Pragmatism and Democratic Faith Unpublished Paper 2010 Melvin L. Rogers Abstract In this article I seek to elucidate the relationship between pragmatism and democratic faith through the writings of William James, John Dewey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. I advanced three claims, all of which when taken together, lays bare the conceptual and political work pragmatism does for us and those in the tradition of American political thought. My argument here, though ambitious, is threefold: First, that James and Dewey provided an orientation toward the social world that emphasized the role of risk, uncertainty, and the necessity of faith, thus undercutting the traditional attribution of metaphysical optimism; second, that Dewey, in particular, tied these themes to a view of democracy that envisioned “the people” or community as a malleable social category in which new descriptions of political life might be invested; and third, that the framework provided by James and Dewey helps elucidate Du Bois’s engagement with his fellows in his classic work of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk, and redirect our attention to the specific resources (i.e. rhetoric and emotions) he believed necessary for shaping “the people.”  O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—And yet must be. Langston Hughes Introduction: Pragmatism and Democratic Faith Interest in pragmatism continues in philosophy, history, and political theory, as evidenced by a number of books that have come out in recent years. But perhaps the most interesting descriptions of the tradition are advanced by those who emphasize the principle of hope or faith in pragmatism. Throughout I will follow the pragmatists in using “hope” and “faith” interchangeably. Citing Christopher Lasch, Robert Westbrook attributes the following to pragmatism: “Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. … The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for.” Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), 17; Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 81; cf. Cornel West, American Evasion of Philosophy, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993); Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999); Patrick Shade, Habits of Hope (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001). This is not a novel claim in the tradition of American political thought. The theme of hope has figured in thinkers as diverse as John Winthrop, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., and in others it has often led to a belief in American national righteousness and providential fate. On this view of democratic faith as tied to national self-righteousness see Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). The crucial difference, however, between those that employ hope to bolster a view of American exceptionalism and the pragmatists is that the latter’s view is “without transcendent foundations. It is underwritten by neither God, nor nature, nor providential history…. The pragmatists thus offer an investment in American hope with peculiar rewards and risks.” Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 141. This view of pragmatism—a philosophy genuinely sensitive to the intimate relationship between human action and risk—has often been diminished or wholly denied. As Bertrand Russell classically said of pragmatism in 1910: “Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human power; which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt that it will achieve victory.” Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 110 On this view, pragmatism offers the illusion that it seriously courts danger largely because it subscribes to an ontological configuration of the world that secures human progress. This reading of pragmatism often suffers from confusion, for while pragmatism does endorse, as I concede, an ontological orientation, it is a view decidedly weaker than what has often been attributed to it. For a more careful elucidation of weak ontology see, Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmations: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pragmatism, especially that which can be found in William James and John Dewey, seeks to figure our most basic sense of what it means to be a human being that warrants the belief in the possibility of progress, even as it simultaneously seeks to deflect the propensity to render progress as inevitable. The idea of risk emerges in this context, is transformed by it, and does important historical and political work for us that demand excavation. It provides us with a perspective from which to assess the demand democracy places on its citizenry, including those who live within but were nonetheless seen as standing beyond the nation’s political and ethical boundaries. Political risk is what makes hope or faith necessary; it at once encourages democratic action (i.e. the Promethean side of pragmatism), but circumscribes our belief in expected outcomes (i.e. the necessity of humility that pragmatism cautions). For as James remarked in 1882: “Faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance,” and yet transformation could not come about without acting. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1897/1956), 90; John Dewey, A Common Faith, in The Later Works: 1925-1953, eds. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 9 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1932/1986), 17. If not otherwise stated, all citations to Dewey’s essays and books will be to the collected works published by Carbondale and I will use the following abbreviations followed by volume number: EW for The Early Works, 1883-1898; MW for The Middle Works, 1899-1924; and LW for The Later Works, 1925-1953. When faith is tied to democracy it helps illuminate the moral and political transformations in America, but also the peculiar space that African-Americans, among others, have so often occupied as second-class citizens throughout a substantial portion of America’s history. This is because democratic faith implies that in political life there will often be cases where citizens must run ahead of evidence needed to justify their sustained commitment to the polity. We are thus reminded, as W. E. B. Du Bois tells us, of that peculiar hope of the Sorrow Songs—“a faith in the ultimate justice of things,” whose realization is fundamentally dependent on tragically flawed human beings. