This interview was conducted after Dipesh Chakrabarty gave the keynote to the conference “The Climate of Philosophy: The Ecological Crises as a Challenge for Philosophy and the History of Ideas” at the University of Wuppertal in November 2024, organized by Melanie Sehgal and Martin Mulsow. The conference discussed the challenges that the current planetary ecological crisis poses for the ways in which we tell, and today need to retell, the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. We resumed the vibrant conversation some months after the conference, picking up some of its threads and starting new ones. A German version of the interview will be published in Das Klima der Philosophie. Die ökologische Krise als Herausforderung der Philosophie- und Ideengeschichte (forthcoming). | Melanie Sehgal: In “The Climate of History: Four Theses” you speak of the “crash of your postcolonial train of thought” into the planetary environmental crisis. Could you describe how this crash happened? What made you realize that the climate crisis poses a problem for the humanities and your own work? Who or what brought the news? And how did you experience this crash? | Dipesh Chakrabarty: Let me take a step back and say a little bit about how I think. That’s not an egotistical question because I’m deeply interested in how disciplines think and train you to think. I came to history late in life, in my PhD years. I had done my undergraduate degree in science, in physics and geology. After majoring in physics, I went to business school as a failed Maoist and then became a historian. So I was always interested in this difference between how you would think as a physicist or a geologist and how you would think as a historian. The question What is history? has always been with me. Provincializing Europe was published twenty-five years ago, and a Portuguese journal, Ler História, recently wanted me to write something about the origins of this book. While working on that essay, I realized that, in my life, since the time I became a migrant, every book I’ve written or every project I’ve undertaken – they have all, each one of them, started, unselfconsciously, from a sense of loss | Think of Provincializing Europe. I was very comfortable in India with whatever Europe meant in our practical life. Europe was not thematized as an issue. Nobody ever said Karl Marx was European. It didn’t matter that he was European. Traffic lanes were a European invention. Driving on the left, as you do in India, is a European invention. Even fighting in any weather was a European invention because previously wars were always interrupted by weather. But this was not an issue. It’s only when I left India and moved to Australia and then to the US that the university systems – through the courses they offered and the research they hosted in the humanities – were much more aware of the fact that they were European institutions that had been grafted on lands that once belonged to indigenous nations. Besides, I realized that institutions and practices – that bore names such as democracy, the parliament, or, let’s say, elections – were visually different from the institutions that went by the same names in India. Thus I became more and more aware of something called Western or European civilization – there were indeed courses taught under that name – and I realized that, for all my Indian admiration for him, Marx was a European thinker after all, and that Europe as an element of my “Indian” life and identity was a problem to think about. But if I hadn’t left India this problem wouldn’t have come up. So, in some ways, at the origins of Provincializing Europe, there was a story of displacement and a loss of the familiar. I now think of the problem as migrancy as method. | My thinking about the climate question also came out of a sense of bereavement or mourning because the 2003 fires in Australia that eventually made me interested in anthropogenic climate change destroyed a lot of the nature spots around Canberra I had come to love. This love was part of how I tried to be at home in Australia. Calcutta had no “outdoors”. You had to look up to the sky to find nature, it was so built up. There are many outdoorsy sites in Australia that my Australian friends introduced me to. I realized that my love of those places was mediated by my Bengali romanticism about nature, which itself was in turn mediated by Bengali films and literature. But this was not all that different from what European settlers did. When you grow up in one place, and you go to another, you keep reimagining the place you’ve lost. That’s one way in which you invest in the new place. It’s displacement, it’s the loss that makes something an issue. I now realize that, for me, this has been a structure that has often repeated itself in my work. | Another thing to say is that because I came to history late, I was already interested in questions that are not necessarily historians’ questions. Through my undergraduate studies in physics and geology, I retained an interest in the history and functioning of the physical world. So, while during my PhD years I formally trained in the methods of humanist history, I had an interest in probing the limits of the discipline as it were, in understanding the many legitimate questions that lay beyond the purview of the methods of my discipline. So I was interested in seeing if the methods of recorded history – extremely useful in reconstructions of human pasts – could be pushed to address questions that maybe, properly speaking and in a disciplinary form, belonged to philosophy. In other words, I was by temperament both faithful to my disciplinary training and someone who strayed a bit. A dabbler. The initial dabbling, when I was doing Provincializing Europe, was through deconstruction and poststructuralism. That was in continuity with reading Marx’s philosophy and being interested in philosophical questions. A part of physics was also into philosophical questions. It’s only much later that I realized that Immanuel Kant spent a lot of his early career reading Isaac Newton and writing on gravitation. What happened with the climate question was that it actually took me back to my physics and geology days. Intellectually, it was truly exciting. It was a way of catching up with an older part of myself I had left behind, recuperating it. Autobiographically as well, my father