Philosophy’s Warnings in the “Absence” of Emergency

William Egginton pays heed to Santiago Zabala’s “Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings.”

By William EggintonNovember 12, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY FOR? Unsurprisingly, philosophers have come up with many different answers to this question. From Socrates’s belief that the examination of life made it worth living to Immanuel Kant’s designation of philosophy as the foundational academic discipline, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values to Gilles Deleuze’s redefinition of philosophy as the invention of new concepts, the Greek notion of philosophy as love of wisdom and knowledge has donned a bewildering array of guises. To this list we can now add a powerful new argument. For Santiago Zabala, philosophy is above all a warning.

Zabala clarifies at the outset of his new book, Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings, that a warning, while it does come from the future (as his title specifies), is not the same thing as a prediction. Indeed, in his view, predictions and warnings represent two contrary modes of discourse. In fact, they entail very different understandings of reality. Predictions presume that time unfolds in a predictable, linear fashion. And this, in turn, entails an understanding of reality that Zabala associates with the realist tradition—one in which what is real is lying out there in an objective way, waiting for us to discover it, whether by using ever more accurate scientific instruments or by removing the blinders of bias that prevent us from seeing the world clearly.

Against this view, Zabala forcefully advances the philosophical perspective he has championed over numerous books and articles throughout his illustrious career, according to which the transparent representation of an inert reality is an ideological subterfuge for the imposition of order, the enforcement of obedience, and the entrenchment of powerful interests. Building on the thought of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and his own teacher, Gianni Vattimo, Zabala understands how we inhabit reality as fundamentally hermeneutic, indelibly informed by place, time, interest, and values, all of which precede and even make possible the most seemingly unvarnished encounters with the real. Philosophy and science—indeed, all human endeavors—never merely reveal; they interpret.

Warnings, then, are hermeneutically informed versions of predictions. Rather than assume that reality and linear time are foregone conclusions, a warning is a sign from a future in flux, a future whose very existence depends on how we listen to its signs. Signs from the Future thus presents us with a way of reading a group of philosophers as having given us dire warnings about the world we are currently making; it clarifies what those warnings are and how we should be listening to them; and it ultimately shows how understanding their thought in this way can help attune us to the ways artists and activists have been issuing similar warnings, and how those warnings can be made more effective.

Zabala lays his work out in elegant proportion to this project. The first of the book’s three sections examines four philosophers whose work, Zabala argues, should be understood as a warning: the aforementioned Nietzsche and Heidegger, along with Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt. In each case, Zabala takes a famous sentence of the philosopher and, in keeping with his philosophical makeup, interprets it as a warning.

Nietzsche, according to Zabala, was warning us when he famously claimed that God is dead and that “we have killed him.” What did he mean by this? In Zabala’s reading, God is another name for truth. Humans invented God as a way of protecting themselves from the dangers and uncertainties of life. But with the advent of modernity and its technologies, medicines, and industrial solutions, God was no longer needed. Zabala writes:

If humanity started to believe in God to protect itself against the dangers of natural life, then the secure world of science and technology we have constructed render him obsolete. His reassurances are no longer necessary now that we can live without the terror felt by primitive mankind.

The problem is that, just as with God, technology’s promise of protection is an empty promise, so by replacing one crutch with another, we have placed our faith in yet another idol, and one with just as much potential for harm as unbridled belief in the will of an arbitrary deity held. Specifically, handing our defenses over to these avatars of modernity creates the sense that reality doesn’t need our active involvement or interpretation, that it is there for us in a solid and reliable form, revealed in ever greater detail by the wonders of modern science. This is the basis for what Zabala calls the “global return to order through realism,” which undergirds the growing tendency we see all around us to put our faith in what Amanda Boetzkes calls “experience without authority.” Thus does Nietzsche’s claim about the death of God turn out to be a warning that, by shirking the responsibility we have to actively interpret the world, we have invited an age of ever-growing fanaticism, political division, violence, and conspiracy-mongering, a technologically supported fantasy world in which everyone seems to be entitled not only to their own opinions but also to their own realities.

For Heidegger, Zabala chooses the dictum that “science does not think.” With this pronouncement, Zabala argues, Heidegger wasn’t dismissing science so much as pointing out that its method and worldview should not be generalized to the point that we allow reality itself to be reduced to the results of scientific research. It may seem counterintuitive in the context of a work that firmly positions itself against the “realism without authority” of our current distrust of experts, intellectuals, and scientists to go out of its way to distinguish science from thinking. But Zabala is making a vital point here that merits close attention. Heidegger’s critique of “research” is a critique of a methodology that proposes a model to explain certain phenomena and then runs tests to ascertain the truth of that model. While extremely effective in solving specific problems, when generalized as the default mode for understanding the world, it turns into an extension of ideas we already have and want to see continued. As Zabala puts it, “thinking in the way of scientific methodology tends to reduce Being not only to a particular and already known form of being but also to one that is predictable, controllable, and inevitable, leaving little space to question the science’s own essence.” Thus, ironically, while today’s “do your own research” conspiracy-mongering is ostensibly at loggerheads with scientific research, it is in fact an extension of the modern tendency to adopt the basic methodology of the sciences as the model for all thought.

Zabala reads similar warnings in the thinking of de Beauvoir and Arendt. For these philosophers, gender essentialism and subsequent oppression, and the increase in banal or administrative evil, are consequences of the realist return to order. This return to order, in turn, is the fundamental condition underlying the multiple crises that beset our contemporary world, from the environmental to the political to the technological.

In the book’s second section, Zabala demonstrates how each of the four warnings he has articulated has distinct applicability to one of these modes of crises. But more pressingly, he shows how all these crises partake in one fundamental “emergency,” which he has detailed in some of his prior work. This fundamental emergency stems from our inability to grasp that, by rushing from one individual crisis to the next (fires, floods, pandemics, wars), we create an underlying absence of emergency, a complacency in the face of the entrenched patterns and behaviors that are undoing society. As he puts it, the most urgent emergency is the sum of “emergencies we do not confront, that are swept aside as the status quo by the demands of global order.” At the top of this list are “climate change, the refugee crisis, and the digital divide.”

Finally, the book’s third section is dedicated to the ways that we can attune ourselves to the signs from our future that are warning us about what will happen if we don’t shake off our complacency and effectuate change. In a series of elegant mini-essays gathered under the theme of “being warned,” which combine the normal sense of the phrase with the implication of a warning to Being itself, Zabala discusses how engagement with art can sensitize us to warnings, how we can change practices within fields such as medicine in order to cultivate the ability to listen to one another, how we should refocus attention to the processes of interpretation over the supposed transparency of realist proclamations, and, finally, how arguing about the truth of assertions overlooks the importance of methods of presentation of that truth, methods whose varied intensity can make or break their effectiveness in convincing people to act.

With Signs from the Future, Santiago Zabala has issued his own clarion call to address the underlying cause of the hydra-headed crises facing the world today—by reviving the dying art of thinking.