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America 1903/1996), 544. If not otherwise stated, all citations to Du Bois’s essays and books will be to this collected volume. James and Dewey agreed, then, with Du Bois that the American community in which one was presently located need not limit the reach of its development, even as they knew that what America would ultimately become was inescapably uncertain. This is because the legitimacy of democracy is coextensive with faith in “the people,” whose moral and political conversion may be quickened by human effort. Properly understood, democratic faith is a species of what James and Dewey called melorism, and which is the basis upon which Du Bois staged his appeal in his classic 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk: that is, “the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or comparatively good, in any event may be bettered.” Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, MW 12, 181-82; cf. James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1907/1981), 128. The auxiliary verb “may” in this formulation denotes caution, but it is also what makes us sensitive to the fact that democracy is not principally about what we have done, but what we must still do. Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” LW 14. The use of “may” allows us to specify, as these thinkers often did, both the degree of power humans possess, even as it prevents us from questing after certainty regarding how that power would precisely be deployed. The idea of “the people” is doing double work for us and contains an important distinction that bolsters this view of democratic faith—it is a descriptive designation, denoting those with rights and privileges of citizenship, and also an aspirational category. There are a number of scholars who have done interesting work on the concept of “the people” from which I have learned a great deal (e.g. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People [New York: Norton, 1988]; Bernard Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10 [1996]: 193-211; Rogers Smith, The Stories of Peoplehood [New York: Cambridge UP, 2003]; Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004]; Margret Canovan, The People [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005]; Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America [Durham: Duke University Press, 2010]). Still, while useful in drawing our attention to this important concept, none of these thinkers (save Frank) discusses the kind of political deployment of “the people” in American political thought that I explore nor do they track its role in the struggle by women and African-Americans for inclusion into the polity. The latter functions as an “imagined community” or “dream country” to which many reformers sought to guide their fellows. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., (London, UK: Verso 2006); Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 3-4; cf. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Although I shall not defend the point here, I am inclined to say that this view of the people is presupposed by the position of the prophet, as understood in Cornel West’s, George Shulman’s, and Eddie Glaude’s sense (see West, American Evasion of Philosophy; Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008]; Glaude, “On Prophecy and Critical Intelligence,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 32.2 [2011]: 105-22). In the American context specifically, the prophet discerns a gap—the people as they are and as citizens long for them to be—at the core of democratic legitimacy and exploits it in the service of a world yet realized. But precisely because discerning this gap requires no special knowledge, the position of the prophet, as Glaude rightly notes, is one that can be occupied by anyone of us. This idea of “the people” as an imagined community encouraged Du Bois, as he sought to stimulate and direct America’s moral and political imagination. The distinction between the descriptive and aspirational views of “the people” allowed Du Bois (among others) to appeal to the polity amid exclusion—to call his fellows, in Hughes’s language from the epigraph, to “the land that never has been yet”—even as the certainty of success (as pragmatism tells us) was denied to him. So when faith and democracy are combined, I argue, it illuminates a space for evocative appeals, whose substance may transform one’s fellows and reconstitute the polity from which one has been historically excluded. To make good on the claims above, the paper unfolds in two parts. In the next section, I elaborate on the themes of uncertainty, faith, and “the people” within James’s and Dewey’s writings with the aim of showing the orientation they convey—that is to say, the picture of the self that emerges when these themes are taken together. Second, I explore the way this orientation is reflected in Du Bois’s stance toward the American polity that we find in Souls. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes of Souls: it is “both a call to arms and an aesthetic event, at once a manifesto and electrifying sound and light—thus, a book that demands to be read equally as political argument and literary art.” Robert Gooding-Williams, “Du Bois, Politics, Aesthetics: An Introduction,” Public Culture 17 (Spring 2005): 204. By emphasizing “orientation” on the one hand and the “form” it produces on the other, I argue that literary art is the method by which Du Bois’s political argument is advanced, even as he remains attentive to the uncertainty of his approach, thus accentuating the role of faith. This directs our attention, in ways that have thus far gone unattended to in Du Boisian scholarship, The texts I have in mind are largely those that focus on Du Bois’s political philosophy, but which say nothing about the rhetorical framework of Souls: Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayn Press, 1986); Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007); Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). to