[Man] "The unexamined life is not worth living," Plato says in Line 38A of the Apology.
How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself?
What happens when you begin to call into question...
your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions,
and begin then to become a different kind of person?
See, I put it this way. That for me,
I mean, philosophy is fundamentally about...
our finite situation.
We can define that in terms of we're beings toward death,
and we're featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces...
whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.
That's us. We're beings toward death.
At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time,
and so it's desire in the face of death.
And then of course, you've got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty,
various forms of idolatry, and you've got dialogue in the face of dogmatism.
And then of course, structurally and institutionally you have domination...
and you have democracy.
You have attempts of people tying to render accountable...
elites, kings, queens, suzerians, corporate elites, politicians,
trying to make these elites accountable to eveyday people.
So philosophy itself becomes...
a critical disposition...
of wrestling with desire in the face of death,
wrestling with dialogue in the face of- of dogmatism,
and wrestling with democracy- trying to keep alive very fragile democratic experiments-
in the face of structures of domination;
patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power,
um- uh, state power.
All those concentrated forms of power...
that are not accountable to people who are affected by them.
[Woman] So, can you hear me well?
[Astra Taylor] And you can speak to me, so- Good. Vey good.
Wonderful. Okay.
So I was trying to figure out what you were getting me into here,
and how we're implicated in this walk.
I was going to interview you and ask you what you thought you were doing.
I'm specifically thinking about the challenge of making a film about philosophy,
which, um, obviously has a spoken element,
but is typically written.
And book form allows you to explore something so in-depth,
you know, 300, 400, 500 pages exploring a single concept,
whereas in a feature-length film you have 80 minutes...
in the form of speech that's been recorded.
And in the case of this film, each person has 10 minutes.
Yes, that is scandalous.
I can understand that the others would have 10 minutes,
but to- to bring me down to 10 minutes...
is an outrage- there's no doubt about it.
The thing is, we don't know where this film is going to land,
whom it's going to shake up, wake up,
or freak out, or bore.
But even boredom, as an offshoot of melancholy, would interest me...
as a response to these dazzling utterances that we're producing.
But I- I would say that, even if philosophy-
And don't forget that Heidegger ditched philosophy for thinking,
'cause he thought philosophy as such...
was still too institutional, academic,
too bound up in knowledge and results,
too cognitively inflected.
So he asked the question, "What is called thinking?"
And he had a lot to say about walks,
about going on paths that lead nowhere.
One of his important texts is called Holzwege,
which means a path that leads nowhere.
In Greek, the word for path is methodos.
So we're on the path.
[Astra Taylor] One thing I want to ask you about is meaning.
Is philosophy a search for meaning?
[Ronell] I'm very suspicious historically...
and intellectually of the promise of meaning,
because meaning...
has often had very fascistoid,
non-progressivist edges,
if not a core of that sort of thing.
Excuse me. Um-
So that vey often,
also the emergency supplies of meaning...
that are brought to a given incident or structure...
or theme in one's life are cover-ups,
are a way of dressing the wound of non-meaning.
I think it's very hard to keep things...
in the tensional structure of the openness,
whether it's ecstatic or not, of non-meaning.
That's very, very difficult, which is why there is then...
the quick grasp for a transcendental signifier,
for God, for nation, for patriotism.
It's been very devastating, this, um-
this craving for meaning,
though it's something with which we are in constant negotiation.
Everyone wants something like meaning.
But when you see these dogs play,
[Growling] why reduce it to meaning...
rather than just see the arbitrary eruption...
of something that can't be grasped or explicated,
but it's just there...
in this kind of absolute contingency of being.
To leave things open...
and radically inappropriable and something-
and admitting we haven't really understood...
is much less satisfying, more frustrating,
and more necessary, I think, you know.
And that's why I think a lot of people...
have been fed and fueled by promises...
of immediate gratification in thought...
and food and junk, and so on-
junk thought, junk food, and so on.
So the- the-
There's a politics of refusing that gratification.
And I know that's crazy-making, but I think that's where we have to pull the brakes.
[Astra Taylor] Some people might be troubled, or might wonder,
how do you behave ethically if there's no ultimate meaning?
Precisely where there isn't guaranteed...
or palpable meaning,
you have to do a lot of work and you have to be mega-ethical,
'cause it's much easier to live life and know...
that well, that you shouldn't do, and this you should do, because someone said so.
If we're not anxious, if we're okay with things,
we're not trying to explore or figure anything out.
So anxiety is the mood, par excellence,
of- of-
of ethicity, I think, you know.
Now, I'm not prescribing anxiety disorder for anyone.
However, could you imagine Mr. Bush, who doesn't give a shit...
when he sends everyone to the gas chamber...
or the, um, electric chair?
He expresses no anxiety.
And they're very proud of this. They don't lose a wink of sleep.
They express no anxiety.
This is something that Derrida has taught.
If you feel that you've acquitted yourself honorably,
then you're not so ethical.
If you have a good conscience, then you're kind of worthless.
Like, if you think- "Oh, I gave this homeless person five bucks.
I'm great"- then you're irresponsible.
The responsible being is one who thinks...
they've never been responsible enough.
They've never taken care enough of the Other.
The Other is so in excess...
of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce.
This in itself creates an ethical relatedness-
a relation without relation, 'cause you don't know-
You can't presume to know or grasp the Other.
The minute you think you know the Other, you're ready to kill them.
You think, "Oh, they're doing this or this.
They're the axis of evil. Let's drop some bombs."
But if you don't know, you don't understand this alterity,
it's so Other that you can't violate it with your sense of understanding,
then, um,
you have to let it live, in a sense.
This is the center of one of the world's richest countries...
and one of the most expensive places there,
and that raises an ethical issue.
I mean, there are people who have the money to buy at these stores...
and who don't seem to see any kind of moral problem doing that.
