Sunday, February 13, 2022

He who talks loud, saying nothing

I got about a third of the way through “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” before I had to abort. It reminded me of all the reasons why I’ve always found Žižek’s spiel maddening. It’s just too cute, cryptic, and postmodern. According to Wikipedia, “British political philosopher John Gray attacked Žižek for his celebrations of violence, his failure to ground his theories in historical facts, and his 'formless radicalism' which, according to Gray, professes to be communist yet lacks the conviction that communism could ever be successfully realized.” What he said!

I do love “They Live” though, and I totally get why Žižek remains popular. He has moments of brilliance and can be hilariously funny. He’s underrated as a comedian. Perhaps this could have been an alternative career path for him. I guess there wasn’t a lot of demand for comedians in ex-Yugoslavia. But I don’t take him seriously as a thinker, he’s too incoherent for that.

Žižek isn’t a scientist in any meaningful sense, so he doesn’t have scientific peers. He’s a philosopher, and a fan of Derrida which tells us a lot. He’s an offshoot of that gnomic movement that considers incomprehensibility to be proof of authority. But in scientific endeavors it’s the opposite: the goal is to communicate as clearly as possible, avoid superlatives, and back up claims with evidence. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" (Hitchens) and “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (Sagan).

What Žižek does have is Marxist / Post-Structuralist peers, and they’re very snarky and competitive. They’re constantly obliged to prove that they’re not selling out, which is quite a challenge in a capitalist economy, hence their focus on provocation.

Metadelusion is fundamentally an attempt to dispel confusion over what science is, and isn’t. The original antagonist of Metadelusion was also a fan of post-structuralism, and it showed in her refusal to admit the realness of reality that scientific pragmatism takes as axiomatic. Žižek is no expert on reality, despite his references to quantum physics (the last refuge of scoundrels).

Philosophy can be cryptic, and in some of its schools, encryption is apparently a design goal. But philosophy isn’t science, because unlike philosophers, scientists are obliged to make testable predictions about phenomena. Though there is a philosophy of science, which often confuses people.

1 comment:

Phil Torres said...

Chris: How can I get in touch with you? I've tried all of your websites, with no luck. I have a question about when some of your e-Sermons (specifically, #8) were first published. Would you have any objection to sending me an email at philosophytorres@gmail.com? I'm also on Twitter: @xriskology. Apologies for the random messages, just need a good citation for a large book I'm completing on the history of thinking about human extinction, which will include a section on the Church of Euthanasia! Thanks, Phil