Fausto acorda no Antropoceno: onde estão os novos Filémon e Báucis?

Abstract

At the end of Goethe’s Faust II, Faust frees himself from the medieval heritage and assumes the role of colonizer and builder of a new world. This allows us to cross myth, reality and literature from the 16th century to the present days. In Latin America and Brazil, which Goethe came to admire through the eyes of his scientific counterparts, resides a potency of relationship between human being and nature that still continues on the periphery of the world. Successive governments have been following unsustainable models of depleting natural resources and exterminating “people who are in the way” – Goethe’s Philemon and Baucis. Stuck in these models, we are facing the last chance to see the nature/culture relational potency and inaugurate another way of acting in the world. What we propose is the idea that there may be in Latin America some of the Philemon and Baucis who will show this new way to the world.