But what I want to ask is, well, shouldn't they see some sort of moral problem about that?
Isn't there a question about what we should be spending our money on?
So we're outside Bergdorf Goodman, where they've got a display of Dolce & Gabbana shoes.
And it's kind of amusing to me because about 30 years ago,
I wrote an article called "Famine, Affluence, and Morality"...
in which I imagined...
that you're walking past a shallow pond,
and as you walk past it you notice there's a small child who's fallen into the pond...
and seems to be in danger of drowning,
and you look around to see where the parents are, and there's nobody in sight.
You realize that unless you wade into this pond and pull the child out,
the child is likely to drown.
There's no danger to you because you know the pond is just a shallow one,
but you are wearing a nice pair of shoes...
and they're probably gonna get ruined if you wade into that shallow pond.
So, of course, when I ask people this, they always say,
"Well, of course, forget about the shoes. You've just got to save the child. That's clear."
And then I stop and say, "Okay, you know, I agree with you about that.
"But for the price of a pair of shoes,
"if you were to give that to Oxfam or UNICEF or one of those organizations,
"they could probably save the life of a child, maybe more than one child in a poor county,
"where children are dying because they can't get basic medical care...
to treat very basic diseases like diarrhea or whatever else it might be."
And that's really one of the reasons why I think it's interesting...
to be here on 5th Avenue talking about ethics,
because ethics is about the basic choices that we ought to make in our lives,
and one of those choices is how do we spend our money.
[Singer] I started thinking about these issues back in the 1970s...
when, for one thing, there was the crisis in Bangladesh...
where there were millions of people who were in danger of starving...
because of the repression of the Bangladeshis by the Pakistani Army at the time.
And that made me think about our obligations to help people who are in danger of starvation.
Also around the same time, I happened to meet someone who was a vegetarian,
who, uh, got me asking myself about,
am I justified in continuing to eat meat?
What is it that gives us the right, or that justifies us,
in treating animals the way they get treated...
before they end up on our lunch or dinner or whatever it might be?
And I read a little bit about factory farming,
intensive farms, and the way they confine animals,
which was something that was really just getting going at that stage.
And I thought that you can't really justify this,
that we've just taken for granted the idea...
that somehow humans have the right to use animals whichever way they want to.
And that isn't defensible.
The boundary of species is not something that really is so morally significant...
that it entitles us to take another sentient being...
who can suffer or feel pain,
and do as we wish with that sentient being...
just because we happen to like the taste of its flesh.
So these two issues really got me thinking about Applied Ethics,
which at this time in the beginning of the 1970s wasn't really a field.
It wasn't really something that philosophers thought was properly philosophy.
But I think it was a good time to start thinking about these issues...
because of the student movement,
the radical movement of the '60s and early '70s...
which had created a bit more interest in these issues and raised the question,
can we make our academic studies more relevant to the important questions ofthe day?
When you do apply ethics,
you often find that thinking things through leads you to challenge common-sense morality.
And of course, this is consistent with a very ancient philosophical tradition.
It's exactly what happened with Socrates...
when he started asking people about, "What is justice?"
And they thought they knew what justice is,
and then they started thinking about it,
and they realized they didn't understand it.
And of course, Socrates ended up having- being forced to drink the hemlock...
because he was accused of corrupting the morals of the youth.
Now, fortunately that doesn't happen to philosophers today.
But it could well be said that from a conservative point of view,
Applied Ethics does corrupt morals-
"Corrupt" is the wrong word. But it certainly challenges morals...
and might lead us to think differently about some things...
that we have held very dear for a long time.
A lot of people think that you can only have ethical standards...
if in some way you're religious,
you believe that there's a god who handed down some commandments...
or inspired some scriptures which tell you what to do.
I don't believe in any of that.
I think ethics has to come from ourselves,
but that doesn't mean that it's totally subjective,
that doesn't mean that you can think whatever you like about what's right or wrong.
When you start to look at issues ethically,
you have to do more than just think about your own interests.
You have to ask yourself, how do I take into account the interests of others?
What would I choose if I were to be in their position rather than in my position?
One of the most obvious things that emerges...
when you put yourself in the position of others...
is the priority of reducing or preventing suffering,
because ethics is not just about...
what I actually do and the impact of that,
but it's also about what I omit to do, what I decide not to do.
And that's why, questions about- given that we all have a limited amount of money-
questions about what you spend your money on...
are also questions about what you don't spend your money on,
or what you don't use your money to achieve.
They just say, "Oh, well, I'm not harming anyone...
if I go and spend a thousand dollars on a new suit."
But, uh, in fact, given the opportunities that we have to help...
and given the way the world is,
I think that quite often you're actually...
are failing to benefit someone, which you could be doing.
I think we have moral obligations to help just as we have moral obligations not to harm.
[Singer] Over the thousands of years of history and development of philosophy,
a lot of philosophers have asked, "Does life have a meaning? What is it?"
And that's a question for which I think we can give an answer.
And I think the answer is, we make our lives most meaningful...
when we connect ourselves with some really important causes or issues.
And we contribute to that, so that we feel that...
because we lived, something has gone a little better than it would have otherwise.
We've contributed, in however small a way, to making the world a better place.
And I think it's hard to find anything more meaningful than doing that,
than reducing the amount of unnecessay pain and suffering that there's been on this world,
or making the world a little bit better for all of the beings who are sharing it with us.
[Appiah] I started thinking about the difference between...
the context in which we evolved as a species...
and the present, you know, in this age of globalization.
And one way to think about that is to notice that...
if you live a modern life, if you're traveling through an airport,
you're gonna be passing lots and lots of people,
and within a few minutes you'll have passed more people...
than most of our remote human ancestors...
would ever have seen in their entire lives.
As an American, you exist in this kind of virtual relationship with 300 million people.
If you're lucky enough to be Chinese, your virtual relationships are with, you know,
soon, one and a half billion people or something like that.
