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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West
"My proposed aim is both to elaborate West’s position on social justice and to advance a penetrating critique of some of the concrete issues on social justice that West examines in light of his subscription to pragmatism, existentialism, Marxism, and Black prophetic Christianity.
In general, discussions of social justice are formulated responses to the question: “What kind(s) of institutional arrangements and configurations are necessary in society for the existence and promotion of human dignity ?” Fundamentally, this question is about the type(s) of social arrangements that should regulate the distribution of societal benefits and burdens in a manner compatible with justice, thereby promoting social stability and upholding human dignity. Justice in this sense simply means fairness and equity. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have been grappling with this question in one form or another. More recently, noted social and political philosopher John Rawls has responded to the demands of the question by positing an ideal condition, called a veil of ignorance, from which rational agents in an original position of equality would establish a system of justice that would uphold and promote human dignity. The original position is one in which the parties to the discussion and subsequent agreement about the principle of justice they should adopt, prior to establishing a system of justice, are ignorant of whatever advantages or disadvantages they each may have before deliberating and hence choosing a principle of justice. For Rawls, this condition of ignorance is necessary to prevent each individual member’s contingent situation entering into and thus influencing the deliberation and subsequent outcome in terms of their choice of principle. The principle of justice that follows upon this procedure of ignorance is what Rawls calls “justice as fairness.” Others such as Marx, on the other hand, have approached the issue from the backdrop of an already unjust (read unfair) status quo in the sense of bourgeois appropriation of capital and exploitation of labor. And for Marx, such a status quo ought to be dismantled by means of a violent proletarian revolution for justice even to begin to be achieved. In significant ways, Cornel West’s philosophical preoccupations, both theoretical and practical, are an attempt to address this question. And West approaches the task from the presupposition of the existence of injustice in society that he thinks must be eradicated to uphold human dignity.
From a moral point of view, a society is unjust if, among other things, both the mechanism that it establishes to administer the distribution of benefits and burdens and the very distribution itself disadvantage some of its members. Put otherwise, the society has a legal (or constitutional) framework in terms of which its institutions are established and governed, yet, concerning the establishment and distribution of benefits and burdens, the legally sanctioned institutional arrangements disadvantage some members of the society. It is important to stress the legality of the institutional framework through which some members of society are disadvantaged. What this shows is that it does not follow from the fact that a social arrangement is legally sanctioned that it is morally acceptable. Well-known examples are slavery and gender discrimination. Significantly, the lived reality of the disadvantaged members is tantamount to social degradation and devaluation. And this constitutes a grave moral infraction against them because it violates the principle of dignity that befits them as persons."
"West’s preoccupation with social justice may be traced back to his formative years in Sacramento, California. Growing up in a segregated part of Sacramento, West began to be conscious of the disparities in society at a very early age. There was no library where he lived, so that access to reading material was by way of a bookmobile.5 West reports that his first exposure to philosophy was at about age thirteen or fourteen through material on Kierkegaard that he had obtained from the bookmobile. What struck him the most about Kierkegaard’s writing, he says, was Kierkegaard’s struggle with “a certain level of melancholia,” a struggle with a profound sadness, sorrow, and terror about the human condition. Kierkegaard’s preoccupation “resonated deeply”6 with him particularly because of Kierkegaard’s endeavor both to grapple with the issue of “what it means to be human” and “to come to terms with despair and dread … that was inescapable” (Osborne 1996, 128). Considering that at this teenage period West’s experiences were limited largely to the segregated part of Sacramento, one can only surmise that Kierkegaard’s writing resonated with him because it offered him a philosophical representation of the social and existential situation of Blacks in the United States at the time. Through the writing of Kierkegaard, in other words, West was able to give meaning to the pervasive sorrow, sadness, and terror that enveloped his community and by extension the rest of Black America. In this way, Kierkegaard’s writing enabled West to relate philosophical reflection and speculation to the existentially concrete situation of the human being. It is in light of this influence of Kierkegaard’s writing that West later will characterize the lived reality of African Americans in the United States as the absurd, in the existentialist sense, with the society itself being the grand theater in which the absurd is enacted. By the absurd West means the Black experience of disappointment, despair, dread (or anxiety), disease, and (social) death owing to Black subordinate status, the latter of which derives from anti-Black racism."
"The Black church has always been concerned with Black oppression and liberation. Or, as West puts it, the Black church has as its central concern “the problem of evil and the confrontation with social misery” [...] What this means is that the Black church was central to attuning West’s mind, as it did that of most Blacks, to Black social misery owing to White–supremacist policies. The Black church articulated Black experience of vilification, degradation, and suffering and put forward critiques of the society as it also provided African Americans with the mechanism to remake themselves in the context of their social condition. It is in light of this fact about the role and significance of the Black church in his intellectual life that West says that the Black church is “fundamental” to his intellectual development. And it is in this context that we should see West’s own philosophic quest as, among other things, an attempt “to make sense of the world”."
"During his teenage years in Sacramento and prior to attending Harvard for his undergraduate studies, West was exposed to Marxist literature disseminated by the Black Panther Party through the writings of Black revolutionary writers such as Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, and Franz Fanon. And later in college he studied the views of Karl Marx and other Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci."
