Muted Strains of Emersonian Perfection: Reflections on Cornel West's Tragic Pragmatism
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/soundings.95.3.0309
ISSN2161-6302
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoAt 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 to forget or deny the past; we should also be careful to recall just how much the man who claims such a prospective view of experience may be carrying in the present. This took far more time and much closer attention for me to begin to comprehend more clearly.That fact was brought home to me with special urgency in 1986 or '87, when I first heard Cornel West lecture at Emory University. And I recognize now that I essentially was that skateboard dude, minus the board and the dope. I had never heard of Cornel West, but some friends told me that I needed to hear this man speak, a man who proved to be some sort of professor, indeed. Not knowing him, I failed to catch his casual reference to all the travel he'd been doing, couched as an apology for not having been in Atlanta for so long. And then came the gradual shock of realization, as I listened to this man heat up the room with words, discovering along the way how my own moral imagination could indeed be enlivened simply by talk, by gentle phrasing and careful cadences, trusting in the capable hands of an experienced choreographer of the spoken word.West referred repeatedly to “my fellow citizen, Newt Gingrich,” and “my fellow citizens in the Republican Party.” He clearly meant it; there was something in his delivery of the phrase that made this very clear. And thus I was simultaneously confronted by the breadth of his moral vision, and the profound limits in my own. Prejudice often fails to see its own limitations, the limits we impose on a fuller and more complete and more robust embrace of humanity. West was challenging me, challenging us, to extend our moral and imaginative reach.As we learn in his memoir (West and Ritz 2009, 103, 122), West had only recently started lecturing without notes, landing upon the freestyle form of delivery that is now his trademark. He had also recently discovered what he calls the “sanctified” music of John Coltrane (122–24).2 And he was in the thick of some profound personal transitions: dancing artfully within that important transitional life-stage separating thirty years from forty; dancing in a confusing syncopation between Yale, Union Theological Seminary, and Princeton; dancing between the conflicting loves he felt for women and for the Cause. As I have suggested, Professor West's powers of concentration were already evident to me in that first lecture, as they were later on the streets of Princeton. It took me much longer to comprehend their significance.Cornel West really does understand himself to be a bluesman singing for his supper; his memoir makes that very plain (West and Ritz 2009, 4–8, esp. 7). West is re-energized on the road, and is energized by the road. West also identifies himself with several important traditions that inform him intellectually and sustain him spiritually. These include the critical stream in North American Pragmatism; the progressive stream in Marxist theory; the prophetic stream in Christianity; and the moral stream in radical democracy. I hope in this essay to offer some suggestion of what tragedy and the tragic have to contribute to the ways in which West wishes to inhabit each of the four.For the purposes of these reflections, I will concentrate on the critical, and even prophetic, Pragmatist tributary that flows into the river that defines the main current of West's work. And so I begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), who stands upstream as the source and re-source upon whose essayistic foundations3 a great deal of later progressive North American thought would be built.4 Until noting Emerson's recurrent presence in the work of Jeffrey Stout (2004, 19–41) and Cornel West (1989, 9–41), I had only a very superficial appreciation for him. Thus, my brief comments on Emerson are mediated by the two and will have more to do with illuminating their work than Emerson's, in the end. By keeping our pious regard for foundational thinkers within proper bounds, they may be used in creative ways to provoke new insights. Stout (2004, 7–9) makes this point about his Pragmatist forebears; Nietzsche makes much the same point about the pre-Classical Greeks and about Arthur Schopenhauer.5 West enacts this insight consistently in most of his written work.For West identifies himself as a contrapuntal, dialogical thinker. “I'm a collaborator by nature,” he tells us. “In my life it's always been call-and-response” (West and Ritz, 262). Since I owe my friendship with West, as