2023/2024: Dr Cornel West - 'A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane'

How do we emerge from the bleakness of our catastrophic times? In seeking a way forward, I will proceed on three philosophic levels – the genealogical, existential and pedagogical. The genealogical, or historical, level of my analysis will set the stage, and my period will be broadly the Age of Europe (1492-1945) and Age of America (1945-2024). The existential level of my analysis will embrace the lived experiences of struggling, suffering creatures. The pedagogical level will be classical in character and musical in content. My overall theme will resonate with the three pillars of jazz – blues (tragicomic catastrophe lyrically expressed), swing (myopic time opened to new possibilities) and improvisation (practical wisdom and timely interventions unleashed).

We open with the inauguration of philosophy in the West. In his responses to Greek catastrophes, including the Peloponnesian wars, Plato provided profound resources for our own catastrophic moment. To be sure, Plato’s fear of disorder and unruly passions, and his denigration of history, blurred his lens, and could blind him to the catastrophic and tragicomic. And yet Plato also understood that ‘when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining’, philosophy could become redemptive and (in my conception) jazz-soaked and free-style.

My consideration of early modern philosophy focuses on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511) and Montaigne’s Essays (1580) – as responses to an era that saw devastating religious warfare, plagues, and famines, and the onset of European imperial conquests. The great public intellectual, Erasmus of Rotterdam, directed his classic work to the sheer absurdity, indeterminacy and frailty of human societies. Montaigne’s self-explorations, including his essays “Of Cannibals” (1580) and “Of Coaches” (1588), were among the first philosophic reflections on the barbaric European colonization of the New World. Erasmus and Montaigne were both path-blazing exemplars of blues, swing and improvisation in philosophy, facing dark folly with a free-style soul-craft.

The greatest breakthrough in modern philosophy is found in the works of the Italian Giambattista Vico. His perceptions wedded wisdom, eloquence, prudence and providence. The New Science (1725) was the first great philosophic European response to the New World. Vico saw Europe as locked into a dominant ‘barbarism of reflection’, yielding a rapacious individualism, and reducing philosophy to a paralyzing scepticism. In response, his conception of ingenium (ingenuity or improvisation) accentuated our creative human power to transcend barbarism

The two great philosophically-inclined artists in early twentieth-century America were T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill. Eliot’s work, especially his poems and criticism from 1917-1942, explored the end of the age of Europe with its wars, loveless creatures, hollow men, mindless barbarity, and devastated wastelands. Eugene O’Neill’s 49 plays constitute the greatest literary exploration of the cultural and spiritual dynamics of the American empire. Both Eliot and O’Neill understood the profound human tragedy of their times, but, trapped within a waning civilisation, neither artist could find a way out.

My jazz-soaked philosophy looks unflinchingly at our catastrophic times, and says that ‘perhaps’ we can find a way out. How do we go on loving, living, fighting, laughing, crying, swinging and singing? One answer lies in my tradition: the rich tradition of Black love in freedom and Black freedom in love. In literature, the two giants of this tradition are W. E. B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison. And in music, the Black tradition was honed in nearly three centuries of slavery and nearly another century of neo-slavery. This tradition kept a weary people in a God-forsaken world flowing with styles and smiles. Amid catastrophe, this Love Supreme transcends words, flows beneath sentences, and becomes flesh in deeds.