Works of Spirit: Jeffrey Stout and Cornel West on the Arts of Democracy

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition1 and Cornel West's Democracy Matters.2 Both books displayed the contributions that North American pragmatism may offer to contemporary reflection on the future of democracy. They did so by urging that democracy is best viewed as a constellation of cultural norms, moral dispositions, and social vision—in short, a tradition—rather than as a political system.3 Viewed this way, democracy is a tradition that stands in critical relation to any given political arrangements. Practiced this way, democracy may enable and inspire forms of hopefulness in spite of current institutional realities. Democracy, in short, is not a political system; it is a social practice, the practice of living an ethically engaged and discursively serious social life.Stout and West accomplished this shift in democratic vision in part by retrieving three figures for contemporary pragmatist reflection: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), as a democratic individualist with a highly developed and philosophically sophisticated sense of the complexity of such individuality; G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), as a theorist of social and historical selfhood in which “ethical substance” and “spirit” take shape in the context of unfolding democratic conversations among mutually recognized political agents; and Richard Rorty (1931–2007), as a philosopher who was insistent on pragmatism's non-foundational orientation and who urged the activist democratic commitments to which this orientation ought to lead. That said, Stout and West worked diligently to “call attention to the lapses and limitations in all [their] favorite authors to keep [their] piety within bounds.”4 West did so by cautioning against Emerson's occasionally undue optimism and failures of tragic sensibility, Stout did so by countering Hegel's assertive and often optimistic teleologies. And both did so by countering Rorty's apparent biases against religion which they—in the pragmatist tradition of Royce, James, and Dewey—viewed as an essential moral and spiritual tool for democratic coalition-building. Stout and West aimed their democratic criticisms at several recalcitrant institutional and political temptations in contemporary US culture: dominating militarism abroad, dominating authoritarianism at home, the dominance of value-free mercantilism in global capitalist structures, and a pervasive form of cultural nihilism. They paid particularly close attention to what they saw as a muddled view of religion's place in contemporary politics, one that is exacerbated by aggressively anti-religious secularism on one side, and by emphatically religious neo-traditionalism on the other. In various ways, both Stout and West lay claim to Emerson's conception of democratic individuality, which offers the promise of transforming individual genius into practical (that is, social) power. The democratic individual is the locus of the sacred in this account. The inspired work that such sacred individuals may produce are what the Romantic philosophers called “works of spirit”: art, religion, and philosophy. We are urged to trace the career of these works of spirit closely, and to view the practice of philosophy as more akin to the work of art.In two interviews with Cornel West that took place in October 2019 and February 2020, Teodros Kiros identified the 1982 Prophesy Deliverance!5 and the 1993 Race Matters6 as West's two most salient published works. Kiros argued that the former “presented in outline form . . . everything that came later,” and noted of the latter that “many consider it to be his most important book.”7 In the second 2020 interview, West assesses his own work very differently, indeed. He observes: I've never viewed Race Matters really as central for me. I've always looked at the world through the lens of ways in which individuality can flower and flourish—coming to terms with historicity, born in circumstances not of our own choosing, but trying to generate forms of vision, courage, empathy, and witness in light of our historical contexts and circumstances, and then democracy. So, individuality, historicity, and democracy have always been the three fundamental pillars from which I proceed. . . . And so, it's fascinating to me that, although individuality, historicity, and democracy were, all three, conceived in such a way that they informed Race Matters, it was not really until I got to Democracy Matters that I could lay bare my Weltanschauung, my broader worldview.8This claim may seem initially surprising, although further reflection may render it less so. My hope is to offer some of that further reflection within the contours of this essay.The interlacing of West's interests in democracy and individuality is the more obvious point of connection, a connection that rehearses West's provocative embrace of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a premonition, if not a founding figure, in the pragmatist lineage.9 Emerson's commitment to democracy, like West's, lay primarily in his belief that it is a form of social life that empowers the unique individual to express his or her uniqueness in the fullest manner. Democracy, that is, embraces and promotes a compassionate and emancipating culture that celebrates the boundless capabilities and capacities of individual persons when their powers are unleashed, and permitted to flourish. Emerson famously quipped that a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. The set up to this oft-quoted line is especially significant for my purposes in this essay: Our modern wealth stands on a few staples, and the interest nations took in our war was exasperated by the importance of the cotton trade. And what is cotton? One plant out of some two hundred thousand known to the botanist, vastly the larger part of which are reckoned weeds. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered,—every one of the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility in the arts.10Emerson's central point was that democratic culture ideally conditions us to see the virtues in the unconventional and the non-conforming—that is, to see a weed as something more than a drain upon our soil and water. This is a consistent feature of the perspective of our creative artists; the provision of new and unexpected ways of seeing is something for which we turn to them. In an even more famous line, the rousing final sentence of his 1844 essay, “Experience,” Emerson opines: Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.11Democracy, in the Emersonian register, is committed to assisting in this “true romance,” the transformation of individual genius into practical social power. When such individual powers are harnessed collectively, then the demands of social justice are more likely to be served well. Both Jeffrey Stout and Cornel West have done much to tease out the implications of such beliefs.12 And they have utilized West's third term, historicity, as a means of doing so.Yet this term is subject to a wide variety of meanings and so may be put to various uses. West's use of the term suggests the importance of seeing ourselves as historical creatures: dependent upon our ancestors, born into a context we did not choose, embracing the resources such a context provides, and simultaneously battling against its limitations. Depending upon the accidents of your historical context and social circumstances, you may be forced to devote more of your time and moral energy to the cultivation of those resources, or to the criticism of their limitations.13 Other connotations of the term it is not we as individuals who a our and our our our So, our may the importance of to larger that the from the and in for the a view of demands more such as the one Hegel in his on the of Emerson was such historical and Richard are Jeffrey Stout and Cornel The of in this is the of our simultaneously ourselves of our own historicity, the or of which we are a part and from which we have demands that we the of our and our at is that of that one of the of pragmatist to an historical point of some for my Democracy Matters was published in the year that saw Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and into I to a feature of both that they engaged in democratic as much as Stout's and West's of democracy at a from They did not the democratic future they to their what the virtues and commitments of modern democratic in to against the contemporary of democratic and that have in the two they these West a criticism of what Emerson's one that was by and In West's they to the that a or may in an that is than its they In a belief in to the that can in for the term for not offers a West's for to any of his was that this tragic from any of democratic that a modern democratic the resources to the very that it will on his all for the promise of a are what of the I to is that both Democracy Matters and Democracy and not of for democratic its individual virtues and its social the they as as in what then modern and democratic like that of the of Stout and West both viewed secularism and of and religious then and on the as to the essential of democratic of They their books to these the critical to his of democratic by religious on the one and their aggressively on the other. 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and historicity, as as their with secularism on the one and on the other. may be surprising, that Stout and West both trace these of to of Hegel's of a they at They Hegel's of the subject of is, the individual subject as from to to the philosopher in his or her Hegel on our view to a subject who is social and shift will have attention from and to norms, and The of in the more . . . and a more the of and at the of modern democratic to I to Richard Rorty as salient on these two we are the importance West's Prophesy more than and of Race Matters more than then we to that Rorty's of in the year as Prophesy Rorty's a to philosophers and to take up the of and of forms of democratic as by and Rorty that and and up a for the it is the of than of of than in which one can something Rorty further that any of their and especially The Rorty was to what from to be Rorty's of the everything upon The on our are and the of an historical to have any Rorty put it in with at is that you not when you even 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