"West’s exposure to American pragmatism was as an undergraduate student at Harvard. However, it was as a graduate student at Princeton University, under the influence of Richard Rorty, that he developed an acute interest in Dewey’s version of the doctrine. What appealed to West was Dewey’s preoccupation with the plight of the socially underprivileged and disadvantaged in nineteenth-century United States during the industrial revolution. West drew upon Dewey’s brand of pragmatism and synthesized it with features of his Christian background and his Marxist orientation to define his own philosophical outlook, which he calls prophetic pragmatism."
"The ethical consideration that informs West’s concern with social justice is not a variant of the Divine Command theory. On the contrary, we find a secular ethics at the heart of West’s concern, an ethics that I go on to describe as humanistic."
"He says, pragmatism, as a philosophical movement begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson, marked a radical departure in the United States from the dominant philosophy in Europe as reflected in the writings of the continental rationalists and the so-called British empiricists. The concern of rationalists and empiricists alike was epistemological; specifically, to subvert skepticism by providing a sound foundation for knowledge. The foundation was sought in the criterion of certainty. The point of deviance between these two competing schools, however, was over the method by which the purported certainty could be attained. For the rationalists it was through the employment of reason unaided by experience, whereas for the empiricists it was by means of sensation. What is significant is that this issue dogged philosophy with no sign of a resolution. Besides, there was also a metaphysical import to the whole enterprise in that the quest for certainty was a quest for apprehending (i.e., attaining knowledge of) the nature of reality. Thus, the issue between the rationalists and the empiricists was about the method by which knowledge of reality could be attained—whether through the employment of reason unaided by experience or through atomistic sensation. According to West, this unresolvable issue that engaged the European philosophers provided, indeed constituted, the point of departure for pragmatism, the only authentic Western philosophy native to America. What then does pragmatism advocate ?
Pragmatism, says West, in its historical evasion of epistemologically centered philosophy, is “a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action.” Or, better still, pragmatism advances “a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises” (1989, 5). It is this characteristic of pragmatism, namely, of its having as an end knowledge as it relates to action, that clearly distinguishes the doctrine from European philosophy, the latter of which was concerned either with knowledge as such or with being as an extrasensory phenomenon."
"West characterizes Dewey as “the greatest of the American pragmatists” (ibid., 69) because, among other things, Dewey’s pragmatism expresses “a mode of historical consciousness that highlights the conditioned and circumstantial character of human existence in terms of changing societies, cultures, and communities” (69–70). West goes on to elaborate his meaning in a note explaining the difference between the pragmatism of William James and that of Dewey, saying that Dewey’s is concerned with “the social and historical forces that shape the creative individual” (ch. 3, note 1). The central causal agents of change that help shape the individual are the economic structures that had emerged in a nineteenth-century society undergoing rapid industrialization. Inversely proportionate to the rapid industrialization of society and the tremendous economic success of the industrial capitalist investors was a sharp decline in the living conditions of the new industrial working class that consisted largely of immigrants and African Americans. Put baldly, the industrial working class experienced economic poverty and social misery at a time when the capitalist investors and organizations were experiencing huge economic successes. West sums up the socioeconomic reality of the industrial underclass as “principally that of economic deprivation, cultural dislocation, and personal disorientation” (80). It is directly to this crisis of the human condition that Dewey’s pragmatism speaks. Thus, in a sense, Dewey’s pragmatism, in its bid to formulate strategies to ameliorate the predicament thus described, is a form of social activism.
West lists three ways in which Dewey attempted to address the socioeconomic crisis of nineteenth-century America. (1) Through journalism Dewey endeavored to popularize critical intelligence (or critical thinking) so as to be able to educate the masses. (2) Dewey affiliated himself with influential middle-class humanitarian organizations that worked with the underclass in a bid “to assimilate and acculturate immigrants into the American mainstream.” And (3) Dewey exercised leadership over a rapidly growing teaching profession both by practical examples and through his writing (ibid., 79–80).
It is arguable of course that Dewey succeeded in these ventures. For example, West points out that while Dewey’s commitment to cultivate critical intelligence, especially in children, led him to set up a laboratory school in Chicago, popularly known as the “Dewey School,” his endeavor to take philosophy to the people through the newspaper was scarcely helpful to his cause. Dewey outraged the mainstream media, which lampooned his idea, and he was unwilling to engage them in any manner whatsoever. True, Dewey was involved directly with humanitarian groups and organizations that were concerned about the social and economic condition of the industrial working class, as attested to by his participation in Hull House (founded by Jane Addams). According to Richard J. Bernstein, “Dewey mixed with workers, union organizers, and political radicals of all sorts.”3 Yet Dewey’s reluctance to engage the very core middle-class establishment from which his income and status as a professional originated seems to have cast a shadow on his social activism. Thus, although he believed that social and economic redemption for the underclass could be obtained through a democratization process facilitated by education, he was most unwilling to invest the hard capital, using his professional career as collateral, for this end.