the specific connection Du Bois draws between rhetoric (i.e. a mode of speaking and writing to persuade one’s audience) and sympathy for the plight of African-Americans in potentially closing the gap between “the people” as fact and “the people” as ideal. One final word is in order about my use of pragmatism in relation to Du Bois and the larger thrust of the essay. I do not, properly speaking, claim that Du Bois is a pragmatist; there is no reason for me to advance that kind of claim, although I welcome those who have. For arguments of this kind see West, American Evasion; George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Paul Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du Bois a Pragmatist?” Metaphilosophy 35 (January 2004): 99-114; Jonathon Kahn, Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) My argument here, though ambitious, is threefold: First, that James and Dewey provided an orientation toward the social world that emphasized the role of risk, uncertainty, and the necessity of faith; second, that Dewey, in particular, tied these themes to a view of democracy that envisioned “the people” or community as a malleable social category; and third, that the framework provided by James and Dewey helps elucidate Du Bois’s engagement with his fellows, and redirect our attention to the specific resources (i.e. rhetoric and emotions) he believed necessary for shaping “the people.” My argument regarding the connection among these thinkers is not causal, but ideational; it relates to a constellation of themes about democracy and American development that connect James, Dewey, and Du Bois. In the end, my aim is both to elucidate the demand placed on the democratic faithful and the resources (at least in the case of Du Bois) deployed to transform American society. Uncertainty, Democracy, and the Necessity of Faith Writing in the wake of the devastating influence of Darwinian evolution in the 19th century, with its emphasis on contingency and uncertainty, William James and John Dewey sought to articulate an orientation that would both sustain the meaningfulness of human action and caution humility. For a full picture of this in James and Dewey see, Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880; [XXX]; David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). When I use the language of “orientation,” I mean to capture pragmatism’s concern with the kind of psychology of expectation that is required of us given the view of the world they envision us confronting. Orientation, then, reflects inwardly on our powers and capacities as humans, but simultaneously entails a vision of those powers as located in a moving and dynamic world. Orientation is not simply about us, but also about the world we inhabit. This is what is behind James’s reflections when, in Pragmatism of 1907, he writes: “Suppose that the world’s author put the case to you before creation, saying: ‘I am going to make a world not certain to be saved… I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted’.” James, Pragmatism, 130. Dewey shares this view. As he says in Experience and Nature of 1925: “Man[‘s] … existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble.” Dewey, Experience and Nature, LW 1, 43. That James places behind the world an author that brings the world into existence should not confuse the reader. The point James means to emphasize is the independence of the world from us and therefore our inability to exercise sovereignty over it. The point of these reflections is something like the following: The end toward which human action aim is potentially resistant to mastery and therefore implicates us in danger. The pragmatists, then, are trying to answer the following question: What kind of orientation should we cultivate in response to a world that is without ontological or epistemic certainty? Pragmatists thus part ways from two different philosophical orientations, both of which eventuate in a bloated view of human agency. The first of these positions is the initial Enlightenment orientation that emphasizes “Newtonian guidelines of order, balance, and harmony” and which bolsters the idea of sovereignty as ultimate control. For if, as Ralph Ketcham notes, the first Enlightenment has as its exemplar Issac Newton, then the second, which includes James and Dewey, has “Darwinian guidelines of struggle, competition, and indeterminacy” that seeks to both encourage agency and humble its expectation. Ralph Ketcham, The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chap. 6; cf. Hilary Putnam, Enlightenment and Pragmatism (Amterdam: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2001); Robert Brandom, “The Pragmatist Enlightenment (and Its Problematic Semantics),” European Journal of Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2004): 1-16. The second position with which pragmatists part ways is a variant of American liberal Protestantism. By using the term “liberal” to describe one branch of American Protestantism, I mean it to refer to a theological outlook not simply friendly to evolution and modernity, but even more significantly, optimistic in its orientation toward the world because of this amicable relationship. The classics of this genre, we might say, are works like Theodore Munger’s The Freedom of Faith (1883), Henry Ward Beecher’s Evolution and Religion (1885), James McCosh’s The Religious Aspects of Evolution (1890), Lyman Abbott’s two works The Evolution of Christianity (1892) and Theology of An Evolutionist (1897), and John Fiske’s Through Nature to God (1899). Theodore T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1883); Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1885); James McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, in Darwinism and Theology in America: 1850-1930, ed. Frank X. Ryan (Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 1890/2002); Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (New York: Outlook Company, 1892); Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist (Boston: Hougton, Mifflin, and Company, 1897); John Fiske, The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899). All of these works follow the ascendancy of the Darwinian revolution, but these thinkers believe that evolution only requires a modest adjustment to the theological account, which, when complete, justifies a more resilient notion of human agency that embodies divine properties. As Fiske classically summarized the outlook of this view, evolution “shows us Man becoming more and more clearly the image of God, exercising creative attributes, transforming his physical environment, incarnating his thoughts in visible and tangible shapes all over the world.” Fiske, Through Nature to God, 128. Philosophically, however, pragmatism rejects the ontology upon which this view is based. Eschewing political millennialism—that is, the commingling of the City of God and the City of Man—it equally rejects the expanded view of agency this view entails. For pragmatists agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wonderful formulation that nature, broadly conceived, “is no sentimentalist,--[it] does not cosset or pamper us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life, in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1860/1983), 945. These two positions, to borrow from Stephen White, proceed from a strong ontological framework. White, Sustaining Affirmations, 6-7 Strong ontology, typically that of pre-modern and modern times, offers a vision of how the world is, the meaning of human nature, or visions of what God is and the responsibilities we have in relation to God. But a strong ontology is not only articulated through revelation and the existence of the divine, but equally lends itself to the idiom of scientific investigation. With both, there exists either in experience or outside of it self-justifying and credible characteristics that ground all claims of knowledge and serve as the final destination for epistemic adjudication. On a moral and political level, these fixed truths anchor institutions and identities in ways that ignore or suppress, under the pretense of control, uncertainty and the possibility of tragedy. In focusing our attention, as I do below, on the relationship between action and uncertainty implied by James’s and Dewey’s reflections above, what emerges in their writings is the importance of faith to action that is decidedly weaker than a strong ontology. I will turn in the latter half of this section to the connection Dewey draws between faith and democracy. Action and Uncertainty In linking the world of action to uncertainty, James and Dewey are referring to something specific about our relationship to the environment. Action in this instance is organized activity in response to a demanding environment to achieve ends. “All action,” writes James, “is thus re-action upon the outer world.” James, “Reflex Action and Theism,” in Will to Believe, 114. Dewey speaks more directly about the matter: “Man constructs a fortress out of the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He builds shelters, weaves garments, makes flame his friend instead of his enemy, and [this] grows into the complicated arts of associated living.” Dewey, Quest for Certainty, LW 4, 3. The relationship between action and uncertainty accentuates the reflective character of human action. Human beings, for both James and Dewey, find themselves located within a problematic environment and the potential corrective to the situation is partly dependent on how those individuals respond. There is, however, a revelatory dimension to action. This refers to the larger context (e.g. nature, other individuals, and social arrangements) in which individuals are located. The self is not focused on its needfulness, but rather on the problematic situation that generated the need from the outset. Action thus discloses to us a world that is unfinished, in the process of becoming, and which demands a response. The “stimulus to thinking,” writes Dewey, “implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence indeterminate.” Dewey, Democracy and Education, MW 9, 158. An uncertain world thus impinges on and provokes us, bringing action into existence. As James explains: “In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. … [F]or pragmatism [reality] is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.” James, Pragmatism, 115. In discussing pragmatism, we typically emphasize the creative role James and Dewey accord human will. After all, the incompleteness of a situation provides the open space for a kind of expressive freedom that is the hallmark of this tradition of thinking. This is the motivation for their perfectionism (that is, the world can potentially be improved) and experimentalism (that is, crafting different hypotheses for self and collective flourishing in the context of specific problems). Note further, the very idea of the world only comes into view with reference to human purposes. This emphasis on the self- and world-making power gives life to what David E. Cooper rightly calls a “Promethean humanism.” Cooper, Measure of Things, chap. 4. Admittedly this picture of pragmatism often raises concerns, as was evidenced by Russell’s remarks in the introduction; pragmatists, says Patrick Deneen, recognize uncertainty only to domesticate its ill effects and to interpret the universe as being “beneficent toward progressive human activity.” Deneen, Democratic Faith, 47. Cornel West, for instance, often speaks of pragmatism succumbing to an “optimistic theodicy” that is without a tragic sensibility. West, American Evasion, 226; Keeping Faith, 107-118. Although the language of theodicy is inappropriately attributed to pragmatism given its human rather than God-centered approach, West’s formulation seems to denote, in his view, the absorption of divine properties into the human subject. From his perspective, the result is to imbue human agency with a radically transformative power that eschews tragedy. Pragmatism seemingly moves decidedly closer to the liberal Protestant position articulated above. I therefore take West to be saying that pragmatism’s orientation fails to fully confront the recalcitrant dimensions of human existence that can neither be wholly anticipated or removed from human affairs. And West—himself an important contemporary figure in this tradition—has sought to inject pragmatism with a dose of realism. What Deneen and West mean to awaken