As he slowly moved across the stage, silence moved across the audience. Without speaking a word, his presence alone brought a standing ovation.
They stood and cheered; the room resonated with the applause of anticipation and respect.
Cornel West, described by The New York Times as “a cosmopolitan public intellectual among academic specialists” for his movement both in and outside of the realm of academia, spoke and held a question-and-answer session at The University of Memphis Thursday in the Michael D. Rose Theatre.
With eyes wide and eyebrows arched above his glasses, West stretched forth his arms, pointed his slender fingers and spoke.
“Tonight, I begin on a Socratic note,” he said.
Not knowing what was to come, Lemoyne-Owen senior Mahogany Edwards leaned forward, pen in hand, awaiting his explanation.
“Socrates was preoccupied with trying to promote the courage to think for oneself,” West said. “That is what I came to Memphis to do.”
West spoke of Socrates and quoted Plato. From William Butler Yates to
John Coltrane and from Chuck D to the Old Testament prophet Amos, West used noted public figures to make points as he methodically moved through his speech.
West used Socrates to urge the audience to think as a whole person: soul, body and mind.
“The courage to think for yourself is the courage to be yourself,” he said. Using Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” West illustrated the kind of questions
Socrates
and Martin Luther
King Jr. asked; the kind of questions that brought
about change.
“‘What’s going on? ‘“ Marvin says. These are the kinds of questioning and wresting with questions that ought to be taking place,” he said. “Not just in the classroom but when you steal away. In your study groups and when you’re alone.”
He used Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” to illustrate the blues.
“The blues is about maturity and wresting with forms of death,” he said. “The blues is about growing up.
“America now knows what it is like to be hated and targeted for reasons beyond their control: the blues,” West said comparing white America after Sept. 11 to African-American people.
In the question-and-answer session, he went where the audience took him. He gave his opinion on the Democratic party, calling it a “spineless, milquetoast party.” He defined freedom as “the awesome responsibility of defining who I am in relation to those who came before, those alongside me and the unborn.” West described hip-hop as “music that is one of the last forms of transcendence for many young people.”
His movements outside the realm of academia, a spoken word compact disk and his political involvement, were noted causes in his leaving Harvard’s faculty for Princeton. Yet, it is for these same extra-curricular activities that intellectuals in secular, religious and academic communities praise him.
West is a noted social and economic philosopher. He has written 15 books on topics ranging from racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender to history and politics, including the “Cornel West Reader” and the 1993 best seller “Race Matters,” which sparked a national debate on race issues.
He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and both a master’s and doctorate degree from Princeton.
West chose to end his brief time the audience on the just as he began: on a Socratic note.
“I’m definitely leaving with re-thinking my ideologies,” said Toyia Smith who attended West’s speech. “I’ll be asking myself ‘What’s going on.’”
