Sublime

Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953); Shmuel Eisenstadt, Ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations

The third category is methodological and conceptual. My goal as a scholar is to replace the still dominant ‘national-modernization’ model with the paradigm of ‘sustainable modernity’ for the humanistic disciplines.

Three developments in the present century frame my study: the rise of Asia – in particular, China; the crisis of planetary sustainability; and the decline of transcendent and universalist ideals. To what extent are Chinese and Indian intellectuals and activists beginning to address these issues? I

While Zhao acknowledges that the post-Qin ideal of tianxia is transformed, his conception continues to offer a top-down method of political ordering as the essence of the tianxia system. I submit that I have trouble with this model.

The goal of this work is to identify traditions in Asia that have been consonant with global imperatives in the Anthropocene – when humans have begun to significantly affect nature and the environment – not only by revealing different attitudes and ideals regarding nature (and other subjugated entities) but also by showing us different methods and

Modern historians, in contrast, evaluate past events in their contemporary spatial and relational context and regard their archival remains in another time as ‘anachronisms’ or sources to interpret the past.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

may be able to reconfigure the absolute sovereignty of nations;

My goal is not to dispute this account but to grasp: (1) what were the conditions in which this linear vision became institutionalized and hegemonic and (2) how linearity came to be about territorially or socially bounded histories within this time-space. In some ways, I suggest, this is a paradoxical development since this time-space is relatively