Cornel West on Truth and Finitude

Cornel West (b.1953) is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. West is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the Department of Religion.

West is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, pragmatism and transcendentalism.

Below is a clip from the documentary film The Examined Life where West talks about the ultimate nature of reality and human experience:

"A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline. It takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. That socratic imperative requires courage in a way William Butler Yates used to say, 'It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul, than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.' Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.

Plato says philosophy is a meditation on, and a preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life. Because there's no rebirth, there's no change, there's not transformation without death. And therefore, the question becomes how do you learn how to die. Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, 'To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.' You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.

I believe that Theodore Adorno was right when he says, 'The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.' That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. That if we're really talking about truth, as a way of life as opposed to truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain a monopoly on Truth capital T. We might have access to truth small t, but they're fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong. We have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers be they religious like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular like Camus and Sartres, that they are accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things, and therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're gonna talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.

How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth. So the truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth. And scientists can talk about this in terms of deducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so on. And religious folk can talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you. But they're all ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility." - Cornel West