Most professional philosophers are probably unaware of the work of the Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton. He writes largely in the genre of popular environmental philosophy, so this neglect is understandable. But it’s a pity nonetheless because Hamilton has, over the past 20 years or so, written some of the most accessible and important work on issues related to climate change. In view of the fact that climate change represents an urgent threat to the future of our species on this planet, it is something of a scandal that philosophers have not paid more attention to this phenomenon.
Hamilton’s latest book is his most philosophical yet, though it remains in the category of ‘popular’ writing. The book is less about climate change than it is about the larger phenomenon of the Anthropocene. Geologists are now in the process of deciding whether the Earth has entered a new epoch. The stratigraphers—geologists who analyse rock layers—are searching for evidence in the rock strata that the old epoch, the Holocene, has been succeeded by a new ‘age of humans.’ But whether or not the geologists officially approve the new moniker, it looks like it is here to stay. The notion has attained swift purchase well beyond geology and Earth system science. It has been embraced critically by a wide range of academics in the humanities and social sciences as well as by artists and norm entrepreneurs outside the academy.
So why is the Anthropocene of philosophical interest? Hamilton’s analysis begins by taking up Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestion that in the new epoch “human history and geological history have converged” (7-8), and argues that this calls for a new philosophy of history. Philosophy of history has become a moribund sub-discipline. After Hegel’s culminating work in this area, few philosophers have seen the possibility for further development. There are no doubt numerous reasons for this, not the least of which is precisely the shadow cast by Hegel himself over the very idea of a philosophy of history. After the horrors of the 20th-century, who could endorse the idea that history is the arena of the progressive unfolding of Absolute Spirit? But if the sub-discipline itself is inconceivable without some such progressivist narrative, then surely its consignment to the dustbin of philosophical concern is entirely warranted.
That thought made some sense before we discovered the Anthropocene but it must be re-examined now. Hamilton, unfortunately, does not discuss Hegel at all, taking his cue instead from Kant (129). In his Third Antinomy Kant propaedeuticly pointed to the ontological incompatibility of the realms of freedom and necessity. For Hamilton, this division is “the essence of modernity” (139). But we must overcome it now because, given Chakrabarty’s thesis about the two historical streams, “the two realms have bled into one another” (139). Nature has become infused with the human even as the human has been thoroughly shaped by the natural. This idea has led some thinkers—Bruno Latour, for example—to describe the new reality as a nature/culture ‘hybrid.’ Others—like Steve Vogel—have argued in favour of a post-naturalism that dispenses altogether with the two terms of the binary, suggesting that we talk instead of an ontologically undifferentiated ‘built environment’ encompassing all of reality.
Because the Anthropocene has to do essentially with the impact all seven (or so) billion of us are having on the Earth system, Hamilton thinks that our key ethical task is to think of ourselves at a species-level. Many working on these issues have resisted this, insisting that because climate change, for example, has been produced by a subset of humanity—the developed world, basically those who got the fossil fuels out first—it is deeply misleading to ascribe responsibility for it to all of ‘us.’ Hamilton is aware of this problem (who couldn’t be?) but he parries the challenge with considerable skill, as of course he must, because the problem is irreducibly one for the species. The Anthropocene forces us to think big, especially with respect to our historical emplacement. If we crash, then hypothetical future (maybe alien) researchers—Hamilton calls them “future historians of the cosmos” (126)—will, willy-nilly, construct stories about the career of our species. Depending on the quantity and quality of information available to them, this will no doubt involve asking about the profound inequities of our economic system, but the focus will be on the nature of the collective.
Our task, Hamilton implies, is to think through the historical moment at this level of abstraction because that is the only way we can avoid the crash. To this end, there’s a key moment in his argument in which he constructs an ‘Enlightenment fable.’ The fable is important because it hinges on the availability to humans living in the present—us—of a choice: “to care for or neglect the Earth” (134). There is no reason to believe we will choose correctly, or that our choice-moment fits into any kind of neat, progressivist historical narrative. If anything, Hamilton has been persistently pessimistic on this score (he is after all the author of a previous book on climate change called, Requiem for a Species). But he is surely right about the existence of the choice.
This book’s tone is often bombastic, its arguments overly simple and lacking in philosophical nuance. Indeed, in places it reads more like a manifesto than a serious and measured reflection on the relevant issues. But in spite of this it is both timely and important. In short, Hamilton is absolutely correct to claim that if we are going to both understand and survive the mess that is the Anthropocene, we require (a) a re-invigorated philosophy of history; and (b) a species-level, though not biologically reductive, conception of who and what we most fundamentally are. Philosophy’s most urgent task, I believe, is to figure out how these two elements fit together.