us to is a fundamental, even if unidentifiable, limitation to human life that pragmatism seemingly flouts. I understand this worry and I know how it unfolds. Indeed, it becomes all the more poignant when, as I suggested in the introduction, we consider the history of African Americans in this country, for whom the recalcitrant dimensions of human existence were real and daily engaged. But I am inclined to say that this worry emerges because these thinkers obscure the full picture pragmatists intend to paint when they connect uncertainty to action. For while incompleteness creates space for us to add our part to reality, as James says, he is clear that what the world will ultimately be is dependent upon a future we do not fully control. I take James to mean something Dewey states years later: Everything that man achieves and possesses is got by actions that may involve him in other and obnoxious consequences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown …While unknown consequences flowing from the past dog the present, the future is even more unknown and perilous; the present by that fact is ominous. … These things are as true today as they were in the days of early culture. … [The unknown] is a primary datum in any experience. Dewey, Experience and Nature, LW1, 44-45. We should take these remarks very seriously in James and Dewey, for we cannot begin to understand their thinking without this existential imprimatur. Their claim is that we can never know in some final sense that we have outstripped the complexity of the world we engage (including its human aspects), and therefore we must always proceed from a position of humility. Our Promethean ambitions are thus chastened by a wider and more dynamic environment. And our linguistic formulations thus contain within themselves a note of uncertainty: Maybe victory will be ours; maybe our goals will be realized; maybe danger will be averted. But the use of “maybe” here keeps us attuned to the fact that the goods we often enjoy “are by grace not of ourselves.” Dewey, Experience and Nature, LW 1, 44. As James says in his essay, “Is Life Worth Living?”: “Not a victory is gained not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe.” James, “Is Life Worth Living?,” in Will to Believe, 59. For the depth of this point in James’s overall life and philosophy see Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Malestrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) This kind of outlook fuels Dewey’s recommendation of humility in Human Nature and Conduct of 1922: “humility is more demanded at our moments of triumph than at those of failure. … It is the sense of our slight inability even with our best intelligence and effort to command events; a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish and plan.” Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, MW 14, 200. We should therefore recall Dewey’s description of melorism cited in the introduction, “the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or comparatively good, in any event may be bettered.” See n. 9 This is not to say that the universe is beneficent toward human effort, but it does mean that if we could not, at a minimum, assume that good possibilities may accrue in the universe, it is unclear why we would act in the first instance. To be sure, the problematic present demands human intervention, but the pragmatists encourage us not to forget that the unknown future cautions humility. This account of humility does more, however; it goes to the core of one’s self-understanding (or orientation) and makes faith necessary. Indeed, it gives us the kind of chastened outlook Deneen and West recommend: It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of universe from which the element of ‘seriousness’ is not to be expelled. Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames. James, Pragmatism, 133. Precisely because pragmatism is an “attitude of looking away from first things . . . and of looking towards last things,” its emphasis is on solutions whose authority is not, properly speaking, an object of knowledge. James, Pragmatism, 29. This is because pragmatism is concerned to cultivate an orientation attentive to the finite needs of selves and communities confronting social and political realities. We are always posing questions of the following kind: Will this virtue settle some issue? Will this policy satisfy the need for which it was proposed? Will this good be realized? Will my fellows be responsive to my claims and grievances? And what James and Dewey are drawing our attention to is that the confidence we attribute to some virtue, or policy, or good, or the faith we place in “the people” ultimately runs ahead of evidentiary support into “a world of surmise, of mystery, [and] of uncertainties.” Dewey, Art as Experience, LW 10, 41. As Dewey says: “For all endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual.” Dewey, Common Faith, LW 9, 17 (emphasis added). I take James and Dewey to mean that the quest to transform the world we inhabit—to address “evil[s] we would have otherwise”—connects us to a future still in the making, but whose positive settlement could not possibly come about without faith. Dewey, Common Faith, LW 9, 31. Of course our proposals for how to respond, insofar as one accepts pragmatism’s emphasis on critical inquiry, emerge from attentiveness to existing state-of-affairs and evidence. For our faith is liable to become fantasy if not tempered by experience. But in making faith rely on evidence we obscure the imaginative projection of goods it involves, since the moral and political ideals we long for are not actualized. More critically, we undermine the courage that faith demands. Democracy, Faith, and the People Thus far I have argued that the relationship between action and uncertainty makes faith necessary; it both fuels Promethean aspirations even as it cautions humility. Faith accentuates the gap between that which is possessed and that which is longed for; it directs our attention to the leap that is required to realize our moral and political ideals. Before turning to Du Bois, I want to close this section by emphasizing the way Dewey specifically ties faith to democracy, a view bolstered by the two dimensions of “the people” discussed in the introduction. In turning to Dewey, I do not mean to deny James’s reflections on these matters. Rather, it is in Dewey that we get a more deliberate move from the existential horizon of uncertainty to the way in which that horizon serves as the basis for democratic action. Consider his reflections from his 1939 essay, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us”: Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished. … For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free place of facts and ideas. