Cornel West Research Articles

William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity

William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of Receptivity Loren Goldman (bio) William James's work is pervaded by the rhetoric of energy, language intended to convey the felt livedness of experience, the visceral sense of both the universe's teeming potential and our own active powers. Insofar as James aims to philosophize for the sake of life, moreover, this rhetoric captures the timbre of his theoretical concerns. "Human energizing," James writes in a version of his significantly titled 1906 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, "The Energies of Men," is "that sum-total of activities, some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing and waning in himself he is at all times so well aware" (ERM 150).1 Elsewhere, he describes consciousness as "the habitual centre of [one's] personal energy," and states that the "real" self at any given moment is "the centre of [one's] energies" (VRE 161–162).2 Energy is also a moral concern, for it invigorates the "strenuous mood" of ethical exertion James famously exhorts; religious faith is beneficial, for example, because it sets free "[e]very sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils" (WTB 161). For James, the contrasting lassitude of "easy-going" life makes it not worth living, for meaningful existence requires the energy to pursue ends "pertinaciously enough" (WTB 84–85). James's commentators tend to reproduce his energetic language without remark. Cornel West writes that James's rhetoric aims to "energize people to become exceptional doers under adverse circumstances, to galvanize zestful fighters against excruciating odds."3 Colin Koopman describes James as the defender of "the creative energies that individuals inject into institutions."4 The late Sergio Franzese, in a study dedicated to what he terms James's "ethics of energy," describes the latter as "the normative condition of the praxis that realizes human values."5 Even more recently, Sarin Marchetti explains the crux of James's social thought as "the unleashing of our moral energies in conduct,"6 and Alexander Livingston writes that James's moral ideal exemplifies an "energetic character that combines the push of willful impulse with the constraint of habitual inhibition."7 In like fashion, Kennan Ferguson stresses the centrality of pluralism in James's work because of the energizing results of confrontation with radical difference.8 [End Page 706] For these commentators, faith invigorates action, and otherness mobilizes new energies within us.9 An energetic ethos clearly has its dangers. Any approach that views all existence as struggle—James wrote that life is worth living only if "combats may be carried to successful terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat" (WTB 47)—can lead to the view that living itself as a zero-sum game. In an age where "low-energy" becomes a devastatingly unheroic epithet, it might even reinforce the notion that politics is about nothing more than winning.10 This concern is not limited to James scholars, but goes to the heart of the question of the appropriate mode of political comportment in democratic life. James often appears part of a Liberal tradition in which good citizens are active, bringing themselves to bear on the public, and revealingly dedicates Pragmatism to the memory of John Stuart Mill, the champion of non-conformist individuality, "whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day [1909]" (P 3). Taken authoritatively, this stress on self-assertion may slide into the uninterrogated assumption that politics needs only politicians, excluding those who lack the privilege or capacity to speak for themselves. James's work can appear to make this tendency manifest: he sought by dint of higher education to save democracy from its lower tones, couched his ethical ideals in the terms of manly virility, and thought historical progress came from (male) genius imposing itself on the world.11 Despite James's reputation as "the first democrat in metaphysics,"12 as philosopher Horace Kallen called him in 1914, one may reasonably wonder how this energetic manliness harmonizes with the pluralism often celebrated in his work.13 Like Kallen, Ferguson and William Connolly have emphasized...

Response To Jason Springs

AbstractJason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep‐seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. On the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio‐political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things.

Advising Pre-Dead Students

Academic advising, to be “critical,” must be emancipatory. I argue that the task of critical advising today is to liberate students from the dominant conceptualization of higher education as pre-professional schooling in order to open them up to humanistic exploration and to help them make their education meaningful on their own terms. Inspired by Cornel West’s idea of going to college to learn how to die, I introduce the concept of “pre-dead” students to argue that the task of critical advising is to help students move from a premature professional narrowness to a maturation of the soul. Using Burns B. Crookston’s theory of education for human development, I argue that the task of critical advising is to open up students to self-examination by way of a deep, disciplined humanistic education that many students avoid, often due to parental, social, and economic pressures that push them toward premature professional narrowness. I develop my approach to critical advising in contrast to Andrew Puroway’s overtly political Frierian-inspired approach. I also offer some practical advising strategies and examples of how advisors can help students open themselves up to the life-changing study of the humanities.

