Cornel West
speaker
48 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Cornel West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, no, no. I hear what you're saying, brother. But keep in mind what we mean by truth here, though, that, yes, the pursuit of truth ought to be central. But truth is a species of the good in the sense that the way to truth requires trust, integrity, humility, openness and respect for others saying what they say, even when you radically disagree.
So truth is not some abstraction that you're just trying to grab. It requires a process so that character formation, what I'd call soul craft, that's old language going back to medieval times, right? Your soul has to be shaped in such a way that you have an integrity, honesty, decency, so that your quest for truth is a genuine one, not just a rationalization of your own opinions and dogma.
That's crystallized in this way. I've been collaborating with my brother for 20 years. I'm telling you so that it depends on what form. Very, very much so. But certainly this text is a kind of crystallization because we've been on chocolate sides, vanilla sides of cities. We've been among the well-to-do, the working classes. We've been in Catholic churches. We've been in Baptist churches.
We're just trying to bear witness, Brother Charlie. We're trying to bear witness.
I don't know if that would have killed a lot of my vote. He's taking a lot of grief for that. Most of them came from non-voters, but don't go there.
I think we have narrow ideological lens and we're not willing to learn from a variety of perspectives. Lift every voice is the very anthem of black folk. When you lift every voice, you're like a jazz woman or a blues man. You're willing to go beyond being an echo and become a a voice. You know, you all were talking about Hillsdale College.
I just want to shout out my dear brother Bradley Burtzer and his magisterial text on Russell Kirk as well as Christopher Dawson. Never met him. Learned much from him. Why? He's lifting his voice. I'm lifting my voice. We're bouncing off against each other. Never met him in the flesh. But why? Because we're involved in the quest for truth.
Because love is the most profound force. in human life and in human history. And the last thing you ever want to do is to truncate any kind of flow of love because of a political or ideological issue. When you sit down at Thanksgiving around your family, with your mama and grandmother and aunts and uncles.
Keep the love flowing, even though you might have political differences, because love is the fruit of the red, produces the fruit of the red joy that will help sustain you in your move from mama's womb to tomb.
Absolutely. Thank you so very much for having us. Yeah, thank you, Georgia.
Absolutely. I think that Brother Robbie and I view ourselves as being part and parcel of great traditions, the Socratic legacies of Athens, where we try to muster the courage to think critically for ourselves, to examine ourselves, examine our society and world, do it in the spirit of intellectual humility, but also tenacity.
So we're in pursuit of the truth, but also the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem, the courage to love. And because justice is what love looks like in public, to actually be justice seekers. But we recognize that truth, capital T, and justice, capital J, they're bigger than any of us, any of our groups, our tribes, our nations, our races, our genders, our sexual orientations.
So we have a certain sense of acknowledging we're both fallible, but we do believe that we've got to get beyond any kind of narrow relativism and any kind of sense of not being deeply concerned about courage, courage, courage to think, courage to love.
Yes, I would just add that I think we're living in a moment of such spiritual decay and moral decrepitude. What is not just polarization, what is gangsterization, obsession with the 11th commandment, thou shall not get caught, rather than the 10. And so Robbie and I are simply trying to make the case that integrity
honesty, decency ought to be at the center of our sense of what it is to have civic virtue. And civic virtue is about public interest in common good. That, again, like Robbie says, goes beyond tribe, goes beyond region, race, gender, or what have you. It's something profoundly human. And we are missing that in this moment.
And as you know, I actually ran for president, so I have a particular kind of bias here. But it has to do with the lens through which I look at the world. You see, as a Christian and a black freedom fighter, I look at the world through the lens of morality and spirituality. And what I saw was corruption in both parties.
mendacity in both parties, hypocrisy in both parties, big money playing a disproportionate role in both parties. And I'm concerned about the moral quality and the spiritual content of our citizenry. And if they're feeling cynical, if they're feeling nihilistic, if they're feeling as if they're choosing Thrasymachus over Socrates, might makes right rather than right having its own gravitas.
then it means we're sliding down a slope toward chaos in terms of both our society and culture as a whole.
I mean, as a Christian, I'm always tied to ways of spiritual awakening, which have to do with how do we get beyond our egoism and narrow tribalism and be tied to a love with the blood at the bottom of a cross that can transform our lives so we recognize the ways in which we are all connected.
human beings made in image and likeness of an almighty and loving God and therefore have a fundamental commitment to the least of these.
Showing 21–40 of 48 · page 2 of 3
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