Dipesh Chakrabarty
Earth System Science (ESS), the science that among other things explains planetary warming and cooling, gives humans a very long, multilayered, and heterotemporal past by placing them at the conjuncture of three (and now variously interdependent) histories whose events are defined by very different timescales: the history of the planet, the history of life on the planet, and the history of the globe made by the logics of empires, capital, and technology. One can therefore read Earth system scientists as historians writing within an emergent regime of historicity. We could call it the planetary or Anthropocenic regime of historicity to distinguish it from the global regime of historicity that has enabled many humanist and social-science historians to deal with the theme of climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene. In the latter regime, however, historians try to relate the Anthropocene to histories of modern empires and colonies, the expansion of Europe and the development of navigation and other communication technologies, modernity and capitalist globalization, and the global and connected histories of science and technology.
It is my contention that when we read together—as we must—histories
produced on these two registers, the category planet emerges as a category of humanist thought, a category of existential and, therefore, philosophical concern to humans.