Reflection and redesign
Dedicated to the many companions along the way.
On 14 July 1989, exactly 200 years after the storming of the Bastille, four students almost accidentally founded a small IT company. We had the courage - or the naivety - to believe that the ideals of the French Revolution could also guide our entrepreneurial actions: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Over the years, this developed into two prospering companies. Technological innovation flourished, we created jobs and contributed to digital transformation. My company focused strongly on digital collaboration and transformation processes.
But over the years it became increasingly clear that many concepts and implementation attempts remained superficial. The digital revolution promised connectivity but often created new forms of isolation. It promised efficiency but also contributed to that "aggressive relationship to the world" that characterises our time today. A few years ago, I left my company, which had meanwhile merged with three other IT companies, and turned to psychological counselling. Along the way I have been rediscovering, almost like a homecoming, the philosophy that shaped my brief but formative student years with the Jesuits.
I would like to share a few of my current thoughts with you today on the occasion of 14 July.
What has become of the three great ideals? Liberté was reduced to negative freedom – the right to be left alone. Égalité survives only in speeches on solemn occasions. Fraternité almost completely disappeared from political vocabulary because it could not be translated into rights and duties.
Liberal thinking from Hobbes to Rawls constructs society as a contract between autonomous individuals who coordinate their self-interests through mutual benefit. This "exchange justice" works as long as – as John Rawls writes – "moderate scarcity" prevails and there is enough for everyone.
But what happens when resources dwindle? When ecological collapse threatens? When societies split apart? Then the fundamental weakness of the liberal model becomes apparent: It can guarantee Freedom and Equality, but not Fraternity. For genuine solidarity requires people who feel responsible for others – not just for themselves.
This is where Emmanuel Levinas comes in, the French-Lithuanian philosopher whose radical ethics designs a completely different anthropology. For Levinas, human beings are not primarily free, autonomous beings, but responsible ones.
"The primacy of responsibility over freedom," as his interpreter Corine Pelluchon formulates it, means a revolution in the understanding of the subject. Not: First I am a sovereign individual, then I take responsibility. Rather: Responsibility for the Other constitutes me as a person in the first place.
This responsibility does not arise through rational decision or contract, but through concrete encounter with the Other. In their face, their suffering, their vulnerability, I see not only them, but "all of humanity" looking at me. The Other "calls to me" – and in this calling, my identity as a responsible being emerges.
Pelluchon shows this using the example of the medical encounter: the patient's dignity does not depend on the judgement the professional forms of them. Yet the way the patient is received, and the respect shown to them, is decisive. "The dignity of the other is not relative to my point of view; rather, I vouch for it. That is the ethical paradox that the clinical situation brings to light with particular clarity."
The structure of the paradox: