Slavoj Žižek: God, Marxism, Philosophy, and Quantum Mechanics | Robinson's Podcast #213
Interview · Robinson Erhardt ·
2024-06-23 · 1:16:29 · 9,302 words
philosophy-generalideologyreligion-theologycapitalismcommunism-socialismscience-physicslanguagetechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climateethicssexuality-genderrevolution-violence
Žižek argues that today's crises (ecology, AI, abortion, war) demand a Socratic return to questioning the very terms we use to debate them. He contrasts Socrates' radical self-doubt with pre-Socratic cosmology and with Confucius's return to tradition, and reads Christianity as the same kenotic logic in which divinity is reduced to a despised man on the cross so that a new egalitarian universality (the Holy Spirit) can emerge. He then mounts a case that socialism is not utopian, marshaling anecdotes of spontaneous solidarity (Tristan da Cunha, hospital carers, wartime Kharkiv), and turns to quantum foundations as a philosophical 'mess' where philosophers can clarify terms, before sketching a theory of language as originally an instrument of lying whose zero-level is the curse.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “language as instrument of lie”
Against Habermas/Engels, language is at its most basic an instrument of seduction and lying, not communication that later gets distorted.
as “the divided heaven”
Borrowed from Christa Wolf: we no longer even share the terms of the debate, so the crisis is not just empirical but conceptual.
Radical questioning of what we mean by our basic words (freedom, justice, beauty) as the proper philosophical response to social crisis.
Divinity reduced to a despised beggar on the cross; only by passing through this zero-point does a new universality emerge.
The egalitarian universality of individuals equal in principle that emerges after the kenotic self-loss, not a return to old tradition.
as “vocation”
Work you were 'chosen' for rather than chose; the limit beyond which raising pay corrupts the quality of the work.
as “logic of envy”
The capitalist move from rational egoism to 'it matters more that the other loses than that I win', not natural, suspended in emergencies.
Paraphrasing Freud: humans are simultaneously more evil (envy) and more capable of spontaneous solidarity than the egotist image allows.
Rovelli's flat notion of observation as any interaction; Žižek likes its anti-idealist intent but finds it too weak.
as “cursing as zero-level of language”
Following Lacan/Kafka, the curse is the properly human entry into language: a protest at failing to say what one means, not mere humiliation.
Brutal Socratic confrontation with the absolutely basic questions underlying our accepted notions (freedom, rights, happiness).
Treated ontologically, not merely epistemologically: even a single particle takes all possible paths virtually, in superposition.
In quantum physics what appears as a limit of our knowledge (superposition, indeterminacy) is already a feature of the thing itself.
Sabine Hossenfelder's position; Žižek finds the idea appealing but unclear when she is pushed on what it means.
as “multiverse”
Carroll's no-collapse actualization of all superpositions; Žižek finds it anti-empiricist and questions whether it is worth the price.
Stories he reaches for 1
After a debilitating accident Kureishi noticed that low-paid hospital carers, asked why they don't quit for better pay, all gave the same uncoordinated answer: this is my vocation, I have no moral right to leave you.
“But I'm here to do this, that's my vocation. I have no moral right to abandon you here.”
Works invoked 9
Christian Atheism book
Žižek's own recent book, referred to for the parallel between Socratic kenosis and Christ's reduction of divinity to a despised man on the cross.
Popper's 'Plato to Hegel to Marx = closed society totalitarian' line is the explicit target of Žižek's defence of Plato as egalitarian.
Christa Wolf's novel; its line 'even the heaven is divided' is used to frame the claim that we no longer share the terms of the debate.
Analects book
Confucius's text; cited as the counter-model that diagnoses words-in-crisis but answers by restoring traditional meanings rather than risking self-loss.
Kafka's late tales of the philosopher-dog, read via Aaron Schuster, are used to develop the Lacanian thesis on cursing as the zero-level of language.
The waiter slipping and crying 'Oh Christ', answered 'Yes please', is the set-piece for the curse turning into an act of communication.
Meno book
Plato's early dialogue; the slave-geometry episode is cited as proof of Plato's egalitarianism against Popper's proto-totalitarian reading.
Parmenides book
Plato's dialogue praised as the greatest, a series of questionings of being and the one that ends in a 'total mess', after which Plato steps back.
Engels's short text on language emerging from collective labour is called 'ridiculous', 'theoretically wrong' and tautological.
People invoked 31
Franz Kafka positive
His late animal stories (the investigating dog) are used via Schuster as a route into Lacan's thesis on cursing as the zero-level of language.
Podcast host; Žižek teases him for posing as an innocent abstaining observer while not being so, and repeatedly defers the direction of the interview to him.
Sean Carroll negative
Physicist (now partly in philosophy) whose multiverse / no-collapse actualization of all superpositions Žižek finds anti-empiricist and questions whether it is worth the price.
Carlo Rovelli negative
Liked for avoiding the idealist 'big observer = God' conclusion, but his flat relational notion of observation-as-any-interaction and his reduction of superpositions to epistemology are judged too weak.
Mel Brooks positive
His comedy sketch of a waiter slipping at the Last Supper and exclaiming 'Oh Christ', answered 'Yes please', is used to illustrate the curse turning into communication.
Aaron Schuster positive
Author of a book on Kafka's animal stories (the philosopher-dog) that Žižek reads as following Lacan on language and cursing.
Jacques Lacan positive
Credited with convincing Žižek that the zero-level of human language is the curse, the protest at failing to say what one means, and that language is not signal-exchange.
Thomas Kuhn positive
Loved for showing empirically that science does not progress by simple falsification, a corrective to Popper from within the analytic space.
Roger Penrose negative
Criticized for drifting toward a divine mega-observer guaranteeing the cosmos's consistency, the idealist conclusion Rovelli (and Žižek) want to avoid.
Superdeterminist; Žižek finds the idea attractive but unclear once she is pushed on what superdeterminism actually means.
Elon Musk negative
Target for Neuralink's promise of direct brain-machine communication; Žižek's question is whether, if machines do our communicating, we will still be thinking.
Hanif Kureishi positive
Good friend left half-paralysed after an accident; his rehab memoir supplies the anecdote of low-paid carers who refuse to leave because the work is their vocation.
Friedrich Engels negative
His essay on the origin of language through collective labour is called 'theoretically wrong' and tautological, language was not invented because people had something to say to each other.
Thales positive
Credited as the first philosopher for displacing the earth with water as the dynamic ground of everything, a revolutionary move against pre-philosophical cosmology.
Robinson notes Lewis already believed in concrete causally-disconnected possible worlds, Žižek's 'craziest philosophers did believe in that' point.
Named in passing as the philosopher of constant change and struggle among the pre-Socratics.
Named in passing as the atomist among the pre-Socratics.
Lee Smolin positive
Trained physicist who takes philosophical foundations seriously; Žižek looks forward to debating superpositions and ontology with him.
Confucius negative
Foils Socrates: both diagnose that words have lost their meaning in crisis, but Confucius returns to traditional stability while Socrates risks self-loss, the conservative move is rejected.
Christa Wolf positive
East German half-dissident writer; her novel Der geteilte Himmel supplies the formula 'even the heaven is divided' that Žižek uses to frame the crisis of shared terms.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Credited with seeing that egoism per se is not bad, rational egoism discovers collaboration is profitable; the pathology is the later logic of envy.
Named alongside Einstein as figures whose revolutionary thinking involved a properly philosophical moment, and as the source of the now-betrayed Copenhagen 'don't think, just calculate' stance.
Jürgen Habermas negative
The 'Habermasians' and modern rationalists who treat language as originally a medium of communication later distorted are explicitly rejected.
Karl Popper negative
Popper's 'Plato to Hegel to Marx = totalitarian' line is rejected as a caricature of Plato; his falsificationist model of science is also softened by Kuhn.
Plato positive
Defended against Popper's proto-totalitarian charge; the Meno slave episode is cited as evidence of Plato's egalitarianism, and the Parmenides as the summit of Socratic aporia.
Mentioned only as the conventional empirical/open foil to the supposed proto-totalitarian Plato.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek identifies in his heart as 'a deep communist'; Marx's collaborator Engels is, however, criticized for his theory of language origin.
Socrates positive
Held up as the model for today: radical questioning of the meaning of our words, born of political crisis, risking total self-loss rather than returning to tradition.
Sigmund Freud positive
Paraphrased for the thesis that people are simultaneously worse (more evil) and better than they believe themselves to be.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited approvingly for the formula 'if facts don't fit theory so much worse for the facts' and for the idea that truth must be thought in language against language.
Albert Einstein positive
Cited for the Hegelian moment of trusting relativity against recalcitrant measurements and for the philosophical insight that time and space had to be redefined.
What it argues
Socratic self-questioning as the response to crisisSocrates vs the pre-Socratics vs ConfuciusChristian kenosis and the emergence of a new universalityWork as vocation vs the corruption of the marketSpontaneous solidarity in extremis (Tristan da Cunha, nurses, Kharkiv)Quantum foundations as a philosophical mess needing term-clarificationLanguage as instrument of lying; cursing as its zero-levelAnalytic vs continental philosophy and Kuhn against Popper
Dialectical moves 8
“Not just the earth is divided — even the heaven is divided; we don't even share the terms of the debate.”
The crisis is reframed from empirical disagreement to a split at the level of the very concepts used to argue.
“Language is not communication later distorted; at its most basic dimension it is an instrument of lie.”
The usual story (communication primordial, lying parasitic) is inverted: lying is the founding dimension.
“The same diagnosis, opposite remedy: Confucius returns to tradition, Socrates risks reduction to pure shit.”
Two readings of words-in-crisis diverge into conservatism versus radical self-loss.
“God is reduced to a despised beggar on the cross — only through this zero-point does a new universality emerge.”
The highest (divinity) is reached only by passing through the lowest (the miserable crucified man).
“People are much worse than they think and at the same time much better than they believe.”
Human nature is not the mediocre mean of the egoist image but the coincidence of radical envy and radical solidarity.
“What appears an epistemological limitation is already an ontological feature of the thing itself.”
The standard epistemology/ontology split in quantum mechanics is collapsed: the limit of knowledge is the structure of being.
“The curse is not the humiliation of the other but the failure to say what I want — language used against language.”
Cursing, apparently aggressive, is inverted into a mark of the speaker's own alienation in language.
“If facts don't fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts — the Hegelian moment Einstein enacted.”
Empirical anomaly, far from automatically falsifying, can be the occasion to trust the theory against the data.
