"Climate Change as Epochal Consciousness"

February 18, 2015

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Law at the University of Chicago. His lecture “Climate Change as Epochal Consciousness” was given on February 18, 2015, as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. This first of two lectures takes as its starting point Karl Jaspers’s notion of “epochal consciousness.” Chakrabarty probes what policymakers mean when they claim that we have a “common but differentiated responsibility for climate change.” He puts particular pressure on just what we mean by the “common” here, arguing that instead of serving as a vague placeholder, the full notion of the common must be composed and constructed. Contending that climate change cannot be seen only as a political or economic issue, or solely as a physical event, he defends the use of the “anthropocene” as a way to describe our time, while arguing for a less human-centric, and more zoe-centric view of our planet and the changes occurring on it.