Nihilism and the Roots of Crisis in American Democracy: A Diagnosis of Cornel West

Cornel West’s diagnosis of the crisis of the American democracy is the subject matter of this article. Analyzing the condition of the American democracy of the end of XX and the beginning of XXI centuries, C. West focused on the individual, existential character of the crisis. The diagnosed state had according to him much affect not only on political issues, but first and foremost on the spread of nihilism among American citizens. Nihilism – is understood in the C. West as senselessness of life and low self-esteem is the subject matter of this article.

Consumerism as a moral attitude

In this theoretical and explorative essay, from an analysis of Pope Francis’, Cornel West's, and William T. Cavanaugh's works, it is argued that it is possible to construe a specific understanding of the concept of consumerism within the political theological discourse. From the analysis, consumerism is imagined as a fundamental attitude of remaining morally indifferent towards suffering. Accordingly, the proposed definition for consumerism is understood as the act of trivializing the good and remaining indifferent towards suffering. Furthermore, the article highlights how this definition of consumerism challenges the idea of consumerism as an “ersatz” religion, which is an understanding of consumerism that is often used within a Christian theological context.

Theoretical Riffs on the Blues

After disambiguating the word, the author explores the blues primarily not as a genre of music but as a sensibility or orientation toward the world. In doing so, he is taking seriously suggestions made by a host of writers, most notably, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Cornel West. As such, the focus is on the blues as an extended family of somatic practices bearing upon expression (or articulation). At the center of these practices, there is in the blues (to modify Foucault’s words) always the patient yet exuberant work of giving articulate form to our impatience for human freedom. But here the distinction between practices of emancipation, by which a people throws off their political domination, and practices of freedom, by which they tirelessly work to make their freed self truly their own, is crucial. In this, the author is guided by an insight provided by Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (1987: 95). As “an art of ambiguity”, the blues turns out to be also an art of ambivalence: the task of claiming ownership of one’s freed self is one demanding, not only learning to live with irreducible ambiguity but also working toward “an achievement of ambivalence”.

Navigating social justice in the current historical moment

Writing about the current historical moment, Cornel West (2018) powerfully argues that Trump “is a symbol and a symptom—not cause or origin” of the problems today.” While racism, xenophobia, settle...

The Incomplete Circle: Dialectics of Social Structure and Theological Conviction for Greater Unification in the DRC Family (1994–2016)

This essay proposes that despite an ingrained awareness in the Uniting Reformed Church and the other members of the Dutch Reformed Church family that church division was born from socio-political and theological factors, the orientation of all parties to the unification process was to prioritise the theological conviction side and downplay the socio-political, allowing it to function surreptitiously and essentially undermining the possibilities for greater progress. This essay will highlight the discourse of church assemblies indicating the trends and arguments relating to unification. It will secondly draw on the reflections of the Afro-American philosopher Cornel West to cast light on the tasks of any church unification process that strive to enhance both reconciliation and transformation. In the light of the theoretical framework of West, it will proceed to posit certain tasks that the unification process must address in order to make any sustained progress. 

Re-Framing Hottentot: Liberating Black Female Sexuality from the Mammy/Hottentot Bind

Taking up Michele Wallace’s call to interrogate popular cultural forms and unravel their relationship with the political discourse of the time, this paper begins by examining the popular discourse about Black female sexuality in the USA. White, cis-hetero-patriarchal cultural and visual imagination still represents Black women either as asexual and maternal mammies or as the deviant ‘Other’ that is as Venus Hottentots or ‘hypersexual’ Jezebels. Maternal and sexual scripts were first naturalized by popular and scientific discourse(s), and then covertly deployed by the dominant white hetero-patriarchal set up to mask the exploitation of Black women, and constrict the opportunities of growth that were available to them even after the emancipation. This paper analyzes how Black women writers like Elizabeth Alexander and Alice Walker, and visual artists such as Renee Cox develop an oppositional gaze, to use Hooks’s phrase, and ‘re-frame’ the Venus Hottentot from their radical and subversive points of view. Building on theoretical insights of Gina Dent, Cornel West, and Audre Lorde, this paper engages with the oft-neglected relationship between pleasure, desire, identity, and Black female sexuality. Thus, Black female sexuality that has been expunged and/or termed ‘deviant’ actually becomes a source of empowerment for Black women.

