Anthroposapience of Life: Aspects of Environmental Rationality in the Face of the Planetary Civilizational Crisis

Abstract

The socio-environmental crisis that threatens the planet has opened a new inquiry in the fields of anthropology and political ecology about the criticality of the state of the world in the face of the ecological collapse of the planet. Anthropology must question humankind's possible knowledge about the conditions for life and its own human condition in order to take responsibility for the destiny of life on Earth. Nowadays, the crucial question to answer is how to follow the path towards a sustainable world before the collapse of life produced by the rationality of enlightenment of reason, by the scientific way of knowing of reality and the capitalist mode of production of the world. But, also about the ways of understanding the unconscious drives that mobilize the practices of appropriation and transformation of nature: to learn to inhabit the planet under the conditions for life. This opens a new inquiry about the traditional imaginaries of life of the peoples of the earth, who have the sensibility of being part of nature and building their worlds within the immanence of life. 

The philosophical category of environmental rationality intends to rescue the sense of reason in the way to contest the theoretical and instrumental rationality of capitalism, to deconstruct the techno-economic rationality that destroys life, in order to reorient human sciences to think the historical transition toward the sustainability of life.