Zizek’s appeared, this time he’s been interviewed for New Scientist.
Like all “cultural esoteric heroes from the Humanities” interviews that seem popular at the moment, this ones got several mini-generalisations that I’m sure will spur a few questions. Alongside the statement that philosophers should join scientists in investigating metaphysical questions about reality (is he trying to step ‘on board’ with Speculative Realism?), and the very bizarre Heideggerian quip on the way we only become fully aware of when things ‘go wrong’, take a look at this….
“There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy, not finishing his creation. The idea is that God (but the point is to think about this without invoking God), when he created the world, made a crucial mistake by saying, “Humans are too stupid to progress beyond the atom, so I will not specify both the position and the velocity of the atom.” What if reality itself is rather like a computer game where what goes on inside houses has not been programmed because it was not needed in the game? What if it is, in some sense, incomplete?”
In other words reality is abstract. Thanks Slavoj…
2 Comments
Reality being incomplete is not the same thing as reality being abstract. Thanks for the smug, dismissive quip though
No it’s not the same thing and I did not actually conflate the two: I do not agree with Zizek’s statement that reality is incomplete (which I think is ontologically flawed and useless as statement), what he actually means is abstraction – in the sense that there is an ontological, procedural difference between an operable door and door that cannot be opened in a video game. This is generally called abstraction.
Thanks for the smug, dismissive comment though.
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