W.E.B. Du Bois is credited with laying the phenomenological groundwork for black subjectivity and self consciousness in the Souls of Black Folk. Rooted in a distinctly American social, academic and historical context, Du Bois’ project in Souls developed a new theory of self reflection and transcendental consciousness that intertwined Hegel’s concept of unhappy consciousness and the master-salve dialectic in the creation of his famous notion of “double consciousness”.
In Souls, Du Bois points towards an ethical/political way out of double consciousness, or the “rending of the veil” which again incorporates Hegel and pragmatism into its praxis. This paper will discuss Du Bois’ phenomenological analysis as influenced by Hegel in relation to the American transcendentalist and pragmatist approaches which also influenced Du Bois’ project for applying “philosophy to an historical interpretation of race relations” (Dark Voices, 74).
Double consciousness is clearly influenced by the master-slave dialectic from the chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a point of influence that has been noted and analyzed in most systematic detail by Shamoon Zamir in Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought 1888 – 1903. While Zamir’s reading of the role of Hegel on Souls is invaluable, many have questioned Zamir’s interpretation of the way in which Hegel was appropriated to fit Du Bois’ philosophical project in Souls (Posnock, 1998; Williamson, 1984; Wienfried, 2005; Henry, 2006). With the exception of Henry, each author seeks to locate Du Bois’ reading in philosophical proximity to Hegel in the Phenomenology. In this tradition, I will seek to identify the ways in which Du Bois’ alterations of Hegel apply to double consciousness and the rending of the veil in Souls, and I will explore the unique interplay Du Bois’ pragmatist social-scientific approaches had on his new theory of consciousness. In conclusion, I will explore the poetic imaginative components to the future of cultural difference and the philosophical implications of Du Bois’ way forward, or the project for “rending of the veil.” I will also explore Du Bois’ ethical/practical strategy for promoting greater racial equality and proper liberation of the Negro subject.
The Pragmatist Fermentative Capacity
At this point it is important to explore the contours of the major philosophical concepts Du Bois reworks and then alters in Souls: “double consciousness” and “the veil” – the two concepts which formulate the radical constitution of the Negro subject as well as the categorical structure of the Negro transcendental domain.
Du Bois’ philosophical project in Souls should be seen in the context of a phenomenological project. Du Bois was concerned with developing a grounded theory of Negro subjectivity that could articulate the predicament and history of Negro consciousness. James’ voluntarism, will to action, and pluralist method were theoretical positions that denied metaphysical certainties in favor of relativist epistemologies and individualist studies of the mind (Zamir, 71-85). Du Bois would incorporate and then eventually revise James’ concept of voluntarism into an ethical political project, but he had to develop a theory of Negro consciousness first. What Du Bois would find in the American pragmatist project, as well as the transcendentalist school of Emerson and Whitman was a reduction of consciousness to a passive experience of objects, a process not tied to any historical or cultural mode of difference. Du Bois sought to open these spaces for metaphysical teleologies and historicism to enter the discourse on consciousness in order to include black consciousness as a fundamentally different and distinct category of consciousness and subjectivity. As an undergraduate immersed in the pragmatist project at Harvard, Du Bois’ move away from pragmatism was evident in “The Renaissance of Ethics,” when he writes, “we must study, not my mind, but the great and universal mind, in its millions of manifestations past and present, using introspection.” (RE, Z).
Prior to Du Bois’ theory of negro subjectivity and consciousness, he would search for academic support to challenge American exceptionalism, and the Reconstruction era period which Du Bois saw as series of state sponsored policies that legitimated institutional racism. As Zamir, Williamson and Posnock have noted, the American pragmatist model is the methodology Du Bois utilized throughout his career when approaching the race problem, and solutions to the “color line”. Indeed, this influence is evident after Du Bois’ pursuit of social-scientific approaches to the race issue in The Philadelphia Negro and The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, both of which are tombs of empirical social science data that sought to advocate state interventionist approaches to social change and progressive reforms to entrenched institutional racist policies (Zamir, 80 – 83). The rise of pro slavery movements in the post antebellum south, the passing of separate but equal with Plessy vs. Ferguson and record numbers of lynching’s had led Du Bois to question the role of American exceptionalism, and the professional and academic support for the legitimating of racist policies based on scientific rationalizations of progress (Souls, 9-24). Du Bois’s social-scientific projects still lacked an effective way of isolating the Negro American subject, and it was in the domain of consciousness and reflection that Du Bois would develop in Souls to ground his work to support his social scientific arguments (Dark Voices, 95).
