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

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 has given In exploring his and the him to we can learn something about how to our what do we learn from should our be our must be simply because we in each of our must be as we are all in or both of those we must yet do we learn from Du The we to a answer to this question can be in the aforementioned final chapter as I will what he says there remains in and like the first chapter, with German but I would like to this chapter as not only but also as helpful to to be to Du Bois, for Appiah in it much of what I take to be of the in Du Bois's There is a discussion of like before him, Du Bois and and of the aspects of his work that has had the influence on my There is also an of one of the most famous in African American the on in The Souls of Black connecting it to and in my how we might understand its seemingly of a in a manner that could find A chapter like this leaves me to Appiah as a to Du Bois, although it should be that to on what is in a work and to new ways of what he says is not yet to say clearly what we should take from (“The of the which with Du Bois on race, a The topic of German has not yet into the who has been for an of on race will be As the chapter though, and certainly in its final Du Bois the thinker The final with between various ways in which Du Bois example, and one being its discussion of how race is with in the of the in The Souls of Black What we also find in the chapter, however, is a of the with to his views that Appiah's to as intellectual as Having described in that scientific thinking about race, to which Du Bois appears to have attention, Appiah the and many at this there is any reason to take Du Bois, of course, did not this What is frustrating about this though, is that, in “The Uncompleted Appiah does this He is thus part of the and one naturally wishes he would be more about whether he is part of the that The I take it, is that he But why make us have to this on our (“The is more about Appiah's views chapters. to of it is perhaps my chapter in the book. It is a discussion of Du Bois's on and knowledge of early in the University study The Negro to on and such as The Negro Black and and The and Appiah Du Bois's for the of African and the impact of on the He for the that this development in some ways him further from the goal that his in of to his sense of the I think the of this is up for debate but I am that this is a debate Appiah is us to given my in Du Bois as a thinker of now at chapter (“The One and the the chapter, in which we learn about how Du Bois, through the influence of James and to a that certain of his and him to a of race as what now a social In a of the chapter Appiah an of what he as contemporary philosophical of that is my but I take it to a The about how he to a may the who has not up with Appiah's over the What he in this is something distinctively his a of the conception of identity he has on in over a of notably, from the book his book, The of and but very in my to from or Black and on this are of like philosopher or and like or as in this do Appiah the of This question is to be raised by those with his early work on race, such as “The Uncompleted and his book In in the of Even those with in which Appiah does much to the he to here, will that he is there to from describing the latter as He does not, however, time making such a in to he a major in view in the at which he in “The Conservation of Races,” he to that what to each other for Du Bois must have been a of would a thinker he had in with people raised in an culture and on a of But we can from Du between of race and of that his conception is not what we would looking up to an he those of who are that's a of something I said in the most famous about W. E. B. Du He is of course, to “The Uncompleted where he that, the fact that Du Bois to in “The Conservation of a he was ultimately back on the scientific of race, which he This is also the article in which he “The is that there are there is in the that can do all we to do for to have his about What is that what he most clearly in the was not his position on race but his of Du Bois, and not even that appears in Lines of Descent, which is in part on the at Appiah to in chapter what he describes as Bois's recognition that a of social in and through social there is about this Appiah has now out more as a social about who are real social he was perhaps the most famous about One wishes that such a major of would be and even though, there is an important sense in which Appiah's position on Du Bois and race in fact, between “The Uncompleted and Lines of that Bois's social constructionism us to move from thinking of the Negro race as a kind to thinking of it as of people who share a Appiah don't think Du Bois this the of his he of the Negro as a that in ways that to his But his work in the to make this move without This is the move Appiah makes in “The Uncompleted in which he that Du Bois was to the of race he had explicitly making it our to what he left The the thought that any is merely Appiah has from the to now. however, be the what Du Bois to to the Appiah of was the very of what he left the concept and leaving it In Lines of Descent, race is not something be It is a of social identity to be example, Appiah the power of Du social constructionism and the chapter to the by a brilliant of how we can see black identity as in while the that African are what make black of us to social constructionism as a of to those of us to as a and political but be to see Appiah our I would even describe these aspects of the book as part of why I find it Nevertheless, I think I have also said to why it is frustrating that Appiah does not more us into his as a thinker of race, even as he to us into the of Du Bois. the of the final of the final chapter, Appiah Du Bois's with to the topic of race as and Du Bois his way into a a of race that was and this did the subject to him it he never that he had the if he by As I read Lines of Descent, I has the concept of race he he has it What has since the when he was us to be of the What should we be to as having the Like Du Bois's thought, the development of Appiah's on race is a topic worthy of I as time that we will more in pursuit of this project from the

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