Turning night into day and day into an endless race: for a radical ecological ethics

Abstract

This paper is a description of a day lived in the shadow of the authentic danger that modern technique implies. It has taken us into a world that is merely functional, in which the forgetting of being leads to forgetting our own interiority. Rivero claims that a key phenomenon in this process is the loss of contact with nature, and this makes us forget the most essential references of our place in the world. These are dark times from which we can only be saved by our ability to think together with a certain sensibility towards the world that surrounds us; it is only the artistic experience that can bring us close to this salvation. To save the creative and artistic capacities of the human being by way of art leads into the possibility of extending a not functional view of the rest of the world. Thus, the world could cease being something that is there to be used, stored, consumed and thrown away, and become instead something that is there to be taken care of and respected.