Title: The Philosophy of Warnings
Author: Santiago Zabala
Category: Articles

Santiago Zabala

***The Philosophy of Warnings***

([[Published in the *Institute of Arts and Ideas* on October 7,
2020]{.underline}](https://iai.tv/articles/the-philosophy-of-warnings-auid-1646))

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.

[[Santiago Zabala]{.underline}](http://www.santiagozabala.com/) is ICREA
Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in
Barcelona. His most recent book is *Being at Large: Freedom in the Age
of Alternative Facts* (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020).