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...