host: What do you think philosophy is?
Zizek: Okay i will try to answer this question in a specific way. Not what
generally philosophy is, but what can philosophy, maybe in a more Wittgensteinian way, what can It do today?
I think it can do something extremely important. I don't think It can solve problems. When people ask us [about]
ecology, environment, racism, what to do [about them],
well i don't know. But we can do something much more important, I think.
As we learn, and this is the first thing to learn from philosophy, there are not only wrong answers to the right questions, there are also
wrong questions. In other words, when we are facing problems today,
often, as a rule even, I would say,
the very way we perceive the problem,
is part of the problem. So the first thing to do is, as It were, to correct the question.
For example, my standard example is ecology. A very real problem, but my god, how much of
ideology is Invested into it? For example, all that
New-Age Mythology of mother Murph Raped, lost balance and so on...or racism, my classical example.
Why do we today
automatically translate problems of sexism, racism,
into problems of tolerance? This is not an evidence. So you see, think like this:
here we are needed more than ever. Why? I claim that with things going on today, take just one field of
Biogenetics and Also Numerous ethical problems and so on, we no longer can rely on old standard value system.
Where you just look into the old books,
maybe you do a little bit of Jewish Kabbalah reading, double reading, and you have the answer.
Let's take big, even popular debates: gay marriage, abortion, contraception,
or should we punish people or not, or how to deal with biogenetic challenges....
my god, to answer these questions, and we all, even ordinary people, have to answer them. In a way, you have almost to confront a
philosophical problem, because if you consider (that) human being is genuinely free,
you would have replied in a different way to this question. Implicitly, your answer implies a reference to
"what is Human Freedom/What is Human Dignity" and so on and so on, which is why i think that,
(this is rather a setting, but nonetheless that) with growing problems of this radical uncertainty,
problems where we have not only to provide answers, but (as it were, you know) it's what Kant defined in a very nice way: Of these true problems,
where you don't simply apply a rule, but you have [to], as it were
reconceptualize, or even reinvent a specific rule. There, philosophy is needed more than ever, i think, today.
So it's great future for us but this is not a good sign because, as already Hegel knew in his early writing,
I think, ""The Difference Between Schelling's and Fichte's Systems of Philosophy",
philosophy's time is always, unfortunately, the time of trouble.
When a certain way of life loses its substance, when you cannot simply orient it.
It all starts with Socrates.
Socrates began [with] precisely [that] you could no longer simply rely on old
values, in their organic immediate status. and then of course then you need
Socrates to ask about What is virtue, about What is need, about What is death.
So again, for us, maybe [it is] good news but we are not always good news for humanity.
But we will be needed more than ever today, I claim.
