Santiago
Zabala is
ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Barcelona. His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic
Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009)
and Hermeneutic Communism (2011, coauthored with G.
Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press. His most
recent book is
Why Only Art Can Save Us. (2017)
An undergraduate student told me his parents were using the
pandemic to persuade him to avoid philosophy as it could not
prevent or solve real emergencies. I told him to let them know
that we find ourselves in this global emergency because we haven’t
thought philosophically enough.
The
increasingly narrow focus of experts this century has prevented
us from addressing problems from a global perspective, which
has always been the distinctive approach of philosophy. This
is evident in the little consideration we give to warnings.
Too often these are discarded as useless or insignificant—much
like philosophy—when in fact they are vital. Though philosophers
can’t solve an ongoing emergency—philosophy was
never meant to solve anything—we can interpret their signs
through a “philosophy of warnings.” Although this
philosophy probably won’t change the views of my student’s
parents, it might help us to re-evaluate our political, environmental,
and technological priorities for the future.
Like
recent philosophies of plants or insects, which emerged as a
response to a global environmental crisis, a “philosophy
of warnings” is also a reaction to a global emergency
that requires philosophical elucidation. Although the ongoing
pandemic has triggered this new stance it isn’t limited
to this event. Nor is it completely new.
Warnings
have been a topic of philosophical investigation for centuries.
The difference lies in the meaning these concepts have acquired
now. Before philosophy we had prophets to tell us to be alert
to the warnings of the Gods, but we secularized that office
into that of the philosopher, who, as one among equals, advised
to heed the signs; to use our imagination, because that is all
we got. The current pandemic has shown how little prepared we
were for a global emergency, even one whose coming has been
announced for decades. But why haven’t we been able to
take these warnings seriously? Before tackling this question,
let’s recall how warnings have been addressed philosophically.
Warnings
point toward what is to come and are meant involve us in a radical
break, a discontinuity with the present signaled by alarming
signs that we are asked to confront.
Examples
of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology
and Plato's Apology. Apollo provided Cassandra with the gift
of prophecy even though she could not convince others of the
validity of her predictions, and Socrates warned the Athenians—after
he was sentenced to death—that their inequity and mendacity
undermined the democracy they claimed to honour. Against Gaston
Bachelard, who coined the term “Cassandra complex”
to refer to the idea that events could be known in advance,
Theodore Adorno warned that any claim to know the future should
be avoided. It is probably in this spirit that Walter Benjamin
warned we should pull the brake on the train of progress as
it was stacking disaster upon disaster. In line with Hannah
Arendt’s warnings of the re-emergence of totalitarianism
after the Second World War, Giorgio Agamben began his book on
the current pandemic with “A Warning”: biosecurity
will now serve governments to rule through a new form of tyranny
called “technological-sanitary” despotism.
These
examples illustrate the difference between warnings and predictions.
Warnings are sustained by signs in the present that request
our involvement, as Benjamin suggests. Predictions call out
what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as
the only continuation of the present, but warnings instead point
toward what is to come and are meant involve us in a radical
break, a discontinuity with the present signaled by alarming
signs that we are asked to confront. The problem is not the
involvement warnings request from us but rather whether we are
willing to confront them at all. The volume of vital warnings
that we ignore—climate change, social inequality, refugee
crises—is alarming; it has become our greatest emergency.
Indifference
towards warnings is rooted in the ongoing global return to order
and realism in the twenty-first century. This return is not
only political, as demonstrated by the various right-wing populist
forces that have taken office around the world, but also cultural
as the return of some contemporary intellectuals to Eurocentric
Cartesian realism demonstrates. The idea that we can still claim
access to truth without being dependent upon interpretation
presupposes that knowledge of objective facts is enough to guide
our lives. Within this theoretical framework warnings are cast
off as unfounded, contingent and subjective, even though philosophers
of science such as Bruno Latour continue to remind us that no
“attested knowledge can stand on its own.” The Internet
and, in particular, social media have intensified this realist
view, further discrediting traditional vectors of legitimation
(international agencies, major newspapers, or credentialed academics)
and rendering any tweet by an anonymous blogger credible because
it presents itself as transparent, direct and genuine. “The
quickness of social media, as Judith Butler pointed out, allows
for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful
debate.”
The
central argument in favour of a philosophy of warnings is not
whether what it warns of comes to pass but rather the pressure
it exercises against those emergencies hidden and subsumed under
the global call to order.
Our
inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences,
as recent months make clear. The central argument in favour
of a philosophy of warnings is not whether what it warns of
comes to pass but rather the pressure it exercises against those
emergencies hidden and subsumed under the global call to order.
This pressure demands that our political, environmental and
technological priorities be reconsidered, revealing the alarming
signs of democratic backsliding, biodiversity loss, and commodification
of our lives by surveillance capitalism. These warnings are
also why we should oppose any demand to “return to normality,”
which signals primarily a desire to ignore what caused this
pandemic in the first place. A philosophy of warnings seeks
to alter and interrupt the reality we’ve become accustomed
to.
Although
a philosophy of warnings will not prevent future emergencies,
it will resist the ongoing silencing of emergencies under the
guise of realism by challenging our framed global order and
its realist advocates. This philosophy is not meant to rescue
us from emergencies but rather rescue us into emergencies that
we are trained to ignore.