So I think that's- that's a way of dramatizing,
I think, the challenge that we face.
We're- We're good at small, face-to-face stuff.
That's what we were made for.
We know how to be responsible for children and parents...
and cousins and friends.
But we now have to be responsible for fellow citizens,
both of our country and fellow citizens of the world.
And the question is, can we figure that out?
which means citizen of the cosmos, of the world.
And we need a notion of global citizenship.
The cosmopolitan says, we have to begin by recognizing that we're responsible...
collectively, for each other, as citizens are.
But second,
cosmopolitans think that it's okay for people to- to be different.
That they care about everybody,
but not in a way that means they want everybody to be the same, or like them.
Whereas, there's a certain kind of philosophical universalism,
which is often associated with evangelizing religions, where,
"Yeah, we love everybody, but we want them to become like us...
in order to love them properly."
There's a great German proverb which says-
"If you don't want to be my brother, I'll bash your skull in."
And that's- that's the opposite of cosmopolitanism.
It's the universalist who says, "Yeah, I want you to be my brother, but on my terms."
Now, if you think that everybody's entitled to be different, right,
it can produce a kind of cultural relativism, in which you say,
"Whatever they want to do, that's fine.
"There's no place for me standing outside to make any moral judgments,
any ethical judgments, about what they're up to."
So that's kind of one position that I want to distinguish myself from.
I think that it's very important...
that in the global conversation of human beings that cosmopolitans recommend,
one of the things we're doing...
is exchanging ideas about what's right and wrong,
and that it's perfectly appropriate to do so.
I have this privilege of having grown up in a couple of places.
My mother came from England. My father came from Ghana.
And they would never, either of them,
tell us exactly how they met or exactly what it was that drew them to each other,
though my father always said that my mother had a splendidly un-English behind.
That it was-
She actually had a more African behind and he found that attractive. So I don't know.
It happens that in the shanty where I grew up, kinship- that is, the family-
is organized in a very different way from the way that it's organized in England.
We're what anthropologists call matrilineal.
That means that the most important adult male in a child's life...
isn't, um, his mother's husband, that is, his father.
It's his mother's brother, his maternal uncle.
There's a word for that; wofa.
So I have, uh- uh, these eight people in the world,
two- two young women...
and six young men who are my nephews and nieces.
I'm their wofa. And by our tradition, I'm-
Since my sisters don't have any other brothers,
I'm the guy who's responsible for their education.
If anything bad happens to them, I'm supposed to look after them and so on.
Um, now of course, in England, if you have a father, that's his job.
There's a certain kind of universalist who will say,
"One of these has to be correct."
But the cosmopolitan says these are two ways of doing it,
and as long as they do the thing they're supposed to do,
it seems to me absurd to suggest that one has to be better than the other,
or that one should be universalized for any reason.
One thing that people talk about all the time these days is conflicts of values across cultures,
and often people think they're kind of inevitably irreconcilable...
and that they're the root of all the difficulties in the world.
And I- The first way, I think,
you need to work to disentangle all the problems of that way of thinking...
is to recognize the huge diversity of values by which people are guided.
We're different. The cosmopolitan thinks we're entitled to be different,
and that it's permissible that there should be differences in certain ways.
But the cosmopolitan also assumes the fact that there are all these different kinds of values...
and the fact that we can recognize so many of them...
is a recollection of the fact that we're all human beings,
that we share what you might call a moral nature.
[Appiah] Our responsibilities aren't just to a hundred people whom we can interact with and see.
And that's, I think, the great challenge.
Cosmopolitanism, for me, is meant to be an answer to that challenge.
It's meant to say...
you can't retreat to the hundred.
You can't simply be partial to some tiny group...
and simply live out your moral life in that.
That's not- That's not morally permissible.
But you can't abandon your local group either,
because that would take you too far away, I think, from your humanity.
So what we have to do is to learn how to do both.
[Nussbaum] Aristotle had the ingredients of a theory of justice...
that I think is very powerful.
And that is that it's the job of a good political arrangement...
to provide each and every person...
with what they need to become capable...
of living rich and clourishing human lives.
Now, of course, he didn't include all the people,
but he at least had that idea of supporting human capability...
that's the foundation of my own approach.
Now then, in the 17th and 18th centuries,
a very powerful new approach came on the scene,
and that was the social contract approach-
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant.
The social contract approach was inspired...
by the background culture of feudalism,
where all opportunities were distributed unequally...
to people according to their class,
their inherited wealth, and their status.
And so what these theorists said is try to imagine human beings...
stripped of all those inherited advantages,
placed in what they called the "state of nature,"
where they had only their natural body and their physical advantages,
and try to imagine what kind of arrangements the would actually make.
The social contract tradition is, of course,
an academic, philosophical tradition,
but it also has tremendous influence on popular culture...
and our general public life.
Because we- Every day we hear things like,
"Oh, those people don't pay their own way."
Or, supporting some new group of people,
"Well, they'll be a drag on our economy."
So the idea that the good member of society is a producer...
who contributes advantage to everyone, that is very- a very live idea.
And it lies behind the decline of welfare programs in this county.
I think it lies behind many Americans' skepticism about Europe,
about European social democracy.
You hear terms like the "Nanny State,"
as though there were something wrong with the idea of maternal care...
as a conception of what society actually does.
Um, we also see it in another way in images of who the real man is.
The real man is sort of like these people in the state of nature.
He doesn't deeply need anyone.
He isn't bound to anyone by ties of love and compassion.
He's the loner who can go his own way...
and then out of advantage,
he'll choose to have certain kinds of social arrangements.
The theorists of the social contract made certain assumptions that aren't always true.
They assumed that the parties to this contract...
really are roughly equal in physical and mental power.
Now, that was fine...
when you're thinking about adult men with no disabilities,
but as some of them already began to notice,
it doesn't do so well when you think about women,
because women's oppression has always been partly occasioned...
by their physical weakness, compared to men.
