《受审视的生活：哲学就在街头巷尾》是一部由Astra Taylor执导，Anthony K. Lewis / 彼得·辛格 / Cornel West主演的一部纪录片类型的电影，特精心从网络上整理的一些观众的影评，希望对大家能有帮助。
THE PHILOSOPHERS
Kwame Anthony Appiah
was born in London (where his Ghanaian father was a law student) but moved as an
infant to Ghana, where he grew up. A philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist, he is
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the University Center for Human
Values at Princeton University and the author of many books, including The Ethics of
Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Thinking it Through, and
Experiments in Ethics.
Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Berkeley, has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory,
olitical philosophy, and ethics. Published in 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
ubversion of Identity has sold well over 100,000 copies internationally, becoming one
of the most cited contemporary philosophical texts. Her other books include Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; "Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and
Violence; and Giving an Account of Oneself.
Michael Hardt
is the co-author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire—an international bestseller dubbed “the
Das Kapital of the anti-corporate movement” by Naomi Klein—as well as its sequel,
Multitude. He is a professor of literature at Duke University.
Martha Nussbaum
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, holds appointments in the
hilosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago
and is a board member of the university's human rights program. She holds thirty-two
honorary degrees from universities around the world. Her research and writing covers a
road range of subjects: philosophy and literature, ancient philosophy, liberal education,
ocial and political issues, and philosophy of law. Her many books include Frontiers of
Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership; Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions; and Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of
Religious Equality.
Avital Ronell
literary critic, feminist/deconstructionist, and philosopher-received her PhD from Princeton
University in 1979 before continuing her studies with Jacques Derrida and Hélène
Cixous in Paris. University Professor at New York University and Jacques Derrida Chair
of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, she is the
author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech; The Test
Drive; and Stupidity, among other works, and has written consistently for ArtForum,
ArtUS, and Vacarme (Paris). She is a 2009 guest curator at the Centre Pompidou, where
he offered a “'Rencontre” with Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Laurence Rickels, Jean-Luc
ancy, and others.
eter Singer
called the “most influential” living philosopher by the New Yorker, is Ira W. Decamp
rofessor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University
and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE),
University of Melbourne. He has written many books, including Animal Liberation, a
eminal text of the animal rights movement; Practical Ethics; and, most recently, The Life
You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.
unaura Taylor
is an artist, writer, and activist living in Oakland, California. She is disabled due to U.S
military pollution, a legacy that has affected all aspects of her work. Her artworks have
een exhibited at venues across the country, including the Smithsonian Institution and the
erkeley Art Museum. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a 2004
acatar Foundation Fellowship and a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Her published
work includes the Monthly Review article “The Right Not to Work: Disability and
Capitalism” and “Military Waste In Our Drinking Water” (with Astra Taylor), which was
ominated for a 2007 Project Censored Award. Taylor is currently co-editing a book on
disability and animal rights. She received her undergraduate degree in disability studies
from Goddard College and holds an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley's
department of art practice. Her website is www.sunaurataylor.org.
Cornel West
the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, has been heralded by
ewsweek as an “eloquent prophet with attitude.” In his latest book, Hope on a
Tightrope, he offers courageous commentary on issues that affect the lives of all
Americans. Themes include Race, Leadership, Faith, Family, Philosophy, and Love and
ervice. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers Race Matters, which
won the American Book Award, and Democracy Matters. West has won numerous
awards and has received more than twenty honorary degrees. He also was an influential
force in developing the storyline for the popular Matrix movie trilogy.
lavoj Zizek
is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European
Graduate School; International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,
irkbeck College, University of London; and a senior researcher at the Institute of
ociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published over twenty books, including
Welcome to the Desert of the Real, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Parallax
View, and In Defense of Lost Causes. He is also the subject of the feature documentary
Zizek! directed by Astra Taylor and distributed by Zeitgeist Films.
《受审视的生活：哲学就在街头巷尾》影评(二)：Cornel West / Avital Ronell / Slavoj Zizek
Examined life
The unexamined life is not worth living
-Plato
Cornel West
How do you examine yourself？ What happens when you interrogate yourself？
What happens when you begin to call into question？
Your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions, and begin then to become a different kind of person？
For me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation.
We can define that in terms of we are beings towards death.
And we are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces…whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.
That's us. We are 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 have got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty.
Various forms of idolatry and you have 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 tying to render accountable
Elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people. So philosophy itself becomes a critical disputation 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 very fragile democratic experiments 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 them.