Claims 22
reframes
Today's crisis is not merely empirical (warming, war, migration) but a crisis of the very terms in which we debate — even the heaven is divided.the nature of the contemporary crisis
asserts
The big problems confronting us compel us to act like philosophers by reflecting on the basic terms we use to diagnose them.the necessity of philosophy today
asserts
Debates like abortion require a fundamental philosophical stance (is the fetus a being that can be hurt), not just empirical fetal analysis.abortion and philosophical fundamentals
reframes
Anti-abortion campaigners reframe their prohibition as the next step in the inclusionary struggle for human rights — a clever ideological move he opposes but admires.anti-abortion rhetoric as rights-inclusion
asserts
We must return to Socrates: radical questioning of the meaning of our words rather than relying on assumed notions of freedom, rights, democracy.the Socratic method today
reframes
Socrates is unique against Confucius: both diagnose that words have lost their meaning, but Confucius returns to tradition while Socrates risks total self-loss.Socrates vs Confucius on crisis
asserts
Christianity enacts the same kenotic logic: God reduced to a despised man on the cross, after which a new egalitarian universality (the Holy Spirit) emerges.Christianity and kenotic universality
rejects
Plato is not the proto-totalitarian of Popper's caricature but is egalitarian, as the Meno slave episode shows.Popper's reading of Plato
asserts
Socialism is not a utopia: empirical cases (Tristan da Cunha, hospital carers, wartime Kharkiv) show spontaneous solidarity that violates market logic.the feasibility of solidarity
reframes
People are simultaneously worse (envy) and better (solidarity) than the capitalist image of natural egotism allows.human nature under capitalism
asserts
The capitalist logic of envy makes it more important that the other loses than that I win — not natural, suspended in emergencies.envy as capitalist pathology
asserts
Quantum physics today is one big mess of competing interpretations, so philosophers trained in the Socratic tradition can help clarify the terms.philosophy's role in quantum foundations
rejects
Rovelli's flat notion of observation as any interaction is too weak to sustain the anti-idealist point he wants.Rovelli's relational observation
rejects
Carroll's multiverse is anti-empiricist and perhaps not worth the price of an infinity of causally disconnected worlds.the multiverse interpretation
reframes
What appears as an epistemological limitation in quantum physics is already an ontological feature of the thing itself.epistemology vs ontology in quantum physics
rejects
Language originally emerged as an instrument of seduction and lying, not as communication later distorted — against Habermas and Engels.theories of the origin of language
asserts
The zero-level of properly human language is the curse, a protest at failing to say what one means, not animal signal-exchange.the basic dimension of language
asserts
Machines would genuinely think only if they could curse out of their own subjectivity, violating their own program.the test for machine thinking
asserts
Big scientific progress sometimes requires the Hegelian move of saying 'so much worse for the facts' when measurements contradict a theory, as Einstein did.theory change in science
asserts
String theory and multiverse claims cannot be experimentally tested and so must be evaluated philosophically.untestable physical theory
asserts
Analytic and continental philosophy each carry a caricatured, simplifying image of the other.the analytic-continental divide
asserts
Kuhn's account of science (no simple falsification, complex development) is a corrective to Popper from within the analytic space.Kuhn vs Popper
Quotes 13
“no, even the heaven is divided. Like, we don't even share the terms of the debate.”Slavoj Žižek · crisis at the level of shared concepts
“language is at its most basic basic dimension an instrument of lie.”Slavoj Žižek · language as primordially lying
“people are much worse than they think, much more evil, and at the same time much better than they believe.”Slavoj Žižek · the dual nature of human morality
“what appears an epistemological limitation is already an ontological feature of the thing itself.”Slavoj Žižek · epistemology collapses into ontology
“the only thing I really know is that I don't know anything”Slavoj Žižek · Socratic ignorance as method
“it's only that I have to win, the other has to lose also”Slavoj Žižek · the logic of envy under capitalism
“you didn't just choose your job, in some sense you were chosen”Slavoj Žižek · vocation as being-chosen
“But I'm here to do this, that's my vocation. I have no moral right to abandon you here.”Slavoj Žižek · spontaneous solidarity of low-paid carers
“without taking into account all these obscene examples and so we cannot really understand language.”Slavoj Žižek · obscenity as key to language
“machines think if they can curse, if they can say, but not of course you can talk them teach them to curse. But if they can violate their own program by simply cursing”Slavoj Žižek · the test for genuine machine thinking
“today's quantum physics is one big mess”Slavoj Žižek · foundations of physics as philosophical mess
“First I have to reduce myself to pure shit as it were.”Slavoj Žižek · kenotic self-reduction
“if facts don't fit theory so much worse for the facts”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian trust of theory over data
Transcript 19 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Among most of animals then we know, it’s male members who put on masquerade, you know, animals have colored nice feathers and so on to attract the woman. But then with humans uniquely it changes. It’s the women, feminine sex, who has to mask themselves to attract men. Now I totally accept something third will emerge and so on. But I like much more this idea that language is not as some Habermasians or modern rationalists think, originally a medium of communication, collaboration, thinking, which then gets distorted with all this sexualized or manipulative game. No, that language is at its most basic basic dimension an instrument of lie.
Among most of animals then we know, it’s male members who put on masquerade, you know, animals have colored nice feathers and so on to attract the woman. But then with humans uniquely it changes. It’s the women, feminine sex, who has to mask themselves to attract men. Now I totally accept something third will emerge and so on. But I like much more this idea that language is not as some Habermasians or modern rationalists think, originally a medium of communication, collaboration, thinking, which then gets distorted with all this sexualized or manipulative game. No, that language is at its most basic basic dimension an instrument of lie.
unknown
Hello, this is Robinson Erhardt here with the introduction to Robinson's Podcast number And this episode is with the Slovenian menace Slavoj Žižek. This is his fourth time on the show. The first go-around we talked about psychoanalysis, then we did joint episodes on quantum mechanics with Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin respectively. And this time we cover Slavoj’s views on why we need philosophy today more than ever before. We talk, or Slavoj talks and I listen very happily, about God, Marxism, ancient philosophy, the origins of language, quantum mechanics, and also as usual more than I could possibly list. Other things to mention are I am still fiending for a five-star average review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Spotify is a black box, I have no idea how many more reviews I need for that, but with Apple I think I need more five-star reviews to get that five-star average, so please help me out. There is also a Patreon if you would like to join and there are going to be monthly AMA episodes but more importantly there is a link to an ad-free RSS feed as well as show notes. And now without any further ado, I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it with Slavoj. Slavoj today, I mean you wanted to talk about why philosophy is more important in our daily lives now than ever. Because I think
Hello, this is Robinson Erhardt here with the introduction to Robinson's Podcast number And this episode is with the Slovenian menace Slavoj Žižek. This is his fourth time on the show. The first go-around we talked about psychoanalysis, then we did joint episodes on quantum mechanics with Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin respectively. And this time we cover Slavoj’s views on why we need philosophy today more than ever before. We talk, or Slavoj talks and I listen very happily, about God, Marxism, ancient philosophy, the origins of language, quantum mechanics, and also as usual more than I could possibly list. Other things to mention are I am still fiending for a five-star average review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Spotify is a black box, I have no idea how many more reviews I need for that, but with Apple I think I need more five-star reviews to get that five-star average, so please help me out. There is also a Patreon if you would like to join and there are going to be monthly AMA episodes but more importantly there is a link to an ad-free RSS feed as well as show notes. And now without any further ado, I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it with Slavoj. Slavoj today, I mean you wanted to talk about why philosophy is more important in our daily lives now than ever. Because I think
Slavoj Žižek
that the crisis we are approaching, not even approaching, in which we are now, is not just the crisis of empirical phenomena like global warming, will there be war, immigrants, whatever, but it’s, it’s what? I remember Christa Wolf, she died now, an East German writer, a half-dissident. Her most famous novel is *Der geteilte Himmel*, The Divided Heaven, where a heroine in her novel has a debate with a West German person and the West German person says, okay we have our conflicts but still we are under the same heaven, you know. And the narrator says on her behalf, no, even the heaven is divided. Like, we don’t even share the terms of the debate. Not just in this superficial sense like you talk about ecology and different people will give you, this is elementary, give you a totally different view of ecology. Like, again for some people, radical pessimists, it’s humanity as such which is responsible. For some people it’s capitalism, this profiteering, the logic of self-reproduction, increasing value which a priori ignores the consequences for environment. Then you have simple socialists or even state ecologists, I’m getting closer and closer to them almost, who say it’s too easy to claim let the market take care of it, just raise the taxes on those products which hurt the environment. I think that there will be catastrophes of different, we will have different situations, we will have to act much faster. So I am saying that the problems that we are encountering today, they more and more demand of us, even if we ignore this dimension, to act like philosophers, you know. And in what sense? For example, we have now debates about artificial intelligence. But even to participate in this debate, you have to make some decisions which are so fundamental that they have to be qualified as philosophical, no? Like what is freedom? Are we free? In what sense does artificial intelligence constrain our freedom? What do you mean by freedom? I know, for example, many people who are in their scientific outlook fully determinist materialists. And they say when we talk about social freedoms, this has nothing to do with this philosophical aspect like in my brain am I really free when I act, when I say something? They will say it may be totally determined there, but freedom simply means the subjective feeling of freedom. But I agree with those who claim that with today’s not only artificial intelligence but also new options to control our mind, to interact directly with our mind, the two dimensions interact. That is to say the question can our mind be mechanically controlled, do we really have a free will, is not just an abstract theoretical question. It has consequences for our social life and so on, because new forms of power, domination, control and so on act already at this level which we thought doesn’t concern our everyday life. So that I don’t get lost, what I am saying is that the problems, big problems that confront us today, don’t they compel us to reflect on the very basic terms that we use, especially terms which we use to diagnose our situation or to explain based on what is our criticism? Like when I said technology is constraining our freedom, my immediate reaction is, okay what do you mean by freedom, and so on and so on. So here I think philosophy is needed, even, maybe I already mentioned this at some of your previous shows with you, even let’s take a debate which is now everywhere going around, abortion. But in order to have a position on abortion, you must make, look I am not saying these are philosophical decisions, but nonetheless you have to take a certain fundamental stance. Is the fetus a living being? Is somebody being hurt when you do abortion? Because you know what fascinated me, how I remember already years ago, some guys were defending the prohibition on abortion in a very logical way, I almost like it although I am opposed to it. They simply put prohibition of abortion into the series of big progress on human rights and human freedoms. They claimed listen, it began with fighting racism. All races should have the same rights and so on. Then there was the feminist struggle. Women should be treated in their social activity as equal to men and so on. Then we have sexual liberation struggle, LGBTQ and so on and so on. And what they are saying is, for us the fight against abortion is simply the next step in this struggle. Each stage of this struggle included some group previously excluded. Other races, no they should be also included. Women, no they should be also included. So-called transsexuals, no they should be also included. And they are claiming we just want to say that the unborn people, they should also be included. Now I think it’s too simple to go directly into, how should I call it, into this empirical debate, you know. You analyze the fetus, you say sorry up to that week the fetus even doesn’t yet have the organs of sensitivity developed so it cannot feel anything. No, there are again, it’s not just a scientific question. We have to make, assume a fundamental statement. So what do we have to do today? And here I found a nice solution reading a recent book on the history of philosophy. I think the thing we have to do is to return to Socrates, you know, the first one. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. You know why? Socrates is known what, for his statement of the only thing I really know is that I don’t know anything, that I know nothing, and his constant questioning. But I think this was an attitude that we need more than ever today. I’ll put it like this. Socrates broke not only with the pre-philosophical cosmologies, you know where you immediately speculate about what the universe is. Usually you get some sexualized duality like lightness and dark, masculine and feminine principle, or whatever. Okay, with philosophy this is over. But nonetheless up to Socrates, philosophy was still in some sense similar to these pre-philosophical speculations. They took, the first philosophers, a kind of a panoramic view of all of reality and proposed some first founding principle or ground. For example, the one who is usually counted as the first philosopher, Thales. His idea was everything is water. Water is the ground of everything. And this is a very revolutionary statement at that time. You know why? Because it goes against the standard pre-philosophical cosmology stance which is the earth. You know, we all are on the earth. The earth as unmoved foundation of our life. No, he said water, which already means dynamic, borderless and so on. But okay, Thales. Then we get Heraclitus, you know whose point is change, constant change, struggle and so on. Then Democritus, atoms and so on. But what I am saying is that all of them were simply posing some fundamental principle of all reality. They were critical in some formal sense, their solution contradicted other solutions, but it was still as if from some empty place, external position, we can take into our view all of reality, cosmos, and speculate about what our reality is at the most elementary level. With Socrates thing, things take a totally different turn. First we should not forget, here I see the actuality of Socrates, we should not forget that he came in a moment of political crisis. The Greek traditional way of life as embodied in *polis*, city-state Athens and so on, was in decay, was in the process of disintegration. So for Socrates his position was a direct reaction to this social crisis. And but what was his solution? It wasn’t so much a new positive principle, it was very interesting. It was a radical questioning. Also you can say self-questioning. Like, you know what so interested in at least early, what we know, we only know Socrates of course from Plato, early and middle Plato’s dialogues. Socrates does something which I claim is radically new in the entire history of humanity. He just asks questions about basically the meaning of the words, you know. Like I think his early dialogues they are typically about okay beauty, but what is beauty? Tell me, he probes into his opponent or partner, tell me what do you mean by beauty. Tell me what do you mean by courage. Tell me what do you mean by knowledge. Tell me what do you mean by justice, you know. And it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t arrive, in the early dialogues they end in confusion, he doesn’t arrive at a simple solution. It’s just this radical uncertainty. We don’t know what words mean. And the beginning is to clarify this. And now I don’t have time, people will get bored to go deeper into it, but the beautiful paradox of Socrates, at least as we know him from Plato, is that it’s not that he begins with this and then he gets of course at eternal ideas as unchangeable forms so that our common material reality is always changing but it’s a copy of eternal universe of ideas. No, he doubts even about this. He would have asked okay but what do you mean by idea, okay and so on. And here for me the greatest dialogue is *Parmenides* of Plato, which ends up in a total mess. It’s a series of questioning of this what is being, what is one and so on. And again it ends up in a total mess. And after that Plato kind of retreats, steps back. But what is so important here? First that for the first time philosophy, and this is philosophy in the only serious sense, is directly presented as a reflection of the social crisis in which we are. And the idea of philosophy is that instead of directly proposing a solution, you risk this, it’s not a good word but let’s say, you risk reducing yourself to this absolute zero of I’m a nobody, I know nothing and so on. And then you hope that through this radical contraction, I’m just who I am, what do I know, what is our reality and so on, you will get at some new universality. And you know why I think here Socrates is unique? Because a Chinese friend immediately answered me, but wait a minute, Confucianism doesn’t it do the same? Confucius also says, wrote in his *Analects*, we live in a time of a crisis and even goes a step further in a Socratic way and says the origin of crisis is that we no longer use words in their proper meaning, you know. One guy means one thing, another another thing, it’s a mess. But Confucius then nonetheless tries simply to return to the tradition. His hope is that let’s stabilize the basic meaning of words and let’s act properly. So let’s bring back the old traditional stability. While with Socrates it doesn’t function. The idea is that you should risk a total self-loss, reduction to almost nothing. There are even sometimes excremental metaphors used to get really close to God. First I have to reduce myself to pure shit as it were. And I claim, if I may refer to my last book *Christian Atheism*, that there is something of this same logic in Christianity. We have okay God all that blah blah, but then we have Christ which is the reduction of all divinity to a single poor man dying there, despised as a beggar almost on the cross. And only by passing through this serious point, what happens? No, we don’t return to the old traditional security, safe traditional position, but something much more interesting happens. A new universality emerges which is of course called Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, which is again not the same as the old traditional divine principles or whatever. It’s just the egalitarian universality of individuals who are in principle equal. And it’s incredible because you know better than me maybe that Plato is often dismissed as the proto-totalitarian, you know. Like with Karl Popper already, Plato, from Plato to Hegel and Marx, closed society totalitarians. Against, Plato is usually opposed to Aristotle who was more empirical, more open and so on. But no, Plato was fully egalitarian in one of his earlier dialogues, *Meno*. He to clarify a mathematical point, of course it’s a fake but it’s an interesting productive fake, he in a dialogue, not reality, he brings in Socrates when he debates his partners, I’m not sure who they are, he brings, he calls an ordinary slave who sits next to him and proves how a slave also can comprehend this difficult mathematical point. So you have again this universal self-doubt, principle egalitarianism, all traditional hierarchies are suspended, and then a new much more emancipatory universality emerges. I think that Socrates is a real beginning here. And I think again that we are today in such a mess that we cannot simply rely on some old traditional cultural element. Like okay let’s return to the origins of Christianity or whatever, or even science today and so on. This is what I would like to, how do you say it for a rough investigation in American police procedural movies and novels, I want to give him a third degree in this sense of brutal questioning. I just want to confront him with this absolutely basic questions. Like today we all act on, which are our basic notions? Human rights, happiness, freedom, justice and so on. And I think our first approach should be Socratic here. We cannot simply rely on, oh we are for freedom, human rights, democracy, so we know who are the bad guys. No, these terms are so abused today, all of these terms, freedom, equality, whatever, that we have to begin by this critical turn on the words themselves that we use. It’s not a kind of a linguistic solipsism, it’s just that we have to vacillate to destabilize the basic frame, ideological frame of how we understand, approach reality. And I’m not now saying that we should just do pure philosophic, a pure philosophical speculation. No, I think that often here even empirical inquiries and tests can be very productive. In one of my previous books I report on how I find, sorry in old senile I forgot the title and the author, but I read a wonderful book where an empirical sociologist did an experiment which is for me a true empirical, empirically demonstrated rejection of the basic premises of our capitalist worldview, you know. That people are basically egotists, that there is no natural, here I agree with them, sense of solidarity and so on. No, but there is something else. You know this guy reports first of an experiment done in a, I forgot which one, is it even MIT or where, top scientific laboratory. It’s a wonderful experiment, it makes me cry as still in my heart a deep communist, you know. This was the experiment. They manipulated, probably without telling them, a group of top researchers. And then they were raising their salaries and observed the effects. You know what was the shock? When they were really paid low, not enough to live safely, they of course worked better if you paid them more. But only up to a certain point. The presupposition here is of course that these were people who really enjoyed their works. Like researcher whose work, scientific research was, and I use this term with all pathetic magnitude, it’s a vocation, you know. Your job like, if I may put it in ideological terms, your job is not just something you do for money to survive, your job is your vocation. In the sense that you didn’t just choose your job, in some sense you were chosen, you know. Like if you are really a great philosopher or scientist or artist, you didn’t simply decide I want to be this. No, all of a sudden you discovered and chosen, like I as if addressed, I cannot not do this. So what he discovered, I already hinted it, is that if then you raise the salaries of these researchers even more, they get so obsessed by money that, if again, if the wages or whatever they earn, maybe the term wages is not enough here, that there the quality of their work lowers. Because when they get so much money they this, they get corrupted by money. You know, they say oh who, okay it’s interesting what I am working but my my, my God I could buy another house, go to a holiday from blah blah blah. And again the quality falls down. So I find this a wonderful thing of how there is no simple correlation between how well you are paid and what you are and the quality of what you are doing. We have a certain standard. We want to of course live a nice life, but not a life of luxury. You just want to be free to do what you feel is your vocation. And did I already mention the last time we were here then I found a, I found a place where they are all communists in this sense, interrupting or cut me out if already mentioned it. Now my favorite place newly discovered in the world, you know which is? It’s not the smallest but it’s maybe the smallest inhabited island which is really alone. Like the nearest inhabited island from this island is Saint Helena where Napoleon was imprisoned, it’s over miles away. It’s in Southern Atlantic, Tristan da Cunha. Do you know how people there live? Check it on Wikipedia or what. It’s a small island, no airport, just a boat reaches it maybe once, twice a month. And around people live there. Modest but nice life. They don’t own any land. It’s collectively owned just at the beginning of each season they said you will work this part, that part, they help each other and so on. They have very little contact with outside world. And this is happening today. Now you will say, of course they must be idiots isolated there. Now comes the true wonder. In the year I think, there was some earthquake or volcanic eruption or whatever there, so the British government, and the island is under their protection, moved all the people for two years back to England. And then after two years the situation got normalized. Now comes the shock. You know that except two people who there fell in love or were seduced by city life, all of them returned. They were returned to Tristan da Cunha. They were so identified by this. Then, I think it’s not too obscene out of respect for my good friend who had this terrible accident, maybe you heard it, Hanif Kureishi. Who is now and it looks as if he will remain with basically half-vegetable till his death. And he made a pleasant discovery. In this there are many nurses who serve you there, but in I’m not talking in sexual sense here, most of them are men and so on, but I don’t want to be caught in that. But what I want to say is that he noticed something. They are low paid, much less than the big doctors who come to see them, you know when you are in these rehabilitation centers, you know. And it’s horrible to be a vegetable, you know. It’s not only they feed you but each morning and evening they turn you on your stomach and with fingers go into your ass, try to see if some shit will come out and so on. But he discovered Hanif, you must know you don’t know, he made a couple of movies which were quite a triumph, wrote scenario for them. Okay, what I want to say is he discovered that for these people, even if they were lowly paid, and now I’m not talking about some some extravagant small Atlantic islands, I’m talking about big hospitals or rehabilitation centers in the suburb of London. He noticed how in contrast to doctors, high specialists who are the usual corrupted bullshit, you know, care about money, ignore you and so on, these lowly paid helpers, carers, those who care of you at this everyday level because Hanif now he cannot even eat alone and so on, you know. That they nonetheless they complain about not getting enough pay, sorry money, but they never, they it’s Hanif writes in his memoirs of this year that he spent there, that he asked them once then, okay why don’t you leave your job if it’s so low paid and go somewhere else? And all of them gave him, they were not coordinated, the same spontaneous answer. But I’m here to do this, that’s my vocation. I have no moral right to abandon you here, you know. So you know, I don’t, this would be, I don’t buy this eternal argument, you know, that we are much more corrupted than we think, socialism is a utopia and so on. No, these are elements of a surprising solidarity which totally violates this profit-market oriented behavior. These people knew they are exploited. But since they are they are doing it in immediate contact with their patient and they develop not a personal connection but this type of my God I see suffering I cannot just go away. I think that if our societies with all crazy problems that we have, if our societies are to survive, we will have to move along these lines. Rediscover this work as a vocation and this spontaneous dedication, you know. Like okay I don’t earn enough, I complain blah blah, but I have no choice. I was chosen as it were to do this. I think just imagine, people do act like this when you get big catastrophe. I don’t idealize Ukraine, but I have some friends there and they even feel a little bit oppressed with the present Zelensky government for making too much compromise with Western powers and so on. But I have some friends there and some friend journalists who visited them, them is where? You know that city which is now almost under siege, Kharkiv, the second biggest city. My friend, a big Slovene journalist, we are good friends, went there two weeks ago and wrote for a Slovene leftist weekly journal a wonderful text where he discovers how these people are not involved, he’s talking about everyday people, he’s talking about people who learned how to survive when you know every day one or two bombs fall here or there in Kharkiv. But they somehow manage to organize their life, like it becomes part of the life, you know that with radars and so on they discover that some drones or whatever are approaching, you’re told okay go quickly into some into some basement or what and so on. But nonetheless the social life go on and ordinary people bring food to soldiers, it’s I was quite fascinated by all this. So this would be my answer to those who claim, oh socialism is a utopia. No, people are at the same, no then now I will be more