And so if you leave out that physical asymmetry,
you may be leaving out a problem that a theory of justice will need to fix.
But it certainly does not do well when we think about justice...
for people with serious physical and mental disabilities.
And in fact, some of the theorists who noticed that said,
"Well, this is a problem, but we'll just have to solve it later.
We'll get the theory first, then we'll work on this problem at some other point."
Well, my thought is that this is not a small problem.
There are a lot of people with serious physical and mental disabilities.
But not only that, but it's all of us-
when we're little children and as we age.
How do you think about justice when you're dealing with bodies...
that are very, very unequal in their ability and their power?
And perhaps even harder,
how do you think about it when you're dealing with...
mental powers that are very, very unequal in their potential?
And I think that this is a really serious political problem.
We have only just began to understand how to educate children with disabilities,
how to think about their political representation,
how to design cities that are open to them.
I mean, this bridge we walked across, a person in a wheelchair can go over that bridge.
But, you know, 50 years ago that would not have been the case.
There would have been steps, and that person could not get to see this beautiful lakeshore.
The capabilities approach, as I've developed it as a theory of justice,
begins with the idea that all human beings...
have an inherent dignity...
and require life circumstances...
that are worthy of that dignity.
The areas of life that seem to me particularly important...
when we think about the capabilities are;
of course life is the very most basic one;
bodily health; bodily integrity;
the development of the senses, imagination and thought;
the development of practical reasoning;
the development of affiliations, both more informal,
in the family and friendship but also in the political community;
the development of the ability to play...
and have recreational opportunities;
the ability to have relationships...
with other creatures and the world of nature;
developing emotional capabilities,
because I think a lot of theories leave out the fact...
that we don't want to have lives that are filled with fear, for example.
In my view, people get together to form a society...
not because they're afraid...
and they want to strike a deal for mutual advantage,
but it's much more out of love...
that they want to join with others in creating a world that's as good as it can be.
[Astra Taylor] So, do you have to go to school to be a philosopher?
[ West ] Oh, God, no. Thank God you don"t have to go to school.
No. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage...
to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
The Socratic imperative of examining yourself requires courage.
William Butler Yeats used to say it takes more courage...
to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
Courage to think critically. You can't talk-
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher,
for any human being, I think in the end.
Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
Plato says philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death.
And by death, what he means is not an event,
but a death in life because there's no rebirth,
there's no change, there's no transformation without death.
And therefore, the question becomes, how do you learn how to die?
And of course, Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay,
"To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die."
You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
I believe that Theodor Adorno was right when he says...
that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.
That gives it an existential emphasis, you see.
So we're really talking about truth as a way of life...
as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions...
that correspond to a set of things in the world.
Human beings are unable...
to ever gain any monopoly on Truth, capital "T"
We might have access to truth, small "t," but they're fallible claims about truth.
We could be wrong. We have to be open to revision and so on.
So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand-in-hand with truth.
This is why so many of the existential thinkers, be they religious,
like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich,
or be they secular, like Camus and Sartre,
that they're accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp...
the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things.
And therefore, there, you talk about truth...
being tied to the way to truth,
because once you give up on the notion...
of fully grasping the way the world is,
you're gonna talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.
How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth?
So the truth talk goes hand-in-hand with talk about the way to truth.
And scientists could talk about this in terms of, you know,
inducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so forth and so on.
Religious folk could talk about this in terms of...
surrendering one's arrogance and pride...
in the face of divine revelation and what have you.
But they're always of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility.
I want all of the rich, historical colorations...
to be manifest in talking about our finitude.
Being born of a woman...
in stank and stench- what I call "funk."
Being introduced to the funk of life in the womb...
and the love-push that gets you out.
Right? And then your body is not just death-
The way Vico talks about it. And here Vico was so much better than Heidegger.
Vico talks about it in terms of being a corpse.
See, Heidegger didn't talk about corpses.
He talks about death. It's still too abstract.
Absolutely. Read the poetry of John Donne.
He'll tell you about corpses that decompose.
Well, see, that's history.
That's the raw funky, stanky stuff of life.
That's what bluesmen do. See, that's what jazzmen do.
See, I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind.
I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas. Therefore for me, music is central.
So when you're talking about poetry, for the most part,
Plato was talking primarily about, uh, words,
whereas I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre,
I talk about rhythms.
You see, for me, music is fundamental.
Philosophy must go to school not only with the poets.
Philosophy needs to go to school with the musicians.
Keep in mind, Plato bans the flute in the republic but not the lyre.
Why? Because the flute appeals...
to all of these various sides of who we are...
given his tripartite conception of the soul;
the rational and the spirited and the appetitive.
And the flute is- appeals to all three of those,
where he thinks the lyre on one string, it only appeals to one and therefore is permissible.
Now of course, the irony is when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do?
Well, he requested the Thracian girl to play music on the flute.
I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure.
And orgiasmic pleasure has its place. Intellectual pleasure has its place. Social pleasure has its place.
Televisual pleasure has its place. You know, I like certain TV shows.
My God, when it comes to music- Oh!
You know, Beethoven's 32nd Sonata, Opus 111.
Unbelievable aesthetic pleasure.
The same would be true for Curtis Mayfield or the Beatles or what have you.
There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied.
It's true that you might be socially isolated,
because you're in the library, at home, and so on,
but you're intensely alive.
In fact, you're much more alive than these folk...
walking these streets of New York in crowds...
with just no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
But if you read, you know, John Ruskin or you read a Mark Twain,
or, my God, Herman Melville,
you almost have to throw the book against the wall...
because you're almost so intensely alive that you need a break.
[Astra Taylor] You get electrified. Exactly.
It's time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life.
Take Moby Dick, throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw von Kleist's work against the wall.
