this paper I just got back with an "A" and "A real pleasure" written on it. There were no other marks by the teacher but other mistakes of my own doing.
W. E.B. DU BOIS ------------------------------------------------------REMUS the Trainbearer
By Brad McFall
W.E.B. Du Bois’ cultural prescription relies on a concept of evolutionary- self progress as a ruleable law of nature. Despite the appearance of abolished wrongs legally sacrificed by horrible deaths during the Civil War, Du Bois clearly cognized that a sociological division retained, and even with the egression of any supposed emancipation. This divided but not fully ameliorated structure was clearly visible to him within the praxis of actual Jim Crow laws. The default position in evolutionary theory however is against the supposition of Du Bois’ treatment of the cultural praxis, no matter how high-minded and preferable the moral response of Du Bois was. There is no doubt that Du Bois had captured the human cycle towards improved living, in his book “The Souls of Black Folk” but his means did not meet the end he sought. Darwin had thought long and hard about progress in biology, a couple of decades before Du Bois and denied such kinds of changes, for what later came to be known as “geographic races” or what for Du Bois divides, in-itself, into a “color-line”. Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard continued this vein of thought into the present millennium on how races evolve, siding with Darwin rather than the general opinion of likes of Du Bois. The Jim Crow laws are gone but the progress Du Bois hoped for did not fully materialize. There continues to be a separation where the hope for an end to the double life was to have been substantiated rather then become somewhat commercialized as has occurred.
The song “My Way’s Cloudy” opens the chapter titled “Of the Meaning of Progress” marking musically the dispensation Du Bois establishes with crucial narrative at the issue of South States right revolution of 1876(1) his notion of progress, under the metaphor of a shadow.(2) In his mediation, the material “veil” can be broken through beyond, as Du Bois relates said “shadow,” to reconstruction and the Freedman’s Bureau via a “new situation in a shadowy relief”.(3) He further works his meditation with “Progress in human affairs is more often a pull rather than a push.”(4)
If one takes the notion of better education as either a push or a pull, where a push merely moves someone out of their center versus a pull, that brings someone else’s center to a new place, rather than simply moving one near the pushee or pullee location, then one might recognize indeed Dubois’ “pull” and identify with it, as the need to actually get the laborers off their land and into college (see Chapter 13 “Of the Coming of John” in general) rather than simply “push” them around in their own owned land, by teaching them in common schools and enticing them with a notion of better education . In other words one might read Chapter 4 (“Of the Meaning of Progress”) to the effect that one has to pull the laborer off the land, because a “push” leaves Josie dieing and little to no progress, even though she is given the clue of a better education.(5)
This situation of Du Bois’ position seems to be more than a mere analogy and it must be “progress” as a concept, for Du Bois himself, as he objects to Washington’s version of “mutual progress”.(6) Du Bois concept is a goal directed progress directed to the path rather broad than narrow (7) and one that will potentially lead the Negro out of its childish ways.(8) Generally it appears that Du Bois sought to link culturally what S.J. Gould suggests that every evolutionary biologist should “never loose sight of”(9) and thus Darwin’s contradictory statements on progress (10) can not be resolved in Du Bois terms through a rejecting of a mutual progress, of Washington (which might fall within Darwin’s view), but could be integrated to Du Bois’ terms only if Darwin is mistaken about biological change and that mutations themselves (“saltations”) rather than natural selection lead to any changes thought by humanity as “progress.”
Du Bois has the idea that criticism contrary to his quite well elaborated vision of sociological history occurs from the perspective of the “Negro a priori”(11). Immanuel Kant with whom the a priori is mostly associated had an apprehension relevant to Du Bois concept of racial self-progress in his “Conflict of the Faculties”(Kant 45)
“The Concept and Division of the Lower Faculty”
“The lower faculty is the rank in the university that occupies itself with teachings which are not adopted as directives by order of a superior, or in so far as they are not so adopted. Now we may well comply with a practical teaching out of obedience, but we can never accept it as true simply because we are ordered to (de le Roi). This is not only objectively impossible ( a judgment that ought not to be made), but also subjectively quite impossible (a judgment that no one can make). For the man who, as he says, wants to err does not really err and, in fact, accept the false judgment as true; he merely declares, falsely, an assent that is not to be found in him. So when it is a question of the truth of a certain teaching to be expounded in public, the teacher cannot appeal to a supreme command nor the pupil pretend that he believed it by order. This can happen only when it is a question of action, and even then the pupil must recognize by a free judgment that such a command was really issued and that he is obligated or at least entitled to obey it; otherwise, his acceptance of it would be an empty pretense and a lie. Now the power to judge autonomously - that is, freely (according to principles of thought in general) - is called reason. So the philosophy faculty, because it must answer for the truth of the teachings it is to adopt or even allow, must be conceived as free and subject only to laws given by reason, not by government.
