Crisis, Catastrophe and the Shaken World (2/7)
From Tohu va-Bohu to the Kali Yuga: The Patočkian Experience of a World Put to the Test
This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, tracing them from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of a world shaken to its foundations. Bringing Greek, Biblical and Indian traditions into dialogue with the philosophy of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essays, this study follows a demanding yet essential line of inquiry: Is catastrophe a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our historical condition? What follows is the second chapter.
A Cosmology of Disorder
The concepts of crisis and catastrophe have marked the conceptual history of modern politics as two major operators through which disorder has been rendered historically intelligible. The term crisis derives from the Greek krisis, whose original meaning is “decision” or “judgment.” In Hippocratic medicine, it designates the decisive moment at which the course of a pathological process turns toward one of two equally possible outcomes: recovery or death. Transposed into the political sphere, crisis thus denotes a regime of disequilibrium in which established forms of regulation are no longer capable of absorbing or neutralizing social, economic or symbolic tensions. It therefore has a dual function: it is revelatory, insofar as it lays bare the lines of fragility within an existing order; it is also productive, insofar as it calls for the reconfiguration of that order and the renewal of its principles of coherence.
Crisis refers to a moment of suspended decision, an unstable interval within the unfolding of becoming, where determinations are provisionally held in abeyance while the outcome remains undecided. This Greek framework stands in marked contrast to the plurality of its counterparts, which are never true equivalents, within the Sanskrit tradition.
Among these are saṅkaṭa (सङ्कट), denoting a critical situation, distress or a dangerous impasse; vipatti (विपत्ति), referring to adversity or impending disaster; and, in certain philosophical contexts, saṃśaya (संशय), expressing doubt or a structurally constitutive state of indecision.[1] Yet none of these terms fully captures the semantic density of the Greek krisis, understood as the immanent moment of decision in which judgment emerges from within indeterminacy itself.
Another Sanskrit term, niṣkarṣa (निष्कर्ष), may nevertheless be invoked, not as an equivalent of crisis, but as its logical counterpart, a kind of inverted image of the Greek concept of krisis. Whereas crisis designates the open moment of decision, niṣkarṣa refers to the stabilized outcome of a process of discernment, the conclusion reached after passing through indeterminacy, in other words, meaning once the crisis of meaning has been resolved.[2]
On closer examination, however, these Sanskrit notions illuminate certain dimensions of the critical as it manifests itself in lived experience, without making it either necessary or even possible to stabilize them within a strictly conceptual framework.
For crisis is not merely a logical category or a schema of decision; it also belongs to an affective regime. It presents itself as hesitation, as the weakening of one’s grasp upon reality, as a relative loss of control, but equally as the effort to recover what is slipping away. It thus embodies a tension between powerlessness and the will to master what resists mastery.
Crisis also possesses its own distinctive tonality: the anxiety provoked by time as it slips away, contracts or remains suspended, as though becoming itself were withdrawing from its own habitual coordinates.
In politics, therefore, crisis does not merely designate a moment of rational transition. It is simultaneously the eruption of the political and the exposure of its most strained underside: a state of tension in which power discovers itself both energized by its own reconfiguration and weakened by what exceeds every stable form of control.
Crisis both plays with and outwits catastrophe. The critical, a rudimentary attitude, almost a reflex of survival, disguises itself as relief: “I have not yet reached catastrophe.” In that displacement, it establishes itself as a position of relative respite, a way of postponing collapse by keeping it at a distance.
Catastrophe, by contrast, presents itself as a kind of inverted festival of crisis: not a celebration, but an excess without a subject, a suspension of all points of reference, the world’s stark exposure to its own unbinding. It thus appears as the intensified reverse side of crisis. Whereas crisis still remains governed by the logic of management and thresholds, catastrophe exceeds every economy of control and postponement.
The two great Indian epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, each unfold, in their own way, a complex dynamic between crisis and catastrophe, yet neither offers an explicit conceptualization of the relationship.[3] Instead, this articulation emerges through a narrative, cosmological and ethical staging of disorder, in which disorder appears simultaneously as the suspension of decision and as the collapse of the world’s order.
