structures of each will sing or extol values and truths that are often far apart, even radically different, sometimes contradictory.

Consequently, depending on the place and the way in which each person’s mind has been awakened to life and to the world, personal creativity will implicitly be framed and potentially drawn towards whichever form is more locally represented rather than towards another that is less present or whose economy is absent.

Yet, until now, it may be accepted that the different forms of knowledge from which each individual benefited were roughly balanced. But — an upheaval, and a unique and very recent fact in the history of the human adventure — the international scientific community has lately become the most effective active organisation ever invented in the history of human civilisations, in its accelerated capacity — and its method, since method there is, lends itself to this — to ensure an exponential production of new knowledge, of a scientific kind of course.

From this formidable productivity, through this unique machinery, there results today in the Western cultural matrix a notorious gap in efficiency between the efficiency of the production of scientific knowledge and the ultimately very weak parallel productivity of the other, complementary forms of knowledge, “revealed” or “artistic”, which for their part do not enjoy similar economic conditions of production. (“Local consensual” knowledge is left aside here, in so far as it consists more of established and tacitly accepted social protocol rules than of knowledge in the strict sense.)

The average creativity likely to emerge in our societies therefore has the greatest probability, through an effect of proximity and seeding, of belonging to this particular form of dominant ambient knowledge, knowledge of a scientific nature, since — let us recall — this particular form of creativity possesses, by its structure and by its applications, the means for its economy, its research and its development. All the more so since its method of effectively producing knowledge (scientific communications, development of technological know-how) can be taught rapidly — in less than ten years of school and university — which is far from being the case for the assimilation of the other forms of knowledge.

A specific corollary of this particular cultural situation that is ours today: the Western technocultural matrix of which we are the actors is a scientifically hypertrophied matrix, and moreover one that is evolving exponentially. A surging tide of scientific knowledge results from it, which leads some to say that it is alienating and others that it holds the future of

p. 37

man, just as it secretes its own problems too. What is more, we are forced to note that this is a form of knowledge which, as we observe, is spreading across the entire planet, whose face in turn is changing, driven by the most active dominant principle of knowledge production. Without being much of a prophet, one may say that the most effective principle of creativity, expanding daily on a worldwide scale, may well be of a scientific or technological nature in the coming decades, in so far as scientific and technological culture, with each passing day, is strengthening its conquest and spreading to the rest of the world through its commercial practices and its exchanges of students from one scientific laboratory to another across the universities.

But what is more, and a further paradox: if this knowledge of scientific allegiance is indeed able, over almost the entire surface of the globe, to supplant the other forms of knowledge in efficiency — even if in certain countries knowledge of the “revealed” type tries to resist it, as can be seen in certain Arab countries — it is in fact directed by only a handful of people, and its evolution remains under the triple effective responsibility of, of course, the scientific community itself, but also of political decision-makers, subject as they in turn are to the various forms of local and/or global economic constraint.

And I should now like to insist on two essential observations: the first, that science sees its developments proceed in directions induced — as has just been suggested — by a blind, uncontrolled logic (its military developments and above all its economic outlets); the second, that science has never had the mission of thinking about itself — any more than about its development — since in fact it has no conceptual tool of its own suited to fulfilling this primordial mission: to think itself!

For this twofold reason, science is therefore doomed — as can already be seen — to a production that is at once anarchic and invasive, for better and for worse, incapable as it is by its very essence of reasoning with itself and situating itself.

And if in future the production of knowledge, particularly of an “artistic” and a “revealed” nature, did not come to act as a counterweight and to place science, in some of its branches, at the service of a few noble causes yet to be determined, not only might the Western matrix tip over into meaninglessness, if it has not already done so, but the other matrices, over there and elsewhere, might in turn follow its example. Whereas our brain, the fruit of 2.5 million years of evolution, is most certainly entitled to expect from its surrounding socio-cultural environment the presence of conditions favourable to the expression, in whatever form, of what might be called spirituality — a living spirituality that would not have deserted the stage of the exercise of Life, since the brain holds the capacity for it and expresses the demand.

Moreover, if indeed History can henceforth serve as our guide, generally speaking and across the ages History clearly shows us that the various stable cultural matrices have, until now at least, required the four essential kinds of Knowledge — “local consensual”, “scientific”, “artistic” and “revealed” — to be present in roughly equal measure, which then augured conditions favourable to maintaining the balance of the said matrix. By virtue of which, one also notes that the various associated forms of creativity were in their turn balanced as well, and the system “harmonious”.

