Esprit de FES Foundation

Argument

"Renaissances" are more than a theme or a title; they are an invitation to explore welcoming horizons, to hospitable gateways opening onto spaces and times of benevolence, hope, dreams, imagination, and discovery.

Renaissances suggest knowledge, social, cultural, and political dynamics. They can be analyzed through multiple facets with several dimensions: Knowledge, heritage, and cultures are perhaps the most fertile and interactive with the totality of their substances.

Renaissances are collective and global metamorphoses. They express and imprint profound mutations that societies experience at privileged moments in their evolution. They are maturations, symbioses, ruptures, and leaps toward the better. Potentialities flourish, talents emerge. Social cohesion strengthens. Social bonds are built. Collective confidence consolidates. Societal projects mobilize, and energies unfold.

Renaissances as a field of reflection and creation summon the culture of cultures and all heritage from which all wisdom and collective intelligence springs.

This ascending approach may have the great privilege of shedding light on the values, lifestyles, beliefs, behaviors, and material and immaterial landmarks that forge meaning in society.

Creativity, all forms of creativity, are then invited to greater intelligibility. They are societal markers. They are the imprints of societies' interactions with their immediate and distant environment. They are the mirror of the impacts that cultures provoke on their heritage and which are in turn impacted by societal evolutions.

Culture is both a receptacle and a vector of mutations and metamorphoses.

Several dimensions of these effects and impacts raise today the persistent question of interrelations and interfaces between cultures and technologies. Digital, social networks, and artificial intelligence are the most active, most perplexing, and most distressing.

Without any pretense of delving into the etymological and epistemological meanders of the term "renaissances," we must concede it the merit of suggesting dynamism, momentum, and being a detector of horizons wide open to contrary winds.

The "expanded reproduction" (with a nod to a great philosopher) that this term suggests presupposes the mastery of fundamental foundations and their intelligent appropriation. They thus serve as launching pads for societal dreams and imaginaries toward the hoped-for collective better.

It is at the heart of the cultural dimension that this metamorphosis unfolds.

Three Levels of Articulation

1. The Collective Internal

At the collective level, a society that internalizes the culture of cultures as the crystallization of humanist principles, values of respect, justice, freedom, and solidarity, behaviors, lifestyles, to conceive, build, consolidate, maintain peace and well-being, is carried by this famous "renaissances." It is in phase with its virtuous flights. The inclusive mobilization that results projects society toward its social project in search of its harmony and prosperity to come.

2. The Individual

At the individual level, adequacy calls for this salutary movement that revolutionizes societies and emanates from individuals of a new kind. Citizenship, since that is what it is, is concomitant with rationality, respect for differences, adherence to diversity as a human substrate, and love of one's homeland as a component of a varied, complex but complementary world. Is it anything other than modernity? Assumed citizenship that carries confidence in oneself, in one's homeland through its cultures; languages, values, modes of thought, conception of the universe and its mysteries, and creations; is in intrinsic dialogue with other cultures. It is open, introspective, and eager to know others to confirm its doubts and aspirations in interactions with others, however different they may be.

3. The International

At the international level, serenity and shared citizenship favor and privilege living together with others. There can be no question of births or "re-births" when there is no Other (with a capital O) facing and opposite, in harmony but also in adversity.

Renaissances cannot rhyme with closure, lockdown, isolation, arrogance, ignorance, hatred, violence, and rejection of diversities. Renaissances are a hymn to diversity, sharing, knowledge and recognition of the near and the other, and to assumed and protected citizen freedom by law, justice, solidarity, and the demand for equity.

Three Conference Axes

1. Cultures and Heritage; what expressions of renaissances?
2. Collective Intelligence, Artificial Intelligences; what promises, what risks?
3. Strategic Questionings: expressions of announced renaissances?