The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. This article argues that in the current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming, we have to insert ourselves into a future ‘without us’ in order to be able to visualise it. Thus, our usual historical practices for visualising times, past and future, times inaccessible to us personally—the exercise of historical understanding—are thrown into a deep contradiction and confusion. The article presents some responses to the contemporary crisis from a historian’s point of view. In the interest of clarity and focus, the author presents his propositions in the form of four theses. The last three theses follow from the first one. The author begins with the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history, and ends by returning to the question he opened with: How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while at the same time challenging our capacity for historical understanding? More specifically, the article is built around the discussion of four theses: Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History; Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological Epoch When Humans Exist as a Geological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalisation; Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us to Put Global Histories of Capital in Conversation with the Species History of Humans; Thesis 4: The Cross-Hatching of Species History and the History of Capital Is a Process of Probing the Limits of Historical Understanding. The article concludes with an important argument, namely that climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally call it a ‘negative universal history’.

Tõlkinud
Peeter Tammisto