Sustainable development and social progress: Retrieving the human

The present paper is concerned with tracing the genealogies of the concept of sustainable development in philosophy per se, comparing those genealogies with two important conceptions of rationality, i.e.; metaphysical rationality and instrumental rationality with its previous and contemporaneous developments on other intellectual fronts. The paper expounds the idea that sustainability implies more than the economics that follows therein. Rather, it includes the aspects like spiritual character and the ability to know and to act. The paper further considers the present circumstances that encourage a strong interest in instrumental rationality, which is the theoretical reason that subordinates nature and use it in an unsustainable way. Thus, the paper elucidates on the notion that the metaphysical understanding of the term ‘sustainable living’ enhances the quality of human life that implies the unfoldment of the human spirit. We must also include in our characterization the mental aspects of sustainable living such as the cognitive capacities and our activities of perceiving, imagining, reasoning, judging and deciding. Proponents of sustainable living aim to conduct their lives in manners that are consistent with sustainability, in natural balance and respectful of humanity's symbolic relationship with the Earth's natural ecology and cycles. Thus, we argue that a person's conception of good life, Sreyas rather than Preyas, is the basis upon which the meaning of sustainable living is based.