It was just too much. It made Goethe-
It reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping...
after he overcame those suicidal impulses...
with Sorrows of Young Werther in the 1770s...
that made his move toward neoclassicism in Weimar.
There are certain things that make us too alive almost.
It's almost like being too intensely in love. You can't do anything. [Chuckles]
It's hard to get back the Kronos. It's hard to get back the everyday life, you know what I mean?
That chirotic dimension of being in love with another person,
everything is so meaningful, you want to sustain it. It's true.
You can't just do it, you know. You gotta go to the bathroom, have a drink of water. Shit.
For my generation in the mid-'80s when I was in my 20s...
just starting to do politics in a serious way,
it seemed like the only way to-
the only outlet for revolutionay desire was to go to Central America...
and to somehow participate in, or at least observe, their revolutions.
I mean, so a lot of people went to Nicaragua.
I, with my friends, was mostly interested in El Salvador.
But the, um- the thing I realized at a certain point...
was that all we could do is really observe what their revolutions were.
And the defining moment for me came in a meeting in El Salvador...
with a group of, uh, students at the University of El Salvador.
And at a certain point, a friend there said,
"Look, we're really grateful for these North American comrades who come to help us,
"but we really- what would be really best for us...
"is if you all would go home and make revolution in the U.S.
That would really be better than trying to come help us here."
And it was true, of course. I don't think any of these North Americans were particularly helpful...
in Nicaragua and El Salvador, et cetera.
Um, and- But I said at that point-
"You know, Reagan's in the White House.
I have no idea what it would mean to make revolution in the U.S. I just don't have any-"
And then he said, "Look, don't you have mountains in the U.S.?"
And I said, "Yeah. We have mountains." He says, "It's easy.
"You go to the mountains. You start an armed cell. You make revolution."
And I thought, "Oh, shit." You know.
It just didn't correspond to my reality.
Like those notions of constructing the armed cell,
especially constructing the armed cell in the mountains and then sabotaging things.
It didn't- It didn't make any sense at all, so we really had no idea how to do it.
Um, not just we didn't know practically-
like we didn't know which rifles to take up into the mountains.
It's-The whole idea of what it involved was lacking,
um, and required a real conceptual rethinking.
We're stuck conceptually, I think, between two almost cliche ways of thinking revolution today.
On the one hand, we have...
the notion of revolution that involves...
the replacement of a ruling elite...
with another...
better, in many ways, ruling elite.
And that's in fact the form that many of the modern revolutions have taken...
and have posed great benefits for the people, et cetera, but they have not arrived at democracy.
And so that notion of revolution is really discredited, and I think rightly so.
But opposed to that is another notion of revolution,
which I think is equally discredited from exactly the opposite point of view,
which is the notion of revolution- that, in fact hasn't been instituted-
that thinks of revolution as just the removal...
of all of those forms of authority-
state power, the power of capital-
that stop people from expressing their natural abilities to rule themselves.
The question of human nature has long been a thing of political philosophy.
In fact, I'm sure everyone had some stupid evening in college smoking way too much and talking,
where you end up in a discussion where, like, you decide you disagree with your friend...
because she thinks that human nature's evil,
you think human nature's good, and you can't get any further.
I mean, this is- I think that kind of stupidity, I think,
has affected a lot of the history of political philosophy.
And I think the relevant fact for politics-
Running aground.
Shipwrecked.
The relevant fact for politics is really that human nature's changeable.
Human nature isn't good or evil. Human nature is, uh, constituted.
It's constituted by how we act, how we-
The history- Human nature is, in fact, the histoy of habits and practices...
that are the result of- of past struggles,
of past hierarchies, of past victories and defeats.
And so this is, I think, actually-
The key to rethinking revolution is to recognize...
that revolution...
is not just about... a transformation for democracy.
It's really- Revolution really requires...
a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.
Democracy is one of those concepts that seems to me has been...
almost completely corrupted today.
In some cases, it's used to mean...
simply periodic elections with a limited choice of rulers.
In other cases, when one thinks especially in international affairs,
it often means following the will of the United States.
But really, democracy means the rule of all by all.
It means everybody involved in collective self-rule.
You see those turtles over there?
How do you transform human nature so that people will be capable of democracy?
Lenin's solution to this problem is a properly dialectical one.
He thinks- and this is in large part what the Soviets enact-
that there has to be a negation of democracy.
Call it "dictatorship of the proletariat,"
some sort of hegemonic state that would then operate the transition,
that would transform human nature,
then to eventually arrive at the time when people are capable of democracy,
the state's no longer necessary, et cetera.
It's properly the dialectical nature of this that seems to me mistaken.
How do people learn democracy? How does human nature change to become capable of democracy?
Not by its opposite.
It can only be done in a sort of positive development by-
You can only learn democracy by doing it.
And so that that seems to me- the conception-
the only way it seems to me today to be able to rehabilitate...
the conception of revolution.
Revolution then today refuses that dialectic between purgatory and paradise.
It's rather instigating utopia every day.
There's something quite- that feels immediately quite inappropriate...
about talking about revolution on such a-
what would be sort of like... aristocratic almost.
I mean not even bourgeois. Aristocratic location.
You know, rowing on a beautiful pond in a park...
with the rich of New York all around it, it seems like kind of an absurdity.
[Astra Taylor] Well, where would we pick that would be the revolutionary spot?
But then that would be cliche already.
Here, the cliche would be that you'd choose as a visual site...
either- either a scene of poverty...
or a scene of labor and production.
Um,
because then you would show the ones who would benefit from it,
and even the subjects, you know, the actors that would- that would conduct it.
But it strikes me in another way that it might be appropriate to have-
to work against such a conception of revolution...
as, um-
as loss and as deprivation.
It makes little sense to me to say revolution can't be made in the United States...
or revolution can't be made in New York because everyone is too comfortable,
because they have too much to lose, et cetera.
