Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers

PREFACE

Are the philosophers dead? How do you keep the audience from falling asleep while watching academics walk and talk for nearly ninety minutes?

These are the questions that frequently greet me after I describe Examined Life, the companion film to this volume. The first question reflects a common view of philosophy as a rather antiquated activity and assumes that my documentary is historic in nature—an exploration of a quaint and heady pursuit for which no one has the time or patience any longer. The second always causes me to marvel that a field devoted to exploring the power and limits of human knowledge, to pondering basic, intractable questions at the heart of our collective condition, strikes otherwise curious, knowledgeable, and vibrant people as wearying.

There are various reasons for philosophy’s rather musty reputation. Our current culture’s anti-intellectualism plays a strong role, standing in stark contrast to a country like France, where philosophers possess comparatively significant cultural and political influence, helped in part by a decades-long tradition of televising philosophical discussions. The turn away from liberal education, with its emphasis on the humanities, critical thinking, and the arts, in favor of more market-friendly disciplines certainly hurts philosophy’s cause. Without a doubt, the professionalization of the field and the narrowing of its language has contributed to this situation as well—can the public really be blamed for finding current academic debates a bit arcane, if not wholly incomprehensible? As a consequence, where people may have once turned to philosophy for consolation, they now look to self-help; when they seek insight into human nature or the world we inhabit, they look to science. At the same time, communication technologies have immersed us in the ecstasies and agonies of ubiquitous and relentless—if often fleeting—connectivity, eroding both patience and stamina for the unique sort of contemplation and dialogue philosophy invites.

Examined Life attempts to address this disconnect by using cinema and the simple art of conversation to relate philosophy to everyday experience. The title refers to Socrates’ famous maxim The unexamined life is not worth living. The figure of Socrates, as transmitted by Plato, has come to symbolize the birth of Western philosophy: the posing of ceaseless questions about truth and appearances, the origins of creation, the meaning of the good, and the fickle nature of common wisdom. His maxim also announced a timeless contradiction addressed by several of the philosophers in this book. The examined life is indeed hard; it has driven many a mind to crippling doubt or even madness and has invited, in the case of Socrates and countless others from diverse cultures, the wrath of panicked communities. But a life of questioning is also a dearly vital one, studded with passions and rewards and a courage all its own.

Examined Life draws in another sense on the example of Socrates, who, in the words of Cicero, called philosophy down from the heavens. He did so by wandering the Athenian agora, engaging everyone he encountered in passionate discussion, allowing no assumption or assertion by vexed interlocutors to escape his playful scrutiny. Over the intervening centuries the peripatetic impulse remained strong, manifesting in Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Kierkegaard’s melancholic rambles, Immanual Kant’s famously punctual strolls, and Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic urban flaneur. As Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts reached by walking have any value. Slowly but surely, though, philosophical thinking moved indoors, into college classrooms and onto bookshelves. Examined Life takes philosophy outside again, playing off its long and salient relationship to walking by inviting eight thinkers to share their ideas in the streets and on camera.

The philosopher’s walk is straightforward enough, but it also possesses numerous registers of significance. Given its historical precedents, it resonates with philosophy’s past. Cinematically, the walking motif provided an opportunity for movement, gesture, and variation of scene, saving me from conducting stagnant sit-down interviews. Symbolically, the walks take philosophy out of the ivory tower and into the real world. Politically and culturally, these conversations unfold against a backdrop of diminishing public space in a society that worships speed and efficiency while placing little value on the peaceful reflection—with its unpredictable revelations and chance encounters—walking encourages. Yet as soon as I devised the pedestrian approach I knew I wanted to diverge from it. Thus, for me, the three excursions that ultimately utilize other modes of transportation—a car, a rowboat, and a wheelchair—expand the original concept and bring it up to date, a process pushed to further limits by Judith Butler’s penetrating conversation with my sister, Sunaura Taylor, which challenges our most elemental, everyday understanding of what it means to take a walk.

