Beautiful minds- not very telegenic though

The Guardian published an article Beautiful minds that addressed what it is like to do a film about philosophy and philosophers. They picked as their subject the philosopher Richard Rorty. Now, I am very much not a fan of Rorty. I tend to think much of his work is almost not even worth criticizing.

I have been known a few times to lament on the fact that tere are not enough philosophers in the public eye, and there are even fewer philosophers who are glamorized in the mass media. When you ask people who the last philosopher they saw in a film inevitably they answer something as dumb as Ethan Hawke's character in Reality Bites or something like that. He is a philosopher because he seemed bored with life and he was show reading Heiddegger on the movie.

Now the reason why it is hard to portray a philosopher is because philosophers don't really do much. They have pencils and ideas. So to make Rorty look interesting they resorted to showing flowers. I am not sure I understand why even after reading their explanation.

Of course the author points out, and they hardly exploit this, that many important philosophers have had facinating lives. Socrates, Descartes, and Wittgenstein for example had been soldiers. Russell was a peace activist, decended from a prestigious political family. Chomsky, not exactly a philosopher, but close enough has been involved in so many things it is dizzying, has had many films made about him. Kripke, the most importatn philosopher this century lives a life so interesting he has been satirized in a novel. But enough about philosophers.

What philosophy is often about is much more telegenic than filmaker give credit for. The problem is that much of philosophy sounds (and often is) hard, so before you can make something visual, you have to understand it. The Matrix portrayed a few elementary philosophical concepts amazingly well. Something like this, but with a philosopher doing the talking can portray what philsophy is about. There are all these anthologies out now about the Matrix, Buffy the vampire slayer, and even the Simpsons as topics for philosophers. But even if you don't take all that seriously, which I can understand, there is still so much to work with.

Much of philosophy is thought experiments. What if the world were a certain way? What if wer were brains being maipulated by evil scientists? What if we lived in a world with a different government? What if we lived in a world with different laws? What about different laws of nature? What if we lived in a world with different laws of logic? What if we really had souls? Many of these questions are waiting for some good visual effects to bring them to light in to sharper focus.

I suspect that the author both chose the wrong philosopher, the wrong topic, and had too poor an understanding of philosophy to understand how to put it on to film.

Give me a call next time you need advice on this, OK?