Muted Strains of Emersonian Perfection: Reflections on Cornel West's Tragic Pragmatism

The greatest genius is the most indebted man. . . . The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner, but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Shakespeare, or, the Poet"

I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who, once they have read one page, know with certainty that they will go on to read every page he ever wrote, and listen to every word he uttered. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. . . . I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can provide an example. That he is capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example is beyond doubt; the history of India, which is almost the history of Indian philosophy, proves it. But this example must be provided by his visible life and not merely his books, that is, in the way the Greek philosophers taught—through their bearing, demeanor, clothing, food, habits more than by what they said, let alone by what they wrote. This courageous manifestation in our philosophical life is what we lack most in Germany. Here the body is slowly beginning to be liberated, long after the spirit seemed to have been liberated.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "Schopenhauer as Educator"

The Chekhovian Christian perspective put forward in this reader is my testament of hope for the twenty-first century. The words, sentences and paragraphs are but linguistic marks that track my journey of blood, sweat and tears, which tries to achieve and enact the best of what it means to be human, modern and American. These marks often fall short of the high mark—and pale in the face of good music—yet they point toward a certain kind of musical life that painfully pursues a compassionate individuality and courageously struggles for a more free and democratic world. This reader is my attempt to transfigure our gutteral cry into a call to care-

—CORNEL WEST, "Introduction to the Cornel West Reader"

Preliminaries

At the conclusion of a public discussion of Jeffrey Stout's (2010) latest book, Blessed Are the Organized, Cornel West was walking with a group of students and colleagues to a restaurant for dinner when he was accosted by a skateboard dude on Nassau Street in Princeton. The young man, an amateur herbalist to judge by the suggestive cloud of witness, confronted him with the following:

"Hey man, aren't you, like, some kind of professor or something?"

"Or something," West chuckled, then listened patiently as if he had all the time in the world, while the young man explained how and why it was that "[he] really need[ed] to talk to [him]." West gave the young man his number and invited him to schedule an appointment to do just that. The young man eagerly responded to the invitation, with the most memorable line in the whole exchange:

"Dude, what's your name again?" Then he boarded off.

I was struck by the way Cornel West approached that young man with the gracious humanity that is his hallmark, and the sure touch of an improvisational blues artist. The simultaneous notes of hilarity and deep seriousness were quite remarkable and left a lasting impression.

West's powers of concentration were especially striking. And in fact, that laser focus is the very heart of progressive Pragmatism, in his own practice of it. West calls a quip from Dewey to our attention in his marvelous essay on Josiah Royce: "What should experience be but a future implicated in a present!"¹ A future implicated in a present. A future that refuses to be shackled to its past. West refers to this as "the prospective perspective," a powerful and recurrent theme in his mature work. But it is important to recall that this prospective orientation ought not tempt us...