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The Planet: An Emergent Matter of Spiritual Concern?

In earth system science, humans are not the protagonist of the story.

By Dipesh Chakrabarty

Martin Heidegger, who, for all his personal and political failings, remains a teacher for those who think about fundamental questions of human existence, once pronounced the word “planet” as being of no interest to philosophers. When he introduced “earth” as a philosophical category, he distinguished it carefully from the “planet.” “What this word [earth] says,” he wrote in 1936, “is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet.” “Earth,” he explained, is that which made life possible. It was the ground for humans’ attempt to dwell: “Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world.”1 Or, as he put it in another essay: “Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal.”2 Heidegger thus posited a relationship of mutuality between the individual human and the earth. Every time we look at it, the earth rises up to greet humans. Heidegger wrote: “We come and stand facing a tree, before it, and the tree faces, meets us. Which one is meeting here? The tree, or we? Or both? Or neither? We come and—just as we are, and not merely with our head or our consciousness—facing the tree in bloom, and the tree faces, meets us as the tree it is.”3

Heidegger’s turn toward philosophizing the earth produced a minor intellectual tumult among his followers. In an essay titled “The Truth of the Work of Art,” published in 1960, Hans-Georg Gadamer remembered what “a new and startling thing” it was to have the category “earth” thus introduced as a foil to Heidegger’s concept of the “world.”4 Human worlds and the earth are in a relationship of strife and are yet mutually bonded. “World and earth are essentially different from one another,” writes Heidegger, “and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and the earth juts through the world. . . . The opposition of world and earth is a striving.”5 The word “striving,” with its connection, in English, to the word “strife,” acts as a reminder that the relationship of mutuality between individual humans and the earth was not one of harmony and would include moments of what Heidegger—and Kierkegaard before him—would call anxiety.

I begin with this relationship because it seems to me that Heidegger gives us a basic structure within which religious and/or spiritual experience can take its place: the relationship of mutuality between individual humans and what Heidegger calls the earth. I am using the word “mutual” in its fourteenth- to fifteenth-century meaning of “reciprocally given and received,” and not in its later seventeenth-century meaning of “[held or experienced in] common,” as may be found in the expressions “mutual society” or “mutual funds.”6

The earth/world distinction and the earth/planet distinction cut in different ways for Heidegger’s readers today. We cannot help but be influenced by decades of scientific research that have deepened our understanding of the intertwined physical and biological phenomena that shape Earth. By “planet,” I therefore refer to what is called the “earth system” by the practitioners of earth system science, the interdisciplinary science that sees the planet’s biology, geology, physics and chemistry producing a dynamic system sustaining complex life. This planet, the earth system, I will argue, has emerged as an impossible matter of ethico-spiritual concern for humans. The reasons for choosing this particular understanding of the planet will, I hope, become clear in the course of this essay.

If Heidegger’s earth/world distinction helped him formulate his ideas on human dwelling and the mutuality of humans and the earth, his earth/planet distinction, by contrast, roughly maps onto the distinction that some earth system scientists make between the zone of the planet, the biosphere, that is critical to the maintenance of life—the “critical zone,” as it is called—and the rocky, hot, and molten interior of the planet.7 Throughout their history, humans have encountered the planet—deep earth—empirically, through earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, without necessarily engaging it as a category in humanist thought. They have—as shown by Voltaire’s debate with the dead Leibnitz after the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon or by Gandhi’s with Tagore after the 1934 earthquake in Bihar—dealt with the “planet” without having to call it by that name.8 The planet was instead folded into human debates about morality, theodicy, and, more recently, into the idea of “natural disaster.”9 True, modern Europeans discovered “deep time” in the eighteenth century—the time of geology—and yet modernity has been about forgetting this deep time, or simply treating it as a background to human dwelling on the planet. Events of deep time do not affect that time of mutuality between the earth and humans.