What brought Du Bois out of the realm of social science guided by James’ will to action and empirical method and into a new theory of Negro consciousness was his engagement with the Phenomenology of Spirit. Du Bois’ first exposure to Hegel came from the pragmatist George Santayana who was sympathetic to Hegelian ideas of “spiritual biography” in the Phenomenology and saw them as a passing through of bewildering metamorphoses in the form of outer objects and phenomenal events, or shapes of consciousness (Dark Voices, 159). In contrast to James and Emerson, Hegel located the subject in relation to the world, particularly the political and social realms, in a concrete way, and with greater specificity. Nondialectical transcendentalism of James and Emerson identified a concept of self identify that was not culturally constructed or articulated within the parameters of a given historic and social context from which the subject could resist or create (Dark Voices, 215).
The way in which race was dealt with by James and the pragmatist project was at best a romanticization of the non European that characterized blacks in terms of a social Darwinist “fellahin” class whose exotic purpose was to offer vital rejuvenation to the Bourgeoisie. While James’ position on race was tepid, he attempted to solve the problems of the “dispossessed” through the classic pragmatist gradualist approach, which posted inferior races should receive a greater spiritual share in the well-being of the privileged and the powerful. Zamir’s reading of Du Bois’s complex relationship James, John Dewey and Santayana, i.e. the pragmatist school gave Du Bois the methodology that enabled him to eventually break away from the pragmatist school. This “fermentative capacity” of the pragmatist pluralist method developed an important orientation to theory not only for Du Bois, but John Dewey notes in Absolutism: “I seemed to be unstable, chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even incompatible influences; struggling to assimilate something form each” (Absolutism, 9).
Du Bois would appropriate this sense of pragmatist eclecticism into his social-scientific approach, yet both pragmatism and social science left no way to describe self consciousness as a phenomenon struggling for self-realization. The false duality – to James – between sensibility and conduct was dismissed by Du Bois as action without thought. Similarly we find this in Emerson, “our responsibility ends with performance of our duty of conduct” (Dark Voices, 37). The idea of a dual mind was already prevalent in pragmatist thought, James wrote in the General Principles of Psychology, “one system to give rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simultaneously existing consciousness” (Principles of Psychology, 399). Yet, the pragmatist project was not sufficient for Du Bois’ search for a grounded Negro subjectivity, and the pragmatist dualism provided no tangible links to any notion of inequality of perception, to subjectivity or social context.
By the mid nineteenth century, Europe had discarded much of Hegel in the wake of political movements that saw in his systems approach a tie to state sponsored terror. In late nineteenth century America on the other hand, Hegel’s popularity had peaked, especially in the post civil war climate. Most notable were the St. Louis Hegelians, a vibrant academic movement which co-opted Hegel to develop a narrative of American national identity in world-historical terms, and to further ideas of American exceptionalism. According to Hegel, America is “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself” (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 90). Most relevant to Du Bois’ project in Souls was the way in which the master slave dialectic, and in particular the chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” was dealt with by American Hegelians of his time. It is evident that Du Bois was influenced by the American Hegelian project early on before he left to study in Berlin; this is clear in his ironic Harvard commencement speech about Jefferson Davis as a world historical figure. None of the late nineteenth century American interpretations of Hegel acknowledged either the positions by which the master and slave become independent and reversed, and in other cases, their interpretations went to justify slavery outright. Furthermore, their readings posited that a humane attitude towards the slave could destabilize the supremacy of the master, a point that even Hegel would have denied (Dark Voices, 60-67).
