The cosmology of transformation as a new ethical-environmental paradigm in Leonardo Boff

Abstract

This work deals with the third phase of the production of the philosopher and theologian Leonardo Boff, located from 1990, characterized by its change to the ethical-ecological paradigm, or cosmology of transformation as an element of proposal of a world ethos, focusing on the context in which such change occurs. The proposal to create a world ethos will be explained in the works of the thinker Leonardo Boff,  in which the author advocates a minimum planetary consensus among humans, in order to combat not only the social injustices, historically defended by liberation theology, but expanding the struggle, by prioritizing the defense of all forms of life,  more precisely the defense of Mother Earth (Gaia) and its ecosystem, deciphering and combating the relationship of exploitation and degradation of the poorest and the environment. The study focuses on the context in which Leonardo Boff makes the shift to the ethical-ecological paradigm; in the analysis of what the ethical-ecological paradigm consists of Boff's thinking; and finally, in the essence of the ethical-ecological paradigm, which he will also call the Cosmology of Transformation, as a proposal of universal ethics, materialized mainly, according to him, in the proposals of the Earth Charter. As a methodology, we seek to analyze the works of Leonardo Boff, from the 1990s; briefly discuss the concept of paradigm; its first two phases of intellectual production are briefly addressed; we study the change to the ecological paradigm in Leonardo Boff's thinking; it is explained how liberation theology has been reformulated and expanded, unfolding and influencing the new ecological paradigm; the theoretical bases and influences as well as the characteristics of the new ecological paradigm in Leonardo Boff are observed. It is verified the presence of the two antagonistic ethical projects of contemporaneity, that is, the Western paradigm called by Boff of cosmology of domination, of linear anthropocentric characteristic, reductionist, based on instrumental reason, which submits nature and destroys it indiscriminately, in contrast to the new ecological paradigm, or cosmology of transformation, of holistic characteristic. The paths and practices of the current ecology are observed: environmental, political and social ecology, mental and integral. It also analyzes the ethics of essential care, poetically described in the fable-myth of care, which are embodied in the Earth Charter. It deepens in the various elements that will constitute its proposal of world ethos: (1) sustainability; (2) Boff's scathing criticism of the capitalist system; (3) the description of the incompatibility of capitalism and ecology; (4) Capitalism, which is self-destructive, suicidal, and may also be ecocidal and biocide; (5) its alternative to capitalism, ecosocialism, or "solar communism".

DOI: https://doi.org/10.56238/tfisdwv1-100