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Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozeman. Returning to NBN today is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book, Signs from the A Philosophy of Warnings. Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crises and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt, and Beauvoir, but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare. Zavala's book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabula is ICREA Research professor of Philosophy at the Pompeo Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Santiago Zabala, welcome back to the New Books Network.
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Thank you very much for having me, Steven.
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Yeah, so for guests who maybe didn't hear you on when you were here last time or haven't heard of you or don't know who you are. Could you maybe just introduce yourself to our listeners? Tell us a bit about what your main areas of specific specialization in research tend to be?
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Right, so I'm a philosopher. I'm a professor also here in Spain, and I mainly work on hermeneutics, philosophy. And my points of reference are Heidegger, Gadamer, Batimo, Rorty, and. Well, I'm a hardcore continental philosopher who is not afraid to challenge the analytic dominion.
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C
Good place to be. So you start this book off by discussing an artwork that is on the book's cover. A sculpture composed of various mirrors of various sizes placed at various angles, producing a somewhat confusing and disorienting reflection. You say that this sculpture forces us, the viewer, to become involved in interpreting what we see by becoming actively involved with it. And that in this way, the sculpture embodies the hermeneutics of warning for you. Could you unpack what you see in this sculpture and how it points to what you intend to develop with this book?
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Right, so actually, all my books, at least I think all of them, have an image on the COVID that deals with that. I. So I always. I like to have some sort of image that that explains what the book is about or that gives some sort of hint of what the book will revolve around. And I think that that sculpture by Graham Caldwell, who is an American artist, works well for what warnings are. I think that the idea that all these mirrors, these mirrors are a little bit like rear mirrors in cars, right? When we would look behind, we look at the mirror and we see reality or we see what passes behind and what's going on. It's not that clear, right? One has to interpret what you see. I mean, often it looks like it's further away or it's closer. So I think that all these images, at least for those of us who have seen the sculpture, live, when you walk towards it, you also see everything change it, it becomes smaller or bigger. And you have to sort of make an effort to decide what to look at, because you just can't look at all, all of it on from one angle. You just. You can't really see the truth of what, of those reflections. And I think that's what warnings are. Warnings are signs for the future. They're signs that we are invited to interpret and to in some way to get involved with them. And just like the rear wind, the rear mirrors in our cars, it's we also supposed to get involved with them, and we actually have a sort of responsibility to get involved with them. I mean, you can't drive a car without looking at those mirrors. So. And so I think that warnings are a little bit the same thing. We are also supposed to be looking at them, supposed to be listening to them. And it's something. And I think that the sculpture, which is very beautiful sculpture, I think it gives us, let's say, a figurative idea of what that means or what a warning is.
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Yeah. To further clarify warnings, you distinguish them from predictions, which most people might assume are similar, if not the same thing. You instead see this big difference between them, as warnings demand not just a deeper hermeneutic involvement, but also a different, more active way of orienting to the present and the future. Warnings destabilize in a way that predictions do not. Could you explain this difference?
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Right, so the big difference between warnings and predictions is that warnings, as opposed to prediction, give us the possibility of an alternative. In other words, when my. My doctor tells me that I shouldn't drink so much, he's giving me an opportunity. Right. To improve the future or maybe to have a different future. In other words, he's giving me an alternative. He's not telling me, you know what? He's not giving me a prediction. A prediction would be, you know what, you can just keep on drinking because, you know, your liver failed something, which is something that luckily still did not happen to me, but it happened to people. So a warning implies that there is an alternative. A warning implies that you can do something to change the present. Prediction is said. They literally tell you what the present would be. In other words, tomorrow it will rain. Now, from a philosophical perspective, and this is what I try to do in this new book, explain not only the philosophical meaning of warning, but also the idea that philosophy is a warning. In other words, philosophers, what we do, we don't really do. Much more, at least good philosophers than warn about the death of God. The time doesn't think, et cetera, et cetera. We would. We will discuss later. So also, it's a. There's a question also of the different features that warnings and prediction imply. Warnings imply a feature that is not that. It's a feature that in English we could call something sort of a feature, that it's something that it's coming towards. It is not. So the word that we use for warnings is lavenier in French, would be that it's a word that data opposes to the future. The future is something that deals more with meteorology and science that they actually can predict what would happen. Now I don't think that what will happen is that interesting. It's actually from a theoretical point of view, it's actually quite poor. I mean, you really can't do anything. Basically, it's over. Warnings instead invite us to have a whole different worldview, right? A whole different horizon of understanding, like Gadamer would call it, that require our involvement and it also requires different ways we can involve in what we're supposed to do. So warnings do not tell us the truth, right? Warnings imply that there is a different future for us waiting for us, and we can become involved in that. And of course we don't always do that. So I think warnings are much more interesting than predictions. And philosophy has a lot to do with warning because that's basically what we do. This is sort of the new this. I don't think anything news happens in philosophy, but I am trying to give here a different understanding of the history of philosophy and what philosophy can be through this idea of warning. And well, and as I explained throughout the book, we have a serious problem today that we do not listen to warning. And there are specific reasons.
