Understanding the Question ‘What is Philosophy?’ in the Apocalyptic ‘End of Time’

Abstract

While Stalinism destroyed the Bolshevik Revolution completely by replacing Marx’s idea of communism as the ‘association of free people’ with a dictatorship of the despotic Oriental version of state capitalism that masqueraded as socialism, liberalism, fascism, and authoritarianism (the three axes of modern capitalist societies) have led not only to the collapse and destruction of reason, but also to the destruction of the very basis of critical thinking itself. This essay claims that Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the Denkverbot (‘prohibition against thinking’) is an important idea that raises the importance of philosophy to not only counter the rise of global versions of authoritarianism, but also to critique late imperialism in permanent and terminal crisis. It talks of the apocalyptic idea of the ‘end of time’, a biblical theme that is now being put into practice in Ukraine with the Russian invasion and fueled by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bloc of nations which, like Russia, can only exist with the help of images of the apocalypse. What must be mentioned is that while Stalin replaced Marxism as critical theory with authoritarian dogma and while fascism completely repressed classical German philosophy to create a nationalist mytho-politics of the ‘Aryan race’, the discipline of rigorous philosophy was banished in universities by neoliberal capitalism for whom philosophy as critical thinking had to be supplemented by the principles of hyper-consumerism and the corresponding ‘complete regression of thinking’. This essay is on the very important questions ‘What is called philosophical thinking?’ and ‘How can revolutionary thinking transcend the domain of the counterrevolutionary repressed mind?’ and, most importantly, the very burning question: ‘What is philosophy?’