West contrasts Dewey’s unwillingness to risk his professional career in support of his political beliefs with the willingness of his friend and former classmate Henry Carter Adams to do just that. Adams was dismissed from his teaching position at Cornell University because of his public support of the Knights of Labor. What is significant is that Adams had considerable difficulty securing a job because of his socialist beliefs (ibid., 80). Yet this difficulty in obtaining a job did not quell his desire to give expression to his political beliefs after he had landed a job. To be sure, Dewey did try to exercise leadership over his professional colleagues by even castigating them for their complacency, indolence, and ivory-tower mentality. As West puts it, “Dewey castigated the ivory-tower scholar frightened by the dirty world of politics and afraid of the consequences of active engagement” (82).4 But when one considers that Dewey just was not prepared to face the consequences of subscribing to a political belief, his criticism of his professional colleagues seems to ring hollow."
"In a similar Deweyan spirit, West’s philosophy (or his pragmatism) is unquestionably a form of cultural criticism and social activism. His principal motivation in outlining his philosophical views in Evasion (1989) is, in his words, “my disenchantment with intellectual life in America and my own demoralization regarding the political and cultural state of the country.” In the intellectual sphere, West is disenchanted by what he describes as “the transformation of highly intelligent liberal intellectuals into tendentious neoconservatives owing to crude ethnic identity-based allegiances and vulgar neonationalist sentiments.” On the political sphere, West is concerned about and disappointed with “the professional incorporation of former New Left activists who now often thrive on a self-serving careerism while espousing rhetoric of oppositional politics of little serious integrity.” And on the cultural domain, he is “depressed about the concrete nihilism in working-class and underclass American communities—the pervasive drug addiction, suicides, alcoholism, male violence against women, white violence against black, yellow, and brown people, and the black criminality against others, especially other black people” [...]
There can be no doubt but that these concerns about the human predicament in contemporary America situate West squarely within the pragmatist tradition of Emerson and Dewey. Some parallelisms are certainly in order. For example, West’s avowed interest in the plight of the underclass parallels Dewey’s concern with the new industrial underclass in nineteenth-century United States. West’s declared disappointment with intellectual colleagues is but a reflection or a replay of Dewey’s indictment of Dewey’s own professional colleagues. And West’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America is reminiscent of Dewey’s affiliation with unions and organized labor.
As with Dewey, West gives a practical use to philosophy by deploying it to resolving concrete issues that affect human beings in their day-to-day struggles."
"One existentialist concern that West raises in Race Matters (1994) is what he describes as the pervasive sense of utter meaninglessness, despondency, self-loathing and impotence that permeates Black America, especially its youth [...] It is this horrifying phenomenon that West characterizes as nihilism in Black America. Black nihilism, in short, is a life without hope that constitutes a severe threat to the very survival of Black America. And it is precisely because of the severe threat that nihilism poses for Black America that West says nihilism needs to be confronted.
West identifies two main causes of this nihilism: (1) the preponderance of market morality in America and (2) the serious and deleterious crisis of leadership in the Black community. Concerning the first, the preponderance of market morality, West contends that the market forces promote, even advocate, an ethic of consumerism that subordinates, instrumentalizes, or objectifies others as a means of pleasure for one’s own profit. Another way of putting this point is to say that market morality commodifies human beings, thereby treating them as a means to an end, the end being profit, rather than (in Kant’s well-known terminology) ends in themselves.9 This morality construes bestial hedonism as a virtue, for it takes the end in life to be indulgence in the seductive transient pleasures of the body. Furthermore, and more importantly, this market morality is transmitted through the airwaves and dominates popular culture—radio, television, movies, and so on—thereby creating a form of environmental and psychological pollution for all who exposed to the American environment. It is in this regard that the market morality is a partial cause of Black nihilism. For, to the extent that Blacks in the United States coexist with others in the environment whose atmosphere is overwhelmed by this pollution, their behavior is thus environmentally and psychologically determined by the influences of the market morality. In other words, there is a form of environmental and psychological determinism according to which the behavior of Blacks, and all others in the American atmosphere, is a direct consequence of the preponderance of market forces. Among Blacks, in particular, this determinism gives rise to either of two forms of behavior, depending on the economic (and hence social) stratum of society to which the individual belongs: (1) excessive, tasteless, and nauseating consumerism, if the individual belongs to the Black middle class ; or (2) drugs, crime, alcoholism, and violence, if the individual belongs to the underclass. Since the majority of Blacks in American society occupy the lower stratum in the socioeconomic ladder, it is therefore among them that the nihilistic behavior is most virulent. The reason is that they cannot be active participants in the market forces that shape their lives and to which they nonetheless are exposed constantly. Thus they cannot enjoy the seeming benefits, albeit banal, that market morality glorifies and presents as the virtues of self-worth and personal success. The individual’s perception of his or her failure to experience via the market medium the bodily titillations glorified and worshiped by market morality occasions a sense of utter despair and meaninglessness, an existential anguish. And the net result of such anguish is crime, drugs, alcoholism, and violence. In sum, we have in the Black community, particularly among the underclass, self-destructiveness brought on by a sense of utter powerlessness.
In saying this West is not excusing the immoral conduct of some Blacks or attempting to absolve them from personal responsibility for their actions. He clearly states that “black murderers and rapists should go to jail” [...] a position that would be difficult to maintain if he subscribed to, because it is incompatible with, rigid determinism. On the other hand, he notes that failing to offer a causal explanation of the conduct of Blacks in terms of the socioeconomic forces that impinge upon their very being, forces that affect individual decisions, and yet condemn them, is to ascribe blame or responsibility to them unfairly. And it is this charge of unfairness that West brings against the new Black conservatives for what he considers their unevenhanded indictment of Black behavior and their argument for the wholesale dismantling of those social programs upon which individuals in the Black underclass depend for sheer survival."
