LeCain provides a detailed analysis of Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” and its implications for humanism. He explores Chakrabarty’s suggestion that the advent of climate change has broken down the divide between natural and human history; our unnatural actions in the natural world have become natural—we are both human and nonhuman. LeCain illustrates how this thinking diverges from that of Western Enlightenment by challenging the humanistic belief that we are separate from, even above, the material world. In fact, human culture is inextricably linked to the natural material world; we are both a force and product of it. So many aspects of human sociocultural existence are embedded in the material world. Perhaps it is this connection, LeCain suggests, that will see the emergence of a new, nonhuman humanism.
DOI: doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7434