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Turning to the work of Martin Heidegger, you develop his critique of science, which is not intended, as some have thought, as a total embrace of anti scientific irrationalism, but a warning of the limits of science, the way it can only grasp what it has already in some way assumed or in his terminology, projected to already be there. This stands against a more essential form of thinking. Could you unpack what you see him getting at here?
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Right, so the more essential way of thinking will be what Hedger calls andanken, which is a sort of preparing for what will come. So sort of a. Preparing a philosophy that prepares for, for us who are able to, or who are interested in listening to, to what is coming. Heidegger has in some way predicted so many things, but in particular he also predicted this idea of philosophy, of warning that I sort of came up with. He actually even points out in Introduction to Metaphysics that being should be interpreted as a warning. And he's right, because the idea of being, of existence, is already a warning. It's a warning that, well, reality is not simply made of objects, right? Reality is not simply. Philosophy doesn't only have to deal with object, which is something very poor, but philosophy has also to deal with what reality can be. And so when Heidegger points out this idea that science doesn't think, which I reinterpret in my book as a Warning, what he's trying to tell us is that, well, on the one hand, of course it doesn't think, it calculates. But what does thinking mean? Well, thinking also implies pointing out the limits of what science does to all the other disciplines we have. So when today in academia we are requested, for example, to, to win, to get funding and to get funding through, of course, projects and these projects imply of course, what would he, what the result would be of the same project. In other words, the research already, the projects already implied the result, so it's not a real research. Well, that's what that, that's where thinking ceases to, to take place. In other words, we don't really have to, I mean, someone evaluating a project that, that tries to get funding, he will read basically the result of the same project. So, and it's very difficult to imagine that we can always predict what the result will be, even if our own conversation now we, we will see where it leads. Right. I don't, I sort of know more or less what I should answer now, but I don't know precisely everything. Right. It depends on, on several issues, even on what been happening now in the world. So Heidegger is basically telling us to, to be careful, that science is not the only way to go. It's not the only measurement we have, it's not the only method we have to understand reality. And most of all, it's telling us that science is not the only way. We have to listen to warnings, in other words, and if we read carefully, well, science has become almost useless as far as warnings are concerned. I mean, we are warned constantly by science about climate change and etc. Etc. But these warnings, even if they tell us the truth, and I do believe signs when they tell us that we have a serious air pollution problem, for example, here in Barcelona, is pretty bad. But the problem is that truth alone is not enough to warn us. That's not going to do the job. And it hasn't done the job. I mean, otherwise we will have solved the climate emergency decades ago and we haven't. So science is not enough. Truth is not enough. And so we need to find different ways to be able. So the problem is not science. The problem is that we are not listening properly to science, but it is also a problem of science because we have been, we become, we have become used to think in terms of methodology, of truth, of predictions also. And that's not enough to change, to change the world.
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Yeah. Turning to questions of gender, you look at and compare different translations of Simone de Beauvoir's famous claim that one is not born but instead becomes a woman. So while seemingly subtle and minor, you point out that a very slight difference in translation has large implications in terms of bringing out Beauvoir's underlying philosophical meanings and what you bring out as her underlying warning. Could you unpack what you see going on here?