well as any proper understanding of his thought that I possess, to Jeffrey Stout, I will use Stout's work as the call that will help me to formulate my response to the enormous moral challenge that West's impressive body of work represents.Stout (2004, 8) has observed that the essay is one paradigmatically modern and paradigmatically democratic literary genre. Montaigne shows us the former; Emerson shows us the latter (Stout 2004, 164). West, in this sense, clearly identifies himself as a democratic essayist in an Emersonian key. Stout goes on to observe that most essayists worthy of our attention are products of conflict, conflicts that they find novel ways to describe, and then to resituate, however partially and inconclusively by “splitting the difference.” This insight already offers an important new way to read Emerson and the essayist tradition. It used to be the case that Emerson was read “transcendentally,” as if he were speaking outside of time more than to his own times (Porte 2004, 30–33, 196–97). His own times were constituted by a period of seething religious and racial conflict, and Stout reminds us that Emerson should be read in that light. In much the same way, we should read West's work in the context of the rise of neotraditional religion, ethnic nationalism, economic neoliberalism, the proliferation of the tools of and the trade in war, and the general rise of a new tribalism, worldwide.6In Emerson's world, Stout sees two essential conflicts that are directly relatable to the current situation: the debate between a kind of moral perfectionism versus an Augustinian pessimism about human capacities, on the one hand (think of Emerson's famous essay on “Self-Reliance” [Atkinson 1992, 132–53]); and a brash anticlericalism versus a new kind of traditionalism on the other (think of Emerson's notorious “Divinity School Address” [Atkinson 1992, 63–78; Stout 2004, 20–21]). Stout clearly announced which side of these Emersonian conflicts he was on, going so far as to describe himself as an “idiosyncratic” Emersonian perfectionist (2004, 76 and 29),7 as well as a profound lover of democratic virtue. In other words, Stout is more perfectionist than pessimist, and more anticlerical than neotraditional (though, to be sure, he sees much to be pessimistic about these days, he demonstrates rich sympathy for persons of faith and the language of sacrality, and he has a very high regard for democracy as a tradition).8 While I do not have a definitive answer to this myself, I do think it worth posing the question of how West situates himself within these Emersonian conflicts. He may seem more pessimistic, and more traditionalist than Stout, and this difference may be due to his explicit and unflagging identification with the prophetic Christian tradition. West, rather unlike Stout, remains a “Jesus man.”And yet the two converge in their overlapping descriptions of the virtue of hope, a virtue that takes us beyond false dichotomies like optimism and pessimism.9 Or to put it in the challenging terms West used in 2010 in an address entitled “Critique in the Age of Obama,” the challenge now is to live with hope, but without submitting to the temptation of optimism. West put this same point in even more jarring terms the following year, counseling the friends of democracy to “[put] on our cemetery clothes and be[] coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle” (West 2011, A23). I have spent the past year thinking about what that moral challenge means, and what it might look like in tragic practice.In 1993 West asserted that Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln were “the spiritual godfathers of pragmatism” (this comment is found in “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic” [West 1999, 174]). Emerson's contribution to that rich ethical tradition, for West, was a celebration of the “heroic action of ordinary folk in a world of radical contingency” as they “try to jettison static dogmatisms and impersonal determinisms by accenting the powers of unique selves to make and remake themselves with no original models to imitate or emulate” (West 1999, 174, emphasis added). Here, West sounds very much like the idiosyncratic perfectionist Stout described: unconventional if not anticlerical, and a deep believer in the moral resources of the democratic person whose subtle perfections are easy to underestimate.10 Even Emerson cannot serve as an original model to imitate; he merely points the way toward a type of creative individuality and artful originality. That was West's point in an important essay about Horace Pippin's painting (“Horace Pippin's Challenge to Art Criticism” [West 1999, 447–55]). That is Stout's point about grassroots organizers and activists (Stout 2004, 8; 2010, 146–47). For both Stout and West, then, Emerson's thought represents a unique synthesis of the varying individualisms we associate with Protestantism, Romanticism, and modern democracy. Such individuals may tend too quickly to sever their ties to influences, teachers, and community, and yet for all of the dangers and excesses involved, there is still much to commend in such an artful, lyrical, and uncompromising subject.11That said, in The American Evasion of Philosophy, West will distance himself from Emerson, arguing on the one hand that his practices of self-cultivation—gardening, walking, and reading—are far too isolated, individualistic, and bourgeois (West 1989, 211–12). But the deeper criticism West levels at Emerson concerns this Pragmatist godfather's lack of a tragic sensibility.12 Of all the Pragmatists in his genealogy, West asserts that only Josiah Royce grappled sufficiently with Schopenhauer's philosophy and thus with the depths of tragedy in a contingent world (West 1999, 175, 179), a world balanced precariously and perennially between the sublime and the absurd.This is the world of what West calls the “death shudder” (West and Ritz 2009, 26ff). And this is why we need art—tragic art. I turn now to a brief, but methodologically necessary, discussion of tragedy.In taking up this important topic, I am delighted to make appreciative mention of my colleague in the state of Georgia's university system, Robert Pirro, whose wonderful book, The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship, contains a superb and insightful chapter on Cornel West (Pirro 2011, 74–96). And I begin anew with a remarkable passage from West's 2002 preface to Prophecy Deliverance!: For Christians, the realm of history is the realm of the pitiful and the tragic. It serves as the context for passive persons who refuse to negate and transform what is and for active persons who reject and change prevailing realities. The pitiful are those who remain objects of history, victims manipulated by evil forces; whereas the tragic are those persons who become subjects of history, aggressive antagonists of evil forces….In this sense, to play a tragic role in history is positive … prophetic African-American Christian thought imbues Afro-American thinking with the sobriety of tragedy, the struggle for freedom, and the spirit of hope. (West 2002, 17–18, 20, emphasis added) This linkage of tragedy, freedom, and hope recalls a related remark from the early Nietzsche. In section 9 of The Birth of Tragedy,13 Nietzsche juxtaposes the pitiful depiction of rebellion against the divine he sees in the Genesis account of Adam's and Eve's expulsion from Eden, with the tragic account of rebellion against the divine he sees in Aeschylus's Prometheus trilogy. The tragic point is to be an active resister of domination in history, not a passive submitter to necessity. We live always aiming at a future implicated in a present. And for this we need the inspiring power of those “unique selves [who] make and re-make themselves” as well as the world.Rather unexpectedly, this cluster of complex virtues brings the Greek hero, Odysseus, to mind.I certainly do not wish to distract West from his deep immersion in Chekhovian theater, nor his eloquently tragicomic renderings of the Christian gospel. But I take seriously the candid assessment he offers in The Cornel West Reader: “My work is shaped by an obsession with modernity and the problem of evil. In fact, the major blindness in my writings may well be my relative neglect of premodern contexts” (West 1999, 49). Clearly, Cornel West has not ignored the Classical foundations of tragic thinking, anymore than he has ignored Athens's profound contributions to Jerusalem, but I do want to use this essay as an opportunity to invite him to give us, one day, a book-length treatment of tragedy and the tragic as he understands these resonant terms historically, genealogically, and morally. In order to prompt that endeavor, I wish to turn briefly to Sophocles, and to what I consider his most remarkable surviving tragedy, the Ajax.14Ajax was Achilles's first cousin and widely perceived to be the second-best Greek warrior at Troy. “Second-best” is a very difficult role for anyone to inhabit well, but in the Iliad Ajax inhabits it without complaint. He is a man of action, and a man of few words. When he plants his giant shield on the ground, he does not intend to move. And he rarely does. But he is not a ferocious closer, as Achilles was. He fights Hektor to a draw; he wrestles Odysseus to a draw; he cannot really find the words to defend himself when he is challenged. So he suffers, Homerically, in silence. Just prior to the opening of Sophocles's play, Ajax has