Invitation à la prospective An Invitation to Foresight

Prospective and Liberty

As neither prophecy nor prediction, la prospective (foresight) does not aim to predict the future — to unveil it as if it were prefabricated — but to help us build it. It invites us to consider the future as something that we create or build, rather than as something already decided, like a mystery that simply needs to be unravelled. Note that the above statement represents a revolution in philosophical thought, since the idea that dominated in the past of a self-regulated system (or a system regulated by God),perpetuated by its own logic (remember the idea of Nature as good) in which Man was merely a subject, has been replaced by a philosophy in which Man has become a key player, if not the master (some may say this is a massive presumption).

A link can be established here with the long-term process of transition from ‘traditionalist’ values, in which the principle of legitimacy is based on transcendence, to ‘individualist’ values, so called because their principle of legitimacy resides in the individual. Individualism entered the frame during the 18th Century with the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the philosophical system of Kant; its first great public consecration came in 1789 with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (following on from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776). Let us make no mistake about the concept of individualism, the multiple meanings of which often lead to misunderstandings. Here, it has nothing to do with the term ‘egoism’. The transition to which I am referring has been the subject of much analysis by Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Norbert Élias and many others looking at the types of legitimacy on which our values are based. “The legitimacy of traditionalist values,” wrote Étienne Schweisguth, “is based on an order reputed to be superior to individual consciences and that individuals should respect without question, whether it be a natural, supernatural, social, moral or some other order. Rooted in tradition, these values frequently advocate the subordination of individuals to the group to which they belong and to the established authorities.

They prescribe social roles and standards of behaviour for individuals that cannot be questioned […].The principle of individualism on the other hand is about subordinating the order of things to the desires, needs, reason or will of human individuals. Values are not accepted as intangible facts but weighed up according to their appropriateness, according to what is considered to be good for individuals.

The law of God, nature, the city or tradition alone has no legitimacy in itself. It is in the individual and the individual alone that the principle of what is good resides.” I’m not saying in the individual here and now, for myself to the exclusion of others. I am referring to the individual as amember of a human community, capable of giving up a share of his personal and immediate interests for the good of common aims, of things considered beneficial (that are different, then, from the sum of individual interests), including in the long term, things like ‘sustainable development’, that respect the ecosystem and others, our contemporaries and the generations to come.

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