was a teacher of physics and my mother was a teacher of literature. I was kind of putting them together. In a lot of ways, it was a very good experience. But it came out of its sense of loss, again, of a migrant, somebody who had learned to fall in love with a very different landscape through other images of landscapes. And climate-induced fires had destroyed those landscapes. | I went back to Australia soon after the fires and the sense of loss was visceral. The fires destroyed about three hundred houses in Canberra, and about thirty people died (which sounds small by Indian standards but not by Australian measures). When I went back to these spots I loved, they looked like scenes from Hollywood nightmare films like Mad Max (dir. George Miller, 1979). People dumped stolen cars right in front of those places. They were simply burnt metal by now. I asked my friends why the fires were so bad, and they said “climate change.” I hadn’t heard about climate change. Most historians hadn’t heard about climate change, even though the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change (IPCC) was already fifteen years old. Things were being written about climate change, but social scientists or humanists were not reading them, they were reading about globalization. I was late, but I was one of the first among the late comers to this question. | I began to read up on climate change. When geologists said humans had become a geological force, I had some sense of what a geological force is from my undergraduate years. I knew how metamorphic rocks were formed through intense heat, tremendous pressures, and so on. I knew how sedimentary rocks were formed. When I read that humans had become a geological force, I had some sense of the magnitude of what was being expressed. But force is also a physical concept. Humans being a “force” implies a very different kind of agency on their part, not what historians meant by agency. See, I came out of the late 1960s and the ’70s when the idea that everybody had agency was very prominent. Later on, I realized that agency was, for social scientists, the democratization of the classical idea of the hero. In a classical society, the hero was exceptional. In modern society, everybody has agency. Everybody is a little bit of a hero. That’s the kind of agency we talked about. Geological agency is something we’ve never, in writing history, thought about at all. To think of humans not as victims of geological forces like those released by an earthquake but as victims of themselves having become a geological agent – that was new! | Then I read a geophysicist say that with our numbers, technology and levels of consumption of the various resources the earth provided, we have a physical impact on the planet similar to that of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. So there’s a mental picture of ourselves with our numbers and technology being a thing or an object. This is a real contrast that with the kind of philosophical critique of thingification of humans, for instance. If you make somebody a slave, you make them into a thing, so in my social scientist thinking, being rendered into a thing was always something very bad. But here I was reading geologists saying: we have become a thing; we collectively have a physical impact. We can wipe out life. For me, that was a kind of shock and a flash of insight. Suddenly, I felt that whatever I was trained in, the historian’s method, which clearly separated geology from human history, was like the ground under my feet being taken away. And that came with a sense of disorientation but also, for me, with a tremendous sense of excitement. | Melanie: This is really interesting because it shows how important it is – especially, but not exclusively, in view of the climate question – to have a wider disciplinary training from the start, to not specialize too early. Because even if you were not an expert in physics or geology, your undergraduate training gave you an openness to hear the news of climate change. You also spoke, in a personal way, of a sense of writing against a background of loss. At our conference in Wuppertal, you spoke of the “loss of the givenness of the world” as a descriptor of our present in the Anthropocene. What does this “loss of the givenness of the world” entail? How do we feel it? | Dipesh: In India now with every flood, every landslide in the Himalayas, people are reminded, even by journalists, that the Himalayas are a young mountain and are still growing. There’s a geological fact that comes into everyday reporting, into geopolitical discussions of what’s happening to the Himalayas, like China and India making the Himalayas the most militarized mountain range in the world. The dangers of militarizing that mountain range, building roads, exploding dynamites and such, can’t be explained without talking about the instability of the mountain because it’s still growing. When you have to think about the age of a mountain, then that’s a symptom that the givenness of the world is gone. But that doesn’t mean that it has already entered your own consciousness, that you feel it. I was reading it as a symptom because most people don’t feel it. Most privileged, middle-class people don’t feel it. | Melanie: In Wuppertal, you also spoke about the importance of the disciplines to encounter the world, to open the door to the world. Are these two things connected – the general loss of the givenness of the world in the Anthropocene and the need for the disciplines, especially the humanities, to open themselves to the world in a new way? | Dipesh: Yes, they are connected. It came up at your conference, and I’ve been thinking since, What does it mean to encounter the world? In every language, there are expressions where the language is struggling with the failure to represent. One example, and this is a Wittgensteinian thought, is the feeling of pain inside your body. When the doctor asks you, What are you feeling?, you use words like cramp, or some other word, which will not be translatable. In every language, you have a different kind of word to explain what your stomach is experiencing. So the encounter with the world is actually at that point where your system of representation is under serious strain. When that happens to a discipline, that is when you need to read another discipline, to borrow their means of representation. Wittgenstein