They too have an enormous amount to gain.
When we say a better world is possible,
we don't just mean a better world for those who are least off today.
We mean a better world for all of us.
[Man] This is where we should start feeling at home.
Part of our daily perception of reality...
is that this disappears from our world.
When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it.
Of course rationally you know it's there in canalization and so on,
but at a certain level of your most elementay experience,
it disappears from your world.
But the problem is that trash doesn't disappear.
I think ecology-
The way we approach ecological problematic...
is maybe the crucial field of ideology today.
And I use ideology in the traditional sense of illusory
wrong way of thinking and perceiving reality.
Why? Ideology is not simply dreaming...
about false ideas and so on.
Ideology addresses very real problems, but it mystifies them.
One of the elementay ideological mechanisms, I claim,
is what I call the temptation of meaning.
When something horrible happens,
our spontaneous tendency is to search for a meaning.
It must mean something. You know, like AIDS. It was a trauma.
Then conservatives came and said it's punishment...
for our sinful ways of life, and so on and so on.
Even if we interpret a catastrophe as a punishment,
it makes it easier in a way...
because we know it's not just some terrifying blind force.
It has a meaning.
It's better when you are in the middle of a catastrophe.
It's better to feel that God punished you than to feel that it just happened.
If God punished you, it's still a universe of meaning.
And I think that that's where ecology as ideology enters.
It's really the implicit premise of ecology...
that the existing world...
is the best possible world,
in the sense of it's a balanced world...
which is disturbed through human hubris.
So why do I find this problematic?
Because I think that this notion of nature-
nature as a harmonious, organic,
balanced, reproducing, almost living organism,
which is then disturbed, perturbed,
derailed through human hubris, technological exploitation and so on,
is, I think, a secular version of the religious story of the Fall.
And the answer should be- not that there is no fall- that we are part of nature,
but on the contrary, that there is no nature.
Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb.
Nature is a big series...
of unimaginable catastrophes.
We profit from them. What's our main source of energy today? Oil.
What are we aware- What is oil?
Oil reserves beneath the earth are material remainders...
of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Are we aware- Because we all know that oil- oil- oil is-
oil is composed of the remainders of animal life,
plants and so on and so on.
Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe...
had to occur on Earth?
So that is good to remember.
No. You call this porn? My God.
You can have a half of a hamburger. There is some cheese sandwich.
Then you can have a muffin and some juice.
Ecology will slowly turn, maybe,
into a new opium of the masses...
the way, as we all know, Marx defined religion.
What we expect from religion is a kind of an unquestionable highest authority.
It's God's word, so it is. You don't debate it.
Today, I claim,
ecology is more and more taking over this role...
of a conservative ideology.
Whenever there is a new scientific breakthrough- biogenetic development, whatever-
it is as if the voice...
which warns us not to trespass,
violate a certain invisible limit...
like, "Don't do that. It would be too much."
That voice is today more and more the voice of ecology.
Like, "Don't mess with D.N.A.
Don't mess with nature. Don't do it"-
this basic conservative...
partly ideological mistrust of change.
This is today ecology.
Another myth which is popular about ecology-
namely a spontaneous ideological myth-
is the idea that we Western people...
in our artificial technological environment...
are alienated from immediate natural environments-
that we should not forget...
that we humans are part of the living Earth.
We should not forget that we are not abstract engineers,
theorists who just exploit nature-
that we are part of nature, that nature is our unfathomable, impenetrable background.
I think that that precisely is the greatest danger.
Why? Think about a certain obvious paradox.
We all know in what danger we all are-
global warming, possibility of other ecological catastrophes and so on and so on.
But why don't we do anything about it?
It is, I think, a nice example...
of what in psychoanalysis we call disavowal.
The logic is that of, "I know very well,
but I act as if I don't know."
For example, precisely,
in the case of ecology, I know very well there may be global warming,
everything will explode, be destroyed.
But after reading a treatise on it, what do I do?
I step out. I see- not things that I see now behind me-
that's a nice sight for me-
I see nice trees, birds singing and so on.
And even if I know rationally this is all in danger,
I simply do not believe that this can be destroyed.
That's the horror of visiting sites of a catastrophe like Chernobyl.
You- In a way, we are not evolutionarily-
We are not wired to even imagine something like that.
It's in a way unimaginable.
So I think that what we should do...
to confront properly the threat of ecological catastrophe...
is not all this New Age stuff...
to break out of this technological manipulative mold...
and to found our roots in nature,
but, on the contrary, to cut off even more these roots in nature.
We need more alienation from our life-world,
from our, as it were, spontaneous nature.
We should become more artificial.
We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism,
a kind of a mathematical universe where there is nothing.
There are just formulas, technical forms and so on.
And the difficult thing is to find poetry,
spirituality, in this dimension...
to recreate-if not beauty- then aesthetic dimension...
in things like this, in trash itself.
That's the true love of the world.
Because what is love? Love is not idealization.
Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man,
that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person...
with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points.
And nonetheless, the person's absolute for you.
Everything life- that makes life worth living.
But you see perfection in imperfection itself.
And that's how we should learn to love the world.
True ecologist loves all this.
I thought we should take this walk together.
And, um-
One of the things I wanted to talk about was what it means for us to take a walk together.
When I first asked you about this, um, you told me you take walks, you take strolls.
I do. And...
can you say something about, um, what that is for you?
When do you do it and how do you do it and what words do you have for it?
Well I think that I- I always go for a walk- Mm-hmm.
Probably every day I go for a walk. Every day.
Um, and I always tell people that I'm going for walks.
I use that word.
And most of the disabled people who I know use that term also.
And which environments make it possible for you to take a walk?
I moved to San Francisco largely because it's the most accessible place in the world.
Yes. And part of what's so amazing to me about it...
is that the- the physical access-
the fact that the public transportation is accessible,
there's curb cuts most places.
