THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#23, MARCH-MAY/2017
The unexamined life is not worth living Plato says in line 38A of the Apology. How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions, and begin then to become a different kind of person? See, I’ll put it this way that for me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we’re ‘beings-toward-death’, featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us, ‘beings-toward-death’.
At the same time we have Desire while we are organisms in space and time. And so it’s Desire in the face of death. And then of course you’ve got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry. And you’ve got dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and then of course structurally and institutionally you have domination. And you have democracy, you have attempts of people trying to render accountable elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people.
So philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with Desire in the face of death. Wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism and wrestling with democracy trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment in the face of structures of domination. Patriarchy. White supremacy. Imperial power. State power. All those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by it.
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Thank God you don’t have to go to school [to be a philosopher]. No, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative of examining yourself requires courage. William Butler Yeats used to say that it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being I think in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
Plato says philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life. Because there is no rebirth, there is no change, there is no transformation without death. And therefore, the question becomes, how do you learn how to die? Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die’. You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
I believe that Theodore Adorno was right when he says that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That gives it an existential emphasis. You see, so that we’re really talking about truth as a way of life, as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth. We might have access to ‘truth’, but they’re fallible claims about truth, we could be wrong, we have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers, be they religious like Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular like Camus and Sartre, that they’re accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things. And therefore there, you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is. You’re going to talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth. So the truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth. And scientists can talk about this in terms of producing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so forth and so on. Or religious folk can talk about this in terms of surrendering one’s arrogance and pride in the face of Divine Revelation and what have you. But they’re all ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility.
I want all of the rich historical colorations to be manifest in talking about our finitude. Being born of a woman in stink and stench, what I call funk, being introduced to the funk of life in the womb and the love push that gets you out. Right, and then your body is not just death, but the way Vico talks about it. Hear Vico is so much better than Heidegger. Vico talks about it in terms of being a corpse, see Heidegger doesn’t talk about corpses, he talks about death, it’s still too abstract. Absolutely, read the poetry of John Donne, he’ll tell you about corpses that decompose. We’ll see that’s history, that’s the raw funky stinky stuff of life. That’s what Bluesmen do, see that’s what Jazzmen do.
See I’m a Bluesman in the life of the mind, I’m a Jazzman in the world of ideas. Therefore, for me music is central. So, when you’re talking about poetry, for the most part Plato was talking primarily about words. Whereas I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about temper. I talk about rhythms, see for me music is fundamental. Philosophy must go to school not only with the poets, philosophy needs to go to school with the musicians. Keep in mind Plato bans the flute in The Republic but not the lyre. Why? Because the flute appeals to all of these various sides of who we are given his tripartite conception of the soul – the rational, and the spirited, and the appetitive. And the flute appeals to all three of those, whereas the lyre on string only appeals to one and therefore is permissible. Now of course the irony is that when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do? Well he requested a Thracian girl to play music on the flute.
I’m a Christian but I’m not a puritan I believe in pleasure. Orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place. Televisual pleasure has its place, you know I like certain TV shows. Oh my God when it comes to music, Beethoven’s 32nd sonata, op. 1 1 1, unbelievable aesthetic pleasure. Same would be true for Curtis Mayfield, or The Beatles, or what have you. There is a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. It’s true that you might be socially isolated because you’re in the library or at home and so on, but you’re intensely alive. In fact, you’re much more alive than these folk walking these streets of New York in crowds, with just no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
But if you read John Ruskin, or you read a Mark Twain, or my God, Herman Melville, you almost have to throw the book against the wall because you’re almost so intensely alive that you need a break. It’s time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life. Take Moby Dick and throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw Von Kleist’s work against the wall, it was just too much. It reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping after he overcame those suicidal impulses he saw as young Werther in the 1770’s and made his move towards neo-classicism in Weimar.
There are certain things that make us too alive. It’s almost like being too intensely in love, you can’t do anything. It’s hard to get back to chronos then, it’s hard to get back to everyday life. You know what I mean. That kairotic dimension of being in love with another person. Everything is so meaningful you want to sustain it, you just can’t do it. You know, you gotta go to the bathroom or have a drink of water, sh*t.
Romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers. Can you totalize? Can you make things whole? Can you create harmony? And if you can’t – disappointment. Disappointment is always at the center. Failure is always at the center. But where does the Romanticism come from? Why begin with Romanticism? See I don’t begin with Romanticism? You know Beethoven said on his deathbed – said I’ve learned to look at the world and all its darkness and evil and still love it. And that’s not Romantic Beethoven, this is the Beethoven of the string quartets, one three one, the greatest string quartet ever written. Not just in classical music, but of course, its European forms. Beethoven is the grand master. But string quartets, you go back to those movements, there is no Romantic wholeness to be shattered as in the early Beethoven. He’s given up on that. You see, this is where Chekov begins. This is where the Blues starts. This is where Jazz starts. You think Charlie Parker is upset because he can’t sustain a harmony?! He doesn’t care about the harmony, he’s trying to completely ride on the dissonance, ride on the Blue notes. Of course he’s got harmony in terms of his interventions here and there. But why start with this obsession with wholeness and if you can’t have it then you’re disappointed, and want to have a drink, and melancholia, and blah blah blah, blah blah.
No you see, the Blues, my kind of Blues, begins with catastrophe. Begins with the Angel of History in Benjamin’s Thesis, you see. Begins with the piles of wreckage, one pile on another. That’s the starting point. The Blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. And Black people in America and in the modern world given these vicious legacies of White supremacy, it is, how do you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness, so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic, and the calamitous, and the horrendous, and the scandalous, and the monstrous?
You see part of the problem though is that see when you have a romantic project, you’re so obsessed with time as loss, and time as a taker. Whereas as a Jacobean Christian, I want to stress as well, time as a gift, time as a giver. So that yes, its failure, but you know how good is the failure? You’ve done some wonderful things now Beckett can say you know – ‘try again, fail again, fail better’. But why call it failure? Why not say you have a sense of gratitude that you’re able to do as much as you did? You’re able to love as much, think as much, and play as much. Why think you needed the whole thing? You see what I mean?
This is even disturbing about America. And of course, America is a Romantic project, it’s a paradisial City on the Hill, and all this other mess and lies and so on. I say no, no, America is a very fragile democratic experiment predicated on the dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples, and the subjugation of women, marginalization of gays and lesbians. And it has great potential, but this notion that somehow you know, we had it all, or ever will have it all has got to go. You got to push it to the side. And once you push all that to the side then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment, and the language of failure. And you say ok well how much have we done? How have we been able to do it? Can we do more? Well it certain situations you can’t do more. It’s like trying to breakdance at 75 you can’t do it anymore. You were master at 16, it’s over. You can’t make love at 80 the way you did at 20, so what, sh*t, time is real.
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I think the problem of meaning is very important. Nihilism is a serious challenge. Meaninglessness is a serious challenge. Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement. But the problem is of course you never reach it, you know, it’s not a static stationary telos, or end or aim. It’s a process that one never reaches, its Sisyphean. And you’re going up the hill looking for, better meanings, or grander more ennobling, enabling meanings, but you never reach it. In that sense, you die without being able to have the whole in the language of Romantic discourse.
excerpted, transcribed, and edited from a dialogue between Cornel West and Astra Taylor featured in Examined Life, Zeitgeist Films, 2008. Directed by Astra Taylor.
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