122 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
122 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
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).
|