Examined Life

“Examined Life,” points towards the days of Socrates, not only in its opening lines—Socrates’ famous defense “The unexamined life is not worth living” reaffirmed millennia later by the booming voice of Cornel West—but in its recreation of a world where philosophers wandered regularly among market places and stone forums. Eight of today’s most prominent thinkers are set loose from their offices and classrooms by director Astra Taylor to roam the sites of daily life—airports, parks, Fifth Avenue. While the philosophers’ ruminations lose their grounding in academic method, the liveliness that takes hold of their ideas more than makes up for the loss, making “Examined Life” 87 minutes of excitement for the mind—with plenty of food for thought left for the walk home from the theatre.

The 30-year old Canadian writer/director Astra Taylor has used the medium of film to explore philosophy before. In her 2005 documentary “Žižek!” she followed Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek on his lecture tour, and he makes an appearance again in “Examined Life”—along with seven other modern thinks, including University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum, “Empire” author Michael Hardt, and feminist post-structuralist Judith Butler. Despite her experience, Taylor reveals her anxieties about making philosophical film in a conversation with NYU professor Avital Ronell, the first onscreen thinker after “Matrix Revolutions” celebrity-philosopher Cornel West.

Philosophical thinking has traditionally taken place in the written form, which gives both its deliverer and its audience enough time to explore ideas in-depth and parse out the details of the arguments. Taylor is justified, then, in the fast-paced aspect of her endeavor—with only 10 minutes to talk through their ideas, none of these thinkers are about to make a philosophical break-through. Ronell tells a helpful anecdote about Heidegger’s abandonment of what he believed to be institutionalized philosophy in favor of simply thinking. Indeed, Taylor’s film presents nothing like a close reading of “Being and Time,” but it does rouse its viewers to consider various takes on what it might mean to be alive today.

Walking down 5th Avenue in New York City, Princeton’s Peter Singer asks, “Can we make our academic studies more relevant to our questions today?” as he applies ethical theory to the affluence around him. His idea that what we spend money on affects what we don’t spend money on—saving lives, for example—relates closely to Ronell’s considerations of morals in a potentially meaningless existence and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah’s thoughts on what it means to be a cosmopolitan in an ever-shrinking world. Indeed, part of the success of “Examined Life” comes from the flow and interaction between each of the philosophers’ ideas, even though they never meet face-to-face.

Taylor includes known rhetoricians such as West and Žižek in her line-up of all-star thinkers, and they do not disappoint. West is the only figure who appears more than once in the film, and his musings are dispersed throughout. “I’m a jazz man in the world of ideas,” he says, sitting in the back seat of a car driving through New York City, his astounding breadth of knowledge and poetic name-dropping engaging, if not inspiring. Žižek stands in front of a garbage dump wearing a bright orange vest, excitedly ranting about ecology in a counter-intuitive way. “We must find poetry—spirituality—in this dimension,” he says. “To recreate, if not beauty, then aesthetic dimension in trash.”

The strength of “Examined Life” is that it also allows philosophers less public than West or Žižek to bring their ideas to life. Butler, for example, known for being difficult on paper, emerges here even more engaging than West. A thinker in feminism, queer theory, and ethics, she shows up sporting a baggy leather jacket and an equally loose style of talking. Accompanied by Sunaura Taylor, the filmmaker’s disabled sister, Butler strolls around San Francisco considering traditional Western conceptions of a body—the pitfalls of having “an ideal morphology… [of] what a body should look like, move like” and whether we really live in a world where we assist each other. This discourse is all the while exemplified as they visit a second-hand clothing store to pick out a new sweater for Sunaura. “This is going to be a new show: ‘Shopping with Judith Butler,’” Sunaura quips. “For the queer eye,” Butler gamely adds as she winks at the camera.

“Examined Life” is filled with many such animated and appealing moments, affirming Taylor’s implicit premise for the film, West’s declaration that “there’s ascertainable pleasure in the life of the mind that cannot be denied. You’re intensely alive!”