In his discussion of Wittgenstein, James C. Edwards writes that there is no such thing as a formula that applies itself, “one whose intrinsic meaning is independent of a conventional, public practice” (AL 163). The similar point can be made, and probably with less risk of controversy, that the significance of a theory will never be independent of the way people interpret that theory and respond to it. This paper evaluates how one might respond to Cornel West’s “Afro-American critical thought. ” First, West’s theory is outlined as it is presented by the theorist himself.
Second, the significance of key features of his approach to theory with regard to formulating a response is evaluated. At the same time, we will assess the importance of those features to any theory which takes society as its field of inquiry. The core of West’s presentation of his Afro-American critical thought contains two elements. First, West provides an account of the history of African-American thought and the historical experience that has shaped it; this account includes West’s assessment of the present situation.
He fits these elements of the past and present, intellectual and non-intellectual history of the Afro-American experience within a conceptual framework. He ascribes a particular significance to each element as it falls within this theoretical framework, whether the element is as concrete as the African slave trade, or as academic as the treatment of the “marginalistic tradition” in the writings of Sutton Griggs and Charles Chesnutt. West’s assessment of each element is in terms of its meaning for the situation of the Afro-American community in the present day.
West’s theory is not restricted to an interpretation, however. He presents the aforementioned historical analysis as a description of the present context from which he can draw up a recommendation for changes in existing society. This prescriptive part of West’s theory draws from his historical analysis in two different respects. First, these prescribed changes would aim to alleviate or eliminate the undesirable elements West has identified in the status quo. At the same time, his recommendations for change are the result of his own historically influenced way of thinking.
West explicitly traces the influences which have shaped the ideas his theory contains. The history he has analyzed is also his own history, and the theory he formulates in response is one more element of that history – a product of the factors in the historical progression which preceded it. West has drawn up his theory for a particular purpose, beyond the pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake. ” That purpose is intimately connected with the course for social change West has plotted out.
The theory West has created is to play a role in bringing about that change; creating that theory is an intellectual action intended on providing ideological support for the prescribed social transformation. West emphasizes that his purpose is not to provide a metaphysical “ground” for the undertaking (PD 15). He is not attempting to prove that there are objective reasons which would compel any rational agent to pursue West’s own vision. Rather, he sees himself as involved in the task of creating a “textuality and distinctive discourse which are a material force for Afro-American freedom” (PD 15).
This description naturally raises two questions as to his meaning. First, what is this “textuality and distinctive discourse” West seeks to create? Second, how can text and discourse be a “material force” for any kind of change? West clarifies the first question by explaining that the Afro-American critical thought he writes of “is a genre of writing, a textuality, a mode of discourse. ” This description reflects the fact that that his intellectual work is not a line of deductive arguments intended to relate the objective truth about its area of inquiry.
At the same time, his inquiry is not an amorphous mass of unsupported assertions and allegations. Despite the clear presence of structure and purpose in West’s work, it risks the fate of being ignored by “serious” academics as not rational or rigorous enough. West’s presentation of past and present events is imbued with his interpretation of them, and his inquiry is contiguous with exhortations to social action; these features are particularly distinct from academic standards of theory requiring passive objectivity on the part of the theorist.
The action West is calling for is so specific, and his advocacy is so impassioned, that it may be seen as belonging in the realm of politics, or even simply “activism,” each more further removed than the last from the more detached, more traditional theoretic activities. Moreover, its prophetic Christian elements have caused academics to categorize West’s works as “Religion,” further insulating it from consideration as serious social critique. How can a work with such obvious bias be considered “theory” when theorists should be seeking objective standards for just and unjust, right and wrong?
Arguments raised in other contexts by critical theorists of the Frankfurt school demonstrate that the unusually spiritual and unusually worldly features of West’s theory need not exclude it from secular, philosophical consideration. In fact, consideration of West’s writing in light of the critical theorists’ arguments shows that the very features that may seem to compromise its standing as a theory add to its credibility as a social critique.
Features of Cornel West’s Afro-American Critical Thought To clarify what response is appropriate to West’s project of inquiry, it is first necessary to examine the details of his approach. One striking feature of West’s analysis of his own theory is his extensive examination of the intellectual influences on his inquiry. The central guiding force to his inquiry, West writes, is prophetic Christianity. It is probably the presence of this element, and West’s placement of it in the position of his primary guiding ideology, which has led academics to banish his entire theoretical project to the category of “Religion.