DAMN GREAT EMPIRES! WILLIAM JAMES AND THE POLITICS OF PRAGMATISM BY ALEXANDER LIVINGSTON

Reviewed by: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism by Alexander Livingston Shannon Sullivan Alexander Livingston Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 264 pp. I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually [End Page 209] synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. (To be fair, I’d say the same thing about other classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce.) I’m not alone in thinking and feeling this way. Cornel West (1989: 60), for example, once claimed that “James was preoccupied with the state of his and others’ souls, not the social conditions of their lives…. In regard to politics, James has nothing profound or even provocative to say.” Even James himself claimed in 1899 that his “political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly not to the past or present” (epigram in Livingston 2016). For all I knew before reading Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (2016), the “damn” in Alexander Livingston’s title might have been an adjective rather than a verb, conveying James’s enthusiasm for rather than his condemnation of large imperial nations. But a verb it is, and with an exclamation mark from James to boot. Livingston’s remarkably refreshing book has written a new chapter in the story of what pragmatism has to contribute to political philosophy, and it has changed my thinking about the value of James’s philosophy for political purposes. As important as the concept of democracy is, it is not the only or the final word on how pragmatists might approach political theory and action. James’s contribution is not merely to insert individuality into democracy (cf. Rondel 2017), a reading of James that has value but which still seems to assume that the topic of democracy exhausts his political insights. On Livingston’s account, James instead provides an anti-imperialist critique of modern nations that is shaped by its “anarchist edges” (George Cotkin, quoted in Livingston 2016: 9). Rather than a full-blown Anarchist (capital “A”) ideology, what we find in James is an anarchist (lowercase “a”) criticism of what he called “bigness,” which led him to oppose empire building. Eloquently elaborated by Livingston and read with an “anarchist squint” (Scott 2012), James’s political vision becomes both apparent and appealing. James’s political philosophy is found primarily in his Nachlass, the notes, letters, and editorials that James wrote especially in the last ten years of his life (from 1899–1900). These were the years after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which as Livingston argues (2016: 2), triggered a kind of political awakening for James. While James has been understood variously—and somewhat inconsistently—as “an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan democrat” (2016: 7), Livingston convincingly demonstrates that James instead should be considered an anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist thinker. In Livingston’s view, James’s most significant contribution to pragmatist political philosophy is to “reorient[t] political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life” (2016: 7, emphasis in original). [End Page 210] Chapter 1 of Damn Great Empires! demonstrates how James’s former student, Ralph Barton Perry, significantly shaped the reception of James’s political thought. Perry was a liberal who advocated individualism, toleration, and democracy, and he used James’s philosophy to advance American liberalism in the twentieth-century era of the two World Wars. In doing so, Perry was combatting an emerging interpretation of James’s philosophy as proto-fascist. In the 1920s, James’s pragmatism became aligned with the anti-intellectualism in Europe that fed into Italian fascism. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini even infamously claimed...

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Between Activism, Religiosity, and the Public Sphere: the Intellectual Insurgency of bell hooks

In the collaborative project Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) with Cornel West, when interviewing West, bell hooks traces “the roots of (her) own critical consciousness” to her early experiences in the Black church and with religion in general, to the extent that her role as an intellectual is predicated on “spiritual practice.” It is through this practice that hooks perceives her role as an intellectual as one that “links religiosity to solidarity with the poor,” in a measured effort that avoids what she refers to as “the commodification of religion.” To be sure, this form of commodification limits what an intellectual can and should do, when she views that role within the intersectionality of meaningful activism, critical religiosity, and the engaging of the public sphere. For hooks, an intellectual must be deeply invested in “the kind of compassion, love, and openness” necessary for inclusiveness in the face of increasingly exclusive practices of the Black community, ultimately employed in how larger society devalues and degrades Black women and Black womanhood. Because of this, hooks ascribes to an insurgent intellectualism that, while recognizing her own situatedness between activism, religiosity, and the public sphere, is contingent on a kind of process thought: her intellectual insurgency is always “becoming” and contains a phenomenological intendedness with moving beyond her ontological blackness and epistemological womanhood towards a metaphysical intellectualism and a deontology fundamentally inherent in it. She presents a Black feminist/Womanist thinking into an insurgent Heideggerian-like question of the meaning of being, as both a Black woman and a Black intellectual. To do this, her insurgency in the role of the public intellectualism is grounded on both Frederick Douglass’ notion of “a heavy and cruel hand” (1853) and James Baldwin’s belief that being relatively conscious means “to be in rage almost all the time” (1969).