A New Conception of Negro Subjectivity and Consciousness
Susan Buck-Morss has recently shed light on the historical events of Hegel’s own time that have made the lordship and bondage chapter of Phenomenology a revolutionary work of western philosophy. In “Hegel and Haiti”, Buck-Morss argues that Hegel was heavily influenced by the disintegration of the colonial slave system of capitalist exploitation and in particular the Haitian revolution, where for the first time liberation of the slave occurred from below, not as a privileged granted on high from an enlightened master. In the Phenomenology, Hegel positions the master, or lord as dependent on the slave, which ends up affording the slave a more dominant position in world-historical terms, as the master’s “for-itself” existence must be eliminated to contribute to the spread of reason, or freedom (Hegel and Haiti, 847-850). Du Bois’ general interpretation of the master slave dialectic fit the holes and passive handlings of race and consciousness that his pragmatist method so sorely lacked. Du Bois was attracted to German idealism because it also gave him an intellectual system to aid the shortcomings of American pragmatism. Furthermore, European culture showed Du Bois the model for a cosmopolitan society not prone to the “nigger-hating America” (Dark Voices, 76 and 83). Posnock has noted that upon realizing Hegel’s method for studying consciousness, Du Bois would continue to accommodate both his formal training in American pragmatism and Hegelian metaphysics, and he would let each system work off of one another (Color and Culture, 117-121).
Du Bois sought to locate race in terms that grounded a new conception of Negro subjectivity, one that was distinctly rooted in an American psychical context. In Hegel’s chapter on “Lordship and Bondage”, amidst the transition from unhappy consciousness to skeptical consciousness, the self requires a communal foundation. This transition to the communal foundation out of unhappy consciousness enables the subject to no longer view itself as a pseudo universal, and now sees itself as a contributing member of an intersubjective community (Phenomenology, 111-117). The transition requires the substitution of a theological absolute for a communal tradition, a standpoint for a communally mediated universality. This standpoint is the primary education that unhappy consciousness receives when it undergoes the dialectic of master-slave from the chapter of “Lordship and Bondage” in the Phenomenology.
Du Bois’ idea of “double consciousness” and the very notion of unhappy consciousness is an internalization of the dialectic of struggle, and unhappy consciousness transposes itself into self-consciousness itself. Unhappy consciousness, like double consciousness is a paradoxical consciousness because it embodies both absolute self certainty and no certainty simultaneously. In the transition from unhappy consciousness the self realizes itself as behind a veil, “this curtain [of appearance], therefore, hanging before the inner world is withdrawn, and we have here the inner being [the ego] gazing into the inner realm” (Phenomenology, 211). For Du Bois himself, the lowering of his veil is expressed in the opening of Souls in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” as a young boy in New England playing with the white children. “The exchange was merry, until one girl refused my card, - refused it peremptorily with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others” (Souls, 2). In 1920, Du Bois goes into finer detail about how he had adjusted to “life behind the veil” in Darkwater, “I would retreat into a tower above the loud complaining of the human sea” (Darkwater, 17). From this standpoint, Du Bois would attempt to grasp and engage the world intellectually. As noted by Henry, this position behind the veil is one possible existential response to the involuntary presence of the racial veil. In Souls, Du Bois explores the life behind the veil for the vast majority of blacks, which was not so “fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white, or wasted itself in a bitter cry, why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house” (Souls, 4).
In revealing the social history and contours of Negro consciousness, Souls offers a politicized understanding of double consciousness and the unique ground of Negro self consciousness, which not even Du Bois can escape as a new England elitist. Instead of revealing a natural history of Negro consciousness in Souls, Du Bois presents Negro consciousness to fit a specific social history (Dark Voices, 136). Du Bois’ reading of labor in the Phenomenology should be understood in terms of a Marxist critique of alienation, even though Du Bois wasn’t fluent with Marx’s critique of dialectical materialism while writing Souls. Yet, Du Bois’ own psychology of self consciousness works somewhere between materialist and idealist critiques. As we will see, his concept of recognition remains idealist and teleological, but it alters Hegel’s model to accommodate inclusion of the Negro subject.
Du Bois’ strategy for realizing Negro self identity was chiefly concerned with the concept of Hegelian recognition. Indeed, Zamir sees the search for recognition as the central concern of Souls. In the chapter on “Lordship and Bondage”, Hegel calls for a level of mutuality in the process of recognition, whereby the slave and the master reach a level of mutual realization that their dependence is for the other. In the Hegelian dialectic, the self starts from the master-slave stage to the unhappy consciousness stage. After reaching skepticism, a negative process then becomes the moment of self-consciousness itself, a consciousness that is caught between transcendence and determinateness (Dark Voices, 143 - 145). In Souls, the moment of self consciousness in skeptical thought is a moment that presents a potential opening for the Negro subject, an opening where a perpetual transition between unity and disunity occurs. This transition in Du Bois is the lifting of the veil, where the Negro subject is revealed to the others as a nightmare, and his whole existence is under state of terror, “how does it feel to be a problem?” (Souls, 1). Paradoxically, this state of terror is the ground upon which the transformation of Negro self consciousness or the rending of the veil can take place (Dark Voices, 145).
