Chakrabarty wants to introduce “the planet” as a “humanist category.” I suppose “humanist categories” are those that organize our thoughts and discussions when we reflect upon our past, present, and future as human beings. He gives “the state” and “capital” as examples of categories like this (70), for good reason: to say that the planet is a “humanist category” is more than to say that it can be the object of human values and actions; it is to recognize in it a “dynamic ensemble of relationships” (70) in which the human is cast. Two of his claims on this point are, in my view, indisputable. The first is that “the planet” has already emerged as a humanist category in some important sense. As the planetary consequences of human activity increasingly force their way into our awareness, the category will become almost as familiar as “the state.” I say “almost” because Chakrabarty's second incontestable point is that “the planet” poses particular difficulties to the humanist imagination. There are many reasons for this, but he alludes to two: the inhuman scale of planetary time, and the planet's utter resistance to normative questions. “The planetary,” he says, “has nothing moral or ethical or normative about it” (90).
Chakrabarty draws on a range of thinkers to demonstrate, on the one hand, how some of us have understood our relationship to the earth or the planet, and on the other, how inadequate those understandings are to the future that faces us. Almost all his examples of thinking of the planet as a “humanist category” are negative ones. Now Chakrabarty avoids the cliché of laying the current crisis at the feet of value systems that are patently oriented toward extraction and consumption (whether we call them colonialist, capitalist, or whatever). Instead, he shows that the understanding of the planet that has emerged over the course of modernity—from Thomas Hobbes to Hannah Arendt—is in fact of what he calls “the globe,” the total but nevertheless limited space of human habitation, and is therefore a fundamentally anthropocentric concept.
If we have so far failed to conceive of “the planet” in contradistinction to “the globe,” it is not exclusively because of ideological distortion. And according to Chakrabarty, to the extent that we have been able to conceive of “the planet” at all, it is because of two things: the increasingly obvious irruption of “the planet” onto the earth where humans dwell, and, crucially, the accomplishments of modern science. It is the voices of scientists in Chakrabarty's book—Carl Sagan, James Lovelock, Wally Broecker, and many others—that advocate, explicitly or not, for the nonanthropocentric perspective that discloses the planet as a humanistic category. Traditional humanists would never have gotten there on their own, Chakrabarty seems to suggest.
This seems wrong to me, or at least overstated, if the overstatement is not my own. One very powerful example of planetary thinking in the book comes from Rohith Vemula's suicide note. Following Sagan, Vemula spoke of man as “a glorious thing made of stardust” (114) and it is precisely this aspect of man that modern society, with its collusion of capitalism, casteism, and electoral politics, denies. Vemula's perspective, from which one can “read together” the histories of human beings and their planetary home (68), immediately reminded me of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi provides, in my view, a positive example of how we humans can imagine ourselves as dwelling together on a planet. In “La Ginestra” (“Broom”) he reflects on the ruins of Pompeii, a bustling Roman city that was swallowed up by “the planet” in Chakrabarty's strict sense of the word—the flows of molten rock and metal usually contained under its surface. Some lines from that poem read:
Leopardi has no interest in denying human values and desires, but sees nature as utterly indifferent to them, and hence capable of disclosing their contingency and fragility.Footnote 2 By imagining how earth looks from “billions and billions” of light years away, as Sagan would say, he disassociates subjectivity from our terrestrial home, and achieves, in 1836, something like the planetary perspective that Chakrabarty suggests was unavailable until the later twentieth century. Leopardi's description of the destruction of Pompeii, like an apple falling carelessly onto an anthill,Footnote 3 anticipates Chakrabarty's critique of “mutuality,” the idea that man exists for nature and nature for man (184–86). As a corrective to mutuality, Leopardi's “carelessness” seems more promising than the Heideggerian idea of “striving” that Chakrabarty introduces (182). By invoking Leopardi as a humanist, I do not want to suggest that he was cut off from scientific thought: he was as much influenced by geologist James Hutton as Vemula was by Sagan. Leopardi made a radical attempt to draw out the human consequences of deep time, and in this respect differs profoundly from the thinkers whom Chakrabarty takes to represent one of the dominant strains in European thought toward the earth and the planet (72).
I am unqualified to read anything into the pattern of scientific references in Chakrabarty's book, but the pattern of humanistic references is bound to strike some readers as strange. Certainly Nazis are overrepresented: presumably not because they were Nazis, but because they were self-consciously “foundational” thinkers, who attempted to “get to the bottom of” the question of human existence (Heidegger) and political life (Schmitt). In this book, as in his previous work, Chakrabarty shows us how to “encounter together . . . disparate forms of thinking,” in this case “read[ing] together” the still-unconnected histories of the globe and the planet (68, 84). The world outside Europe appears, often in a critical role, but almost never as providing intellectual or moral resources for rethinking our relationship to the planet.
Chakrabarty poses the problem, although implicitly. On the one hand, there are Indians who were deeply influenced by European thought, such as Jawaharlal Nehru or Rabindranath Tagore, whose Hibbert Lectures (delivered in English at Oxford University) Chakrabarty discusses at some length. But even there, Tagore's views exemplify mutuality, a way of conceiving of our relationship to nature that is no longer tenable in the planetary age. On the other hand, there are Indians, like Narendra Modi, who at least claim, if they do not actually believe, that solutions for the world's hardest problems are easily found in Indian scriptures (110–11). If the planetary demands an “encountering together” of disparate forms of thought, how should we bring non-European traditions into this encounter?
There was a long debate in premodern India about the existence of the self. Of course most of us experience the self as a primary psychological and phenomenological category. But Buddhists insisted on not taking that experience at face value. They analyzed it into putatively more basic experiences that subsist in a diverse collection of states, capacities, and dispositions. Nor was this merely a semantic question, since, in some sense, Buddhists saw the dissolution of the self as a category as a prerequisite to liberation. Because it runs contrary to our everyday experience, the dissolution of the self needs to be practiced. In a discussion of remembering and forgetting, Vyōmaśiva, a Brahmin of the eighth century CE or so, notes that with repeated practice in “non-self,” the awareness of the self can be set aside. He argues at length for the reality of the self, but does not deny that, with a certain type of training, we might think “a feeling of hunger has arisen” instead of “I am hungry.”Footnote 4
This idea that we can train ourselves to experience truths that are more true than those of everyday life is widespread across Indian traditions. There is a family resemblance between these programs and the increasingly urgent calls to reimagine our relationship to the planet, some of which Chakrabarty discusses (e.g., Lovejoy's Gaia model) and some of which he does not (e.g., the renewed interest in Native American philosophies of nature). I am not proposing, like Modi, that a renewed study of Sanskrit texts will in itself set our relationship to the planet right; Chakrabarty's book argues powerfully that the planet itself is a modern category. What interests me is the possibility of converting knowledge into action by a thoroughgoing recalibration of the way we see ourselves and our environment.
Chakrabarty reflects calmly and systematically on issues that many of us cannot think about without panicking. But as it becomes increasingly clear that our knowledge about the climate crisis will not, in itself, lead to action—and clear to some of us that Enlightenment presuppositions about knowledge and power might be part of the problem—we might take a closer look at the concept of “training” (śikṣā). Training is supposed to allow us to overcome the limitations on our thinking, feeling, and acting that are imposed by the relatively circumscribed horizons of our biological and social existence. As Chakrabarty and many others have argued, the planetary age requires us to see things we cannot at present see, think of things we cannot currently think of, and organize ourselves politically in ways we never have.
Open access
