any proposal for a planetary wisdom must honor and integrate the hard-won accomplishments of modernity. Corresponding to the general moment of difference, these include the sociopolitical ideal of freedom (however difficult in practice it might be to implement, and even to define in unambiguous terms), as well as the cumulative (if partial and sometimes misleading) revelation of the nature of the cosmos through science and technology. A planetary wisdom, therefore, will not involve a wholesale repudiation of modernity and a literal return to origins, but rather (recall Hegel’s notion of
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