Universality in the climate catastrophe: rethinking Chakrabarty’s Anthropocene philosophy of history with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature

Abstract

This article critically examines Dipesh Chakrabarty's concept of Anthropocene history, a philosophy of history that is designed to respond to the universal challenge of the Anthropocene. It uses the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to mitigate the pitfalls of Chakrabarty's concept and to propose an alternative relation between nature and history. I argue that the problem of Chakrabarty's Anthropocene history resides not in its use of the category of the universal per se but in its insufficient articulation of the particular. Even if he is correct in asserting that it is impossible to conceptualize the ecological crisis within the modern logic of history and that it is necessary to conceptualize the ecological crisis from a non‐Eurocentric perspective, Anthropocene history still leaves the modern structure of history untouched, resulting in a structure that is unable to meaningfully articulate particularity and universality because of its reliance on teleology and phenomenological emptiness. With this in mind, I show how Merleau‐Ponty's conceptual redefinition of nature as a foundational universality, when combined with the chiasmic intertwining of history and nature and a reflection on the concept of the institution as a point of passage between nature and history, enables us to rearticulate universality and particularity in the face of the ecological crisis. This in turn enables a freer conceptual navigation between the existential and political dimensions of the ecological crisis with which environmental philosophy is concerned.