skeptical, people are at the same time better and worse I claim than this image of egotists. First, people are worse in the sense of as already Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw, egotism in itself is not a bad thing. Egotism means I care of myself, I want to take care of blah blah. But if you’re a rational egotist, not in any pathetic sense but rational, you soon discover that collaborating with others is profitable even to your self-interest, you know. No, the problem is when logic of envy enters. When as they say, this is one of the big sayings of capitalism, it’s only that I have to win, the other has to lose also, you know. And then the next step is that it’s more important that the other loses than for me to win. But there is nothing natural in this, because it’s incredible, when you are in a state of emergency, war and so on, people who before in their daily life were corrupted opportunists and so on, they all of a sudden do incredible things. Not in a pathetic thing way, like oh I want to be a hero, but simply like shells or to enter a building which is under fire to save somebody or when the building is collapsing. Yes, it has to be done, you are there, you hear the shouts from outside, it has to be done. So this is how, the direction in which I would have moved as a Socrates figure today. I think that this idea that socialism is too naive, that that people are egotists, full of envy and so on, is simply not the whole truth. People are, if I may paraphrase Freud, people are much worse than they think, much more evil, and at the same time much better than they believe. You know, this is one of the most fascinating ethical moments how, this is the moral stories from everyday life that I like to hear, how ordinary people, corrupted opportunists then there is an emergency situation and you don’t know why, click, they become ultra-ethical. Not in this pathetic way I am ethical, but they simply do things that have to be done. And here I see some hope. I’m not a total pessimist. But it was a long way, my God. Again, maybe I already used this joke with you. Again, you know the joke, I mean from Slovenia where the joke was circulating already for years, how do you make a one-hour interview with me so that you ask me one question, you know? So I came pretty close to that. So let me leave you some time to move maybe the direction of our interview into where you want. Yeah, sure. Yeah, there’s a lot on the table now, but I’d like to focus on this underlying through-line that we need to think like philosophers because philosophers themselves have very, very different ideas of what philosophical thinking is or what the practice of philosophy should be like. So analytic philosophers... You hit it, only philosopher. Sorry to interrupt you, but you know that’s why I would like to talk with Lee Smolin, with others, no? Because people who say this, no, usually say oh this is philosophy, every idiot can deploy his view. But sorry guys, with science it’s a little bit different. Sorry, look quantum physics, which is generally recognized as the with capitalized T, the science today. Sorry but I will try to when we will have a conversation with Lee Smolin or something like this, isn’t it that concerning determinacy and entanglement and Big Bang and whatever, almost all logically possible versions, solutions are advocated by today’s scientists who are then in strict disagreement with each other, no? Like the one with whom I first spoke to you, Sean Carroll, no? He is basically although he’s a little bit more careful, his basic stance is multiverse, no? Simply there is no collapse because all all superpositions are actualized. Then I noticed now how the notion of observation, collapse of superpositions into one reality through observation. But at what level does observation occur? And I found with different authors almost all the possible, all possible solutions, like at one extreme, I like extremes that’s not a criticism is Carlo Rovelli. Who and I support him here, who tries to avoid this conclusion, ah observation means a conscious mind and so on, for reading quantum physics in this idealist even mystical way, isn’t the point of quantum physics that if there is if reality is collapsed, emerges as our reality that we know only through observation, doesn’t this mean that the whole cosmos only exists if there is a big observer let’s say God and so on? No, Rovelli tries to avoid this conclusion and I think maybe a little bit too far waters down, makes the notion of observation totally flat. For him whenever elements interact in reality, they in some sense observe each other, you know. Like every interaction, every interaction means that one agent let’s say who is a victim affected by the other in this sense observes the other. Of course the problem disappears here. But nonetheless I don’t think this totally flat almost notion of observation is strong enough. I don’t know where you stand here. My theory is that you get rid of a problem in almost the same way symmetrically than Sean Carroll’s multiverse solution, you know. Like everything is observation, everything that happens in reality is observation. On the other hand you have, at least in some of his formulations, Roger Penrose, who is now even moving close to a position of accepting God of some divine authority a mega-observer who guarantees the consistency of our entire cosmos and so on and so on. So again you see they say you philosophers blah blah just each of you each of you has his own theory, but wait a minute, if there is a crazy plurality of theories, again it’s in quantum physics today, you know, and it’s science at its top. And why modest proposal here is that precisely we philosophers, and we may be of different orientations, but we who are trained in this Socratic tradition, we can be of some help not in this totalitarian traditional Marxist sense that a quantum physicist will bring me his text and I will say sorry subjective idealism, no not to judge, but to whenever there is a mess in science, and today’s quantum physics is one big mess, just to look at it from this Socratic standpoint, you know, and ask but wait a minute what do words mean for you? For example that would be my question to Rovelli and to Roger Penrose, you know. Because that’s again I know a big problem. For majority of quantum mechanics scientists they try to avoid direct idealism but they simply materialize observation in a machine of registration. They say a quantum phenomenon, oscillations, superpositions is collapses when it’s registered by a machine. Like electron is freely floating, it goes through all possible ways, if you measure it it’s only one way, you know. This solution is I think also too simple but again what interests me so much is this multiplicity of versions, you know. And maybe we philosophers can do something not in being brighter than them. I still have this maybe it was felt when I almost fear when I spoke with Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin the first time, like I simply respect them. Now it will sound ridiculous what I will say now, but I think they are much brighter than me and so on who am I even to, but I think I can maybe not help them in this pushing them in the right direction what the hell do I know but just
that the crisis we are approaching, not even approaching, in which we are now, is not just the crisis of empirical phenomena like global warming, will there be war, immigrants, whatever, but it’s, it’s what? I remember Christa Wolf, she died now, an East German writer, a half-dissident. Her most famous novel is *Der geteilte Himmel*, The Divided Heaven, where a heroine in her novel has a debate with a West German person and the West German person says, okay we have our conflicts but still we are under the same heaven, you know. And the narrator says on her behalf, no, even the heaven is divided. Like, we don’t even share the terms of the debate. Not just in this superficial sense like you talk about ecology and different people will give you, this is elementary, give you a totally different view of ecology. Like, again for some people, radical pessimists, it’s humanity as such which is responsible. For some people it’s capitalism, this profiteering, the logic of self-reproduction, increasing value which a priori ignores the consequences for environment. Then you have simple socialists or even state ecologists, I’m getting closer and closer to them almost, who say it’s too easy to claim let the market take care of it, just raise the taxes on those products which hurt the environment. I think that there will be catastrophes of different, we will have different situations, we will have to act much faster. So I am saying that the problems that we are encountering today, they more and more demand of us, even if we ignore this dimension, to act like philosophers, you know. And in what sense? For example, we have now debates about artificial intelligence. But even to participate in this debate, you have to make some decisions which are so fundamental that they have to be qualified as philosophical, no? Like what is freedom? Are we free? In what sense does artificial intelligence constrain our freedom? What do you mean by freedom? I know, for example, many people who are in their scientific outlook fully determinist materialists. And they say when we talk about social freedoms, this has nothing to do with this philosophical aspect like in my brain am I really free when I act, when I say something? They will say it may be totally determined there, but freedom simply means the subjective feeling of freedom. But I agree with those who claim that with today’s not only artificial intelligence but also new options to control our mind, to interact directly with our mind, the two dimensions interact. That is to say the question can our mind be mechanically controlled, do we really have a free will, is not just an abstract theoretical question. It has consequences for our social life and so on, because new forms of power, domination, control and so on act already at this level which we thought doesn’t concern our everyday life. So that I don’t get lost, what I am saying is that the problems, big problems that confront us today, don’t they compel us to reflect on the very basic terms that we use, especially terms which we use to diagnose our situation or to explain based on what is our criticism? Like when I said technology is constraining our freedom, my immediate reaction is, okay what do you mean by freedom, and so on and so on. So here I think philosophy is needed, even, maybe I already mentioned this at some of your previous shows with you, even let’s take a debate which is now everywhere going around, abortion. But in order to have a position on abortion, you must make, look I am not saying these are philosophical decisions, but nonetheless you have to take a certain fundamental stance. Is the fetus a living being? Is somebody being hurt when you do abortion? Because you know what fascinated me, how I remember already years ago, some guys were defending the prohibition on abortion in a very logical way, I almost like it although I am opposed to it. They simply put prohibition of abortion into the series of big progress on human rights and human freedoms. They claimed listen, it began with fighting racism. All races should have the same rights and so on. Then there was the feminist struggle. Women should be treated in their social activity as equal to men and so on. Then we have sexual liberation struggle, LGBTQ and so on and so on. And what they are saying is, for us the fight against abortion is simply the next step in this struggle. Each stage of this struggle included some group previously excluded. Other races, no they should be also included. Women, no they should be also included. So-called transsexuals, no they should be also included. And they are claiming we just want to say that the unborn people, they should also be included. Now I think it’s too simple to go directly into, how should I call it, into this empirical debate, you know. You analyze the fetus, you say sorry up to that week the fetus even doesn’t yet have the organs of sensitivity developed so it cannot feel anything. No, there are again, it’s not just a scientific question. We have to make, assume a fundamental statement. So what do we have to do today? And here I found a nice solution reading a recent book on the history of philosophy. I think the thing we have to do is to return to Socrates, you know, the first one. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. You know why? Socrates is known what, for his statement of the only thing I really know is that I don’t know anything, that I know nothing, and his constant questioning. But I think this was an attitude that we need more than ever today. I’ll put it like this. Socrates broke not only with the pre-philosophical cosmologies, you know where you immediately speculate about what the universe is. Usually you get some sexualized duality like lightness and dark, masculine and feminine principle, or whatever. Okay, with philosophy this is over. But nonetheless up to Socrates, philosophy was still in some sense similar to these pre-philosophical speculations. They took, the first philosophers, a kind of a panoramic view of all of reality and proposed some first founding principle or ground. For example, the one who is usually counted as the first philosopher, Thales. His idea was everything is water. Water is the ground of everything. And this is a very revolutionary statement at that time. You know why? Because it goes against the standard pre-philosophical cosmology stance which is the earth. You know, we all are on the earth. The earth as unmoved foundation of our life. No, he said water, which already means dynamic, borderless and so on. But okay, Thales. Then we get Heraclitus, you know whose point is change, constant change, struggle and so on. Then Democritus, atoms and so on. But what I am saying is that all of them were simply posing some fundamental principle of all reality. They were critical in some formal sense, their solution contradicted other solutions, but it was still as if from some empty place, external position, we can take into our view all of reality, cosmos, and speculate about what our reality is at the most elementary level. With Socrates thing, things take a totally different turn. First we should not forget, here I see the actuality of Socrates, we should not forget that he came in a moment of political crisis. The Greek traditional way of life as embodied in *polis*, city-state Athens and so on, was in decay, was in the process of disintegration. So for Socrates his position was a direct reaction to this social crisis. And but what was his solution? It wasn’t so much a new positive principle, it was very interesting. It was a radical questioning. Also you can say self-questioning. Like, you know what so interested in at least early, what we know, we only know Socrates of course from Plato, early and middle Plato’s dialogues. Socrates does something which I claim is radically new in the entire history of humanity. He just asks questions about basically the meaning of the words, you know. Like I think his early dialogues they are typically about okay beauty, but what is beauty? Tell me, he probes into his opponent or partner, tell me what do you mean by beauty. Tell me what do you mean by courage. Tell me what do you mean by knowledge. Tell me what do you mean by justice, you know. And it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t arrive, in the early dialogues they end in confusion, he doesn’t arrive at a simple