The Examiner Examined

[ornoth]

Last night I went to see "Examined Life", film wherein the filmmaker gives a dozen-odd modern philosophers ten minutes each to pontificate.

The 2008 film reminded me far too much of a less skilfully done version of Richard Linklater’s 2001 animated movie "Waking Life". The parallels are too many to ignore: the same loosely-related episodic format of someone discussing philosophy with the protagonist/narrator; the same incorporation of striking background settings and jazzy music to lend an atmospheric air to the monologues; the same toeing the line between genuine hopefulness and sarcastic postmodern cynicism; even the same walking/strolling visual motif. Despite the inarguable validity of the Plato quote, the parallel between the movie titles—Waking Life versus Examined Life—is so close as to imply subconscious (if not conscious) appropriation.

Aside from the facts that the newer film is not animated and the philosophers are real people, the main dissimilarity is the fact that unlike Waking Life, Examined Life has no overarching storyline to bring it all together. In the end, it’s just a bunch of talking heads with separate agendas, one talking about environmentalism, another about disabilities, another about gender, and so on, and neither they nor the director make any attempt to connect the disparate issues and bring them into a coherent whole. It’s a movie with no message, no direction, no conscious intent, which leaves one with the lingering question: is the unexamined movie worth seeing?

Despite that shortcoming, each scene did have value within its own context, and I came away with what, to me, were three interesting thoughts.

The first is the most obvious, and the ultimate reason for philosophy’s existence and importance. Most people look outside themselves for some source to define their ethics, whether that be the Biblical God or a political ideology or whatever. But in an era when most intellectuals have denied the existence of a supreme being, that raises the question of whether we should try to live an ethical life, and where our ethics should come from. The obvious answer is to look within: you are acting ethically when your actions are aligned with your values, and it’s the examination of those values that provides us with direction. And lest anyone think that ethics are outmoded in a largely secular culture, I point out that our ethics and our values are what guide every decision we make. Our ethics may look somewhat different than those of modern or historical Christians, but that does not mean that we do not live by certain ethical precepts.

Another interesting point was made by Cornel West. He said that courage—courage to think for ourselves, the courage to express our love, and the courage to manifest our beliefs in this selfish world—is the most critical attribute for a modern philosopher. I found that very interesting, and very apropos to my Buddhist studies. It’s something I hope to share with my dharma friends in the near future.

My final thought makes a connection between philosophy and superstition, between this movie and a number of upcoming local events. When faced with life or death or natural disasters, humans try to assign meaning to the event: it is God’s will, or the evolutionary imperative, or the material dialectic. Finding meaning and patterns of cause and effect are what human brains are wired to do; even when there is clearly no meaning, we create theories, like the Polynesian islander whose cargo cult tells him that huge silver birds magically bestow chocolate and cigarettes upon his people. Our ideas about the unanswerable, unknowable facts of life, death, and natural disasters are no more than superstitions created by a brain that evolved to find meaning in every event it observes.

I made this connection after reading a bit about a handful of very interesting and related author talks that are coming up. Tomorrow, cognitive neuroscientist Bruce M. Hood will be speaking about his book "SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable", which explores this very topic. A week later, Gary Marcus discusses his book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind", which asserts that our brains are the result of a random evolutionary process that piled new systems on top of old ones, resulting in an imperfect and inconsistent facility. Finally, a week after that, Alva Noë talks about his "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness".

It’s quite a month for thinkers!