Alterity and Responsible Act in Bakhtin and Lévinas: Contributions to Environmental Education Inspired by the Ethical Infinite

Abstract

The environmental crisis requires a critical reflection concerning the assumptions that guide modern Western society. In abandoning the conception of Nature as an organic and self-determined form of life, and thus conceiving it as an object of domination, Nature is thus subtracted from ethical relationships. The approach that inspires our understanding of ethical crisis in this paper discusses how the categories of responsible act and alterity in Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Lévinas, respectively, can surpass the relationship human-to-human, reaching new ways of responsibility that could include the relationship between human to the other non-human, which is also recreated by culture. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to contribute to the field of environmental education through an approximation of the concept of Nature to the core sense of alterity/difference inherent to the responsible act towards the ideal of ethical infinite. Nature must be placed as an Other that should go further beyond domination/servitude grammars.