Cornel West on Multiculturalism and Universality.

Unfortunately the image accompanying this post has been blocked by a new virus. It was an image of a strong African man holding a white child in his arms that may be found at: http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/shimages/vvimages/inamerica5.jpg

This image is found offensive by people, who also seem to find many of these posts offensive. We must not allow racists or antisemites to silence us. We must never give in to hatred or intimidation. It still amazes me that this image of an African-born man holding, loving and protecting a child is more disturbing to American officials than pornography.



Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), $19.95.

"The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight."

Western societies are burdened with an increasingly intense struggle over multiculturalism and a related concern to avoid the dangers of racial and ethnic factionalism and ideological division. We wish to see ourselves as members of families and communities, as citizens of nations and yet still members of a single species, nation, family and religous affiliation, striving to achieve peaceful coexistence with others in recognition of that shared humanity. We are uncertain about:

"... how we think of universality when it has been used as a smoke screen for a particular group. How do we preserve notions of universality given the fact that various other particularities -- traditions, heritages, communities, voices and what have you -- are moving closer to the center of the historical stage, pushing off those few which had served as the centering voices between 1492 and [1945?]"

Cornel West, "Diverse New World," in Debating P.C.: The Controversy of "Political Correctness" on College Campuses (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 327.

If we agree that one monolithic understanding of Western culture is unattractive or evil, that one understanding of what our responsibilities are, as human beings, is no longer plausible because it is too exclusive, then we should not feel obligated to discard the ideas of universality nor of cultural truth (especially complex ideas of such truth) in their entirety. We should not decide that all of the Western tradition is in need of revision or dismissal, or that we can do without it. We can not do without it. It is our tradition. It enriches us.

Race, ethnicity, sexual-preference and heritage matter -- but some things matter more. I suggest that the things which matter most are those which are fundamental and not parochial or trivial in our tradition. I believe that what unites us is more important than what divides us: decency, integrity, respect for human rights and the infinite and absolute moral worth of persons -- of all persons, regardless of race or class, religion or gender, or sexual orientation.

Skepticism about a single human nature, or an imperial conception of Western civilization, should not lead us to discard the unifying ideal of a "family of humanity," nor our need to identify with those who are externally different from us yet internally alike -- alike in frailty and suffering, and in the unwillingness to surrender freedom, as well as in the need for love.

In opposing "cultural imperialism" and all forms of racism, together with homophobia and sexism -- all of which I detest -- it should be clear that I do not wish to become a different sort of "politically correct" bigot. I have no desire to indulge in the mirror-image of those hateful attitudes that we have come to regard as benighted.

Hatred of whites is just as loathsome as hatred of blacks; antisemitism refers to the hatred of all semites, whether they are Muslims or Jews; religious intolerance is unacceptable when directed at any group; sexism in all of its forms is vile.

Professor West makes the point that we are all one species, one people, with a common genetic heritage and a shared ancestry, deriving from the material origins of the universe and from the emergence of human beings in the African plains. What is more, we are all made of that primal "stuff" of the universe. As a species, and this comes as a shock to racists, we have common ancestors in Africa -- as I never tire of explaining to racists -- despite our current physical differences.

This is to suggest that we give up the quest for "purity" of race or aristocratic pedigree. We must understand that, like it or not, we are in this situation together. We sink or swim together, as a species. We belong to one another, so that the great artistic and scientific achievements also belong to all of us, make us all richer, but may even be thought of as the collective creative achievements of all of us. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

No, this is not to deny the contributions of individuals of genius. Yet we must not forget that there are necessary conditions to make, even the emergence of genius, possible. A great film maker born before the invention of the movie camera, will never become what he or she might have been. Persons denied basic education, something which happens to billions of human beings on the planet today, will never become the scientists, artists, or philosophers that they might become. This impoverishes all of us. No wonder they want to silence me for saying these disturbing things.

If one ultimate or fundamental human act is that of artistic creation, then each of us is a participant in that act when any of us engages in it, especially when creative effort leads to the very best results by the finest artists. Take pride in the achievements of Shakespeare, Mozart or Da Vinci, of Jane Austen or Paul Robeson, Cervantes or James Baldwin because they are also your achievements. Do not be misled by differences in ethnicity or skin color into believing that such a person's achievements can not be your own. The greatest cultural achievements are yours as much as anyone else's, they exist "for" you.

Artists create works and (appropriately) attach their own names to them. Nevertheless, works of art and all that they inspire belong to the tradition, finally, and to the culture and species. Plato's writings are now part of the cultural legacy of people living thousands of years after the philosopher's death, in a time and place that he could not have imagined. Those puzzling dialogues still live and inspire readers to ponder philosophical ideas, even in rejecting Plato's solutions. They are invitations to philosophizing that are all the more welcome because of their ability to assume a hybrid form today, for the new t.v.-reared subjects engaged in philosophical endeavor. They appeal to everybody. They should. They're great.

