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Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/critphilrace.4.1.0127

2165-8692

Chike Jeffers,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

One of the most brilliant and interesting thinkers in our contemporary moment trying to better understand one of the most brilliant and interesting thinkers in all of modern history—that would be a dramatic but not unreasonable way to describe and evoke the significance of Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah's latest book. It is about W. E. B. Du Bois and it is an effort to partially chart the development of this transformative figure's thought, especially on the topics of race and social identity, paying special attention to the influences of German thought on his intellectual formation. I would characterize the book as useful, although disturbing, and as delightful yet frustrating. I will explain each of these pairs of characterizations in turn.Appiah's particular focus on the impact of German thinkers on Du Bois is a double-edged sword. It is useful because it is simply true that immersion in German ideas formed an important part of Du Bois's training as an intellectual, most obviously through his time at the University of Berlin (or the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, as it was then known) from 1892 to 1894. Appiah is certainly not the first scholar to note this, but Lines of Descent is the first book-length work in which exploring this dimension of Du Bois is a central aim.1 As philosophical attention to Du Bois continues to grow, carefully studying his influences will remain among the tasks that we scholars of Du Bois must be sure never to neglect. This makes further study of how German ideas shaped him philosophically welcome. There is something disturbing here, though, especially in light of the fact that Appiah is not the first to note German influence on Du Bois. There is the worry that placing so much emphasis on Du Bois's connection to Germany may ultimately serve to link his greatness to Europe in a manner that supports racist patterns of devaluing nonwhite traditions of thought.Tommy Curry has raised questions related to this worry in a recent article (2014). Like Curry, I think it is helpful for reflecting on this matter to provide some quotations from an interview conducted with Appiah by Cornel West on C-SPAN's Book TV. Speaking about Lines of Descent, Appiah says: "You could say that what I'm trying to do in the book is to recover the sense in which Du Bois was, in fact, a German intellectual, and not just the American and African American and of course always cosmopolitan person that we already know." He also explains the motivation behind this project of recovery as follows: The temptation, thinking of him as a great American and a great African American, is to sort of push the American ancestry, to push the Emersonian ancestry, to push the continuity of his ideas with Alexander Crummell and Frederick Douglass and the great African American intellectuals who preceded him, and that's all there, but I don't think that part of the normal picture is yet the recognition that he was embedded in a framework of thought that comes from the late 19th century Germany.2 The suggestions concerning what has been sufficiently discussed and what has been ignored in the statement above strike me as a bit odd. There has undoubtedly been great work done linking and comparing Du Bois with African American predecessors like Crummell and Douglass, but I would also say that what has been done so far remains too little.3 Thinking just about those two figures, we are dealing with complex philosophical minds in relation to whom Du Bois explicitly positioned himself, on the one hand, as a kind of heir (most notably, in the third and twelfth chapters of The Souls of Black Folk) but with whom he also had, on the other hand, very serious differences. Much work remains to be done in providing nuanced articulations of the various ways in which Du Bois's thought was shaped by these two both through positive influence as well as opposition. Now, it is true that, in Robert Gooding-Williams's 2009 book In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, we have a wealth of exemplary attempts to provide just what I have called for, as Crummell and especially Douglass are major figures in the book and Gooding-Williams is a first-rate philosophical interpreter whose boldness is nicely complemented by his attention to detail. But Gooding-Williams also brings these ample skills to the task of examining the influence of late-nineteenth-cen-tury German thought on Du Bois, paying special attention, just as Appiah does, to Gustav Schmoller and Wilhelm Dilthey. The topic of German influence on Du Bois has not been unduly neglected, in my view.One of the major points of Curry's article is that Appiah furthermore overstates the impact of this source of influence on Du Bois. I share this concern. As one moves through the first three chapters, one becomes accustomed to a pattern of connections being drawn between German thought and Du Bois's work that threatens to make just about everything in the latter somehow German in