been dismissed by jealous Greeks once again. Achilles has been killed. After a terrible battle for control of his corpse, Ajax single-handedly slashes his way to his cousin's body and removes it from the field. He thus saves the corpse for burning, and the divine armor for the Greeks. Inexplicably, then, the Greek leadership awards the armor as a prize to Odysseus. Enraged, Ajax determines that this is the last slight he will endure at Greek hands; he attempts to kill all the Greek leadership that same evening. Athena maddens him, such that he theatrically tortures a herd of mute animals instead, believing them to be Agamemnon, Odysseus, and the rest. Restored to his right mind and covered in gore, Ajax opts for suicide in the face of what he takes to be an unendurable public shame.What we see in the play is this: Ajax commits suicide … but not right away. In short, Ajax resists time. For Ajax, the Heroic Code—and Greek ethics more broadly—speaks to the existence of absolute values, matters that are unwavering and unchanging, like his shield. We might think of friendship, love, courage, and justice here, but Ajax thinks more of enmity, violence and death. He will not be swayed from his suicide by the advice of friends, anymore than he was ever moved in battle. Everyone else—especially the Chorus of fair-weather friends—speaks of flux, of change, and of time. But Ajax will have none of it. He refuses to live in such a changeable world. Not only will he not have it, he makes it impossible for us to have it in the audience as well. The Chorus may speak of time, and flux, and change. But Ajax actually manages to stop dramatic time in this play.Each time he leaves the stage, we expect a messenger to come out and report on his suicide. Three times, Ajax returns to the stage, for repeated soliloquies. One of these soliloquies offers an extended meditation on time (Ajax 644–92). To put it very simply, the play cannot move again, until Ajax kills himself. But Ajax refuses to do so, thereby stopping dramatic time with his own words. When he finally does commit suicide, Ajax plants his sword in the ground and falls upon it. As Herbert Golder (1990) has shown,15 since Sophocles was a master of visual drama, Ajax has managed first to make a sundial on stage—and thus, he stops time yet again when he falls upon it. This is one of the few acts of physical violence that takes place onstage in all of the surviving Greek tragedies, so there must have been dramatic need for it. The second half of this play takes place on a stage still dominated by Ajax—as a corpse.What we see in the second half of this play is the gradual working out of one good thing that comes of a “less heroic” way of seeing, the one thing that Ajax, being who he was, could not see or understand. I am speaking of the virtues of compassion and forgiveness, which is to say, of changing one's attitude or orientation with time. It is Odysseus, the very man whom Ajax had most wanted to kill, who will defend Ajax's burial rights in the second half of the play. He almost casually shrugs off the contradiction by claiming that it is pure self-interest: “I will stand under this same need one day,” Odysseus observes. “I look at him and I see myself” (Ajax 121–26, 1345–69).This may seem the cynical perspective of an opportunist or immoralist, but that is not how Sophocles frames the situation. He forces us to realize that Ajax could never have argued this way on Odysseus's behalf. He was the hero who refused any kind of change, on principle; in the Odyssey, even in death his shade refuses so much as to speak to Odysseus in Hades (Odyssey 11:541–67). Ajax is what we might call a perfectionist, rather than a pessimist, in the Emersonian sense (but unlike Stout, he is a perfectionist utterly committed to never changing). He was also a heroic traditionalist, committed to the Code.16 By contrast, Odysseus is the anticlerical figure here, more than willing to break with tradition when it suits the moment. He is bluesier than Ajax, far more attentive to timing, which is what made him a superb wrestler and (one suspects) far more interesting to the women in the Odyssey, Athena first and foremost.Sophocles takes both men with equal seriousness in the play, reminding us that absolute appeals (to things like “evil”) have their place, but that so does the virtue of being swayed, with time. Odysseus's tragic sensibility, unlike Ajax's, enabled him to move, to change, and to grow as a character. Perhaps unheroically, Odysseus nonetheless lives in a world with “no permanent enemies and no permanent allies.”17 But there are real losses in this way of thinking, as well as tragic insight.18 Sophocles depicts the tragic suicide of Ajax as the literal end of an