Transcript: We Need Thinking Today More than Ever

http://bigthink.com/ideas/44390

Transcript

Slavoj Žižek: More than ever we need philosophy today.  Even the most speculative (in the sense of reflecting on itself) science has to rely on a set of automatic  presuppositions, like a scientist simply presupposes in his or her very approach to nature a set of implications of how the nature functions, what's the causality in nature and so on and so on.  And philosophy teaches us that.  Philosophy teaches us what we have to know without knowing it in order to function, even in science -- the silent presuppositions.

I claim that what is happening, for example, in quantum physics in the last 100 of years -- these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality -- that Hegel’s philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help here.  I claim that reading quantum physics through Hegel and vice versa is very productive.

What I really want do is rehabilitate classical philosophy today.  That is to say, Hegel was a child of his time.  We are 200 years later.  How to repeat Hegel, not to do the same things as he did but repeat in new circumstances the same gesture?  And even here more for Hegel than for Marx.  I think we should even return from Marx back to Hegel.  So this is the focus of my work.  Then come all the things for which I’m unfortunately better known, for example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture and so on and so on.  But frankly, to use the not very appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this, my writings on politics, on analysis of Hollywood and so on, is more or less collateral damage of my basic work.  

I think this is also what has to be done today.  The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism.  You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates.  Let’s do something.  I always hear in this call there are people starving.  Let’s do something.  I always discern in this a more ominous injunction.  Do it and don't think too much.  Today, we need thinking. 

Signs from the Future

http://youtu.be/pOTufvP9-6U

On Australian Radio

Today we need thinking more than ever

Acclaimed Intellectual Slavoj Žižek Waxes Philosophical About God

by Trevor Laurence Jockims

Posted Thursday, May 24, 2012 5:57 PM

God In Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse

Slavoj Žižek, Boris Gunjevic (authors)

Seven Stories Press

http://highbrowmagazine.com/1185-acclaimed-intellectual-slavoj-zizek-waxes-philosophical-about-god

Slavoj Žižek has earned himself a reputation as something of a philosophical wild man, an epithet derived at least as much from the way he inhabits a room as it is from the content of his books. When I heard him speak, a few years back at a lecture he gave during the Sarajevo Film Festival, he was in true oracular form, a kind of mangy apostle of sharp, caustic philosophical insight. The threadbare brown T-shirt he wore—for those of the correct age, think early Seattle grunge—darkened steadily with rings of sweat that moved out in widening crescents from each armpit, eventually meeting in the middle. His hair was fully adrift. Eyes wild. Arms swinging beneath an enormous screen that projected clips of the films he was “reading” — themselves a delightful mix, running through classic Hitchcock, Stalinist propaganda films, They Live (starring Rowdy Roddy Piper), Schindler’s List, andJurassic Park. About those final two Žižek memorably, and rightly, quipped:  Schindler’s List is a remake of Jurassic Park. . And Jurassic Park is the better film.

The four of us who saw the lecture went out afterwards for coffee. We were divided over what we’d heard in pretty much the way critics remain divided about Žižek. One of us thought he was brilliant, one of us wasn’t so sure, one thought he was a total huckster, the other just enjoyed the show.  The next day my friend who hadn’t been sure (a journalist in Sarajevo), was assigned to interview Žižek. He arrived at 10 a.m. at Žižek’s hotel, as instructed. Žižek emerged in the courtyard wearing the same brown T-shirt, sat down rapidly, and declared that he had very little time, really just a minute or two. Two-and-a-half hours later, my friend’s recorder long since dead, Žižek was soaked in sweat, swinging his arms, still filling my friend’s ear. 

Following this session, my not-sure-about- Žižek friend was now my very-sure-about- Žižek friend.

In reading Zizek’s new book, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, written with Boris Gunjevic, I feel like I get close to the euphoria my friend witnessed while talking to—well, really, listening to— Žižek up close. The book is written in a very direct manner, and if Žižek can sometimes suffer from being a paradoxicalist, he (usually) means what he says. In God in Pain he is also able to say what he means (usually). 

The crux of the book is a good one, and although tempting to see it as a corrective to Hitchens and Dawkins-esque writings on atheism, the latter group is so thoroughly outweighed by the sheer force of Žižek’s brain—I’m reminded of a comment made by another politician when Žižek ran for the presidency of Slovenia: Look, we all know you’re the smartest one in the room—that the comparison is sort of pointless.  Still, Žižek is running in the same milieu, and his response to the wild rush of atheism, especially in the more privileged regions of the West, is to say, Not so fast:

“If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess out skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while we privately remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions.”

For Žižek, the fundamentalist and the cynic both drink from the same well. It’s a compelling argument, and Žižek is particularly apt in discussing a timely issue without falling into t clichés: He has no interest in any so-called war on religion (from either “side), and he has no interest in the virtues or vices of atheism (again, from either “side”). What he is interested in doing—and this is more or less Žižek’s bread and butter as a thinker—is to think clearlythrough  a topic that is so pervasively thought about and discussed as to be nearly unthought. Said another way, everyone is able to take a position on the God question; Žižek isn’t so much interested in taking a position as he is in pointing out what the positions are — and aren’t.

The entire book might be reduced to Žižek’s reading of the aphorism, (mistakenly) first attributed to Doestoevsky by Sartre, that “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” Žižek works with this phrase, turning it into the opposite assertion Lacan saw in it — If God is dead, everything is prohibited.” This, argues Žižek, is the real dilemma faced by the death of God.

As is the usual case in Žižek and, really, most insightful thinkers, not only are the widely accepted positions wrong — they’re actual veils preventing any possibility of insight. Morality, for instance, has nothing to do with the loss of God. God never made anyone good. (But that’s too easy, and it isn’t really Žižek’s point). At best, under God the good stay good. (Also, too easy). The bad also stay bad. (Too easy, still).

In the Shadow of Hegel: How Does Thought Arise out of Matter?

http://bigthink.com/postcards-from-zizek/less-than-nothing-2

What's the Big Idea?

Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic.

[…]

Often seen as a precursor to Marxists and existentialists, Hegel believed that knowledge is not static, but dynamic. In the Hegelian framework, history is a process in which many paradoxes interact and are then synthesized into a unified whole. Reality is mind, and the universe is spirit objectified. It's one analysis of existence and being.

But what does it mean in a world where cognitive scientists can see brain function on an fMRI scan, capture the visual data, and reassemble it into videos using quantitative modeling? Now that physicists have the god-like power to accelerate tiny particles of matter and throw them at each other just to see what happens, is metaphysical philosophy dead?

What's the Significance? 

Reductionists like Stephen Hawking may give the impression that contemporary science is uniquely capable of answering the big questions, like Does the world have an end? or Where does thought come from? but that's not the case, says Žižek. Our deep empirical understanding of the material world hasn't displaced the study of philosophy. It's made it more relevant.

Which is why he's calling for the rehabilitation of classical philosophy: for contemporary philosophers to engage with the work of scientists and vice versa. "What is happening, for example, in quantum physics, in the last 100 of years, these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality -- Hegel's philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help." 

What does philosophy teach us that empirical science does not? The things we know without knowing it, says Žižek, the silent presuppositions that constantly shape and inform our perception. It's important to be able to observe our surroundings and act on them, but we also need to understand what we're seeing and why we're seeing it. "The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism. You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates. Let’s do something.  I always hear in this call there are people starving. I always discern in this a more ominous injunction. Do it and don't think too much. Today, we need thinking."   

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