Between Inevitability and Hindsight: End-Times and the Loss of Agency in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Judeo-Christian eschatological time has re-emerged in scholarly and popular discussions of climate apocalypse in the last decades, also in attempts to mobilise action against climate change. I argue that speaking about climate change as the eschatological endpoint in linear time undermines the call for action, understood as the contingent capacity for new beginnings. When the severity of climate change is made sense of by introducing an end to linear Chronos time, the result is a confusion in the direction and contingency of temporal politics, which effectively undermines action through speech. Eschatological, linear time frames the time for action as too narrow: first, by casting the end of time as inevitable, and second, by upsetting the chronology and direction of time as a prerequisite for politics. The conclusion is that climate eschatology is disempowering in Chronos time and that another temporal frame is needed to address climate change politically.

Keywords

temporality climate change eschatology Chronos time agency

Introduction

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence.

Arendt (2006: 10).

Time is of the essence for climate change. On the 24th of January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the doomsday clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been (Mecklin, 2023). The move reflected not just the unprecedented threat of atomic war between Russia and the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 but also the increasing threat of ecological disaster resulting from the world’s inability to effectively address systemic climate change. It is no coincidence that the symbol of proximity to disaster is a clock (Hom, 2019, 2020). The clock symbolises that humans are ‘running out of time’ and that humanity is mere seconds away from its own undoing. The language for speaking about threats to humanity is pervaded with temporal imagery, but importantly, such imagery always stands in the tension between time as a condition of human existence and time as a social construct. For all practical purposes, regardless of what quantum physics may discover, there is a passing of time which humans have little ability to impact (Rovelli, 2019). In Western societies, time as condition is often referred to as Chronos time, the experience of ceaseless and unavoidable movement, which encompasses not just human life on earth, but also the earth system and the universe (Hartog, 2021). However, time is not just a condition but also socially constructed and used for political purposes: how time is organised, delineated, measured and spoken off, impacts the audience’s sense of time (Adam, 1998; Hartog, 2021; Lazar, 2019; Little, 2022; White, 2024). The doomsday clock is a case in point; it was created for the purpose of communicating the urgency of human action against catastrophe as estimated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The choice of a clock is peculiar because it always carries this double meaning: it is a technological time-keeping device, meant to measure time as condition, which is ceaseless and unavoidable, and yet it is employed in a social and political attempt at time-keeping, as if humans could avoid the future or stop time (Hom, 2020).

In this article, I investigate the way in which speaking of climate change as the eschatological endpoint in Chronos time undermines the time and space for action. The starting point is that the temporal positioning of climate change matters: the connection between time and language impacts the imagined ability to theorise and act to counter ecological disaster. Language also impacts thinking. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021: 19) calls for making ‘a conceptual place for thinking the human condition before committing to any particular version of practical or activist politics.’ However, there is always a path dependency to how audiences think about time: temporal frames become part of the cosmological order and are not completely free to be renegotiated with new insights (Foucault, 2009; Koopman, 2013). A range of scholarship has criticised the construct of Western Chronos time, and how Western temporal frames are implicated in driving both oppression and climate catastrophe (Chakrabarty, 2021; Gault, 1995; Gilroy, 1993; Mbembe, 2003; McNevin, 2022). My argument starts from a different angle, asking: if Western audiences still relate to climate change as an event in Chronos time, defined through the categories of past, present and future, what happens to agency when climate change is cast as the eschatological endpoint to time itself? Arendt’s concept of political action is useful for this project because her framework, first, maintains a sensibility to the relationship between thinking, speaking and acting, as the faculties of agency and politics, and second, conceptualises action in Chronos time, making her a representative thinker of a Western conception of agency. However, Arendt’s concept of action also maintains the space for radical new categories and realities to emerge (Canovan, 1994; Zerilli, 2018 [2016]). I suggest that this makes her framework a potential bridge between an old modernist historicity and an emerging Anthropocene historicity.

Judeo-Christian eschatological temporal frames are employed in both scholarly and popular discussions of climate change. Often, such eschatological frames are used to instil urgency, whether this is to mobilise a political response or to securitise the issue of climate change (Buzan et al., 1998). I argue that eschatological timeframes undermine a sense of agency for climate change in Chronos time. Traditional Western conceptions of agency and responsibility in linear time are dependent on a chronology of temporal movements combined with the contingency of events, both of which are disrupted by eschatological time (Arendt, 1998). Framing climate change as the eschatological endpoint in linear time has the effect of both presenting the future as predetermined because of the inherent inevitability of the eschaton appearing in linear time, and upsetting the chronology of events, positioning the speaker and audience in the future looking back on the present with hindsight. From this retrospective point in the future, the present is framed as the crucial moment to take action that was revealed to be so too late. Both temporal effects are detrimental to keeping the appropriate balance between fear and hope that Alison McQueen (2021) argues for in her account of Aristotle’s civic fear. Climate change is a salient threat and should be presented as such, but the way many actors use Judeo-Christian eschatology counteracts a sense of urgency in linear time, because it always communicates the end as inevitable and, in a sense, already past. Inspiring action in linear time by falling back upon eschatological temporal language is self-defeating because agency in linear time requires a political temporality that preserves the space in which meaningful action can be taken (Arendt, 1970, 1998; Benhabib et al., 2010). In this article, I use Arendt’s framework to illustrate how introducing an eschatological endpoint to linear time undermines action, however, Arendtian action also entails the radical possibility of the new beginning. Hence, Arendt’s framework stands both inside and outside the ‘modernist regime of historicity’ (Hartog, 2021), making it a fruitful starting point for illustrating the limits of conceptions of action in linear time, while also maintaining the possibility of something new to appear in the midst of unfolding history (Mackinnon, 2017), a possibility that is sorely needed in the current debate on climate eschatology.