says, if a lion spoke to us, we would not understand what the lion was saying. And I think this is not true. We somewhat understand what the lion is saying. We somewhat understand what our dog is saying. The lion has some kind of thinking, from which I’m not totally separated. We communicate, however, imperfectly. Therefore, to encounter the world, as the world is always wrapped up for us in systems of representation, would mean to get to a point where your discipline suffers a crisis of its capacity to represent the world. That is when you would feel interested to stray into another discipline, to at least see how your discipline produces its internal blind spots. | Melanie: Like a diffraction? | Dipesh: Yes, like a diffraction, or using Paul de Man’s expression in Blindness and Insight (1971), I often think that a discipline is a combination of insight and blindness. Without blindness, you can’t have insights. But sometimes you get to a point where you think, now I need to dabble. | Melanie: What would that other discipline be for you? Geology, physics? | Dipesh: In the context of my work on climate change, it’s become geology, physics, evolutionary biology. But when I was writing Provincializing Europe, I got quite deeply into Martin Heidegger, through translation. There was one year when I used to read Heidegger every morning, I had two translations of Being and Time (1927), and I had five or six commentaries. Every morning, I’d get up and read both the translations and the commentaries, page by page, paragraph after paragraph. And I always liked the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation, which is more difficult than the one by Joan Stambaugh. Stambaugh was trying to make Heidegger English. Macquarrie and Robinson were struggling with Heidegger as a German. And at every point they were saying, okay, this translation is wrong, it doesn’t quite say it so in German. And that experience was extremely deep for me because I had gone to Heidegger to find the universal that I could anchor Provincializing Europe in; this is because Marx was not giving me that universal. The universal I was trying to find was that the human of phenomenology, the human you imagine after phenomenological reduction is a human that exists everywhere. Dasein is not modeled on a European human being. Dasein is modeled on human being in general. So I thought that the human being in general is the anchor of Provincializing Europe. Dasein was nonhistorical. Dasein was just given. Dasein has a sense of direction. Dasein’s basic moods contain boredom, the capacity of boredom. Later I read a book by a neurophysiologist on the history of the human brain. I learned that because the brain’s development is modular, the part of the brain where you feel boredom can be roughly dated. I realized then that what Heidegger treats as having no history, which is Dasein, actually has a deeper history because it’s only at a certain point in its history that the human brain becomes capable of experiencing boredom. That can be dated and therefore historicized. Even Dasein can be historicized. If you do evolutionary history, if you do geobiological history, your history becomes much longer. Even if Heidegger is resistant to historicizing, you can do a historicizing operation. | Martin Mulsow: I am currently working on a deep history of truth, that is, beginning the history of truth in deep time—not in the deep time of the planet, but in the deep time of the human species. Do you think that such a deepening of philosophical concepts from the age of human worlds and the global could help us to grasp the complex entanglements of the global and the planetary today? Would that be a perspective for a new history of ideas? | Dipesh: Two things. One is that, in animal studies, there’s this question, Do or can animals lie? If you agree that they lie, then you already see them as capable of making a distinction, however rudimentary, between truth and falsehood. In some experiments with chimps, they think they can be protoliars. If you think of a capability functionally, then one will often find that the function continues from one form of life to another. In humans, of course, the capacity to develop elaborate symbolic systems makes many things seem different and special to humans. The other notion of truth I was struggling with in spelling out the conceptual distinction between the planet and the globe was the debate that Quentin Meillassoux started between his understanding of truth and the Kantian understanding of truth. He was saying, if, as in Kant, you have the phenomenal and the noumenal together, and time and space are part of the apparatus with which you organize the thing that you’re looking at, you are being too subjective. This position was repeating the proposition that when we look outside of ourselves, we only see ourselves. And Meillassoux was trying to get out of it by going to geology. He considered the earliest rocks that were found in Western Australia, which were, I think, 4.2 billion years old, and from which they extrapolated that the planet must be about 4.5 billion years old. So his point was that even if there were no humans to make the statement that the planet was 4.2 billion years old, or 4.5, the planet would have still been 4.5 billion years old, in a sense. In other words, the proposition about, let’s say, there being gravitation, or even other some dark force, the stance in physics would be that this statement would be true, even if there were no humans to make the statement, that the apple would have fallen downwards even if there were no human theory of gravitation. Meillassoux was trying to make the point that certain things would have been true, even if there was nobody of my kind to say them in a human language. He called his own view “ancestrality”. Unlike in physics, in history, for instance, you would have a Viconian argument saying: We created the institutions, capitalism for instance, and we therefore know how they work. Thus, our statements are always encased in our assumptions about our institutions, our behavior, all of those things. So you could make a perfect Kantian proposition, even with Marxism. Meillassoux was trying to go beyond the subjectivism, which he called “correlationism”. I was channeling some of that in saying that while the globe was a category born of human-built technologies and