Du Bois and James

Du Bois and JamesAuthor(s): James CampbellSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1992), pp. 569-581Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320376 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 12:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactionsof the Charles S. Peirce Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.220.202.46 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 12:06:55 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320376?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


James Campbell

Du Bois and James

The published historical record shows a very modest personal relationship between William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and William James. Du Bois spent four academic years at Harvard, from the Fall of 1888 through the Spring of 1892. The first two years were spent completing a second baccalaureate degree, which he earned cum laude in philosophy in 1890. The third year found Du Bois involved in graduate studies, completing an M.A. in history in 1891. His fourth year in Cambridge was spent in doctoral research. Du Bois spent the next two academic years, 1892-1894, studying in Berlin; and he returned to the United States in 1894 to assume an academic post at Wilberforce Uni- versity. While in Ohio, he completed his doctoral dissertation, and his Ph.D. in history was awarded by Harvard in 1895. His adviser in both of these advanced degrees was not William James but Albert Bushnell Hart (1854-1943).

Du Bois reports that during his time at Harvard he studied philosophy with such stars of its 'Golden Age1 as Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, and George Santayana (A 143, 148; D 37-38). l Most important for his development, however, was the philosopher and psychologist William James, for whose influence Du Bois exclaims gratefully "God be praised" (A 127; D 33). Du Bois continues: "I became a devoted follower of James at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy," and he "guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism. . ." (A 133; cf. 148; C III/394-395). Further, Du Bois maintains that it was James who, together with Albert Bushnell Hart, turned him "back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic specula- tion, to the social sciences as the field for gathering and interpret- ing that body of fact which would apply to my program for the

Negro" (A 148). In addition to these intellectual influences, Du Bois reports frequent personal contacts with James outside the aca-



570 James Campbell

demic setting, including being "repeatedly a guest in the home of William James. . ." (A 143; cf. 135; D 38).2

One should not be taken as being maliciously inclined toward Du Bois who suggests that perhaps this relationship was of more importance to Du Bois than it was to James. We note, for example, that while Du Bois may have seen James as "my friend and guide to clear thinking. . ." (A 143), James distantly described Du Bois on at least one occasion, in a letter to his brother Hen- ry, as

H a mulatto ex-student of mine."3 Moreover, while it may be true that few students appreciated as much as Du Bois did the opportunity given them to experience James's glorious egalitarian spirit in the midst of Cambridge's many social barriers, it is also true that all sorts of people were invited into the James home and considered themselves to be his friends.4 As one farther indication of the limited nature of the friendship between James and Du Bois, let me suggest that, although James was no doubt concerned with Du Bois's future (A 148; D 39), and respectful and supportive of Du Bois's work (A 218, 220; D 322), it is not clear that James offered him any real help to advance any of his projects.5 And as one farther indication of how Du Bois made too much of their relationship, let me point out that Du Bois, confused over some matter of person or time, reports that he had had dinner with James in 1918, years after James's death in 1910 (A 269; D 259).

II If we turn from the personal relationship between James and

Du Bois to the potential influence of James's ideas on Du Bois, it seems unlikely that Du Bois could have found in the individu- alist James a mentor for his developing program of social reform. We do find in James, of course, no shortage of compelling ideas. Included here is the Pragmatism of which Du Bois has already spoken, a Pragmatism that means to James " ftjhc attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,1 supposed necessi- ties; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts*



Du Bois and James 571

(P 32).6 We do not find, however, much that would serve to un- dergird Du Bois's cry for more justice and greater racial equality.

While some have exaggerated James's importance as a social re- former,7 several studies have detailed the limitations of James's social stance.8 One of James's limitations was his fundamental individualism. Because of the centrality and power of his individualism, because of his call to people to strive to create and appreciate their own lives and to respect what he saw as others' harmless attempts to create and appreciate their own, James was unable to respond effectively to a world that was becoming in-

creasingly integrated and interdependent, and that required in- creased circumspection and cooperation.9 In such a world, James's suggestion that "[i]t is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field" (IT 149) proves to be inadequate. James's individualism was, in the words of Merle Curri, "incompatible with the full development of the very individuality of the masses of Americans for which in principle James sincerely stood."10 In addition to the problematic aspects of his individualism, James demonstrated no particular sensitivity to ethnic or racial problems, nor to the material and practical problems of the poor.11 James's genius was elsewhere; and, without attempting to under- mine his importance in the least, we may still wonder just what there might have been in his work to attract Du Bois so strongly.