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Right, so this is a very good question, because of all the warnings that I analyze here. Here there's a specific semantic distinction that it's important to specify. So there's a difference between those who read the Bevoir as a social conservative theorist and those who interpret her as a philosopher in the existentialist tradition, which is what we should be doing. So the groups can be. You can identify by the two translations which are available. The one from 2000, where the authors claimed translated the famous sentenced by one is not born, but rather becomes comma woman. And the second one is said that it's from 1953, where he translated it by one is not born, but what it becomes a woman. Now, the first translation, their decision to omit the article is founded on decades of feminist scholarship to emphasize women as an institution, that is a social, cultural and historical contract. Being born a woman, as they explained, means that that person will, from childhood, embody a social and human condition, woman defined by biology, by history, by culture. But if femininity is always constructed by the culture in which we are immersed, then Bebois was not only denaturalizing gender, but also stressing the sex gender distinction that is absent in the second step. Now, the second translation, which includes the A in this famous sentence, I think it's the correct one. If we want to read her not only as an existentialist philosopher, but also a philosopher of warnings, like I claim she is, the omission of the article in the translation inevitably swings towards objectivism, that is where a woman becomes a wholly determined thing. This goes against the project, the feminologist project, overcoming both realism and idealism, the binary habits of our metaphysical tradition that Hediger pointed out and criticized. So against the future of scientific prediction, Like I was saying before, warnings point toward an alteration, a becoming that cannot be known in advance through causal relationship. So the bewilder warning is meant not only to protect the identity of a woman from having a fixed identity, but most of all, to understand femininity as a reaction to a situation rather than a consequence of biological facts. So, although, I mean this is a quote, actually quote from the Bevoir, although these facts cannot be denied, they themselves have no Significant, she claims, because becoming a woman is a matter of embodying a specific set of habits, behaviors and choices that can only be explained existential. So her warning is basically meant to overcome that dualism that we feel in which we still live in some way. It's that specific dualism that even Trump during his inauguration claimed that, well, United States only have women and, and men. Which is of course absurd.
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Yeah. So against this vision of gender as a process of becoming, you look at the contemporary rights attempts to shut down what they are often calling transgender ideology, and their attempt to reinstitute gender as something solid, immutable and immune from hermeneutic freedom. But what's interesting is you note that gender for the right is connected to a host of other political questions of economics and nationalism. So it is as if they recognize that if gender is open to interpretation, then by extension, much else will also be open for questioning. So how does the right see these issues as being intertwined and what does it reveal about the danger hermeneutics poses to more conservative political forces?
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Right, so in relation to the previous question, because my book is articulated in such a way that, well, there's a sort of. On the one hand in chapter three, I explained the bevoirs warning. And then in part two, in the third chapter also I, I try to, to focus on how we haven't been listening to her warning. And one of the way we haven't been listening to her warning is that, well, many in Europe and of course everywhere now unfortunately, many far right populace, they sort of, you know, they really incarnate this idea of not listening to her warning. Of course not only heard many other warnings. And I see, at least I see in particular here in Spain, the far right racist, and it's soon to be perhaps even second. Right now they're the third strongest party in Spain. They're called box. And they don't only hate immigrant, but they also actually hate women. And of course gender. They constantly insist that there is a sort of a gender ideology and that, you know, and that men are the ones that are suffering the most. So they are what I think they are a very good example that shows that, well, gender ideology for them is basically a threat, threat to their freedom and, but it's a threat to the freedom that they in some way connect to neoliberalism. Because all this far right operates, the politicians around the world, they are, you know, they are conservative, but at the same time they, you know, they, they fault the wrong, the, the wrong person. In other words, instead of Faulting neoliberalism and most of all sort of capitalism which we live. They fault anyone who claimed that, well, one has to become a woman, for example, or become a man. The. I think this is a problem. It's a very tricky problem to answer because I. They don't seem to have. This is, this is one of the things that doesn't seem to be working for them. They're, they work more against, against the foreigner, against immigrants. But it is, it is, it is, it is a big problem here in Spain, at least.
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Yeah, yeah. Looking at various instances of political extremism, you see a very unique hermeneutic at play, one that ironically connects factions and groups who would insist they have nothing in common, such as Islamic fundamentalists and right wing Christian extremists. So against this insistence, you write of a highly reductive hermeneutics, either of texts, of history or of reality that depends on appeals to textual or expert authority, even if it is an authority that these readers have really only fantasized, vindicates their actions. What do you see going on here?