solution. It’s just this radical uncertainty. We don’t know what words mean. And the beginning is to clarify this. And now I don’t have time, people will get bored to go deeper into it, but the beautiful paradox of Socrates, at least as we know him from Plato, is that it’s not that he begins with this and then he gets of course at eternal ideas as unchangeable forms so that our common material reality is always changing but it’s a copy of eternal universe of ideas. No, he doubts even about this. He would have asked okay but what do you mean by idea, okay and so on. And here for me the greatest dialogue is *Parmenides* of Plato, which ends up in a total mess. It’s a series of questioning of this what is being, what is one and so on. And again it ends up in a total mess. And after that Plato kind of retreats, steps back. But what is so important here? First that for the first time philosophy, and this is philosophy in the only serious sense, is directly presented as a reflection of the social crisis in which we are. And the idea of philosophy is that instead of directly proposing a solution, you risk this, it’s not a good word but let’s say, you risk reducing yourself to this absolute zero of I’m a nobody, I know nothing and so on. And then you hope that through this radical contraction, I’m just who I am, what do I know, what is our reality and so on, you will get at some new universality. And you know why I think here Socrates is unique? Because a Chinese friend immediately answered me, but wait a minute, Confucianism doesn’t it do the same? Confucius also says, wrote in his *Analects*, we live in a time of a crisis and even goes a step further in a Socratic way and says the origin of crisis is that we no longer use words in their proper meaning, you know. One guy means one thing, another another thing, it’s a mess. But Confucius then nonetheless tries simply to return to the tradition. His hope is that let’s stabilize the basic meaning of words and let’s act properly. So let’s bring back the old traditional stability. While with Socrates it doesn’t function. The idea is that you should risk a total self-loss, reduction to almost nothing. There are even sometimes excremental metaphors used to get really close to God. First I have to reduce myself to pure shit as it were. And I claim, if I may refer to my last book *Christian Atheism*, that there is something of this same logic in Christianity. We have okay God all that blah blah, but then we have Christ which is the reduction of all divinity to a single poor man dying there, despised as a beggar almost on the cross. And only by passing through this serious point, what happens? No, we don’t return to the old traditional security, safe traditional position, but something much more interesting happens. A new universality emerges which is of course called Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, which is again not the same as the old traditional divine principles or whatever. It’s just the egalitarian universality of individuals who are in principle equal. And it’s incredible because you know better than me maybe that Plato is often dismissed as the proto-totalitarian, you know. Like with Karl Popper already, Plato, from Plato to Hegel and Marx, closed society totalitarians. Against, Plato is usually opposed to Aristotle who was more empirical, more open and so on. But no, Plato was fully egalitarian in one of his earlier dialogues, *Meno*. He to clarify a mathematical point, of course it’s a fake but it’s an interesting productive fake, he in a dialogue, not reality, he brings in Socrates when he debates his partners, I’m not sure who they are, he brings, he calls an ordinary slave who sits next to him and proves how a slave also can comprehend this difficult mathematical point. So you have again this universal self-doubt, principle egalitarianism, all traditional hierarchies are suspended, and then a new much more emancipatory universality emerges. I think that Socrates is a real beginning here. And I think again that we are today in such a mess that we cannot simply rely on some old traditional cultural element. Like okay let’s return to the origins of Christianity or whatever, or even science today and so on. This is what I would like to, how do you say it for a rough investigation in American police procedural movies and novels, I want to give him a third degree in this sense of brutal questioning. I just want to confront him with this absolutely basic questions. Like today we all act on, which are our basic notions? Human rights, happiness, freedom, justice and so on. And I think our first approach should be Socratic here. We cannot simply rely on, oh we are for freedom, human rights, democracy, so we know who are the bad guys. No, these terms are so abused today, all of these terms, freedom, equality, whatever, that we have to begin by this critical turn on the words themselves that we use. It’s not a kind of a linguistic solipsism, it’s just that we have to vacillate to destabilize the basic frame, ideological frame of how we understand, approach reality. And I’m not now saying that we should just do pure philosophic, a pure philosophical speculation. No, I think that often here even empirical inquiries and tests can be very productive. In one of my previous books I report on how I find, sorry in old senile I forgot the title and the author, but I read a wonderful book where an empirical sociologist did an experiment which is for me a true empirical, empirically demonstrated rejection of the basic premises of our capitalist worldview, you know. That people are basically egotists, that there is no natural, here I agree with them, sense of solidarity and so on. No, but there is something else. You know this guy reports first of an experiment done in a, I forgot which one, is it even MIT or where, top scientific laboratory. It’s a wonderful experiment, it makes me cry as still in my heart a deep communist, you know. This was the experiment. They manipulated, probably without telling them, a group of top researchers. And then they were raising their salaries and observed the effects. You know what was the shock? When they were really paid low, not enough to live safely, they of course worked better if you paid them more. But only up to a certain point. The presupposition here is of course that these were people who really enjoyed their works. Like researcher whose work, scientific research was, and I use this term with all pathetic magnitude, it’s a vocation, you know. Your job like, if I may put it in ideological terms, your job is not just something you do for money to survive, your job is your vocation. In the sense that you didn’t just choose your job, in some sense you were chosen, you know. Like if you are really a great philosopher or scientist or artist, you didn’t simply decide I want to be this. No, all of a sudden you discovered and chosen, like I as if addressed, I cannot not do this. So what he discovered, I already hinted it, is that if then you raise the salaries of these researchers even more, they get so obsessed by money that, if again, if the wages or whatever they earn, maybe the term wages is not enough here, that there the quality of their work lowers. Because when they get so much money they this, they get corrupted by money. You know, they say oh who, okay it’s interesting what I am working but my my, my God I could buy another house, go to a holiday from blah blah blah. And again the quality falls down. So I find this a wonderful thing of how there is no simple correlation between how well you are paid and what you are and the quality of what you are doing. We have a certain standard. We want to of course live a nice life, but not a life of luxury. You just want to be free to do what you feel is your vocation. And did I already mention the last time we were here then I found a, I found a place where they are all communists in this sense, interrupting or cut me out if already mentioned it. Now my favorite place newly discovered in the world, you know which is? It’s not the smallest but it’s maybe the smallest inhabited island which is really alone. Like the nearest inhabited island from this island is Saint Helena where Napoleon was imprisoned, it’s over miles away. It’s in Southern Atlantic, Tristan da Cunha. Do you know how people there live? Check it on Wikipedia or what. It’s a small island, no airport, just a boat reaches it maybe once, twice a month. And around people live there. Modest but nice life. They don’t own any land. It’s collectively owned just at the beginning of each season they said you will work this part, that part, they help each other and so on. They have very little contact with outside world. And this is happening today. Now you will say, of course they must be idiots isolated there. Now comes the true wonder. In the year I think, there was some earthquake or volcanic eruption or whatever there, so the British government, and the island is under their protection, moved all the people for two years back to England. And then after two years the situation got normalized. Now comes the shock. You know that except two people who there fell in love or were seduced by city life, all of them returned. They were returned to Tristan da Cunha. They were so identified by this. Then, I think it’s not too obscene out of respect for my good friend who had this terrible accident, maybe you heard it, Hanif Kureishi. Who is now and it looks as if he will remain with basically half-vegetable till his death. And he made a pleasant discovery. In this there are many nurses who serve you there, but in I’m not talking in sexual sense here, most of them are men and so on, but I don’t want to be caught in that. But what I want to say is that he noticed something. They are low paid, much less than the big doctors who come to see them, you know when you are in these rehabilitation centers, you know. And it’s horrible to be a vegetable, you know. It’s not only they feed you but each morning and evening they turn you on your stomach and with fingers go into your ass, try to see if some shit will come out and so on. But he discovered Hanif, you must know you don’t know, he made a couple of movies which were quite a triumph, wrote scenario for them. Okay, what I want to say is he discovered that for these people, even if they were lowly paid, and now I’m not talking about some some extravagant small Atlantic islands, I’m talking about big hospitals or rehabilitation centers in the suburb of London. He noticed how in contrast to doctors, high specialists who are the usual corrupted bullshit, you know, care about money, ignore you and so on, these lowly paid helpers, carers, those who care of you at this everyday level because Hanif now he cannot even eat alone and so on, you know. That they nonetheless they complain about not getting enough pay, sorry money, but they never, they it’s Hanif writes in his memoirs of this year that he spent there, that he asked them once then, okay why don’t you leave your job if it’s so low paid and go somewhere else? And all of them gave him, they were not coordinated, the same spontaneous answer. But I’m here to do this, that’s my vocation. I have no moral right to abandon you here, you know. So you know, I don’t, this would be, I don’t buy this eternal argument, you know, that we are much more corrupted than we think, socialism is a utopia and so on. No, these are elements of a surprising solidarity which totally violates this profit-market oriented behavior. These people knew they are exploited. But since they are they are doing it in immediate contact with their patient and they develop not a personal connection but this type of my God I see suffering I cannot just go away. I think that if our societies with all crazy problems that we have, if our societies are to survive, we will have to move along these lines. Rediscover this work as a vocation and this spontaneous dedication, you know. Like okay I don’t earn enough, I complain blah blah, but I have no choice. I was chosen as it were to do this. I think just imagine, people do act like this when you get big catastrophe. I don’t idealize Ukraine, but I have some friends there and they even feel a little bit oppressed with the present Zelensky government for making too much compromise with Western powers and so on. But I have some friends there and some friend journalists who visited them, them is where? You know that city which is now almost under siege, Kharkiv, the second biggest city. My friend, a big Slovene journalist, we are good friends, went there two weeks ago and wrote for a Slovene leftist weekly journal a wonderful text where he discovers how these people are not involved, he’s talking about everyday people, he’s talking about people who learned how to survive when you know every day one or two bombs fall here or there in Kharkiv. But they somehow manage to organize their life, like it becomes part of the life, you know that with radars and so on they discover that some drones or whatever are approaching, you’re told okay go quickly into some into some basement or what and so on. But nonetheless the social life go on and ordinary people bring food to soldiers, it’s I was quite fascinated by all this. So this would be my answer to those who claim, oh socialism is a utopia. No, people are at the same, no then now I will be more skeptical, people are at the same time better and worse I claim than this image of egotists. First, people are worse in the sense of as already Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw, egotism in itself is not a bad thing. Egotism means I care of myself, I want to take care of blah blah. But if you’re a rational egotist, not in any pathetic sense but rational, you soon discover that collaborating with others is profitable even to your self-interest, you know. No, the problem is when logic of envy enters. When as they say, this is one of the big sayings of capitalism, it’s only that I have to win, the other has to lose also, you know. And then the next step is that it’s more important that the other loses than for me to win. But there is nothing natural in this, because it’s incredible, when you are in a state of emergency, war and so on, people who before in their daily life were corrupted opportunists and so on, they all of a sudden do incredible things. Not in a pathetic thing way, like oh I want to be a hero, but simply like shells or to enter a building which is under fire to save somebody or when the building is collapsing. Yes, it has to be done, you are there, you hear the shouts from outside, it has to be done. So this is how, the direction in which I would have moved as a Socrates figure today. I think that this idea that socialism is too naive, that that people are egotists, full of envy and so on, is simply not the whole truth. People are, if I may paraphrase Freud, people are much worse than they think, much more evil, and at the same time much better than they believe. You know, this is one of the most fascinating ethical moments how, this is the moral stories from everyday life that I like to hear, how ordinary people, corrupted opportunists then there is an emergency situation and you don’t know why, click, they become ultra-ethical. Not in this pathetic way I am ethical, but they simply do things that have to be done. And here I see some hope. I’m not a total pessimist. But it was a long way, my God. Again, maybe I already used this joke with you. Again, you know the joke, I mean from Slovenia where the joke was circulating already for years, how do you make a one-hour interview with me so that you ask me one question, you know? So I came pretty