Staying with Heidegger’s language, we can say that the harder we work the earth in our increasing quest for profit and power, the more we encounter the planet. The “planet” emerged from the project of globalization, from the “destructive” and futile project of human mastery (what Heidegger would call “impotence of will”).10 The planet is neither the globe nor the world, and definitely not the earth. These are all categories that, in various ways, belong to the structure of mutuality. The planet is different. We cannot place it in a communicative relationship to humans. It does not as such address itself to humans. As our civilization ever more overbalances natural cycles and processes, this impersonality becomes ever more clear. How do humans—finite and individual humans—face the planetary, this “earth system” that, unlike the earth, does not rise up to embrace us within a perceived relationship of mutuality?11

Can humans experience their individual, finite, and singular lives today without facing the destruction of life that human activity is causing? Life here must be taken as a collectivity, as a metaphysical indefinable category, often understood as the point at which chemistry passes into biology, something that has in deep time passed through a variety of forms, from microbe to megafauna, allowing us to make statements of the order: “life has survived five great extinctions so far, and now faces a sixth.”

 

Spirituality is not identical with mutuality, but it is deeply related to the structure of mutuality within which arises the possibility of religious/spiritual experiences. A passage from Martin Hägglund’s recent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom—a book that stridently argues against religion—will illustrate what I have in mind:

One late summer afternoon, I am sitting on top of a mountain in northern Sweden. The ocean below me is calm and stretches towards an open horizon. There is no other human being in sight and barely a sound can be heard. Only a seagull is gliding on the wind. Like so many times before [my emphasis], I find it mesmerizing to follow a seagull as it hovers in the air and lingers over the landscape. For as long as I can remember, seagulls have been a part of my life. . . . Yet I have never encountered a seagull the way it happens this afternoon. As the seagull stretches its wings and turns toward an adjacent mountain, I try to imagine how the wind may feel and how the landscape may appear for the seagull.12

Of course, Hägglund quickly acknowledges that he will “never know what it is like to be a seagull.” Yet, in Hägglund’s mind, this solitary encounter with another creature—and the vast landscape is what makes it “solitary” in this case—gives rise to a fundamental question of being: he wonders “what it means to be a seagull.”13

Above: Edward Burtynsky, Colorado River Delta #2, Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico (2011). Photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz Galleries, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

Griffiths’s reference to “faces”—of God, of the sky—speak of that reciprocal act of facing that can happen between the singular human and whatever she or he faces.

As you will notice from Hägglund’s passage, mutuality refers to an experience that repeats itself, forming a relationship over time: “Like so many times before. . . .” Mutuality arises for a single human being, facing what surrounds her or him from within the solitariness of her or his singular human life, and experiencing the surroundings as they rise up to meet her gaze. William James assumed this idea of mutuality when he said, quite early in his series of lectures on varieties of religious experience: “Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.14 Martin Buber’s classic and celebrated conception of the I and Thou relationship is yet an instance of what I am calling mutuality within which the bearer of singular, finite human life exists. Charles Taylor’s idea of “fullness of human life” that he sees as critical to this “secular age” has as its point of reference the experience of singular lives, as otherwise the question of “experience” could not arise. Taylor quotes from the autobiography of the British-born Benedictine monk and yogi Bede Griffiths a passage remarkably similar to that quoted from Hägglund. Once, “walking out alone in the evening”—while he was still in school—Griffiths experienced the song of birds in a strikingly new manner:

A lark arose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. . . . [A] feeling of awe . . . came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.15

Griffiths’s reference to “faces”—of God, of the sky—speak of that reciprocal act of facing that can happen between the singular human and whatever she or he faces.

A similar relationship between the singular and finite life of an individual human being and what surrounds them underlies the two categories of jagat and prithibi—the world and the earth—that are so embedded in the sense of the religious that the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, sustained throughout his life. “The most surprising thing of all,” he wrote around 1914, “how ceaseless is the fountain of forms that issues constantly from the formless One. It never wants to end. I have observed that the sun shines brighter and the light of the moon feels heavier with sweetness when my heart feels full of love. . . . From this I know, the world and my mind and heart are inseparable.”16

The problem of mutuality, of course, does not have to entail the Tagorean vision of a fusion of the singular self with the world. One could understand the question of facing in a Levinasian way, not as one face turned necessarily toward another, but as the face itself being constituted through an exposure to alterity. The more fundamental point is that the structure of mutuality can only work when the word “life” refers to the singular life of the finite individual, for the question of “having to be”—the task and the question within which the “experiencing” of the earth happens—is a question that arises only in the case of singular humans. What happens when we are summoned by the general crisis of life—the possibility of another Great Extinction, caused by a species, for the first time in the history of the planet—to face the earth system that is critical to our and to other forms of life? What does it mean for the spirit to face, as the political theorist William Connolly puts it, the planetary?17