Do you have to go to school to be a philosopher？
Oh, God, no. Thank God you don’t have to go to school. No. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
It takes tremendous discipline it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative 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 for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Courage to think critically. You can't talk.
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being, I think in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
lato says philosophy is a mediation on and a preparation for death.
And by death, what he means is not an event, but a death in life because there is no rebirth, there is no change, there is no transformation without death.
And therefore, the question becomes, how do you learn how to die？
And 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.
I believe that Theodor Aorno was right when he says that condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. So we are really talking about truth as a way of life, as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.
Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth, capital "T", we might have access to truth, small "t", but they are fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong, we have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand-in-hand with truth.
This is why so many of the existential thinkers, be they religious, like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular, like Camus and Satre, that they're accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things.
And therefore, there, you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're going to talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.
How do you sustain a journey a path toward truth, the way to truth？
o the truth talk goes hand-in-hand with talk about the way to truth.
And Scientists could talk about this in terms of inducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so forth and so on.
Religious folk could talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you.
ut they're always of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility.
I want all of the rich, historical colorations to manifest in talking about our finitude.
eing born of a woman in stank and stench what I call "funk".
eing introduced to the funk of life in the womb and love-push that gets you out.
Right？ And then your body is not just death but the way Vico talks about it.
And here Vico was so much better than Heidegger.
Vico talks about it in terms of being a corpse.
ee, Heidegger didn't talk about corpses. He talks about death.
It's still to abstract. Absolutely.
Read the poetry of John Donne. He'll tell you about corpses that decompose.
Well, see, that's history. That's the raw funky, stanky stuff of life.
That's what bluesmen do. See, that's what jazzmen do. See, I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind. I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas. Therefore for me, music is central.
o when you are talking about poetry, for the most part, Plato was talking primarily about words, whereas I talk about notes, tone, timbre, rhythms.
For me, music is fundamental.
hilosophy must go to school not only with the poets. Philosophy needs to go school with the musicians. Keep in mind, Plato bans the flute in the republic but not the lyre.
ecause the flute appeals to all of these various sides of who are given his tripartite conception of the soul; the rational and the spirited and the appetitive. And the flute is appeals to all three of those, where he thinks the lyre on one strings, it only appeals to one and there is permissible.
ow, of course, the irony is when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do？
Well, he requested the Thracian girl to play music on the flute.
I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure.
And orgiastic pleasure has its place. Intellectual pleasure has its place. Social pleasure has its place. Televisual pleasure has its place. You know, I like certain TV shows.
My God, when it comes to music- Oh!
You know, Beethoven's 32nd Sonata, Opus 111.
Unbelievable aesthetic pleasure.
The same would be true for Curtis Mayfield or the Beatles or what have you .
There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied.
It's true that you might be socially isolated.
ecause you're in the library at home and so on. But you're intensely alive.
In fact, you're much more alive then these folk walking these streets of New York in crowds.
With just no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
ut if you read, you know, John Ruskin or you read a Mark Twain, or my God, Herman Malville,
You almost have to throw the book against the wall.
ecause you're almost so intensely alive, that you need a break.
It's time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life.
Take Moby Dick throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw Von Kleist's work against the wall. It was just too much. It made Goethe, it reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping after he overcome those suicidal impulses with Sorrows of Young Werther in the 1770s…
That made his move toward neoclassicism in Weimar.
There are certain things that make us too alive almost, it's almost like being too intensely in love. You can't do anything. It's hard to get back to the Kronos. It's hard to get back the everyday life. You know what I mean？
That chirotic dimension of being in love with another person, everything is so meaningful, you want to sustain it. It's true.
You can't just do it, you know, you got have to go to the bathroom, have a drink of water. Shit!
Romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers.
Can you totalize？ Can you make things whole？
Can you create harmony？ And if you can't, disappointment.
Disappointment's always at the center. Failure is always at the center.
ut where'd the Romanticism come from？
Why begin with Romanticism？ See, I don't begin with Romanticism.
You remember what Beethoven said on his deathbed, you know.
He said, "I have learned to look at the world, in all of its darkness and evil and still love it."
And that's not Romantic Beethoven, that is the Beethoven of the String Quartet 131."
The greatest string quartet ever written, not that in classical music.
ut of course it's a European form, so Beethoven is the grand master.
ut the string quarter your go back to those movements.
It's no Romantic wholeness to be shattered as in the early Beethoven.