close to that. So let me leave you some time to move maybe the direction of our interview into where you want. Yeah, sure. Yeah, there’s a lot on the table now, but I’d like to focus on this underlying through-line that we need to think like philosophers because philosophers themselves have very, very different ideas of what philosophical thinking is or what the practice of philosophy should be like. So analytic philosophers... You hit it, only philosopher. Sorry to interrupt you, but you know that’s why I would like to talk with Lee Smolin, with others, no? Because people who say this, no, usually say oh this is philosophy, every idiot can deploy his view. But sorry guys, with science it’s a little bit different. Sorry, look quantum physics, which is generally recognized as the with capitalized T, the science today. Sorry but I will try to when we will have a conversation with Lee Smolin or something like this, isn’t it that concerning determinacy and entanglement and Big Bang and whatever, almost all logically possible versions, solutions are advocated by today’s scientists who are then in strict disagreement with each other, no? Like the one with whom I first spoke to you, Sean Carroll, no? He is basically although he’s a little bit more careful, his basic stance is multiverse, no? Simply there is no collapse because all all superpositions are actualized. Then I noticed now how the notion of observation, collapse of superpositions into one reality through observation. But at what level does observation occur? And I found with different authors almost all the possible, all possible solutions, like at one extreme, I like extremes that’s not a criticism is Carlo Rovelli. Who and I support him here, who tries to avoid this conclusion, ah observation means a conscious mind and so on, for reading quantum physics in this idealist even mystical way, isn’t the point of quantum physics that if there is if reality is collapsed, emerges as our reality that we know only through observation, doesn’t this mean that the whole cosmos only exists if there is a big observer let’s say God and so on? No, Rovelli tries to avoid this conclusion and I think maybe a little bit too far waters down, makes the notion of observation totally flat. For him whenever elements interact in reality, they in some sense observe each other, you know. Like every interaction, every interaction means that one agent let’s say who is a victim affected by the other in this sense observes the other. Of course the problem disappears here. But nonetheless I don’t think this totally flat almost notion of observation is strong enough. I don’t know where you stand here. My theory is that you get rid of a problem in almost the same way symmetrically than Sean Carroll’s multiverse solution, you know. Like everything is observation, everything that happens in reality is observation. On the other hand you have, at least in some of his formulations, Roger Penrose, who is now even moving close to a position of accepting God of some divine authority a mega-observer who guarantees the consistency of our entire cosmos and so on and so on. So again you see they say you philosophers blah blah just each of you each of you has his own theory, but wait a minute, if there is a crazy plurality of theories, again it’s in quantum physics today, you know, and it’s science at its top. And why modest proposal here is that precisely we philosophers, and we may be of different orientations, but we who are trained in this Socratic tradition, we can be of some help not in this totalitarian traditional Marxist sense that a quantum physicist will bring me his text and I will say sorry subjective idealism, no not to judge, but to whenever there is a mess in science, and today’s quantum physics is one big mess, just to look at it from this Socratic standpoint, you know, and ask but wait a minute what do words mean for you? For example that would be my question to Rovelli and to Roger Penrose, you know. Because that’s again I know a big problem. For majority of quantum mechanics scientists they try to avoid direct idealism but they simply materialize observation in a machine of registration. They say a quantum phenomenon, oscillations, superpositions is collapses when it’s registered by a machine. Like electron is freely floating, it goes through all possible ways, if you measure it it’s only one way, you know. This solution is I think also too simple but again what interests me so much is this multiplicity of versions, you know. And maybe we philosophers can do something not in being brighter than them. I still have this maybe it was felt when I almost fear when I spoke with Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin the first time, like I simply respect them. Now it will sound ridiculous what I will say now, but I think they are much brighter than me and so on who am I even to, but I think I can maybe not help them in this pushing them in the right direction what the hell do I know but just
unknown
a, you know, push them philosophically into please clarify the points, are not so much clarify the points there is still definition but where some of us philosophers are good is pushing people and Socrates, at least Plato’s Socrates, was doing this all the time. Pushing
a, you know, push them philosophically into please clarify the points, are not so much clarify the points there is still definition but where some of us philosophers are good is pushing people and Socrates, at least Plato’s Socrates, was doing this all the time. Pushing
Slavoj Žižek
people into thinking upon or analyzing the implications and the consequences of what they advocate. Like you are saying this but are you aware what will be the consequences of this? That’s always my question, not personally I don’t know him at all but you know when Elon Musk went into that Neuralink computers will be able to communicate directly with our brain. Okay I’m too stupid to pass a scientific judgment is this possible or not. But my question is once if machines will be doing this, will we still be thinking? How will this affect our notion of communication? Let’s say we, I think already talked about this in one of my previous podcasts with you, like let’s say that you have direct access to my mind and I to your mind. In a way it’s at least in today’s stage of things it’s a pretty horrifying perspective because I think the whole point of talking, language, is not to tell the truth but to lie. I read again I’m old and senile a wonderful old old okay today old means years ago wonderful analysis of language nothing to do with Lacan, Freud or whatever, a simple positive behavior analysis which tries to reconstruct how language emerged. And the idea is in a nice way anti-Marxist because Marx or Engels on his behalf, he wrote that rather ridiculous short text The Emergence of Man Through Work Out of Apes or whatever all that stuff. There the idea is that it’s through collaboration, collective work, that language emerged. And Engels’ theory is pretty stupid here you know his idea is that he even uses at some point rather regresses to this tautological stupidity, he said that when productive process became too complex it couldn’t go on without language because you had to signal to your coworker do this don’t do that. So it’s horrible theoretically wrong saying of Engels, he says language was invented the moment people had something to tell to each other. Thanks, but you know to be in this position you already have to be in language my God, you know. And here and this is maybe even my pleasure, I’m not just doing with some abstract Lacanian Hegelian speculation, I it almost give me intellectual orgasm when I follow empirical research results which then trigger an echo at the very abstract philosophical level. For example the book that I mentioned, an author whose name I forgot, he claims quite convincingly that language originally was invented, emerged, in the process of seduction to lie, how to make an impression on your partner. And he even does it very intelligently this guy sorry forgot his name, when he goes into sexual difference mating and he says that among most of animals then we know, it’s male members who put on masquerade, you know, animals have colored nice feathers and so on to attract the woman. But then with humans uniquely it changes. It’s the women, feminine sex, who has to mask themselves to attract men. Now I totally accept something third will emerge and so on. But I like much more this idea that language is not as some Habermasians or modern rationalists think, originally a medium of communication, collaboration, thinking, which then gets distorted with all this sexualized or manipulative game. No, that language is at its most basic basic dimension an instrument of lie. And that to tell the truth, Hegel had somewhere this formula, you have to you have to think in language against language. So what is, and still you know please be careful when you listen to this to to what I found a charming madness, namely how I run from elementary empirical examples to high speculation. I read now another book by Aaron Schuster on Kafka’s stories especially his story on dog, dog his late tales on animals, Kafka dog who wants to be a philosopher investigator. Okay but my point is this one, that he follows here Aaron Schuster, Jacques Lacan, who I think has convinced me totally who claims that language at its zero level it’s not this communication exchange of information and so on, animals already have that kind of language. You know for example we all know bees, they know how to communicate like one bee by flying in certain way can let other bees know move here and then left and you will encounter I don’t know a big flower with a lot of potential honey or whatever and so on. No, it’s not it’s not just it’s not just communicating information. It’s a wonderful idea that Kafka indicates somewhere but others developed it that the basic act of language is sorry for the shock is cursing, curse. Because cursing, curse is not simply just a condensed way to humiliate you like no instead of arguing against you I say F off, up yours, you are an it whatever, no. You find hints of a much more wonderful notion that cursing always involves you. The basic dimension of cursing is not I want to humiliate you. You curse when you are at a loss of proper words. Cursing emerges because ultimately we are in language, but we are also always alienated in language. We never succeed in fully saying what we want in language. So cursing basically means I’m confused I don’t know what to say the proper word I’m missing it, you know. In this sense Lacan I think has right that you from this animal signaling which can be very advanced, you enter proper human language when you add a curse. Because a curse means sorry but I don’t recognize myself in my words, I cannot say what I want to say. This is the zero this is the zero level of language. So you see this is the reason I like these examples is that again we have a very empirical phenomenon, cursing, but at the same time we are at the high philosopher in a high philosophical topic of what is the basic dimension of language, why human language cannot be reduced to exchanging information, you know. Cursing is this basic protest gesture of I want to say something but I fail again and again, I’m I’m oppressed by language but I’m also condemned to be in language. I cannot abandon language because if I abandon language I am nobody, I no longer exist. And based on these insights I would even approach again all these questions about artificial intelligence do machines think and so on. I don’t for me the measure would have been machines think if they can curse, if they can say, but not of course you can talk them teach them program them to curse. But if they can violate their own program by simply cursing and so on, cursing out of their own as it were subjectivity. You know this is for me here maybe already mentioned it to you I forgot the the nice moment, Mel Brooks, did I already mention to you his movie this short history of humanity or whatever where one episode Mel Brooks is he plays a a waiter who is in Jerusalem it’s a comedy asked by some mysterious people, we have a very important dinner tonight could you come there and serve you know. And then okay the guys goes there it’s Last Supper of course no. And there is a wonderful moment, he carrying many plates he slips down, slip not sleeping, slip like falls down and of course as a curse said Oh Christ. And you know what he hears, a gentle guy saying Yes please and so on. This here the movement goes into another dimension. He said it as okay not a curse but like this exclamation of impotence and what comes is somebody takes this as a personal address as an act of communication, you know. This is why again I’m more and more convinced that without taking into account all these obscene examples and so on we cannot really understand language. And language is getting so important today again. We will have to close slowly so add another, in which direction are you thinking? Yeah, well let me just say first a note on the quantum mechanics material you brought up. It’s sociologically quite fascinating and relevant to this conversation that most of these discussions about the foundations of quantum mechanics are happening in philosophy departments rather than physics departments. Really? But on the other hand you know what amuses me, yes, but that people precisely the people who criticize philosophy as confused but then they nonetheless get into this type of speculations because I know, I know what you are saying. I’m following it closely but okay who would you say Carlo Rovelli is? Is he already half-philosopher? I would say that like Lee Smolin, he’s very much a trained physicist but he takes the philosophical problems very seriously, which not a lot of physicists do. Yeah, but sorry I still think that the mess of quantum mechanics today itself pushes people to they are pushed into approaching things in a philosophical way. I don’t think it’s simply external to quantum mechanics, you know. This was the Copenhagen option and now everybody is betraying Copenhagen. This pure like pure stance which is we know what’s the formula, don’t think just calculate or whatever, you know. I mean... So Sean, yeah. Sean was just he was most recently a research physicist at Caltech but he’s now in the philosophy department at John Hopkins. Really, he also? Yeah, in part though because he thinks that this mess we’re in, particularly with regard to quantum gravity, requires untangling the foundations of physics. Yeah, yeah. Yeah but again I I am not against this philosophizing because I think that as a rule this philosophizing moves in a correct Socratic way, not we have all the answers in advance we just have to discover them but it’s like this authentic perplexity, you know. My God what’s happening, what do we mean by these terms and so on, as I already developed for example apropos observation. Or another big debate, do you have positions here? Where would you, I will give a third degree to to Lee next week but for example for example this wave superpositions, you know. I’m here the big I’m here more towards a speculative but still materialist version in what sense? Rovelli even goes into this for me a little bit too modest stance which is that superpositions and so on these are more epistemological phenomena. That when you say for example if an electron is to arrive from point A to point B, the highest probability is that he will take this path but he may take many other paths. Sometimes Rovelli reduces this to an epistemological limitation. That