 

The planetary involves the work of deep time. We do not normally think of deep time. It remains as a part of what we take to be given. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein once observed: We ask of buildings how old they are, why do we not ask that question of a mountain? We do so because we think of the mountain—or the landscape—as simply providing background material against which to experience our relationship of mutuality with the earth.18 The noted photographer Edward Burtynsky has captured a striking image of the relationship between humanity and landscape: a couple enjoys the sun on the rock-cradled Itzurun Beach in Spain’s Basque Country. Behind them, unheeded, the layers of rock bear witness both to the mass extinction 65 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs and to the major warming event that happened 10 million years later and lasted 200,000 years. When will the couple notice the past, preserved in rocks around them?19 What if the landscape itself is in crisis—seas rising to submerge or droughts ravaging the land, species facing extinction—and needs to be foregrounded? In the crisis of the Anthropocene—the prospect of inhabiting a less habitable planet—that which was usually relegated to the background—the work of deep time—intrudes into our present. Asking what has made the earth less habitable entails an engagement with deep time.

Photo of a couple relaxing at the beach with geological formations behind them

Edward Burtynsky, Basque Coast #3, UNESCO Geopark, Zumaia, Spain (2015). Photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz Galleries, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

 

A point to keep in mind, however, is that the planet is not the globe. This is a crucial distinction. The story of globalization has humans at its center and narrates how humans historically became connected in the conceptual context of a human sense of the globe. It is not a history involving deep time. It is at most a story of 500 years. This understanding of the globe, one could say, has remained in place since the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) work, even across centuries, with a shared sense of how the earth was conditioned for humans by the history of European expansion, trade, the mapping and navigation of the seas (and eventually the air) along with the development of instruments of navigation and mobility—in other words, a shared sense of the processes and institutions that created the modern sense of the globe.20

Anthropogenic global warming is no doubt connected to the story of globalization. One could even argue that a certain period in the history of globalization now known as “The Great Acceleration” (1950 onwards) overwhelmingly contributed to the forging of this connection, so much so that some scholars have pinned the beginning of the Anthropocene down to this period itself.21 Earth system science itself was a product of the politics of globalization of the planet, of the Cold War and the military and civil competition that it spawned in the atmosphere and in space. It is a deeply interdisciplinary science, synthesizing “elements of geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.”21 The consciousness into which earth system science ushers us simply could not have arisen without the development of technology that “rifled” not only “the bowels of the earth”—as Milton described early mines—but also the seemingly empty vault of the heavens and all that lies beyond.23 Consider this: it was the very technology of space exploration that came out of the Cold War and its concomitant weaponization of the atmosphere and space that eventually brought the planetary into our awareness. Or think of our capacity to explore deep earth: climate scientists would not have been able to bore into 800,000-year-old ice if the U.S. defense establishment and the much-denounced oil and mining companies had not so developed drilling technology.24

Some of the basic ideas related to earth system science go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet its recent history may be said to have begun in the 1960s when the British scientist James Lovelock, working for Carl Sagan’s unit in NASA, developed his now-famous proposition that life on Earth created the conditions for its continued maintenance, as though the earth behaved as a self-maintaining super-organism that he christened—on advice from the writer William Golding—Gaia.25 Lovelock’s early homeostatic view of the planet did not survive scientific skepticism, but his fundamental question about what made the earth so continuously hospitable for life—a receptivity to life that the two neighboring planets Mars and Venus conspicuously lack—endured in earth system science as the so-called habitability problem that today is central, for instance, to understanding the natural history of life.

