Prof. Cornel West engages with Edinburgh - delivering the Gifford Lectures, pitching to be President, standing with peace protestors

Cornel West delivers his Gifford Lectures, 14th May 2024, Edinburgh (Photo: Pat Kane)

From our new Edinburgh base, we have been celebrating the presence of Professor Cornel West in the city. Cornel is one of America’s greatest public intellectuals, and has taught (and professed) at Harvard, Princeton and Yale. He is currently standing as an independent candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

But he’s here to deliver what’s generally regard as the “Nobels” of religious and philosophical awards - the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University. His title is “Jazz-Soaked Philosophy in Our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane”. West’s own summary is:

These lectures reflect my passionate conviction that the vocation of philosophy may be, in the language of the great jazz musician, John Coltrane, a force for good in a broken world. My lectures will mobilize philosophic and artistic resources to help us make courageous, compassionate responses to our catastrophic times.

My particular calling reflects my Christocentric and cruciform version of Christian life – a decolonizing and democratizing way of being wedded to the mysterious forces of kairos (disruptive hope), kinesis (holy folly of faith) and, above all, kenosis (revolutionary love).

These forces – when embedded in great philosophic traditions – can sustain us in the painful but also joyful trek from womb to tomb.

Our DA editor and Alternative co-initiator, Pat Kane, wrote in his National column on what this bridge between philosophy, politics and the Black American musical/literary tradition might mean. An excerpt:

I have loved West’s work ever since I heard him speak, in the late 80s and early 90s, about the Black American music tradition.

He doesn’t just regard that tradition for its superlative virtuosity and invention. He claims these very qualities are themselves a kind of moral action – a template for a higher way of being in the world.

That tradition managed to compose a graceful, joyful, and experimental response to what West calls the “catastrophe” of racism and white supremacy.

Jazz and blues (and all the popular developments from them) took the rigid “bars” of Western European melody and rhythm, and “swung” against them, or “funked” with them.

As West put it in his first Gifford Lecture this week, this musical “dissonance” is “a way of life”, which helps black folks “fight against nihilism and despair”. To sing the blues is about “wounded hurters becoming wounded healers”.

“In a situation of no way out” – for example, the continuing oppressions of 20th-century Jim Crow America – these musicians “found a way through, and beyond”, continues West.

Their improvisations and new forms represent a reckoning with death (the brutalised and murdered black body of American slavery and after).

Yet they are also, and equally, a celebration of love, vitality, and community. One which “overflows from the chocolate side of the city”, as West earthily calls it, to raise up the cause of the poor and the dominated, of all colours and states.

These Gifford Lectures have, so far, been a great opportunity for West to speak in this expansive mode.

Their overall title is A Jazz-soaked Philosophy For Our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates To Coltrane. His second lecture last week fully delivered on that.

The Greek philosopher Socrates (as rendered by Plato) has the quality of a “good jazz musician”, says West. Both try to be “unclassifiable and unsubsumable” by any school of thought.

West cites Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald especially, as representing “a wave in an ocean, so distinctive that there’s no conceptual net that can catch her richness”.

That ocean of the black music tradition can teach us about “collective voicing”, in our politics and activism. We source the courage to act by honouring the struggles of forebears.

But also, in another crossover between black music and Greek philosophy, West also cites the concept of kenosis – “a flow of love and compassion, the emptying of oneself towards others”. The jazz tradition does this too, according to West: it “democratises the voice”.

West incants: “I can be just a brief, brief creature in space and time by means of seeing and feeling and acting, grounded in lenses, broader lenses, to view the world … Deeper feelings, swings and grooves, polyrhythms, and then, most importantly, the actions, the deeds, the praxis”.

More here. All the lectures are available on video, in full, here.

Professor West also took to the streets in Edinburgh when here, mounting the steps across from Waverley station to express his condemnation of the Isreal Defence Forces’ action in Gaza:

As for Cornel’s Presidential hopes and plans, we have found this late 2023 interview with broadcaster (and CW’s collaborator Tavis Smiley) to be most instructive (interview begins at 6.05):

For a more recent presentation, see this May 2024 interview with Channel Four News. And To find out more about West’s presidential bid, visit his campaign website.