The worldview that dominates a civilization always plays an absolutely central role, not only for its social and economic organization, but also for what such a civilization may or may not consider achieving.
In 1054, a supernova resulting from the explosion of a star had actually been observed in broad daylight from the surface of our planet. Chinese records exist concerning this unique occurrence, but no one in the West has documented it. As indeed, in referring to the Aristotelian vision, in "the sphere of the fixed", everything was supposed to be eternal and immutable. A star’s explosion or the creation of a new star was simply unimaginable at the time. This anecdote indicates the truly essential character of the types of vision of the world that structure our reality.
It remains that the vision of the world born in the West and called “modernity” has spread all over the world and is first and foremost inspired by science. Whenever you say: "it's scientific", you will most certainly be infinitely more credible than if you’d said: "I dreamt it..."!
Now the so-called “classic” view of science of the 18th and 19th centuries is reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic. Its motto could be summed up as “what is not measurable and quantifiable does not exist”. While this has allowed enormous progress which has improved the quality and life length of several billion people on earth, it has also had a number of negative consequences such as considering man as a mere cog in the great Taylorian organization machines or to let all economic activities be governed solely by the quest for maximum profit.
Although Thomas Friedman was a promoter of economic liberalism, he once said: “We have created a system of growth that depends on building more and more stores that sell more and more products made by more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal, which causes more and more climate change, but allows China to earn more and more money to buy more and more US Treasury bonds which allows Americans to have more and more funds to build more and more stores that sell more and more products from factories that employ more and more Chinese ... ".
The loss of meaning could not be better defined, not only at the philosophical and metaphysical level, but even at the practical level. And this is induced by a vision of the world that allows us to always better know how to do things, but less and less why we do them. Fortunately, a huge, but still silent revolution has taken place in this last century, and it is about the foundations of science itself. From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the sciences of consciousness to that of complexity through the evolution of living things, a new vision of the world has emerged.
Dozens of scientific personalities of the highest level have contributed to analyzing this particular evolution and for which, for example, Nobel Prize in Chemistry Ilya Prigogine said, speaking of the old vision: “Our science is no longer this classical knowledge”.
This mutation induced by the findings in quantum mechanics, general relativity, epigenetics, in certain fields of neurosciences, and even in mathematics and logic is indeed the carrier of an immense conceptual revolution which has so far only affected a yet small public, although it already represents millions of people.
Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum physics, said in the 1950s: “it will take more than half a century for what we have found to really impact society”.
We therefore have hope in finding a sort of “remedy” for the disenchantment of the world in the very field which generated the disenchantment. It is to bring to light this revolution and to analyze its impacts in all fields, whether scientific, economic, philosophical or managerial, that the "Science and Quest for Meaning" Center was created at the UM6P within the Africa Business School.
I had already managed programs of this nature in many countries, so it is with joy that I can finally do the same in Morocco, a country that can be considered my second home by the frequency of my trips and the activities I have carried out as well as the great amount of friends I have made there.
Jean Staune is a graduate in Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Economics, Management, Human Paleontology and Philosophy of Science.
He is the founder and Secretary General of the Interdisciplinary University of Paris (French association of the law of 1901) within the framework of which he has organized major international events and brought together hundreds of speakers including more than twenty Nobel Prize winners. He has also organized training and research programs in 19 countries in the fields of the philosophical, metaphysical and cultural implications of contemporary scientific discoveries that were financed by major international foundations. On the philosophy of science question, he is the author of numerous books, including the bestseller “Does our existence have a meaning?” and “The keys to the future” (prefaced by Jacques Attali) in the domain of futurology.