superpositions don’t have an ontological properly status but they’re simply an expression of the limitation of our knowledge or also maybe indeterminacy in reality. But they are epistemological. Probability means from my limited view I can say this is the most probable way. But I’m here a little bit more speculative, maybe it’s just that I’m also here seduced by my philosophical spirit, I nonetheless like version and isn’t this the whole point of all those double slit experiments and so on to prove that in some it’s not enough to say if there are many electrons depending on observation and measurement they can act like a wave or like particles. Isn’t it that that’s the point they try to prove, even if you do this experiment particle after particle still if you don’t observe it you get a wave, if you observe it you get particles. But you know what I want to say is that so still if you do it even with one particle after the other, they still behave as part of a wave. And the conclusion that I like speculatively, I want to be beaten here by Lee I don’t know how he will reply, is that in some sense even one particle takes all possible paths virtually, in a superposition, not in reality. But I this is the question that bothers me. Some of the quantum physicists are afraid to make the step that I’m tempted to make, that there simply is not in a metaphysical sense another reality but another level of reality which doesn’t behave in the way our time-space ordinary reality coordinates determine that we should behave, you know. I follow here closely all the arguments for example Rovelli as a relationalist, he tries to reject the conclusion of all these Zeilinger and so on experiment that with entangled particles that there is an instant communication or however you call it interaction faster than the speed of light. He in his radical relationalist stance, he claims that no, to see this that they are entangled, you would have to have one divine observer observing at the same time both, but you never had this. The observer has to be somewhere, he always get the information with a delay and so on and so on. But again it you now in a good sense ruined my enjoyment a little bit because you know I was so glad discovering how deep quantum physicists are in philosophical speculations and then you told me basically yes but they are already doing philosophy in their own way, no. It’s not this nice surprise that you see even the most radical empirical scientists are caught in this, you know. But then in
people into thinking upon or analyzing the implications and the consequences of what they advocate. Like you are saying this but are you aware what will be the consequences of this? That’s always my question, not personally I don’t know him at all but you know when Elon Musk went into that Neuralink computers will be able to communicate directly with our brain. Okay I’m too stupid to pass a scientific judgment is this possible or not. But my question is once if machines will be doing this, will we still be thinking? How will this affect our notion of communication? Let’s say we, I think already talked about this in one of my previous podcasts with you, like let’s say that you have direct access to my mind and I to your mind. In a way it’s at least in today’s stage of things it’s a pretty horrifying perspective because I think the whole point of talking, language, is not to tell the truth but to lie. I read again I’m old and senile a wonderful old old okay today old means years ago wonderful analysis of language nothing to do with Lacan, Freud or whatever, a simple positive behavior analysis which tries to reconstruct how language emerged. And the idea is in a nice way anti-Marxist because Marx or Engels on his behalf, he wrote that rather ridiculous short text The Emergence of Man Through Work Out of Apes or whatever all that stuff. There the idea is that it’s through collaboration, collective work, that language emerged. And Engels’ theory is pretty stupid here you know his idea is that he even uses at some point rather regresses to this tautological stupidity, he said that when productive process became too complex it couldn’t go on without language because you had to signal to your coworker do this don’t do that. So it’s horrible theoretically wrong saying of Engels, he says language was invented the moment people had something to tell to each other. Thanks, but you know to be in this position you already have to be in language my God, you know. And here and this is maybe even my pleasure, I’m not just doing with some abstract Lacanian Hegelian speculation, I it almost give me intellectual orgasm when I follow empirical research results which then trigger an echo at the very abstract philosophical level. For example the book that I mentioned, an author whose name I forgot, he claims quite convincingly that language originally was invented, emerged, in the process of seduction to lie, how to make an impression on your partner. And he even does it very intelligently this guy sorry forgot his name, when he goes into sexual difference mating and he says that among most of animals then we know, it’s male members who put on masquerade, you know, animals have colored nice feathers and so on to attract the woman. But then with humans uniquely it changes. It’s the women, feminine sex, who has to mask themselves to attract men. Now I totally accept something third will emerge and so on. But I like much more this idea that language is not as some Habermasians or modern rationalists think, originally a medium of communication, collaboration, thinking, which then gets distorted with all this sexualized or manipulative game. No, that language is at its most basic basic dimension an instrument of lie. And that to tell the truth, Hegel had somewhere this formula, you have to you have to think in language against language. So what is, and still you know please be careful when you listen to this to to what I found a charming madness, namely how I run from elementary empirical examples to high speculation. I read now another book by Aaron Schuster on Kafka’s stories especially his story on dog, dog his late tales on animals, Kafka dog who wants to be a philosopher investigator. Okay but my point is this one, that he follows here Aaron Schuster, Jacques Lacan, who I think has convinced me totally who claims that language at its zero level it’s not this communication exchange of information and so on, animals already have that kind of language. You know for example we all know bees, they know how to communicate like one bee by flying in certain way can let other bees know move here and then left and you will encounter I don’t know a big flower with a lot of potential honey or whatever and so on. No, it’s not it’s not just it’s not just communicating information. It’s a wonderful idea that Kafka indicates somewhere but others developed it that the basic act of language is sorry for the shock is cursing, curse. Because cursing, curse is not simply just a condensed way to humiliate you like no instead of arguing against you I say F off, up yours, you are an it whatever, no. You find hints of a much more wonderful notion that cursing always involves you. The basic dimension of cursing is not I want to humiliate you. You curse when you are at a loss of proper words. Cursing emerges because ultimately we are in language, but we are also always alienated in language. We never succeed in fully saying what we want in language. So cursing basically means I’m confused I don’t know what to say the proper word I’m missing it, you know. In this sense Lacan I think has right that you from this animal signaling which can be very advanced, you enter proper human language when you add a curse. Because a curse means sorry but I don’t recognize myself in my words, I cannot say what I want to say. This is the zero this is the zero level of language. So you see this is the reason I like these examples is that again we have a very empirical phenomenon, cursing, but at the same time we are at the high philosopher in a high philosophical topic of what is the basic dimension of language, why human language cannot be reduced to exchanging information, you know. Cursing is this basic protest gesture of I want to say something but I fail again and again, I’m I’m oppressed by language but I’m also condemned to be in language. I cannot abandon language because if I abandon language I am nobody, I no longer exist. And based on these insights I would even approach again all these questions about artificial intelligence do machines think and so on. I don’t for me the measure would have been machines think if they can curse, if they can say, but not of course you can talk them teach them program them to curse. But if they can violate their own program by simply cursing and so on, cursing out of their own as it were subjectivity. You know this is for me here maybe already mentioned it to you I forgot the the nice moment, Mel Brooks, did I already mention to you his movie this short history of humanity or whatever where one episode Mel Brooks is he plays a a waiter who is in Jerusalem it’s a comedy asked by some mysterious people, we have a very important dinner tonight could you come there and serve you know. And then okay the guys goes there it’s Last Supper of course no. And there is a wonderful moment, he carrying many plates he slips down, slip not sleeping, slip like falls down and of course as a curse said Oh Christ. And you know what he hears, a gentle guy saying Yes please and so on. This here the movement goes into another dimension. He said it as okay not a curse but like this exclamation of impotence and what comes is somebody takes this as a personal address as an act of communication, you know. This is why again I’m more and more convinced that without taking into account all these obscene examples and so on we cannot really understand language. And language is getting so important today again. We will have to close slowly so add another, in which direction are you thinking? Yeah, well let me just say first a note on the quantum mechanics material you brought up. It’s sociologically quite fascinating and relevant to this conversation that most of these discussions about the foundations of quantum mechanics are happening in philosophy departments rather than physics departments. Really? But on the other hand you know what amuses me, yes, but that people precisely the people who criticize philosophy as confused but then they nonetheless get into this type of speculations because I know, I know what you are saying. I’m following it closely but okay who would you say Carlo Rovelli is? Is he already half-philosopher? I would say that like Lee Smolin, he’s very much a trained physicist but he takes the philosophical problems very seriously, which not a lot of physicists do. Yeah, but sorry I still think that the mess of quantum mechanics today itself pushes people to they are pushed into approaching things in a philosophical way. I don’t think it’s simply external to quantum mechanics, you know. This was the Copenhagen option and now everybody is betraying Copenhagen. This pure like pure stance which is we know what’s the formula, don’t think just calculate or whatever, you know. I mean... So Sean, yeah. Sean was just he was most recently a research physicist at Caltech but he’s now in the philosophy department at John Hopkins. Really, he also? Yeah, in part though because he thinks that this mess we’re in, particularly with regard to quantum gravity, requires untangling the foundations of physics. Yeah, yeah. Yeah but again I I am not against this philosophizing because I think that as a rule this philosophizing moves in a correct Socratic way, not we have all the answers in advance we just have to discover them but it’s like this authentic perplexity, you know. My God what’s happening, what do we mean by these terms and so on, as I already developed for example apropos observation. Or another big debate, do you have positions here? Where would you, I will give a third degree to to Lee next week but for example for example this wave superpositions, you know. I’m here the big I’m here more towards a speculative but still materialist version in what sense? Rovelli even goes into this for me a little bit too modest stance which is that superpositions and so on these are more epistemological phenomena. That when you say for example if an electron is to arrive from point A to point B, the highest probability is that he will take this path but he may take many other paths. Sometimes Rovelli reduces this to an epistemological limitation. That superpositions don’t have an ontological properly status but they’re simply an expression of the limitation of our knowledge or also maybe indeterminacy in reality. But they are epistemological. Probability means from my limited view I can say this is the most probable way. But I’m here a little bit more speculative, maybe it’s just that I’m also here seduced by my philosophical spirit, I nonetheless like version and isn’t this the whole point of all those double slit experiments and so on to prove that in some it’s not enough to say if there are many electrons depending on observation and measurement they can act like a wave or like particles. Isn’t it that that’s the point they try to prove, even if you do this experiment particle after particle still if you don’t observe it you get a wave, if you observe it you get particles. But you know what I want to say is that so still if you do it even with one particle after the other, they still behave as part of a wave. And the conclusion that I like speculatively, I want to be beaten here by Lee I don’t know how he will reply, is that in some sense even one particle takes all possible paths virtually, in a superposition, not in reality. But I this is the question that bothers me. Some of the quantum physicists are afraid to make the step that I’m tempted to make, that there simply is not in a metaphysical sense another reality but another level of reality which doesn’t behave in the way our time-space ordinary reality coordinates determine that we should behave, you know. I follow here closely all the arguments for example Rovelli as a relationalist, he tries to reject the conclusion of all these Zeilinger and so on experiment that with entangled particles that there is an instant communication or however you call it interaction faster than the speed of light. He in his radical relationalist stance, he claims that no, to see this that they are entangled, you would have to have one divine observer observing at the same time both, but you never had this. The observer has to be somewhere, he always get the information with a delay and so on and so on. But again it you now in a good sense ruined my enjoyment a little bit because you know I was so glad discovering how deep quantum physicists are in philosophical speculations and then you told me basically yes but they are already doing philosophy in their own way, no. It’s not this nice surprise that you see even the most radical empirical scientists are caught in this, you know. But then in
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that sense you know what would have been my counterargument to you, but didn’t even even Einstein and Bohr in their crucial revolutions, they were not simply empirical scientific thinking, there was always a moment of
that sense you know what would have been my counterargument to you, but didn’t even even Einstein and Bohr in their crucial revolutions, they were not simply empirical scientific thinking, there was always a moment of
Slavoj Žižek
