On a fine summer day In Hay, at the packed main stage of HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s biggest philosophy festival, Yuval Noah Harari and Slavoj Žižek appeared together on a panel for the first time. Nature was on the agenda. Is it an existential threat to us, or a source we can continue using freely to improve our lives? It’s not nature we should be worried about, both thinkers agreed. It’s what comes next: a world post-nature. Watch the video debate here.

Yuval Noah Harari and Slavoj Žižek debate the nature of nature. Günes Taylor hosts.

If there is such a thing as celebrity intellectuals, Yuval Noah Harari and Slavoj Žižek fit the bill better than most - even if the latter flinches at being called one. Both thinkers have found popular success beyond the narrow confines of their academic specializations – medieval history for Harari, Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis for Žižek. The world, it seems, wants to know what they think on all the most pressing issues of our times, from the war in Ukraine to the climate crisis and our posthuman future. Which is what brought them to HowTheLightGetsIn at Hay, the world’s biggest philosophy festival, to debate the question of nature: friend or foe. 

The answer is unsurprisingly nuanced: nature is neither our friend nor our enemy. As Zizek and Harari so often claim, everyone is failing to ask the right questions. Because we’re about to enter a post-nature era, and that will change everything.