I’m carefully reading The Cornel West Reader. West’s profundity is almost annoying. It feels nearly superhuman. I struggle to understand how he has accumulated such detailed scholarship.
West is my hero, my star. If I aim to be like him, I’m bound to hit something orbital. Though my scholarship likely won’t be as in-depth in literary theory, for instance, I’ll at least have a unique appreciation for Tennyson, Auden, Goethe, and Kafka. In our disciplinary and technocratic age, theoretical-poetical-empiricist holism, to name some elements of my yearning interdisciplinarity, is rare.
I’ve perused the journal Social Text, which I found was vibrant in the 80s and 90s but has since declined in quality (as it relates to my own intellectual intrique).
What’s interesting to me is that the intellectuals in those early years seemed to have a pulse on something very special. Greatness was being born. This pulse reverberates throughout my current doctoral program, where we have the spirit of the early years but with a new irrelevant jargon. The early lucidity is part of its pull.
I mentioned Kafka. In my previous entry, I noted a dismissal of existentialism. After further reading and returning to key works, I’ve concluded that there may be something still worth valuing in that domain. For example, Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion seems useful for better understanding the nature of living a life with less sadism, as Rorty might say.
At the beginning of this year, I had little respect for fiction and poetry. I found it tedious. I’m now developing, respect, though. I was told this year that stories are the main medium for pedagogical social transformation. I think there’s something to that.
I don’t know where I’m going. I’m just following West right now. I’m trying to borrow from his perspective as much as possible so that my worldview might enlargen and better approach his.
I think good writers develop by emulating others. They steal from a variety of sources they respect. Good thinkers are probably similar. One learns to think more critically, with deeper questions, and a bigger picture of the world by steeping oneself in the views of someone with a grand vision.