An Unexamined Life

I wanted to post something about Philosophy today. Actually, more about "philosophy" (no capital 'P') but in the end it all boils down to the same thing. Yep... I know I can get dozens of rabid pro and con comments just from that last phrase, but let's not go there right now. I had a rough idea of what I was going to write, but then I remembered a paper I wrote for my Philosophy class a few years ago, and decided to publish that first. The paper was about the movie An Examined Life.

So, here it goes:

My life started when I was about twenty years old. I was in my third year of college, unhappy, my world had changed, my life seemed to have no meaning, and I was seriously considering ending it, but I knew my family would be devastated. So, instead, I started writing in an old notebook, every day, whatever came to my mind. It didn’t occur to me to read what I had written until there was just one page left to write. So I read it, and that was the day when I woke up. I was very surprised by the things I wrote, but even more surprised by the fact that I didn’t know myself. Until that day I was merely an eating and breathing machine, functioning in auto-pilot.

That kind of self discovery is, to me, what Socrates meant when he said that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” and my own story was the first thing that came to mind when I started watching Examined Life.

I was a little disappointed by the movie, because most of the interviewed philosophers seemed (judging from the subjects discussed) to wear a shield that dissociates the person from the philosophy. I don’t think we can really, meaningfully learn anything if we don’t know who we are first. We can read a whole library and still process everything above the surface, without letting the knowledge grow roots inside the essence of who we are, and letting ourselves grow above the surface, being enriched by that knowledge.

It seems to me that is the case of Avital Ronell. She probably has a great deal of “book smarts”, but that appears to be just a coat of varnish on a sterile surface.

Dr. Cornel West, on the other hand, is the extreme opposite. His references to music, life, death, desire and pleasure reveal someone who internalized and digested his books, mixed his studies with his own experiences and emerged transformed by them. His philosophy is as alive as he is. I know exactly what it means when he says “It takes courage to examine yourself.” But his enthusiasm shows that it is well worth the trouble.

What gives us the right to eat meat? I have struggled with that question a great deal. I didn’t eat meat for three years, and I don’t feel that made me a better, or more ethical person. It got to a point where I started to fight friends and family to defend my position, until I realized it was causing me more harm than good. The fact is that death is an intrinsic fact of life. Our bodies are constantly fighting and killing microorganisms in order to stay alive. We kill flies and roaches to protect ourselves. We kill plants. Where should we draw the line? It is not a matter of “right”, but a biological fact that we kill things in order to survive. Otherwise we would have to ask what or who gives a lion the right to kill a zebra.

Michael Hardt approach on Revolution is curious. Dictionary definitions apart, I understand “revolution” as a tool to reach a desired result when other tools were unsuccessfully used, especially in the context of political revolutions in South America. Hardt mentions “learning to do revolution in America”, or “practicing revolution”, but he fails to identify the need for a “South American model” revolution in America. Without a cause, in my opinion, a revolution is nothing more than a criminal enterprise.

And Cornel West is not wearing a seatbelt. Not cool!