Why Theres No Such Thing As Knowledge Slavoj Zizek And Hilary Lawson

It’s true, but Nazis were saying that uh 70 80% of literary critics in Berlin in 37 were Jews. Journalists were mostly Jews. Lawyers were mostly Jews. The moment you accept the debate, what are really the Jews? In some sense, you already sold your soul to the devil. The true question is why do the Nazis need the figure of a Jew to maintain their identity?

Thank you so much. Fantastic. Now, before I start with the blur of this thing, I’m just going to say right now that this is obviously going to be a spicy debate and I have been given expressed permission to be the human face of Stalin and to make like some people in history and crack out a weapon of mass destruction uh to your physical body should you talk over time, Slavoy. So, if I kick him, don’t be surprised is my point here. I’m well known never to talk too much. So, absolutely. Exactly. So, now that we’re all in on this, we’re here today to talk about beyond truth and reality. Most think that they have a good grip on what is true and what is real. Yet, in a world of radically incompatible and competing perspectives, we can’t all be right. And many conclude that we have to give up on the idea that there is a single true version of the world. But what is the alternative? And how can we navigate a world without assuming there is one true version of reality? We’re joined today by two radical philosophers, Slavoy Xek and Hillary Lawson, as they debate the nature of truth, reality, and the illusory ideas about them that continue to hold the modern mind captive. Slavoy Xjek is a senior researcher at the University of Ujubljana’s department of philosophy and arguably the most provocative philosopher of our times. Foreign policy named Xjek a top 100 global thinker quote for giving voice to an era of absurdity. His work focuses on Marxism, Hegelore, psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics, film and culture. To my immediate right, we have Hillary Lawson, who is a philosopher and renowned critic of philosophical realism and the editorial director of the Institute of Art and Ideas. The work for which he he is best known is Closure, a story of everything and has been described as the first non-realist metaphysics and offers a radically new account of language, truth, and reality. So this event is um an in conversation format and we’re going to start basically by me asking um each of you how do we navigate a world without assuming there is one true version of reality. You each get five minutes. Hillary how do we do that? Well, um I think Slavo and I have many similarities in the approach in that both of us are critical of the enlightenment idea that we can reach through and say how it is and describe uh reality. But the real question of course is what would do we do as a consequence of that and how do we make sense of our space uh given that that’s the case. Now I I think um it’s a common place at the moment to say we’re seeing the end of the west uh in sort of geopolitics and that is um encouraged by the actions of the uh American president. But uh I think the signs of the end of the west conceptually stem a lot further back because the idea that we can describe reality is a core part of western thought and that has been undermined. And what has it been undermined by is a I think a recognition of the importance of perspective. Uh in the case of uh Britain, it probably first came into public uh uh view with the publication 135 years ago of Fraser’s Golden Bow where he just listed the various religious and mythical views from around the world. uh and when they were listed one after the other it just seemed implausible that any one of them might be true and he included Christianity which of course turned it into a sensation but the perspectival genie was out of the bottle and it wasn’t long before it was applied to morality uh of course the recognition that language shapes the way that we understand the world was another key twist in that and postwar we had people like and Fire Armored who applied it to science science as well that we operate within paradigms that you can’t get at facts independent of the framework. So there we are. Uh by the time we get to postmodernism, we are lost in a series of alternative frameworks and we have apparently no easy way of determining which one dominates and a lot of people uncomfortable with that. So what do we do about that? And um it seems to me that we have to give an account of how it is. It’s the opposite of what the German philosopher Kant said a couple of hundred years ago where he said we’ve got to identify what the structure of thought is enough it is for us to be able to have knowledge and now as it were we have as a result of our observation of the world discovered that we don’t have knowledge we can’t we are always trapped by our perspective so the challenge that we have now and that the that what the theory of closure is seeking to address is how is it possible that we are able to intervene in the world even though we don’t have knowledge of it. That is the key story. So my in order to answer that I think we’ve got to change our notion of reality language uh and thought and step one of that instead of thinking of the world as being already divided and differentiated into bits and things we have to give up that idea and stop thinking that what language and our thought is doing is somehow naming the bits as if there’s a correct answer if that’s the point of philosophy the point of science is just to get the correct answer. Instead, we should see it as a space of potential. I I call it the openness of the world. And we can’t describe that stuff. We can’t break through, as it were, and say what the openness of the world is. But what we can do is hold it in certain ways. And we we hold it through I what I call closures, which are the creation of identities. And we create identities in all sorts