two thousand, seven hundred and fourteen.

I like this. Not usually into auto tune, but I like it enough. I also enjoy the polka dot blouse paired with the big watch. I want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4hYT-mYzI4

“I think early on I was just in some sense seized by a certain kind of terror that struck me as being at the heart of things human and a profound sadness sorrow that struck me as being at the core of the human condition. And so in reading Kierkegaard from the Bookmobile, and here was someone who was seriously and substantively wrestling with a certain level of melancholia, I was struck by his very honest and candid- I want to stress honest and candid- encounter with what he understood to be this terror, this suffering and this sadness and sorrow. It deeply resonated with me.” 

What West is getting at here, when he discusses his encounter with Kierkegaard via his local library’s Bookmobile (and at 13 years of age, no less) is something I don’t think I’ve ever had the presence of mind to really reflect on. At least, not in any sort of intellectually active and profound way, as he does here. But it resonates with me, much the way I think he feels with respect to Kierkegaard. Mind you, I’ve only read a pathetic amount of Kierkegaard, but I don’t think that what West senses that Kierkegaard struggled with was limited strictly to a Kierkegaardian sense of existence. I think it’s quite the same thing as realizing, one day, that you will die. You will no longer be. So then what? What is left behind? What makes this whole cruel experiment worth it? Can anything bring a little bit of worth to this absurd combination of lightness and weight? I’m borrowing Kundera shamelessly here, and I don’t care. That’s almost a citation, so it ought to be duly noted. But West continues, reflecting on how this sense of worry regarding existence has shaped his intellectual and academic journey:

“It gave me a profoundly Kierkegaardian sensibility that required then that philosophizing be linked to existentially concrete situations, wrestling with decision, commitment, actualized possibility and realized potential. And so I tended then to have a deep suspicion of what Arthur Schopenhauer calls “university philosophy” or “academic philosophy,” which tended to be so much concerned with abstract concepts and forms of universalizing and always in track of pursuit of necessity as opposed to the concrete, the particular, the existential, the suffering beings and the loving beings that we are and can be… How do you struggle against the suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much evil?”

Isn’t there something right in suggesting that we ought to be more concerned than we are with the concretized moment of suffering? If we are really to bring meaning to the world, should that meaning be constituted by my pointing out to a fellow philosopher that they have simply made a sloppy equivocation, or perhaps that their syllogistic form leaves something to be desired? I am uncertain that this sort of academic masturbation, in which one is fighting, not for a sense of life, not for an idea that brings something to the table, as it were, with respect to how one might live a meaningful life, but for a simple position of superiority regarding an academic treatise is actually worthwhile or meaningful at all. Now forgive me if I sound patronizing, and know that this is a drastic oversimplification of what I take to be the case in academic positions. Yet the concern for me lies in the fact that, when one is overtaken by the worry of abstract conceptions lining up and falling into place, one takes themselves out of the messy arena of existence. I do not really care, quite frankly, to find cogent, well-positioned arguments to suggest that there might be reasons to consider that physical theory can in some way offer an analogous kind of expression of some metaphysical truth. Or at least not as a primary objective. It can be an ancillary concern, I think. What I do primarily care about, though, is that I can look up at the stars and recognize the wonder that any of this exists at all. And is that not, in some way, just the simplest and most cogent way to suggest such a link between the physical and the metaphysical? No, it is certainly not a standardized argument form, but does it not say exactly what I wish to say, regardless of some sort of objective truth outside of my own sense of existence? I think this kind of concern is loosely connected to why West has refused, and will continue to refuse, any invitations within philosophy departments. I wonder if in some way, he’s not right to preserve a sort of intellectual autonomy in this manner. I don’t doubt that he’s made the right choice for himself, of course, but whether it is of the same kind for me, I am uncertain.

All quotes are from Cornel West, in his interview with George Yancy, titled “On My Intellectual Vocation.” The interview is featured in The Cornel West Reader.