origin. Even his famous debate with Booker T. Washington turns out to have been "essentially prefigured" in the way that one of his professors in Berlin, Schmoller, wrote about education and labour while criticizing another, Heinrich von Treitschke (66). Schmoller is figured as having echoed the position of Wilhelm von Humboldt, a major philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after whom the university Du Bois attended has since been named (i.e., it is now the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). Indeed, Appiah relates Du Bois not merely to the late nineteenth-century German figures who would have taught him in Berlin like Schmoller, Treitschke, Dilthey, and Adolf Wagner, but also a whole host of figures from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including Humboldt, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Leopold von Ranke, Hermann Lotze, Friedrich Ratzel, Friedrich Meinecke, Max Weber, Leo Frobenius, and Franz Boas. He points out, moreover, that when Du Bois studied at Harvard before going to Berlin, his professors had all studied in Germany, making his subsequent trip to study there a kind of journey to the ultimate source. The picture Appiah paints of a dominating German intellectual world, unintentionally or not, manages to obscure the influence of the African American thinkers on Du Bois, and not only Crummell and Douglass. In chapter 2, for example, the emphasis on Herder's influential expression of the view that each people has a distinctive contribution to make to the advancement of humanity allows us to overlook the fact that, as Kathryn Gines (2015) has noted, there are very strong similarities between the particular way in which Du Bois expressed this position in his famous essay, "The Conservation of Races," and the way Anna Julia Cooper did five years before in her book, A Voice from the South.4On the other hand, it is important to ask: in spite of all I have said thus far, are the connections Appiah draws between Du Bois and German thinkers insightful? Whether drawing such connections is new or not, and whatever these connections may happen to obscure, do we learn something by seeing them? I would answer these questions affirmatively. Like Gooding-Williams's treatment of Schmoller in his book, I think Appiah's discussion of this interesting figure in the first chapter of Lines of Descent succeeds in shedding new light on the development of the early Du Bois's sense of the relationship between social scientific research and social reform. Even the aforementioned discussion of the Du Bois-Washington debate, in the book's second chapter, effectively suggests that reflecting on the distinctively German concept of Bildung, especially as Humboldt theorized it, illuminates Du Bois's thinking about education. But perhaps the clearest reason to think that connections of the kind Appiah draws are worth drawing is that Du Bois himself suggests as much. In "My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom," a 1944 essay that Lines of Descent has taught me to value highly, Du Bois talks about how a time eventually came when he "fell back upon my Royce and James and deserted Schmoller and Weber" (Du Bois 1944, 58). This clearly indicates that studying the influence of Schmoller on the early Du Bois is a sensible and important enterprise. It also, of course, raises the further question of how to understand the recurrent influence of the famous philosophy professors at Harvard—Josiah Royce and William James—that he describes himself as falling back upon. Thankfully, Appiah makes very admirable efforts in pursuit of this latter goal in the final chapter of Lines of Descent.5Is it contradictory to worry about the seemingly Eurocentric implications of focusing on German influences while also admitting the usefulness of studying them? There is definitely at least a tension here, but it is a productive tension, in my view. We should certainly never refrain from advancing scholarship regarding a black thinker simply out of fear that, if we are connecting the person to white thinkers, we will be seen as glorifying whiteness and the West at the expense of nonwhite people. It would be equally wrong, however, and with perhaps even more damaging effects, to simply dismiss any concern about Eurocentric patterns of research as baseless. Celebrating how a thinker like Du Bois participates within important streams of the Western tradition does antiracist work of a sort, yes, but it does this work in a manner that leaves prejudices concerning which intellectual traditions are important and worthy of study untroubled. When these prejudices are left in place, research of this sort can be seen to ennoble Du Bois by lifting him out of the darkness of the less valuable Africana tradition up into the light of Europe's grandeur. We do a disservice to Du Bois and to scholarship more generally when we enable this way of looking at things. We must therefore balance the need to cast off certain forms of race-based anxiety and follow the trail of scholarship where it leads with the need to constantly interrupt colonial habits of assigning more worth to that which is white. Appiah's depiction of Du Bois