But a department of this kind, too, must be established at a university; in other words, a university must have a faculty of philosophy. Its function in relation to the three higher faculties is to control them and, in this way, be useful to them, since truth (the essential first condition of learning in general) is the main thing, whereas the utility the higher faculties promise the government is of secondary importance We can also grant the theology faculty’s proud claim that the philosophy faculty is its handmaid (though the question remains, whether the servant is the mistress’s torchbearer or trainbearer), provided it is not driven away or silenced. For the very modesty [of its claim] - merely to be free, as it leaves others free, to discover the truth for the benefit of all the sciences and to set it before the higher faculties to use as they will - must commend it to the government as above suspicion and, indeed, indispensable.”
Du Bois was not driven away nor silenced. In this respect the work and life of Du Bois responds to the questions that Kant said “must come up for discussion some day” (12). He helped to draw needed attention to the color-line by subjecting the “philosophy faculty” to the “theology faculty.”
However Du Bois in rejecting teleologically Washington’s utilitarian position(13)( on a subjected philosophy (whether coming from any of the three “higher faculties” (theology, law, or medicine) that Kant encompassed a priori)) does not leave “Washington” “free” even though he frees nearly everything and anything else. Du Bois drove away the very progress he sought by becoming a trainbearer (after the fact) (to use Kant’s “words”) rather than a torchbearer(before a fact).
“The Distinctive Characteristic of the Theology Faculty”
“The biblical theologian proves the existence of God on the grounds that He spoke in the Bible, which also discusses His nature(and even goes so far into it that reason cannot keep up with the text, as, when, for example, it speaks of the incomprehensible mystery of His threefold personality). But the biblical theologian as such cannot and need not prove that God Himself spoke through the Bible, since that is a matter of history and belongs to the philosophy faculty. [Treating it] as a matter of faith, he will therefore base it- even for the scholar - on a certain (indemonstrable and inexplicable)feeling that the Bible is divine. But the question of the divine origin of the Bible (in the literal sense) must not be raised at all in public discourses directed to the people; since this is a scholarly matter, they would fail completely to understand it and, as a result, would only get entangled in impertinent speculations and doubts. In such matters it is much safer to rely on the people’s confidence in their teachers. The biblical theologian can also have no authority to ascribe a nonliteral - for example, a moral - meaning to statements in the text. And since there is no human interpreter of the Scriptures authorized by God, he must rather cont on a supernatural opening of his understanding by a spirit that guides to all truth than allow reason to intervene and (without any higher authority) maintain its own interpretation. Finally, as far as our will and its fulfillment of God’s commands is concerned, the biblical theologian must rely not on nature - that is, on man’s own moral power (virtue) - but on grace ( a supernatural but, at the same time, moral influence), which man can obtain only by an ardent faith that transforms his heart - a faith that itself, in turn, he can expect only through grace. If the biblical theologian meddles with his reason in any of the tenets, then, even granting that reason strives most sincerely and earnestly for that same objective, he leaps (like Romulus’s brother) over the wall of ecclesiastical faith, the only thing that assures his salvation, and strays into the free and open fields of private judgment and philosophy. And there having run away from the Church’s government, he is exposed to all the dangers of anarchy. But note well that I am here speaking only of the pure (purus, putus) biblical theologian, who is not yet contaminated by the ill-reputed spirit of freed that belongs to reason and philosophy. For as soon as we allow tow different callings to combine and run together, we can form no clear notion of the characteristic that distinguishes each by itself.”(Kant, 37)
Du Bois may have made this willful mistake because he thought that evolutionary racial progress could substitute for the advantage a one such as Kant recognized( that the legal faculty has something essential over and through the theological faculty(
(”In one respect, however, the faculty of law is better off in practice than the theology faculty: it has a visible interpreter of the law - namely, a judge or, if his decision is appealed, a legal commission, and (as the highest appeal) the legislator himself. The theology faculty is not so well provided for, when the sayings of its sacred book have to be interpreted. But this advantage is offset by a disadvantage at least equal to it: namely, that any secular code of laws always remains subject to changer, as experience brings more or better insight, whereas the sacred code decrees that there will be no change (either by subtraction or addition) and maintains that it is closed forever.”