institutions, the planet, i.e. the earth system of earth system science was something ancestral. Its truths were not dependent on human presence. If I see myself projected in the universe, there’s a kind of mutuality between me and the universe. I face the object and the object faces me. Whereas, Meillassouxs argument was really saying, there is no mutuality between me and the ancestral. The earth system is something of which we’re a product. We’re trying to find out its nature and this is an attempt to find a truth that is not centrally about ourselves. A truth that is not a human truth, even though you’re expressing it in human language. I found this tension extremely interesting and relevant as I was trying to express a measure of the nonmutuality between the earth system and us. The one-way street nature of the relationship, that it produced the oxygen for all forms of life, not just for us. And even without humans, this atmosphere would have been the same. In fact, it would have been less polluted but basically the same in a purer way if we hadn’t come along. The point of evolution is not us; we are not the culmination of the process; the earth was not looking for an animal with language to vouchsafe the question of being to that animal. Even Dasein has a specialness of the human built into its structure. By drawing a distinction between the globe and the planet, I was trying to get out of this constant supposition about us being special. Meillassoux’s debate interested me for that reason, because it was actually about the nature of truth, whether the truth is ultimately about ourselves, or whether truth is something that in spite of our effort to grasp it with our categories, escapes them. | Melanie: This idea that there are different kinds of truths in different disciplines brings me back to what you said about blindness being necessary for disciplines to see something in the first place. I’m wondering what that means for educational practices, because, in the current system, we’re putting students on a path towards specialization and professionalization from day one where they are taught to only consider and apprehend one kind of truth. | Dipesh: I think there’s always a lag between a problem becoming perceptible to everybody and people wanting to continue with what has profited them in the past. The bigger the ship is, the more difficult it is to turn it around. This goes back to appreciating how much we actually owe to fossil fuel, to our current energy systems, in being able to create things that make life enjoyable at least for the privileged. I think the deep problem is that we are facing multiple uncertainties, risks that are uncertain, because of their nonlinear nature. They’re not incrementally increasing at a steady rate that you can plan for. Technology, climate change, biodiversity loss are all nonlinear developments. If you have several nonlinear processes interacting with one another, it becomes a system that’s very hard to predict. If I speak to pension financial advisors about pension money and investments, they will hold many things constant in order to give me an advice that’s based on past experience. And most of their advice virtually ignores climate change. This system has been comfortable for us for so long, for the last 150 years. The education system is part of this. When you think of your child’s career, what will they be? You have to hold the world constant. | Melanie: He wants to be a fireman. | Dipesh: [Laughs] He’s very farsighted for a child of his age. There will be a lot of fires for him to deal with. I think our pedagogical systems are just catching up with the crisis. For instance, we have a climate and sustainability institute at the University of Chicago that is dominated by scientists and economists and policy people. Geoengineers are carrying out experiments on making the seas more alkaline because the seas are becoming acidic, by changing the composition of the seas. They also plan dimming the sunlight if needed as an emergency measure. But they do not yet study biodiversity in that institute even if the “engineering” they propose to carry out – admittedly as emergency measures – has significant impact on biodiversity. It is as though the way the institute has been structured is to forget the question of biodiversity or to treat it as a subject of less urgency. | I feel that education, right from school, should actually make people realize why biodiversity is important to sustaining life and sustaining our kinds of life and what kind of dangers we face if we destroy biodiversity. Once you take biodiversity into account, you don’t have to give up on technology, but you must ask: What kind of technology do I have to create? I think that is something that should inform everybody’s education. But for that to percolate and come into syllabi, it will take time. And so we lag behind. There will be a lag because the system we now have, the specialization system, has brought us a lot of benefits. | There is something else I wanted to raise with you in this conversation. The real division in human history, it now seems to me, is between post- and pre-antibiotic periods. Being and Time, for instance, was a pre-antibiotic book. Heideggerian ruminations about “Being towards death” come out of a historical period where people were far more aware of death, their awareness enabling certain views of heroism, battle, risk taking, all of those things that become almost impossible after we have antibiotics and longevity and infant deaths and maternal deaths go down. These are two different worlds. | We have made ourselves more and more comfortable by medical technology, biotechnology, other kinds of technologies in order to live long. With fossil fuels, our emotions have been retrained. That’s why I think we are facing a deep predicament. This is not something to be solved, for instance, by changing the political system. From a right-winger Bill Gates to a left-wing degrowth person, nobody wants to have shorter lives, nobody wants infants to die. That fundamentally shapes our sense of life. People migrate to societies that consume more energy per capita because their sense is that these societies – basically, the “developed” nations – will give them longer and more comfortable and more enjoyable lives than India might, where pollution reduces lifespan, even for middle class people. We