as a "German intellectual"—as distasteful as I find that way of describing the project—is useful insofar as it corresponds to real and significant aspects of who Du Bois was. Nevertheless, I would uphold Gooding-Williams's In the Shadow of Du Bois, with its many connections to major figures in Western thought but also its strong commitment to positioning Du Bois within a transnational "Afro-modern tradition of political thought," as superior in its ability to maintain the balance I have just identified as imperative (Gooding-Williams 2009, 2).Let me now move on to explain why I describe the book as both delightful and frustrating. It is delightful because Appiah is such a talented writer, a master of presentation whose philosophically interesting material is further enriched through countless well-chosen phrases and engrossing narrative arcs. It is frustrating because one wishes that a philosopher of his stature, a person who has had such a deep impact on discussions of race and social identity in contemporary philosophy, would have allowed us greater insight not merely into Du Bois's thought but also into his own. This is especially the case given that the book can be viewed as a return to the subject of his first major work on race, his 1985 essay "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race," and because there are continuities but also very significant discontinuities between his position on race in that essay and the position he appears to hold now. Unfortunately, our access to knowledge of Appiah's position in this book is disappointingly indirect.In order to further explain both the compliment and criticism above, it will be useful to lay out the structure of the book and say more about the contents of its chapters. One noteworthy element of its structure, indicated by the book's subtitle, is the increasing focus on Du Bois's originality in thinking about race that emerges over its course, culminating in the last chapter's treatment of him as having pioneered the kind of social constructionism about race that Appiah views as both presently ascendant and as basically right. Chapter 1 ("The Awakening") says the least about how we might see Du Bois as original, focusing mostly on the influence of his time in Berlin. It is instructive for my current purposes, however, to quote the final lines of this chapter. Having just described Treitschke's view that the individual "lives only in and through submitting himself to the aggregate culture of his people," Appiah writes of Du Bois: "If Du Bois kindled to the 'fire-eating Pan-German,' it was because this conception of culture had a potent allure for him. The challenge was to take its power without its parochialism – to steal fire without getting burned (43)."6 One experiences here, first of all, the delightfulness of Appiah's writing that I mentioned above: the poetic phrasing, with its alliteration and vivid metaphor, and the narrative structure implicit in closing the chapter in this cliffhanging way. But the question naturally arises as to whether we are supposed to view ourselves as being in the same relation to Du Bois that he was in to Treitschke. Are we coming to Du Bois to take what is powerful while leaving behind that which is problematic, whether because of parochialism or whatever else? The closing lines of Appiah's introduction may be read as suggesting as much: "[Du Bois] faced in a peculiarly public way one question that faces every human being: What am I to do with the identities fate has given me? In exploring his answers, and the life they enabled him to make, we can learn something about how to shape our own—no doubt, different—responses" (23).But what exactly do we learn from him? How should our responses be different? Perhaps our responses must be different simply because we live in different times. Perhaps each of our responses must be different as we are all separate individuals. But, in either or both of those cases, we must ask yet again: what, then, do we learn from Du Bois? The closest we get to a clear answer to this question can be found in the aforementioned final chapter but, as I will explain, what he says there remains vague in notable ways.Chapter 2 ("Culture and Cosmopolitanism") is, like the first chapter, concerned throughout with German influences, but I would like to highlight this chapter as not only skillfully written but also as extremely helpful to anyone seeking to be introduced to Du Bois, for Appiah captures in it much of what I take to be of the utmost importance in understanding Du Bois's thought. There is a fine discussion of how, like Herder before him, Du Bois combines and reconciles cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism (one of the aspects of his work that has had the greatest influence on my own). There is also an innovative reading of one of the most famous passages in African American letters, the passage on double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk, connecting it to Fichte and (more interestingly, in my view) explaining how we might understand its seemingly essentialist talk of a "Negro soul" in a manner that few could find objectionable. A chapter like this leaves me happy to commend Appiah