I am a big fan of Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking and I kept thinking about this book while I was watching Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor who previously made Zizek! (having my beloved worlds of academia and documentary coming together like this is geek-bliss for me) At the Q&A after the screening in the lovely Bearsville Theater at the Woodstock Film Festival I was pleasantly surprised when Astra mentioned Wanderlust and said that the film wouldn’t have happened without that book.

Cornel West riffing in Examined Life.

Examined Life is about contemporary philosophers and specifically it is about philosophers walking – or rowing and driving in the case of Michael Hardt and Cornel West, but the dance of thought and movement is a constant. Astra focuses on philosophers who are concerned with how philosophy can interface with ethics and policy in the real world and the film has continued to provoke and inspire me weeks after seeing it. I immediately rushed out to buy Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers because I was so impressed with his ideas for avoiding both universalism and relativism and finding a better way to approach living together in a globalized world. I have also had endless discussions/arguments since with people about Peter Singer’s Drowning Child ethics (and I am happy to keep arguing so please post comments about your thoughts on his challenge that we expand our circle of ethics and not only do some good occasionally but also not do harm inadvertently – I personally am not convinced by his argument although I appreciate the way that it makes us interogate our priorities). The other philosophers featured in the film are: Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Avital Ronell (my hero ever since I read an interview with her in RE:Search Angry Women), and Martha Nussbaum.

The joy of simply being able to THINK about all the issues brought up in Examined Life made me think again of the David Foster Wallace Kenyon Commencement Address that I love so much.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

…

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.