This article offers interventions in two fields. First, it contributes to the growing scholarship on the political stakes of temporalities and temporal language for framing issues like climate change (Adam, 1998; Hom, 2019, 2020; Lazar, 2019; Little, 2022; White, 2024). Second, applying perspectives from political theory, it critiques attempts to use eschatological temporal language in Chronos time to inspire action (Friberg, 2022; Hogg, 2022; Latour, 2017; McQueen, 2021; Rossing and Buitendag, 2020). I will start with an account of the debate in political thought on the re-emergence of Judeo-Christian eschatological time in climate change. One of the great challenges stemming from the scope, complexity and timeframes of climate change is to even think it, let alone speak about it (Charbonnier, 2017: 224). It may, in the words of Duncan Kelly (2022: 2): ‘. . . throw human beings back upon premodern and (or) apocalyptic eschatological senses of time, to make sense of the strangeness of the moment and give it an experiential reality, whether as terror or as something akin to the sublime’. Scholars have used Judeo-Christian eschatology to think, speak and write about climate change and the Anthropocene. Some take it further, using eschatology not just for sense-making, but arguing that it may be a fruitful way to convey the salience of climate change as a threat to human survival in a way that is enabling or inspires hope (Friberg, 2022; Hogg, 2022; Latour, 2017; Rossing and Buitendag, 2020). Despite appeals to hope and faith, when climate change is made sense of as the eschatological endpoint in Chronos time, it entails a deterministic sense of the future and chronological confusion, where the future is predetermined and the present already past. Drawing on scholarship on the complex relationship between eschatological time and Western politics, I show how casting climate change as the eschatological endpoint in Chronos time is undermining the temporal space for action and speech as fundamental to politics (Arendt, 1998). In an Arendtian sense, speaking is already a political act, and it therefore always entails a great responsibility (Arendt, 1998: 3). If the speaker wishes to inspire action, it requires careful consideration of how to convey the seriousness of climate change without foreclosing the future (White, 2024).

Climate Change and the Re-Emergence of Eschatological Time

Eschatology is the study of the last things or the end(s), and although usually associated with Judeo-Christianity,¹ it spans several cultural traditions (Lazar, 2019: 172; Phillips and Hovey, 2015; Walls, 2008). In Judeo-Christian theology, eschatology refers to the end of the world initiated by the return of Christ and the last judgement and the revelation that this event instantiates (Hogg, 2022; Phillips and Hovey, 2015). In other words, eschatology entails conceptualising time as an arc from creation to destruction. Importantly, the coming of the end is revealed to humanity through the foresight of a prophet (Walls, 2008: 14). Eschatology encompasses more specified ideas about the end of the world such as the idea of apocalypse (Collins, 1974; Rothe, 2020: 157). This article will not attempt to settle the disputed debate on the difference between eschatology and apocalypse in Judeo-Christian theology, rather, it suffices to say that eschatology is the broader term referring to sometimes conflicting accounts of the end of time (Collins, 1974).

An eschatological temporal frame positions humans as living in a time that is approaching the end, understood as a full stop or the dispelling of time forever (Hartog, 2021). Importantly, theological eschatology entailed a narrow anthropocentric understanding of time from creation to the return of Christ. Scott Hamilton (2018: 385–387) argues that this anthropocentric theological view was fundamentally challenged with the discovery of geological timescapes and deep time in the eighteenth century because these timescales move beyond any kind of meaningful human comprehension. However, climate change discourse, and particularly the idea of the Anthropocene, reintroduces the eschatological timeframe (Hamilton, 2018: 391). Kelly (2022: 2–3) suggests that the unprecedented events and incomprehensible timeframe(s) of the Anthropocene entail that there is no language and no metaphors for speaking about what is happening, making human beings fall back upon eschatological imagery where the end of (human) time is approaching. Julia Nordblad (2021) argues that the concept of the Anthropocene has a temporality that closes down the open future and that the concept of ‘climate change’ is better for communicating the coming crises because it entails multiple possible trajectories.

Much of the language used to make sense of and communicate about climate change draws on imagery and phrases derived from eschatological time (Evans, 2018; Hartog, 2021). I focus on the cases where the aim of using eschatological time is to inspire urgent political action in chronological time. The approach therefore excludes those who use eschatological imagery but either explicitly refute that they want to inspire action (Scranton, 2015; Thaler, 2024), or argue that it is already too late to do anything (Cassegard and Thorn, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Servigne and Stevens, 2020). The cases under consideration here use eschatological temporal frames to make sense of and make salient the threat of climate change as an issue for politics, understood as the capacity to act in concert (Arendt, 1998). What unites these cases is a framing of the political space to act upon climate change in the present and immediate future as a moment on a temporal arc towards the end of the world. The eschatological temporal language is aimed at instilling fear and mobilising action among readers, stakeholders and populations. Mobilising through emotions such as fear can be fruitful according to McQueen (2021), because the right amount of civic fear will help make a future threat that requires immediate action salient in the present. In the case of climate change, scholars like Anna Friberg (2022), Emily Hogg (2022) and Barbara Rossing and Johan Buitendag (2020) argue that eschatological imagery can contribute to effectively mobilise action, while others, including Madeleine Fagan (2017), Scott Hamilton (2018) and Delf Rothe (2020), are more sceptical of the advantages of including the temporal narrative of end-times.