of different ways. So at a very basic physiological level when you look out your neurons in your eye respond to the whole openness of the world in two ways. They either fire or they don’t fire. They don’t do anything else. They don’t describe the stuff out there. They just respond with creation of an identity. The firing of a neuron. One step up with sensation. We hold a hundreds of millions of neurons together as one thing. Say a patch of blue. There’s not blue out there any more than there’s a firing of a neuron out there. They are ways of holding the world. And language is one step up again. It holds the world through the closures of language. And I think that if you look at that process of closure, that process of c of of creating identities, you can learn a great deal about the nature and structure of our thought and how we might go forward. So very briefly I would just want to identify three key characteristics of closure which are embedded in all of our sorts of thought and a thought of language. And the first of which is it’s unlimited. Um you can take any bit of the world and you can close it in an indefinite number of ways. Uh different species on the planet physiologically close the world in different ways. There is no correct way of doing it. There’s an indefinite number of ways of closing the world. Linguistically, we close it into individual things. So you, you know, I used this example with Steven Pinker yesterday. If you, if you look at this, you probably think, oh, glass, but there’s a whole load of other ways you can close it. It’s a weapon. It’s a series of uh silicon atoms. It’s an example in a conversation. There’s no limit to the way that you close any one bit of the world. there’s an indefinite number of ways of closing it. So that’s the first thing. Closure is unlimited. So don’t be surprised there there are lots of different perspectives in the world. The second is that every closure fails. It’s not the same thing as the stuff out there. It’s a different sort of thing. There’s no connection between the firing of the neuron and the stuff out there. There’s no connection between glass. We can’t go looking for the glass as if we find it in the world. It fails. And if you try and look at it, well, you might think, well, you know, do we dig down? Do we think that each of the atoms has a little label on it which says glass? Well, no, of course it doesn’t. And you can’t identify what is it that makes it glass. And that’s because all closure fails. And there’s one last characteristic which is um closures need to be stable. That is we can only hold one of them at any one time. So you all know those pictures, you can see two ways as a duck or a rabbit. You can’t see them at the same time as a duck and a rabbit. You can only do one. And that’s because closure has to provide us with some stability in our interaction with the world. And that’s why when we look around, we think it’s pretty static, don’t we? We think, oh, well, there are people and there are lights and there’s a tent and you know, all of those sort of things. And we think we know, but every bit of our visual field we could hold in an indefinite number of different ways, but we need stability. So those three characteristics are I think embedded in every way that we hold the world and determine how we might go about holding it differently in the future to do things that we can’t do at the moment. Interesting. Okay. Slavoi, what what’s your take on this? How can we navigate a world without assuming there is one true version of reality? Uh uh I agree with all you said. I would just like to try to not relativize it but uh play a little bit with it and I wonder if you will follow me or not. The first thing that I would like to add I wonder if you would agree is that you know closure is not simply a closure in the sense of I’m within a limit mostly we our common view is not just there is a closure but we often even had an idea which is often also wrong. Every closure has an idea of what is beyond closure. How do they put it? you know for uh for example uh from Plato onwards you know Plato idealist but then he introduced Kora which is some kind of a half spiritualized matter and so on or uh like closure is for me not simply a closed space and many think outside. Closure also always implies a certain idea of what is outside. I would say uh uh second thing uh uh so that I don’t get lost in where the way I would take your example of closure and so on what interests me and uh is that I would like to introduce maybe you would disagree I don’t know nonetheless a relatively naive distinction between uh factual truth things really are like that and I don’t mean it in any mystical higher sense but I call it but it’s still obligatory something very serious real subjective truth if you permit me and then I will simply stop one or two examples it’s my eternal example sorry if some of you know it my starting point here is a wonderful remark by Jacqu Long who said somewhere It’s a little bit male chauvinist bias. I don’t like it. But nonetheless, uh, if you are jealous pathologically of your wife, thinking she’s cheating on you all the time, and even if it’s a nice point, even if factually it’s all true, your jealousy is still pathological because, and Lon’s point is, and I will immediately to show you the relevance of this, take a different example uh uh also uh because uh the question to ask is not okay, did I hire a good enough private detective? Did he miss something? No, the question is why do I why am I so fixated on my wife cheating me or not? Why do I need to sustain my identity a figure of or a suspicion at least of my wife is cheating on me? This is the truth of it. And now you will say ridiculous example. Ah let’s take a similar example but slightly a different level. Let’s imagine we are in let’s say 36 377 in Nazi Germany. Okay. I am uh I will take the bed role. I am not but let’s say I am anti-Semitic