as a guide to reading Du Bois, although it should be noted that to put one's finger on what is fascinating in a thinker's work and to offer new ways of understanding what he says is not yet to say clearly what we should take from him.Chapter 3 ("The Concept of the Negro"), which deals with Du Bois on race, marks a transition. The topic of German antecedents has not yet receded into the background—indeed, anyone who has been waiting patiently for an account of Lotze on race will be pleased! As the chapter progresses, though, and certainly in its final section ("Subtle Forces"), Du Bois the independent thinker gradually emerges. The final section wrestles instructively with tensions between various ways in which Du Bois characterizes racial difference—for example, positively and negatively—with one highlight being its discussion of how race is equated with sin in "Of the Passing of the First-Born" in The Souls of Black Folk. What we also find in the chapter, however, is a perfect example of the inconvenient indirectness with regard to his own views that accompanies Appiah's choice to write primarily as intellectual historian, rather than as engaged philosopher. Having described developments in biology that undercut past scientific thinking about race, developments to which Du Bois appears to have paid attention, Appiah writes: "Some drew the conclusion- and many still do—that at this point there is no longer any reason to take racial groupings seriously" (107). Du Bois, of course, did not draw this conclusion. What is frustrating about reading this passage, though, is that, in "The Uncompleted Argument," Appiah famously does draw this conclusion. He is thus part of the "some" and one naturally wishes he would be more upfront about whether he is part of the "many" that still do. The answer, I take it, is that he isn't. But why make us have to piece this together on our own?Chapter 4 ("The Mystic Spell") is no more forthcoming about Appiah's views than previous chapters. And yet, to speak of delights, it is perhaps my favorite chapter in the book. It is a superb discussion of Du Bois's evolving thoughts on and knowledge of Africa. From early reflections in the 1903 Atlanta University study The Negro Church to later works focused primarily on Africa's past and present, such as The Negro (1915), Black Folk Then and Now (1939), and The World and Africa (1947), Appiah usefully traces Du Bois's developing appreciation for the complexity of African history and the impact of colonialism on the continent. He argues for the provocative thesis that this development in some ways led him further away from achieving the goal that initially motivated his interest in Africa: "his studies of Africa served to complicate rather than clarify his sense of the Negro" (139). I think the accuracy of this judgment is up for debate but I am glad that this is a debate Appiah is encouraging us to have, given my interest in Du Bois as a thinker of Pan-Africanism.We arrive now at chapter 5 ("The One and the Many"), the climactic chapter, in which we learn about how Du Bois, partly through the influence of James and Royce, managed to "glimpse a strategy that sidestepped certain of his difficulties and brought him close to a notion of race as what we'd now call a social identity" (147). In a section of the chapter entitled "Identity Now," Appiah produces an account of what he identifies as "the contemporary philosophical theory of identity," adding that "[t]he formulation is my own, but I take it to capture a widely shared understanding" (147–48). The comment about how he seeks to represent a shared understanding may mislead the reader who has not kept up with Appiah's writings over the years. What he offers in this section is something distinctively his own: a summary of the conception of identity he has concentrated on developing in works stretching over a long period of time—most notably, "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," from the 1996 book Color Conscious; his 2005 book, The Ethics of Identity; and (less well-known but very important, in my view) "Does Truth Matter to Identity?" from Jorge Gracia's 2007 collection, Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity. Identities, on this account, are "the nominal, normative, subjective classifications of persons" (152). Professions, like philosopher or teacher, and affiliations, like baseball fan or jazz aficionado, count as identities in this sense. So do races.But wait, doesn't Appiah reject the reality of race? This question is likely to be raised by those familiar with his early work on race, such as "The Uncompleted Argument" and his 1992 book In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.7 Even those familiar with "Race, Culture, Identity," in which Appiah does much to develop the theory he refers to here, will recall that he is careful there to distinguish racial identities from races, describing the latter as nonexistent. He does not, however, spend time making such a distinction in "Does Truth Matter to Identity?" Then, tellingly, he publicly admitted a major change in view in the inaugural Henry Louis Gates Jr. lecture at Yale University, which he gave in 2012. Discussing "The