age, the symbolic end of the Heroic Code and the Homeric world. Ajax, in short, is uncompromising; his commitment to absolute values is understood as a commitment to values that brook no compromise. No one of this type of hero makes it back from Troy alive. Odysseus, by contrast, is the survivor, and he will make his lying way home again, in one piece, however long it takes. It is important to recall that Odysseus is the transitional figure who captures the shift in atmospherics from oligarchy to democracy. Compromise is the very heartbeat of life in the democratic assembly, with its privileging of persuasive speech and elenchic back-and-forth (all of this mirrored in the tragic stichomythia at which Sophocles excelled). That is why it is so very symbolically significant that Ajax will not speak to Odysseus, not even in death, whereas Odysseus remains capable of weeping on Ajax's behalf.It has taken me a long time to get to what I hope is a fairly simple point of entry. While it would be silly and trivializing to charge Cornel West with not being tragic enough, I do wish to put one question to the articulation of a kind of tragically inflected, progressive Pragmatism such as Stout and West represent. Here, then, is my suggestion of a conceptual springboard for West's further reflections on tragedy and the tragic.I have already suggested that West's thought is Odyssean. He is a traveler, a wanderer, a humanist, a dancer with impeccable timing, a stunning speaker, and a virtuoso storyteller. He is extremely fast on his feet. He is also not afraid to change, as Odysseus does, in mid-play. But Cornel West is also what we might call a “Scylla and Charybdis thinker” (much like his beloved Reinhold Niebuhr).19 In fact, one of the single most recurrent rhetorical phrases in his vast literary repertoire is this: “we must avoid the Scylla of X and the Charybdis of Y.”20 This is related to Stout's observation about the democratic essayist's striving to “split the differences” defined by the cultural fault-lines of his or her own day. Both men get this from a Pragmatism that has deep roots in Hegel's paradigmatically oppositional way of thinking.But the epic-and-tragic point here is that Odysseus could not avoid the choice and could not split that difference. He had to pick an evil in the Odyssey, whether to lose all of his men in the whirlpool of Charybdis, or to lose some of his men to the hungry jaws of six-headed Scylla.21 It may appear as if Odysseus was trying to split the difference, sailing down the middle of a narrow waterway, but in fact he was trying to avoid the whirlpool, knowing that this would bring him within range of the monster. He lost six men there, and he could very easily have been one of them. While exposure to great risk is not the same thing as killing, the dilemmas posed here are acute. In the face of some conflicts, then, you cannot “split the difference,” nor can you easily secure a Hegelian Aufhebung. Clearly Hegel knew this, and West knows this, but attending more explicitly to those moments when avoiding Scylla and Charybdis is impossible might help to sharpen West's explanation of the ways in which tragedy is related to the prophetic and the most radical dimensions of his work.I am suggesting, albeit tentatively, that West must ultimately choose to stand with Odysseus rather than with Ajax. What he can offer to Ajax is his appreciative grief and loving remembrance. But the absolutist turns of phase we hear sounded so passionately by Ajax—and captured in the language of “good and evil”—may have to be muted, if not given up entirely. I recognize that this must sound like a very strange thing to say about a thinker with West's prophetic pedigree, at least initially. West has been, by his own admission, obsessed with “modernity and the problem of evil.” Furthermore, too many blithe post-Nietzschean dismissals of the language of good and evil are just that—blithe and dismissive. The language of good and evil is part of a complex moral discourse with a complex history that is presumably designed to enable us to talk about certain matters of great ethical import, like human enslavement. Indeed, West explicitly links his tragic sensibility to an interest in the category of the catastrophic, “catastrophe” being an apt descriptor for much of the African American experience.22 What, then, might become of West's laudable “obsession with modernity,” if the rhetoric of good and evil were to be set aside? I would like to suggest that two figures who may have been dismissed a bit too quickly, Emerson and Nietzsche, will prove to be illuminating in exploring such a question.23Nietzsche expresses three central concerns in his attempts to move “beyond good and evil.”24 The first is