"West’s point is that post-civil rights Black leadership has failed to undertake a critical discussion of issues, actual and potential, affecting the Black community with a view toward putting forth concrete solutions, even in a preemptive way, to some of the ills that wreak havoc in the community. Among these ills are the disintegration of the Black family, sexism and violence toward Black women, homophobia, and xenophobia.
According to West, nowhere was this absence of Black leadership voice more pronounced than in the 1992 Senate Confirmation Hearings of Clarence Thomas, then President George Herbert Walker Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Among other things, West argues, the Black leadership was silent on the issue of Thomas’ (in)competence and hence (un)suitability to serve in the Supreme Court; they did not examine Thomas’ proven track record in any of the offices in which he had served prior to being nominated, nor did they even discuss Thomas’ character, especially in light of the charge of sexual harassment that Anita Hill had brought against him during the Confirmation Hearings, either to absolve him from or convict him of wrongdoing.
West attributes this immoral silence of the Black leadership to what he describes as racial reasoning, a Black “closing-ranks mentality” [...] that demands that Blacks should rally behind their fellow Blacks in a racist society where the opportunity to serve in such a highly respected capacity is rare. Thus, even if the leadership had reservations about the suitability of Thomas to serve as the representative of the Black intellectual leadership in matters of jurisprudence in the highest court of the land, they nevertheless allowed racial reasoning to override their better, honest, and truthful judgment about Thomas’ very (un)qualification for the office. And this, says West, is “most disturbing,” for it reflects a “failure of nerve of [the] black leadership” [...]
More generally, concerning Black leadership in dealing with the threat of nihilism in the Black community, West remarks that contemporary political leaders seem too anxious to call attention to themselves, in particular to their being successful in America, rather than to the afflictions of the less fortunate. And he deems this aspect of current Black leadership a mark of moral degeneracy [...] since for such leadership politics functions instrumentally to the realization of each leader’s own individual selfish ends."
"West laments the nonexistence of quality individuals of the likes of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer."
"Historically, such leadership functioned as custodians of traditional cultural (or institutional) pillars of strength and support in the community—the church, schools, and mosques and other civic organizations. These institutions served as a source of empowerment, transmitting and reinforcing values in the community. Thus, it was in and through these institutions that individuals drew support to affirm their self-worth. Both the centrality and the vitality of these institutions in Black communal life during trying times of economic deprivation, political exclusion, and social anguish were owing to effective leadership. The erosion of the influence of these institutions in present-day Black communal life, but particularly among youths, added to the self-serving kind of political leadership in the Black community, cannot but count as major factors for the moral crisis among Black youths."
"It is worth noting West’s insistence that effective leadership of the kind described must build race-transcending coalitions. The point here is not simply that West is invoking a historical accident of the kind witnessed in the social movement of Martin Luther King Jr. Rather, and more importantly, he sees such a coalition as a pragmatic measure to anchor the moral crisis in the Black community to the economic reality of American life that is its partial cause. This point can be expressed alternatively as follows. To the extent that the economic circumstances of the Black community, felt disproportionately by its youth, are determined directly or indirectly by White-owned corporate institutions over which those communities have no control, the only way to alter those economic circumstances and hence partly to resolve the existential crisis in the Black community is to involve White and other (usually liberal) like-minded individuals concerned with justice and fairness in exerting pressure on those corporate institutions to respond to the affliction that they bring on the powerless."
"Central to this politics, says West, is “an affirmation of one’s self-worth fueled by the concern of others” [...] In other words, one’s self-worth is affirmed through and measured by one’s concern about the predicament of others.
West’s view of a politics of conversion echoes the biblical exhortation for a person to love her or his neighbor as herself or himself."
"An intellectual who fails to engage in a critical discussion of the issues affecting his or her community is committing a moral crime against the community because there can be no solution to the ills that afflict the community in the absence of such discussion."
"If I have a sense of self-worth, then I am more likely to value the personhood of others than if I do not. Conversely, if I lack a sense of self-worth then, I would devalue others. From this psychological point of view, an important remedy to the nihilistic threat to Black America is to promote self-love, in the sense of self-esteem, in youths."
"The relative ease with which West traverses traditional disciplinary boundaries in some ways is evidence that these boundaries are largely artificial and only promote intellectual parochialism. For West, a significant consequence of such parochialism is that it disconnects the intellectual life from praxis. And in his view this disconnect is inconsistent with the role of the intellectual, especially the humanistic scholar, to society."
"The establishments to which humanism is reacting may be religious; economic, in the sense of the etherealization and transcendence of market forces that affect the life of the ordinary individual and over which he or she has no control; or political, in the sense of the primordial and immanent institutions of power that determine the lives of ordinary citizenry but over which the ordinary citizen has no control. The net effect of this controlling influence of the institutions on individual life is that it renders the individual powerless and thus dispossesses her or him of the agency to determine the direction of her or his life. Humanism thus seeks to liberate the individual from such dominating and oppressive forces that deprive her or him of individuality so that she or he can realize her or his potential."
-Clarence Johnson, Cornel West and Philosophy. The Quest for Social Justice, Routledge, 2003.
