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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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