He's given up on that, you see.
This is where Chekhov begins, this is where the blues starts, this is where jazz starts.
You think Charlie Parker's upset because he can't sustain a harmony？
He didn't car about the harmony. He was trying to completely ride on the dissonance, ride on the blue notes.
Of course he's got harmony in terms of its interventions here and there.
ut why start with this obsession with wholeness？
And if you can't have it, then you are disappointed and want to have a drink？
And melancholia and blah, blah, blah…
o, you see, the blues my kind of blues begins with catastrophe begins with the Angel of History in Benjamin's theses.
You see, it begins with the pillage, the wreckage on pile on another.
That's the starting point. The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed.
And black people in America and in the modern world given these vicious legacies of white supremacy. It is how you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness.
o that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic and calamitous and horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous.
ee, part of the problem, though, is that, see, when you have a Romantic project, you are so obsessed with time as loss and time as a taker.
Whereas, as a Cheknovian Christian, I want to stress, as well, time as a gift and time as a giver.
o that, yes, it's failure, but how good is a failure？ You done some wonderful things.
ow, Beckett could say, you know, "Try again, fail gain, fail better."
ut why call it failure？ I mean, why not say you have a sense of gratitude that you are able to do as much as you did？
You are able to love as much as think as much and play as much.
Why think you needed the whole thing？
You see what I mean？ This is even disturbing about America.
And, Of course, America is a Romantic project.
It's paradisal , "City on a Hill" and all this other mess and lies and so on.
I say no, no. America is a very fragile democratic experiment predicated on the dispossession of the lands of indigenous people and the enslavement of African peoples and the subjugation of women and the marginalization of gays and lesbians.
And it has great potential. But this notion that somehow you know, we had it all.
Or ever will have it all, it's got to go.
You got to push it to the side.
And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment
And the language of failure.
And you say, Okay, well, how much have you done？
How have we been able to do it？
Can we do more？ Well, in certain situation, you can't do more.
It's like trying to break-dance at 75. You can't do it anymore.
You were a master at 16, it's over.
You can't make love at 80 the way you did at 20. So what？
Time is real.
Q: the idea of the meaning of life？ Is it philosophy's duty to speak on this？
A meaningful life？
Q: How to live a meaningful life？ Is that even a relevant ？ Is that even an appropriate question for a philosopher？
o, I think it is. No, I think the problem with meaning is very important.
ihilism is a serious challenge. Meaninglessness is a serious challenge.
Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement.
The problem is, of course, you never reach it, you know.
It's not a static, stationary telos or end or aim.
It's a process that one never reaches. It's Sisyphean.
You are going up the hill looking for better meanings, or grander, more enabling meanings.
ut you never reach it. You know, in that sense, you die without being able to "have" the whole
In the language of the romantic discourse.
The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.
-Diderot
Avital Ronell
Yes, that is scandalous. I can understand that the others would have 10 minutes,
ut to bring me down to 10 minutes, is outrage, there is no doubt about it.
The thing is we don't know where this film is going to land, whom it's going to shake up, wake up, or freak out, or bore. But even boredom, as an offshoot of melancholy would interest me.
As a response to these dazzling utterances that we are producing.
ut I would say that even if philosophy, and don't forget that Heidegger ditched philosophy for thinking, because he thought philosophy as such was still too institutional, academic, too bound up in knowledge and results, too cognitively inflected.
o he asked the question, what is called thinking ？
And he had a lot to say about walks, about going on paths, that leads nowhere.
One of his important texts is called Holzwege, Which means a path that leads nowhere.
In Greek, the word for path is methods. So we are on the path.
Is philosophy a search for meaning？
I am very suspicious historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning, because meaning has often had very fascistoid(fascistic？) and non-progressivisit edges.
If not a core of that sort of thing, so that very often, also this emergency supplies of meaning,
That are brought to a given incident of structure or theme in one's life are cover-ups, are a way of dressing the wound of non-meaning.
I think it's very hard to keep things in the tensional structure of the openness, whether it is ecstatic or not, of non-meaning. That's very difficult, which is why there is then the quick grasp for a transcendental signifier, for God, for nation, for patriotism. It's been very devastating this craving for meaning, though it's something which we are in constant negotiation.
Everyone wants something like meaning. But when you see these dogs play, why reduce it to meaning rather than just see the arbitrary eruption of something that can't be grasped or explicated. But it's just there in this kind of absolute contingency of being.