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” LW 14, 227. In this passage Dewey is attentive to the moral and political gap that opens between the community as it is and the community as we wish it to be. This is precisely why both here and elsewhere he places the accent on the role of communication—that is, consultation, discussion, and persuasion. In recent philosophical circles attuned to political life, the point Dewey makes is often described as two different accounts of “the people” that animate the core of democratic legitimacy. See n. 11 So when we appeal to “the people” in light of some grievance, we mean both to refer to the actual democratic community of rights holders, but also the ideal vision of the community—that is, what it may yet become if it is responsive to our grievances. As Jason Frank rightly notes, the idea of “the people” and the democracy it enacts resides in its “constitutive futurity, in [it] remaining forever a people that is not … yet.” Frank, Constituent Moments, 182. This point was not lost on Dewey, as he explains in his classic work of political theory, The Public and Its Problems, “what the faithful insist upon . . . is that the idea [of democracy] and its external organs and structures are not to be identified.” Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, LW 2, 325 [emphasis added]. The point here is of critical important and relates to democracy’s framework of legitimacy. Since “the people” can never be represented at any given time in their totality via the binding acts of the polity, legitimacy rests on a critical reflexivity in order to ensure the possibility of self-governance for all. This is why the idea of democracy is not to be identified with the external organs and structures that claim to speak in the name of the people. The dual aspect of the democratic community captures both unity and difference, and this dual quality renders the democratic community susceptible to criticism by those individuals and groups whose political claims have not been fully absorbed. Hence Dewey’s aversion, especially in The Public and Its Problems, to defining the democratic state in terms of “authorship.” His point is that authorship wrongly refers the meaning and direction of the democratic state back to antecedent interests. But this, he argues prevents the democratic state from being attentive to new and emergent claims within, and consequences of, political action. Preoccupation with authorship, as Dewey configures the matter, mistakenly fixes the identity of “the people” with respect to prior concerns, making the democratic state inattentive to the potential problems resulting from decision making and political life. For Dewey’s remarks on this see, The Public and Its Problems, LW 2, 247-49. For my own extended reflections on this point in Dewey’s philosophy see [XXX]. To genuinely engage in criticism of the democratic state implies the malleability of “the people,” but it also implies faith that the political community has not been settled in some constellation of political acts once and for all. Another way of saying this is that we place faith in the possibility that the people are not beyond reproach. The idea that “the people” are not beyond reproach opens up the iterative process of deliberation and contestation that is at the core of Dewey’s thinking specifically, but democracy more generally. Because there is no certainty about the transformative possibility of the community, Dewey’s use of the language of faith in this and the previous section makes sense. Hence he explains, employing the phrase democratic faith specifically: “A genuinely democratic faith …is faith in the possibility of conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.” Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” LW 14, 228. One way of reading the meaning of this passage is the following: While the uncertainty that accrues to democratic action implies the possibility of redirecting the community to a higher, transformed state, democracy equally places us in a position where we court adverse consequences from which we cannot finally be relieved, and in which we can only see ourselves through with faith. The reader may well object, arguing that constitutional protections undercuts the necessity of faith. But we should be careful in accepting this point. For example, the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and reaffirmation of terror against blacks on the one hand, and the 2008 Proposition 8 that rescinded rights in California that were extended to same sex couples on the other, signal that the democratic public is not immune to retrieving rights previously extended. This is because rights only matter insofar as one belongs to a community in which those rights are affirmed and acknowledged (for this view of rights see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004], 204-209). The aim, then, even in the American context although not confined there, has always been to induce in the community an ethical and political vision of the polity in which members of that polity find it difficult to imagine living in a human community where those rights are denied. For a historical understanding of rights in this regard see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Du Bois’s Democratic Faith While Dewey rightly emphasizes the importance of faith to democracy, and he and James clearly see that this implies a kind of orientation that positions us to transform the polity, it isn’t always clear how we close the gap between the actual and the ideal. Dewey’s language of persuasion and deliberation, however, is suggestive. For when we try to persuade, we typically employ language, narratives, and appeal to emotion and sentiment in addressing the audience. As I argue in this section, the dual description of “the people” creates a space for evocative appeals for reimagining the polity. By emphasizing evocative engagements against the backdrop of “the people,” we are positioned to see the rhetorical force of Du Bois’s classic work of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk. Indeed, it is precisely Du Bois’s quest to induce in the reader sympathy for the suffering of black folks that is the key to directing his fellows to “the land that never has been yet,” even as Du Bois (like James and Dewey) holds in view the uncertainty that attaches to this quest. Or to put it differently, Du Bois’s deployment of rhetoric as a means for potentially influencing the emotional states of his white counterparts regarding the condition of blacks in America encodes precisely the uncertainty and the necessity of faith James and Dewey believed democratic life entailed. I begin with defending the rhetorical framework in which Du Bois’s thinking is located. I then use that as a basis for interpreting Souls, and conclude with the theme of uncertainty that it keeps in view. The Dominion of Rhetoric Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a collection of fourteen essays, some which previously published. Despite the distinct methodological approaches informing the essays that give the book an uneven character of never wholly being philosophy, history, sociology or literature, Du Bois is clear that there is a “unity to the book, not simply the general unity of the larger topic, but a unity of purpose in the distinctively subjective note that runs in each essay”. Du Bois, “On The Souls of Black Folk,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist. (New York: Oxford University Press 1904/1996), 305. The unity consists in a critical and courageous engagement to dramatize the problem of racial inequality, the institutional and psychological motivations for sustain the second-class status of African-Americans, and its impact on those who live behind the veil, including Du Bois himself, with the aim of transforming the larger democratic community. If the idea of “the people” so central to democratic life opens up space for evocative appeals for re-imagining and re-constituting the polity, then Souls sought to give that reconstitution direction. In short, it sought to answer the following question: How do you move the people, and here we mean those white Americans enjoying the rights and privileges of American democracy, such that they will embrace an expanded view of political society so as to include African-Americans? In reading Souls as a response to this question, I argue we should see the text as working in the domain of rhetoric. The turn to rhetoric has received renewed attention by political theorists concerned to explore the subtleties of deliberation. See n. 3. As Bryan Garsten notes: “When speakers or writers try to persuade us of something, they are confronting us with a particular situation in speech. … [T]hey are … drawing upon and reorganizing our existing patterns of thought and emotion—they are appealing to our capacity for judgment.” Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9; cf. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Broad of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). This formulation might easily be read as describing Du Bois’s orientation as well, for as he writes in “The Forethought”: “I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me . . . and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.” Du Bois, Souls, 359. He presents the book so that they—author and reader—might arrive at shared judgments regarding the plight of African-Americans. Attesting to the role of rhetoric in Souls, Arnold Rampersad explains: “For the first fifty years and more of his life [Du Bois] showed the mark of classical principles of rhetoric . . . The Souls of Black Folk is overwhelming evidence” of this fact. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 36. Of course, this should not be surprising given Du Bois’s training as a graduate student at Harvard University under the instruction of English Professor Barrett Wendell. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 581-82; cf. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 35-38. For an outline of some of Du Bois’s course work, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1985), 35-38. The central text for the course Du Bois took with Wendell was The Principles of Rhetoric (1878), written by Adams Sherman Hill, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (1876-1904). Located wholly in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian school of thinking, Hill underscores the purpose of rhetoric from the outset of his work: Rhetoric “uses knowledge, not as knowledge, but as power.” Adams Sherman Hill, The Principles of Rhetoric and their Application (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878), iii; cf. to Hill’s longer chapter titled, “Persuasion,” chap. V. And one of the important aims for which rhetoric is useful, in good classical fashion, is political and ethical development. This point was not lost on Du Bois. The rhetorician thus appeals to the judgment of the reader and does so by taking the reader to the experiential source from which appropriate emotions and judgments might spring. As Hill explains: “We are made to feel by being taken to the sources of feeling.” Hill, The Principles of Rhetoric, 239. This approach fuels the “storied” or “narrativized” structure of Souls, the way many of its chapters turn on the detail depictions of dreams unrealized (chapters II, IV, XII, and XIII), communities destroyed (chapters IV and IX), and lives lost (chapters XI and XIII) as a way to locate the reader in the richness of the joy and pain described by the text. “Let me on the coming pages,” Du Bois says at the conclusion of chapter one of Souls, “tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.” Du Bois, Souls, 371. To listen, for Du Bois, entails that the audience will actively seek to comprehend, interpret, and evaluate what is being heard. The aim is to evoke an emotional response in the reader