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Okay, so basically, so this party and its voters here, or this far right Spanish party, but also many voters of Trump in the United States, perhaps most of them, they have a hermeneutics also, of course, just like maybe like we do. The difference is that we, our hermeneutics implies not only the possibility that one could be wrong. I don't think they imply that. But Gadamer points out that that's one of the first principle of hermeneutics, that you know, you can, you're, you can perhaps not understand. So you can be wrong. But most of all that they have, they have no horizon. In other words, they don't see too far ahead. Actually, they don't see far ahead at all. And if one looks at the amount of people that never left their country, those are mostly the people that would tend to not to have horizon. In other words, another way of saying, telling someone that they don't have horizons, that they had never, you know, they never visited another country, they never heard another language, maybe they didn't even learn another language. So the idea of not having a horizon, not being able to see, having a horizon, also implies that, well, you can only understand what is very near, what is just in front of you. Right. So in some way the idea of fusion of horizon, which is a technical term in gadamus hermeneutic, is also a way of calling out the idea that we have to expand our horizon. We have to do what gadamer calls a fusion of horizon that takes place if we don't read our text, whatever text it is, from a novel to the Bible, not as a text that is very simple. In other words, that it's straightforward. On the contrary, the more there is to interpret in a text, the richer the text become. And at the same time, the richer we become. But at the same time we are constantly expanding our horizon. And therefore we also have to be careful because the further your horizon goes, the more risk you are taking also. Right. In other words, the more conservative also you become. So it is important to take risk. It is important to take risk in order not to be conservative reader in some way. And I think that many of these groups nowadays, they are very limited and they are limited also thanks to how social media works today. And well, all that, that I'm not going to go into here. But it's a problem of horizon here, of lack of horizons. In other words, this is also, you can imagine, it's. It's linked to the problem of listening to warnings. I mean, you listen to a warning if you have a certain horizon, because a warning is not telling you what to do. A warning is telling you what might happen. So to listen to a warning, you actually have to be educated in some way, Right. Or even better educated in a different way. Right? So when Gadamer insisted we only understand if we understand differently. Well, we are only educated if we are educated differently. If we will all be educated the same way, like artificial intelligence is trying to set up, then nobody will understand anything.
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C
Yeah. Moving on to Hannah Arendt. You pick out her similarly quoted but often misunderstood phrase about the banality of evil, which she applied to Adolf Eichmann. Again, you detect a warning not just about how people like Eichmann operate, but about us in our moral outlooks that may actually struggle to deal and cope with people like him. Could you unpack what you see Arendt trying to warn us about?
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Well, Arendt is trying to warn us about how we have become used, how we have. We think it's quite normal, or we don't. We're not desperate enough, for example, of the genocide that is going on now in Palestine. That is I. It's absolutely certain that it's a genocide. Even Grossman, one of the famous Jewish writer, has even he has pointed out that this is the genocide. So why is this taking place? Well, what Anna Allen was telling us about Banana, what she was warning us about is that the problem is that when evil becomes something banal, something normal, something that we shouldn't really be too concerned about. And this is happening now and it's happening at the global scale. There are some signs now of change, but not that many, unfortunately. And we have gotten used to that in some way. And so her call, her. Her call to be warned about the banality of evil is that evil can become banner very quickly and, and we have to be very, very careful not, you know, to make sure that this does not happen. And how can this not happen? Well, it can, it can happen. For example, one way of that, this we can avoid this is by for example, listening to the warning. Because when after the genocide of Holocaust, which no one denies, of course, at least I don't. Well, one of the ideas was that this will never happen again. So apparently we haven't heard that warning properly considering where we at now as far as that genocide taking place now is. So Arendt, which of course she was an anti Zionist, just to remember to recall she was totally against this idea that well, we could reach some sort of. And she actually warned us about this idea. You know, the problem of Eichmann was that he was a normal person. That's the problem. He was an, you know, he was basically an administrative organizer. He was, you know, an accountant, basically. Well, that's a problem because normally I'm mostly at least not. Not good accountant. They don't, they don't really think and they shouldn't even also think too much. Right. The problem is that when we are dealing with questions of genocide or torture or whatever, well, we have to be very careful not to let that become something banner. Right. Something that simply occur. So her warning and of. Of the. I think of all the authors I analyze in the book, her warning is probably one of the most. I mean everybody recognize her as a philosopher warning. And I don't think anybody has actually described her this way, but I mean she's a very good example here, of course.
