system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do you think the School of Life video series on philosophy oversimplifies and idealizes philosophers and their works?

I've generally enjoyed the philosophy videos -- I think I've seen them all now. Most of the ideas and philosophers were already familiar, to me, at least a little. In many cases, I ended up thinking, "Philosopher X is much more inspiring, reasonable and easy to understand than I had previously given him credit for." But, I wondered if the author of the video had over-polished the philosopher and philosophy.

When I saw the video about Thoreau (in the political theory series), I became much more skeptical about the whole series. I recently read a biography of Thoreau. The School of Life video about Thoreau seems extremely naive, at best. The short version of my concern -- Thoreau didn't reason out anything. He merely did what he liked to do. He acted on impulse when he declined not to pay his poll tax. The idea that government should be small and that citizens should decline to fund it if they didn't like its actions was well-known by then. He wasn't reclusive -- he dined with Emerson's family, or his own family, almost every evening. He planted beans and caught some fish from the pond, but he was not self-sufficient by any means. He produced very little of his own food. His writings superficially sounded philosophical but they were more poetical and polemical, and were written for the purpose of impressing Emerson, possibly impressing some girls, and selling books. He actually wanted and needed to make money, though he wasn't fond of conventional employment.

I don't expect the authors of The School of Life to say all of this in a short video, but I wonder how much I've been misled by some of the other videos. Your comments?
gpt
I don't think I've ever seen a *good* philosophy video from School of Life. Their descriptions of philosophers aren't just facile and inaccurate, sometimes they're downright *offensive*. In the Foucault video de Botton implies that the reason Foucault 'hates the bourgeois' is because they remind him of his father! And they seem to miss out on like, the thing Foucault repeats over and over, that you can't just 'get out' of power relations by being aware of them. So de Botton ends up saying things like "Foucault was trying to create a Marxist anarchist utopia" when it's clear that Foucault was aggressively resistant to making sweeping claims about what the "right" political aim should be.