LE DEVELOPPEMENT DURABLE : PRINCIPE D’UN NOUVEL HUMANISME EUROPEEN ?
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A NEW PRINCIPLE OF THE EUROPEAN HUMANISM?

Summary/Abstract: The sustainable development has to be an ethical and cultural purpose in order to become an economic and political project. It supposes a humanist trust in the human responsibility. But Europe lives nowadays a contradictory relationship in the humanism. Maybe the European humanism is partially forgotten and contains resources which can give to the idea of sustainable development ethical, cultural and spiritual foundations. It is the reason why it is possible to rediscover the humanistic Kantian cosmopolitanism in the light of two contemporary questioning. The overtaking of the ecology is essential for the Kantian morality, because its supreme end consists in the moral destination of the quite whole human race, for which the personal effort is not enough. According to Kant, there is “a duty of the mankind towards itself”: it has to contribute to the promotion of the supreme good, understood as the common supreme good of the whole mankind. So, the Kantian idea of sublimation of the ends of our action can be compared to the ontological theory of the responsibility for the other by Lévinas: in both cases, ethics became a supra-individual foundation of the action in the world.

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