Presenting the problem of climate change is never just a story of the end-times, it is an attempt to disseminate information about how contemporary and historical human activity is now impacting the climate (McQueen, 2021). This depends on science and technology spanning a plethora of fields: ‘. . . motivating human action on global warming necessarily entails the difficult task of making available to human experience a cascade of events that unfold on different scales, at once human and inhuman’ (Chakrabarty, 2015: 158, original emphasis). When information about climate change is communicated through and placed in recognisably eschatological timeframes, I argue that such speech always makes an appeal to the politics of eschatology alongside any scientific claims to truth. There cannot be established a clear causal effect between the language for speaking about phenomena and action. However, in a Foucauldian sense, problematizations, the embedded and specific sets of practices and norms that shape behaviours, impact beliefs about how to approach them (Foucault, 2009; Koopman, 2013; Lawlor and Nale, 2014). Language is an important part of these practices.

Action to effectively counter climate change remains woefully insufficient despite the scientific evidence for systemic climate change that has been readily available for decades (Mayer and Smith, 2019). Responding to this paradox, Chris Methmann and Delf Rothe (2012) argue that ‘the logic of apocalypse’ in climate change is the root of this mismatch and offer a host of examples of how official institutions frame climate change in apocalyptic terms, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] to the UN Security Council. According to Methmann and Rothe, the logic of apocalypse as a ‘dispositif’ of security has four characteristics, one of which has to do with time. Unlike the catastrophe which momentarily interrupts time, the apocalypse frames the world in a temporal trajectory towards a designated end, which dispels time altogether (Methmann and Rothe, 2012: 328–330). The focus of this article is the interplay between eschatological time and Chronos time, and how these two ways of conceptualising time together communicate that there is no time for addressing climate change through political action, as conceptualised by Arendt. Unlike Methmann and Rothe, I use the broader notion of eschaton, because the political effects of casting climate change as the end of linear time are similar.

Politics in Eschatological Time

An important question remains to be answered, what does eschatological time do to politics? Eschatological time pervades the history of Western political thought, and how politics and eschatology interact has been widely debated for centuries. In its origin, the force of original Jewish and Christian eschatology both as religious and political projects should not be underestimated, as exemplified in the religious appeal to the overturning of the tyranny of the current regime, for example the Babylonian kings, or preserving the status of the one true church against corruption (Koselleck, 2004; Phillips and Hovey, 2015: 274–276; Zakaia and Mali, 1993). Even with the subsequent attempts to separate secular and religious authority, the appeal to eschatology has remained a force to reckon with. For example, J. G. A. Pocock traces Thomas Hobbes’ fear of eschatological framing in the English Civil war through his writings. According to this reading, stakes are raised when a political conflict is cast in the rhetoric of the end of time, leading to accelerating violence (Pocock, 1989). In a different context, the Russian philosopher and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev argued in his book The Russian Idea that the eschatological idea of the ethical transformation of society makes the Russian people inherently religious and maximalist, leading to regime extremities (McDaniel, 1998). Political theory has long been concerned with the connection between eschatological temporal frames and heightened stakes or extremities, where eschatology is connected to the experience of both revolution and crisis (Hartog, 2021; Koselleck, 1988).

The twentieth-century political philosopher Carl Schmitt (2003, 2009) wrote about the interplay between eschatology and politics, specifically the concept of the Katechon as the restrainer of chaos. Schmitt’s political theology prioritised order (Falk, 2020, 2022). In Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, the Katechon is conceptualised as the principle or personification of the restrainer of lawlessness. In Christian eschatology, lawlessness is associated with the coming of the Antichrist, which is a sign of the impending end. The Katechon is that figure or those practices that keep this chaos at bay, thereby delaying the end of time. Schmittian historicities see human historical developments as the continuous restraining of societal lawlessness through the quest for order (Schmitt, 2003, 2009). The unfolding of history is defined by this continuous resistance against disorder with the aim of delaying the end-times. Schmitt acknowledged the potential hopelessness and futility of action in a world that is ending. However, the Katechon can make acting meaningful for Christians even in the end-times: the restraining of chaos is the task of every good Christian (Falk, 2022). Importantly, Schmitt’s eschatological argument was formulated in the context of early twentieth-century German political turmoil, characterised by revolutionary movements with their own eschatological imageries of doom and salvation, but also against the backdrop of the rise of liberalism and conceptions of progressive history (Kelly, 2003).

Nomi C. Lazar (2019) argues that eschatological movements are characterised by an ability to bypass the need for political legitimacy. Lazar sees eschatological time in relation to what she calls a ‘primitivist’ temporal framing, where society is seen as corrupting, and all order, including temporal order, is a form of domination. But since there can never be a return to a premodern state, the only solution to the primitivist lament is the eschatological end of time (Lazar, 2019: 166). Eschatology, in Lazar’s framework, is characterised by a paradoxical combination of the inevitability of the outcome, and the compulsory call for action. It

‘. . . constructs compulsion, inevitability, and sometimes immediacy through talk of kairos, the right or ripe moment, the moment by means of which the force of change against which no one can stand, demands submission in the form of active participation’ (Lazar, 2019: 174).

Eschatology casts the present as the end of history, and the most important moment of that history. However, this emphasis on the present moment is used to delegitimise or depoliticise existing relations of power, by appealing to the rewards that will be reaped in the afterlife, or at the end of time. The leaders of eschatological movements can forgo political legitimacy by mobilising through the force of the inevitability and compulsion in eschatology rather than a perceived right to rule (Lazar, 2019: 167–75). Where Schmitt and Lazar might agree is on the resistance to order which frames the eschatological project, as exemplified in the primitivist frame in Lazar, and the forces of chaos in Schmitt. For both, the release of eschatological time on politics constitutes a moment of disorder or chaos, as exemplified by the extreme violence of some of the movements Lazar (2019) uses to illustrate her argument, for example the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso movement.