have to acknowledge our investment in all this, independent of our beliefs in socialism or capitalism, to realize that this is what eventually makes it very, very hard to deal with the climate problem. Our lifestyles – I am speaking of the growing middle classes of the globe, of course – lock us into structures that we cognitively know are not good for us collectively. | Martin: We talk about longer lives and future generations and at the same time have to fear that maybe in fifty or sixty years or who knows when, a total collapse of our civilization could take place. This is such a contradiction. What consequences does the possibility of a complete collapse of our civilization have for our present lives, for the meaningfulness of our long-term projects? For when we engage with fundamental questions, we presuppose readers even in the more distant future (so to speak, a temporally extended community of discourse); yet this future is precisely what is at stake. How do you deal with this loss of futurity in your own work? | Dipesh: This is such an important question. It makes me sad thinking about it, for often I don’t know the answer. I’m writing – but for whom? But it’s partly existential. Writing is a way of thinking about and coping with the situation and disseminating the thought. But I have to accept the fact that there may indeed be a collapse of the civilization because globally the birthrate is falling; we do not know what may be the future of work (and therefore inequality), and there is, of course, climate change, biodiversity loss, and so on. My hope is that between now and when the crisis becomes so deep that we cannot ignore it, somewhere humans will learn, probably at some great cost, to change our thinking. We have a capacity to learn. But we learn something easily, cognitively; to live it out takes much more time. Here I’m dabbling again. But from everything I understand from evolutionary biology, short-termism is an evolved human trait. Just being focused on getting through today. And Short-termism is not a moral failure. It’s a deep desire to get through today and to deal with tomorrow when it comes. But at the same time, you’re making the tomorrow much worse by what you’re doing today. Climate change is not a morality tale. It’s a deep, deep predicament for us, members of the world’s growing consuming classes. See, if there were no climate change, we would have happily gone along with stories of industrialization, technologization, global mobility. We would have debated immigration and debated the right to move from one place to another. | I think what’s dead is a gift that Europe gave to other societies, and it was a very inspiring gift, the idea of a common future for humanity, whether it’s capitalism or democracy or socialism. Marx’s vision – from each according to their ability to each according to their needs – was a vision of such a harmonious society of plenitude where every inequality was voluntary and didn’t hurt you. That promise is gone. | Melanie: There is something optimistic, hopeful, at least not desperate or dark in your writing. How to retain hope, or at least sanity, while fully acknowledging the extent of the threat of climate change to so many life-forms, including our own? | Dipesh: Until now in my work, I’ve emphasized the oneness of the planet, the oneness of the earth system. And now I realize that what I also need to emphasize is the fact that to the degree the earth system is one; we cannot fix its problems. Humans are too much of a not-one-entity to address that problem. I think our recent history points in that direction. The earth system, because it’s the combination of geology and biology, doesn’t present itself everywhere in the same way. So for every problem you face, it has a planetary aspect, but we have to work out how the planetary presents itself in a particular context – in your locality, in your home, in your street, in the country. That freedom that arises from the planet also being not-one – while it is one at a certain level of abstraction – is not taken away. | But this freedom will be exercised within a world that is climate stressed. The more we fail democratically to address the question of the one planet, the more the IPCC processes and the Conference of the Parties (COP) discussions fail, the more you will have geoengineering and other techno fixes. Which is why it’s very important to actually create opportunities for our engineers to learn more about biodiversity so that they produce more directed and caring technologies. I think that’s part of the struggle. And that struggle will also have to do with acknowledging that the earth system is also diverse so that what you do with the Amazon forest will be different from what you do with the Himalayas. | Sometimes, when I have had the opportunity, I have said to Indian politicians: Do your geopolitics as you have to, but be informed by geology. | Melanie: And what do they say? | Dipesh: They understand intellectually what I’m saying, but they don’t see it as practical. Because the short-term question is: I always have to anticipate what my neighbors might do to me and be ready to face them. Politics is still geopolitical. Politics is not informed by geology, even at the global level. IPCC was trying to do that. And that’s failing because more powerful nations think that there’s something for them to win by letting the world drift into more crises. It’s going to be a more conflictual world within which we’ll learn to address both peace and the locality. But peace will require new kinds of training, thus the need to bring together, for example, technological training and biodiversity thinking, thinking about the conditions for the flourishing of not just our life but all other forms of life. | Melanie: What does that mean for emancipatory or liberational politics? If we acknowledge that the freedom we know and have strived for has been built with fossil fuels, as you point out, what does that mean for liberational politics in a climate stressed world? | Dipesh: You come back to the old question of how to marry our emancipatory dreams to principles of sustainability (that should include principles protecting the habitability of the planet). You have to reimagine development; you have to reimagine infrastructure and not pursue wasteful consumption. Today’s world is stressed in part by the existence of a