Reversibility in 299 words

"Reversibility" centres on the critical reflection on the modernist belief of universal human reason and its political manifestation in technological and instrumental (re-)producibility of the human and natural world as well as in the belief of unlimited economic growth, causing irreversible harm to the environment and the planet. Against the modern ‘pointed Self’, re-versibility suggests intellectual and practical self-restraint in the face of always looming uncer-tainty and unpredictability of action consequences. Responsible political action must act only in such a way that its consequences are reversible, or at least non-irreversible. If consequences can neither be predicted, nor controlled, nor contained, and consequences are always inad-vertently harmful for further generations or directly harmful for an incalculable amount of people, then policies must be enacted and designed in such a way that they trigger only conse-quences that can be reversed; or that are simply discontinued when harmful and irreversible consequences begin to unfold.

Reversibility is philosophically grounded in the triangulation of "perspectivity" and "ne-gation" (including non-linearity) with "noesis" and develops self-restraint as normative con-cept of policy analysis and policy making. This raises the question ‘But when and how do we know that a policy is irreversible, precisely because consequences are unpredictable after all?’ as well as the problem of normative policy prescriptions that cause conflict in a world of pers-pectivity and refutation. The principle of triangulation of perspectivity, negation, and noesis resonds to these concerns: An intellectual position and an action/policy are then irreversible when they undermine and violate their own conditions of perspectivity and negation. Respon-sible political action accounts for its own conditions. Thus, reversibility provides normative guidelines for acting under conditions of contingency and uncertainty without prescribing the content of politics, but rather judges policies acording to their faithfulness to their own con-ditions

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