Greece, from August 4th to 10th 2013.
School of Philosophy of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, University Campus, Zografos – Athens, Greece
António dos Santos Queirós Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
If every systematic philosophical construction is built on an intrinsic foundation, a fundamental intuition or attraction to the objective, the starting point of the philosophical renewal in the 20th century was the concept of environment and its supreme desideratum, the rational justification that allows environmental ethics to prevail over the advanced achievements of blind science and over socialist and liberal democracies, both responsible for generating the environmental crisis.
School of Philosophy of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, University Campus, Zografos – Athens, Greece
António dos Santos Queirós Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
From Bento de Espinoza (Benedict Spinoza) to Antero de Quental
If every systematic philosophical construction is built on an intrinsic foundation, a fundamental intuition or attraction to the objective, the starting point of the philosophical renewal in the 20th century was the concept of environment and its supreme desideratum, the rational justification that allows environmental ethics to prevail over the advanced achievements of blind science and over socialist and liberal democracies, both responsible for generating the environmental crisis.
Let’s go back to the capital
questions that Spinoza's work placed on the advent of our modernity: How to
think about the rational explanation of man’s existence and the universe? How
to adapt the philosophical thinking to the raison
d' être of everything that exists and how to transform spiritual life into
full understanding and peaceful enjoyment of life to its limits? Espinoza reply
"everything that doesn’t compete for the supreme human perfection must be
seen as useless" (Ethics) cost them the excommunio.
References
Action Plan for the Human
Environment. B.5. Development and Environment. United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
A/CONF.48/14/Rev.1 June 1972 Stockholm, Sweden
The philosophy of Nature, and later,
the Environmental philosophy, allowed building a new ontology as a critique to
anthropocentrism, a new epistemology, based on the critique of the
ethnocentrism and a new ethical theory, with a universal value and practical
content applicable to all the social fields.
As in the philosophy of Spinoza and
later of Antero de Quental, the fundamental impulses of the environmental
philosophy reflection were the ethical issues and the moral problems.
Since the publication of the pages
of Spinoza's Ethics, there are two juxtaposed conceptions of the world in
philosophy: the Universe of Imagination, dominated by an anthropomorphic
conception of God in the Aristotelian-scholastic continuity of world
representation, and the Universe of Reason, which, according to that philosopher, is the
manifestation of another concept of God, unique substance or Nature naturam naturantem and also the
intelligible reason intelligible, of Nature natura
naturata.
Spinoza's God, meaning the Substance
or Nature, is not the omniscient Being, omnipotent, creator and transcendent to
the world, all merciful, Lord of Heaven and of Hell and Supreme Doomsday
Punisher.
The fundamental intuition of
Espinoza, according to which God is Nature developing itself in accordance with
the laws that are intrinsically necessary corresponds to the last great
discoveries in Astrophysics and Cosmology according to the modern scientific
reason.
Hubert Reeves states that the
universe, which is not eternal and will be fifteen billion years old, is also
not static and continues its evolution from the primordial chaos, formless and
without organisation. The history of the universe is the story of the
growing complexity in the cosmic scale, a progressive structuring of the
cosmos, with its physical forces governed by strict and universal laws. Such laws already had, since the beginning, the ability to develop the
complexity, life and consciousness.
Therefore we return to the
"unknown land" and to the knowledge relativity, but not necessarily
to a theological explanation of the origin of the Universe and Life.
Under the sign of Antero de Quental
Philosophy, the "metaphysical
speculation", in the eyes of Antero, was a debtor of the amazing progress
of "natural sciences" and "organisation science" (social
sciences), dialectically, being science their foundation.
The roll of the human reason is to
fill the blank that the scientific view would leave the Universe in. Because
the human consciousness expresses itself throughout the process of development
of society and moral facts (the Law society and the "individual
Holiness" from Antero, that today is the environmental consciousness).
Following Antero and set against
common opinion, the general theory of evolution does not arise as a discovery
of natural sciences of this century, but rather as a result of philosophical
speculation: "… from the Renaissance, inside the fundamental
idea of nature. The dynamic way,
autonomous, realistic, of conceiving nature is what more radically
distinguishes the modern thinking from the old thinking... "
The
environmental reason
The principle of preservation of life, before man and earth before life
In the context of the world
environmental conference held in Stockholm, 1972, the principle of common home
emerged:"… man has two homelands, his own and the planet Earth"; the
principle of planetary Community and planetary solidarity establishing a new
international order (ethics) and the principle of planetary defense of life
before Humanism.
What today is dramatic, recognised
by the law of paleontology, which posits the irreversibility of evolution, is
the rhythm of the loss of biodiversity.
The extinction of homo
sapiens sapiens and species associated with our evolution, an imaginary
world of plants, microbes and insects, would unlikely rise again to the human
species or even to mammals. According to this perspective, the preservation of the
human being returns to the centre of environmental ethics, but, but, at the
same time, the biodiversity.