class of super-rich people who want to dominate the world and human futures by linking up with populist, authoritarian politicians. There was a time when, realizing the problems that ailed Soviet type socialism, people used to think of different kinds of social democracy as a helpful middle ground between untamed and wild capitalism and the so-called socialist repressive societies. But since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the world has developed a wild unhinged capitalism that has left us with human futures defined by three major uncertainties: climate change with its attendant problems of biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and human suffering and displacement; AI and other technological developments that make the future of stable employment uncertain; the globally falling birthrate for humans that, combined with most humans shifting to cities, make us an urban and aging species. We clearly need to move away from current models of capitalism, but it is very difficult to do while our polities become less democratic. The problem here is practical and political. I often feel that those who speak of degrowth, local supply chains for food, and so on are right in principle, but we don’t know how to ramp off to those alternative futures. No nation would want to risk such futures on its own. We come back to a collective action problem. I don’t feel optimistic in this situation, but I have hope. Optimism is a matter of rational calculation. To hope is human. Humans are facing a predicament and we don’t know how we’re going to solve it. But I also think it’s a developing, evolving situation. In fifteen years, people will think differently to the way that I’m thinking today. The urgency will be different, and maybe what doesn’t work now will work then, in a more climate-stressed world. Maybe becoming an aging species in the coming decades will create some new opportunities and new ways of thinking for us. This is really an evolving problem. Many elements in the conversation we have today will date in some ten or fifteen years. As this crisis looms larger, I think humans will think and try harder. My sense of hope comes out of that thought. Humans learn, albeit slowly sometimes. | Martin: If we look at this climate stressed world, and if we’re really going towards a climate Leviathan – fortresses of civilized people defending themselves against migrants and all that – and if this sense of multiple modernities changes, then we see different civilizations handling this much more stressed world differently. | Dipesh: I think that we have the sense that the futures we worked for are not there. As Karl Löwith says in Meaning in History (1949), there was once a European and a secular-Christian project of imagining paradise on earth. If such a paradise is not providentially guaranteed, then questions of human unity and humanism will have to be a much more matters of political will, creativity, and judgment. And one of the conditions for that is that humans, as Kant puts it, are given enough time. | Martin: Which we don’t have. | Dipesh: The assumption in the middle of the twentieth century was: we do. But we don’t have that kind of time. So depending on how that pressure of urgency will work through human politics, it can both divide human beings, but it can similarly give rise, however falteringly, to new ideas about human futures and some kind of global governance – not a Climate Leviathan that you just mentioned. But I agree that the current US government seems to be moving towards a more conflicted and unequal world. | Going back to your question about emancipatory politics: it seems to me what we need to give up are the inherited paradise-like images of the future. These futures are only to struggle for. Will we ever abolish wars and massacres? I have no reason to think that we will. But, surely, we can build systems and processes that make them less likely. We need a world in which humans feel more secure and less stressed. | Melanie: How can we reframe our very idea of freedom? Detach it from fossil fuels? | Dipesh: By imagining it on different scales. At the moment, for retirees of my generation in India, a huge freedom is freedom of movement, which means flying: flying to see their grandchildren, flying to see new countries. They have a lot of disposable income in retirement, and they spend some of it by traveling. A huge part of the airlines market now, of the consumers, is my generation. But flying is not good for the planet. I am not blaming these people. The global middle class is literally global. We live on larger scales. | What we have not thought about in history is what scale does to things. Take the question of prejudice. All societies have prejudice. All societies have members who don’t like people who seem different. But what the Europeans did by taking slaves from one part of the world to another by the millions was to transform everyday prejudice into a hardened structure of race and racism. We all live with prejudice in everyday life. But what Europeans did was to expand the scale of the world to a kind of planetary scale, and that magnified the impact of many instincts that humans have. I think scale has a lot to do with our possibilities and predicaments. | Melanie: There’s a sense in current discourse that it’s basically the entire Western cosmology that somehow proved itself to be wrong once it crashed into the planetary. As a framework, as an ontology or spiritual framework even, Western ways have come to their limits. | Dipesh: That’s true. But the West was also once Indigenous (let’s say, hunters and gatherers) and then, as in many other places, evolved into peasant societies. Indigenous peoples and peasants think of things being interrelated in this world. And they are. But (Western) science also relates things to one another. What is gravitation but a relation between objects? How would James Lovelock come to the idea of Gaia and talk about things being interrelated in the same way that Indigenous people sometimes talk about things being interrelated? The idea of Gaia resulted from a moment of creative/poetic insight, but that’s the kind of insight scientists and engineers often have as part of the thinking that leads to great discoveries. It is part of the scientific imagination. Sometimes we criticize science overlooking the fact that scientific practices