We need philophers, thinkers

A public service announcement, brought you by “The Big Think” through Slavoj Žižek. Transcript follows the video.

We Need Thinking by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

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

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

“What I really want to do is rehabilitate classical philosophy today. That is to say, Hegel was a child of his time, we are 200 years later, how to repeat Hegel? Not to do the same things as he did, but to repeat in new circumstances the same gesture. And even here more for Hegel than for Marx; I think that we should even return from Marx back to Hegel.

“So, this is the focus of my work. Then come all the things for which I am unfortunately better-known. For example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture, and so on and so on. But frankly, to use the not-very-appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this—my writings on politics, analysis of Hollywood and so on—is, more or less, collateral damage … of my basic work.

“I think this is also what has to be done, today. I think the danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism. You know, like when people tell you, ‘oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid, philosophical debates. Let’s do something.‘ I always hear in this call, ‘there are people starving there, let’s do something’.

“I always discern, in this, a more ominous injunction, ‘do it and don’t think too much.‘

“Today, we need thinking.”