André Gorz for thinking tomorrow
When I am asked to name alumni from my university who inspire me, one of my first choices is neither a celebrated tech entrepreneur nor a distinguished scientist, but André Gorz. In addition to having attended the same institution (forgive the anachronism), Gorz later lived in Vosnon, in my native region, and I had the pleasure of occasionally discussing his memory with my bookseller, who had been his friend. In this article, I do not intend to write a biography of Gorz (for that, I refer you to Willy Gianinazzi’s excellent work) nor do I claim to present his ideas exhaustively or faithfully. I humbly wish to share my own understanding of and attachment to his writings. I cannot conceal the fact that, having discovered him during my studies, I felt that our shared trajectory contained the promise that my future need not be determined solely by the technical path I had chosen.
At the heart of Gorz’s philosophy lies his engagement with the notion of the monde vécu, the “lifeworld” of phenomenological tradition. In his eyes, the ecological question could not be reduced to the scientific aspect. Its true origin resided in the texture of everyday experience, in the ways individuals perceive, inhabit, and seek to shape the world around them. In his essay L’écologie politique entre expertocratie et autolimitation, Gorz drew a distinction between the technical ecology of experts and the political ecology of lived experience. It expresses the desire of citizens not merely to survive within managed systems, but to live meaningfully within environments that they can understand and influence.
The expansion of excessively complex technologies often undermines this monde vécu. Here his thinking resonates with Ivan Illich’s critique of industrial society. Ordinary people forfeit autonomy when they are deprived of the capacity to repair, maintain, or comprehend the tools and systems that surround them. This estrangement reduces citizens to passive consumers, alienated from their environment and unable to exercise responsibility over their own conditions of life. For Gorz, the ecological question therefore became inseparable from the question of freedom.
From this perspective, he advanced the idea of autolimitation, which he conceived as both an ethical and a political project. Autolimitation does not simply mean accepting limits as an external imposition, but rather engaging in a collective definition of what it means to have “enough”, like a communicative action in Habermas terms. It is a conscious act of emancipation, through which individuals free themselves from the compulsion to consume without measure and from the tyranny of productivity that colonizes human time. At the same time, it becomes the foundation of a sustainable social future, one in which communities deliberately choose to live within planetary boundaries while seeking richer, more dignified forms of flourishing. This relationship between self-limitation and a more scientific understanding of ecological thinking is not unfamiliar to modern approaches such as that of the Shift Project. Gorz inspires that the true measure of progress lies not only in what we can produce, but in the quality of life we are able to shape for ourselves and for others.
Finally, I would just like to mention his work Lettre à D, which is one of the most touching declarations of love I have ever read. I will leave it to curious readers to discover it for themselves.
Source principale :
André Gorz (1977) Écologie et Politique
André Gorz (2019) Éloge du suffisant
André Gorz (2008) Lettre à D
Autres lectures :
Willy Gianinazzi (2019) André Gorz. Une vie