John Legend recently delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences.
Here's John Jackson on Legend's speech:
He argued for the academic conceptions of “truth” that he learned as an undergraduate, conceptions he considers a lot more rigorous and weighty than what gets passed off as truth in the contemporary public/politic sphere.
He challenged the students to hold fast to the methodological and epistemological lessons they learned in their Penn courses. He dared them to think internationally by putting their own relative luxuries in conversation with the material disadvantages of human beings in other parts of the world. He asked students to redefine “soul” as a framework for operationalizing more holistic engagements with our social world and more empirically verifiable/falsifiable truth-claims based upon such engagements.
Legend proffered soul as an apt scaffolding for the substantive stuff that truth should be made of. He thinks of soul and truth as directly related, even mutually constitutive.
As a soul-singer, people sometimes ask him to define soul. And according to Legend, it isn’t reducible to race or a conventional genre of popular music. Anyone can be soulful, he says in the speech, just as long as the person is “authentic,” “real and pure,” trying to find fleeting but fecund moments “when silence and sound come together” so profoundly and unpredictably that it might bring tears to one’s eyes. And those eyes will always see the world just a little bit differently as a result.