require a lot of imagination (sometimes expressed in numbers or formulae). Even technology, Western technology, can function as a critique of its own functioning. It sometimes helps us to catch up with the damage that the same technology does. So think of the irony of actually boring in polarized caps to find ancient air bubbles and therefore being able to say that this warming is unusual for the last 800,000 years. But you wouldn’t have been able to bore without the gas industry already having produced the technology necessary for it. The real problem, I think, happens when technology or what I’ll call an “engineering approach to the world” makes us temporarily forget that we live, in the final judgment, at the mercy of the planet and of its interactive processes. We cannot be what Clive Hamilton once called – with a touch of irony – “earthmasters.” For a long time, humans used to look at the sky to pray for rain and sun and air and wind and for the trade winds to come at the right time. Somewhere along the way, with the coming of railways, metalled roads, irrigation, and irrigation pumps, we turned away from the sky and became more focused on land and what we could do here. And the sky became a matter of aesthetics as it were (like saying, it’s a nice day, beautiful day, and so forth). There was a marginalization of sky, seasons, weather, all of those things. But we woke up in the 1980s very rudely to the fact of there having been a hole in the ozone layer. We had forgotten about the importance of the skies, and we had fallen in love with technology that was called all-weather. So basically, our cultures of technology produced a collective hubris and marginalized seasons, weather, which are the usual intimations of planetarity in human life. I often think of it as a movement in human history whereby humans moved their once-upturned faces praying to the sky for rain and sunshine downwards to be more focused on managing the earth, forgetting the life-and-death importance of the skies, the clouds, and all that connects the up there with what’s down below. The fourfold that Heidegger talks about, that we live in – one of the four is the sky. The crisis reminds us that a lot of stuff happens in the skies. But what woke us up was a hole in the ozone layer and the fact of there being too many carbon dioxide molecules in there. And we realized again that the sky is related to the earth. The water on and in the earth goes up and comes down, creates the hydrological cycles. And we’re part of that; we have to be embedded in that system. We had come to think that we had somehow made us free of that system, and the system has reminded us rudely that we’re not. | Melanie: You have used the expression infrastructures of forgetting. I think that is a really beautiful expression because it points to the fact that forgetting is not just something that happens, but there’s constant work to do in order to forget. Iwona Janicka, for example, claims that we need to reclaim grand narratives because Western frameworks that have globalized and universalized themselves very successfully have to confront what they purposefully forgot, what you call planetarity. So we need different frameworks and new narratives in order to supplant these modes of thinking. | Dipesh: Another thing we realize through the crisis is that we are a minority form of life,that’s now impacting other forms of life badly. In political thought, there’s a lot said about thinking from the position of being minor. Particularly in the Jewish tradition. Hannah Arendt’s essays on the Jewish question clearly were being written from a minority position. How do we actually think about being a minority form of life where the majority forms of life are microbial? That’s a philosophical point. But how do we translate it into our existence? | It does mean, for one thing, not having global agriculture. The problem right at the moment is that if you don’t use artificial fertilizers to produce the food we need, according to Vaclav Smil, 40 percent of humanity will go without food. We are so dependent on what I called the infrastructure of forgetting. So there has to be a transition to a moment when we actually live like a minor form of life, but we can’t do that without changing our food habits or reduce the huge amount of plane travel. Lives became global, my kind of middle-class lives, in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. I literally live in the fear of another pandemic separating me from my family, which means that all this connectivity, all this migration and globalization happened by ignoring the data on frequency of pandemics rising or potential pandemics happening. Or think about migrant laborers – caught between and inside nations – during the pandemic. How do we get back to formations where we are a little more fragmented, a little more separated, but maybe connected through some essential services. But that would need a kind of global governance agreement. That would be a peaceful project of transition. But capitalism has extended itself at every point by making things addictive. Tobacco, salt, sugar, opium, all of these things that we know about from history. And now technology itself has become addictive. Social media, completely addictive. It produces echo chambers. And there’s a small section of hugely powerful people behind it. But if you suddenly banned social media, the young people would revolt in the name of freedom, of information, and related things. Even knowing that social media spreads lies, they would rather have that than lying authoritarian governments. So it’s a very difficult question. But philosophically, I think we need to go over to a different social system, which can even be capitalist but of not such an exhausting and exhaustive type. | Melanie: Do you see a role for the humanities to play in this larger discussion? | Dipesh: Yes, because we’re talking about changing values. But it’s only by engaging other disciplines. For instance, if you want to feed everybody bananas, then you find that there are only two varieties of bananas you can globalize. The other varieties don’t globalize, which means you make the genetic pool shrink, so bananas become more vulnerable to diseases. | There’s an evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire (2025). One of the points he makes, which is interesting, is that all humans, because