"My proposed aim is both to elaborate West’s position on social justice and to advance a penetrating critique of some of the concrete issues on social justice that West examines in light of his subscription to pragmatism, existentialism, Marxism, and Black prophetic Christianity.
In general, discussions of social justice are formulated responses to the question: “What kind(s) of institutional arrangements and configurations are necessary in society for the existence and promotion of human dignity ?” Fundamentally, this question is about the type(s) of social arrangements that should regulate the distribution of societal benefits and burdens in a manner compatible with justice, thereby promoting social stability and upholding human dignity. Justice in this sense simply means fairness and equity. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have been grappling with this question in one form or another. More recently, noted social and political philosopher John Rawls has responded to the demands of the question by positing an ideal condition, called a veil of ignorance, from which rational agents in an original position of equality would establish a system of justice that would uphold and promote human dignity. The original position is one in which the parties to the discussion and subsequent agreement about the principle of justice they should adopt, prior to establishing a system of justice, are ignorant of whatever advantages or disadvantages they each may have before deliberating and hence choosing a principle of justice. For Rawls, this condition of ignorance is necessary to prevent each individual member’s contingent situation entering into and thus influencing the deliberation and subsequent outcome in terms of their choice of principle. The principle of justice that follows upon this procedure of ignorance is what Rawls calls “justice as fairness.” Others such as Marx, on the other hand, have approached the issue from the backdrop of an already unjust (read unfair) status quo in the sense of bourgeois appropriation of capital and exploitation of labor. And for Marx, such a status quo ought to be dismantled by means of a violent proletarian revolution for justice even to begin to be achieved. In significant ways, Cornel West’s philosophical preoccupations, both theoretical and practical, are an attempt to address this question. And West approaches the task from the presupposition of the existence of injustice in society that he thinks must be eradicated to uphold human dignity.
From a moral point of view, a society is unjust if, among other things, both the mechanism that it establishes to administer the distribution of benefits and burdens and the very distribution itself disadvantage some of its members. Put otherwise, the society has a legal (or constitutional) framework in terms of which its institutions are established and governed, yet, concerning the establishment and distribution of benefits and burdens, the legally sanctioned institutional arrangements disadvantage some members of the society. It is important to stress the legality of the institutional framework through which some members of society are disadvantaged. What this shows is that it does not follow from the fact that a social arrangement is legally sanctioned that it is morally acceptable. Well-known examples are slavery and gender discrimination. Significantly, the lived reality of the disadvantaged members is tantamount to social degradation and devaluation. And this constitutes a grave moral infraction against them because it violates the principle of dignity that befits them as persons."
"West’s preoccupation with social justice may be traced back to his formative years in Sacramento, California. Growing up in a segregated part of Sacramento, West began to be conscious of the disparities in society at a very early age. There was no library where he lived, so that access to reading material was by way of a bookmobile.5 West reports that his first exposure to philosophy was at about age thirteen or fourteen through material on Kierkegaard that he had obtained from the bookmobile. What struck him the most about Kierkegaard’s writing, he says, was Kierkegaard’s struggle with “a certain level of melancholia,” a struggle with a profound sadness, sorrow, and terror about the human condition. Kierkegaard’s preoccupation “resonated deeply”6 with him particularly because of Kierkegaard’s endeavor both to grapple with the issue of “what it means to be human” and “to come to terms with despair and dread … that was inescapable” (Osborne 1996, 128). Considering that at this teenage period West’s experiences were limited largely to the segregated part of Sacramento, one can only surmise that Kierkegaard’s writing resonated with him because it offered him a philosophical representation of the social and existential situation of Blacks in the United States at the time. Through the writing of Kierkegaard, in other words, West was able to give meaning to the pervasive sorrow, sadness, and terror that enveloped his community and by extension the rest of Black America. In this way, Kierkegaard’s writing enabled West to relate philosophical reflection and speculation to the existentially concrete situation of the human being. It is in light of this influence of Kierkegaard’s writing that West later will characterize the lived reality of African Americans in the United States as the absurd, in the existentialist sense, with the society itself being the grand theater in which the absurd is enacted. By the absurd West means the Black experience of disappointment, despair, dread (or anxiety), disease, and (social) death owing to Black subordinate status, the latter of which derives from anti-Black racism."
"The Black church has always been concerned with Black oppression and liberation. Or, as West puts it, the Black church has as its central concern “the problem of evil and the confrontation with social misery” [...] What this means is that the Black church was central to attuning West’s mind, as it did that of most Blacks, to Black social misery owing to White–supremacist policies. The Black church articulated Black experience of vilification, degradation, and suffering and put forward critiques of the society as it also provided African Americans with the mechanism to remake themselves in the context of their social condition. It is in light of this fact about the role and significance of the Black church in his intellectual life that West says that the Black church is “fundamental” to his intellectual development. And it is in this context that we should see West’s own philosophic quest as, among other things, an attempt “to make sense of the world”."
"During his teenage years in Sacramento and prior to attending Harvard for his undergraduate studies, West was exposed to Marxist literature disseminated by the Black Panther Party through the writings of Black revolutionary writers such as Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, and Franz Fanon. And later in college he studied the views of Karl Marx and other Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci."