Let us admit that it is o.k. to say that much, regardless of whether Plato was male or female, straight or gay (and he probably was gay, though he would not have recognized the concept), and whatever the degree of darkness in the shade of his complexion. Let us be willing to recognize another great writer today, whatever his or her color, ethnicity, or economic class, without worrying too much about whether some are offended by the work this person produces. I doubt the quality of any work of art that is not found offensive by at least one person who comes into contact with it. Professor West points out:

"Europe has always been multicultural. Shakespeare borrowed from Italian narratives and pre-European narratives. When we think of multiculturalism, we're so deeply shaped by the American discourse of positively valued whiteness and negatively valued blackness, that somehow it's only when black and white folk interact that real multiculturalism is going on. ... But Europe is an ideological construct. It doesn't exist other than in the minds of elites who tried to constitute a homogeneous tradition that could bring together heterogeneous populations -- that's all it is."

Moreover:

"... In responding to these circumstances, the problem has been that most of us function by a kind of self-referential altruism, in which we're altruistic to those nearest to us, and those more distant, we tend to view as pictures rather than as human beings, we do have a common humanity. We must not forget our long historical backdrop. The present is history -- that continues to inform and shape our perceptions and orientations." (History that hurts?)

Debating P.C., pp. 324-325. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

And finally:

"The political challenge is to articulate universality in a way that is not a mere smokescreen for someone else's particularity. We must preserve the possibility of universal connection. That's the fundamental challenge. Let's dig deep enough within our heritage to make that connection to others."

Ibid., at p. 331 (emphasis added). ("Jacques Derrida's 'Philosophy as Jazz.'")

One of the things that acquisition of a tradition -- such as the Western philosophical tradition -- can do for us is to allow for a Sartre-like "totalization" of the reading experience, so as to construct a community of fellow readers or a "sharing-with" other students of the tradition. To philosophize, or just to read, is already an entry into the social, political, communal realities of our world. This is another important benefit of the classics: they provide us with instant community.

In my writings and in every attempt that I make to articulate my thoughts, I hope to engage the reader's attention and invite agreement, but I prefer to offend him or her rather than apathy or to produce the indifference of the banal and harmless sentiment contained in a greeting card. I hope to reach that center of value in the reader that is like mine, by reaching my own center of value. I hope to be human as opposed to merely male, Latino (whatever that means), ex-Catholic, socialist, heterosexual, but most of all I insist on being FREE.

Cornel West on Kolakowski and "Combative Spirituality."

The Cornel West Reader (New York: Perseus Books, 1999), $20.95.

"When you talk about hope, you have to be a long distance runner. This is again so very difficult in our culture, because the quick fix, the overnight solution, mitigates against being a long distance runner in the moral sense, the sense of fighting because it's right, because it's moral, because it's just. That kind of hope linked to combative spirituality is what I have in mind."



Cornel West, in a much more accomplished and successful way than I can hope to achieve, has sought to bring together his life-experiences as an African-American intellectual with his theoretical concerns as an important philosopher:

"My work is a feeble attempt to understand and respond to the guttural cry that erupts from the depths of the soul of each of us. The existential quest for meaning and the political struggle for freedom sit at the center of my thought. My writings focus on the specific and contemporaneous ways in which we grapple with concrete and universal issues of life and death, oppression and resistance, joy and sorrow."

The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. xv.

In a provocative essay examining the philosophy of religion of Leszek Kolakowski, West writes from the heart:

"... human beings must learn how to be failures and how to cry for help while acknowledging that this very capacity to learn and wisdom to cry out is a form of empowerment from a Reality greater than human beings that keeps people struggling and living. The major foes are self-deception, for example, forms of happiness that are really types of bad faith, and self-deification, for example, the refusal to acknowledge the need for divine help or aid."

The Cornel West Reader, p. 388.

And he concludes:

"Kolalowski links the religious conception of learning how to be a failure yet avoiding insanity to God’s inability to commit suicide. This crucial divine inability (even Nietzsche has God killed by humans!) confines evil to a separation from God -- that is, Sin -- that is moral, not ontological. The world is viewed as essentially good, yet existentially evil. On this Christian view, a deep sense of the tragic is required, yet the world is not inherently tragic."

The Cornel West Reader, pp. 388-389.