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C
Yeah. In a chapter on the use of technology in war zones, you point out that developing forms of artificial intellig are being used to carry out military operations even on their own. These new technologies raise a lot of questions. But you also point out in that in a way the application of quantitative data sets to carry out military operations is really just a continuation of the mechanized logic that writers like Hannah Rent and Heidegger warned us about long before this technology existed. So how do you see this tech fitting into an already present worldview?
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Right. That's a very good question. They have warned us specifically of what is taking place now through artificial Intelligence. I don't see anything particularly new in artificial intelligence. And as far as I, I see even the creators of artificial intelligence, you know, it, it has, it has moved on. It has become sort of a commodity now. But the point is still the same. We have constructed or we are even better submitted to a technology that in some way forces us to become submitted to it. In other words, we are not in possession of the technology. The technology is actually in possession of us. The warning, both of them, the warning is against technology taking over or us letting technology become one. That, let's use this term, which is, I don't like, but letting technology become intelligent. I don't really like this idea nowadays that, you know, we should, we should embrace any, any new technology. We should probably embrace the older ones because new technologies are always. We don't really know about too much about new technologies. Even when they, when eye surgery becomes. Want to correct your vision. Well, at the beginning it was new and many people tried, but we have to. I think we need to become a little bit more conservative as far as new technology is concerned. And I think artificial intelligence is a good example there because, I mean, if there would be a democratic election as far as whether we should be using artificial intelligence, I am quite certain that most people would be very cautious because we know that a lot of people are afraid that, you know, and a lot of people have lost their jobs. And I actually explained how many are about to lose them. So I wonder whether artificial intelligence is supposed to be something that we, that we cherish as we are cherishing. I also think that as far as warnings are concerned, artificial intelligence is literally a warning because it's sort of the idea that. Well, we don't. Because in the book I try to explain that warnings require much more than truth, right? They require pressure, they require many things in order to convince us. And I don't see how artificial intelligence, considering the way it works and the way it's supposed to, it's going to let us be different. In other words, be able to interpret that alternative warnings imply for the future. I am very pessimistic and I might add, I'm also afraid of it in some way.
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C
To try and elucidate the existential importance of warnings for us as listeners, you look at a number of different pairs of ways of looking at the world and the existential orientations they entail. So there's Heidegger's Gekta in Historia, Derrida's Lavenier and Lefuture, and Umberto echoes signals and signs. And you summarize it all by writing, quote, the ontological import of Heidegger's living past, Derrida's future to come, and echo's sine function together constitute warning's alternative horizon of understanding. Within this horizon, unbound to historical facts, present deductions, or real reference, the anxiety generated by warnings is welcome and sought after. End quote. So could you unpack the different stances these pairs imply in terms of our orientation to the world and what it means to welcome the anxiety generated by warnings?
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A
Right. So artificial intelligence, on the contrary, is not provoking. It's not creating any anxiety at all. Right. It's giving us the world, already organized. Everything is set, everything is comprehensible. Well, what does that do? Does it give us. I mean, what do we lose by not being anxious by a different horizon of understanding? I'm interested in the idea of warnings as a philosophy and as a philosophical concept because it provides, it invites us to have to create a different horizon of understanding, which I constructed in the. In the book through Heidegger data and an echo. Why? Well, because they provide us together a vision of how we are supposed to understand or how we can understand warnings. In other words, warnings require from us anxiety. Warnings require from us horizon, different horizon of understanding, which is much broader, but also one is required from us taking a risk and most of all, giving more weight to, for example, the to come la venir rather than the future, giving more weight, for example, to the past rather than history, and also giving much more importance to signs rather than signals. I mean, what are signals? Signals are simply indications in the street of how we should drive. Right? But we have to interpret them. And a good driver is one that interprets them because, you know, the signal might be, you know, there might be a situation there with a. With an ambulance coming on the back that you have to. You have to, you know, you don't have to listen to that signal. So here the idea is that warnings require from us an existential stance, an existential posture that is not easy. It's not straightforward. It's actually, it takes. It's actually a responsible position that we have to in some way become involved with, and we have to become involved with, not only for us, but also for all the others around. Most warnings are related to society in general. Right. So at the end of work, I tried to develop also this last idea of a sort of a politics of warning. What is the politics of warnings? Because it's very difficult nowadays for a politician to, you know, to do A program to come up with a plan for the next 20 years. Right. That's why we're not prepared, for example, for another pandemic. Right. We will probably have. We had eight in the past 20 years, more or less close calls, Right? One was a big call, as we know, but we are very close. We would probably have another one very soon. Right. And we will have another big blackout, Internet blackout soon also. So the idea here is that we have to open up our horizon of understanding to be able to listen to those warnings, right, that concern us. Right here you might ask, well, who is us? Well, we have to listen to the warnings that concern us. If we listen, if we look at climate change, well, that's one that concerns all of us. So this is the idea. I would prefer to live in a world where we all have to take much more responsibility rather than in a world where artificial intelligence has everything already organized. Because we know very well that that's not a neutral technology. Right? There is no neutral technology. There is a specific political and financial agenda behind artificial intelligence. Right. We just need to look at who is. Who owns it. And so, right. There's nothing, you know, the worst thing that can happen to a warning is artificial intelligence. And by artificial intelligence, I mean the idea that the world is already in some way organized or even can be organized and predicted in advance.
