Achieving concrete utopia through knowledge, ethics and transformative learning

ABSTRACT

Roy Bhaskar's concrete utopianism assumes that a key role for intellectuals, given the current precarious situation of humanity, is the envisaging of alternative possible futures, coherently grounded in the deep structure of what already exists, which includes what people already know and have. Without this grounding, people will not be able to make a persuasive case for change. With this grounding, and by combining the realism of the intellect with the optimism of the will, they may be able to usher in a future of which the youthful Marx said ‘the world has long since dreamed’. This paper is both motivated by Bhaskar's position, and takes it as its starting point. I therefore begin by presenting three scenarios for the world's future, which I take to be real possibilities. I consider which of these possibilities would be worth striving for, and in so doing, I introduce a strategy that I take to be a means to that end. Specifically, this strategy involves harmonizing interventions with critical realist eco-philosophical ambitions. I argue that such interventions should therefore have an interdisciplinary framework, be dedicated to an ethics of dialogue and care, and be directed by dialectical (transformative) change and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Concrete utopianism
• knowledge
• interdisciplinarity
• ethics
• transformative learning
• ecoliteracy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Leigh Price for her detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Trond Gansmo Jakobsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3025-9705

Notes on Contributor

Trond Gansmo Jakobsen is a Professor in Philosophy at Innland Norway University of Applied Science, Lillehammer, Norway. Email: [email protected]