Before proceeding to consider this question, however, I would like to take a moment to point to the work of a genuinely social

Pragmatist whose work sharply diverged from James on matters of social life and social ethics. I am referring, of course, to John Dewey.12 While Dewey had little more to say on racial matters than James did,13 he had a great deal to say about the necessity for and the possible methods of social reconstruction.14 Moreo-

ver, Dewey (1859-1952) and Du Bois (1868-1963) lived

through a long common period of our troubled history; and,



572 James Campbell

even allowing for their admittedly different roles within the period, we find them both advocating improvements in education and public dialogue for the advancing of a social democratic con- ception of American society. Even their formulations at times sound similar. Who but the most familiar with the writings of both Du Bois and Dewey would be able to identify the author of the following statement from 1942?

Democracy is not, as so many of us are prone to think, simply the right of electing our rulers. It is not simply, as others think, the right of working people to have a voice in the conduct of industry. ... it is a vaster and more inclusive ideal; it is the right to accumulate and use a great reservoir of human thought and experience, out of which a people may choose, not simply men and methods, but the wisest and best policies of government and conduct and have their choice all the more valuable because the sum of human knowledge is open freely to their understanding and inspection. It is here, in thought and concept, that real freedom lies.

The passage, however, 'Deweyan' it might seem initially, is actu- ally by Du Bois (R 201; cf. 51, 61, 237, 242)15; and, while similarities at this theoretical level cannot necessarily be equated with similarities in policy recommendations,16 the existence of such similarities does suggest the need for further comparative study of Du Bois and Dewey.

Ill Returning to the question of the nature of Du Bois's attraction

to James, I would like to consider some clearly parallel themes in the thought of James and of Du Bois. I would like to consider these themes, initially at least, as free as possible from claims of direct influence since 'proof is so difficult to come by in such matters. Questions of influence are important and must be considered at some point; but initially, I think it is more important




to try to uncover and display the parallelisms themselves. I see at least four areas of significant parallelism in the thought of James and Du Bois.

A first of these parallelisms is that both emphasize the need for the explicit recognition of the limitations of science and its methods in any analysis of the human situation that hopes to be ade- quate. For James, as might be expected, the insistence is funda- mentally individual: while he has nothing but respect for science in its proper place, he is unwilling to have the parameters of his life defined by the proponents of deterministic and materialistic science; and he posits, by means of his voluntaristic analysis of belief and rationality, a more rich and open order of existence. It is possible to root James's attitude in a personal crisis that he re- solved extra-scientifically by positing the truth of human freedom and the congeniality of nature to human powers.17 For Du Bois as well, the view that science is only one avenue among many was rooted in a personal crisis. For Du Bois, however, the crisis was social in nature: the lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia while Du Bois was carefully working toward the advancement of scien- tific social studies of Black life at Atlanta University (D 67; A

221-222). Du Bois thereafter maintained that propaganda and

pressure, agitation and force, must be used to supplement the work of science (D 5-6, 94-96, 221-223, 296-297; A 253).

The second parallelism between James and Du Bois can be found in their complex conceptions of the human self. James writes first of our multiple social selves, and suggests that a person has "as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares" (PP 282). He continues that, not only do we present these selves to others, we care for the most part that they meet with approval: we have a desire Hto please and attract notice and admiration. . .M (PP 294). Moreover, James notes that we internalize social measures of our personal worth, feeling good or bad about ourselves rela- tive to our "actual success or failure, and the good and bad actual position one holds in the world" (PP 292).



574 James Campbell

I doubt that there could be a better general introduction into what Du Bois calls Hthc Negro's double environment11 (D 173) than James's discussion of the social self. What Du Bois under- stands by his term "double-consciousness" is the fundamental split between the social self with which the Black person con- fronts white society and the social self with which he or she con- fronts Black society. For such individuals, Du Bois writes, there is a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." As a result, within the Black person in white society there are always "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings. . ." (W 364; cf. D 173).

A further aspect of this second parallelism can be found in considering the manner in which individuals react to negative evaluation. For James, when I resist the condemnation of one such ref- erence group and reject it as my standard for what is proper and successful, I do so by adopting another group that I take to be better. In James's words, "I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now" (PP 300). And we do this, James notes, however remote or unlikely those possible judges may be. For Du Bois, the situation is the same. The individual who rejects the slights of the prejudiced and the discriminatory does so not simply out of personal displeasure or ill-will, but in terms of some potentially better evaluators and of eventual justice. These reactions would not be matters of the victim's personal preference, but rather moral claims that were deeply-rooted in our social selves and our conceptions of equality and justice.18

A third parallelism in James and Du Bois is that both present a pluralistic society as a goal for our social lives. We must begin, James writes in the late 1890s, by recognizing "the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of crea- tures and people different from ourselves" and the resulting "stu- pidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the




significance of alien lives" and "falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals" (TT 132). In the place of this myopia, we must try to cultivate a tolerance of diversity. We know that our success will be limited here because "beings as es- sentially practical as we are are necessarily short of sight," and hence none of us can hope to have "insight into all the ideals." Still, recognizing our weakness should increase our concern: "cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places?" (TT 150-