In the Mahābhārata, crisis first manifests itself as the obscuring of dharma, understood simultaneously as normative, cosmic and social order. Even before the outbreak of the Kurukṣetra war, the world has already entered a regime of disequilibrium: the law becomes unreadable, lineages contradict one another, duties collide, and hierarchies begin to disintegrate. The situation thus fully belongs to the register of crisis in the strongest sense of the term: a condition of structural indeterminacy in which judgment is both demanded and rendered impossible without transgression. Its paradigmatic expression is the figure of Arjuna, suspended in judgment on the battlefield, incapable of deciding without compromising the very order he is called upon to defend.[4]
Yet crisis is never merely internal to a regime of decision. It is always already traversed by a catastrophic potentiality. The war of Kurukṣetra represents its absolute actualization, where the virtuality of disaster becomes embodied in an all-encompassing catastrophe: the near-total destruction of lineages, the collapse of structures of filiation, and the exhaustion of ordinary moral categories.[5] Disorder no longer merely suspends order; it dissolves the very conditions of its possibility.
Within Indian thought, catastrophe belongs to the cosmic logic of the yugas. It is not the contingent event of ruin, but the decisive moment of a cosmic metamorphosis: the world must come undone in order to be reconfigured. The end of a cycle is never an absolute rupture, but the opening of a necessary recomposition, in which dissolution and regeneration follow one another according to the rhythm of cosmic temporality.
The Mahābhārata illustrates this dynamic by presenting catastrophe not as closure but as the re-sedimentation of being. By destroying the old order, conflict prepares the rebirth of the world and the emergence of a renewed equilibrium of dharma. The war, despite its apocalyptic scale, becomes the vehicle of a cosmic restoration: a passage from decline to the reaffirmation of meaning.
The Rāmāyaṇa, by contrast, offers a different modality of disorder and its resolution. Here, crisis does not take the form of a cosmic cataclysm but is condensed into Rāma’s exile, the symbol of suspended legitimacy. Catastrophe never fully erupts; it is displaced, deferred and contained. The narrative neutralizes disaster through its own structure. Rāvaṇa, the sovereign figure of disorder, embodies the temptation of chaos; his defeat marks the restoration of the continuity of dharma and the re-establishment of legitimate sovereignty.
Thus, whereas the Mahābhārata makes catastrophe the matrix of a cosmic re-foundation, the Rāmāyaṇa stages its narrative domestication. Disaster is transformed into a process of purification and the reaffirmation of order. Crisis becomes a passage rather than an ending; destruction becomes the very principle of the world’s endurance.
What fundamentally distinguishes the two great Indian epics is that crisis is never purely decision-oriented, nor catastrophe purely terminal. Both belong to the same cosmic regime, structured by the three dynamics that govern all worldly becoming: dissolution (pralaya), recomposition (sṛṣṭi), and cyclical repetition (saṃsāra).[6]
Within the framework of dharma, as it structures the itihāsas (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa), no stable separation exists between crisis and catastrophe, because the world itself is conceived as unfolding through cycles of disequilibrium and readjustment. The unraveling of dharma is therefore never absolute; it belongs to a broader economy of cosmic recomposition. Crisis corresponds to an internal instability of order, already permeated by the possibility of collapse, while catastrophe never signifies pure annihilation but rather the world’s reconfiguration, the reordering of meaning after disintegration.
[1]On the philosophical uses of saṃśaya as a structure of doubt and indecision in the Indian traditions, see also Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2011).
[2]Nadja Stchoupak, Luigia Nitti, and Louis Renou, Dictionnaire sanskrit-français (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1959).
[3]Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), Chapter 9 (“Women and Ogresses in the Rāmāyaṇa”), pp. 213-250; Chapter 10 (“Violence in the Mahābhārata”); and Chapter 11 (“Dharma in the Mahābhārata”), pp. 251-338. Doniger examines how both the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata stage the disintegration of dharma through wars, dynastic conflicts, and cosmico-political disorder.
[4]On Arjuna’s suspension of judgment and the crisis of dharma in the Mahābhārata, see Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), especially the introduction and the chapters devoted to the Bhagavad Gītā, particularly the sections analyzing the opening dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, where the coordinates of the dharma collapse and the suspension of decision on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra are brought to the fore.
[5]On the Kurukṣetra war as a total catastrophe and as the moment of the collapse of dharma, see in particular Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), pp. 75-82; D. D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 100-108; Irawati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 1969), pp. 7-32 and 95-120; and Bimal Krishna Matilal, Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), pp. 1-24.
[6]Upinder Singh, Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021), chapter “Violence in Early Indian Tradition” and the sections devoted to the Mahābhārata, particularly Singh’s reading of the Kurukṣetra war as a moment of extreme intensification of political and cosmic violence rather than as a mere dynastic conflict. Singh emphasizes that the epic and normative sources do not construct a unified theory of violence, but instead reveal its central structural role in the imaginaries of power, kinship, and dharma.