Review of Examined Life (2008) by Maggie S — 08 May 2010

*sigh* *another sigh but longer* This is not philosophy on the streets. It is political philosophy on the streets. The movie is selling itself as something it clearly is not. Philosophy will remain the discipline of elitist academia because that is the only place it has been and ever will be. Because they covered one branch of philosophy (and very narrowly I might add) the title is a misnomer as well. The examined life means precisely that in all of its unnuanced glory. The movie tries to equate the examined life with the shallow ruminations of a group of political philosophers. The whole movie is made irrelevant for the same reason that all ethical and political philosophy becomes irrelevant when separated from the larger discipline: Philosophy begins and revolves around its metaphysical systems. No discussion of ontology, hermeneutics, epistemology, logic and many other crucial disciplines were touched on by any of the philosophers. Indeed most of the philosophers in this movie have never published anything in these fields. They may be popular now but no one will be reading them 20 years after they're dead, I promise.

Ultimately the movie backfires badly. By gathering a who's who of political philosophy to ramble on in a casual setting about philosophy they manage to make philosophy look exactly like what most people believed it was in the first place: navel gazing. It really isn't the ontologists and logicians that are the navel gazers of philosophy its the ethicists and activists that don't think any deeper than a humanist agenda that they've warped through clever reasoning gymnastics. Anyone who watches this that happens to disagree with a view they are seeing expressed will likely be able to ask one of the questions that that philosopher's opponent is asking (in a more academic and elitist way) thus simultaneously conflating all philosophy with this pseudo-intellectualizing and dismissing the whole discipline like they did before watching the movie. I'm only giving the movie 2 points for trying and gathering the group of hot shots it did.