Cornel West: Thinking From the Mess

THE thinking of peoples that have perpetrated and benefited from slavery and colonialism cannot be the same with that of those who have been at the receiving end of the catastrophes and calamities.

It is for that reason that Cornel Ronald West believes that black philosophy in the world cannot be the simple love of truth and wisdom. To think in black and to philosophise from the underside of Empire is to do so from the toilets and hells of history.

From experiencing life as a tragicomedy and suffering the black condition in white America, Cornel West has fashioned a prophetic pragmatism of thinking from the “funk” and “mess” of life. Some decades before Cornel West, E.W. Dubois characterised the black American as a descendant of the slaves who suffered the status of a seventh son of history and lived with a double consciousness of himself as a person and also a second class citizen of the world.

The burden of black philosophy is to search for and establish humanity beyond simple homo sapiens, to locate the human being beyond biological classifications, stereotypes and labels.

Thinking as such, Cornel West has found Barack Obama worse than George Bush Junior. Not only did Obama bolster the American military industrial complex, he also extended America’s imperial expansionism, fuelled Wall Street crimes of 2008 and ensured that poor black criminals are consigned to jail while big white ones walked the streets.

Obama’s talk and activism about blacks and the poor was a political act of “benevolent neglect” where one ignores a problem by paying attention to it, by giving charity and philanthropy where justice and public policy are needed.

The crime of Barack Obama was to so powerfully embody and promise hope then deliver disaster and catastrophe. Obama’s “audacity of hope” began as a political campaign and ended as such instead of graduating into a social movement.

In Obama, good education, fine manners and motivational oratory were used to cover the ugly face of the same cow boy gangsterism that Bush had represented.

To use the name of good to cover the face of evil is worse than evil. In other words, Obama and his amazing rise to the presidency of America gave the world a false impression of the USA as a just democracy, where even former slaves could rise to power, but the former slave in power went on to perpetuate slavery while giving Empire an undeserved good reputation and the world false hope. To Cornel West it is telling that Obama produced and used more drones against innocent people than George Bush ever had and did. As a political side effect, the fact of Obama’s blackness angered the American right wing that fought back by sponsoring the election of Donald Trump. Obama’s fruitless presidency awoke the sleeping dogs of Empire. Normally measured in his poetic language, Cornel West has called Obama a “Rockefeller Republican” and a “Brown Clinton.” In critique Michael Eric Dyson, another public intellectual, called Cornel West a “heavy weight champion of controversy” even as he is the “most exciting black American scholar ever” to walk the earth, a “marvel of intellectual rigour.”

The Musicality of Black Philosophy Plato was wrong that the poets and musicians were to be expelled from the circle of philosophers as pretenders and merchants of laughter and illusions. In describing his vocation as a philosopher Cornel West says: “I am the jazz man and the blues man of philosophy,” who thinks from the “mess” and the “funk” of history but does so with rhythm, rhyme and lyric. Philosophy has a lot to learn from the poetic and the musical. In confrontation with the present American experience under the military industrial complex and automated killing machines Cornel West still thinks in rhyme with the Negro spirituals of the plantation and the poetic sermons of the slave preachers.

Cornel West has not only referred to black public intellectuals in America as prophets but he has gone on to describe himself as a prophetic thinker. As a professor, a philosopher and an ordained Christian minister West speaks on political and historical issues with rare authority. This authority and confidence has been called names from narcissism to deluded self-importance by critics and detractors. Others have picked on his propheticism as blind political messianism and a major compromise to the scientific thinking that is expected from an iconic scholar.

Some students of Cornel West in Princeton University and Harvard have publicly complained of lectures that have progressively declined from the academic deliveries to sermons and spirited polemics. Competitors in the black American community and white media and academy have noted what they have described as “a philosophy of victimology, anger and hate” in the thought of Cornel West.

Even the most scathing of his critics have admitted that Cornell West cannot be ignored unless at the expensive risk of neglecting some of the most provocative philosophical ideas of the century. The American presidents, a series of them, for whom Cornel West has reserved some of his frying critique have not been able to ignore him either, seeking his endorsement and using his critique as proof of their availability to public intellectual and political probity. Cornel West’s frequent presences and appearances at the White House has courted the observations that he lives by double standards and speaks with a forked tongue.

Entangling himself with the presidents that he criticises and mixing with politicians and scholars that hold ideas that are opposed to his is perhaps part of the jazz, the funk and the mess of life that Cornel West claims to think from.

The blues and jazz are musical genres whose genius and beauty lies in their deliberate discord and intentional disorder. Funk is a state of panic and anxiety, a scramble for order in an emergency situation.

In the discord and disorder of things, the meeting of opposites and harmony of chaos does Cornel West locate his philosophical relish and political energy.

The musicality of philosophy and its poetic and prophetic nature allows Cornel West the political privilege to turn enemies into opponents and critics into characters that fulfil the drama of his political and philosophical life. It may not be an exaggeration that Cornel West is both a crying and a laughing philosopher, in one and at once.

To laugh and cry at the world may be the privilege of black philosophy in search of lost humanity. Thanks to his musicality of philosophy, Cornel West is an inconvenient and even unhygienic political thinker the end product of his thought cannot be ignored as it is compelling and relevant.

Thinking with the Monsters Before every lecture or sermon (or both combined) that Cornel West delivers he has made it a ritual to name the black legends of thought and giants of the struggle that inspire him. It is a kind of incantation and invocation of the names of iconic African Americans that came before his generation, a habit that almost escalates or degenerates to public ancestor worship. The dramatic thing about a thinker who has been called an “apostle of racial hatred” is that Cornel West goes public about his inspiration from and admiration of white racist philosophers such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. In what he celebrates as his “paideia,” that is deep maturity of mind, Cornel West claims the ability to learn from monsters and nihilists, the intellectual capacity to use the genius of racists to decipher and nuance ideas of liberation and rehumanisation.

Cornel West minces no words or terms about himself as a philosopher of the underdog in the world, the drama is there where a philosopher of the underdog mines for wisdom and shops for insights from philosophers and prophets of the top dog. Or the wisdom is that the poor need the logic of the rich in fighting against poverty.

In the political and philosophical universe of Cornel West the ideas and ideologies of the Wild West must be studied by thinkers and peoples of the Global South, otherwise how do we decolonise a coloniality that we do not understand. It is not even that simple as Cornel West goes further to not only recognise and understand Western philosophers, he offers a spirited celebration and veneration of Nietzsche for instance. The philosophy that Cornel West claims to practice is of “the West that is open to the East and the North and the South” at once. The intellectual courage of Cornel West is made of a political bravado that is willing to be empowered and enriched by the thinking of the monsters themselves.

Black liberation philosophy as exemplified in Cornel West does not only derive its inspiration from the mess of history and tragicomedy of life but it also gets its basis and motivations from the genius of the evil prophets whose ideas built Empire in the first place.

Ronald Robert Suresh, in his study of Thabo Mbeki noted how white supremacists and racists get worried when they encounter a black political thinker that has mastered Niccolo Machiavelli, the top most technician of power politics, a Niger that schemes and calculates power irritates Empire.

The art and science of irritating Empire using Empire’s own archive is what Cornel West effectively offers.

The thinking of those that have suffered slavery and colonialism cannot really be the same with that of perpetrators and beneficiaries of the evils but it can use evil geniuses for its liberatory force.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail. com.