of certain accidents in our history, there having been some bottlenecks in our genetic history and with the gene pool shrinking, are genetically very similar or uniform. So skin color is a very superficial difference between human beings. Now, as a humanities person, I would welcome this discovery and say, yeah, we’re all the same, great! But as a biological thinker, Gee points out that this puts us at a disadvantage because if we were to face a crisis of existence, natural selection would not have a diversity of a genes to play around with. So something that looks like a wonderful discovery from a humanities point of view may seem quite dangerous if you think of it as an evolutionary biologist. | The reason why I’m smiling as I say this is that there’s certain joy in discovering these disciplinary differences. The question of truth sometimes has a parallax built into it: things look from different points of view. For this reason, history is not a morality tale. It’s not like a bunch of really bad human beings brought us to this point and getting rid of them now would fix the problem. Rising numbers of humans have enjoyed the forgetting of the planet that our technological advances enabled. We have enjoyed our flourishing. If you told retirees from India, just traveling places because they have money to burn, that flying had no benefits for the air, they would simply ignore it because, they would say to themselves, “I’ll be gone in ten years; the world can deal with itself.” There’s this peculiarly human sense of time at work here, the temporal structure of Dasein that Heidegger wrote about. That hasn’t gone away. It is very hard to feel the urgency today that people who’ll be in their fifties in thirty years’ time might feel. I don’t know about Germany, but here in the US young people already have the feeling that they may not have it so good as their parents did. I think they’re developing a different mindset, and maybe they’ll discuss different things and learn from some. Going back to Martin’s question about who we write for, I still believe that there will be a readership for at least another fifty years. But I don’t know if you’ll have an Aristotle produced today that you’ll read thousands of years hence. | The other thing I want to raise is the question of weighing justice versus survival. If you look at the history of life in general, survival is a more key category for life, for any form of life, than justice. And our own life form is not based on any cosmic justice. In our terms, it’s based on cosmic injustice in that when the air had the share of oxygen that was good for us, a lot of nitrogen- fixing forms of life either died or got pushed underground. And without that kind of murderous development, we would not exist. But at the same time, we are creatures for whom justice is very important, even if we’re not very good at giving it, but we’re very keen on demanding it. I raise that question in the context of many friends saying that climate justice is the only issue. Climate survival may become as important an issue, and how to combine justice with survival will be critical. But unfortunately, in the humanities, we think more about justice. We think of John Rawls. We need a Rawls for survival. We need a philosopher of survival who can then make survival speak to questions of justice and the relationship between the two. | Martin: But not a Thomas Hobbes of survival, a Rawls. | Dipesh: Yes! There are far more books on justice in the humanities. Whereas survival is something that evolutionary biologists think about. But the separation seems wrong. | Melanie: It’s one of the bifurcations that have marked our disciplines. | Dipesh: That’s why we need to place ourselves not only in the history of social life but also in the history of life to understand that we’re a minor form of life and that we came about because a murderous event happened in the history of life. As the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari says, we are the greatest predators on earth. Changing the food industry means we have to stop industrializing the lives of animals, birds, fish, all of those things, which really means a relatively less connected world. But on the other hand, we need to have connections on the question of mutual advantage and disadvantage. For instance, without connections, how would we bring medicine from one part of the world to another? You need to keep some of this destructive technology. Refrigeration is not good for the planet, but without refrigerated container ships, we won’t be able to sell, store, or transport medicine. The problem is the we. To produce the we is the real problem because evolution makes us a not-we. | Melanie: The question of belonging is also in there, right? It’s the question of being connected to certain, specific places – and to reconnect the land that we live on and the land that we live off as Bruno Latour and Pierre Charbonnier put it. | Dipesh: Vaclav Smil says that four items have become absolutely essential for us: plastics, cement, ammonia, and steel. The use of fossil fuel is almost compulsory as of now in the production of all of them all. I don’t think we can do without fossil fuel. We’ll need some of the technology, sequestering carbon dioxide, all of those things. But what I envision as a rational system is something not globalized but connected minimally. But for that to function, you need a global governance. And the real problem there is the we question: How do you trust the people who are running the global government? What makes you think they’re actually speaking for you? How do we arrive at a global government? While working on that problem, I think we need to work on local problems and local solutions and ask that question: How does the planet, the earth system, present itself on a scale with which I’m capable of engaging? And make that a constant question we have to learn to live with. | Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His “Questions Concerning Longevity” is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry. | Martin Mulsow is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Erfurt and Director of the Gotha Research Center. | Melanie Sehgal is s Professor of Philosophy and Director of Research at the Institute for Basic Research into the History of Philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. | |