To leave things open and radically inappropriable and something and admitting we haven't really understood is much less satisfying more frustrating and more necessary.
That's why I think a lot of people have been fed and fueled by promises of immediate gratification in thought and food and junk, junk food and junk food and so on.
There is a politics of refusing that gratification. And I know that is a crazy-making, but I think that's where we have to pull the brakes.
How do you behave ethically if there is no ultimate meaning？
recisely where there isn't guaranteed or palpable meaning, you have to do a lot of work and you have to be mega-ethical, cause it's much easier to live life and know that well, that you shouldn't do, and this you should do, because someone said so.
If you are not anxious, if we are okay with things, we are not trying to explore of figure anything out. So anxiety is the mood, par excellence of ethicity(ethic). Now, I am not prescribing anxiety disorder for anyone. However, could you imagine Mr. Bush who doesn't give a shit when he sends everyone to the gas chamber or the electric chair？ He expresses no anxiety. And they are very proud of this. They don't lose a wink of sleep. They express no anxiety. This is something Derrida has taught. If you feel that you have acquitted yourself honorably, then you are not so ethical.
If you have a good conscience, then you are kind of worthless. Like, if you think "Oh, I gave this homeless person five bucks. I am great." Then you are irresponsible. The responsible being is one who thinks they have never been responsible enough. They have never taken care enough of the other. The Other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce. This in itself creates an ethical relatedness, a relation without relation, cause you don't know , you can't presume to know or grasp the Other. The minute you think you know the Other, you are ready to kill them. You think, "Oh, they are doing this or this. They are the axis of evil. Let's drop some bombs." But if you don't know , you don't understand this alterity. It's so Other that you can't violate it with your sense of understand. Then you have to let it live, in a sense.
lavoj Zizk
This is where we should start feeling at home.
art of our daily perception of reality is that this disappears from our world.
When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it.
Of course rationally you know it's there in canalization and so on.
ut at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world.
ut the problem is that trash doesn't disappear.
I think ecology, the way we approach ecological problematic is maybe the crucial field of ideology today.
And I use ideology in the traditional sense of illusory, wrong way of thinking and perceiving reality.
Why？ Ideology is not simply dreaming about false ideas and so on.
Ideology addresses very real problems but it mystifies them.
One of the elementary ideological mechanisms, I claim, is what I call the temptation of meaning.
When something horrible happens, our spontaneous tendency is to search for a meaning.
It must mean something. You know, like ADIS. It was a trauma then conservatives came and said it's punishment for sinful ways of life, and so on and so on.
Even if we interpret a catastrophe as a punishment, it makes easier in a way, because we know it's not just some terrifying blind force. It has a meaning.
It's better when you are in the middle of a catastrophe.
It's better to feel that God punished you than to feel that it just happened.
If God punished you, it's still a universe of meaning.
And I think that that's where ecology as ideology enters.
It's really the implicit premise of ecology that the existing world is the best possible world.
In the sense of it's a balanced world which is disturbed through human hubris.
o why do I find this problematic？ Because I think that this notion of nature, nature as a harmonious, organic, balanced, reproducing almost living organism which is then disturbed, perturbed, derailed through human hubris, technological exploitation and so on, is ,I think a secular version of the religious story of the Fall.
And the answer should be not that there is no fall, that we are part of nature.
ut on the contrary, that there is no nature.
ature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb.
ature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.
We profit from them. What's our main source of energy today ？ Oil.
What are we aware, what is oil？
Oil reserves beneath the earth are material remainders of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Are we aware, because we all know that oil is composed of the remainders of animal life, plants and so on and so on.
Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe had to occur on Earth ？
o that is good to remember.
Ecology will slowly turn, maybe, into a new opium of masses, the way, as we all know,
Marx defined religion.
What do we expect from religion is a kind of unquestionable highest authority.
It's God's word, so it is you don't debate it.
Today, I claim, ecology is more and more taking over this role of conservative ideology.
Whenever there is a new scientific breakthrough, biogenetic development, whatever,
It is as if the voice which warns us not to trespass, violate a certain invisible limit, like,
quot;Don't do that. It would be too much." That voice is today more and more the voice of ecology.
Like, "Don't mess with D.N.A. Don't mess with nature. Don't do it"
This basic conservative partly ideological mistrust of change.
This is today ecology.
