Responsible Innovation in light of Levinas: rethinking the relation between responsibility and innovation

ABSTRACT

To date, much of the work on Responsible Innovation (RI) has focused on the ‘responsible’ part of RI. This has left the ‘innovation’ part in need of conceptual innovation of its own. If such conceptual innovation is to contribute to a coherent conception of RI, however, it is crucial to better understand the relation between responsibility and innovation first. This paper elucidates this relation by locating responsibility and innovation within Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology. It structures his work into three ‘stages’, each described in terms of their leading experience and objectivation regime. This analysis identifies a need for constant innovation of political and technological systems, originating from and motivated by our responsibility to others. It also shows the relation between responsibility and innovation to be threefold: foundational, ethical and structural. These insights could help RI to avoid some pitfalls of ‘regular’ innovation, and provide moral grounding for important aspects of RI.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible Innovation
• Levinas
• responsibility
• technology
• innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jan Peter Bergen is a PhD candidate at Delft University of technology. His main area of research is the ethics of nuclear energy technologies, with a focus on the role of technological reversibility in responsible technology development. Jan holds a Masters of Integrated Product Development (University College of Antwerp) and an MSc in Industrial Ecology (Leiden University/Delft University of Technology).

ORCID

Jan Peter Bergen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8140-604X

Notes

1. This is sometimes more inclusively formulated as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).

2. See https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges, Accessed 22 September, 2016.

3. ‘Deformalization’ describes Levinas’ efforts to move some concepts (especially that of ‘time’ (e.g. Levinas 1998a, 175)) away from the schematisms, abstractions or ontological systematizations in terms of which they are usually described, and back to the concrete experiences that ground them (the interruption of egological existence by the Other being chief among them).

4. Blok’s use of Levinas’ concept of responsibility as the putting into question of the Ego and its totalizing tendencies is probably the most developed Levinasian account of (part of) RI (Blok 2014).

5. This structure is mainly inspired by Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (Levinas 1969), amended with other works where applicable. I take Totality and Infinity to provide the most helpful thematic structure to think about how the experiences most central to Levinas’ work are objectivated in the ‘outer world’.

6. The irony of such a ‘technical’ presentation of Levinas’ thought so as to locate his stance on technology and innovation is not entirely lost on me. For reasons of both brevity and clarity, however, this simplified account seems appropriate nonetheless. To counterbalance this (over-)systematization and let some of the sensitivity and atmosphere of Levinas’ initial analysis shine through, I liberally cite Levinas’ own writings.

7. As a phenomenologist, Levinas considers experience to be concrete and not abstract. However, throughout this paper, the word ‘concrete’ is used in terms of (experiences that involve) active and material engagement with the outer world, similarly to how Levinas does when he writes that ‘[t]he whole of the civilization of labor and possession arises as a concretization of the separated being effectuating its separation. But this civilization refers to [ … ] existence proceeding from the intimacy of a home, the first concretization’ (Levinas 1969, 153).

8. Levinas emphasizes enjoyment as the foundational experience for the ego: ‘enjoyment is not a psychological state among others [ … ] but the very pulsation of the I’ (Levinas 1969, 113).

9. Enjoyment underlies every experience of the things around us, even of (technological) tools used pragmatically, whose existence ‘is not exhausted by the utilitarian schematism that delineates them as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines’ (Levinas 1969, 110).

10. Levinas’ conception of egoism should not be read as a condemnable selfishness in the face of others. It is pre-conscious and unreflective, and thus naïve rather than evil.

11. The labouring hand, Levinas tells us, is

no longer a sense-organ, pure enjoyment, pure sensibility, but is mastery, domination, disposition. An organ for taking, for acquisition, it gathers the fruit but holds it far from the lips, keeps it, puts it in reserve, possesses it in a home. (Levinas 1969, 161)

This is a telling illustration of Levinas’ recognition that enjoyment, dwelling, habitation, and possession are only possible in an existence that is a body.

12. By selectively suspending the elemental in the home, possession com-prehends [comprend] or grasps the being of the existent. It is through labour and in possession that the thing first arises. (Levinas 1969, 158).

13. I regrettably have to exclude what would undoubtedly be an interesting discussion of Levinas’ concept of the il-y-a.

14. I will not delve deeper into the intricacies of the phenomenology of the Other presenting itself, that is, of the face. For a discussion of the face of the Other, see Totality and Infinity, Section 3 (Levinas 1969).