Almost most places I'll go, there's curb cuts. Buildings are accessible.
And what this does is that it also leads to a social acceptability,
that somehow because- because there's physical access,
there're simply more disabled people out and about in the world.
And so people have learned how to interact with them...
and are used to them in this certain way. Yes.
And so the physical access actually leads to, um,
a social access, an acceptance. Yeah.
It must be nice not to always have to be the pioneer.
Yes, definitely. Definitely. The very first one they meet...
The first disabled person they've ever seen. and having to explain.
Yeah. And yes I do, you know, speak...
and think and talk and move and enjoy life... Yes.
and suffer many of the same heartaches that you do.
Anyway, um,
but what I'm wondering about is, um, moving in social space, right?
Moving- all the movements you can do...
and which help you live and which express you in various ways.
Um, do you feel free to move in all the ways you want to move?
I can go into a coffee shop and actually pick up the cup with my mouth...
and carry it to my table.
But then that- that becomes almost more difficult...
because of the-
just the normalizing standards of our movements... Yes.
and the discomfort that that causes...
when I do things with body parts...
that aren't necessarily what we assume that they're for.
That seems to be even more, um,
hard for people to deal with.
Is that somebody's shoe? Someone's shoe.
I wonder if they can walk without it. Yeah.
I'm just thinking that nobody takes a walk without there being a technique of walking.
Yeah. Nobody goes for a walk...
without there being something that supports that walk, uh, outside of ourselves.
Mm-hmm. Um, and that maybe we have a false idea,
um, that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.
[Sunaura Taylor] Yeah.
It wasn't until I was in my early 20s, about 20 or 21,
that I became aware of disability...
as a political issue.
Um, and that happened largely through discovering the social model of disability...
which is basically-
In disability studies, they have a distinction...
between disability and impairment. Yeah.
So impairment would be my- my body, my embodiment right now.
The fact that I was born with arthrogyposis,
which affects- what the medical world has labeled as arthrogyposis-
Um, but basically that my joints are-are-are-are fused.
My muscles are weaker. I can't move in certain ways.
And this does affect my life in all sorts of situations. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
For instance, you know, there's a plum tree in my backyard.
I can't pick the plums off the plum tree.
I have to wait for them to drop or whatever.
Um, but then- And so there's that- there's that embodiment,
um, our own unique embodiments.
And then there's disability which is basically the-
the... social repression of disabled people.
The fact that disabled people have limited housing options.
We don't have career opportunities.
Um, we're socially isolated.
We're, um-
You know, in many ways, there's a cultural aversion to disabled people.
So would disability be the social organization of impairment?
The disabling effects, basically, of society.
What happened? Did you come in contact with disability activists?
Or did you read certain things? I read a book review actually.
Oh, really? Yeah, I just read a book review.
And when that happened, I lived in Brooklyn.
And I would- I would really try to make myself go out...
and just order a coffee by myself. Yes.
And I would sit for hours beforehand in the park...
just trying to get up the nerve to do that. Oh.
In a way, it's a political protest for me to go in...
and order a coffee and demand help...
simply because in my opinion, help is something that we all need.
Yes. And it's something that is- is, you know, looked down upon...
and... not really taken care of in this society...
when we all- when we all need help... Yes.
and we're all interdependent in all sorts of ways. Yes.
Should we stop and get me something warm?
I don't know, honey. That's pretty fancy.
Let's go find something good.
Yeah, I think that would probably fall off my shoulders.
Although I guess we can try it on.
Basically, that's the back, yeah. That would be-
Yeah.
Okay.
Other arm. Other arm?
And I like it. It's stylish. It's very stylish.
Okay. It's kind of, you know,
sporty and fancy.
It's gonna be a new show, Shopping With Judith Butler.
For the Queer Eye.
Maybe I can just get it while wearing it.
[Clerk] Hey. Hi. We put the sweater on.
Yeah, so I'm actually buying the one that I'm wearing. We just wanna buy it.
Okay. Um, so it's by weight.
Oh, it's by weight? Can we guess?
I can probably just do it for four bucks plus tax. That sounds good.
Here you go.
Can you give me the- the bills first and then give me the change? Sure.
Oh. Oh, I just meant the- Oh, you just want-
Yeah, I just can't hold both at the same time. There you go.
- There you go. - Thanks. Thanks so much.
I think gender and disability converge in a whole lot of different ways.
Yeah. But one thing I think both movements do...
is get us to rethink, um, what the body can do.
There's an essay by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called "What Can a Body Do?"
Uh, and the question is supposed to challenge, um, the traditional ways...
in which we think about bodies. Mm-hmm.
We usually ask, you know, what is a body...
or what is the ideal form of a body...
or, you know, what's the difference between the body and the soul...
and that kind of thing. Yeah.
Uh, but "what can a body do?" is, um- is a different question.
It's- It- It isolates a set of capacities...
and a set of instrumentalities or actions,
and we are kind of assemblages of those things. Mm-hmm.
Um, and I like this idea.
It's- It's not like there's an essence,
and it's not like there's an ideal morphology-
you know, what a body should look like.
It's exactly not that question. Yeah. Yeah.
[Laughs] Or what a body should move like. Mm-hmm.
Um, and one of the things that I found...
in thinking about gender and even violence...
against, uh, sexual minorities or gender minorities-
people whose gender presentation doesn't conform with standard ideals...
of femininity or masculinity-
is that very often, um,
it comes down to, uh,
you know, how people walk, how they use their hips, what they do with their body parts,
uh, what they use their mouth for, [Laughs]
what they use their anus for or what they allow their anus to be used for.
There's a guy in Maine who- I guess he was around 18 years old.
And, uh, he walked with a very, um,
distinct swish.
You know, the hips going one way or another- and very feminine walk.
But one day he was walking to school,
and he was attacked by three of his classmates,
and he was thrown over a bridge and he was killed.
