Translator: Antoni Martínez Riu

Only by putting the climate crisis at the center can the enlightened project be renewed

The legacy of the Lights is in crisis. Their blind trust in reason and technology is naïve in the face of the ecological emergency we are experiencing. Faced with this situation, there are many intellectuals who have chosen to seek alternatives to the Enlightenment, often traveling the dangerous paths of anti-rationalism or authoritarianism. However, should we discard the Enlightenment in its entirety? Is it a watertight, immovable, outdated project? Can one actualize, more than two hundred years later, a thought whose objective was the autonomy of the human being?

Corine Pelluchon lucidly addresses these questions to relaunch, in a context of eco-social collapse, the critical and emancipatory presuppositions of the original enlightenment movement, but purging anthropocentrism and adjusting it to the biophysical limits imposed by our planet. An absolute reason, which has become instrumental rationality, thus gives way to the humility of a thought that knows itself eco-dependent. This is, according to the author's bet, the only way to a democracy that respects nature.