Displaying an image of open debate and friendship between individuals of politically opposite perspectives, conservative legal scholar Robert George and liberal thinker Cornel West discussed the importance of liberal education and open-mindedness on Wednesday night to a packed Sherman Function Hall.

George, professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and West, professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard, addressed each other as “brother” throughout their conversation, which often highlighted their vastly different backgrounds and political beliefs.

“We acknowledge our differences, we acknowledge the ways we might look at the world through a different lens,” West said.

“This is simply not about politics; there is nobody whose integrity I admire more than Cornel West,” George told the audience.

“See, he’s from a vanilla, bluegrass section of America,” West said in reference to George, “and I’m from gut-bucket, black, Aretha Franklin-shapen…chocolate side of town, but our love and friendship are genuine.”

George used his West Virginian home as a starting point for a discussion on the importance of liberal education, telling the audience that while he was growing up his family had impressed upon him that education is important, “mainly because it promised socioeconomic advancement.”

“What I was not brought up understanding was truth as something worth pursuing just for its own sake,” he said. It was only in his sophomore year at Swarthmore College, where George earned his undergraduate degree, that he encountered Plato’s dialogues for the first time and began to understand truth in this way.

“Cornel and I are both disciples of Plato,” he said. “Plato was the guy who asked questions about everything, especially the most important things, the deepest things, the most elusive things, the fundamental questions of existence and meaning and value.”

He described Plato as someone who “could never really find a way to rest content, fully content, with answers, even the best answers.” He noted that Plato was always willing to “question the premises of everything.”

“What Plato, that old Greek, forced me to do was to think, for the first time in my life, why I believed what I believed,” George said. “I had never subjected my beliefs to criticism; I didn’t know why I should. Now I do.”

George described the idea of subjection of beliefs to criticism as “a continuing and lifelong project” and “the real value of a liberal arts education.”

West also played with the idea of scrutinizing beliefs, noting that intelligence alone is not enough. “Gangsters can be smart, Nazis can be smart, white supremacists can be smart, misogynists can be smart, homophobes can be smart,” he said, “but when you really cut deeper and allow for that compassion and wisdom to play the role, then you’re not just impressed by the smartest person in the room.”

“Let the phoney be smart, you better be something deeper,” he told the audience. “That deeper is precisely what the liberal learning is all about.”

West noted the importance of this kind of critical thinking, saying “you can’t sustain a democracy without it, that’s why we’re spinning, sliding down a slope of chaos and hatred and contempt.”

West and George’s different beliefs on the market and how it should or should not be regulated indicated their political differences.

“Cornel, as you may know, is an honorary chair to the Democratic Socialists of America and I’m, I’m a conservative,” George said. “Now I’m not a laissez-faire libertarian; I think there are legitimate reasons to regulate the market, but I believe in the basically free market,” he noted.

Whereas George said that he thinks that “the market is a wonderful mechanism for lifting people out of poverty or dispersing power [and] making sure there is not too much power in the hands of the government,” he noted that “Brother Cornel is a bit more skeptical, I’d say a good bit more skeptical, than I am about the magic of the market pulling people out of poverty and creating centers of power that are alternative to the government.”

“The market from Cornel’s point of view is a sort of lesser evil,” George said. “I see it as a positive good.”

“The mechanisms of accountability when it comes to the government, when it comes to public power,” West said, “I want that same focus on the accountability on the concentration of power in the market.”

George noted that, “We agree people ought not to be suffering” because of economic inequalities, but said that while “I have more faith in the markets than [West] does, he has more faith in government programs than I do.”

“It’s really important to find people you have really fundamental disagreements with and develop relationships with them,” George said near the end of the event. “Try to figure out where they’re coming from, consider the possibility that they might be right on some things [and] you might be wrong on some things.”

At the end of the event, which was introduced by President Ron Liebowitz and sponsored by the American Studies Department and several other academic departments, George and West embraced in a hug.