Adrien Morel
Writer, epistemologist and theorist of the human sciences.
In the end-of-cycle period of civilization in which we now find ourselves, Adrien Morel wishes to be among the “guides toward the next world”. He sometimes presents himself in this way, with a touch of humour, to express his desire to contribute to the emergence of a more advanced future form of society.
He has always been driven by one passion: understanding the human being. Not only the individual human being in their subjectivity, but humanity in what characterises it as a species, unique and singular within the animal kingdom.
Rooted in the European tradition, and more specifically in the French tradition of the Enlightenment, this passion has taken for him the necessary form of a rational approach, a scientific quest. Everything therefore leads him, logically, to take an interest in the “human sciences”. In order to understand.
Problem
These do not exist. At least, not quite yet. They are still in the process of emerging. No one agrees on what they are, what they should be, or what can be expected from them. We are in the 1980s, and a war is raging in universities — in departments of psychology, sociology and language sciences.
So he looks elsewhere, giving the situation time to settle. He leaves the academic world to explore the world of business.
The turning point comes when, twenty years later, feeling that he has reached the end of what he had to discover in the worlds of computing and marketing, he realises that the situation in the human sciences has not really improved in the meantime, and that he may have, at that moment and in that place, a contribution to make.
Indeed, in the meantime, the relationship between the so-called human sciences and society has not evolved. It may even have deteriorated.
On the one hand, because these disciplines are invaded, under the heading of “sciences”, by the by-products of various ideologies, which colonise them and obscure their intellectual space.
On the other hand, because after having rid himself of God, then of the Party, the humanist, citizen of
democracies, no longer even believes in Science either. At least, no longer as something capable of bringing him progress
or a better future. Rationalism is receding.
It is time to react.
Classical humanism, that of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, is indeed exhausted. Its time has passed. Humanism is no longer able today to offer the citizen of Western democracies a meaning to history. The discourse of contemporary philosophers speaks only of despair, disenchantment and “disbelief”. And since modern man no longer believes in anything, he is at a loss.
Yet history is not over. Contrary to what some intellectuals write — expressing only their own inability to invent its future — answers and solutions do exist.
We are currently living through a new Renaissance, and “old Europe” is closer than ever to regaining initiative and authority in the field that is its own: the values of the Enlightenment and the universalism of a reconciled civilization.
A civilization that no longer seeks its future in its tools or technologies, that no longer confuses modernity with technicality, because it has finally succeeded in producing an atheistic conception of morality. Unfortunately, it does not know it yet…
In fact, Western societies continue presumptuously to define themselves as postmodern, whereas they have not yet entered true modernity. But this modernity will not be defined in the field of the sciences of matter or nature, which have indeed already reached maturity, but in that of the human sciences, now appearing on the horizon.
Indeed, through the human sciences, we already have the means to think the next world, the future of our civilizations. But who knows this? We are living through this uncomfortable period in which civilization is unaware that it has already given birth to the solution it is waiting for.
Will we have to wait 300 years to realise it? No. We begin right away. It is no longer time to hope for consensus, but to produce it. It is time to take up the torch of humanism where it stopped in the “Age of Enlightenment” and to invent the next one: second-generation humanism.
Strengthened by this awareness, our man then decides to take courage in both hands and to create himself what he calls his “intellectual debugging kit for the citizen of democracies” — and for others too — of which he has now published twelve volumes under the pseudonym he adopted in the meantime: Adrien Morel.