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This month 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 reevaluate our -political, environmental, and technological priorities for the future.
- -Like recent philosophies of plants or -[[insects]{.underline}](http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791), -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]{.underline}](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/) -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.
- -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 honor. 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 -reemergence 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]{.underline}](https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism) -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]{.underline}](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564) -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]{.underline}](https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times), -allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful -debate."
- -Our inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences, -as recent months make clear. The central argument in favor 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.
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