A friend has guided my steps towards the rediscovery and study of some key passages from Augustine’s Confessions and other works, as well as interpretations of them -- all of which, I am ashamed to admit, I knew hardly at all (despite having survived examinations dealing with the material since my Catholic high school days). I have now returned to Augustine’s ideas in an effort to make up for lost time:

"As the mind, then, itself gathers the knowledge of corporeal things through the senses of the body, so of incorporeal things through itself. Therefore it knows itself also through itself, since it is incorporeal, for if it does not know itself, it does not love itself."

Augustine, "On the Trinity," Book IX, Chap. III, from Basic Writings of St. Augustine, quoted in The Age of Belief (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954), p. 34.

Through participation in the memory of ideas transmitted by our civilization -- that is, through philosophical effort -- we come to know ourselves, and to know ourselves, for the Christian philosopher and especially in the gnostic tradition, is also to know God. It is to know love as a healing force in our lives. We must discover, Augustine suggests, what we have always known. "We must remember to remember." ("The Allegory of the Cave" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

This neo-Platonic effort of recollection, which begins with our shared language, need not involve the acceptance of a particular dogma, religious or otherwise, but rather, it has to do with the acceptance of a tradition and of the choice to embrace a particular attitude and disposition in life -- the choice to remain an individual, a person -- seeking to abide by the moral law, yet finding one’s own way to “love” and be of service to others. See Irving Singer, The Pursuit of Love (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1994), p. 144 (“Love and Do as You Will”).

The point at which we touch bottom in the self, at which we strike the essence of the self, is the point at which we find not only the source of memory, but also (for the religious person) the divine. "Knowledge of ourselves," say the mystics, "is knowledge of God."

For the non-religious person, the point of contact is with that structure in which we participate and which contains all of us, call it our shared culture, and which is nonetheless much larger than we are or ever will be. Perhaps both are speaking of the same entity. (See "Pieta.")

Think of each person as occupying a tiny point in an infinitely complex and fine web or network of relations that stretches back to the origins of the universe and forward until -- and I know that this is a paradox -- the end of time, so that even the tiniest gestures and effects have a purpose and meaning, they are the proverbial flutterings of a butterfly, a meaning that may not be seen by any one of us from any single perspective or at any one time. We experience ourselves as fragments, yet we must believe ourselves to be parts of a vast whole.

Do we believe that everything somehow makes sense in the grand scheme of things? Not necessarily, not anymore. To speak of an "implicate order" (David Bohm) or of a larger coherence is not -- not at all -- to speak from a rational and secular standpoint, such as the one that I defend, necessarily to accept any kind of theodicy that says "everything is for the best" or that "we live in the best of all possible worlds." Much less is it to claim that those of us who suffer should not bother ourselves with thinking about the social injustices that cause us to suffer, nor trouble ourselves to replace political leaders or forces exploiting us because we should trust in a superior intelligence that watches over us or in a coherence that we only dimly apprehend. This is the sort of attitude that makes religion, as Marx claimed, the "opium of the people."

The kind of religion that I respect inspires a form of resistance to unjust power -- Professor West calls it a "combative spirituality" -- on behalf of very worldy forms of social meliorism, even as the metaphysical optimism that I have discussed also suggests that things may never be as bleak or as meaningless as they seem.

This gamble provides some hope for those of us who want to believe, despite the odds against it, that there are non-religious grounds for insisting that we are each implicated in the lives of all others, that their pain is ours too, and that we must never give in to hatred or vengeance, rage and frustration -- as tempting as these emotions become on occasion -- because those persons who hurt us are more deluded and self-destructive than anything else.

In the end, hatred becomes a form of self-destruction for those who hate. Hate is a kind of cancer that always ends by devouring the host organism. Hatred can perform a distracting function. By hating we numb our own pain, we feel less, directing our energies towards those who hurt us. I refuse to take a step towards becoming what they are. I refuse to diminish my capacity to feel because it is to water down my humanity. I refuse to hate, even as I call for justice. This means that I have no alternative but to accept my pain, to live with suffering, without palliatives: no anesthetic, no hate, no denial of the pain. I also have no alternative but to struggle in order to come to terms with the monsters who have hurt me and so many others. In my struggle against hatred, sometimes I win; sometimes the hatred and disgust I feel at my torturers wins. However, I always keep struggling against those destructive emotions.

Can I believe this? I would like to. There are days when I know that I am in danger of succumbing to rage. And I need all the help that I can get to avoid giving in to despair and fury right now. Norman Mailer says: "the shits are killing us." Maybe some day this will change. For now, we must not be deterred or prevented from struggling on behalf of the causes and values in which we believe, whatever obstacles must be faced and overcome. We will not give up our faith in the healing power of love nor abandon the effort to find love in our lives. We must insist on justice. "Combative spirituality" sounds about right.