Bhumics: PAPE, Part2

The Mountain

Some years ago, no, many years ago, some college friends and I boarded a bus from Kanpur to Almora, and then another bus from Almora to Jageshwar, a temple town in the lower Himalayas. It’s an old temple town.

Wikipedia says: “Jageshwar Temples, also referred to as Jageswar Temples or Jageshwar Valley Temples, are a group of 125 ancient Hindu temples dated between 7th and 14th century.”

We arrived in Jageshwar in the late afternoon, as the shadows were lengthening and the smoke from stoves across the valley swirled in the air. The four of us were famished, not having eaten all day, but Jageshwar didn’t have a single restaurant back then. Only a U.P (it was still U.P back then) state guest house that was kept under lock and key by a guard who had to be fetched from the village before he could open the door for us.

The guard called his brother over, who presented himself as an odd-job man: temple guide, cook, driver, dispenser of wisdom - you name it. I will call him M for the rest of this anecdote. We arranged to have M’s Swiss Army knife at our side for the next two days. The rate M quoted us was a pittance even by our impoverished student standards. The hills have never been known for their economy, which leads to terrible decisions like cutting down old growth forests for a buck or two.

Anyways.

That evening M was a cook, turning a portable stove into a temporary kitchen from which arrived hot rotis, some dal and a curry.

Delicious!

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We retreated to our guest house after dinner and spent the night shivering in the coldest weather we had ever experienced - like it or not, sub-zero temperatures with no heating and inadequate blankets will force you into spooning with your fellow men. The next morning, after eating a hearty breakfast (M) and filling our bottles with water, the four of us set out with our guide (M) for a trek to a sister temple about a two hour climb up a hill close to the main temple. I don’t remember much about the winding path, except that we spent the time talking and joking, being the young men that we were.

A couple of hours later, the top of that little mountain came into view, with the temple showing brief glimpses as the switchback took us ever closer and then further away. After paying respects to the temple deity we asked M if there was something else to do up there. He suggested we take a walk past the stand of trees about 100 feet down a gentle slope from the temple.

Why not? Little did we know about the surprise awaiting us.

The smokers among us wanted a break (even the thought of leaving cigarette stubs up in the sacred landscape fills me with shame now - but at least I wasn’t one of those lighting up) and all of us felt like a quick rest before trekking to the next village. As we were passing the last line of trees, we noticed the most amazing sight: the tree line ended abruptly at the mountain’s edge, from where was a steep drop - felt like several thousand feet - to the valley where (most likely) the Sarju (Sarayu) river snaked its way to its appointment with the Sharada. The Sarju split the 20 mile valley in half, with small villages dotting the landscape on both sides. The surprise waited patiently on the other side of the valley: the white mountains of the greater Himalayas in a line of unending glory from west to east, a vision both in the literal and in the metaphorical sense, the most breathtaking sight I had ever experienced in my life.

The others felt the same.

Three boisterous young men were reduced to silence, not speaking a word for, I don’t know how long, an hour, two hours. We just stared as our feet dangled over the edge. We had walked up a green hill and chanced upon the tallest mountains in the world.

Like humans strolling up the hill of history and encountering the planet.

I should also say: the expanse is terrifyingly awesome, but it’s more than human in a reachable way if we stretch ourselves - there’s a thread of continuity connecting the first proto-cell to us. Stretch it even more, and we can see ourselves in the wider solar system. The wider universe, on the other hand, is terra incognita, not for humans, or even the rest of the living planet.

Long detour but the detour is the journey. Like a solar eclipse, we cannot view the planet directly in our mind’s eye, but rather approach it aslant. Our next detour takes a bite out of Hegel and after that, a bite out of Marx.

Hegel Revisited

In the preface to his 1820 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel penned one of modern philosophy’s most enduring dicta: “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought”. With this pronouncement, Hegel decisively positioned philosophy not as a practice of timeless speculation, detached from the contingencies of history, but as a rigorous form of historical self-consciousness. That statement of Hegel has now been reduced to a cliche, but if we read the Philosophy of Right, we come upon other statements that reveal his position. For example, Hegel says:

apart from anything else, philosophy with us is not, as it was with the Greeks for instance, pursued as a private art, but has an existence in the open, in contact with the public, and especially, or even only, in the service of the state.

This contact with the public, of thinking things over with others is an important departure from earlier times, when the public didn’t exist, at least not in the way that modern mass politics brings into being. Elsewhere, Hegel says (all translations from the Oxford World Classics Edition):

since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond

To philosophize, on this view, is to undertake the systematic labor of comprehending the essential character of one’s own epoch, to render in the clarity of the concept that which is otherwise lived as immediate, often opaque, experience. By Hegel’s time, that experience was of an existence lived in public, in view of the state. He says:

This book, then, containing as it does the science of the state, is to be nothing other than the endeavour to apprehend and present the state

Let’s change one word in that sentence:

This book, then, containing as it does the science of the planet, is to be nothing other than the endeavour to apprehend and present the planet

Marxian Praxis

A generation later, Karl Marx issued a sharp rejoinder that would reorient the philosophical project for centuries to come. In his first thesis on Fuerbach, Marx says (all translations from the Oxford:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

and later on, in the now famous 11th thesis:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Read against the backdrop of the Hegelian mandate, this is not, as it is often misunderstood, a simple rejection of apprehension in favor of blind activism. Rather, it is a radical intensification of it. For Marx, to truly apprehend one’s age is not merely to interpret it but to seize it, to arrest its destructive logic, and ultimately, to bring its contradictions to a revolutionary resolution.

Marx shifts the object of apprehension to the material reality of Capital—the specific mode of production and the “ensemble of social relations” that structure exploitation and alienation. The goal is no longer reconciliation with an existing order that is shown to be rational, but the practical overthrow of a social order that is revealed to be fundamentally self-contradictory. In this framework, the truth of thinking is no longer a purely theoretical question to be settled in the quiet of a study; it is a practical question that must be proven in the crucible of “revolutionary practice”.

The university is not the natural home of the philosopher!

How does that exiled philosopher make their way from the ivory tower to the union hall to the marshland and the forest?

The Planetary Rupture

This romantic vision of the philosopher as worldly investigator and agent of history, born from the creative tension between Hegel and Marx, has animated critical thought for nearly two centuries. Yet today, the world that philosophy is called upon to apprehend has undergone a transformation so profound that it challenges both apprehension and praxis. We are confronted with the Anthropocene: a new geological epoch defined by the fact that human beings have become a planetary-scale force, altering the fundamental systems of the Earth—its climate, its biosphere, its chemical cycles. The “age” that must now be apprehended is no longer reducible to a set of human social, political, or economic relations.

The object of apprehension - the Planet - is an entangled, dynamic system in which human and natural histories have become irrevocably coupled.

This planetary rupture displaces the anthropocentric objects of both Hegel and Marx. The state and capital remain crucial, but they are now understood as components within a much larger, more complex system whose dynamics operate on scales of time and space that dwarf human history.

To fulfill Hegel and Marx’s mandate today, i.e., to apprehend our age in thought and to seize it in praxis, is to face the Planet. This task compels a radical rethinking of philosophy’s most basic questions: What is being apprehended? Who is doing the apprehending? And by what means is this apprehension to be achieved? The answer to each question forces philosophy to transform, to move beyond its traditional humanist boundaries and toward a new, planetary horizon.

TLDR; to grasp the planet is to move toward a planetary constitution, a practice that can only be described as philosophical engineering. This is not a break from the tradition of critical thought, but its necessary culmination in an age where our object of concern is the Earth system itself.