Ágape e liberdade: os fundamentos da espiritualidade laica de Luc Ferry

Abstract

For Luc Ferry the contemporaneity is characterized fundamentally as the era of love. According to the author, the secularization and the deconstruction process that happened in philosophy did not bequeath to man a society without foundations, not even a nihilistic pessimism. Instead, what is seem is a deification of the human being, through the appreciation of the other as the one who allows the man to come out of himself, and then, to exceed the subjective limits to expand his thoughts. This deification is a clear result of the appreciation of freedom, being this the divine spark in the human being. After all, freedom is characteristically what displaces man beyond all enabling determinisms to become himself then. In this way, what it is seen is a disruption, according to the author, to all the traditional ways of thinking and an overcoming of the religious and its seductions. The God-man is therefore the great accountable for the whole process of secularization: of both moral and love as well as of His own spirituality. In this context, it becomes visible a seemingly secular spirituality because, based on the secularized agape, it presents above all as a Christian spirituality, as it cannot disentangle itself from its own bases of influence of Christian love.