"West’s exposure to American pragmatism was as an undergraduate student at Harvard. However, it was as a graduate student at Princeton University, under the influence of Richard Rorty, that he developed an acute interest in Dewey’s version of the doctrine. What appealed to West was Dewey’s preoccupation with the plight of the socially underprivileged and disadvantaged in nineteenth-century United States during the industrial revolution. West drew upon Dewey’s brand of pragmatism and synthesized it with features of his Christian background and his Marxist orientation to define his own philosophical outlook, which he calls prophetic pragmatism."
"The ethical consideration that informs West’s concern with social justice is not a variant of the Divine Command theory. On the contrary, we find a secular ethics at the heart of West’s concern, an ethics that I go on to describe as humanistic."
"He says, pragmatism, as a philosophical movement begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson, marked a radical departure in the United States from the dominant philosophy in Europe as reflected in the writings of the continental rationalists and the so-called British empiricists. The concern of rationalists and empiricists alike was epistemological; specifically, to subvert skepticism by providing a sound foundation for knowledge. The foundation was sought in the criterion of certainty. The point of deviance between these two competing schools, however, was over the method by which the purported certainty could be attained. For the rationalists it was through the employment of reason unaided by experience, whereas for the empiricists it was by means of sensation. What is significant is that this issue dogged philosophy with no sign of a resolution. Besides, there was also a metaphysical import to the whole enterprise in that the quest for certainty was a quest for apprehending (i.e., attaining knowledge of) the nature of reality. Thus, the issue between the rationalists and the empiricists was about the method by which knowledge of reality could be attained—whether through the employment of reason unaided by experience or through atomistic sensation. According to West, this unresolvable issue that engaged the European philosophers provided, indeed constituted, the point of departure for pragmatism, the only authentic Western philosophy native to America. What then does pragmatism advocate ?
Pragmatism, says West, in its historical evasion of epistemologically centered philosophy, is “a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action.” Or, better still, pragmatism advances “a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises” (1989, 5). It is this characteristic of pragmatism, namely, of its having as an end knowledge as it relates to action, that clearly distinguishes the doctrine from European philosophy, the latter of which was concerned either with knowledge as such or with being as an extrasensory phenomenon."
"West characterizes Dewey as “the greatest of the American pragmatists” (ibid., 69) because, among other things, Dewey’s pragmatism expresses “a mode of historical consciousness that highlights the conditioned and circumstantial character of human existence in terms of changing societies, cultures, and communities” (69–70). West goes on to elaborate his meaning in a note explaining the difference between the pragmatism of William James and that of Dewey, saying that Dewey’s is concerned with “the social and historical forces that shape the creative individual” (ch. 3, note 1). The central causal agents of change that help shape the individual are the economic structures that had emerged in a nineteenth-century society undergoing rapid industrialization. Inversely proportionate to the rapid industrialization of society and the tremendous economic success of the industrial capitalist investors was a sharp decline in the living conditions of the new industrial working class that consisted largely of immigrants and African Americans. Put baldly, the industrial working class experienced economic poverty and social misery at a time when the capitalist investors and organizations were experiencing huge economic successes. West sums up the socioeconomic reality of the industrial underclass as “principally that of economic deprivation, cultural dislocation, and personal disorientation” (80). It is directly to this crisis of the human condition that Dewey’s pragmatism speaks. Thus, in a sense, Dewey’s pragmatism, in its bid to formulate strategies to ameliorate the predicament thus described, is a form of social activism.
West lists three ways in which Dewey attempted to address the socioeconomic crisis of nineteenth-century America. (1) Through journalism Dewey endeavored to popularize critical intelligence (or critical thinking) so as to be able to educate the masses. (2) Dewey affiliated himself with influential middle-class humanitarian organizations that worked with the underclass in a bid “to assimilate and acculturate immigrants into the American mainstream.” And (3) Dewey exercised leadership over a rapidly growing teaching profession both by practical examples and through his writing (ibid., 79–80).
It is arguable of course that Dewey succeeded in these ventures. For example, West points out that while Dewey’s commitment to cultivate critical intelligence, especially in children, led him to set up a laboratory school in Chicago, popularly known as the “Dewey School,” his endeavor to take philosophy to the people through the newspaper was scarcely helpful to his cause. Dewey outraged the mainstream media, which lampooned his idea, and he was unwilling to engage them in any manner whatsoever. True, Dewey was involved directly with humanitarian groups and organizations that were concerned about the social and economic condition of the industrial working class, as attested to by his participation in Hull House (founded by Jane Addams). According to Richard J. Bernstein, “Dewey mixed with workers, union organizers, and political radicals of all sorts.”3 Yet Dewey’s reluctance to engage the very core middle-class establishment from which his income and status as a professional originated seems to have cast a shadow on his social activism. Thus, although he believed that social and economic redemption for the underclass could be obtained through a democratization process facilitated by education, he was most unwilling to invest the hard capital, using his professional career as collateral, for this end.