support the Nazis and my friend is more sympathetic towards the Jews and we debate are the Nazis right or not and I can tell you in advance if I am uh intelligent tricky enough the result will be by definition undecided I can list the whole series of facts which are absolutely true Let’s begin with it’s true what Nazis were saying that uh 70 80% of literatur literary critics in Berlin in 37 were Jews, journalists were mostly Jews. Lawyers were mostly Jews. Uh then you have these ideas Jews are seducing our girls. Well, all I can say is I hope they did and I hope also the other way around and so on. But you know what I mean? The true question is not what are what the Nazis are claiming about Jews factually true or not. We should clarify this. I don’t doubt it. Mostly it’s a lie. What I’m just saying is that the true question for me is why do the Nazis need a figure of the Jew to maintain their political agency to act? Because if you take to simplify to the atmos vulgar Marxism Nazis fascism denies I’m sorry to be so simplistically Marxist uh basic social antagonism for them societies are in themselves organic whole where all the members collaborate and uh then you need an external evil intruder who brings class struggle and so on and so on. So again the it’s the moment you accept the debate what are really the Jews in some sense you already sold your soul to the devil the true question is why do the Nazis need the figure of a Jew to maintain their identity and here I claim here I would say not absolutely from standpoint of eternity but in that concrete situation, it was simply unambiguously a lie, their anti-semitism, even if some of their claims were factually true. And I’m very I’m here not in any sense uh pro-Israel. I’ve written a lot about what Israel is doing now in let’s I don’t want you you made the point. Yeah, I made the point. So again would you do you think this is and then I have another point but for this later does it tell this to you something this basic idea that in situations like u killing torturing women anti-semitism all that uh if we define truth not in the sense of out there there is reality and uh at that level of course it’s always uh structure through our ideological perception. There is no objective truth but in some sense there is an imminent subjective truth or lie. Did I go too far? So the question that you raised is obviously in fact an absolutely central one for the outlook that I put and indeed I have had that conversation with uh not with me. I’ve had I I I I’ve had the the the conversation about the sort of Nazi uh You had that conversation? I’ve the conversation with uh somebody who had a relative who was in a streets and he said to me, “So are you saying that this is just a relative truth uh and that didn’t actually happen. So it is an absolutely central uh thing for me to identify.” So I think there are there are a couple of things that I’d want to say about that. The first of which is that the account that I’ve given doesn’t mean that we can’t identify lies. Yeah, lies don’t require there to be objective truths. When you when somebody lies, they are saying something to you which is not what they think. They are pretending to say something and that is what makes it a lie. It’s not that somehow uh they’re saying a lie because it’s not true out there. In fact, I think there are occasions when people might be uh lying in the sense they’re pretending something and they happen to be saying that most of people think is socially normally true. So I don’t think that the the the framework I’ve got means that you can’t say people are lying. But there’s a separate question is are there some some things we just want to say well that is absolutely true. Well, I think of course we make choices about which closures we want to operate with. And if you were dealing with a a a neo-Nazi who says actually the whole of the Holocaust was in a a fake, it didn’t really happen. The whole thing was made up. Then there are a whole series of ways in which you can respond to that. Not by just saying you’re wrong, but saying, “Well, if you think that, doesn’t it also mean this? Shouldn’t we be able to go here and find that? Shouldn’t we be able to? So you can within their account of the world within their closure as it were you can examine that and test it and say that doesn’t add up. Now I would though at the same time caution that it is always the case that we can maintain closures that it doesn’t matter how seemingly absurd it is you can always make a move. The Nazi can always say, “Actually, all of these evidences you’re showing me are fake. Somebody has produced them. These uh these um uh statements aren’t wrong. Uh the the people who claim to remember this are are not real. They can always make moves in that direction. Um but you you what what you hope you can do is to demonstrate that the in order to be able to maintain all of those things they have to build an ever bigger extraordinary structure to enable them to maintain that structure. And at some point you it’s just not going to be plausible. They just can’t uh uh retain that. And last thought on that this particular thing it doesn’t help. Truth doesn’t help. If you’re dealing with a neo-Nazi and you say, “Oh, no. It’s just not true.” That doesn’t convince them. They’re not con, “Oh, I see. I see. I’ve got it wrong. The objective truth means that I No. The only way you convince somebody is to stand in their closure and use it and say, “Look, these are the consequences. This is what will happen if you see it like that. And we don’t or I don’t want those consequences.” And that’s why we shouldn’t adopt that closure, not because of some abstract notion of objective truth out there. That’s Can I to continue watching this video, click the link in the top left or in the description below. With a free trial, you can enjoy the full talk and thousands more. Thank you for being part of the conversation.