Locating Du Bois’ Reading of Hegel
Du Bois found in Hegel a type of theoretical schema, which unlike James’ pragmatist method, presented an adaptable system for interpreting one’s own subjectivity. Jurgen Habermas has identified two types of philosophical readings: a general interpretation and a general theory (Knowledge and Human Interests, 246-273). A general interpretation is a generalized narrative of self-development that is directed at a subject and must therefore have an “addressee”. General theories, like pragmatism are aimed at objects rather than subjects. One applies general interpretation as a way to fit the theory onto their subjectivity (Africana Phenomenology, 6 – 7). In this sense, Du Bois’s revisions to Hegelian phenomenology represent an accommodation to a proper fit of a culturally relevant subjectivity and a racialized interpretation of the life world.
Shamoon Zamir and Paget Henry are essential in understanding the radical reworking of Hegel that we see in Du Bois’ development of “double consciousness” and the veil. Although they differ on the role that consciousness plays in important ways about the way in which Du Bois accommodated the Hegelian transition of unhappy consciousness to skepticism, from the chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in the section on master-slave in the Phenomenology. Henry argues that Souls represents the first work of Africana phenomenology, and that we should place Du Bois’ reading of Hegel in the company an existential phenomenological project aligned with that of Kojeve, Sartre and Fanon. Furthermore, Henry argues that Du Bois’ reading is internalized, revisionary and ground breaking as it alters “unhappy consciousness,” the central concept from which “double consciousness” is built around. Henry continues to point out that Souls develops a racialized Negro identity which defies any literal application to Hegel’s discussion of unhappy consciousness, rendering Souls as a work of general interpretation that only incorporates the broader contours of Phenomenology. Both Zamir and Paget agree that the master-slave dialectic was only tangentially incorporated into Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness”, Henry argues:
“As a racialized subject, the Africana individual remains very much within the terms of the master-slave relationship. Consequently, the above dualizing is not the source of the two poles between which the Africana subject oscillates. This subject moves not between a changeable “I” and an unchangeable “Other” but between two “We’s”. To suggest that “double consciousness” is a version of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness is not the same dilemma of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness” (Africana Phenomenology, 6).
Conversely, Zamir argues that Du Bois’ appropriation of Hegelian unhappy consciousness must be seen as a literal reworking, a reworking unique to Du Bois’ specific academic trajectory and American historical context. In this line interpretation, Du Bois’ version of Negro subjectivity in Souls cannot embody the global Africana subjectivity at the stage of capitalist development Du Bois was rooted in when writing Souls. Henry’s reading of Souls as the first work of Africana phenomenology is helpful in terms of understanding Du Bois’ method and theoretical approach within the discourse of Africana phenomenology, and his very important use of Habermas’ notion of the racialized takeover of the life world helps us to understand the use of Negro subjectivity in Souls, especially the production not of two “I’s” but of two We’s (Africana Phenomenology, 7-8).
Henry extends Souls impact into the twentieth century Africana phenomenological project. Such a project is important; however, was it Du Bois’ interest in developing a global Africana subjectivity? I argue that such a reading is misleading as it performs an interpretation of Du Bois from a vantage point after his later turn to more radical Marxist and materialist position, and it includes Du Boisian double consciousness in a tradition of Africana phenomenology that has the benefit of hindsight. We must not forget that Du Bois had very little exposure to Marx upon reading Souls, and his formal training in American pragmatism and the fact that he was rooted in a distinctly American context were what most profoundly shaped the phenomenological project in Souls. Henry does a great service in helping us understand Du Boisian phenomenology, but he limits our ability to understand the actual context and immediate perceived conflicts that Du Bois faced in formulating his theories of double consciousness and the lifting of the veil.