Another myth which is popular about ecology namely a spontaneous ideological myth is the idea that we Western people in our artificial technological environment are alienated from immediate natural environments that we should not forget that we humans are part of the living Earth. We should not forget that we are not abstract engineers, theorists who just exploit nature that we are part of nature, that nature is our unfathomable, impenetrable background.
I think that that precisely is the greatest danger.
Why？ Think about a certain obvious paradox.
We all know in what danger we all are, global warming, possibility of other ecological catastrophes and so on and so on.
ut why don't we do anything about it？
It is, I think, a nice example, of what in psychoanalysis we call disavowal.
The logic is that of, I know very well, but I act as if I don't know.
For example, precisely, in the case of ecology, I know very well there maybe global warming.
Everything will explode, be destroyed.
ut after reading a treatise on it, what do I do？
I step out. I see nothings that I see now behind me.
That's a nice sight for me, I see nice trees, birds singing and so on.
And even if I know rationally this is all in danger, I simply do not believe that this can be destroyed.
That's the horror of visiting sites of a catastrophe like Chernobyl.
In a way, we are not evolutionarily, we are not wired to even imagine something like that.
It's in a way unimaginable.
o I think that we should do to confront properly that threat of ecological catastrophe
Is not all this New Age stuff to break out of this technological manipulative mold
And to find out roots in nature. But, on the contrary, to cut off even more these roots in nature.
We need more alienation from our life world.
From our, as it were, spontaneous nature.
We should become more artificial.
We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism.
A kind of mathematical universe where is nothing, there are just formulas, technical forms and so on.
And the difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality in this dimension.
To recreate if not beauty then aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself.
That's the true love of the world.
ecause what is love？ Love is not idealization.
Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points.
And nonetheless the person's absolute for you.
Everything life that makes life worth living.
ut you see perfection in imperfection itself.
And that's how we should learn to love the world.
True ecologist loves all this.
《受审视的生活：哲学就在街头巷尾》影评(三)：一个浅显易懂的片儿
前些日子跟Gianpaolo闲聊的时候，他跟我说起这个片子，我就翻出来看。他本意是让我看齐泽克，因为这哥们挺神棍，好像总是对什么都不满意，批评那种已经变成“意识形态”的环境运动。这电影里一共采访了八个哲学家，齐泽克确实是最好玩的一个，站在垃圾场里批评环境运动，样子特别愤世嫉俗。
我最喜欢的竟然还是第一个，Avital Ronel。人生的意义不必要说尽，没有焦虑的生活才是问题，不要总觉得自己知道别人要的是什么，最负责任的人其实是那些成天担心自己不够负责任的人。我都还蛮同意的。爱人其实是种很谦卑的状态，成天欢喜琢磨自己这样做这样说是不是真的让对方感到舒坦，时常伴有轻微的负疚感，因为把重心暂时从自己身上移开了。
选择做学问很大程度上也是选择了一种生活的方式，学会带着疑问生活，把焦虑弄成常态。当然同时也得学会驾驭这焦虑的情绪，不然它也就只是种令人感到不太愉快的情绪罢了。
Michael Hardt讲革命那一段也还行。可是呢，有时候真是弄不清楚哲学家对于社会主义实践的抽象批判，到底算深刻还算肤浅。
其他人讲世界主义精神，讲福利国家的重要性，讲消费观念与道德，等等等等，基本无感。我知道这都算美国的人文学者关注的焦点，而我总有意无意和这些热门话题保持距离罢了。
今天过节，就看了这么个电影。这个片儿拍得十分浅显易懂，我想没读过任何哲学的人应该都能看明白。
《受审视的生活：哲学就在街头巷尾》影评(四)：DIRECTOR’S Q & A
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
inger, Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith
utler) 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
ociety. 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
arack 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
hilosophers necessarily “have all the answers” but that they can help us ask different
questions and see things in new ways.
hilosophy 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
hy. 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,
olitary 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
hould 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
ure 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
un) 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
hilosophers 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
roblematic. 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
oth 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.
《受审视的生活：哲学就在街头巷尾》影评(五)：Love, romanticism and the meaning of life
est movie in the last two years for me. It makes you think and opens your mind. I especially appreciate the comments about ecology and love - perfection in inperfection - is so true and so relevant. Most of us knows it but never raise it to the level of zeitgeist and we still struggle and doubt about ourselves. Revolution is another topic that nobody touches any more, but was enlightened by the movie. Finally, the meaning of life has been examined from several angles and each one of them is eye-opening. You probably know now which one I like the most and would interpret for my life.