NASA first set up its Earth System Science Committee in 1983 when it realized that the planet needed to be studied as a whole by different kinds of scientists.26 The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, launched in 1987, defined the earth system as “Earth’s interacting physical, chemical, and biological processes”:

The system consists of the land, oceans, atmosphere and poles. It includes the planet’s natural cycles—the carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and other cycles—and deep Earth processes. Life too is an integral part of the Earth system. Life affects the carbon, nitrogen, water, oxygen and many other cycles and processes. The Earth system now includes human society. Our social and economic systems are now embedded within the Earth system. In many cases, the human systems are now the main drivers of change in the Earth system.27

The chief protagonist of the story that earth system science tells is not humans or human life but complex, multicellular life in general. In contrast to the story of capitalist globalization, this is a perspective on humans and other forms of life in which humans are not at the center of the story. We simply come too late in the story to be its protagonist. This science, of course, is produced by humans and therefore practices a human version of non-anthropocentrism, an attempt by humans to understand their own story by standing outside, as it were, of the story of humans (as the historical sciences of geology and evolutionary biology routinely do). Besides, as Lovelock himself pointed out, earth system science entails a view of the planet that is essentially taken from the outside. Lovelock wrote: “To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers.”28

The key term in planetary thinking that relates to life is “habitability.” Habitability does not reference humans. Its central concern is life, complex, multicellular life in general, and what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable. The problem of habitability, therefore, should be distinguished from the discussion on sustainability, which is defined as a relationship between “the environment” and humans. It should also be distinguished from the discussion on “life” that has gone on in the humanities under the rubric of “biopolitics.” The idea of “biopolitics” connects life to questions of disciplinary power, state, capitalism, and so on and rejects “a biological thematization of life”; this would squarely be a part of what I have characterized here as global thought, that is to say, of mutuality.29 The global or the worldly exist within human horizons of time, the multiple horizons of existential, intergenerational, and historical time. Planetary processes, including the ones with which humans have interfered, operate on various timetables, some compatible with human times, others vastly larger than what is involved in human calculation. The question at the center of the habitability problem is not what life is or how it is managed in the interest of power, but rather what makes a planet friendly to the continuous existence of complex life.

Habitability is maintained over vast timescales that are illustrated, for instance, by the share of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is currently around 21 percent and has been stable for a very long time. An O2 molecule resides in the atmosphere for 4 million years before it is absorbed into the earth’s crust. “This may sound like a long time,” remarks Tim Lenton, “but it is far shorter than the 550 million years or so over which there have been oxygen-breathing animals on the planet. It is also far shorter than the 370 million years over which there have been forests.” “Thus, remarkably,” he concludes, “the amount of atmospheric oxygen has remained within habitable bounds for complex animal and plant life despite all oxygen molecules having been replaced over a hundred times.”30 Humans play no part in this process. The planet, in a manner of speaking, does it.

A point to keep in mind, however, is that the planet is not the globe. This is a crucial distinction. The story of globalization has humans at its center and narrates how humans historically became connected in the conceptual context of a human sense of the globe. It is not a history involving deep time. It is at most a story of 500 years. This understanding of the globe, one could say, has remained in place since the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) work, even across centuries, with a shared sense of how the earth was conditioned for humans by the history of European expansion, trade, the mapping and navigation of the seas (and eventually the air) along with the development of instruments of navigation and mobility—in other words, a shared sense of the processes and institutions that created the modern sense of the globe.20

Anthropogenic global warming is no doubt connected to the story of globalization. One could even argue that a certain period in the history of globalization now known as “The Great Acceleration” (1950 onwards) overwhelmingly contributed to the forging of this connection, so much so that some scholars have pinned the beginning of the Anthropocene down to this period itself.21 Earth system science itself was a product of the politics of globalization of the planet, of the Cold War and the military and civil competition that it spawned in the atmosphere and in space. It is a deeply interdisciplinary science, synthesizing “elements of geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.”21 The consciousness into which earth system science ushers us simply could not have arisen without the development of technology that “rifled” not only “the bowels of the earth”—as Milton described early mines—but also the seemingly empty vault of the heavens and all that lies beyond.23 Consider this: it was the very technology of space exploration that came out of the Cold War and its concomitant weaponization of the atmosphere and space that eventually brought the planetary into our awareness. Or think of our capacity to explore deep earth: climate scientists would not have been able to bore into 800,000-year-old ice if the U.S. defense establishment and the much-denounced oil and mining companies had not so developed drilling technology.24

Some of the basic ideas related to earth system science go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet its recent history may be said to have begun in the 1960s when the British scientist James Lovelock, working for Carl Sagan’s unit in NASA, developed his now-famous proposition that life on Earth created the conditions for its continued maintenance, as though the earth behaved as a self-maintaining super-organism that he christened—on advice from the writer William Golding—Gaia.25 Lovelock’s early homeostatic view of the planet did not survive scientific skepticism, but his fundamental question about what made the earth so continuously hospitable for life—a receptivity to life that the two neighboring planets Mars and Venus conspicuously lack—endured in earth system science as the so-called habitability problem that today is central, for instance, to understanding the natural history of life.