Upon conceiving Examined Life, I began to focus on thinkers primarily concerned with social and ethical issues, a decision that reflects both my personal interests and my belief that serious reflection is a crucial ingredient of any effort to improve our collective condition. As a result, there are many branches of philosophy not touched on in this book, including linguistic philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, among others. This is not a comprehensive introduction to philosophy; instead, I tried to attain some sense of thematic unity while featuring a diversity of thinkers and perspectives—from varied geographies, cultures, and intellectual traditions—not often found together. I settled on a rough balance between individuals associated with the analytic, pragmatic, and utilitarian traditions and those identified with what has come to be called theory, incorporating continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer studies, post-Marxism, and deconstruction.

The people I invited to participate in this project are ones who have left a mark on my thinking over the years. I wagered that if their work managed to produce a lasting effect on me, the same might be true for an audience and a readership. I was twelve years old when I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which gave me a new ethical framework for understanding vegetarianism. As a teenager wrestling with what it meant to be a feminist and a woman (or a man, for that matter), I pored over Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Years later, Martha Nussbaum’s work on the position of people with disabilities in our society would help frame my thinking on the topic and understand better Sunaura’s experiences. Slavoj Žižek (with whom I collaborated on my documentary Žižek!) and Michael Hardt consistently provoke me to reevaluate my political assumptions, much as the divergent methods of Cornel West and Kwame Anthony Appiah have impacted my understanding of race and identity, as well as the relationship between the local and the global. A graduate seminar led by Avital Ronell (co-taught by the late Jacques Derrida) coincided with my initial foray into documentary filmmaking, inspiring my first inkling of desire to make philosophy more accessible to a nonspecialized audience. Film and philosophy have always struck me as uniquely simpatico. Different theories present opportunities to look at the world anew, shedding light on difficult issues from various angles; film has a similar ability to shift perception, to transform the way we see and appreciate what’s around us.

Yet philosophy can be very technical in its argumentation, relying on analytic categories that may seem, at first blush, cosmically and even comically complex. But, as Isaiah Berlin, echoing Bertrand Russell, once said, The central visions of the great philosophers are essentially simple. I agree with Berlin, and my aim was to present the basic impetus or insight of the philosophers profiled in a way that was free of jargon and that resonated with common experiences and concerns. Indeed, perhaps the greatest thrill brought by doing philosophy is the moment when a concept that initially appeared impenetrable all of a sudden becomes clear, perfectly illuminating some problem, situation, or sensation that had previously eluded comprehension. I experienced many exhilarating moments in the conversations recorded here and hope similar epiphanies might be sparked in the reader.

Much of the credit for these moments of course goes to the thinkers featured in this book. They are, I quickly learned, possessed of exceptional intelligence, intensity, charisma, and even irreverence. But they also are all deeply committed to communicating their ideas to the broader world, often in defiance of our culture’s antiintellectual bent. Crafting accessible presentations of their own complex ideas, they have written for major newspapers, collaborated with artists from various disciplines, given public lectures, appeared on radio and television, and been guests on cable news shows. They have championed, in other words, the democratic nature of learning and knowledge.

As the chapters in this book reveal, each conversation centered loosely on a specific concept, something intrinsic to the philosopher’s work that I felt would play well against the topics to be tackled by other participants. At the same time, the project was designed such that all the philosophers are, in key respects, talking about two overarching themes—the search for meaning and our responsibilities to others in a world rife with inequity, persecution, and suffering.

