Gilles R Cadrin

Humankind Facing Itself Gilles R Cadrin

We humans, more than ever confronted with ourselves, what are we going to make of ourselves? The references founding our certainties and hopes have given way to uncertainty. We must thus seek a better version of ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as a species. We are urged to take the path of effort to reinvent ourselves. But to what end? Without an instruction manual, how can we make ourselves the successful object of our creation?Could it be that the answer lies in the question? The absence of an instruction manual forces us to go back to ourselves, inviting us to become our own reference, in other words, to become self-referent. Self-reference happens to be a process endowed with its own autonomy; it characterizes all that is living. By tracing the contours of this process and using it appropriately, we will discover the path to follow - and also the point of arrival, the latter being, for all intents and purposes, only a completed version of the path. This book is a transdisciplinary approach to the human being. The method consists of producing a matrix that represents the self-referential process in its simplest expression and using this tool to schematize various fields of human experience, from the individual to society. As soon as these various fields take on the color of self-referentiality, they, in turn, force the matrix to adjust and enrich itself with the particularities of the fields explored. Thus one obtains, by successive approximations, an image of the human being in the process of self-construction.