Looking After the Future: Notes on Hope

ABSTRACT Hope is a complex social-psychological phenomenon. It combines cognitive and affective dimensions, and it is temporally extended, drawing upon the past in order to orient the present toward the future. In conversation with various texts, ranging from Ernst Bloch to Cornel West to Patrick Shade, the article offers a multidimensional account of hope, arguing that it is integral to human action and possibility.

A Political Companion to James Baldwin ed. by Susan J. McWilliams

Reviewed by: A Political Companion to James Baldwin ed. by Susan J. McWilliams Douglas Field Ed. Susan J. McWilliams. A Political Companion to James Baldwin. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2017. 426 pp. $80.00. In "The Price of the Ticket," James Baldwin briefly recalls his Trotskyite years in the 1940s, recalling that he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). Baldwin's tantalizing reference to his political past is brushed aside by the writer, who claims, "[m]y life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me." As Susan J. McWilliams points out in the introduction to A Political Companion to James Baldwin, despite Baldwin's reluctance to identify with one or other political camp, [End Page 112] he emerges as "not just one of the nation's most important thinkers on matters of racial consciousness and injustice but also one of our most articulate theorists of democratic life" (6). Baldwin's work, McWilliams observes, points to "the interconnectedness of all our lives," as well as "an essential commitment to the idea that bearing witness to other human beings is a central political responsibility, and in striving to meet that responsibility we give ourselves the best chance of transformation or even salvation" (9). Across fourteen chapters, the essays in A Political Companion to James Baldwin, written by established and emerging scholars, examine the writer as activist, citizen, and democratic theorist, as well as reading his work against the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women's liberation. In "'A Most Disagreeable Mirror': Race Consciousness as Double Consciousness," Lawrie Balfour reads Baldwin against W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of double consciousness, exploring Baldwin's polyphonic voice in essays such as "Many Thousands Gone," where the writer's use of "we" provides "moments of keen insight into the psychological burdens and the moral and political implications—for all citizens—of living with the color line" (31-32). In "The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory, and the Presidential Race," P. J. Brendese argues that the writer's "insights illuminate and counter a willful innocence about the complex legacy of segregated memory in American politics in general, and the [Obama] presidential race in particular" (50). Drawing on the work of Balfour and George Shulman, Brendese recuperates Baldwin as an invaluable theorist of the role of race in American political life, just as Susan J. McWilliams in "James Baldwin and the Politics of Disconnection" points out that "[y]ears before it was common to talk about 'social construction' … Baldwin became one of social construction's greatest theorists" (100). Baldwin's complexity is explored by Nicholas Buccola in "What William F. Buckley Jr. Did Not Understand about James Baldwin: On Baldwin's Politics of Freedom," which focuses on the debate between Buckley and Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society in 1965. Buccola rightly points out that Baldwin's suspicion of ideology was "applied across the political spectrum" (121) but nonetheless offered keen insights into the notions of freedom and liberty. As George Shulman points out in "Baldwin, Prophecy, and Politics," he is rarely recognized "as a political thinker or even contributing to the understanding of politics" (151). By focusing on his prophetic tradition, Shulman explores the ways in which Baldwin's religiosity is deeply connected to his personal political practice. While the majority of the essays collected focus on Baldwin's essays, in "Go Tell it on the Mountain: James Baldwin and the Politics of Faith," Wilson Carey McWilliams provides an insightful close reading of Baldwin's first novel in order to illuminate how the author's religious past informs his views on identity and the importance of love, a neglected theme that nonetheless courses through his fiction and nonfiction. In "The Negative Political Theology of James Baldwin," Vincent Lloyd also explores the importance of love in the writer's work by arguing that the writer "transformed, rather than rejected, his father's Christianity" (172). Drawing on Cornel West's book Democracy Matters, in "Socrates in a Different Key: James Baldwin and Race in America...

