Dialectic as a Therapy Against the Modern Ignorance That Produces Planetary Crises

This chapter introduces the three interrelated concepts addressed by this book – nature, sustainability and future. I posit that modern society has very narrow definitions of these concepts and that this is partly cause and partly consequence of the current planetary crises. ‘Healing’, I propose, should come from a multiactor and multispecies global dialogue, in a dialectic process in the Platonic sense: a therapy to the soul that leads to knowledge, overcoming pathological ignorance. My central argument, here and across the book, is that to overcome this harmful ignorance, society must resort to dialogues that approach nature, sustainability and future with enough openness to learn from new experiences and remember old ones, even if and when differences emerge. When such openness is overtaken by hegemonic blueprint precision, metaphors emerge as an expression of resistance and an attempt for dialogue. Thus, I argue that ‘Gaia’, ‘regeneration’, ‘planetary well-being’ and ‘futures’ (in plural) are metaphors that challenge, provide alternatives to the concepts abducted by modern hegemonies and, ultimately, reopen the perspectives of the original concepts in a dialectic fashion. This argument is built upon Hans Blumenberg’s theory of non-conceptuality, Henri Bergson’s ideas on time and concepts, Robert Proctor’s ‘agnotology’ (the study of culturally induced ignorance) and Plato’s dialectics.