ironically an historical argument of sorts—ironic, given how much of his early career was devoted to working against historicism. It is articulated most clearly in Daybreak, where he insists upon what he calls the “dirty origins” (pudenda origo)25 of every allegedly clean or noble idea. Morality, in this sense, is all too often little more than ill-disguised narcissism; in other words, it is rooted ironically in immorality. As he quipped already in his first aphoristic work, “How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness [Vergesslichkeit]! A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of the temple of human dignity.”26Nietzsche's second worry about the language of good and evil is psychological. What, he challenges us to ask ourselves, is really gained by calling something—and more to the point, someone—“evil” rather than merely “bad”? First, he suggests, we are placing ourselves unambiguously in a position of indelible and immoveable superiority, in much the same way we do when we allow ourselves to pity another person (the overcoming of pity as intentionally or unintentionally demeaning is a major theme in Beyond Good and Evil). Second, Nietzsche worries, by employing this loaded language, we may also be wittingly or unwittingly initiating the process of eventually justifying horrific deeds by way of retributive punishment. We feel authorized to do things to those we deem “evil” that we would presumably be far less likely to do to someone we deemed simply “bad.” Cruelty is often the end result of moralism, in Nietzsche's view, and virtue, he is quick to insist, uses the same punitive and vicious tools as vice does; the spirit of ressentiment cuts deep.27 That insight lies at the very heart of his grand Genealogy of Morals (KSA 5:247–412).A final point follows from this insight. Nietzsche became increasingly disaffected with those he deemed “the ‘improvers’ of mankind” (Die “Verbesserer” der Menschheit [Nietzsche 1997, 38–42; KSA 6: 98–102]), because he was suspicious of the standpoint they claimed all too easily for themselves as knowing practitioners of improvement. The central contention in any such program, whether individual or social, is the perception of the need for change, coupled with the belief that one is in a unique position to effect such change. For Nietzsche, the world changes all on its own, all the time; it does not need our help. Amor fati thus becomes a more significant (and strangely nonfatalistic) moral position than the self-professed attitude of the change agent.28 To be sure, no one likes a moralist, but Nietzsche's mature “immoralism” cuts a critique far more deeply than this, and raises questions anyone wishing to defend or reclaim the rhetoric of good and evil might profitably confront.Now, to be sure, any language, and certainly any moral language, is open to abuse. Such abuse does not necessarily invalidate the more circumspect use of that same language. But I share Nietzsche's sense that not all moral language is equally susceptible to abuse. In the Sophoclean context I am considering here, it is Ajax who gravitates toward the language of good and evil, with results that are catastrophic. It is precisely his conclusion that the Greek leadership is evil, not simply bad or misguided, that determines his path on the tragic course of torture and attempted extermination. Odysseus, by contrast, does not consider Ajax to be an enemy, just a rival; it is Ajax who makes Odysseus an enemy and thus a target for destruction. Odysseus thus remains willing to fight for, and to secure, Ajax's rights of burial at the end of the play. We should recall that the mutilation of the corpse is a significant Homeric trope designed to show how far the morality of the battlefield may degenerate (Segal 1971), whereas leaving the corpse unburied is a profound Sophoclean trope designed to make much the same point. This problem drives the first half of his Antigone and the second half of the Ajax. My point is that naming the dead person as evil, is often the necessary first step in a tragic chain of horrors. This category, when applied to a person, may have dire consequences indeed.I began this essay by observing that there were four main confluences—Pragmatist, Marxist, Christian, and democratic—that contribute to the tumultuous crosscurrents and the soothing springs that constitute much of West's best writing. Emerson is a philosophical lodestar of sorts, Nietzsche less so.29 West draws far more on the arts for sustenance—on playwrights like Anton Chekhov, musical choreographers like Stephen Sondheim, novelists like Herman Melville and Toni Morrison, performance artists like James Brown, and a marvel
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