However, the tenets of prophetic Christianity which West aspires to affirm in his hybrid ideology are most familiar from non-religious contexts. Most Christian ideologies emphasize, first, that the primary end of human existence cannot be found in the perceptible world, but is instead an eternal life after physical death. Second, it asserts that the one critical factor in attaining this end is each individual’s acceptance of Jesus Christ as a savior and son of the one true God.
These two classic pillars of evangelism deserve mention in this paper because they are conspicuously absent from West’s own text. He does not explicitly deny or refute these ideas; however, he also does not include them as part of the vital core of his theory. Instead, the main Christian ideal West has adopted is that “every individual regardless of class, country, caste, race, or sex should have the opportunity to fulfill his or her potentialities” (PD 16). This ideal may have a familiar ring to those conversant with Marxist thought, which also seeks to remove barriers to human self-realization.
West himself brings up Marxism’s emphasis of “self-fulfillment, self-development, and self-realization of harmonious personalities” (PD 16). West explains this common feature of the two ideologies by writing that some of the central ideals of Marxism were originally appropriated from Christianity, and therefore the ideologies are mutually compatible. One area of overlap he takes special care to point out is that Christianity calls not only for human fulfillment in the afterlife, but for self-realization in the human world as well.
Focusing on this earthly side of self-realization is the step that most firmly connects West’s theory to secular values, and frees it from supernatural religious claims. This ideal of self-realization is closely connected to the “norm of individuality” which West’s ideology has also inherited from Christianity. The norm of individuality imposes an obligation to see that individuality is preserved in any reform of society, and to identify and correct instances of its suppression within existing social structures. West writes that this norm “conceives persons as enjoyers and agents of their uniquely human capacities.
The importance of the individual is stressed because the concept of each person having a chance to realize her human capacities requires as a prerequisite that she be provided with the opportunity to achieve such development. This concept is explicitly distinguished from what West calls “doctrinaire individualism. ” Rather than focusing on enabling individuals to realize their natural human potential, doctrinaire individualism views them “as maximizers of pleasure and appropriators of unlimited resources” (PD 17).
West opposes such values because they promote a conception of a human life characterized by materialistic hedonism and unreflective consumption. The consequence of holding such values would be an idealization of selfishness promising little real gain for the individual, and at the expense of a sense of community. This last point is particularly important to West; he argues that any person’s achievements, including realization of her human potential, cannot occur in an individualistic vacuum, i. e. in a context that includes only that lone individual.
If an individual finds her greatest fulfillment in creating poetry, she will use the words her community has taught her. If she finds herself realized in the act of farming, she will be growing the crops which her community possesses. True self-realization cannot ignore the individual’s ties to her community. West formalizes this assertion by endorsing the “Principle of the self-realization of individuality within community. ” West describes two different levels to which this goal of providing all individuals with an opportunity for self -realization can be attained.
One might think of it as two sub-goals, one a grander vision than the other. The lesser of the sub-goals is what West calls “penultimate liberation,” a name clearly meant to evoke its status as a goal to be pursued, but not to be rested on. He describes penultimate liberation as “the developmental betterment of humankind, the furtherance of the uncertain quest for human freedom in history” (PD 18). In more general terms, this can be understood as any incremental change in society which decreases the ills West has diagnosed.
Penultimate liberation either brings his goals closer within reach, or causes the status quo to more closely resemble the ideal West’s theory proposes. The phrase “penultimate liberation” naturally implies a higher good beyond itself, however, and this higher good is the final goal of West’s theory: “ultimate salvation. ” West continues to keep his “prophetic Christian” ideology clear of the otherworldly and supernatural aspects of Christianity: his “ultimate salvation” does not refer to the salvation of souls for eternity.
Nor does it refer to a simple act of throwing off the shackles imposed by a particular class or another. To understand the ideal of ultimate salvation, one must be exposed to West’s idea of the “Christian dialectic of human nature and human history. ” This is not identical to the Marxist conception of the progress of history as a dialectical process. Marxism, writes West, describes a dialectic between human practice and human history. The “human practice” in this dialectic of the pure Marxist is entirely determined by cultural and historical context.
There are no factors which guarantee that human practice necessarily takes a certain form; it is extremely flexible depending on context. The Christian dialectic of human nature and human history, on the other hand, “stresses the dignity and the depravity of persons. ” From West’s discussion of this idea, one can infer that he considers human nature, with both its good side (dignity) and its dark side (depravity) to be a fairly constant factor. In this way the Christian dialectic is more absolute and less historicist than the Marxist dialectic.