Conservation of Races," he said: We're inclined nowadays to suppose that what bound Negroes to each other for Du Bois must have been a biological theory of race. Why else would a Victorian thinker believe he had anything in common with people raised in an entirely different culture and climate on a continent thousands of miles away? But we can tell from Du Bois' easy movement between talk of race and talk of nation that his conception is not what we would call biological.8 Then, looking up to deliver an amusing aside, he admitted: "For those of you who are keeping track, that's a retraction of something I said in the most famous paper I've ever written about W. E. B. Du Bois." He is referring, of course, to "The Uncompleted Argument," where he argued that, despite the fact that Du Bois sought to offer in "The Conservation of Races" a sociohistorical account, he was ultimately "thrown back on the scientific definition of race, which he officially rejected" (Appiah 1985, 29). This is also the article in which he proclaimed: "The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask 'race' to do for us" (35).Appiah seems to have changed his mind about this. What complicates things is that what he most clearly retracted in the lecture was not his position on race but his interpretation of Du Bois, and not even that retraction appears in Lines of Descent, which is based in part on the lecture at Yale. Appiah seems to celebrate in chapter 5 what he describes as "Du Bois's recognition that race—as a species of social identity—is made in and through social processes" (157). Assuming there is nothing deceiving about this appearance, Appiah has now come out more strongly than ever as a social constructionist about race—that is, someone who believes races are real social kinds—even though he was once perhaps the most famous antirealist about race. One wishes that such a major switching of sides would be flagged and explained!To complicate things even further, though, there is an important sense in which Appiah's position on Du Bois and race is, in fact, unchanged between "The Uncompleted Argument" and Lines of Descent. After arguing that "Du Bois's social constructionism … urges us to move from thinking of the Negro race as a natural, biological kind to thinking of it as composed of people who share a socially made identity," Appiah writes: "I don't think Du Bois ever fully made this move: until the end of his life he spoke of the Negro as a category that worked across societies, in ways that seem to ignore his own insight. But his work encourages us, in the end, to make this move without him" (158). This is precisely the move Appiah makes in "The Uncompleted Argument," in which he concludes that Du Bois was "unable to escape the notion of race he had explicitly rejected," making it our responsibility to complete what he left uncompleted (Appiah 1985, 36). The similarity here produces the thought that maybe any apparent change is merely apparent—perhaps Appiah has remained completely consistent from the mid-1980s to now. This, however, cannot be the case: what Du Bois failed to escape, according to the Appiah of old, was the very idea of race. Completing what he left undone meant transcending the concept and leaving it behind. In Lines of Descent, race is not something be transcended. It is a form of social identity to be properly understood. For example, Appiah demonstrates the power of Du Boisian social constructionism and links the fifth chapter to the fourth by offering a brilliant defence of how we can see black identity as "narratively rooted in Africa" while avoiding the idea that African genes are what make you black (160).Those of us committed to social constructionism as a realist metaphysics of race—not to mention those of us committed to Pan-Africanism as a viable cultural and political project—cannot help but be glad to see Appiah strengthening our position. I would even describe these aspects of the book as part of why I find it delightful. Nevertheless, I think I have also said enough to show why it is frustrating that Appiah does not more readily let us into his own head as a thinker of race, even as he strives to help us peer into the mind of Du Bois. At the start of the final section of the final chapter, Appiah depicts Du Bois's evolution with regard to the topic of race as involving incessant struggle and discomfort: Du Bois found his way into a narrowing orbit around a notion of race that was nominalist, narrative, subjective, normative, and even, sometimes, antirealist. Why wasn't this enough? Why did the subject continue to vex him profoundly? And plainly it did: he never felt that he had mastered the concept; if anything, he felt undone by it. (161) As I read Lines of Descent, I cannot resist asking: has the concept of race vexed Appiah? Does he feel he has mastered it now? What precisely has changed since the days when he was encouraging us to be rid of the concept? What should we be careful to notice as having remained the same? Like Du Bois's thought, the development of Appiah's perspective on race is a topic worthy of study. I hope, as time goes on, that we will get more help in pursuit of this project from the man himself.