philosophical properly philosophical thinking because you know what Einstein did concerning time-space relativity blah blah, passage from to to global
philosophical properly philosophical thinking because you know what Einstein did concerning time-space relativity blah blah, passage from to to global
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general relativity. What he saw and this is a philosophical insight is that we have to change the
general relativity. What he saw and this is a philosophical insight is that we have to change the
Slavoj Žižek
meaning of what temporal distance means, temporality, time-space and so on. You see this you don’t just measure time, at the same time you discover that you have to redefine what time is, what space is and so on and so on, you know. And that’s why I’m so passionate about it. But I’m silently resigned to the result that this all will not end well for me in the sense that
meaning of what temporal distance means, temporality, time-space and so on. You see this you don’t just measure time, at the same time you discover that you have to redefine what time is, what space is and so on and so on, you know. And that’s why I’m so passionate about it. But I’m silently resigned to the result that this all will not end well for me in the sense that
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you know, I don’t think I will make a mega breakthrough. I’m much more modest here, I just would like to so can I ask you now to see understand where things are? So can I ask you in my obscene way an extremely intimate question, you I think you will refuse to answer. Don’t
you know, I don’t think I will make a mega breakthrough. I’m much more modest here, I just would like to so can I ask you now to see understand where things are? So can I ask you in my obscene way an extremely intimate question, you I think you will refuse to answer. Don’t
Slavoj Žižek
be afraid not about your sex life or what but simply where do you stand? Do you have a position or you prefer as an as it were observer you have debates not to limit yourself too much. As a character I would judge you don’t want to clearly adopt one position. Or where do you stand in all these conflicts? Yeah, my position is like a good tennis player not to make unforced errors. So because I don’t understand the physics well enough, I like to abstain from making judgments. But unlike you, I have this deep intuition and intuitions are not worth very much, especially when you’re as uninformed as I am. But of course not but sometimes they are the best thing that happens. Yeah, but a lot of the issues you’re pointing to are epistemological rather than ontological as you put it. Yes, but my point, the whole point of my effort is to show how what may appear an epistemological issue really is ontological. That the this is if you want my what I’m looking in quantum physics, if you want it in one sentence, is that what appears an epistemological limitation is already an ontological feature of the thing itself. Isn’t this the whole point of superpositions, indeterminacy and so on, that it’s not just epistemological contingency, I think that it’s in the thing itself. But now that’s why I look forward also to the debate with Sabine Hossenfelder because I know that she is the superdeterminist, you know. But it’s a nice idea but then at least I followed some debates with her, when you push her closer at what she means by superdeterminism it gets a little bit unclear to me. Well one question then that I would like to finish with is, I mean analytic philosophers think of philosophy as much more continuous with science or informed by formal logic while continental philosophers are influenced by literary traditions or psychoanalysis or Marxism, which since you mentioned Popper earlier, many analytic philosophers have been hostile to. So I just wanted to be more clear on what characterizes this philosophical approach to reality that you have in mind? Is it just this Socratic method that unites them, but if that's the case then where do they diverge? For me, no I am not saying we should all just become Socratics and so on, you know. The Socratic approach would have been here very modest but at the same time crucial. It would have been simply first I’m a pessimist when we have this opposition of vaguely continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. I think that each of them as a rule if we generalize it into two simple positions, continental, analytic, has usually a very raw wrong simplifying image of its opponent, you know. Like if you read some analytic philosophers then guys like Hegel and Heidegger are confused idiots, you know. And I also admit more than willingly if you read some people high in hermeneutic tradition, you know, they they don’t see the extraordinary finesse of much of analytic philosophy. I mean there are incredible things happening there. But even in analytic philosophy you mentioned Popper, no? But then I don’t follow them totally but then I like guys like Thomas Kuhn and so on who kind of tried to limit, reject maybe it’s too strong to word the Popperian tradition from within the very analytic space. First empirically claiming and I love this proof that science doesn’t progress in this simple way of oh hypothesis is falsified and so on. No, it’s much more complex. Even I read a wonderful analysis of still in first stage of relativity. Do you know that it’s not as simple as that that Einstein had the right intuition and then it was only empirically confirmed by some I don’t know star moonlight and so on, it’s that many at least from at that stage of experimenting, many empirical results spoke against Einstein. And it was his greatness that you said FU, no there must be something wrong, I love this when scientists get a little bit arrogant and say almost in a Hegelian way, you know, when Hegel says if facts don’t fit theory so much worse for the facts, you know. Sometimes good scientists do this at a certain point Einstein said this, he said okay if your measurement, measurements don’t fit my theory so much worse for your measurements. There must be something wrong in your measurements, you know. And I think that big progresses in science
be afraid not about your sex life or what but simply where do you stand? Do you have a position or you prefer as an as it were observer you have debates not to limit yourself too much. As a character I would judge you don’t want to clearly adopt one position. Or where do you stand in all these conflicts? Yeah, my position is like a good tennis player not to make unforced errors. So because I don’t understand the physics well enough, I like to abstain from making judgments. But unlike you, I have this deep intuition and intuitions are not worth very much, especially when you’re as uninformed as I am. But of course not but sometimes they are the best thing that happens. Yeah, but a lot of the issues you’re pointing to are epistemological rather than ontological as you put it. Yes, but my point, the whole point of my effort is to show how what may appear an epistemological issue really is ontological. That the this is if you want my what I’m looking in quantum physics, if you want it in one sentence, is that what appears an epistemological limitation is already an ontological feature of the thing itself. Isn’t this the whole point of superpositions, indeterminacy and so on, that it’s not just epistemological contingency, I think that it’s in the thing itself. But now that’s why I look forward also to the debate with Sabine Hossenfelder because I know that she is the superdeterminist, you know. But it’s a nice idea but then at least I followed some debates with her, when you push her closer at what she means by superdeterminism it gets a little bit unclear to me. Well one question then that I would like to finish with is, I mean analytic philosophers think of philosophy as much more continuous with science or informed by formal logic while continental philosophers are influenced by literary traditions or psychoanalysis or Marxism, which since you mentioned Popper earlier, many analytic philosophers have been hostile to. So I just wanted to be more clear on what characterizes this philosophical approach to reality that you have in mind? Is it just this Socratic method that unites them, but if that's the case then where do they diverge? For me, no I am not saying we should all just become Socratics and so on, you know. The Socratic approach would have been here very modest but at the same time crucial. It would have been simply first I’m a pessimist when we have this opposition of vaguely continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. I think that each of them as a rule if we generalize it into two simple positions, continental, analytic, has usually a very raw wrong simplifying image of its opponent, you know. Like if you read some analytic philosophers then guys like Hegel and Heidegger are confused idiots, you know. And I also admit more than willingly if you read some people high in hermeneutic tradition, you know, they they don’t see the extraordinary finesse of much of analytic philosophy. I mean there are incredible things happening there. But even in analytic philosophy you mentioned Popper, no? But then I don’t follow them totally but then I like guys like Thomas Kuhn and so on who kind of tried to limit, reject maybe it’s too strong to word the Popperian tradition from within the very analytic space. First empirically claiming and I love this proof that science doesn’t progress in this simple way of oh hypothesis is falsified and so on. No, it’s much more complex. Even I read a wonderful analysis of still in first stage of relativity. Do you know that it’s not as simple as that that Einstein had the right intuition and then it was only empirically confirmed by some I don’t know star moonlight and so on, it’s that many at least from at that stage of experimenting, many empirical results spoke against Einstein. And it was his greatness that you said FU, no there must be something wrong, I love this when scientists get a little bit arrogant and say almost in a Hegelian way, you know, when Hegel says if facts don’t fit theory so much worse for the facts, you know. Sometimes good scientists do this at a certain point Einstein said this, he said okay if your measurement, measurements don’t fit my theory so much worse for your measurements. There must be something wrong in your measurements, you know. And I think that big progresses in science
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happens in this way. It’s not simply you get contrary data and then you say oh my God it’s too much let’s change the frame and so on. It’s a more complex development, no. Well
happens in this way. It’s not simply you get contrary data and then you say oh my God it’s too much let’s change the frame and so on. It’s a more complex development, no. Well
Slavoj Žižek
this is another place where
this is another place where
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philosophy is so important because you mentioned that science does not always progress
philosophy is so important because you mentioned that science does not always progress
Slavoj Žižek
with hypothesis falsify and so on and the issues that we’ve been discussing are precisely some of these areas. You can’t really test whether there are multiple branches in the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics because they’re causally disconnected from us or even with string theory and loop quantum gravity. I mean in the regimes where quantum gravitational phenomena are salient we have no way of generating enough energy to run experiments. So we need to evaluate the
with hypothesis falsify and so on and the issues that we’ve been discussing are precisely some of these areas. You can’t really test whether there are multiple branches in the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics because they’re causally disconnected from us or even with string theory and loop quantum gravity. I mean in the regimes where quantum gravitational phenomena are salient we have no way of generating enough energy to run experiments. So we need to evaluate the
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situation philosophically. That is the point, it’s wonderful what you said now. Because for me the strongest from the scientific point even criticism I don’t know if it’s true maybe you know more of string theory is that it’s not only that we cannot yet measure and confirm it experimentally is that with our present knowledge
situation philosophically. That is the point, it’s wonderful what you said now. Because for me the strongest from the scientific point even criticism I don’t know if it’s true maybe you know more of string theory is that it’s not only that we cannot yet measure and confirm it experimentally is that with our present knowledge
Slavoj Žižek
it’s even difficult, some scientists try I know, but nonetheless it’s even difficult to imagine experiment experiments that would do it, you know. It’s very difficult. So again here I am a little bit of a naive empiricist saying is it now, Sean Carroll wouldn’t like what I will say now but is it worth the price to go into multiverse, you know. Like it’s so counter-intuitive the price. You want to be an empirical scientist but you are doing what even the most crazy philosophers wouldn’t be doing, you invoke an endless multiplicity of worlds with whom you will never interact and so on, you know. It’s very anti-empiricist. Well it’s funny you say that because David Lewis, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the last hundred years did exactly this. He thinks that there or he thought that there are all of these possible worlds out there and they’re really concrete, they’re just not spatiotemporally or causally connected to ours. So the craziest philosophers I guess did believe in that. Yeah. It was pleasure but sorry I’m getting tired but you again made me
it’s even difficult, some scientists try I know, but nonetheless it’s even difficult to imagine experiment experiments that would do it, you know. It’s very difficult. So again here I am a little bit of a naive empiricist saying is it now, Sean Carroll wouldn’t like what I will say now but is it worth the price to go into multiverse, you know. Like it’s so counter-intuitive the price. You want to be an empirical scientist but you are doing what even the most crazy philosophers wouldn’t be doing, you invoke an endless multiplicity of worlds with whom you will never interact and so on, you know. It’s very anti-empiricist. Well it’s funny you say that because David Lewis, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the last hundred years did exactly this. He thinks that there or he thought that there are all of these possible worlds out there and they’re really concrete, they’re just not spatiotemporally or causally connected to ours. So the craziest philosophers I guess did believe in that. Yeah. It was pleasure but sorry I’m getting tired but you again made me
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wonder if all of this is worth and if yes please remember Comrade Stalin you are for me. Tough. As ever Slavoj this was terrific, thank you so much. No but I enjoy it so much because you know why? You are not as innocent as you claim to be.
wonder if all of this is worth and if yes please remember Comrade Stalin you are for me. Tough. As ever Slavoj this was terrific, thank you so much. No but I enjoy it so much because you know why? You are not as innocent as you claim to be.
Slavoj Žižek
Take it as a compliment. Goodbye.
Take it as a compliment. Goodbye.