West contrasts Dewey’s unwillingness to risk his professional career in support of his political beliefs with the willingness of his friend and former classmate Henry Carter Adams to do just that. Adams was dismissed from his teaching position at Cornell University because of his public support of the Knights of Labor. What is significant is that Adams had considerable difficulty securing a job because of his socialist beliefs (ibid., 80). Yet this difficulty in obtaining a job did not quell his desire to give expression to his political beliefs after he had landed a job. To be sure, Dewey did try to exercise leadership over his professional colleagues by even castigating them for their complacency, indolence, and ivory-tower mentality. As West puts it, “Dewey castigated the ivory-tower scholar frightened by the dirty world of politics and afraid of the consequences of active engagement” (82).4 But when one considers that Dewey just was not prepared to face the consequences of subscribing to a political belief, his criticism of his professional colleagues seems to ring hollow."
"In a similar Deweyan spirit, West’s philosophy (or his pragmatism) is unquestionably a form of cultural criticism and social activism. His principal motivation in outlining his philosophical views in Evasion (1989) is, in his words, “my disenchantment with intellectual life in America and my own demoralization regarding the political and cultural state of the country.” In the intellectual sphere, West is disenchanted by what he describes as “the transformation of highly intelligent liberal intellectuals into tendentious neoconservatives owing to crude ethnic identity-based allegiances and vulgar neonationalist sentiments.” On the political sphere, West is concerned about and disappointed with “the professional incorporation of former New Left activists who now often thrive on a self-serving careerism while espousing rhetoric of oppositional politics of little serious integrity.” And on the cultural domain, he is “depressed about the concrete nihilism in working-class and underclass American communities—the pervasive drug addiction, suicides, alcoholism, male violence against women, white violence against black, yellow, and brown people, and the black criminality against others, especially other black people” [...]
There can be no doubt but that these concerns about the human predicament in contemporary America situate West squarely within the pragmatist tradition of Emerson and Dewey. Some parallelisms are certainly in order. For example, West’s avowed interest in the plight of the underclass parallels Dewey’s concern with the new industrial underclass in nineteenth-century United States. West’s declared disappointment with intellectual colleagues is but a reflection or a replay of Dewey’s indictment of Dewey’s own professional colleagues. And West’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America is reminiscent of Dewey’s affiliation with unions and organized labor.
As with Dewey, West gives a practical use to philosophy by deploying it to resolving concrete issues that affect human beings in their day-to-day struggles."
"One existentialist concern that West raises in Race Matters (1994) is what he describes as the pervasive sense of utter meaninglessness, despondency, self-loathing and impotence that permeates Black America, especially its youth [...] It is this horrifying phenomenon that West characterizes as nihilism in Black America. Black nihilism, in short, is a life without hope that constitutes a severe threat to the very survival of Black America. And it is precisely because of the severe threat that nihilism poses for Black America that West says nihilism needs to be confronted.
West identifies two main causes of this nihilism: (1) the preponderance of market morality in America and (2) the serious and deleterious crisis of leadership in the Black community. Concerning the first, the preponderance of market morality, West contends that the market forces promote, even advocate, an ethic of consumerism that subordinates, instrumentalizes, or objectifies others as a means of pleasure for one’s own profit. Another way of putting this point is to say that market morality commodifies human beings, thereby treating them as a means to an end, the end being profit, rather than (in Kant’s well-known terminology) ends in themselves.9 This morality construes bestial hedonism as a virtue, for it takes the end in life to be indulgence in the seductive transient pleasures of the body. Furthermore, and more importantly, this market morality is transmitted through the airwaves and dominates popular culture—radio, television, movies, and so on—thereby creating a form of environmental and psychological pollution for all who exposed to the American environment. It is in this regard that the market morality is a partial cause of Black nihilism. For, to the extent that Blacks in the United States coexist with others in the environment whose atmosphere is overwhelmed by this pollution, their behavior is thus environmentally and psychologically determined by the influences of the market morality. In other words, there is a form of environmental and psychological determinism according to which the behavior of Blacks, and all others in the American atmosphere, is a direct consequence of the preponderance of market forces. Among Blacks, in particular, this determinism gives rise to either of two forms of behavior, depending on the economic (and hence social) stratum of society to which the individual belongs: (1) excessive, tasteless, and nauseating consumerism, if the individual belongs to the Black middle class ; or (2) drugs, crime, alcoholism, and violence, if the individual belongs to the underclass. Since the majority of Blacks in American society occupy the lower stratum in the socioeconomic ladder, it is therefore among them that the nihilistic behavior is most virulent. The reason is that they cannot be active participants in the market forces that shape their lives and to which they nonetheless are exposed constantly. Thus they cannot enjoy the seeming benefits, albeit banal, that market morality glorifies and presents as the virtues of self-worth and personal success. The individual’s perception of his or her failure to experience via the market medium the bodily titillations glorified and worshiped by market morality occasions a sense of utter despair and meaninglessness, an existential anguish. And the net result of such anguish is crime, drugs, alcoholism, and violence. In sum, we have in the Black community, particularly among the underclass, self-destructiveness brought on by a sense of utter powerlessness.
In saying this West is not excusing the immoral conduct of some Blacks or attempting to absolve them from personal responsibility for their actions. He clearly states that “black murderers and rapists should go to jail” [...] a position that would be difficult to maintain if he subscribed to, because it is incompatible with, rigid determinism. On the other hand, he notes that failing to offer a causal explanation of the conduct of Blacks in terms of the socioeconomic forces that impinge upon their very being, forces that affect individual decisions, and yet condemn them, is to ascribe blame or responsibility to them unfairly. And it is this charge of unfairness that West brings against the new Black conservatives for what he considers their unevenhanded indictment of Black behavior and their argument for the wholesale dismantling of those social programs upon which individuals in the Black underclass depend for sheer survival."
