Sublime

In order to develop histories that are adequate to this challenge, we have to learn to link our existing subjecthood – the I of history – in many different scales and temporalities, from natural and geological ones to those of local ecologies; from changing capitalist production cycles to rhythms of sustainable institutions, practices and modes of

If he had a unifying principle, politically and economically, it is what we have said: that concentrated power in any form is dangerous, that institutions should be built to human scale, and society should pursue human ends. Every institution, public and private, runs the risks of taking on a life of its own, putting its own interests above those o

Rather I want to shift the paradigm to suggest that the cultural and subjective conditions needed for the modern revolution are no longer necessary. They have resulted in human overreach in the conquest by man of nature, and we are confronted today with the crisis

If so, might it not be time for us to revisit the alternative traditions from China and India, many strains of which have adapted to the unceasing circulations of modernity, to examine whether they allow a more viable cosmological foundation for sustainability?

In this chapter, I will develop the analytics to grasp what I am calling global modernity and in particular to grasp the crisis of sustainability that it has produced.

In premodern histories, as Zachary Schiffman has recently shown, the past is episodic and even when causal relationships are seen, they are often deemed to be illustrative of a universal principle that is eternally present. That is the reason why the past can be seen to serve as the moral guide of the present and future.

Less known are Rabindranath Tagore’s efforts to invoke what we today call sustainability – but which was called pantheistic philosophy in the 1920s – as a transcendent ideal for the world.