William
Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, professor
of comparative thought and literature, and chair of the
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns
Hopkins University. His most recent book is Alejandro
Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2024).
What
is philosopohy for? Unsurprisingly, philosophers have come
up with many different answers to this question. From Socrates’s
belief that the examination of life made it worth living to
Immanuel Kant’s designation of philosophy as the foundational
academic discipline, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation
of all values to Gilles Deleuze’s redefinition of philosophy
as the invention of new concepts, the Greek notion of philosophy
as love of wisdom and knowledge has donned a bewildering array
of guises. To this list we can now add a powerful new argument.
For Santiago Zabala, philosophy is above all a warning.
Zabala clarifies at the outset of his new book, Signs
from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings, that a warning,
while it does come from the future (as his title specifies),
is not the same thing as a prediction. Indeed, in his view,
predictions and warnings represent two contrary modes of discourse.
In fact, they entail very different understandings of reality.
Predictions presume that time unfolds in a predictable, linear
fashion. And this, in turn, entails an understanding of reality
that Zabala associates with the realist tradition—one
in which what is real is lying out there in an objective way,
waiting for us to discover it, whether by using ever more
accurate scientific instruments or by removing the blinders
of bias that prevent us from seeing the world clearly.
Against this view, Zabala forcefully advances the philosophical
perspective he has championed over numerous books and articles
throughout his illustrious career, according to which the
transparent representation of an inert reality is an ideological
subterfuge for the imposition of order, the enforcement of
obedience, and the entrenchment of powerful interests. Building
on the thought of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger,
and his own teacher, Gianni Vattimo, Zabala understands how
we inhabit reality as fundamentally hermeneutic, indelibly
informed by place, time, interest, and values, all of which
precede and even make possible the most seemingly unvarnished
encounters with the real. Philosophy and science—indeed,
all human endeavors—never merely reveal; they interpret.
Warnings, then, are hermeneutically informed versions of predictions.
Rather than assume that reality and linear time are foregone
conclusions, a warning is a sign from a future in flux, a
future whose very existence depends on how we listen to its
signs. Signs from the Future thus presents us with a way of
reading a group of philosophers as having given us dire warnings
about the world we are currently making; it clarifies what
those warnings are and how we should be listening to them;
and it ultimately shows how understanding their thought in
this way can help attune us to the ways artists and activists
have been issuing similar warnings, and how those warnings
can be made more effective.
Zabala lays his work out in elegant proportion to this project.
The first of the book’s three sections examines four
philosophers whose work, Zabala argues, should be understood
as a warning: the aforementioned Nietzsche and Heidegger,
along with Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt. In each case,
Zabala takes a famous sentence of the philosopher and, in
keeping with his philosophical makeup, interprets it as a
warning.
Nietzsche, according to Zabala, was warning us when he famously
claimed that God is dead and that “we have killed him.”
What did he mean by this? In Zabala’s reading, God is
another name for truth. Humans invented God as a way of protecting
themselves from the dangers and uncertainties of life. But
with the advent of modernity and its technologies, medicines,
and industrial solutions, God was no longer needed. Zabala
writes:
If humanity started to believe in God to protect itself
against the dangers of natural life, then the secure world
of science and technology we have constructed render him
obsolete. His reassurances are no longer necessary now that
we can live without the terror felt by primitive mankind.
The
problem is that, just as with God, technology’s promise
of protection is an empty promise, so by replacing one crutch
with another, we have placed our faith in yet another idol,
and one with just as much potential for harm as unbridled
belief in the will of an arbitrary deity held. Specifically,
handing our defenses over to these avatars of modernity creates
the sense that reality doesn’t need our active involvement
or interpretation, that it is there for us in a solid and
reliable form, revealed in ever greater detail by the wonders
of modern science. This is the basis for what Zabala calls
the “global return to order through realism,”
which undergirds the growing tendency we see all around us
to put our faith in what Amanda Boetzkes calls “experience
without authority.” Thus does Nietzsche’s claim
about the death of God turn out to be a warning that, by shirking
the responsibility we have to actively interpret the world,
we have invited an age of ever-growing fanaticism, political
division, violence, and conspiracy-mongering, a technologically
supported fantasy world in which everyone seems to be entitled
not only to their own opinions but also to their own realities.
For Heidegger, Zabala chooses the dictum that “science
does not think.” With this pronouncement, Zabala argues,
Heidegger wasn’t dismissing science so much as pointing
out that its method and worldview should not be generalized
to the point that we allow reality itself to be reduced to
the results of scientific research. It may seem counterintuitive
in the context of a work that firmly positions itself against
the “realism without authority” of our current
distrust of experts, intellectuals, and scientists to go out
of its way to distinguish science from thinking. But Zabala
is making a vital point here that merits close attention.
Heidegger’s critique of “research” is a
critique of a methodology that proposes a model to explain
certain phenomena and then runs tests to ascertain the truth
of that model. While extremely effective in solving specific
problems, when generalized as the default mode for understanding
the world, it turns into an extension of ideas we already
have and want to see continued. As Zabala puts it, “thinking
in the way of scientific methodology tends to reduce Being
not only to a particular and already known form of being but
also to one that is predictable, controllable, and inevitable,
leaving little space to question the science’s own essence.”
Thus, ironically, while today’s “do your own research”
conspiracy-mongering is ostensibly at loggerheads with scientific
research, it is in fact an extension of the modern tendency
to adopt the basic methodology of the sciences as the model
for all thought.
Zabala reads similar warnings in the thinking of de Beauvoir
and Arendt. For these philosophers, gender essentialism and
subsequent oppression, and the increase in banal or administrative
evil, are consequences of the realist return to order. This
return to order, in turn, is the fundamental condition underlying
the multiple crises that beset our contemporary world, from
the environmental to the political to the technological.
In the book’s second section, Zabala demonstrates how
each of the four warnings he has articulated has distinct
applicability to one of these modes of crises. But more pressingly,
he shows how all these crises partake in one fundamental “emergency,”
which he has detailed in some of his prior work. This fundamental
emergency stems from our inability to grasp that, by rushing
from one individual crisis to the next (fires, floods, pandemics,
wars), we create an underlying absence of emergency, a complacency
in the face of the entrenched patterns and behaviors that
are undoing society. As he puts it, the most urgent emergency
is the sum of “emergencies we do not confront, that
are swept aside as the status quo by the demands of global
order.” At the top of this list are “climate change,
the refugee crisis, and the digital divide.”
Finally, the book’s third section is dedicated to the
ways that we can attune ourselves to the signs from our future
that are warning us about what will happen if we don’t
shake off our complacency and effectuate change. In a series
of elegant mini-essays gathered under the theme of “being
warned,” which combine the normal sense of the phrase
with the implication of a warning to Being itself, Zabala
discusses how engagement with art can sensitize us to warnings,
how we can change practices within fields such as medicine
in order to cultivate the ability to listen to one another,
how we should refocus attention to the processes of interpretation
over the supposed transparency of realist proclamations, and,
finally, how arguing about the truth of assertions overlooks
the importance of methods of presentation of that truth, methods
whose varied intensity can make or break their effectiveness
in convincing people to act.
With Signs from the Future, Santiago Zabala has issued
his own clarion call to address the underlying cause of the
hydra-headed crises facing the world today—by reviving
the dying art of thinking.
