Slavoj Žižek: We Need Thinking | Big Think
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Slavoj Zizek answers the question, “Do you think science has replaced philosophy in discovering the bigger questions of life?” Philosophy is not dying, he says — in fact, we need it more now than ever.
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SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK:
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept.
Žižek received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He has been called the “Elvis of philosophy” and an “academic rock star.” His work calls for a return to the Cartesian subject and the German Ideology, in particular the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Slavoj Žižek’s work draws on the works of Jacques Lacan, moving his theory towards modern political and philosophical issues, finding the potential for liberatory politics within his work. But in all his turns to these thinkers and strands of thought, he hopes to call forth new potentials in thinking and self-reflexivity. He also calls for a return to the spirit of the revolutionary potential of Lenin and Karl Marx.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Slavoj Zizek: More than ever we need philosophy today. Even the most speculative (in the sense of reflecting on itself) science has to rely on a set of automatic presuppositions, like a scientist simply presupposes in his or her very approach to nature a set of implications of how the nature functions, what’s the causality in nature and so on and so on. And philosophy teaches us that. Philosophy teaches us what we have to know without knowing it in order to function, even in science — the silent presuppositions.
I claim that what is happening, for example, in quantum physics in the last 100 of years — these things which are so daring, incredible, that we cannot include into our conscious view of reality — that Hegel’s philosophy, with all it’s dialectical paradoxes, can be of some help here. I claim that reading quantum physics through Hegel and vice versa is very productive.
What I really want do is rehabilitate classical philosophy today. That is to say, Hegel was a child of his time. We are 200 years later. How to repeat Hegel, not to do the same things as he did but repeat in new circumstances the same gesture? And even here more for Hegel than for Marx. I think we should even return from Marx back to Hegel. So this is the focus of my work. Then come all the things for which I’m unfortunately better known, for example, my dealings with critique of capitalism, analysis of popular culture and so on and so on. But frankly, to use the not very appropriate metaphor known from today’s military adventures, all this, my writings on politics, on analysis of Hollywood and so on, is more or less collateral damage of my basic work.
I think this is also what has to be done today. The danger today is precisely a kind of a bland, pragmatic activism. You know, like when people tell you, oh my God, children in Africa are starving and you have time for your stupid philosophical debates. Let’s do something. I always hear in this call there are people starving. Let’s do something. I always discern in this a more ominous injunction. Do it and don’t think too much. Today, we need thinking.
Interviewed by Megan Erickson
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd
@bigthink
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
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@gosuhenke
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Axiom
@renegroulx7029
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Throw geopolitics into every argument.
@Lanooski
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
that last part is something i come back to no matter what circumstances i'm pondering: the obsession with "doing," or "making things happen." it's always orated by people who don't put a lot of thought into what exactly it is that they're doing and why, beyond "getting mine." the reactionary "doers vs don'ters" binary. i call em Do Do Heads.
@mentalitydesignvideo
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
yeah, we do need new thinking — one that rejects coked-up leftist charlatans.
@pejelagartomc6384
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Si
@Anachin37
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Is there a full video for this?
If so can somebody please reply with the link to it.
@guybuddyman838
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Who needs a brain when we've got Joe Rogan
@theultimatereductionist7592
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Elon Musk says he is for freedom of speech. StopHavingKids and as many other antinatalists need to use this opportunity to open as many Twitter accounts as possible promoting antinatalism and mandatory vasectomies and mandatory birth control.
just like Musk REPEATEDLY REPEATEDLY REPEATEDLY said: he supports free speech absolutely, and thus especially for silenced censored groups such as SHK and Antinatalists.
@user-btmbangalore
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
There were big thinkers in every era and epoch, from pre-Aristotle to post Marx, from Christ to Francis of Assisi, from Buddha to Gandhi. We now kind of want one line wisdom, we are okay without deepth of life if we can make sufficient income. Income is respectability, you can not think or feel deep enough has no failure attached to it.😮
People know the names of great thinkers, they are not inspired enough to evaluate their works.
Thinking man is a big creature, we have become smaller today, a pygmy by choice. There is however big noise and then cruel big silence, big noise in place of big thought.
@Cris0pa
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
No. We need action. Thoughts are systematically smashed by noise by media controllerz
@torguttormsyvertsen9088
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it."
—Henry Ford (1863-1947)
@aheenobarbushenocied9880
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Slavoj is the Marco Pierre White of philosophy.
@DavidTheCVINFECTI
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Basic philosophy and anthropology are needed in schools.
@alayoubyfadwaa
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Yeah whatever you say, Slavoj…
@thanhdinh3179
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Is he a professor? How is being a philosopher an actual occupation?
@user-pm8uc5dc3e
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Philosophy is dead. The internet has killed it. Opinions/information is too fast and instant for the majority to care.
@pupdiogenes2548
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
Implying that we haven't thought enough about starving children yet. Implying there are no empirically proven solutions.
What about stonewalling?
@Ty1er
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
"Today we need thinking"
That's absolutely true
@Ty1er
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
@neconomicon19
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
I find the last example especially hilarious as children starving in Africa is a source of capitalism and he is already working against that
@Reggemont-Games
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
idk about y’all but he overcomplicates some things and sometimes we don’t need to overcomplicate. Of course he has great ideas, but too verbose in a way that only complicates the message of what he’s saying and gets redundant. You don’t need to draw on such complicated sentences yk.
@anthonywarwick
April 3, 2026 at 11:42 pm
We have become trapped in processes that cannot discern between local minima, and global minima.
Simple linear convergence is not a universal probe for truth.
People need to reassess the ways they approach knowledge representation.
Zizek argues for philosophy.
I argue for mathematical philosophy, from a perspective of symbolic dynamics.
It is true that some arrangement of symbols must exist, so we should approach our understanding of knowledge and representation accordingly: If within our system of conclusions, we admit a solution state where no arrangement of symbols exists, then our understanding of knowledge must be incorrect on a fundamental basis level. We must have assumed something to be true, that is not true.
Free identification is a good example, as we may simply say any symbol is equivalent to the empty symbol, there can be no knowledge representation, so I could not state this.
This must be incorrect if there is to be any comprehension in any manner, unrestricted, partial or otherwise.
We may extend this notion easily, where we take the notion of existence as symbolic i.e. you are a symbol that represents itself, you exist simultaneously with respect to many differing contexts, some of which are more complete than others, which may be apparently appropriate for a specific local frame, but inappropriate for a more general analytic framework.
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