Heather Delancett

American Philosophy

Prof. Serge Grigoriev

Fall 2009

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Applied Pragmatism

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the most influential figures in

American intellectual history. In a country demarcated politically and ideologically by racism, W. E. B.

Du Bois was the first African-American to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard and was a primary founding

member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of America’s

oldest and most successful civil rights organizations. Between the years of 1896 – 1962, Du Bois

produced over 30 published books of sociology, history, political science, fiction and race relations; his

doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, remains the authoritative

work on that subject,1 and is the first volume in Harvard's Historical Series. Additionally, Du Bois was

editor in chief of the NAACP’s magazine “The Crisis” for twenty-five years – a medium for his vitriolic and

eloquent editorials described as “hurled thunderbolts of searing script, scorching the "dusty veil," and

revealing the innards of a country whose quivering heart beat bigotry.”2 In all of these ways and more,

W. E. B. Du Bois used his understandings of the budding Pragmatic philosophy to directly confront,

shape and change the political and ideological realities of American society.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic and

political activist. Dewey served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1899, and was

president of the American Philosophical Association in 1905. Exerting immense influence in many fields,

1 Gerald C. Hynes, A Biographical Sketch of W.E.B. Du Bois. (2003, June 19). Retrieved 11 13, 2009, from W.E.B. Du Bois Learning Center: http://www.duboislc.org/html/DuBoisBio.html

2 Ibid.

Dewey is considered to be one of the founders of American Pragmatist philosophy, though Dewey

identified himself more as an “instrumentalist” rather than a “pragmatist.” Instrumentalism is the “view

that knowledge results from the discernment of correlations between events, or processes of change,”3

where inquiry takes place in an open system with yet unknown variables and interactions. Inspired to

apply a scientific approach to philosophy, Dewey describes ideas as “tools” or “instruments” with the

practical purpose of making greater sense of the world. Idea “instruments” are employed by creating

plans of actions and hypotheses of the future results which empower people to direct natural events

and social processes and institutions.4 In 1919, Dewey, then a philosophy professor at Columbia

University, delivered a series of lectures at the Imperial University of Japan in Tokyo which were

published in 1920 under the title of Reconstruction in Philosophy. In his explorations and commentaries

about the role of philosophy and the nature of the individual within society, Dewey clearly articulates

many of the ideas and themes that appear in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and can help us gain insights

into Du Bois’s applied pragmatic philosophy.

Dr. Du Bois’s third book, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903. In this collection of

fourteen essays, Du Bois explores the nature of the individual within society and identifies a feature

which he terms “double consciousness.” Du Bois argues that this condition of double-consciousness

prevents African Americans from achieving self-realization due to the tensions of warring ideals:

…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world….One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals…5

3 Encyclopaedie Brittanica. (2009). History & Society: John Dewey. Retrieved Dec. 10, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/160445/John-Dewey/283729/Instrumentalism 4 Ibid.5 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1995 ed. (New York: New American Library, 1995), p. 45

Du Bois did not clearly explicate his reasoning behind introducing this concept, but instead uses it as an

instrument to make a larger analysis of individuality and society and to reveal structures of oppressive

conditions within social institutions at their root.

Looking to Dewey’s “Reconstruction” project, we can examine the philosophical understructure

of what Du Bois was doing. In Chapter VIII, Dewey examines the relationship of individuals to society

through the three possible options:

1) Society exists for the sake of individuals

2) Individuals must have their ends and ways of living set by society

3) Society & individuals are correlative, organic – society requires the service and subordination of

individuals and yet exists to serve them.

Dewey argues that each of these models suffer a common defect because they are committed to the

logic of generalized abstract terms which are assumed to have a universal meaning that covers and

dominates all particulars.

“If we talk about the state and the individual, rather than about this or that political organization and this or that group of needy and suffering beings, the tendency is to throw the glamor and prestige, the meaning and the value attached to the general notion, over the concrete situation and thereby to cover up the defects of the latter and disguise the need of serious reforms.” 6

This tendency of using generalized universal concepts tends to minimize the significance of specific

conflicts and has the effect of supplying intellectual justification for the established order.

Dewey’s criticism of how these generalized concepts are employed to carelessly dismiss

particular conflicts is most directed at the conception of the individual self – the belief that individuals

alone are natural and real, where social classes and organizations are artificial and secondary. He posits

6 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920), p. 190

the difficulties that arise from this concept to be rooted in the assumption that the individual is

“something given” or “something already there.”7 He argues that while social institutions are made for

men and are means of human welfare and progress, these institutions have nothing to do with obtaining

something for individuals, instead “they are a means of creating individuals.”8 By these intellectual

abstractions of the concept of the self-contained individual, much harm can be done:

Those who identified self as something ready-made and its interest with acquisition of pleasure and profit took the most effective means possible to reinstate the logic of abstract conceptions of law, justice, sovereignty, freedom, etc. – all of those vague general ideas that for all their seeming rigidity can be manipulated by any clever politician to cover up his designs and to make the worse seem the better cause. 9

The inherent danger in this type of application is that moral reform is placed as the responsibility of the

individual alone and institutional changes are seen as merely external – it is question of the individual’s

vices and virtues in light of the grand ideals, ignoring the conditions of the environment upon the

individual’s development.

In Du Bois’s 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, this confrontation of the logic of the ready-made

individual, who is supposed to be personally, internally responsible for moral virtue and self-

actualization without regard to external societal conditions, is the central thesis of the author’s project.

His aim is to pull back the veil of these American ideal abstractions and to clearly and intimately show

how external institutions and practices create “warring ideals” between the general concepts and

particular practical environments. Du Bois used the most poignant example available to him; that of the

conflict between the abstract ideals of freedom, democracy and justice faced by the African-American

seeking identity through these ideals but living in the practical and pervading consequences of the Jim

Crow era. Du Bois can be, and should be, critiqued for his insistence that “double-consciousness” as a

psychologically limiting factor in the development of the individual is unique to African-Americans. But,

7 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920), p. 1938 Ibid., p. 1949 Ibid., p. 195

as Dewey reminds us “man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and

reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things…in a world of

signs and symbols,”10 and Du Bois designed his intentions in presenting radical examples of how crucially

these echoes and reminiscences of history were still effecting African-Americans in order to conceptually

divide them from the white European ideology of “truths” which rang hollow when applied to black

Americans despite technical Reconstruction in legislature.

Du Bois’s aim with The Souls of Black Folk is to redefine selfhood as an active process and he

focuses on changes to social institutions and practices as keys to the creation of new types of more self-

actualized individuals in equilibrium with their environment. Years later, Dewey articulated the aims of

Du Bois (and others like him) in their application of pragmatic philosophy to challenge social institutions

and the assumptions they are based upon, which gave inquiry into the meaning of social arrangements a

specific, practically experimental direction. Both Dewey and Du Bois envisioned that when we consider

the development of the individual within the terms of what specific influences each type of social

arrangement contributes to this active process of selfhood, “the old-time separation between politics

and morals is abolished at its root,”11 and philosophy can be applied to social and moral issues of our

present society, institutions and conditions.

10 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920), p. 111 Ibid., p. 197