Philosophy of nature
Once science was identified as the "Philosophy of Nature" and people like Goethe who were interested in science, philosophy and literature were considered the highest expression of intelligence. Today science has turned towards an ever greater specialization which has undoubtedly led to enormous technical-scientific advances. These are two radically divergent paths. What do you recommend to those young students and researchers who are taking their first steps in the world of science today?
An important moment in the history of the West is when philosophy realizes that it can no longer exercise control over science, because science has become completely independent from it. In Kant this is perfectly clear and his philosophy represents the last attempt to maintain a relationship with science, placing itself as a doctrine of knowledge capable of setting limits to possible experience. I do not believe that today something like this is among the tasks of philosophy. The relationship between thought and science is not played on the level of knowledge. Philosophy is not only not a science, but neither can it be resolved into a doctrine of knowledge, which, moreover, science has shown that it has no need. Philosophy is always ethical, it always implies a form of life. But this is true for every single man and therefore also for every scientist who does not want to give up being a human being. Of course, scientists have shown that they are ready to unscrupulously sacrifice ethics to the interests of science, otherwise we would not have seen illustrious scientists use deportees to Nazi concentration camps for their experiments. What I would remind a young man taking his first steps in science is to never sacrifice an ethical principle to his own will to know.
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Resistance
You spoke of the need to develop new forms of resistance. What do you mean? Can you give us some examples?
I am a philosopher and not a strategist. Of course, a clear awareness of one's situation is the first condition for finding a way out. I can only add that I do not believe that the way out today necessarily passes, as has perhaps been believed for too long, through a struggle for the conquest of power. There can be no good power - and therefore no good state either. We can only, in an unjust and false society, attest to the presence of the right and the true, we can only, in the middle of hell, testify of heaven.
* The interview was conducted by Andrea Pensotti and originally published in "Organisms. Journal of Biological Sciences ”(Sapienza University of Rome); it is reproduced with kind permission
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The will and the necessity
The question of whether governments are consciously using the pandemic to declare a state of exception that strengthens their powers beyond all limits or whether they have no choice but the emergency is misplaced. What happens today, as in any decisive historical crisis, is that the two things are both true: the use of the state of exception as a stratagem and the impossibility of governing otherwise than through it coincide. The sovereign, while acting in an absolutely arbitrary way, is at the same time forced to make an incessant decision on the exception that ultimately defines its nature. The epoch we are living in is, that is, the one in which the illegitimacy of the powers that govern the earth appears in full light: since they have lost any possibility of configuring themselves in a recognizable symbolic order, they are obliged to suspend the law and the constitutional principles that might define it. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far. In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise.
February 12, 2021
Giorgio Agamben