NASA first set up its Earth System Science Committee in 1983 when it realized that the planet needed to be studied as a whole by different kinds of scientists.26 The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, launched in 1987, defined the earth system as “Earth’s interacting physical, chemical, and biological processes”:

The system consists of the land, oceans, atmosphere and poles. It includes the planet’s natural cycles—the carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and other cycles—and deep Earth processes. Life too is an integral part of the Earth system. Life affects the carbon, nitrogen, water, oxygen and many other cycles and processes. The Earth system now includes human society. Our social and economic systems are now embedded within the Earth system. In many cases, the human systems are now the main drivers of change in the Earth system.27

The chief protagonist of the story that earth system science tells is not humans or human life but complex, multicellular life in general. In contrast to the story of capitalist globalization, this is a perspective on humans and other forms of life in which humans are not at the center of the story. We simply come too late in the story to be its protagonist. This science, of course, is produced by humans and therefore practices a human version of non-anthropocentrism, an attempt by humans to understand their own story by standing outside, as it were, of the story of humans (as the historical sciences of geology and evolutionary biology routinely do). Besides, as Lovelock himself pointed out, earth system science entails a view of the planet that is essentially taken from the outside. Lovelock wrote: “To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers.”28

The key term in planetary thinking that relates to life is “habitability.” Habitability does not reference humans. Its central concern is life, complex, multicellular life in general, and what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable. The problem of habitability, therefore, should be distinguished from the discussion on sustainability, which is defined as a relationship between “the environment” and humans. It should also be distinguished from the discussion on “life” that has gone on in the humanities under the rubric of “biopolitics.” The idea of “biopolitics” connects life to questions of disciplinary power, state, capitalism, and so on and rejects “a biological thematization of life”; this would squarely be a part of what I have characterized here as global thought, that is to say, of mutuality.29 The global or the worldly exist within human horizons of time, the multiple horizons of existential, intergenerational, and historical time. Planetary processes, including the ones with which humans have interfered, operate on various timetables, some compatible with human times, others vastly larger than what is involved in human calculation. The question at the center of the habitability problem is not what life is or how it is managed in the interest of power, but rather what makes a planet friendly to the continuous existence of complex life.

Habitability is maintained over vast timescales that are illustrated, for instance, by the share of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is currently around 21 percent and has been stable for a very long time. An O2 molecule resides in the atmosphere for 4 million years before it is absorbed into the earth’s crust. “This may sound like a long time,” remarks Tim Lenton, “but it is far shorter than the 550 million years or so over which there have been oxygen-breathing animals on the planet. It is also far shorter than the 370 million years over which there have been forests.” “Thus, remarkably,” he concludes, “the amount of atmospheric oxygen has remained within habitable bounds for complex animal and plant life despite all oxygen molecules having been replaced over a hundred times.”30 Humans play no part in this process. The planet, in a manner of speaking, does it.

Fossil fuel, soil, and biodiversity . . . have two things in common: they all have to do with the history of life on the planet, and none are renewable on human scales of time.

Within a planetary mode of thinking, then, the threat of the Anthropocene lies not solely in what it might mean simply for immediate human futures—though that threat remains—but for long-term futures as well. Earth system scientists fear another great extinction of life over the next 300 to 600 years that would return the planet to a more primitive level of biodiversity.31 As Charles Langmuir and Wally Broecker argue, fossil fuel, soil, and biodiversity are critical to human flourishing, and they have two things in common: they all have to do with the history of life on the planet, and none of them are renewable on human scales of time. Thus, atmosphere and surface water have “short recycling times”—as do many metals—but soils and ground water take “thousands of years” to replenish themselves. “Biodiversity,” write Langmuir and Broecker, “is the most precious planetary resource, for which the timescale of replacement, known from past mass extinctions, is tens of millions of years.”32