The release of the forces of chaos and disorder also poses a radical moment, captured in the idea of eschatology as rupture, the upending of categories in a moment of clarity. In this sense, eschatology poses a revolutionary possibility, where the move towards the inevitable allows for redefining the boundaries of the political (Kelly, 2003). There is also a political hope harboured in eschatological time: the end of the current order might offer deliverance and something better (Kelly, 2022; Latour, 2017; Thaler, 2019, 2024). Such hope has been a powerful mobilising force in political movements in history, as exemplified by the US civil rights movement of the last century (Kriner, 2005).

Nevertheless, the case of climate change is different from previous eschatological movements in history: because of its systemic character, there is an unknown factor of non-human agency at play, which makes it even less tangible than other political or religious issues (Chakrabarty, 2021; Latour, 2017). When the scope and incomprehensibility of the problem of climate change are framed as the eschaton in linear time, the revolutionary potential of eschatology disappears. There is already a sense of inevitability at play in talk of systemic climate change. When this systemic character interacts with eschatology in linear time the sense of inevitability and chronological confusion becomes disempowering. Differentiating between Chronos time as a condition and Kairos time as seized by human beings, Hartog argues that while Christian eschatological time is a tempting analogy for an issue like climate change, the developments of the climate belongs to Chronos time: ‘The Earth’s system is not God, and despite the Anthropocene “Event” being unique, without precedent in human history, and the herald of a new time, it is no analogue (not even negatively) of the Incarnation. This unprecedented time belongs, as has been stated, to Chronos time’ (Hartog, 2021: 437, original emphasis). Just as it is not possible to arrest Chronos time, there is already in the conceptualisation of critical thresholds and points-of-no-return in discussions of climate change, a sense that nature is coming back with a rightful vengeance that adds to the force of eschatology (Latour, 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2017).

Climate Eschatology

In the below, I provide a couple of examples of how eschatological temporal language is used in contemporary discussions of climate change. I define eschatological temporal language as the quality of emphasising climate change as the inevitable end of time while simultaneously positioning the speaker and audience in the moment of that ending, looking back upon the present with hindsight. In other words, eschatological temporal language consists of two interrelated temporal motifs. First, climate change is cast as the end of time towards which the audience is moving, simply by each passing minute, and second, the audience is asked to picture themselves in that moment of catastrophe looking back upon the present moment with regret. These temporal motifs are broad but also specific. It is possible to talk about systemic climate change without referring to the apocalypse as a moment in future time towards which humans are invariably moving (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017; Whyte, 2018). Similarly, it is possible to speak of future generations without positioning oneself in the future judging the present, although such generational thinking may have its own pitfalls (White, 2017). The aim here is not to document the prevalence of eschatological motifs in discussions of climate change, but rather to investigate and think with such language. I will merely present examples of eschatological temporal frames, and these examples are chosen from a variety of settings where figures from politics to journalism to academia try to inspire action, either in speech or in writing. Keeping this broad lens is a conscious decision inspired by Arendt: trying to think through what a broad selection of language does for political discussions of climate change.

Popularisations of environmental apocalypse are traced back to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, describing the harmful effects of the rampant use of synthetic chemical pesticides (Thaler, 2024).² The motif was further developed in the neo-Malthusian argument presented by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (1968) in their book The Population Bomb, describing the scenarios of civilisational collapse as caused by overpopulation.³ Both seminal texts have been traced as the start of a new form of millennial ecology, where apocalyptic imagery is used to convey the seriousness of climate breakdown (Johnson, 2009; Killingsworth and Palmer, 1996, 1998). In the contemporary debate, eschatological temporal frames coexist alongside and blend in with the popular, diplomatic, political and scientific discourse on how to address systemic climate change. An early example of this turn is Al Gore’s (1992) Earth in the Balance, meant to convey the seriousness of the threat of climate breakdown to a popular audience, drawing on the scientific consensus of the early 90s. In the chapter titled ‘The shadow our future throws’, he writes:

The potential for true catastrophe lies in the future, but the downslope that pulls us toward it is becoming recognizably steeper with each passing year. What lies ahead is a race against time. Sooner or later the steepness of the slope and our momentum down its curve will take us beyond a point of no return. . . . The odds that we will discern the nature of our plight improve dramatically as we get closer to the edge of history – the point from which we can gaze into the black hole’s very center (Gore, 1992: 49–50, my emphasis).

Gore’s conceptualisation of climate catastrophe as a race against time itself discloses the inherent determinism of introducing an end to Chronos time: when the world’s ending is situated as a later point on the current temporal trajectory, it can no longer be escaped. Moreover, Gore argues that proximity to this endpoint will allow humans to recognise the danger: this is the temporal move of eschatology, where Gore asks the reader to imagine themselves standing at the future edge of history, looking into the depths of catastrophe. A more contemporary example can be found in David Wallace-Wells’ (2017) article for the New Yorker, which created controversy in popular discussions of climate change (Mann et al., 2017; McQueen, 2021). Wallace-Wells used eschatological temporal framing: placing himself in the worst-case future describing all the horrors of rampant climate change, he consistently emphasised how the future may spell the end of civilisation, humanity or even intelligent life in the universe:

And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us (Wallace-Wells, 2017 my emphasis).