West writes that the greater power to transform humanity which traditional Marxism credits to historical forces does not admit the existence of any such thing as a constant human nature. Such a complete malleability of the mode of human existence allows Marxism to predict “the eventual perfectability of persons” as an inevitable human development. More specifically, the selfish human behavior rampant in capitalist society will be replaced, after improvements in social circumstances, by practice more amenable to the selfless production characteristic of individuals in a communist society.
It is a Marxist position that holds this perfection of humanity to be an eventual certainty because of humanity’s inevitable evolution toward a communist society which West opposes. However, one could easily imagine a more moderate Marxist position in which perfection of human practice is not presumed to be inevitable, but merely possible. Perhaps the capitalist system will develop a stable equilibrium in which generation after generation of citizens are content to struggle within the system, not seeking to question the framework itself. (Many might see this outcome as far more “inevitable” than a victory of Marxism).
One might also question West’s contention that Marxism fails to admit the existence of any type of fixed “human nature. ” After all, Marx himself wrote that one of the main reasons to change production to a communist rather than exploitative system is that, “I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature” (KMR 34). From this statement, and by examining Marx’s further development of the same idea, the reader can observe a Marxist account of societal evolution not grounded, as West contends, on assumptions of the infinite malleability of human character.
Rather, Marx posits certain fundamental human qualities as the conditions which make a communist society both possible and desirable. Even further, this Marxist conception of human nature is well suited to affirm the “Principle of the self-realization of individuality within community” that West seeks to follow in his own intellectual project. This Marxist account connects self-realization within a community to human nature itself. Such an account bears enough similarity to West’s own that one might wonder why West would wish to oppose it.
If the Marxist position assumes this type of human nature rather than recognizing only entirely flexible human practice as the first element in the dialectic with history, does West still need to stand apart from it? Even if it includes the conception of human nature which Marx describes, the Marxist account does not depict the dialectic which West seeks to describe. Put simply, the conception of human nature to be found in Marx’s writings is too one-sided – too optimistic – to perform the role West’s dialectic requires.
The “human nature” West imagines in the dialectic between human nature and human history has two sides, the dignity and the depravity mentioned above. Put simply, West sees the “dignity” in human nature as “the capacity to transform prevailing realities for the better,” while human “depravity” is the unfortunate tendency to forego, ignore, or even resist such transformations. The idea that human nature itself (or one side of it) stands in the way of such an achievement seems to throw doubt on the endeavor of pursuing this goal.
Here it is not merely some arbitrary definition of human nature invented by West that stands in the way of realizing his highest goal. West acknowledges that his ideas owe a heavy debt to Christianity, and the imperfection of human nature is an important part of that tradition. However, it is worth noticing that in examinations of humanity ranging from intuition to the Human Genome Project to an analysis of Afro-American history, one finds if nothing else a striking absence of suggestion that human nature is inherently flawless.
West’s inclusion of this belief among his assumptions is not an arbitrary leap. This dual aspect of human nature prevents societal change from being realistically regarded as “man’s evolution toward eternity and redemption. ” Rather, it is marked by “process, development, discontinuity, and even disruption” which “precludes the possibility of human perfection and human utopias” (PD 17). Because he conceives of human nature as imperfect and incapable of being perfected, West writes that history ultimately does not match human ideals.
Consequently, “ultimate salvation” is not a goal to be realized as part of the normal procession of history. Instead, it is “the transcendence of history, the deliverance of mankind from the treacherous dialectic of human nature and human history” (18). The goal of such transcendence would be linked to allowing realization of human capabilities, free from oppression. Given his contention that human nature is inherently imperfect – that it “precludes the possibility of human perfection and human utopias” – how can West in good faith advocate pursuit of the seemingly perfectionist, utopian goal of ultimate salvation?
He acknowledges the conflict, but does not regard it as cause to abandon his call for social transformation: Prophetic pragmatism is a form of tragic thought in that it confronts candidly individual and collective experiences of evil in individuals and institutions – with little expectation of ridding the world of all evil. Yet it is a kind of romanticism in that it holds many experiences of evil to be neither inevitable nor necessary but rather the results of human agency, i. e. , choices and actions. (AEP 228)
The evils apparent in the world – which can be given the secular interpretation, “that which is undesirable in society”- are the results of human action, influenced by (perhaps even ultimately rooted in) human nature. However, they are also not results of the only possible human action, even given an unchangeable (but multi-sided) human nature. This consideration will re-emerge in later discussions of the role of the theorist in studying human society. For now, we need only recognize it as part of the motivation leading West to include a call for social change in his theory.