The earth that is structured by a sense of mutuality with humans ultimately produces a world that is about forms and values. This is why the global can be politicized (i.e., we can talk about its deliberate destruction by Exxon or about creating “global governance”). Debates about issues like climate justice, climate refugees and their rights, democracy and global warming, climate change and inequalities of income, race, gender, about good and bad Anthropocenes, all proceed on the assumption that we have ideas, however contested by competing ideas, about ideal forms of justice, rights, democracy, and so on, in order to be able to judge and pronounce on a situation. These questions that deeply involve the question of forms, and the politics of debating such forms, belong to the structure of mutuality.

In contrast, the planetary, i.e., the earth system, disclosing vast processes of un-human dimensions, resists the Heideggerian structure of mutuality, for it cannot be grasped by recourse to any ideal form. There is no ideal form for the earth as a planet. There is no ideal form of Earth’s history or of the history of any other planet. While the planetary mode of thinking asks questions of habitability—about the conditions enabling the existence for various life-forms, including Homo sapiens—there is nothing in the history of the planet that can claim the status of a moral imperative. It is only as humans that we emphasize the last 500 million years of the planet’s life—the last one-eighth of Earth’s history—for that is the period when the Cambrian explosion of life-forms occurred, creating the conditions that made humans possible. From the viewpoint of anaerobic bacteria, however, which thrived on the planet’s surface before the “great oxygenation” of the atmosphere about 2.45 billion years ago, the history of the atmosphere might look like a history of disasters (as recognized by such human-given names as the Oxygen Holocaust). The planet exists, as Quentin Meillassoux says, “as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life—posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world.”33

 

Facing the planetary then requires us to acknowledge that the communicative framework, the relationship of mutuality within which humans see themselves as naturally situated through categories like earth, world, and globe, has now become inadequate. Many traditions of thought, including some religious ones, may have considered the earth-human relationship special; with regard to the planet, though, we are no more special than other forms of life. The planet puts us in the same position as any other creature.34 Our creaturely life, collectively considered, is our animal-life as a species, a life that, pace Kant, humans cannot ever altogether escape.35

Many traditions of thought, including some religious ones, may have considered the earth-human relationship special; with regard to the planet, though, we are no more special than other forms of life.

Yet, as geological time breaks into our everyday consciousness, and as we ask ourselves what the relationship may be between our individual and finite lives and the ongoing crisis in the distribution of life in general—a concern often captured in discussions of the Sixth Great Extinction—what indeed could be our ethical-spiritual relationship to this planet that refuses to grant us a relationship of mutuality? For the answer, I turn to the scientists themselves, for clues here are provided by very deeply phenomenological and human responses that their cognitive encounter with planetarity produces in them. Many of these responses naturally gather around the question of geo-engineering, the various plans that are now being seriously considered for managing the climate of the whole planet if not the earth system itself.

Those who champion geoengineering belong as a rule to sciences that are ahistorical in their analytical approach—such as physics and chemistry. Those who study the planet historically, such as geologists or evolutionary biologists, are usually wary of such measures.36 I should be absolutely clear that I am not weighing in on the ongoing debate about the desirability or otherwise of geoengineering. I am not qualified to do that. I am simply reporting on the very different spiritual relationship to the category planet (or earth system) that these sciences seem to prompt in their individual practitioners. In my terms, it is as if, as individual humans, they try to bring the planetary into the structure of mutuality.

The Harvard physicist David Keith’s lucid and engaging defense of “climate engineering” in his popular book on the subject provides one example. One of his founding premises is that humans care about nature (mutuality), and that geoengineering is a continuation of that care. “A fuzzy love of nature,” writes Keith, “is uncontroversial.” “I suspect,” he adds, “that Edward O. Wilson, the entomologist and writer, captured more than a grain of truth with his biophilia hypothesis, that humans have an innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” There is thus, for Keith, no conflict between caring for nature and the project of geoengineering, so long as one does not make “naïve claims of a sharp distinction between nature and civilization.”37 There is no Nature untouched by human activity, so climate or geoengineering is simply a continuation of that reality. However, biophilia has its limits. It can extend only to forms of life visible to humans, not the microbes and bacteria that make up the bulk of life. As Tim Luke cogently argued, it is not possible from a human point of view to give all forms of life equal value: “Will we allow anthrax or cholera microbes to attain self-realization in wiping out sheep herds or human kindergartens? Will we continue to deny salmonella or botulism micro-organisms their equal rights when we process the dead carcasses of animals and plants that we eat?”38