Wallace-Wells (2019: 17–18) has since expanded these catastrophic scenarios in The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) where he admits the difficulty of writing about climate change in a way that does not draw on theology: ‘there is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology – and perhaps the Cold War prospect of mutually assured destruction’.⁴ Wallace-Wells’ project is to describe the worst-case scenario of climate change to instil action in the reader today. The whole project is formulated in the frame of eschatological time: Wallace-Wells seeks to convey the salience of climate change, by positioning himself in the worst-case future describing its horrors to the audience of the present. While it is undoubtedly his aim to make the reader shocked and appalled, the temporal move is recognisably prophetic in a way that mimics biblical descriptions of apocalypse. Mark Lynas (2020) makes a comparable move to Wallace-Wells in his Our final warning: six degrees of climate emergency, where Lynas takes it upon himself to sound the final warning before the coming climate catastrophe. The works of Wallace-Wells and Lynas play into a narrative of ‘climate endgame’ as proposed by scholars at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge: seeking to make the worst-case scenarios of runaway climate change tangible to make effective cost-benefit analysis for action (Kemp et al., 2022). The problem for agency does not arise from the premise of forecasting or speculating as such. Rather, it is the way such forecasts are framed that often end up relying on the eschatological temporal motifs of inevitability and hindsight, perhaps for dramatic effect. In the case of Kemp et al. (2022), this involves leaning into the eschatological frame, using for example the four horsemen of the apocalypse to organise their analysis.

Bruno Latour makes exactly the move of eschatology in Facing Gaia, where he first asks the reader to picture the future catastrophe and then look back at the present from the perspective of the future. Drawing on the work of Arendt’s first husband, Günther Anders, he writes:

Without making the threat artificially visible, there is no way to get us to move into action. This is what Günther Anders calls ‘prophylactic’ use of the Apocalypse, it has the same content as Clive Hamilton’s argument that we must first of all give up hope – which projects us from the present toward the future – in order to be able to turn ourselves around – being reoriented by some powerful representation of the future in order to transform the present (Latour, 2017: 218, original emphasis).

The argument of Latour is that eschatology can be a frame for making the threat of climate change salient, and it is only through this artificial visibility that humans will be moved into action. The move is clearly eschatological, first, by using the term apocalypse and calling for giving up hope, and second, by arguing for a temporal reorientation of the audience from the future looking back at the present (Hartog, 2021). What is most important though, is the extent to which Latour sees this as a viable course to instil action: eschatology is used not just to think through or understand the climate catastrophe, but to transform the conditions of the present. Latour’s call is clearly action-oriented.

A last and well-known political example of eschatology in rhetorical appeals to effectively tackle climate change can be found in Greta Thunberg’s (2019) speech to the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019: ‘The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.’ Thunberg’s rhetorical move instils a sense of being watched and judged by future generations, but simultaneously, the appeal to the transcendental ‘we’ gives the audience a sense of being part of that future generation looking back with judgement at today’s inaction. The move splits the audience’s perspective in two: the obvious appeal is to a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of the future, but by positioning the audience in the future looking back upon the present with judgement, such an appeal seems in a sense hopeless because it is already too late, it is already past. Importantly, I do not mean to question the sincerity or necessity of the calls above. Rather, I propose thinking through what inserting an eschatological endpoint to Chronos time does for the perceived possibility to act in linear time. In the below, I argue that the effect is a narrowing of the temporal space for action.

The Loss of Agency in Climate Eschatology

There are two main reasons why conceptualising climate change as the eschatological end narrows the temporal space for speaking and acting in Chronos time. First, eschatology casts the temporal end as inevitable, by making climate change the determined end to linear time. Second, eschatology relies on the temporal move of religious revelation, where ‘all will become clear’ when everything culminates at the end of time, which positions the actors in the future looking back at the present moment. The implication is that speaking of climate change as the eschatological endpoint in Chronos time is both deterministic and backwards looking regardless of any explicit call for action in the present and orientation towards the future. There is a temporal disjuncture that undercuts politics in eschatological time. Political agency in linear time depends on a sense of direction and contingency. Specifically, political action in an Arendtian sense cannot be predetermined, and it must be oriented towards the future in time (Arendt, 2006: 254). This does not mean that politics is instrumental or causal and therefore relies on chronology for having its desired effects. Political action is never causal, but unpredictable and contingent (Arendt, 1998: 177–178). Arendt (1998: 52–53) argues that the possibility for such new beginnings to arise between humans necessitates a space of movement, in which meaningful action can be taken (Canovan, 1994). I argue that it is also dependent on a temporal space of navigation, where the actors themselves believe and can imagine that it is possible to change course and start again. It is this imagined or perceived temporal space that is being threatened by the framing of eschatology in Chronos time because eschatological time forecloses options and upsets the chronology necessary for taking political action directed towards a future, effectively disconnecting politics from both its mode and its aims (White, 2024). Unlike Schmittian eschatology as disorder, where the restrainer holds back the destructive forces of chaos ravaging the earth, eschatological time is dangerous for agency because it restrains politics by narrowing the temporal space in which action against climate change can be taken. Without this temporal space, if time truly has run out, there is no time for action. ‘Not the past – and all factual truth, of course, concerns the past – or the present, insofar as it is the outcome of the past, but the future is open to action’ (Arendt, 2006: 254). The problem is not that eschatological time releases chaos and disorder, but that it forecloses a change of trajectory by narrowing down the space for new beginnings in the world.⁵