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C
Turning to the story of Rita Charon, a medical student who almost changed her name because she was concerned it was causing patients distress, since Charon was an assistant of Hades in Greek mythology who led people into the underworld after death. But as time went on, she realized that instead of covering her name and its unpleasant associations up, she ought to lean into it. And in doing so, developed a new way of thinking about medical practice based on a very different way of listening to and thinking about people's lives. So what did Charon discover, and what are the larger hermeneutic implications you see for learning to think about warnings?
- [35:27]
A
Right. Sharon, I, like you, set up this narrative meditation thing, which is actually, they teach. They teach this course in several medical school, which is basically this idea that they're teaching doctors to. To listen, to be more careful, and to listen to the patient with more care and more attention. Why? Well, because for most part, a lot of doctors do not have the time to listen. Right. You know, they have 20 minutes or even less. And so there's, you know, many patients call for preferred doctors who actually listen to them, even though the diagnosis might be the same one, even if they didn't listen to the whole Story they have. But listening is very important. It's very important because it's also a way of listening to what, for example, the patient is not telling you, which might be also very important, right? And so you might bring in a brother or sister who might actually tell you the truth about whatever. Whatever is going on. So what I'm interested in, her idea of radical listening is that, well, to listen to warnings, we need to be very radical. In other words, listening to warnings, it's not a question of repeating, right? Something that artificial intelligence does. It's not a question of, you tell me you have a headache and I tell you, oh, so you have a headache. No, no, there's much more involved in listening than that. In particular, what is involved in radical listening is the possibility not only of what the patient is not saying, but also of what the patient would like to say and it's not capable of saying. So in some way, the doctor, the more the doctor will listen to a patient, the more also she or he would start to feel better, right? Often one would say, well, I would never get a surgery from this doctor, but only from this other doctor. They might be both, you know, both good, both capable of doing it. But one has there a certain. And I actually experienced this. I had two back surgeries and I knew, I saw many doctors. And I, I know that at the end I was convinced more by doctors with whom I got along more. Basically, he was the one that listened to me more, gave me more. More argument that had nothing to do with the surgery. I remember one of his argument was how much I was bothering everybody at home with my back pain. That was actually a pretty good idea because I started realizing that, well, I was bothering everybody, right? So the idea here of listening to you, listening carefully implies also that if you are listening, you're also engaging. I mean, in order to listen properly, you have to engage with the person, right? You have to be open to it. And you also have to have a different horizon of understanding. All of this is vital to listen to warning, right? If you don't listen carefully to, to your doctor, right? And if the doctor does not listen carefully to you, well, there isn't any true conversation there, right? And this idea that I always make this difference between a conversation and a dialogue, right? A dialogue is not a true conversation. A dialogue, one of the two knows the truth and that's it. A conversation is different. No, Nobody really knows where it's heading. Nobody knows how it will end. And a true conversation, you might actually be convinced at the end by the other person, or none of you might be convinced. The difference between the two is that truth is not presupposed in a conversation, just like truth is not presupposed in a warning. Whether a warning comes to pass is absolutely secondary, absolutely secondary in relation to the pressure it managed to exercise. So a warning that actually works is a warning that pressures me, right? That gives me anxiety and that gives me also hope, for example, for a different future. So this is the difference between the two, which I think it's vital to listen to. Warnings which of course there are warnings on warnings and we can discuss this, but among the different warnings there are. The important thing is that we also have to be there to listen to the warning. Because as I said at the beginning, we've been warned about climate change for a while now. So it's not a question of truth, it's a question of pressure.
