the mellow on cornel
: I read Cornell West's most recent book. I was not impressed. His ideas
: are not new or impressive (only his vocabulary). For the most part, he
: is now being pursued by the white media. That makes me suspicious. I am
: simply tired of African-American intellectuls whose major theoretical
: paradigms are grounded in European-oriented philosophical thought.Cornel's more recent books are popularizations of what he spells out theoretically in works which are probably not easy to find. Fortunately, I knew of hiw work before the nons started chasing him around. (A friend of my family's, one of the the few black female Canons in the Episcopal Church says he's all that).
As for West being European-oriented, that's simply not the case. In fact he is, what he calls himself a pragmatic prophet. In his book, the American Evasion of Philosophy, West chronicles the progression of Pragmatism, an American thread of philosophy which makes a dramatic break for the European forms in that it entirely evades the question of epistemology. He thus traces this school's formal an informal influence over all of the major American thinkers beginning with Emerson. (Neihbur, DuBois, Mills, Quine, Rorty, Dewey, Trilling and a few others are included)
In Prophetic Fragments, he speaks of the moral authority of Christianity in America. In particular he highlights the outspoken nature of *prophetic* Christianity which involves men and women into *acting* according to their convictions and evolving a praxis which is the combination of their deep thought and their purposeful action. King is quite obviously the more recognizable of the thinkers of this school, but there are many others.
By combining the best elements of these schools of thought, West has developed (although not fully - the man is still young yet) a framework entirely American which requires the intellectual to be *active* and not an ivory tower figure. West speaks of *provocation* which is the manner in which I often engage people in this forum; not dispassionately but with my entire being. West puts flesh into philosophy which is a very American and especially -- with his background in the black prophetic church -- African-American thing to do.
West has also served as president of the Democratic Socialist of America, by the way and now he off to Harvard. His prophetic stance, which is now being force fed him by media overkill, requires him to be in the spotlight. It would be unfortunate of that and his more recent 50 page books cause folks to overlook and underestimate him. But this is to be expected, because quite frankly most Americans reject what they can understand and dismiss that which they can't.
I am not fully scooped on what went down between he and bell hooks and I won't mention it any more till I find out. I wrote to Marshall Blonsky on his book - American Mythologies - and he mentioned that he sees West taking up the *sign* of the classic black sellout which simply means here is a black man who is now the hot intellectual. Yes West plays into that. If Blonsky is right, the cachet of white attention will take the place of the substance of West's intellectual achievements. In which case America, including Afro-America will make all of its judgements based on how he is *represented* and what he *represents* rather than who he is, or what he does, or the content of his message. It seems to me that the only thing which can counter this is a genuine understanding of his work.
Can that be gotten, given the way most of us were introduced? Are first impressions everything?