TODAY WE NEED PHILOSOPHY TO SURVIVE AS HUMANS
Thinking means to think in language against language and, in this way, to destroy the ideology inscribed into our language
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(Picture: Les Vacances de Hegel – René Magritte)
We celebrate World Philosophy Day every third Thursday in November—this year it falls on November 20. So let’s use this opportunity to recall what philosophy is at its most basic.
Alain Badiou opens his True Life with the provocative claim that, from Socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth—to estrange them from the predominant ideologico-political order. Such “corruption” is needed especially today, in our liberal-permissive West, where most people are not even aware of the ways the establishment controls them, precisely when they appear to be free. The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom that we experience as freedom. Or, as Goethe put it two centuries ago: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Is a libertarian, who works on destroying the thick social network of customs in which he can only thrive, really free?
The Socratic revolution is characterized by two features. First, it is a reaction to the general crisis of Greek social life, which, for Socrates, is embodied in the widespread popularity of sophists—performers of empty rhetorical tricks who enacted a decay of the tradition of the polis. Second, what Socrates opposes to this decay is not a simple return to the glorious past but a radical self-questioning. The basic procedure of Socrates is the endless repetition of the formula: “What, exactly, do you mean by …?”—by virtue, truth, the Good, and similar basic notions. Today, we need the same questioning: what do we mean by equality, freedom, human rights, the people, solidarity, emancipation, and all other similar words which we use to legitimize our decisions? Thinking means that, when we are confronted with the ecological crisis, we don’t just focus on saving nature, we also ask ourselves what nature means today. With the rise of AI, it is not enough just to ask whether machines are able to think—we should also ask what human thinking really means. We should follow Descartes here: when he wrote that God could have decided that 1 + 1 is not 2, this insight is not a regression to obscurantism but the beginning of modern science, which realizes the contingency of even our most self-evident truths.
Let’s give a simple but extreme case of what thinking means. On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight 171 from Ahmedabad Airport in India to London Gatwick Airport crashed 32 seconds after takeoff. All 12 crew members and 229 of the 230 passengers aboard died. On the ground, 19 people were killed and 67 others were seriously injured. As the aircraft reached its maximum recorded airspeed of 180 knots (330 km/h; 210 mph) three seconds after takeoff, both fuel control switches sequentially moved from RUN to CUTOFF, one second apart. Both engines immediately shut down and stopped producing thrust. The investigation led to a quite terrifying conclusion: the cause of the catastrophe was neither personal (pilot’s error) nor mechanical but purely digital. Because of some miscommunication between the different parts of its digital machinery, the digital system that regulates the plane was simultaneously informed that it was still on the ground and already in the air. When confronted with such contradictory information, the digital system “played it safely” in the same way we might do upon seeing a machine malfunction—not knowing what was really going on, it decided to stop the machine working. So the digital system didn’t think the plane was still on the ground—it didn’t know where the plane was, on the ground or in the air—and deactivated its activity. It also prevented the pilots from intervening because it thought that one of them might accidentally push the fuel control button. In short, the catastrophe was caused by the very precautionary measures intended to prevent a catastrophe. What the digital system was not able to do was a simple decision that even a bad pilot would be able to make: seeing that the plane is in the air, you switch the fuel control to RUN.