Recognition and Rending the Veil
In The Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Williams argues that the very concept of Hegelian spirit is constituted through reciprocal recognition. What occurs in the struggle for recognition in Hegel is a predicament where the master seeks to cancel the other as a means of preserving his original certainty. Autonomy, for the slave is an intersubjective process and unlike in Kant and James the slave had to receive autonomy not merely in an isolated way, but it had to be intersubjectively mediated. Furthermore, autonomy is an ethical conception, involving self-overcoming. The point of transcending the master-slave relationship can only occur when one puts their own existence at risk, and the willingness to place oneself at risk is the only way out of the confines of the color line. Du Bois’ challenge to the reader to break the confines and rend the veil requires a sort of reciprocal work. Ultimately, it is the white who suffers from the existence of the color line, “what the white finds behind the color line is finally, a mirror” (Dark Voices, 177). Du Bois’ vision involves a totally new social and intellectual contract, a new way of interaction amongst whites and blacks. Only through intelligence and sympathy across the color line will justice and right triumph (Souls, 130-131).
Winfried Siemerling, in W.E.B. Du Bois, Hegel and the Staging of Alterity argues that Du Bois’ project of lifting the veil is problematized when reading it in a direct Hegelian dialectic. Du Bois placed responsibility for “rending the veil” in a yet to be imagined America, where difference could operate as a surplus value able to merge double consciousness, or the Negro subject into a “better and truer self” (Souls, 365). Du Bois envisions a process of reciprocal recognition, but he has no model available to envision the day where the Negro would be a “co worker in the Kingdom of Culture” (Souls, 3). In Siemerling’s reading of Du Bois’ rending of the veil, or the loss of double consciousness, what is actually implied is a maintenance and separation of the particulars. Du Bois chose a form of assimilation into white culture that had never before been realized, a merging into a unity that reinforced the particular differences (Politics of Re/Cognition, 45-51).
The chapter “Of the Sorrow Songs” supports Siemerling’s argument, here Du Bois argues for radical inclusion and assimilation that restores differences, as he dreams for the day when black and white will be “co workers in the kingdom of culture” (Souls, 4). Du Bois’ prophetic call for a submerging of differences into a larger entity is premised on an assumption that an absolute transparency in which all contradictions are sublated could only be guaranteed from one universal standard, a distinctly Hegelian position (Du Bois, Hegel and Alterity, 34-37).
While Du Bois gained his notion of subjectivity and a theory of Negro consciousness through his encounter with Hegel, the influence also made an impact in terms of the ethical and political dimensions of Souls. Towards the end of Souls in the Afterward, we again see that the newfound understanding of perception involves a poetic imaginative capacity for both Du Bois, and the reader (Dark Voices, 194-196). In the pragmatist and transcendentalist mode of transcending seeing the other it is done through a “voluntaristic act of seeing” (Dark Voices, 196). Just as Du Bois had politicized consciousness, he had to politicize the capacity of seeing, not the immediate transparency of the world, but that in the hope that Souls would invoke a sort of “politics of transfiguration” the author [Du Bois] is able to transfigure the voices that have the power to lift the veil.
Indeed, the Negro Spirituals that end the book [Souls] contain within them the capacity to recuperate the threatened self confidence of the Negro and rend the veil of double consciousness. By adopting Hegel’s model for consciousness, his ethical platform of “assimilation” cannot be fully realized in the currently visible reason of the nation. The universal is America but she remains hidden and invisible, and the entire rending of the veil should be seen as the potential for the unfolding of the reason of the nation. Du Bois’ assimilation was an idealist merging into the yet to be realized conception of America.
Conclusion
Du Bois’ challenge to the reader requires an intersubjective task to rend the veil of an oppressive imposition for both white and black subjects in the Kingdom of Culture. The Phenomenology gave Du Bois a structure to fill in the passive and individualistic theories of consciousness lacking in the pragmatist school. To understand the development of Du Bois’ phenomenological project of Negro subjectivity and consciousness it is important to understand his position in terms of his entrenched American vantage point. The pragmatist and transcendentalist schools from which Du Bois remained heavily indebted to in terms of methodological orientation were radically altered and revised in the production of Souls. At the same time it was via the pragmatist methods that Du Bois combined Hegel and German idealism into his project.
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