And, um, the question that community had to deal with-
and, indeed, the entire media that covered this event-
was, you know, how could it be that somebody's gait,
that somebody's style of walking...
could engender the desire to kill that person?
And that, you know- that makes me think about the walk in a different way.
I mean, a walk can be a dangerous thing.
I'm just remembering when I was little- when I did walk-
I would be told that I walked Iike a monkey. Ah.
And I think that for a lot of, you know, disabled people,
the violence and the-
the- the sort of- the hatred exists a lot...
in- in- in this, um,
reminding of people...
that our bodies are... going to age...
and are, um, going to die.
And-
You know, in some ways, I wonder also just, you know- just thinking about the monkey comment...
if it is also a level of, um-
and this is just a thought off the top of my head right now-
but just, um,
the- the sort of...
where- where our boundaries lie as a human...
and what becomes non-human, you know.
It makes me wonder whether the person was anti-evolutionary.
Yeah. Maybe they were a creationist.
It's like, "Well, why shouldn't we have some resemblance to the monkey?" I mean-
Well, the monkey's actually always been my favorite animal too.
So actually quite a lot of the time I was flattered.
Exactly. Yeah.
But that- that-
When- When- When in those in-between moments...
of, you know- in between male and-and female...
or in between, um- uh, death and-and health-
when- when do you still count as a human?
My sense is that what's at stake here...
is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency. Mm-hmm.
And I think, you know, when you walk into the coffee shop. Right?
If I can go back to that moment for a moment.
And you- you ask for the coffee,
or you, indeed, even ask for some assistance with the coffee,
um, you're basically posing the question-
Do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? [Laughs] Yeah.
Do we or do we not help each other with- with basic needs?
And are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue...
and not just my personal, individual issue...
or your personal, individual issue?
So, I mean, there's a challenge to individualism...
that happens at the moment in which you ask for some assistance with the coffee cup.
Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, people will take it up...
and say, "Yes, I too live in that world... Yeah.
in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs."
Mm-hmm. You know.
And- And I wanna organize a social, political world on the basis of that recognition.
[West] Romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers.
Can you totalize? Can you make things whole? [Astra Taylor] Right.
Can you create harmony? And if you can't, disappointment.
Disappointment's always at the center. Failure's always at the center.
But where'd the Romanticism come from? Why begin with Romanticism? See, I don't begin with Romanticism.
You remember what Beethoven said on his deathbed, you know.
He said, "I've learned to look at the world...
in all of its darkness and evil and still love it."
And that's not Romantic Beethoven. This is the Beethoven of the String Quartet 131,"
the greatest string quartet ever written- not just in classical music.
But of course it's a European form, so Beethoven is the grand master.
But the string quartet- you go back to those movements,
it's no Romantic wholeness to be shattered, as in the early Beethoven.
He's given up on that, you see.
This is where Chekhov begins. This is where the blues starts. This is where jazz starts.
You think Charlie Parker's upset 'cause he can't sustain a harmony?
He didn't care about the harmony. He was trying to completely ride on the dissonance, ride on the blue notes.
Of course he's got harmony in terms of its interventions here and there.
But why start with this obsession with wholeness?
And if you can't have it, then you're disappointed and wanna have a drink...
and melancholia and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No. You see, the blues- my kind of blues-
begins with catastrophe, begins with the Angel of History in Benjamin's Theses.
You see. It begins with the pillage, the wreckage-
one pile on another.
That's the starting point. The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed.
And black people in America and in the modern world-
given these vicious legacies of white supremacy-
it is how do you generate...
an elegance of earned self-togetherness...
so that you have a stick-to-it-ness...
in the face of the catastrophic and the calamitous...
and the horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous.
See, part of the problem, though, is that, see, when you have a Romantic project,
you're so obsessed with time as loss and time as a taker.
Whereas, as a Chekhovian Christian, I wanna stress, as well,
time as a gift and time as a giver.
So that, yes, it's failure, but how good is a failure? You done some wonderful things.
Now, Beckett could say, you know, "Try again, fail again, fail better."
But why call it failure? I mean, why not say you have a sense of gratitude...
that you're able to do as much as you did?
You're able to love as much and think as much...
and play as much.
Why think you needed the whole thing?
You see what I mean? This is even disturbing about America.
And, of course, America is a Romantic project.
It's paradisal, "City on a Hill" and all this other mess and lies and so on.
I say no, no. America is a very fragile democratic experiment,
predicated on the dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples...
and the enslavement of African peoples and the subjugation of women...
and the marginalization of gays and lesbians.
And it has great potential.
But this notion that somehow, you know, we had it all...
or ever will have it all, it's got to go.
You got to push it to the side.
And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment...
and the language of failure.
And you say- Okay, well, how much have we done?
How have we been able to do it?
Can we do more? Well, in certain situations, you can't do more.
It's like trying to break-dance at 75. You can't do it anymore.
You were a master at 16. It's over.
You can't make love at 80 the way you did at 20. So what?
Time is real.
So the one question that keeps coming up- or a phrase-
is this idea of the meaningful life.
Do you think it is philosophy's duty to speak on this?
A meaningful life? How to live a meaningful life.
Is that even a relevant- Is that even an appropriate question for a philosopher?
No, I think it is. No, I think the problem with meaning is vey important.
Nihilism is a serious challenge.
Meaninglessness is a serious challenge.
Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement.
The problem is, of course, you never reach it, you know.
It's not a static, stationary telos or end or aim.
It's a process that one never reaches. It's Sisyphean.
You're going up the hill looking for better meanings...
or grander, more enabling meanings.
But you never reach it.
Uh, you know, in that sense,
you die without being able to "have" the whole,
in the language of the Romantic discourse.
Let me just jump out here on the corner.
Okay, you'll. Thank you so much. [Man] Thank you very much.
Take good care now. You too.