- [39:37]
C
Turning to climate change, you look at some disputes in climate policy, finding some hermeneutic difficulties around some ambiguous terms such as energy system. Rather than being a niche debate for experts, you point out that how one defines such terms can have expansive policy implications, which is why different factions were pushing for different understandings of some of these terms. Could you unpack some of the difficulties here and what it reveals about the importance of hermeneutics for topics like climate change?
- [40:09]
A
Right, because we've seen that in many, many climate summit, there's always, there's always a battle for interpretation. In other words, for, for, you know, how, how are we supposed to interpret, you know, this result or this, this, you know, this change that we're supposed to implement in our countries or whatever. It's always a battle for. But there is not enough discussion about the battle of interpretation, which is something completely different. The battle for is whether one of the two sides who is right, who is wrong, or whatever. But the battle of interpretation is also important because the battle of interpretation implies the idea that interpretation in itself, right. If we look at carefully at what interpretation means, interpretation is a sort of, it's also a whole worldview, also horizon of understanding. Like we said before, basically it's an existential issue, right? If we describe things, then that's not an existential issue. It's actually very poor theoretically. That's why one of the philosophical enemies I have in the book are all the new realist philosophers, object oriented ontology and all that stuff that they try to go back to objects with that the greatest enemy there is of warning because they try to return to things. And the idea is to Describe them as better we can. But describing them the better we can is not going to change how we are involved by the warnings that we see. So the battle of interpretation is that we have to be. An interpretation of truth deals more with my existence rather than whether it's true or not. So interpreting is an existential affair. And as an existential affair, it also implies certain responsibilities which are secondary to the truth that we interpret.
- [42:04]
C
Finally, turning to the activism of Greta Thunberg, you argue that she is important not just for drawing attention to climate change, but the ways she has done so. Her importance is not in scientific facts, which we had more than enough of before she was even born to act accordingly, but instead that she has embodied that scientific knowledge in a way that gives it a certain existential weight, trying to overcome the hermeneutic inertia of the status quo and force us to heed climate data as a warning. Could you explain what you see Thunberg doing that sets her apart from other forms of climate activism?
- [42:43]
A
Right. So Greta Thunberg, I talk a lot about her throughout the book because she really incarnate this idea of warning, right? She is, you know, the warning that she's facing it. She's telling us all the scientific facts, which we already know, and they're not that complicated either. It's pretty simple at this point. It's pretty simple. All this climate information we have and all the data we have. So the issue here is that we have to incarnate. We have to. It has become. Has to become ours in some way. Well, I use her examples throughout the book because she is that. She is someone that has decided that, well, we need a different horizon of understanding. Right. Maybe that's why she stopped going to school. Right? Or the strikes, because, you know, she did continue to go to school, but she did strike school. So. And the idea of striking school was an idea of. Because most politicians were telling that oppose her, were giving this. They were telling her, oh, you know, the first thing you should do is go to school. Really? What for? To become like everybody else who doesn't listen to climate change warning, specifically what's happening. So the idea here that she incarnates a whole different understanding of what the problem of science is. And she's actually making it in a way more human, more simple. And it's actually pointing out our hypocrisy because the fact that we, you know, we, we think, oh, well, what would, why would, why will we listen to a young, young girl? Well, first of all, if, you know, we Are so. All of us, we are so educated and so smart that if I always ask this at conference, I always ask my colleagues. So who do you know? Do you know Greta Thunberg? And everybody knows her. So you know Stanley Hansen, one of the most important climate change scientists, and nobody knows him. So why is this? Well, because again, warnings are a question that concerns our feelings, are the way we. We relate to others. It's not a question of truth, it's not a question of objectivity. So that's why when, you know, when. When your doctor tells you, explains to you specifically why you should stop smoking, maybe even shows you lung of someone that smokes, you know, you might not care, but as soon as your body gets sick, right. For the same problem, then you immediately stop smoking. So, and I think Greta Thunberg incarnate all this idea that, well, there are all these warnings here and you just don't get it. So it, you know, she is in some way more aggressive, right? She's in some way more. More crude, right? And maybe that specifically what we need, we need warnings that come not only from science. And I would say that we don't need any more warnings from science time. We already had enough, right? We need now to. To. To. To look at art, we need to look at activism. We need to look at other forms to finally be worn once for all. Because after the pandemic, they insisted so much that we should return to normality. That's basically a translation of whether Thunberg should return to school. It's basically the same thing. In other words, we turning to the situation that educated you or that created the condition, the crisis in which we are. So this different horizon of understanding that I propose in the book is meant to create a different education, right? It's meant to create a different relation with truth in order for us to finally listen to.
