Intellectuals and Public Responsibility 

by Cornel West

“I think the life of the mind is fundamentally about a sense of awe, wonder, openness, exploration….It’s an adventure in exploring different views and viewpoints, different arguments and perspectives. There’s a certain capaciousness that goes with it, an expansiveness of heart, mind, and soul that has its own exhilarating joy in and of itself, and it is a desirable way of being in the world. It’s still worldly, in the way Edward Said put it. It’s rooted in circumstances, but it has its own intrinsic joy.”

(Hedgehog Review_, v 9, #1 [Spring ’07], p. 87)