Revolutionizing values in the anthropocene with Arendt and Marcuse

Resumo

The concept of the Anthropocene finds its origins in geology and assumes that humanity has become a geological force, changing the Earth’s environment in an unprecedented scale, blurring the dividing line between nature and society. This new understanding of the power of human beings is accompanied by the demand for a revolution in values capable of providing ways to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore the use of the notion of Anthropocene as the focal point of an understanding of the radically new character of the current situation by way of its approximation to Hannah Arendt’s notion of acting into nature, as well as to probe the critical analyses on value both of Arendt and Herbert Marcuse to provide a sketch of a possible way of dealing with the Anthropocene’s demand for a revolution in values.