An Education from Cornel

I graduated from Yale almost 15 years ago with a BA (in something called American Studies). I am currently getting my education from Cornel.

Cornel West.

West, to me, is the most important public Christian intellectual working in the nation today. He's a philosopher by training, with a background in American pragmatism in the tradition of John Dewey. Pragmatism is a nonfoundational approach to knowledge that treats knowledge as contingent and conditional, but avoids the fatalism and cynicism often associated with postmodernism. It suggests that truth is "found" through one's participation in a community's knowledge--knowledge that is borne out in its collective practice and experience. It's also a philosophical position uniquely (in my view) sympathetic to socially-engaged Christianity.

But it's not West's fondness for John Dewey alone that makes me like him--it's his ability to blend and sythesize thought worlds that makes him compellling. In a single talk, he's likely to quote Aristophanes, Tennessee Williams, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jay Z, and Jesus Christ. And more often than not, West does come around to Jesus. One snippet, from the preface to his book Prophesy Deliverance!, gives a sense of the dialectical energy and deep religious commitment that is characteristic of his thought:

Those who read my book primarily as an attempt to provide a tension-ridden synthesis of prophetic Christianity and progressive Marxism through the prism of black oppression and resistance have a point, but they miss my deeper point:  to transform abstract talk about God and suffering into concrete enactments of existential and political struggles with no human guarantee for ultimate victory.  In short, the human dialectics of death and desire, extinction and eros, failures and foibles are the basic movement in Prophesy Deliverance!  Hence, hope—human hope—is the basic theme of the text.  But it is a hope severed from bitterness and bigotry, cruelty and cynicism, revenge and resentment.  To put it bluntly, it is a hope grounded in Christian love.

Get through what appears to be academic jargon to the main point: West cares about suffering, political consciousness and action, and existential hope. That's not a bad definition of the Christian life, well-lived.

West embraces philosophical and theological positions on the leading edge of postmodern thought, but he injects these views (and, by extension, himself) into the public sphere—a place where the complexities of the human condition both wreak havoc on tidy intellectual constructs and pick apart the finest inconsistencies between the theory and the embodied personality of the theoretician. This willingness to expose himself to public ridicule or praise—on hip-hop radio stations, in the pulpit, and in the classroom—is a testimony to the integrity of West’s intellectual project.  In the public sphere—especially in the postmodern United States with its keen awareness and hunger for irony and exploitation, a remarkable amount of courage is required to articulate complex, coherent ideas that take full account of human suffering but maintain a constructive message of hope. 

I "consume" as much West as I can. Mostly, these days, that means listening to his weekly radio show with Tavis Smiley called Smiley & West. I'm catching up on old shows this week and I recommend the program that features his conversation with comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, as much for the interchange with a 16 year-old about the Gaza flotilla as for the conversation with Maher. Listen to the July 15th show here.