(Kant 39))).
So, rather than relying on grace and special revelation of the music of African-Americans, the gospel and otherwise and what it might by itself generalize over social time, as Kant might have comprehended, Du Bois attempts to list what occurred to justify his trend to desired racial improvement(14). Regardless, he let the “feeling” of the divine, leap over the wall of ecclesiastical faith precisely as Kant warned against. Despite Du Bois’ ever present embellishments that his work was not one of vanity, in truth, Du Bois subverted the philosophical superiority of theology over the philosophy of law for the particular laws of rights to vote and separation of powers etc of a particular government, the USA. So, because he was willing to envision the legal “ faculty “ of a particular country, over and above the theological “faculty” of any, in other words, that one must have the right to vote and must vote, before other changes can occur, his notion of progress was clearly one like Lamarck’s rather than Darwin’s where adaptation (voting) is a separate force than progress (grace induced changeability).(15)
In the end, Du Bois leapt over the wall rather than causing motion through the veil. Thus I name W. E. B. Du Bois, REMUS (the brother of Romulus) who was an important trainbearer of Kant’s unfulfilled conflict introgressing the discriminatory color-line and Jim Crow laws, but a brother nonetheless who emerged not far enough, not because he did not think had gone further but since the regimen his book, “The Souls of Black Folk” provides, can only prevent and not cure, the wound inflicted sociologically no matter what the truth biologically of race relations is and was. This becomes more and more evident as the human population growth problem rears its ugly head, today and tomorrow, but by this future-time, the veil is and would have already been dropped (both figuratively and literally) and the mother figure in consequence will have torqued her neck beyond easy recognition of a familiar hope, since a spectral color had been added. A supplemental can written showing how a modified scholarship of biology might recall Du Bois from the very red clay he buried his own concept of progress in, but then again, Harvard scholarship, would have to be mistaken this time rather than at being at least partially responsible for the vision that sought to and succeeded to some extent to apply edification towards and through the sprit and history of Du Bois’ life.
Kant’s conflict remains as showing that the physical regimen which is all that Du Bois orates for morally, can not resolve completely the social issues derived from a former culture of slavery but can only prevent further abuses . It can not cure - unless of course there is evolutionary progress - Du Bois does not show this - he only shows two sides of the religious black man plus more and the difference of white and black culture in the US. It would have to be that whatever pragmatic hope or practicality that Du Bois embodied deep down to his soul is acquired rather than inherited. The view of one of Darwin’s correspondents at Harvard, A. Hyatt who thought necessary progress is biologically true is accepted no longer, even by the most liberal evolutionists of our day. There is no indication that special mutations in the African-American race are going to help them anymore than the Chinese, as the number of people presses up against the agriculture capacity of a technological society that is slightly more equal thanks to the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Footnotes-
1-(Du Bois 11) “A million black men started to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but sill inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power - a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning.””
2-(Du Bois 8 )“I remember well when the shadow swept across me.”, “I had thereafter no desire to tear down the veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows”, (Du Bois 9 )“The shadow of a might Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx”, p13 “Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. P 14 “Nevertheless, out of the evil came something good, - the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.”
3-(Du Bois 20 )“Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro.”
4-(Du Bois 72 )“Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.”
5-(Du Bois 57) “My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, Life and Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”
6-(Du Bois 36) “To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this, at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: “In all things purely social we can be as separate as five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This “Atlanta Compromise”(2) is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in different ways . ”
7-(Du Bois 37) “The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk warily . In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow.”
8-(Du Bois 61) “To-day it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for himself, - and let no man dream that day will never come, - then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but of words and thoughts he ahs been taught to lisp in his race-childhood.”
