Robert P. George and Cornel West are famous intellectuals and famous friends — friends of each other, I mean. George is on the right, West on the left. They are my guests on Q&A this week: here.
We were at the University of Arizona, under the auspices of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom.
George & West — or West & George — have a book coming out: Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division.
Thinking of cross-political friendships, I think of William F. Buckley Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith. They made joint appearances, as George & West do. Galbraith was very tall — 6-foot-9. WFB was friends with another economist, very different in his views, Milton Friedman — who stood 5 feet. (I think he was a little under that by the time I met him.) WFB would quip, “Economic wisdom is not measured by height.”
Both Cornel West and Robby George knew WFB. They were both guests on Firing Line. West tells me that he and WFB discussed Goethe. George introduced WFB to his ten-year-old son — who loved boats. WFB promptly invited the two of them to have lunch at the New York Yacht Club (which has a superb collection of model boats and ships).
George and West met at Princeton, where they were both teaching. Immediately, they were fast friends. They co-taught a freshman seminar. “It has been a beautiful, beautiful thing and a great joy in my life,” says West. George concurs.
They do not sweep their differences under the rug. Rather, they hash them out. Each man stresses that they have a lot in common. West says (I paraphrase, closely),
We come from Athens and Jerusalem. We are both Christians. Both of us were thoroughly seduced by the life of the mind. We love to read critically, and we love to push each other, philosophically, theologically, politically, and so on.
George says,
We were both nurtured on the works of the great ancient thinkers, such as Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. And the great medieval thinkers: Aquinas, Maimonides, figures like that. Figures from the Reformation Era — Luther and Calvin, yes, but also More, Erasmus. People from the Enlightenment: Locke, Sidney, and so forth. Nineteenth-century writers, from John Stuart Mill to John Henry Newman.
We are even interested in the same writers from the 20th century: John Dewey and C. S. Lewis, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin.
Here’s a fact that most people don’t know about Brother Cornel. They think of him as a man of the Left, which indeed he is, but you’d be hard pressed to find a conservative who knows more about, or appreciates more deeply, the work of such thinkers as Strauss and Voegelin. One place you will always find Brother Cornel is at the Voegelin meeting at the American Political Science Association convention every year.
Robert George is from West Virginia. He was the first in his family to go to college. His mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants, his father the son of Syrian immigrants. “George” is a name from Ellis Island. The family name, from Syria, was “Nehme,” meaning “grace.” (That word is transliterated from the Arabic in different ways.)
Both of Robby’s grandfathers were coalminers. “In our family,” he says, “we believed in four things: Jesus Christ, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the United Mine Workers of America.” He talks about going to college — Swarthmore. (Later, it would be Harvard and Oxford.)
With the exception of one issue, I had thought about nothing, despite having very firm convictions on everything. The issue I had thought about was abortion. It wasn’t until I got to college and encountered a dialogue of Plato — the Gorgias — that I began to realize that tribal thinking was foolish, and it wasn’t really thinking at all. I needed to start thinking.
Cornel West grew up in Sacramento, Calif. — the “chocolate side” of that town, as he says. “I could talk about James Brown and the Temptations and the Dramatics and the Delfonics,” he says. In truth, he could talk about a lot more than that. He was a keen reader and a top student. But when he got to Harvard College — his world really exploded.
In Sam Beer’s class, I read Max Weber, and it was life-changing. Weber’s two great lectures from 1917 and 1919 — they are at the center of what I do. He cuts across the disciplines. He invokes Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. What is a professional sociologist doing talking about Russian novelists? He is an intellectual, you see, not an academic in a narrow sense. He knows, for example, what it is to wrestle with depression.
West’s tutor was Robert Nozick, “whom I loved so dearly.” Nozick was probably the outstanding libertarian philosopher of the era. “I was probably more influenced by Hilary Putnam than by anyone else,” West says, and, when he himself was a teacher, “I was blessed to teach with him the last class he ever taught at Harvard.” West also mentions Talcott Parsons, Martin Kilson — “I could go on and on.”
In our Q&A, I discuss with George and West the role of a teacher. I tell a little story. I have just been in Cleveland, where 15-year-old twin girls — daughters of friends of mine — told me about their government teacher. (Could have been history. I don’t remember.) Students have asked him, “But what do you think? What are your opinions?” He answers, “I’ll tell you after you graduate.”
West and George get a chuckle out of this. Their views are very well-known, because these men are “on the record,” in various ways. They are “public.” But: In the classroom, they insist on assigning a variety of readings and approaching issues from both sides, or all sides. The real teacher helps students know how to think, rather than what to think.
(Bill Buckley, among others, did this for me, by the way.)
Can lefty students learn from righty teachers? And vice versa? Oh, yes. “Manifestly,” as WFB would say.
In our 45 minutes or so, my guests and I talk about many things, including race relations. At the end, I ask about influences — personal influences, be they intellectual, musical, or what have you.
Without Plato, says Robby George, “I think I would have been a tribal person. He fundamentally changed my life.” He continues, “On the substantive issues that divide him from his great student, Aristotle, I tend to side with Aristotle.”
He then names “the greatest of the Aristotelians,” St. Thomas Aquinas. Also Newman and Lewis. Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, et al.
Robby George is a banjo player, and a very good one. Accordingly, he salutes Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass, and Earl Scruggs, that master of the banjo.
Cornel West says, “I begin with Irene and Clifton West [his parents] and the Shiloh Baptist Church.” Early on, he discovered Kierkegaard — “and I remain a card-carrying Kierkegaardian to this day.” Something else to know: “The greatest literary artist for me will always be Anton Chekhov.” Sometimes, West travels under that name. If you see a driver waiting for someone inside an airport, holding a sign that says “Anton Chekhov,” the passenger may well be Cornel West.
Finally:
When it comes to preserving my sanity and dignity, it would be Sarah Vaughan and John Coltrane. And always in the backdrop: Louis Armstrong. So much humility, so much genius, so much joy, so much openness to life.
Yes. Again, to hear this Q&A with Robert P. George and Cornel West, go here.