“Ghostly Voices Rose from the Fields”:Nebraskaand Political Hopelessness

Promised power, many people in our democratic age find their lives swept away by a factory owner’s signature or their way of life eradicated by military violence. Dashed hopes produce anxiety and despair. Cornel West puts it succinctly: “despair and hope are inseparable.” In this article, I argue that Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska explores the despair produced by the failure of hopeful agency and responds to that danger with a counterconception of agency (influenced by horror and sound) that conceives of a world in which objects actively participate. Ghostly sounds rise from earthy fields (as he sings on “My Father’s House”), calling to action with neither hope nor despair.

Race/Ethnicity, Crime and Social Control: An Introduction

As Cornel West (1993) asserted, ‘race matters’ because it has mattered so much and so significantly in the lives of millions of people. [...]

The Personal Is Theoretical and the Past Is Present: Blurring the Lines in Contemporary Anti-Racist Writing

Abstract This article studies the anti-racist writings by contemporary scholars Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., George Yancy, and Claudia Rankine. It uncovers how they include personal narratives in their works in order to theorise the workings of white hegemony in the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue, they productively blur the lines between the personal and the theoretical as well as between the past and the present. Consequently, they problematise the notion of abstract theorising, the myth of continuous racial progress as well as conceptions of postracialism.

Humanist Battles and Embattled Humanists: Neointerventionism, Neopragmatism, and the Coloniality of Truth

AbstractThis paper examines conceptions of truth and “the human” in an effort to engage contemporary discussions of neointerventionism. A central question in the paper is whether one facet of the self‐justifying structure of neointerventionism is an operative framing of theories of truth underlying the explanans sought by foreign policy officials and state actors. To address this question, I turn to an unlikely source within philosophy of language, neopragmatist theorist Richard Rorty, to offer an example of an antirepresentationalist and nonobjectivist description of truth that may help explain the terms and stakes of neointerventionist policies. My claim, however, will be, following the critical insights of Cornel West, Chantal Mouffe, and Sylvia Wynter, that neopragmatist efforts of the sort outlined by Rorty, while sophisticated in their analyses of the nature of truth and forms of justification, fail to thoroughly engage the political conception of “the human” that orders and frames debates regarding objectivity and solidarity. I conclude by returning to the problematic of neointerventionism from Wynter’s framings of what she calls the “coloniality of truth” and “embattled humanisms.”

Theology and Race

AbstractThis study develops a Christian theological response to the problems of race and anti-black racism in conversation with black theology and womanist theology. It provides a detailed introduction to multiple voices, developments, and tensions in these two theological traditions over the last half century. It offers an overview of James Cone’s arguments and their reception. It considers turns toward pragmatism and genealogy in black religious scholarship, focusing on Cornel West, Peter Paris, Dwight Hopkins, Victor Anderson, Anthony Pinn, Bryan Massingale, J. Kameron Carter, and Willie Jennings. It analyzes womanist theological treatments of intersectionality, narrative, and embodiment through Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kelly Brown Douglas, Diana Hayes, and M. Shawn Copeland. Finally, it suggests some open questions related to hybridity, sexuality, and ecology. Ultimately, it argues that the credibility of Christian theological witness depends significantly on the quality of Christian theology’s response to anti-black racism.

English education as democratic armor

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ways in which attention to programmatic vision and coherence – rather than foci on individual courses – might advance the work of justice-oriented, critical English education in important ways. The authors propose that consciously attending to the work of English education on the programmatic level can better enable English educators to cultivate democracy-sustaining dispositions in preservice teachers. Using Grossman et al.’s (2008) definition of “programmatic coherence”, the authors illustrate how one interdepartmental partnership is working to create a shared programmatic vision for English education.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on Cornel West’s call for the development of a three-piece democratic armor – Socratic questioning, prophetic witness and tragicomic hope – the authors describe their programmatic vision for cultivating democracy-sustaining dispositions in preservice teachers. They show how this shared vision constitutes the foundation for the organization, purpose and sequence of the four-semester cohort program. Finally, the authors describe how this vision helps facilitate meaningful and purposeful symbiosis between field experiences and university coursework.FindingsIn an effort to promote replicability regarding programmatic coherence, the authors share structural aspects of their program as well as pose generative questions for colleagues who are interested in approaching the work of critical, democratic English education from the programmatic level.Originality/valueAddressing the challenges of teacher preparation – especially in this polarized and pitched historical moment – requires shifting the focus from individual courses to a more expansive view that might enable English educators to consider how courses within a program might collectively advance a particular vision of critical and democratic English education.