Examined Life (2008)

Cornel West: Self

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Quotes 

• Cornel West : The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says on line 38A of the Apology. How do you examine yourself; what happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions and begin then to become a different kind of person. 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 toward 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, beings toward death. At the same time, we have desire, why we are organisms in space and time, 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've got domination... and you have democracy

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• Cornel West : There's a certain pleasure in the life of the mind, that cannot be denied. It's true that you might be socially isolated, because you're in the library, at home and so on. But you're intensely alive. In fact, you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets in New York, in crowds, which is no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

• Cornel West : Oh, God no.

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  Cornel West : A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative of examining yourself requires courage. You know, William Butler Yeats used to say "it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield." Courage to think critically,

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  Cornel West : courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being, I think, in the end.