Radical History for a just future

Paideia

Werner Jaeger’s paideia is an ancient Greek word that literally means “education.” When we use it today, it means a deep education that connects you to profound issues in serious ways. It instructs us to turn our attention from the superficial to the substantial, from the frivolous to the serious. Paideia concerns the cultivation of self, the ways you engage your own history, your own memories, your own mortality, your own sense of what it means to be alive as a critical, loving, aware human being.

Humando

Humando is an ancient Greek word that literally means “burial.” I begin with the humanity and the humility, which is very different than the biological species like homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens. Very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about humando, you’re talking about those particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

Organic Intellectual

The conception of the “organic intellectual” stems from the Italian thinker in the Marxist tradition, Antonio Gramsci, who discusses it in his essay “The Intellectual Selections from the Prison Notebooks.” See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5-23.

Hegemony

West has appropriated Gramsci’s core concept of hegemony (“the set of formal ideas and beliefs and informal modes of behavior, habits, manners, sensibilities, and outlooks that support and sanction the existing order”) - Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, 119, 121. His own concept of prophetic pragmatism “is inspired by the example of Antonio Gramsci [. . .] the major twentieth-century philosopher of praxis, power, and provocation” whose “work is historically specific, theoretically engaging, and politically activistic in an exemplary manner” (American Evasion of Philosophy, 231).

Prophetic

. In the last and programmatic chapter of The American Evasion of Philosophy, “Prophetic Pragmatism,” West explains that he defines his conception of pragmatism as “prophetic” because “it harks back to the Jewish and Christian tradition of prophets who brought urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day. The mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may” (233).

Theodicy

The triumph of good over evil

Theodicy

The triumph of good over evil

Liberation

Human liberation occurs only when people participate substantively in the decision-making processes in the major institutions that regulate their lives. Democratic control over the institutions in the productive and political processes in order for them to satisfy human needs and protect personal liberties of the populate constitutes human liberation.

Genealogy

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1967); Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139-164.