When did you become interested in philosophy?
My interest in philosophy goes back quite awhile. I was around twelve or thirteen when
I first picked up Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which was over my head even though
the subject was something very important to me. During my first year of university I
discovered “theory,” to which I devoted myself before discovering filmmaking. What I
love about philosophy is the way different theories present opportunities to look at the
world anew. Film has a similar ability to shift perception, to alter the way we look at the
world, so I think the two fields compliment each other well.
Most of the subjects who appear in Examined Life (Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter
Singer, Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith
Butler) are thinkers I have worked with or studied in the past or feel a special connection
to. For example, I initially read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble when I was a teenager
wrestling with what it meant to be a “feminist.” Later, Martha Nussbaum’s work influenced
me to reevaluate my thinking about the position of people with disabilities in our
society. Thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and Michael Hardt regularly challenge my political
assumptions. I’ve found Cornel West’s speeches to be consistently inspiring and provocative
(and he should be making even more of them now that he is a campaign advisor to
Barack Obama). Finally, it was a graduate seminar lead by Avital Ronell (co-taught by
the late Derrida) that inspired my desire to take philosophy out of the academy and
make it more accessible to a non-specialized audience.
What inspired you to make Examined Life?
Many would agree that the world is facing a multitude of unprecedented problems, from
global warming to growing economic inequality. In a way, this is part of why I wanted
to make Examined Life right now -- I feel that the myriad problems facing us demand
more thinking than ever, not less.
That said, most people wouldn’t assume philosophy would have anything useful to say
on these issues. Often when you mention “philosophy” people’s eyes kind of glaze over.
The word conjures images of stodgy old white men pontificating on abstract matters
completely irrelevant to those of us who live in the “real world.” Or maybe folks assume
that philosophy simply doesn’t relate to their lives, or that people who are interested in
the subject are unforgivably ponderous or pretentious.
I happen to think philosophy has something to add to the conversation, not that
philosophers necessarily “have all the answers” but that they can help us ask different
questions and see things in new ways.
Philosophy isn’t necessarily the sort of subject that obviously lends itself
to cinema. How did you translate the subject to the big screen?
Obviously, a lot of philosophy is very technical. But as Isaiah Berlin, echoing Bertrand
Russell, once said, “the central visions of the great philosophers are essentially simple.”
When it comes to defending these central visions, things can get a bit complicated, but
the heart of the matter is usually fairly intelligible and accessible. So my aim was to present
the basic impulse or insight of a variety of philosophers in a way that was free of jargon
and directly relatable to the audience’s experiences.
How did you come up with the concept of the philosopher’s walk for
this film?
I was talking to my friend Aaron Levy, a curator and academic in Philadelphia, about
the project and he suggested a potential subject and mentioned that the fellow was quite
shy. Perhaps, Aaron mused, he’d be more comfortable if you filmed him while taking a
walk instead of sitting down. At that moment a light bulb went off in my brain as I had
recently read Rebecca Solnit’s amazing book Wanderlust, which is a magisterial history
of walking.
The walking theme is a pretty straightforward idea, but it’s also one that has numerous
levels of significance. Cinematically it provides an opportunity for movement, gesture,
and variation of scene. Historically it speaks to philosophy’s peripatetic origins and to
the fact that many great philosophers were avid wanderers (Socrates, Nietzsche,
Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Benjamin all come to mind). Symbolically, it illustrates my
intention of taking philosophy out of the ivory tower. Politically, walking is under siege in
our car-driven speed-obsessed culture. Culturally, we place little value on the peaceful,
solitary reflection walking encourages.
How did you go about directing the project?
I began inviting people to appear in Examined Life in early 2007. Once someone
expressed interest in participating, I started a conversation about the form their walk
should take, keeping in mind how each segment would fit into the greater whole.
Typically I had a specific theme in mind for them to discuss, something central to their
work that I also felt would play well off the other segments I was planning. In some situations
the subject and I discussed the various points they hoped to make, in order to make
sure we were on the same page. In other cases we completely improvised, having a
long extemporaneous and circuitous conversation, which I then had to find some center
to in the editing room. Overall, I did my best to balance the need for pre-planning and
rehearsal with my desire to make a film that was fresh and unforced, something that
would hopefully convey the spontaneous life of the mind and the process (excuse the
pun) of thinking on one’s feet.
That was part of why I wanted to shoot this project outside, in the streets. I wanted
uncontrolled things to happen, to pose challenges and provoke thoughts and reactions
we couldn’t anticipate. Some topics immediately lent themselves to a specific location, as
in Peter Singer’s discussion of consumer ethics (we shot along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,
which is an upscale shopping district) and ecology for Slavoj Zizek (I knew I wanted film
in a garbage dump), but other themes were less easy to illustrate. In those cases I asked
if there was a location the subject felt a special connection to, or perhaps a site that
holds personal significance or one related to their philosophic evolution. So some of the
philosophers are in a spot they like visiting or walking along a route they walk everyday
in real life. In some cases I simply chose a location that I felt suited the subject’s
temperament and that was logistically feasible and visually compelling.
How did you achieve wholeness with so many subjects?
Well, as Cornel West says at the end of the film, our obsession with wholeness can be
problematic. I didn’t want the film to wrap everything up or pretend to provide a definitive
answer to the different and difficult questions it poses (after all, if we had watertight
answers there wouldn’t be any need for philosophical questioning any more). That said,
I do hope the film has a cohesiveness despite the fact it is somewhat fragmented formally,
in the sense that it is a series of vignettes. To achieve some sense of harmony the film
was conceived, directed and edited so that all the subjects are, in a sense, talking about
the same main topics -- the search for meaning and our responsibilities to others in a broken
world (by which I mean a world full of inequity and suffering, one beset by problems
both interpersonal and political) -- from different angles.
Related to the central themes of the film, I chose subjects that are concerned with social
and ethical issues, which is probably a reflection of my personality and interests as much
as anything else. So there are many branches of philosophy that are not touched on in
Examined Life, like linguistic philosophy and logic and philosophy of mind, for example.
These areas can all be fascinating but I felt I had to limit the field of topics from which I
drew in order to achieve a sense of thematic unity.
