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Monday 16 November 2009

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts. I don’t want to make it just urban; you can have life in the streets in the country. But it’s fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth. See, I put it this way: that—for me—philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us; we’re beings towards death. At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time and so it’s desire in the face of death. And then, of course, you’ve got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry. And you’ve got dialogue in the face of dogmatism. And then of course structurally and institutionally you have domination and you have democracy. You have attempts of people trying to render accountable elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people, to ordinary people. So if you’ve got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you’ve got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment in the face of structures of domination, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power, state power, all those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by it. Cornel West

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