Nobody can imagine today what will be the link in the
life chain where the evolutionary leap will occur, as nobody dreamed before
that the grandfather of our human condition was an insignificant rodent that
survived the widespread extinction of dominant species at the end of the
Mesozoic Era.
The modern "environmentalist
reason" develops a new categorical imperative for human action, beyond the
Kant maximum forming individual acts with the principle of a universal law, a
new ethical framework, which derives from the need to configure the human
conduct within the limits that safeguard the continuity of life and its
diversity (Hans Jonas).
life, before man and earth before
life.
Unlike the common history of
philosophy, whose core problems are the human condition, the environmental
philosophy drives its thoughts to the raison
d ' être of the world and its phenomenology, without becoming a philosophy
against Man, because the nature of the Human being, the nature of all entities
and beings from the universe is the same "star dust".
The “ethical imperative of dignity” and the “imperative of perpetual peace", from Jorge de Sena
In this historical and environmental
context, humanity is confronted for the first time with the danger of its own
extinction, either as a result of environmental disaster, or as the tragic
outcome of a nuclear or biological war and pandemics financial crises on
multiple continents.
And it is here that new categorical
imperatives of Environmental Ethics arise again: First, “the ethical imperative
of dignity”, from Jorge de Sena, poet and philosopher:
“Believe me that no world, that
nothing or no one
is more worth than a life, or the
joy of having it.
This is what is the most important -
this joy.
Believe that the dignity they will
tell you so much about
is nothing but that joy that comes
from being alive and knowing that
anytime someone
is less alive or suffers or dies
so that one of you can resist a
little more
to the death that belongs to all and
will come.”
(Sena, J. Letter to my kids about the shootings of Goya)
Second, the ethical “imperative of
perpetual peace":
"In the strange fortune of
doom,
[...]
this strange fortune, from which light comes
oh just harmless powder, I pray
to myself not to lose the memory,
for you, always know how to remember
that everything is lost where peace
is lost,
and first of all freedom is lost.
(Sena, J. "Peace", Fidelity)
Perpetual peace and political ethics
Why must environmental ethics
prevail, over democratic and socialist politics, modern science and
international right? The ethical dimension of societies and modern State and its Governments may be
evaluated by the respect for the principles of political ethics, universal and
permanent, which recognise all individuals as citizens with two homelands,
their own and the Earth (United Nations Conference on the Environment,
Stockholm, 1972), to all human cultures a status of equality (critique of
ethnocentrism) and re-introducing the human community on the pyramid of life
and biodiversity without any status of domain or privilege (critique of
anthropocentrism).
The principle of citizenship or
dignity of its citizens(Jorge de Sena), applied together with the subordination
of the economy to the environmental ethics policy, determines the State's duty
to guarantee its citizens the right to peace, the right to work, the right to
education, the right to health and assistance in old age, the right to access
the justice, the right to the conservation of biodiversity and the right to
freedom, and yes, freedom is placed in this order, since it disappears with the
war and remains a smaller value without the job and other social rights. And
with the destruction of life diversity, human communities have no future.
The political philosophy that seems
to emerge from the perspective of the new environmental ethics, is the program
to a world where the primacy of ethics prevails over politics, that currently
adopts as single valid principle where means justify the ends; a world where
the primacy of ethics confront justice of class, that announces as the end of
history and the natural society order, the triumph of social exclusion; and a
world where the ethics triumph over History, bloody, of all civilizations.
The 20th century was the century of
the triumph of national and international rights of the human people and
nations. Our common civilization will not know their 22nd
century unless the 21st century becomes the century of environmental ethics.
The environmental philosophy build a
new ontology in criticism of anthropocentrism, but only their articulation with
a new epistemology, founded in criticism of ethnocentrism, could lead to a new
ethics universal theory
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New Yorker 16 June, (1962a). 38:35-40; 23 June, 31-36; 30 June, 35-42.
Carvalho, Joaquim de Carvalho. Evolução Espiritual de Antero, in Estudos sobre a Cultura Portuguesa do
Século XIX_ (I Antheriana.. Lisboa: Edit. Comunicação. (1991)
Dubos, René Les Dieux
de l’écologie, trad. fr.. Paris:
Librairie Arthème Fayard. ( 1973)
Espinosa, Bento. Ética. Demonstrada à maneira
dos geómetras. Parte I. De Deus. Introdução e Notas de Joaquim Carvalho. Atlântida Editora. Coimbra. (1960)
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press,
(1949) page 239
Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the
technological Age. Chicago. Chicago & London, The University of Chicago
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Lorenz, K. Die acht Todsünden der zivilisierten Manschheit. München/Zürich:
Piper. (1973)
Sena, Jorge. Carta a meus filhos, sobre os fuzilamentos de Goya. A Paz.
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(1989) page.87.
Reeves, Hubert. Les Dernières nouvelles du cosmos. Éditions du Seuil : Paris. (2002)
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