In contrast to such physicists as Keith, the geologist Andrew Glikson recommends an attitude of reverence for the earth: “Having lost a sense of reverence toward Earth, there is no evidence humans are about to rise above the realm of perceptions, dreams, myths, legends and denial. . . . Perhaps it is too much to expect any living species to possess the wisdom and responsibility required to control its own inventions. . . . [But] without ethics, Homo sapiens cannot survive.”39 A cautionary approach to the planet is recommended also by the geologist Marcia Bjornerud. Speaking of “the idea of cooling the planet by shooting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere” (a measure David Keith advocates), she points out that “the sky [in that case] would always be white,” never blue. Imagine an earth without a blue sky and what happens to our sense of the mutuality! “[T]he most vocal advocates for stratospheric sulfate injection,” Bjornerud adds, “are either economists, accustomed to viewing the natural world as a system of commodities . . . or physicists, who treat it as an easily understood laboratory model. . . . Most geoscientists, knowing the long and complex story of the atmosphere, biosphere, and climate . . . think the idea humans can ‘manage’ the planet is delusional and dangerous [my emphasis].”40 The climate scientist Wallace Broecker once used the image of a temperamental animal to describe the uncertain dangers that accompany climate change: “Every now and then . . . nature has decided to give a good swift kick to the climate beast. And the beast has responded, as beasts will—violently and a little unpredictably.”41 Edward O. Wilson himself uses the word “dangerous” in referring to the “gargantuan and dangerous programs of geoengineering now being discussed.” Wilson instead proposes that, to save biodiversity, humans should follow “the precautionary principle,” and leave half of the planet’s land surface to forms of life other than human.42

Reverence is not simply about wonderment or biophilia. Reverence suggests a relationship of respect mixed in with fear and awe, with Proto-Italic roots that mean “to be wary.” We do not fully understand the planet and its processes. It does not belong to the structure of mutuality that Heidegger outlined. We cannot even always predict its behavior, so we need to be wary of it.

Being wary of something that is both miraculous and dangerous—not always to be embraced in mutuality—this is the spirit in which some earth scientists speak, a nostalgic and cautionary register. There was nothing inevitable about the coming of complex life on this planet: biodiversity was a miracle. Then came animal life. The earth system produced a delicate atmosphere—our “modern” atmosphere—allowing complex animal and plant life to flourish. That atmosphere has persisted for about 400 million years. We depend on it, but it was not made with us in view. Theoretically, it would be there even if we were not around.

When humans came along as an animal, our animal life was full of fear—the source, one might say, mimicking William James, of a variety of superstitious experiences. This was the fear of other animals, reverence toward the nonhuman. Fear was critical to survival of species, for fear regulated interspecies relations. Then came the Holocene and human civilization. The axial religions made us feel central to the miracle of creation. And finally came European empires and capitalist modernity. We gradually forgot the culture of reverence that ancient, indigenous religions were based on. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made European thinkers overconfident about the place of humanity. Locke announced land for humans to be as abundant as water. Grotius pronounced the seas brimming with food for us. Kant said, confidently, that the fleece on the sheep’s back was meant for us, humans.

Through nineteenth- and twentieth-century waves of modernization, through the combination of electricity and technology and the rise in the number of cities and their inhabitants, humans overcame their sense of fear of—and reverence for—other forms of life and what they took as part of their givenness. Becoming modern was fundamentally about overcoming fear, in so many different senses (including the fear of oppressors).43 The planet now reminds us that, while valuable, this drive to overcome fear—except, in political thought, the fear of the state—has also been a loss. A critical loss. The planet is both wondrous and fearful for humans. In developing what some people call an earth ethic, we need to find ways of combining elements of both wonderment and reverence.