The temporal frame of eschatological time positions the present on an arc leading to the inevitable end of time. Wallace-Wells’s writing is a case in point, when the current moment is designated as on the path towards an uninhabitable future. Such language situates the present on a trajectory towards the end of time, even when used to motivate taking action to avoid it. It is the duplicity of time that remains: Chronos time cannot be stopped or changed, and when the end is introduced to unilinear, progressive time it always tells a story of inevitability. This story of inevitability is told in parallel with the explicit call to action when climate change is situated in eschatological time. Lazar (2019: 172) writes: ‘Eschatological speculations share a common structure. An eschatological conception of the flow of time is linear both in its directionality and because it begins and ends at distinct points’. Presenting climate change as the eschatological end of Chronos time makes for inevitability: if time is truly linear, any passing of time is moving towards the end no matter the trajectory. Therefore, any call to action against climate change as the last moment in eschatological time also conveys the inevitability of the end approaching. Many actors would object to their language being labelled eschatological (Servigne and Stevens, 2020), and some explicitly distance themselves from the idea that they are apocalyptic. However, the eschatological temporal frame is part of the Western cosmological order, and when certain phrases or motifs are employed, this frame is immediately recognisable to the audience. An example may be the tendency to say that ‘time is running out’ – in the context of a catastrophic or existential risk, this entails, whether intended or not, an invocation of end-time (Kemp et al., 2022). But as previously mentioned, time is always a condition as well as a social construct, and Chronos time passes regardless of any conscious intention. The idea of time as running out always carries a sense of inevitability. The way in which temporal figures of speech traverse between time as a given and time as a constructed entity makes for political statements that appeal to both the political and the ‘natural’.⁶ The passage of Chronos time is inevitable, but, somehow, humans can race to meet it, try to stall it or seek to counter it. Independent of intentions these ways of speaking carry a certain conceptualisation of the world that immediately resonates with the understandings of Western audiences. Sometimes, eschatological frames are intended to refer to the end of humanity in climate change, rather than an end to time itself. However, the eschatological frame is invariably anthropogenic (Hamilton, 2018), in Judeo-Christianity the end of earthly human life is tied to the end of time. Hence, such distinguishing between the end of humanity and the end of time is occluded in eschatological language. Some Anthropocene scholarship has successfully made the distinction. For example, Chakrabarty (2021) differentiates between the globe and the planet, where the former refers to the human globalised world which may come to an abrupt end in climate change, and the latter refers to the earth system, which has its own rhythm and pace, independent of or careless towards human survival (Hartog, 2021).

Introducing an eschatological endpoint to linear time also upsets the chronology of events by taking the vantage point from the future end of time looking back upon the present with hindsight. This upsetting of temporal chronology is closely related to revelation, the notion that the end cannot be known until it happens. Revelation is essential for understanding eschatology. The eschaton is both doom and salvation in one: heaven and earth, apocalypse and divine revelation, dystopic and utopic (Jones, 2022). Duplicity is at the heart of eschatology. In Judeo-Christian theology, the end of the world is usually foretold in a divine revelation to one or a few people, and when the end of time arrives, the revelation is realised and all that has hitherto been implied becomes clear (Phillips and Hovey, 2015: 289). In the case of climate change, revelation entails that knowledge of the detriment of climate catastrophe is not fully accessible in the present: the actors cannot yet see clearly, they do not perceive the full picture, and knowledge of the implications of their actions will come too late, when everything culminates at the end of time. Knowledge is retrospective. The revelatory idea in eschatology has a clear temporal implication which disincentivises acting in the present because the present is already past. Specifically, revelation entails a double temporal movement. On one hand, humans are ignorant until revelation, but on the other hand, they have the prophecy foretelling the end. Hence, revelation communicates, first, that the present is subject to an explanation not yet available: the importance of the present moment cannot be known until the future arrives. Second, it positions the subject uttering and listening at the vantage point of the future looking backwards, like the prophet. The effect is that eschatological temporal framing communicates the futility of action in the present, and ultimately, through the perspective of the future, casts the present as already past. Again, there is a contradictory story told by framing climate change in eschatological time. When Thunberg says that future generations are watching and judging the actions of the UN Climate Action Summit, she is appealing to this moment as the moment to take action, as judged from the perspective of the future looking back. However, because of the temporal disjuncture of eschatology, this framing undermines the urgency of present action by its retrospective orientation. By temporally situating the audience in the future looking back, the present becomes past, and in linear time, the past cannot be changed. Contrary to Latour’s (2017) appeal, the retrospective turn of eschatology when inserted into Chronos time, narrows the temporal space for transforming the present. In Chronos time, action is always future-oriented and is dependent on being held in place by the chronology of past and present (Arendt, 2006). Eschatological temporal framing undermines the temporal space for agency by upsetting the relationship between the present and the future. The tragedy of the eschatological temporal frame is that knowledge for the many cannot be had until the end of time. Eschatological time situates the audience in a position similar to that of Benjamin’s (2015) angel of history: being ceaselessly blown towards the future end of time by the winds of progress, looking back at, and unable to intervene in, the wreckage of the past and the present.

Unpacking Eschatology, Chronos Time and Climate Politics

It remains to be answered why Arendt’s framework is useful for understanding the problems of political agency in linear eschatological time. Arendt’s framework works within a modernist historicity and therefore speaks to the peculiar problem of conceptualising climate change in an enabling way, at the intersection between Judeo-Christian eschatology, Chronos time and agency. However, Arendt’s framework also retains a possibility for radically unpredictable new beginnings to occur from established patterns, which makes her concept of action promising for moving beyond the modernist historicity. Arendt’s concept of action is clearly working with the categories of Chronos: action is future-oriented, and the actor is inhabiting a gap in time between past and future. The above analysis has shown how making sense of climate change as an eschatological endpoint in linear time, puts the actor in an impossible position: invariably moving towards the inevitable disaster, while already relating to present actions with hindsight.