9-(Gould 469) “Evolutionary biologists should never loose sight of a cardinal principle linking history and function - that historical origin and immediate utility represent independent subjects with no necessary connection (see Chapter 11 for an extended discussion of this principle).”
10-(Gould 467) “Darwin’s dilemma can be stated easily: The bare-bones mechanics of the theory of natural selection provides no rationale for progress because the theory speaks only of adaptations to changing local environments. (The morphological degeneration of a parasite may enhance local adaptation as surely as any intricate biomechanical improvement in a bird’s wing.) Moreover, Darwin regarded the banishment of inherent progress as perhaps his greatest conceptual advance over previous evolutionary theories - and he said so, often and forcefully, as in this epistolary comment, previously cited on page 373, to the American progressionist paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt on December 4, 1872: “After long reflection I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exist”(F.Darwin, 1903, vol.1, p344).”
11-(Du Bois 74) “We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.”
12-(Kant vii ) The translator said, “The theme of a conflict between philosophical and theological faculties appears in Kant’s correspondence as early as 1793. Having expressed his distrust of the biblical theologian who wants to overstep the limits of his authority and pronounce upon purely philosophical writings, he notes that the worst thing about the affair is that the philosopher, instead of resisting the theologian’s claim, comes to an understanding with him. In a letter to J.G. Kiesewetter of December 13, 1793, he says that this sort of coalition and the false peace resulting from it “must come up for discussion one day” “
13- (Du Bois 41) “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.”
14-(Du Bois 42) “In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.”
15-(Gould 478) “In summary, Darwin’s link of progress to biotic competition completes his argument against evolutionary systems (like Lamarck’s) that propose separate forces for progress and adaptation, and that, as an unintended result, fall into the disabling paradox analyzed in Chapter 2:”
WORKS CITED
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Barnes and Noble Classics: New York. 2003.
Gould , Stephen Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard University Press:Cambridge. 2002
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. University of Nebraska Press:Lincoln and London.1979
(Immediate thoughts after reading your comments): I do not know how Du bois treats the work of James, because though I might have read about James and Darwin in the past, I can not recall any direct quotes or positions of James. Given Gould’s statements on progress, “the ladder”, and REJECTION of Lamarck due to “Darwin’s good ideas” (page SET p192 last paragraph in section) it is possible for Du Bois to still be influenced by a process of evolutionary self-progress while still under some influence by James, even if James was a strict Darwinian supporter, like Gould. Gould is referring to a change in biology that occurred in the40s and 50s as Lamarckian biologists, such as his teacher , and Dean”” of modern biology MAYR transitioned through intellectually (from Lamarck to Darwin) Mayr makes references to the effect that this happened to many of his generation (the generation of my Grandfather, who studied genetics and was the first “science” teacher at SUNY Fredonia (there was already only a physics teacher there before him and it was Stan, my granddad that had introduced me to Evolution as a child). If Du Bois read Lamarck in the French Original he may have got his notion of racial self-progress directly there, no matter what Harvard was doing during his time. Harvard was moving away from the position of it’s Museum curator, Louis Agassiz who wrote a defense of natural theology and special creation of species and criticized Darwin in the couple of decades before Du Bois was at Harvard. Gould makes the point of the giraffe stretching the neck is a popular misconception of Lamarck. IT WAS THE ONE I WAS TAUGT TOO!!!! So if Du Bois had read Lamarck he could have made his mind up for himself. I, contrary, to Gould, (I had lunch with SJ at Cornell in the 80s) think that Lamarck’s “TWO FACTOR” theory can exist by direct physical imposition whether that is by GOD or by simple physical ruleable law. In particular I am trying to express my opinion on how organisms translate in space and generate form-making traits as due to “constraints” effected between two different physical TORQUES, on created by the different motions of photons vs electrons and the other by moving subducted plates creating moving relations of metamorphic rock BETWEEN sedimentary and igneous differences in hardness AND MOVED contrarily by the BEHAVIORS (locomotions, dispersals, growths) of living biological entities. It would take me to the time to complete a Master’s Degree to attempt to marshal this thesis in Du Bois favor, but if I was so inclined to look into it it might be accomplished as accommodated.
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