Bleak ontology of pessimism denies prophetic basis of “black aliveness”. Pragmatic commitments avoid their links

(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Yet West demurs from Afropessimism. Yes, like the Afropessimists he analyzes the production of racism by modernity and indicts the “forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity as well as aesthetic and cultural ideals” that “require[d] the constitution of the idea of white supremacy.”18 He is strong in articulating the impact of racism: “The sheer absurdity of being a black human being whose black body is viewed as an abomination, whose black thoughts and ideas are perceived as debased, and whose black pain and grief are rendered invisible on the human and moral scale is the New World context in which black culture emerged.”19 West’s analyses of white supremacy, while severe, come with a crucial distinction from the Afropessimists. While West recognizes despair, he rejects pessimism as “a species of cowardice fearful of life and too spectatorial in its detached practice! It lacks the heightened vulnerability of deep love and the passionate uncertainty of genuine struggle for justice!”20 Sorrow, suffering, mourning, and melancholy are essential elements of the religious life, but there is no room for holiness and transformation in pessimism. Pessimism does not inspire activism, nor does it encourage the empathy and relationships that heal; it is nihilistic and prophetic. West is joined in his critique by the philosopher Lewis Gordon, who writes of Afropessimism, “Do blacks, for instance, suffer social death in relation to each other?” and then asks, “Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as social perspectives?”21 A key element of West’s affirmation of Black suffering and culture focuses on sound. He writes that “the ‘urtext’ of Black culture is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan—a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition.”22 Moreover, his Christian commitments, especially prophetic hope, do not allow him to abandon hope for this-world redemption. He writes that Christianity is an extension of prophetic Judaism.23 Heschel’s phrase that “some are guilty, but all are responsible” finds emphasis in West’s work. The prophetic for West is not simply an extension of the pragmatic, nor does the prophet simply dream of a future; here West is misunderstood by the philosopher Richard Rorty, who imagines “the pragmatist as the dreamer who first glimpses the concrete outlines of a better future.”24 The intellectual independence that has always marked West’s career generates criticism in an era when the most radical and pessimistic voices are misperceived as the most interesting and significant. Yet what West offers is precisely what the Afropessimists ultimately wish to attain, what Kevin Quashie calls “Black Aliveness,” the title of his recent book, and what Sithole calls the “Black register,” a form of language that capacitates Black subjects to speak about their conditions, and what Elizabeth Alexander calls “The Black Interior.”25 Racism may indeed be the ultimate form of necropolitics, as Jackson asserts, but West keeps alive the souls of Black folks, the intellectual, cultural, religious, and musical vitality that is too precious, in his words, to be ignored or discarded as nothing more than a defensive response to white antiblackness. The nihilism of those theorists is far removed from West’s description of “the profoundly tragicomic character of black life,”26 with its “individual and collective black resistance predicated on a deep and abiding black love.”27 Black souls, for West, are infused with the prophetic spirit, which articulates devastating critique of societal injustice yet also insists on the cultivation of the inner life of compassion for others. Prophecy brings together the exterior and the interior of human life, suffering with hope, devastating sorrow with redemptive love. As West puts it, for the Christian “a deep sense of the tragic is required, yet the world is not inherently tragic.”28 Too much tragic is also unacceptable. West writes: “My fundamental problem with Du Bois is his inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life—a refusal candidly to confront the sheer absurdity of the human condition. This tragicomic sense—tragicomic rather than simply ‘tragic,’ because even ultimate purpose and objective order are called into question—propels us toward suicide or madness unless we are buffered by ritual, cushioned by community, or sustained by art.”29 Addressing and ending America’s economic, military, and political exploitation requires, for West, a combination of Socratic questioning, prophetic witnessing, and the power of democratic institutions. Here is where his critique of Afropessimism is sharpest: his emphasis on the prophetic as a source of compassion as well as critique, of vision and hope as well as demand for social change, an offer of optimism as well as rage at cruelty, an insistence on the spiritual dimension of our individual humanity as well as calling out the systemic racist structures that try to exert sovereignty over us. And, ultimately, West’s insistence on cultivating the relationship between our interiority and the exteriority that define our lives: “My painful quest for wisdom is an endless journey that tries to delve into the darkness of my soul to create a more mature and compassionate person. My political project of deepening democracy in the world is a perennial process of highlighting the plight of the wretched of the earth and broadening the scope of human dignity.”30 West insists that three pillars—the Socratic, the democratic, and the prophetic—are essential, with each a corrective of the other. Socratic critical thinking is essential and yet the dry, rational tradition of the Socratic requires the passion and compassion of the prophetic. He writes in his 2004 book, Democracy Matters: “We must out-Socratize Socrates by revealing the limits of the great Socratic tradition. My own philosophy of democracy that emerges from the nightside of American democracy is rooted in the guttural cries and silent tears of oppressed people. And it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries—he never sheds a tear. His profound yet insufficient rationalism refuses to connect noble self-mastery to a heartfelt solidarity with the agony and anguish of oppressed peoples.”31 The limits of the Socratic—the absence of emotion, compassion, passion— lead West to define the crucial role of the prophetic. He draws from Heschel in understanding the prophet giving voice to suffering. The prophet, Heschel writes, is not a messenger of God, but “a person who stands in the presence of God (Jeremiah 15:19).”32 That marks the difference, West would agree with Heschel, between philosophy with its proofs for the existence of God, and the crucial prophetic distinction: to be a witness to God.33 Socratic questioning, however clever, will not help people living in agony and the prophetic demand for justice becomes meaningless if it is only a dry, well-articulated argument. Here West shifts from prophecy as a message to prophetic subjectivity.