Arendt’s framework illuminates the problems for agency when climate change is cast as the end of linear time. First, presenting the future end of time as inevitable undermines agency in linear time, because it entails losing the setting in which actions can become meaningful. Arendt emphasises the generational quality of agency: for action to have meaning, it requires the presence of other people, both in space and in time. Presenting the end of time as inevitable constitutes not just the loss of individual life, but the loss of the world that makes actions meaningful in this life and potentially after (Arendt, 1998: 136–139). The end of time is a threat to the very condition of meaningful life and action: the presence of other human beings in time on an inhabitable earth (Arendt, 1998: 208). However, it is not an option to adopt the perspective of future generations at the expense of the present, because each generation must contend with the times that they have been given: ‘Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses’ (Arendt, 2006, 10). This is invariably an anthropocentric view, humans are the actors of politics and the human community makes up the context in which politics can appear (Arendt, 1998). But if the boundaries of the political can be reconfigured in response to the Anthropocene, what constitutes a political community may change (Chakrabarty, 2021, 2019). Second, the revelatory move in eschatological time undermines agency by removing responsibility for the conditions of the present and the future (Runciman, 2018). If knowledge is retrospective, and the importance of the present moment cannot be known before the end of time, there are no limits and no direction to politics in linear time, which undercuts the relationship between politics and its aims. The temporal orientation of eschatological revelation positions the audience in the future looking backwards, with hindsight. The perspective is turned towards the past, and attention is turned away from the future and what it entails. In other words, maintaining the retrospective approach towards the present ensures a form of blindness towards the future. Ironically this undermining of political agency from the perspective of the future often becomes an embrace of the status quo (Malm, 2021; Thaler, 2024).

In sum, using the temporal frame of eschatology to make the threat of climate catastrophe salient in Chronos time is undermining the force of mobilisation. The implication is that a reconfiguration of cosmological categories is needed if the West wishes to address climate change politically. However, there are multiple avenues for pursuing this project: one alternative would be to shed the eschatological frame, this would preserve agency in linear time, but risks perpetuating Western time as a driver of ecological disaster (Ateliers de la pensée, 2022; Chakrabarty, 2021; Gilroy, 1993; Mbembe, 2003; Phillips, 2025; Rosa, 2013). Another alternative would be to shed the dominant conception of Chronos time and keep the eschatological frame, however, this option depends on whether it is possible to escape the logic of Chronos in Western cosmology (Hartog, 2021). A last avenue would be to reconceptualise political agency in a way that is not dependent on the linear relationship between past, present and future (Chakrabarty, 2021). I will not settle which of the approaches seems most promising, this article has emphasised the incompatibility between the three conceptual frameworks that are currently at work in attempts to mobilise action through climate eschatology: political agency, Chronos time and Judeo-Christian eschatology.

There may be limits to how radically time can be reconfigured for politics (Foucault, 2009). Hartog (2021: 437–438) emphasises how the present is characterised by multiple coexisting historicities: modernist categories of past, present and future exist alongside digital and global presentism and a novel Anthropocene historicity. Past, present and future orient political desires in time and permeate everything from policy documents to official speeches and written interventions, as illustrated by Latour, Gore, and Wallace-Wells. This article has investigated what happens to political agency when the modernist historicity is coupled with a premodern conception of eschatological end-time. There are fundamental differences between theological and geological temporalities, and yet, these distinctions are too often smoothed over in discussions of climate change. It may be a rhetorical choice, as appreciated by Wallace-Wells (2019) and Latour (2017) or it may be a case of falling back upon established cultural frames in the face of the unprecedented (Charbonnier, 2017; Kelly, 2022). Many of the figures who lean into the eschatological temporal frame still maintain that they do not want to be interpreted as apocalyptic (Servigne and Stevens, 2020). Some scholars, such as Thaler (2024), even argue that the way eco-miserabilists, such as Scranton, explicitly condemn any action to mitigate climate change harbours a politics of radical hope in a utopian logic. Multiple attempts have been made to reconfigure or challenge the dominant way of conceptualising Chronos time and climate change. Scholars have argued that everything is bound to collapse (Servigne and Stevens, 2020), that the catastrophe is already here (Cassegard and Thorn, 2018) or that politics has exhausted its function in a Western frame (Thaler, 2024). Nevertheless, figures inside and outside political theory are still trying to inspire audiences to political action by appealing to climate change as the eschatological endpoint in linear time (Friberg, 2022; Hogg, 2022; Latour, 2017; McQueen, 2021; Rossing and Buitendag, 2020). This article has critically investigated what this temporal frame does to political agency, by drawing on the complex interplay between the politics of eschatology and the peculiar problem of Anthropogenic climate change. My conclusion is that placing climate change as the eschatological endpoint in linear time, narrows the space for political action, in an Arendtian sense. Political agency in time is undermined by language. The question is then, can language reconfigure time for politics (Pocock, 1989)? And in which case, how?

Politics in Dark Times

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities (Arendt, 1998: 200, my emphasis).