151).19 For Du Bois, who opposes racial assimilation as strongly as

James opposes the homogenization of individuals, our need to work for pluralism is equally pressing. He writes, also in the late 1890s, that there are strong possibilities for social pluralism:

there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. (W 821-822; cf. 825)

These possibilities, however, were being undercut by prejudice rooted in a lack of familiarity with the lives of members of other races. They were being undercut as well by economic discrimina- tion and exploitation. But if we could overcome these problems, he continues, we would come closer to the day when we could live in a pluralistic world.

A fourth parallelism in James and Du Bois can be found in their emphasis upon the importance of individuals, although here as before the nature of each emphasis is characteristically different. James's presentation is in the context of trying to determine "the causes that make communities change from generation to

generation. . ." Rejecting such possible causes as the environ-

ment, circumstances, physical geography, and ancestral condi-

tions, James settles upon the primacy of "the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and their



576 James Campbell

decisions" (WB 164) ?° Only such a world, where the fermenting power of individuals and their ideas and efforts makes a difference, has the possibility of being a moral world. "The community may evolve in many ways," James writes. "The accidental pres- ence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve" (WB 172).

Recognizing and setting aside for the present the fact that Du Bois is for more sensitive than James to the shaping power of the environment, we note that Du Bois agrees with James's emphasis upon the importance of individuals, at least as far as it goes. The difference between the two appears when we recognize that James gives these pivotal individuals no specific leadership role to per- form in society, no particular public duties to carry out. Du Bois, on the contrary, calls upon these individuals, initially entitled "The Talented Tenth," to adopt a position of responsible leadership within the community, and he calls for educational and other social programs to make them more successful leaders in their efforts. Du Bois is especially concerned with the potentialities of higher education; and he writes that "the college-bred Negro. . . . is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social movements" (W 851). James, on the other hand, writes that the value of a college training is the more modest and private achievement that "it should enable us to know a ¿food man when we see him" (E 108). Du Bois expects more of the gifted, because he sees their potential contribution to be crucial to eventual success. "Can the masses of the Negro people," he asks, "be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character?" (W 847). Even though Du Bois later describes the approach of 'the talented tenth' as a "panacea" (D 217; cf. 300), he does not seem to reject the importance of public duty or leadership by the most gifted; and this leadership role was later passed on to the NAACP, and eventually to the Community Party.

In detailing these four areas of parallelism between James and




Du Bois - their similar positions on the inherent limitations of science, on the complex nature of the self, on the possibility of a pluralistic society, and on the importance of individuals - I have attempted to avoid attributions of direct influence. Perhaps Du Bois derived these views from James, perhaps he did not. Anoth- er matter that I have not considered is whether some recognition must be made of the greater or lesser importance of these four factors over Du Bois's long life. In both of these areas I would defer to those who are at present more familiar with his life's work and his thought. My intention has been to try to uncover in the thought of James and Du Bois some parallel strands that might give us some sense of exactly why Du Bois was so strongly drawn to James.

The University of Toledo

NOTES

1. In this essay I have used the following abbreviations for the writings of Du Bois: A - Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Solil-

oquy on Viewing My Ufe from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International, 1968); C - The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973-1978), three volumes; D - Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Au-

tobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken, [1940] 1968); R -

Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985); W - Writings, ed. Nathan I. Huggins, (New York: The Library of Amer-

ica, 1986). 2. Herbert Aptheker uses this passage, along with a one-

sentence invitation to Du Bois to what James called "a philosophical supper" to suggest a "splendid friendship" between them (C 1/9-10). I believe that the relationship between them was a much more modest af-

fair.



578 James Campbell

3. The full sentence, from a letter of 6 June 1903, is: "I am sending you a decidedly moving book [The Souls of Black Folk] by a mulatto ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta

(Georgia) negro College" (The Letters of William James, ed. by his son

Henry James, [Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920], two volumes, 11/ 196). My focus here is not on any possible interpretation of the com-

plex term 'mulatto' but simply on the lack of explicit emotional involve- ment with the author of this "decidedly moving book. . ."

4. For a brief consideration of James's democratic strain, cf.

e.g. Walter Iippmann, "An Open Mind: William James," Everybody's Magazine, XXIII/6 (December 1910), 800-801; Rollo Walter Brown, Harvard Yard in the Golden Age (New York: Current Books, 1948), 74-84.

