Before Cornel West (b. 1953) was a celebrity he was a philosopher. I first knew him from his wonderful 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Jervis Anderson in The New Yorker provided one of the first profiles of West I ever read in 1994 (see here).
It was with some consternation that I have watched his rise to broader platforms, first as a public intellectual and then as a celebrity intellectual (e.g. appearing in 2 of the 3 Matrix movies) and finally as a presidential candidate. I have mixed feelings.
But I have deep respect for how West has continued to pursue a vernacular philosophy that can be understood and has clear political significance. He’s almost always inspiring even when you didn’t quite understand everything that was said.
I was delighted to discover that West is giving the 2024 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland. Wikipedia is very useful here in both explaining what the Gifford Lectures are and providing a list of the all the speakers since 1889. It’s a distinguished group, and it’s enormously significant (and astonishing) that he is the first African American to contribute to this series.
West is perhaps an acquired taste. I find him totally engaging both in preacherly delivery and philosophic content. Not all of you will be interested in this (I can hear my father saying, “that don’t show me much”) but a few of you will.
Give him a chance. You might learn more than you intended to.
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I've listened to some Giffords before, but I don't remember any of them ever getting rounds of applause in the middle of a lecture.
You might begin with Lecture Six, the first thirty of minutes of which are powerful.
But there's a beautiful passage that begins during Lecture Two about minute 26:00 when West is talking about the philosophical of political significance of the Black national anthem "Lift every voice and sing" (with an emphasis on the democratizing power of that word EVERY), in which West says:
"One of the great contributions of the Jazz tradition is to democratize a topos (i.e. a place) and democratize the voice. Each and every person is, in some sense, beyond category. In some way unsubsumable. Again, my Christian prejudice is there because it's a dignity and a sanctity that they are made in the image and likeness of an almighty God and therefore have dignity. That sanctity is not negotiable as to color, class, national, religious or non-religious identity. There's something about their status, something about the degree to which they are members of a sentient creaturehood … I'm not sure that I would show up for an encampment for the vermin, but I'm showing up for encampment for my very, very precious and priceless Palestinian brothers and sisters as I would for any group undergoing that, be they Armenians or Jews."
And the sober Scottish audience applauds.