In these pages I have also tried to retain a sense of the environment as a central character providing more than just passive scenery. While conducting these interviews I looked forward to interruptions from passersby, to small details igniting my subjects’ imaginations, to the geography of a place determining what way we were or were not able to move. While some of the topics we settled on immediately lent themselves to a specific location, as in Peter Singer’s discussion of consumer ethics (he cleverly suggested we shoot along Fifth Avenue, one of Manhattan’s upscale shopping districts) and ecology for Slavoj Žižek(I immediately knew I wanted to film in a garbage dump), other settings were less obviously illustrative (as in the case of Michael Hardt rowing around a lake in Central Park or Cornel West’s car ride across Manhattan), each environment possessed its own significance and elicited reactions and insights we could not have planned or anticipated. In the wake of this project I am far more aware of our dynamic relationship to the space we occupy, to how it frames and influences us, guides our physical movements, affects our states of mind, intrudes on our thought processes, and shapes our sense of what is possible.

I shot anywhere between ninety minutes and four hours of material for each philosopher’s walk, eventually whittling down these marathon conversations to approximately ten minutes. In that process many moments—by turns incisive, provocative, and humorous—had to be abandoned. Knowing these scenes would be disseminated through another medium made the editing process less painful. Cinema has many charms, but the format also has its limitations, chiefly compression. Here the interviews are presented in their entirety, providing greater nuance and the possibility of sustained engagement, allowing the reader to set her or his own contemplative pace. Though I strove to maintain the informality and freewheeling nature of the exchanges, the dialogues in this book have been revised and restructured in order to abide by the stricter cadences of written prose.

No doubt the conversations in this volume raise more questions than they answer. But, as Cornel West says at the end of the film, our romantic desire for wholeness, for absolute truth, can be problematic. The salient message may be that the multiplicity of perspectives presented here does not lead to a quagmire of moral relativism, as some may fear, but instead to an expansive ethic of intellectual inquiry, compassion, and political commitment. This project doesn’t wrap everything up or pretend to provide a definitive answer to the difficult issues addressed in it—after all, if our answers were incontrovertible, we wouldn’t need philosophy. Rather, for those readers already committed to philosophical discourse, Examined Life may evoke the sense of curiosity, wonder, and moral indignation that initially attracted them to this discipline, while providing a reminder that ideas are always rooted in people, place, and time. For readers new to this field, I hope Examined Life ignites an endlessly inquisitive momentum. If this effort inspires some people to pause and ponder how they came to hold the beliefs they do, to question the ethical assumptions and preconceptions they take for granted, to reconsider their responsibilities to others, or to see a problem in a new way, I’ll be content. But I’ll be most pleased if, after watching the movie or reading this book, they get swept up in enthusiasm for the everyday practice of philosophy and find it to be an irresistible, if demanding, pleasure.

CORNEL WEST

Truth

As dusk fell over Manhattan, I stopped to pick up Cornel West from his midtown hotel. He agreed to let me conduct an interview while driving him to the New School, where he was scheduled to give a lecture with the philosopher Simon Critchley. Although Examined Life was conceived as primarily pedestrian, the car ride seemed an appropriate way to bring the peripatetic concept up to date. How else would a modern-day flaneur travel? The cameraman sat in the front passenger seat; West and the sound man, who also operated the second camera, took the back. I did my best to guide the conversation while navigating rush-hour traffic.

CORNEL WEST

: So here we are in the middle of the Big Apple.

ASTRA TAYLOR

: Since we haven’t settled on a theme in advance, let me throw some possibilities at you: truth, faith, love—

WEST

: Truth is fine, truth is fine. Absolutely.

TAYLOR

: OK, let’s go for truth. A big topic. [The engine starts and we begin our drive downtown.]

WEST

: I think in many ways it is the ultimate question: What is truth? How do we understand truth and what are the ways in which we wrestle with truth? And I believe that Theodor Adorno was right when he said that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. He said that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak—that gives it an existential emphasis, you see, so that we’re really talking about truth as a way of life, as opposed to a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.

TAYLOR

: When we settled on this topic, my mind immediately went to Plato.