5. Cf. George R. Garrison and Edward H. Madden, "Wil- liam James - Warts and All," American Quarterly, XXIX/2 (Summer 1977), 207-221, esp. 216.

6. In this essay, I have used the following abbreviations for the writings of William James: E - Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); P - Pragmatism: A New Name

for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1907] 1975); PP - The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, [1890] 1981); TT - Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1899] 1983); WB - The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popu- lar Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1897] 1979).

7. Cf. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, (Boston: Little Brown, 1935), two volumes, 11/280- 322; F. O. Mathiessen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1947), 617-669.

8. Cf. Max C. Otto, "On a Certain Blindness in William

James," Ethics, LIII/3 (April 1943), 184-191; Sydney Kaplan, "Taussig, James and Peabody: A 'Harvard School' in 1900?" American Quarterly, VII/4 (Winter 1955) 315-331; George R. Garrison and Edward H.

Madden, "William James - Warts and All"; and my "William James and the Ethics of Fulfillment," these Transactions, XVII/3 (Summer 1981),




224-240. 9. For Du Bois's discussion of these social changes, cf. R

50-1, 61, 267. 10. Merle E. Curtí, The Social Ideas of American Educators,

rev.ed., (Paterson, NJ: Iittlefield Adams, 1961), 458. 11. Cf. Garrison and Madden, "William James- Warts and

All," esp. pp. 215-221; John J. McDermott, "Introduction" to James's

Essays in Religion and Morality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), xx-xxi; Gerald E. Myers, "William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press), 423-424, 596.

12. A similar position has been advanced by Cornel West: cf. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 140, 148.

13. In Dewey 's address to the 23rd Annual Conference of the NAACP in May 1932, one of the very few places that he publicly discusses racial matters at all, we find: "I submit to you the thing I

would submit to any white group that is also at a disadvantage, since

your fundamental difficulties do not come through color or any other one thing. They come from the fact that in a society which is economi-

cally and industrially organized as ours is, those who want the greatest

profits and those who want the monopoly, power, influence, that money

gives, can only get it by creating suspicion, dislike and division among the mass of the people" {The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann

Boydston, [Carbondalc: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-90],

6:229-230). Four years later, we find Du Bois writing in "The Negro and Social

Reconstruction": "In considering the problem of industrial depression and unemployment, it is natural to think of the Negro population of the

United States simply as one part of the problem according to its num-

bers. Further thought, however, will modify this" (R 104). 14. Cf. my "Dewey's Method of Social Reconstruction,"

these Transactions, XX/4 (Fall 1984), 363-393. 15. Compare this passage from Du Bois to the following

words of Dewey: "The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than

can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must



580 James Campbell

affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. . . .what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guaran- tees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication?" (The Later Works of John Dewey, 2:235; 14:227; cf. 11:217).

16. For example, while these comments of Du Bois on democracy were taken from a piece that he wrote in defense of Earl Brow- der, then the general secretary of the Communist Party in the United States, Dewey considered the efforts of the Party to be harmful to democracy. For a discussion of Dewey's negative evaluation of the Party, see my " Dewey's Understanding of Marx and Marxism," in Context over Foundation: Dewey and Marx, ed. William J. Gavin, (Dordrect: Reidel, 1988), 119-145.

17. Cf. John J. McDermott, "Introduction" to his edition of The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xviii-xxvi.

18. Also to be considered at some point in any understanding of analyses of the social self are the relationships between James and Du Bois and the rest of the Harvard community. George Herbert Mead, whose work on this aspect of the self also seems in many ways parallel to Du Bois's, studied at Harvard as well, in 1887-1888, departing just as Du Bois arrived.

Josiah Royce, with whom Du Bois also studied at Harvard, writes on the self, in a fashion similar to what we have seen: "I am not first self- conscious, and then secondarily conscious of my fellow. On the contrary, I am conscious of myself, on the whole, as in relation to some real or ideal fellow, and apart from my consciousness of my fellows I have only secondary and derived states and habits of self-consciousness" (The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. John J. McDermott, [Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1969], two volumes, 1/426; cf. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon the Problems of Philosophy and of Life [New York: Appleton, 1898], 180-181, 201; John M. Iincourt and




Peter H. Hare, "Neglected American Philosophers in the History of

Symbolic Interactionism," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, IX/4 [October 1973], 333-338).

19. Cf. Larry C. Miller, "William James and Twentieth-

Century Ethnic Thought," American Quarterly, XXXI/4 (Fall 1979), 533-555.

20. James continues: "The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment, or whose accidental position of authori-

ty was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movement, set- ters of precedent or fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other

persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction" (WB 170).



Date post:	31-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	james-campbell
View:	219 times
Download:	1 times

Du Bois and James

Documents