A Racionalidade e o Debate Ambiental Contemporâneo

Abstract

In the subtext of the contemporary environmental debate are hidden and restores values, beliefs and practices that can be characterized as expressions of rationality. In this context, the article proposes to rehearse answers for the following questions: what is reason? Is it possible to think an environmental rationality that is not centered on the market? Or, that does not serve as ideological legitimation of the society centered on the market? To this end, the first part reviews the origins of the classical concept of reason; in the second one, it explains the process of formation and consolidation of modern instrumental rationality and the marginalization of substantive rationality; in the third one, it rescues the reconstitution of rationality substantive as an objective possibility of expansion of spaces for human self-realization; in the fourth one, it makes visible some connections between human substantivity and environmental rationality; and finally, it concludes in part that environmental rationality, which is understood as an alternative rationality of production, cannot be centered on the market.