WEST

: Well, in many ways I wish people would think of Plato, rather then Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell, one of the grand exemplary analytic philosophers, tried to convince us that truth really was about propositions that correspond to objects in the world, whereas Plato always understood truth as tied into a way of life, as a certain mode of existence. And so what he’s trying to get us to enact is paideia*, which I think at the end is really at the center of any serious philosophic project. How do you engage in that formation of attention? For Plato, that’s to move from becoming to being, but I would just characterize it as moving from the superficial to the substantial, moving from the frivolous to the serious, and then cultivating a self to wrestle with reality and history and mortality and, most importantly, promoting a maturation of the soul. And for Plato, that had to do, of course, with a turning of the soul, so that you become a certain kind of person. So I’m actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

TAYLOR

: Let’s talk about that transformative aspect of philosophy. The title for this project is Examined Life. So what we’re trying to do is bring the Socratic imperative to the big screen.

WEST

: Absolutely. How do we examine ourselves in a Socratic manner? The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says in line 38a of The Apology. How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin calling into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions and begin then to become a different kind of person? You know, Plato says philosophy’s a meditation on and a preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life because there’s no rebirth, there’s no change, there’s no transformation without death, and therefore the question becomes: How do you learn how to die? Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die. You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it’s precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly. So that the connection between learning how to die and changing, being transformed, turning your world upside down, inverting your world the way in which that famous play by Ludwig Tieck† highlights so that you actually are in a different kind of zone, you have a new self. That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

TAYLOR

: Let’s talk more about love. It seems to me that might be something that folks may not see as a properly philosophical concept.

WEST

: I think love is central to any philosophical discourse. Plato understood that you have to talk about eros in talking about truth. That’s why philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom. I mean, my criticism of Plato is that he’s too in love with the abstract forms as opposed to loving concrete human beings. [West pauses to look out the window. The street overflows with people queuing for an event.] Oh, we’re having an opening. Isn’t that nice. A line on both sides—this is New York. Red carpet and everything!

Eros is at the center of it all. Remember, Socrates defined eros in an autobiographical way. It’s lack on the one hand and it’s ingenuity on the other. Plato’s definition of eros emerges out of his wrestling with love in Symposium, which is his great text on love, you see. So that eros is crucial. There’s simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

TAYLOR

: I like this idea of the transformative power of philosophy. When I say the tagline for this project is philosophy is in the streets, does that resonate with you?

WEST

: I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts. I don’t want to make it just urban; you can have life in the streets in the country. But it’s fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth. See, I put it this way: that—for me—philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us; we’re beings towards death. At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time and so it’s desire in the face of death. And then, of course, you’ve got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry. And you’ve got dialogue in the face of dogmatism. And then of course structurally and institutionally you have domination and you have democracy. You have attempts of people trying to render accountable elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people, to ordinary people. So if you’ve got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you’ve got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment in the face of structures of domination, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power, state power, all those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by it.

TAYLOR

: So is philosophy about speaking truth to power?

WEST

: Absolutely, very true. But you also speak truth to the powerless—see, the powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance. [We stop at a red light. A large crowd of people is gathered around a group of performers on the steps of the New York Public Library.] Look at these folks dancing right there. Oh yes, we got a little hip-hop here. That’s the break-dance dimension of hiphop. Isn’t that nice? I was at a session last night; we had four hours of dialogue with all the great hip-hoppers in the country.

TAYLOR

: I just saw your CD.

WEST

: My Never Forget: A Journey of Revelation with Prince, André 3000 of OutKast, the late great Gerald Levert, M-1 of Dead Prez, and KRS-1. Towering, prophetic, and progressive hip-hop artists. KRS-1 is a philosopher, you know—dropped out of school at thirteen, grew up on the streets until he was nineteen, and was in on the first wave of hip-hop.

TAYLOR

: So let me ask: What is your definition of a philosopher? Do you have to go to school to be a philosopher?

WEST

: Oh, God no. God no. Thank God you don’t have to go to school. No, a philosopher’s a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative of examining yourself requires courage. William Butler Yeats used to say it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does