There may be something in Arendt’s framework worth salvaging also for the project of reconfiguring a different temporal frame or a different conception of action, mainly, the emphasis on the new beginning. Arendt’s is not the only useful framework of political action for such a project, however, it may be helpful for an attempt to bridge old and new conceptions of time and agency precisely because Arendtian politics contends with modernist historicity, while also troubling some of its categories, thereby containing a radical possibility of change. Arendt’s (2006) actors are contending with the categories of the past and future. However, Arendtian action is not instrumental and should not be confused with an embrace of the status quo, or a form of technological solutionism or Prometheanism (Dillet and Hatzisavvidou, 2022). According to Arendt, action is fundamentally contingent and unpredictable, which has implications for both the quality of politics and for the way Arendt’s work is placed within a tradition of modernist historicity. That Arendt’s action is non-instrumental and contingent makes her thought more radical than is often appreciated in critiques of her work (Ashcroft, 2022 [2021]; Zerilli, 2018 [2016]; Schwarz, 2018). There is a loss of control entailed in acting into the web of human relationships: this loss of control entails the potential for both democracy and totalitarianism. Importantly, it always harbours the possibility of starting something new (Arendt, 1998). This potential for new beginnings in Arendt’s thought seems like a promising avenue for escaping the current stagnation of climate change discussions. Enabling the appearance of the new is also a task of language: there must be time and space for things to change because time has not yet run out. This space and time must remain alongside any appeals to civic fear (McQueen, 2021). The contingent quality of Arendtian politics also has implications for how it is positioned within a modernist historicity: although Arendt’s framework employs the categories of past-present-future, and Arendt explicitly states that action should be future-oriented (Arendt, 2006: 254), there is a distinct concern for the present in Arendt’s philosophy (Arendt, 2004: xxv; Kohn, n.d., Library of Congress). The present is never fully decoupled from the past or the future but requires continuous engagement with both categories simultaneously: this amounts to an actual struggle that must be undertaken by each new generation (Arendt, 2006). In this sense, Arendtian action is not only Promethean, but also Epimethean: between past and future (Dillet and Hatzisavvidou, 2022; Muldoon, 2016: 131). In the case of eschatological climate change, where agency in Chronos time is undermined by language, enabling the capacity for politics in the present with roots in the past and direction towards the future is also a pragmatic choice, because it can be thought within the imperfect frameworks that are already at work in how a Western audience makes sense of the world.

My aim is not to offer an alternative temporality, but I want to bring the argument to its conclusion by reflecting upon what characteristics would be important for a temporal frame that does not undermine agency in the way that climate eschatology in Chronos time does. Intuitively, such a political temporality would have to balance between communicating the seriousness of the situation with the danger of presenting the end of time as inevitable. Pragmatically, this may mean contending with the way Western societies have come to institutionally and culturally think about time. What is lost in the way climate change is presented on the doomsday clock or in popular discourse as if time is running out, is that agency is to be found in taking responsibility for the conditionality of the future: it is not just time that will bring about world-ending climate change, that will also be brought about by human action. Making the threat salient in order to induce fear can be useful, but as McQueen (2021: 160) acknowledges, only if it does not lead into the passivity of fatalism and complacency. However, I disagree with McQueen (2021: 169) when she writes about how to instil an audience with the appropriate amount of courage to tackle climate change: ‘One promising route would be to invite her audience to consider how they and their actions will be remembered by future generations’. Such an approach is diametrically opposed to the contingency of Arendtian action, which is always boundless and irreversible. Hence, humans cannot know which actions today will be the ones to be commemorated in the future, and motivating actions today primarily through the prospect of remembrance is ultimately futile, because the actors are never fully in control, and never truly the writers of their own stories (Arendt, 1998: 191–192). In the emphasis on the contingency and limits of politics, Arenditan action might be more attuned to ecological concerns than is often appreciated. Climate change may force actors to acknowledge the true meaning of the contingency of action because humans are not just acting into the web of human relationships, but also acting in a way that engages the processes and functions of the planet, which has its own mode and pace and which is to some extent independent of or careless towards the survival of the human species (Chakrabarty, 2021).

Arendtian action is always directed towards the start of something new, and the potential of changing course, this is sorely needed in a Western climate debate that seems to be evermore polarised and agitated. A pragmatic approach to constructing a new temporal language for climate change may be a fruitful avenue. Maintaining and cultivating the space for speech and action through language is crucial because power understood as acting in concert, can only arise in the space and time between people. This space and time cannot be suspended for the sake of emergency, nor dispelled in the interest of the future, it has to be kept open for the prospect of power and new beginnings to emerge, even in dark times.

Conclusion

I have investigated how conceptualising climate change as the eschatological endpoint in Chronos time impacts agency. Relying on an Arendtian approach to action, I show that introducing an eschatological endpoint to linear time undercuts political agency for climate change. I started with an account of how eschatological imagery has re-emerged in climate change, before giving a brief introduction to the complicated relationship between politics and Judeo-Christian eschatology in Western political thought. I defined climate eschatology as temporal imagery that situates climate change as the end of time, and which appeals to the audience to position themselves in that end, looking back on the present with hindsight. The next section showed why climate eschatology undermines agency in linear time. First, because it presents the future end of time as inevitable, and, second, because it upsets the chronology of events, positioning the audience in the future looking back upon the present with hindsight. Hence, eschatological linear time communicates the futility of action alongside any call to act. Arendt’s concepts expose this peculiar problem of agency at the intersection of Chronos time and eschatology, but her framework may also provide a useful starting point for rethinking a temporality where the temporal space for speech and action is preserved. The article has underscored how particular forms of temporal language undermines action, and tried to open up space to think about temporal language itself as key to addressing climate change politically. The aspiration has been to use language to bring out the tensions in climate eschatology, the hope is that this may be a space from which to start reconfiguring time for politics, between inevitability and hindsight.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the reviewers at Political Studies for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the University of Chicago Graduate Conference in Political Thought 2022 for their constructive reading of an early version, in particular, I would like to thank my commentator, Professor Adom Getachew. Thank you also to my supervisor team, Professor David Runciman, Professor Duncan Bell and Professor Duncan Kelly for your constructive feedback. And thank you to Carl Pierer, Benjamin Tan, John Sæten Lilletvedt and Arun Thirunavukarasu for reading.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: I thank Aker Scholarship and the Cambridge Trust for supporting my PhD research at Cambridge.

ORCID iD

Nanna Lilletvedt Sæten

Notes

Author Biography

Nanna Lilletvedt Sæten is a doctoral student at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and an associate researcher with the Chair in Geopolitics of Risk at École normale supérieure, Paris. Her work has appeared in Nations and Nationalism and Filosofisk Supplement.

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