Word: emerson
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...acute awareness of its role in world politics as well as its commitment to society at large. Students confronted matters as trivial as broken curfews and as solemn as deceased classmates. They ate in the Union; they taunted Elis at The Game; they attended classes in Sever and Emerson...
...white, are catching the hell they're catching in America and around the world. If we don't have it, and historical windows open up to make social change, we'll find ourselves unprepared." His goal is to become an "organic intellectual" on the order of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of transcendentalism, "someone who tries to fuse the life of the mind with the public affairs of the nation, who tries to shape public opinion...
West's vision, which he calls prophetic pragmatism, is most fully spelled out in The American Evasion of Philosophy. The book traces how Emerson's emphasis on innovation, refined by John Dewey and other American thinkers, then leavened with a dose of Marxist class analysis and the black church's commitment to racial justice, can be the basis for a rebirth of democratic radicalism. Says West: "I'm trying to revive a grand yet flawed tradition, to take the best from liberalism, populism and the Gospel while keeping track of what happens to everyday people, the ones the Bible calls...
...practice, that makes West a Marxist who believes in God, an admirer of black nationalism who thinks such Afrocentrics as Leonard Jeffries are too narrowly parochial. He pulls the disparate threads together like jazz: "Emerson said it's all about experimentalism, and Louis Armstrong's music is all about improvisation. I think we need these kinds of links, to be eclectic, to open us up to what we actually share rather than what divides...
...when he will withdraw from the public stage back into the ivory tower to think through the practical implications of his ideas, while sustaining himself with books, the black church and sweet soul music. Meanwhile, friends say, West has read biographies of the great public intellectuals of the past -- Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold -- to prepare for the highly visible role that is being thrust upon him, not entirely against his will. After all, if a philosopher like West can't be philosophical about success...