Inside the Classroom: The Examined Life

January 11, 2018
Professors David Lamberth and Cornel West
HDS professors David Lamberth and Cornel West

“The Examined Life,” a course taught by HDS professors David Lamberth and Cornel West, breaks conventions.  

In many classes across Harvard, discussions about the implications of theories on contemporary lived experience don’t take center stage. The main focus in the classroom tends to be the subject at hand.

“The Examined Life” does the exact opposite. The course directly addresses our present moment and experience.

As Lamberth noted on the very first day of class last semester, the explicit purpose of “The Examine Life” is to use the thinking of a specific set of authors—a diverse canon of political and moral thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Josiah Royce to Emmanuel Levinas and Hans-Georg Gadamer—to “address the challenges of the present.”

Or, as West remarked, to “link the tradition of high humanism with our experience,” and “keep track of the way that we can love, truth, beauty, goodness and paideia [a Greek term which refers to the training of the ideal member of the polis] in modernity.”

In one particular class session, the 35 enrolled students came together to discuss three essays from Hannah Arendt’s collection of biographical sketches Men in Dark Times. But after a brief, 30-minute introduction to Arendt’s life and work presented by one of the student discussion leaders, the conversation took on a shape of its own.

The reading became a kind of springboard into a huge range of related topics: the effect of social media on social cohesion; the importance of narrative as a mode for philosophical reflection; the relative merits of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique of white supremacy; and the causes of the recent election of Donald Trump.

That discussion was hardly atypical. In fact, one student remarked during a 15-minute break that divided the three-hour-long seminar that this was par for the course. “The readings are the readings, but the conversation often moves well beyond that.”

The course sessions dealt extensively with topics of ranging political, moral, and existential orientation.

During a discussion of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, students made connections between DuBois’s description of the labor of black sharecroppers and the current prison-industrial-context.

A discussion of Emerson’s essay “Experience” turned into a conversation about how to process (or how to avoid processing) grief and touched on authors from Marcel Proust to Samuel Becket.

In fact, some of the course’s most unlikely sources have provided some of the most intense and existentially generative conversations.

The dense work of Harvard mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stoked a robust and stirring dialogue about the course of history and the importance of remembering the moral catastrophes America has left in its wake.

As organic and spontaneous as the seminar discussions often become, it is also clear that the class cultivated deep engagement with some of the great thinkers of the past.

“I think one of the things we’re trying to do here is push the notion of a kind of reflective discussion and discourse from history with an eye towards our present life. We want to engage a broad range of students in a conversation that is both demanding, but also relevant to our present experience,” explained Lamberth.

West was quick to agree.

“The high quality conversation of the students makes each week an unadulterated joy. But part of it is just working with the texts…These texts are powerful,” he said.

That’s not to say that each author we read garnered the same enthusiasm.

“Sometimes we’re going to make each other uncomfortable, and we’re going to go in directions that you don’t want us to go in, or you’re going to go in directions that we aren’t expecting,” said Lamberth.

Conversations on Emerson and Royce saw lively debates springing up. Some students thought we should hold Emerson’s own moral life, and his participation in the Abolitionist movement, to a higher standard.

Others had trouble connecting with texts whose language, ideas, and authors, often explicitly didn’t include them as readers.

Repeatedly, however, a hermeneutics of charity won out. As West warned at the beginning of the class: “We want to be careful not to fetishize transgression in our readings,” he said, before a smile broke across his face, adding, “However, it is nice to transgress.”

Ultimately, then, “The Examined Life” fulfills its mission. Like Socrates, from whom the course derives its name, West and Lamberth prompt students to reflect critically on their own experiences, traditions, and histories in an attempt to understand themselves not only as individual agents but as the inheritors of a powerful cultural and political legacy.

As one student remarked at the end of one class seminar: “I just can’t believe we get to have these conversations. How lucky are we, to be able to think about this stuff.”

—by Will Walker, HDS correspondent