We are going through a fairly troubled period that accentuates anxiety and loss of meaning in a time of uncertainty. Wars, geopolitical instability, climate change, artificial intelligence accentuate worry and disenchantment, causing a certain gloom, but also a weakening of the moral tone that should be strengthened to prepare a decent and invigorating future. The philosopher of Greek origin Kostas Axelos, a major thinker of our time, can help us understand the current historical moment and the challenges that are looming on the horizon.
Axelos was born in Athens on June 26, 1924. After actively participating in the Resistance during the Second World War, he moved to Paris in 1945 to pursue his studies in philosophy. He then taught at the Sorbonne from 1961 to 1973, before founding and directing the “Arguments” collection at Éditions de Minuit, where most of his twenty or so works have been published. He also gave lectures all over the world. He died in Paris in February 2010. The year 2024 is thus the hundredth anniversary of his birth, which was celebrated in Paris on April 3.
Axelos has deployed a questioning and planetary thought focused on the totality of the multidimensional World. A global thought anchored in the world of life that he launched and developed already in 1964 in Towards planetary thinking (reissued in 2019) and The game of the world (1969, reissued in 2018). Going back to Heraclitus, assuming and crossing the great moments and the great figures of the history of philosophy, it opens the way to a new experience of the becoming being of the World, an important question that can allow man to get closer to his identity as a constitutive fragment of the World, since the truth of the being of the totality is “the only one capable of illuminating that of the human being”.
We now live on a planet unified by technology, which also implies the globalization of problems. Also, the planetary destiny concerns everyone, since our future depends on it.
In his book Metamorphoses (1991, reissued in 2021), he mentions that we have arrived “at a time when points of reference and systems of reference have cracked on all sides”. In his journey, he wondered if there could be peoples who could open a horizon in this time plagued by stagnation, noting that “what is obsolete survives more and more when nothing productive comes to take its place”. And regarding the question of opening a horizon, he emphasizes that “men and peoples can correspond to it through active thought and through thinking action”, while specifying however that the call in question must “be heard, assumed, taken charge of and be sufficiently determining”.
The metamorphoses of thought, Axelos asserts, also change our relationship to life and the world. He further notes that “humanity, the peoples who compose it, walk collectively and there are those who illuminate this walk, open up perspectives for it, create multifaceted modes of access to the unthought.” He specifies the question that presents itself to us: “This time leads us, beyond the collapse of a world, beyond the shipwreck of an entire humanity and generalized insignificance, beyond the weariness that is the lot of each and every one, not towards a haven of peace – “inner” or “outer” – but towards an opening.”
At the dawn of the planetary era that we have already entered, man is called to experience another relationship with beings and things in a time marked by the dominance of technology and planning reason that goes hand in hand with the destruction of nature, and which is not without meaninglessness, fatigue and crises.
For Axelos, opening new perspectives on our future seems to require from us a new type of thinking that “can only be productive and interrogative, questioning and creative, multidimensional and anticipatory.” We are at a crossroads and this is what awakens a need for openness.
The planetary era – and therefore the destiny of humanity, which is composed of peoples – is only just beginning, not without a shaking of traditions and not without a trivialization of what is. And it is under the constellation of technology that the destiny of humanity is being played out and will be played out.
Everything continues and let us not forget, history shows, that a great thought can bring about a great people. The planetary thought of the multidimensional world, of the Game of the world linked to Time working, is a great thought. And, reveals Axelos, “each time a great thought is articulated, we can say: a country is born.”
Can it be welcomed, experienced and implemented by several peoples? Will Quebec be able to hear and assume this thought and this path, actualize itself in this sense and become an inspiring people? An ultimate legacy that we could build as a nation and leave to posterity?
Time will tell, but let us know now that this is the only direction that can escape “shrinking destinies.”