Yet today, at this moment in our societies without historical equivalent, when the stakes sometimes amount to double or quits, when local responsibilities concern the global more often than it appears, when human responsibility stumbles over inconsistencies and incompetence, reflection has an essential role to play. Not hasty reflection, governed only by the urgency of the moment alone, but reflection that, as Leonardo da Vinci said, first takes the time for contemplation in order to prepare and nourish the moment devoted to the act of thinking proper.

Thus there is no doubt an urgent need, starting now, to undertake the creation of structures capable of putting in place elements favourable to building a Vision — a forward-looking vision to be associated with a renewed philosophical thought and with a transdisciplinary political thought, a vision that would make it possible to tackle anew the question of meaning, of a reinvented meaning, and to ask the question of the method to be associated with this quest.

And gradually, where the spirit of the times urged us here towards scientific creativity alone, or reduced the other forms of creativity to homeopathic doses, each person’s lucidity and awareness ought to impose on him — and this is true of every kind of creator — a creativity that is henceforth globalising and transdisciplinary, capable of integrating the three forms of knowledge, “scientific”, “artistic” and “revealed”, so as to contribute to a genuine reorientation of the matrix and thereby help to restore harmony to the minds of the ephemeral passers-by that we all are.

One might also ask and expect of those through whom “local consensual” knowledge is expressed that they equip themselves with a responsible ambition and an appropriate methodology that would take into account the different forms of sensibility coming from the various sectors of the production of knowledge, “consensual”, “scientific”, “artistic” and “revealed”. It would then fall, for example, to those whose role is to draft codes, laws and political programmes to seek out the thoughts of all and to bring them into an authentic democratic process of thought, with the aim of achieving an overall synthesis of human skills and expectations.

By virtue of the foregoing, and by extrapolation, perception arising from artistic creativity no doubt has as much of a part to play in decision-making of every kind as scientific or economic analyses alone. In the same way, the thought of the theologian should, it

p. 38

too, have its rightful place in decision-making mechanisms.

On specific occasions, at a time when ethics committees are meeting and proliferating, I maintain, for example, that the artist too, just like the person of faith, ought to be consulted, on the same footing as the specialist in the question or questions concerned.

It is precisely this kind of struggle that I have been waging for several years now, in which, in addition to my condition as an artist (a somewhat mutant artist and something of a futurologist, who has abandoned his classical tools of creation such as the brush and the gouge for technology-based creative tools such as shape-memory alloys, laser beams carried aboard an orbital station, or radio waves beamed in a particular way across the universe by a radio telescope…), I distil into the Institution, through international symposia on a variety of subjects or within think tanks, remarks of a “different” nature and “other” observations nourished by that sensibility peculiar to the artist, and then charge the people of these institutions with hearing them and putting them into practice, sometimes seeing to it myself as well.

Thus, over a course stretching across several years, and having been its initiator and active advocate, I was for instance led to take charge of the “World Ethics Committee for a Peaceful Use of Space”, with in particular — during the symposium held at the Maison des Droits de l'Homme, Trieste, October 1994 — the task of bringing together in this field the specialists and the complementary non-specialists able to pool their skills and their differences, all within the general framework of a global reflection on Ethics which, on those days, brought together, besides the field of Space, the fields of Nuclear Energy, Computing and Bioethics.

If, having reached the end of this article, I wished only one message, and one alone, to be retained from this text, that message would convey — as I hope to have demonstrated step by step in the preceding lines — the indication that the artist, in this particular era, is perhaps — because of his way of life, which allows him to take the time to observe, and also because of his sensibility, which allows him to perceive and to feel differently — the best suited to identify the shifting movements of a world in full mutation and full questioning, and to detect its signs here and there, as so many clues capable of taking part in, contributing to and assisting general reflection.

Even if, at first, the signs perceived through contemporary artistic sensibility in Western societies most often resemble alarm signals, I maintain that one can also discern signs corresponding to an expectation and to hopes about to emerge on the horizon line of a near future. Beyond the artist's performance in his own specific work, it is, to my mind, time that people were willing to hear him, and then to listen to him, in places that are not usually concerned with the exercise and traditional practice of his art alone, but which could hear what he has to say and take his remarks into account.

Humanity today can already no longer envisage achieving everything it might claim to undertake: elements of vision are lacking, like so many guiding parameters for deciding the choices of society, choices of projects, choices of health… that will have to be defined. And the voice of the artist will henceforth have to be listened to on the same footing, in the concert of other voices, as those of economists, politicians, scientists… so that it may intervene effectively in shifting the centre of gravity of the forms of decision that ultimately concern humanity as a whole. For fifteen years now I have been advocating this synergy, and little by little the institution seems willing to make it its own — still too slowly for my liking, when the emergency is already at our door.