15. Levinas uses the generic ‘he’ when discussing the Other, thus technically not excluding those of other genders. Nevertheless, this is language that risks being discriminatory and would preferably be amended to reflect Levinas’ own inclusionary intentions. However, simply including more genders (e.g. ‘his or her’ or ‘his/her’) would not be appropriate here, since speaking of the Other in terms of gender already constitutes a grasping of the infinite Other in terms of objectifying categories and, as such, fails to do justice to the Other’s alterity. Regrettably, conventional gender-neutral alternatives are equally inappropriate for talking about the infinitely Other. That is, using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘it’ would amount to dehumanizing the Other, the use of a singular ‘they’ is incompatible with the uniqueness of the Other, and less commonly used singular gender-neutral pronouns still conjure up the problem of gender categorization. As such, I also revert to generic ‘he’, if only for textual consistency with the Levinasian source material. However, I have added ‘or her’ between brackets to disavow any intentional exclusion and to indicate the sometimes awkward struggle to find the best terms in which to describe the Other.

16. Levinas’ focus on hunger stems from a somewhat grim analysis of modern sensitivity to the Other:

Of all the appetites [ … ] hunger is strangely sensitive in our secularized and technological world to the hunger of the other man. All our values are worn except this one. The hunger of the other awakens men from their sated drowsing and sobers them up from their self-sufficiency. (Levinas 1998b, 11)

17. This explains Levinas’ somewhat more cryptic statement of this relation: ‘in order that I be able to see things in themselves, that is, represent them to myself, refuse both enjoyment and possession, I must know how to give what I possess’ (Levinas 1969, 171, my emphasis).

18. This quote originally concerns money and its redemptive qualities in preserving alterity amidst more totalizing systems. However, Levinas’ positive assessment of this quality in such a systematized economic totality prompted me to include it as a goal in this discussion of politics.

19. Levinas’ reflections on technology were mainly made in reply to Heidegger’s analysis in his famous essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (Heidegger 1977), although other Heideggerian themes are also caught in the crossfire, notably his focus on Place and enrootedness.

20. While this may sound familiar to Heidegger’s ‘enframing’ the world as ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger 1977), its ethical implications are vastly different.

21. Levinas even goes so far as to say that ‘[s]cience and the possibilities of technology are the first conditions for the factual implementation of the respect for the rights of man’ (Levinas 1993, 119).

22. This is the most important point that Levinas grants to Heidegger’s analysis of humanity’s fate in a modern technological world (Heidegger 1977), although he does not agree with Heidegger concerning its inevitability.

23. This is not always easy. Levinas demonstrates this with the example of the atomic bomb, the potential impact of which was so vast that it clouded any politics that was to take place in its threatening presence (Levinas 1994).

24. My translation from the original French: ‘Donner le pas à la politique sur la physique est une invite à oeuvrer pour un monde meilleur, à croire le monde transformable et humain’.

25. It is important to note that there is a positive role for enjoyment in innovation too. For example, enjoyment underlies the activities of the engineer who (inspired by the needs of others) thinks, reads, works and uses tools to innovate (as described in ‘Origins of the I: Egoism’, above; see Florman 2013). So, while the structure of the experience of enjoyment is self-centred, activities that are enjoyed may nevertheless lead to outcomes that can nourish the Other and aid the cause of justice if they are ultimately motivated by responsibility.

26. It should be noted that, if the Levinasian analysis is correct, responsibility is also a precondition for ‘regular’ innovation, and can be a motivation for it. Still, it can be said that there is a considerably less developed role for responsibility in the techno-politics of ‘regular’ innovation.

27. Blok and Lemmens (2015) do not present their analysis in terms of possible pitfalls, but describe a concept of innovation that is purportedly ‘self-evidently presupposed’ in the RI literature (28). As this section shows, however, the RI literature already describes characteristics of innovation that are at odds with their notion of ‘regular’ innovation.

28. Blok and Lemmens (2015) argue that RI presupposes symmetry between actors in the way it attempts to include ethics in the innovation process, judging this specific assumption to be naïve. To me, this presupposes more conceptual content than their ‘regular’ notion of innovation contains, which I would rather attribute to the specific participatory interpretation of the ‘responsible’ part of RI. The regular notion of innovation has little to nothing to say about actor symmetry, hence my formulation of the fourth pitfall in terms of a blindness of asymmetries rather than the presupposition of symmetry.

29. See note 14 above.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NL)] under Grant No. 277-20-003.