"West’s point is that post-civil rights Black leadership has failed to undertake a critical discussion of issues, actual and potential, affecting the Black community with a view toward putting forth concrete solutions, even in a preemptive way, to some of the ills that wreak havoc in the community. Among these ills are the disintegration of the Black family, sexism and violence toward Black women, homophobia, and xenophobia.
According to West, nowhere was this absence of Black leadership voice more pronounced than in the 1992 Senate Confirmation Hearings of Clarence Thomas, then President George Herbert Walker Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Among other things, West argues, the Black leadership was silent on the issue of Thomas’ (in)competence and hence (un)suitability to serve in the Supreme Court; they did not examine Thomas’ proven track record in any of the offices in which he had served prior to being nominated, nor did they even discuss Thomas’ character, especially in light of the charge of sexual harassment that Anita Hill had brought against him during the Confirmation Hearings, either to absolve him from or convict him of wrongdoing.
West attributes this immoral silence of the Black leadership to what he describes as racial reasoning, a Black “closing-ranks mentality” [...] that demands that Blacks should rally behind their fellow Blacks in a racist society where the opportunity to serve in such a highly respected capacity is rare. Thus, even if the leadership had reservations about the suitability of Thomas to serve as the representative of the Black intellectual leadership in matters of jurisprudence in the highest court of the land, they nevertheless allowed racial reasoning to override their better, honest, and truthful judgment about Thomas’ very (un)qualification for the office. And this, says West, is “most disturbing,” for it reflects a “failure of nerve of [the] black leadership” [...]
More generally, concerning Black leadership in dealing with the threat of nihilism in the Black community, West remarks that contemporary political leaders seem too anxious to call attention to themselves, in particular to their being successful in America, rather than to the afflictions of the less fortunate. And he deems this aspect of current Black leadership a mark of moral degeneracy [...] since for such leadership politics functions instrumentally to the realization of each leader’s own individual selfish ends."
"West laments the nonexistence of quality individuals of the likes of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer."
"Historically, such leadership functioned as custodians of traditional cultural (or institutional) pillars of strength and support in the community—the church, schools, and mosques and other civic organizations. These institutions served as a source of empowerment, transmitting and reinforcing values in the community. Thus, it was in and through these institutions that individuals drew support to affirm their self-worth. Both the centrality and the vitality of these institutions in Black communal life during trying times of economic deprivation, political exclusion, and social anguish were owing to effective leadership. The erosion of the influence of these institutions in present-day Black communal life, but particularly among youths, added to the self-serving kind of political leadership in the Black community, cannot but count as major factors for the moral crisis among Black youths."
"It is worth noting West’s insistence that effective leadership of the kind described must build race-transcending coalitions. The point here is not simply that West is invoking a historical accident of the kind witnessed in the social movement of Martin Luther King Jr. Rather, and more importantly, he sees such a coalition as a pragmatic measure to anchor the moral crisis in the Black community to the economic reality of American life that is its partial cause. This point can be expressed alternatively as follows. To the extent that the economic circumstances of the Black community, felt disproportionately by its youth, are determined directly or indirectly by White-owned corporate institutions over which those communities have no control, the only way to alter those economic circumstances and hence partly to resolve the existential crisis in the Black community is to involve White and other (usually liberal) like-minded individuals concerned with justice and fairness in exerting pressure on those corporate institutions to respond to the affliction that they bring on the powerless."
"Central to this politics, says West, is “an affirmation of one’s self-worth fueled by the concern of others” [...] In other words, one’s self-worth is affirmed through and measured by one’s concern about the predicament of others.
West’s view of a politics of conversion echoes the biblical exhortation for a person to love her or his neighbor as herself or himself."
"An intellectual who fails to engage in a critical discussion of the issues affecting his or her community is committing a moral crime against the community because there can be no solution to the ills that afflict the community in the absence of such discussion."
"If I have a sense of self-worth, then I am more likely to value the personhood of others than if I do not. Conversely, if I lack a sense of self-worth then, I would devalue others. From this psychological point of view, an important remedy to the nihilistic threat to Black America is to promote self-love, in the sense of self-esteem, in youths."
"The relative ease with which West traverses traditional disciplinary boundaries in some ways is evidence that these boundaries are largely artificial and only promote intellectual parochialism. For West, a significant consequence of such parochialism is that it disconnects the intellectual life from praxis. And in his view this disconnect is inconsistent with the role of the intellectual, especially the humanistic scholar, to society."
"The establishments to which humanism is reacting may be religious; economic, in the sense of the etherealization and transcendence of market forces that affect the life of the ordinary individual and over which he or she has no control; or political, in the sense of the primordial and immanent institutions of power that determine the lives of ordinary citizenry but over which the ordinary citizen has no control. The net effect of this controlling influence of the institutions on individual life is that it renders the individual powerless and thus dispossesses her or him of the agency to determine the direction of her or his life. Humanism thus seeks to liberate the individual from such dominating and oppressive forces that deprive her or him of individuality so that she or he can realize her or his potential."
-Clarence Johnson, Cornel West and Philosophy. The Quest for Social Justice, Routledge, 2003.
