INSA engineer, philosopher in action

The role of engineers and their future are at the heart of a process of reflection being undertaken at INSA Lyon with its entire ecosystem. Scientific Co-Director of the Chair ‘Ingénieur.e INSA, philosophe en action. Penser et agir de manière responsable (Thinking and acting responsibly)’, Michel Faucheux, former director of the Humanities Centre at INSA Lyon, a man of letters, sheds light on the context in which this research work is emerging, useful for engineers and the world of tomorrow.

The creation of the chair ‘Ingénieur.e INSA, philosophe en action. Penser et agir de manière responsable’ is in line with the legacy of the philosopher Gaston Berger, one of the founders of INSA Lyon. Although the educational project of training an engineer¹ in direct contact with society and its technological, social and economic issues remains relevant, the fact remains that times have changed and we are no longer in the ‘Trente Glorieuses’.

The Chair aims to update and rethink the INSA engineering model while remaining faithful to a heritage that gives our school a strong historical, philosophical and educational identity, which is what makes it unique in the field of French engineering schools. In a conference speech on 8 March, 1955, Gaston Berger described company directors as ‘philosophers in action’, ‘having become aware not only of the complexity of problems, but also of the duties that are imposed on them and that give them an ethical role’. More than ever, to meet the unprecedented challenges facing us, engineers, engaged in technical ‘businesses’ and often company directors themselves, must assume the role of ‘philosophers in action’, guided by a love of a combination of (technical) knowledge and wisdom to guide their actions and make them capable of rebuilding a more humane world.

For the task before us is a huge one, quite different from that of engineers educated in the 1960s, the driving force behind economic growth and well-being that benefited a France shaken and impoverished by the war years.

Two decades ago, we entered a new world produced by an accelerated and radical technological revolution, which some call ‘disruption’. This artificial, digitised, interconnected, virtualised, globalised, multicultural world is shaking up the relationship of human beings with themselves as well as with society, nature and other living beings. The old oppositions that anchored us in a stable relationship with the world have been shattered: true and the false, real and virtual/artificial, man and machine, me and others, here and elsewhere, inside and outside... While our opportunities for action have increased tenfold.

If ‘the world before’ was stable, solid, based on a foundation of guaranteed practices, certainties and representations, this new world where one can surf for all kinds of knowledge and where information circulates at full speed is a ‘fluid’ world, fluctuating, tempestuous, characterised by turmoil, disorder, crisis and the unexpected. 

This is what we are currently experiencing: a pandemic that has immobilised a large part of the planet and is linked to a major ecological crisis which, caused by the accelerated destruction of species and global warming, is endangering humanity. The phenomenon of crisis is no longer occasional. It has become structural, the constituent element of our world, taking on several interrelated dimensions: ecological, social, societal, economic and political.

In this new context, the aim of the Chair is to help educate engineers, ‘philosophers in action’, who are not only able to deal with crises and storms but creative and ingenious, cutting across different areas of knowledge to think about technology at a time when the knowledge map is changing. This will also lead us to our destination: a diverse, viable and sustainable world order that engineers will have helped to build. This is not a mere utopia, for there is an urgent need to move towards an economic and social system that recognises the finiteness of the earth's resources and puts technology, freed from the dreams of all power and unlimited profit, at the service of humanity, building a new alliance between human beings and nature but also solidarity between human beings, cultures and societies. Finally, it integrates aesthetic concerns into everyday life.

There has never been such a challenge in the history of mankind because, for the first time, we are talking about the survival of our species and the viability of human constructions. At the end of this long period of lockdown, ‘the time has come’, as many now say, to rebuild a future. There have been builders of monuments of all kinds and major political and social projects... There is now a need for builders of the future. And we believe that ‘the INSA engineer, philosopher in action’, to be faithful to his or her history, must be one of those builders of the future, made up of a mix of technology and wisdom, built on resistance to injustice, inequality and the unacceptable.

But the future cannot be built without the experience of those already engaged in action. This is why the Chair, which is open to the INSA community from which it emanates, thanks to a co-construction approach, will draw on the practical experience of alumni to analyse how we can deploy a responsible mode of action in the company and society, and develop everyday ethics and ‘wisdom’ of action beneficial to all. It will be based on the strength of testimony, feedback and analysis of debates generated by, for example, decision, action and implementation. 

The only great projects are those driven by a shared memory and vision. But there are also moments when the storm that sweeps away history can metamorphose into a breath of fresh air towards the future. Caught between a major technological revolution and a radical ecological crisis, we are living at a time that requires us not to look away from ‘our burning house’ but to resist and fight the destructive approaches that threaten the construction of a sustainable world.

We should not be afraid of ambitious projects. The creation of the INSA alternative model was itself an ambitious project. This is why, in the end, I wonder if the project of this Chair is limited to supporting the education of an ‘engineer, philosopher in action’, a bearer of humanist and responsible values - which is already a lot! Perhaps it is much more than that: to help, at the beginning of the 21^st century, with the reinvention of humanism, of which INSA engineers should be among the initiators. 

In the 16^th century, aided by the technical invention of printing, poets, philosophers and scholars returning to the texts of Greek and Latin Antiquity invented a ‘Humanism’ that presided over the period later described as the ‘Renaissance’. INSA engineers, who have become ‘philosophers in action', combining knowledge, thinking about technology to better work with ‘wisdom’ and defining, in an artificial universe, an ideal of human behaviour, could contribute to the reinvention of a humanism that has become our horizon and our necessity. Do we even need to add that there are places conducive to such reinvention and that in the 16^th century, Lyon was one of the great centres of Humanism? 

Gaston Berger, in the conference speech already quoted, noted that company directors, ‘philosophers in action’, ‘do not simply shape objects’, but ‘build the destiny of men’. In exactly this way, I believe that the INSA engineer of today and tomorrow, the ‘philosopher in action’, must play the role not only of offering a destiny to ‘men’ but of working to ensure that they continue to have one. 

The task is difficult and exhilarating, but if the Chair ‘Ingéieur.e INSA, philosophe en action. Penser et agir de manière responsable’, in its rightful place, can help, then it will have found its greatest purpose.