- [46:05]
C
Yeah, along those lines, a few years ago, when I interviewed you last, we were in the middle of the COVID 19 lockdowns and you mentioned that there are likely to be more pandemics in our future. Meaning that the imperative to return to normal could only ever be temporary or illusory. In this way, you were already hinting at a lot of the major themes of this book. How we can succeed or fail to interpret events as warnings. So to close this conversation and with everything we've put on the table, what did the obsession with a return to normal really mean about our interpretation of the pandemic? And what would heeding it as a warning proper instead of have looked like, right.
- [46:49]
A
So to answer this question, let me. First of all, I want to make an example as it often takes place in conversations like here. Well, there's something I should have said maybe at the beginning and one example I should have made at the beginning is that the whole book is about the fact that we don't listen to warning. How can we listen to that? Fine. To point out one of the levels that we don't even listen to warnings is for example, Giorgio Agamben has this little book on the pandemic that it was very polemic because he was against not necessarily the vaccine, more about passport, the certificate. We had to move around and, and when that, and, and that book in, in Italian, the, you know, the first chapter is titled Una vertenza, which it's a literary translation is a warning. And unfortunately the translator, which I don't want to remember, remind me her, her name anyway, politypress, they translated that. Un advertensa, they translated that for a forward. Now we have reached the level that we had. We're not even translating properly the word warnings from other languages, right? So in this situation, right. In this condition in which we are. Well, it has become almost a banality to talk about warnings, like an analyst might tell us, right? And warnings are meant to create disruptions. Warnings are meant to create change. Warnings are made, are meant to create alterations, which is specifically something that has not occurred since the pandemic, since we last spoke. Now when we spoke last time, I remember my book being at large at the time was basically an explanation of the fact that our greatest emergencies are the absence emergencies. In other words, the ones we don't listen to, the ones we don't listen to, the ones who don't, we don't take into consideration, just like climate change. Now I have translated that in some way into the notion of warning, which is not very different from an absent emergency. I mean, a warning is something it's absent. That's why we're warning you about. And yes, there would be many more pandemics and I would be surprised that there wouldn't be one soon because we actually not at all prepared for them. And before we were talking about far right populace. Now, right after the pandemic, the United nations, they set up a new organization in order to. For there to be more coordination among countries. And of course, Neil Farage, the far right, hopeless and unfortunately probably next Prime Minister of England. Let's see if this warning works. He completely accused this organization of going against England. In other words, classical far right rhetorics so we are not. We're not in a situation now that I would say that it's better than after the pandemic. I think that now we are in a much worse situation because we're not prepared for another pandemic. We're not listening to the warnings there are about future pandemic. And not only pandemic, I should also point out now with this high temperatures, the amount of fire that are now taking place throughout Europe. It's uncanny. It's amazing. So I think that now we are in a worse situation than when we were before. Listening to warnings. Learning to listening to warnings is probably something that we should be doing. And I hope that this book will in some way point out how philosophers have already been doing that for a while and maybe how we can start to listen to warnings now in the future. Excellent.
- [50:21]
C
That brings us through the book. So as a final question, I always like to ask, what, if anything, are you working on now?
- [50:29]
A
Right now I am preparing two books. One is entitled Aesthetic Signatures, how to Create in the Age of Alternative Facts. And the second book is titled Horizon Less Society. The Horizon Less Society, which is really about the fact that I think that society now has a lack of horizon. Most societies have a lack of horizon. In other words, they lack future, which is something that we can see from unemployment, but also from many other perspectives. So that's what I'm working on now.
- [50:58]
C
That sounds excellent. So in the meantime, Santiago Zabala, thank you so much for coming back.
- [51:03]
A
Thank you. Thank you very much for this interview.