Notes:

  1. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, 1971), 42, 46.
  2. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 149.
  3. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (Harper and Row, 1968), 42.
  4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Truth of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (SUNY Press, 1994), 99.
  5. Heidegger, “The Origin,” 49. I assume that our capacity to understand Heidegger’s concepts is never fatally crippled by the fact that not all languages may possess words that correspond exactly to those that Heidegger deployed.
  6. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mutual,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/124381.
  7. Andrew S. Goudie and Heather A. Viles, Geomorphology in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7.
  8. Edgar S. Brightman, “The Lisbon Earthquake: A Study in Religious Valuation,” The American Journal of Theology 23, no. 4 (October 1919): 500–518; José Oscar de Almeida Marques, “The Paths of Providence: Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake,” Cadernos de História e Filosofia de Ciéncia, ser. 3, 15, no. 15 (January–June 2005): 33–57; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Power of Superstition in Public Life in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (17 May 2008).
  9. Andrea Westerman, “Disciplining the Earth: Earthquake Observation in Switzerland and Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History 17, no. 1 (February 2011): 53–77; Frank Oberholzner, “From an Act of God to an Insurable Risk: The Change in the Perception of Hailstorms and Thunderstorms since the Early Modern Period,” Environment and History 17, no. 1 (February 2011): 133–52.
  10. Heidegger, “The Origin,” 47, 49.
  11. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 618.
  12. Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon Books, 2019), 173.
  13. Ibid.
  14. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in his Writings (The Library of America, 1987), 36; italics in the original.
  15. Bede Griffiths, The Golden String: An Autobiography (Fount, 1979), 9, quoted in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.
  16. Rabindranath Tagore, “Sanchay,” in Rabindra rachanabali [The collected works of Rabindranath], vol. 12, centenary ed. (Government of West Bengal, 1961), 565.
  17. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke University Press, 2017).
  18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Harper, 1969), §85.
  19. Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nick de Pencier, Anthropocene (Steidl, 2018), 18, 21.
  20. Joyce Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (Simon and Schuster, 2012).
  21. John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the World Since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2015).
  22. Tim Lenton, Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.
  23. John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, I.687, in The Works of John Milton (Wordsworth Edition Ltd., 1994), 130.
  24. Mary R. Albert and Geoffrey Hargreaves, “Drilling through Ice and into the Past,” Oilfield Review 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013/2014): 4015; P. G. Talalay, “Perspectives for development of Ice-core Drilling Technology: A Discussion,” Annals of Glaciology 55, no. 68 (2014): 339–50; Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 3.
  25. James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Basic Books, 2009), 159.
  26. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, rev. ed. (Harvard University Press, 2008), 144–45.
  27. “Earth Systems Definitions,” Global Change (IGBP), www.igbp.net/globalchange/earthsystemdefinitions.
  28. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1979), 7–8; emphasis added.
  29. See the lucid and witty discussion in Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford University Press, 2016); words cited are from pp. 53–54.
  30. Lenton, Earth System Science, 44.
  31. Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?,” Nature 471 (2011): 51–57.
  32. Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker, How to Build a Habitable Planet (Princeton University Press, 2012), 580, 589–95.
  33. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (Bloomsbury, 2008), 9–10.
  34. I owe this point to discussions with Norman Wirzba whom I thank for sharing his unpublished essay, “Rethinking the Human in an Anthropocene World.” See also Joyce Chaplin, “Can the Nonhuman Speak? Breaking the Chain of Being in the Anthropocene,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78, no. 4 (2017): 512.
  35. See my “Humanities in a Warming World: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable,” New Literary History 47, no. 2–3 (2016): 377–98.
  36. Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton University Press, 2018), 13.
  37. David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (MIT Press, 2013), esp. xvi–xvii.
  38. Tim Luke, “The Dreams of Deep Ecology,” Telos 76 (Summer 1988): 82, cited in Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 59–60.
  39. Andrew Y. Glikson and Colin Groves, Climate, Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene (Springer, 2016), 194.
  40. Bjornerud, Timefulness, 157.
  41. Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat—and How to Counter It (Hill & Wang, 2008), 100.
  42. Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (Norton, 2016), 89, 194–95, and passim.
  43. “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 1.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. This is an edited version of the William James Lecture that he delivered at Harvard Divinity School on May 1, 2019.

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