that might generate a reasoned desire to alleviate the condition of African-Americans specifically and to expand the political imagination of the citizenry. For Du Bois, then, it is the repulsive conditions that African Americans endure under the weight of Jim Crow that serve as the experiential backdrop for his reflections—a motivating force that infuses and transfigures his efforts to move his readers to a position of moral rectitude. In fact, it is for this reason that William Ferris writing of Souls says: “Du Bois is a literary artist who can clothe his thought in such forms of poetic beauty that we are captivated by the opulent splendor and richness of his diction, while our souls are being stirred by his burning eloquence.” William H. Ferris, The African Abroad, vol. 1. (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1913), 18. We should read the use of “souls” in this passage by Ferris as acknowledging the moral and emotional nature of human beings that Du Bois is seeking to transform and which is consistent with the rhetorical tradition not only expressed by Hill, but Cicero and Aristotle before him. Rhetoricians—to appropriate Ferris language—seek to stir the souls of those with whom they engage so that they may arrive (and see themselves as participating in that arrival) to a truth hitherto unavailable. The language of rhetoric, especially in contemporary times, often generates concern. Isn’t rhetoric simply manipulation? Or we might put it in the form of a question: What does it mean for Du Bois’s audience, as was said, to see themselves as participating in the arrival of a truth hitherto unavailable? After all, Hill describes rhetoric as the imposition of power. Certainly the imposition of power seems to undercut the idea that rhetoric seeks to affirm rather than stifle the reflective agency of the recipient that is co-extensive with democratic self-governance. Why not, you might ask, interpret the rhetorical framework of Souls straight-forwardly as manipulation, even if for good ends? One way of affirming the dominion of rhetoric and its connection to democracy, I believe, is to compare persuasion and manipulation. When we manipulate someone we typically move them to a belief or action that is inconsistent with the reasons for which they hold that belief or engage in that action. As a result, there is a disconnect between the belief they hold and the reason for holding that belief, making one feel that the belief in question, properly speaking, is not their own. In contrast, when we persuade someone to hold this or that belief or engage in this or that action, there is a sense of ownership by the one who is on the receiving end of persuasion. The person has listened carefully or read closely, and has come to say at the end, “I’m persuaded.” The statement, “I’m persuaded,” is not wholly about the speaker—we must not lose sight of this point. Indeed, this is precisely why Dewey, no less than James, often counsels the importance of communication and persuasion to democratic transformation. “I’m persuaded,” thus denotes something individuals have reflectively done for themselves that connects the belief or action they now hold with reasons for holding that belief or engaging in that action. They are, in essence, responding to a situation in light of reasons to which they take themselves to be committed, the result of which deepens their purchase on those reasons. Hence, when Du Bois says study my words “with me,” as he did above, he means to signal the cooperative core of a democratic social practice in which the listener retains rather than loses her reflective agency. It is precisely this aim that Du Bois has in mind when he deploys the rhetoric of Souls to appeal to the sympathy of whites regarding the condition of black Americans. This much he affirms in his own assessment of Souls in 1904: “The reader will, I am sure, feel in reading my words peculiar warrant for setting his judgment against mine.” Du Bois, “On The Souls of Black Folk,” 305. The diminishment of his authorial voice makes sense in the context of inviting his readers to be co-participants in arriving at shared judgments regarding the plight of African-Americans. His aim is not to manipulate his readers, but to get them to see and feel appropriately about the suffering of black Americans—that is, to get his readers to see and feel that the suffering of black Americans is out of step with what America claims to be about. The Tools of Transformation: Rhetoric and Sympathy Souls thus exemplifies the art of rhetoric and the transformative aspiration it has in view. As Du Bois explains in Dusk of Dawn, reflecting on the period in which Souls was composed: “My attention from the first was focused on democracy and democratic development and upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy.” Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, in Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 574. The focus on democratic development—a sense that democracy is a task before us—required appropriate tools that could potentially reach into and transform the character of the nation. But why should we believe that it is sympathy Du Bois attempts to evoke in his reader? The simple answer is that Du Bois often argues for the importance of sympathy in improving race relations. In chapter VI, “Of the Training of Black Men,” he says: “It was not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood.” Du Bois, Souls, 69. In yet another chapter, “Of Alexander Crummell,” Du Bois remarks in a passage worth citing at length: He did his work,—he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name today, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—who is good? Not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men. Du Bois, Souls, 142. In all instances in which Du Bois employs the language of sympathy, he views it as a sentiment that brings into view the life of another. Sympathy means, for Du Bois, that one imagines how person x feels from x’s point of view in a way that generates concern for x. In this regard, sympathy is meant to both register and consider the specificity of x’s situation, so that one can respond appropriately to their condition. As Dewey explains, agreeing with Du Bois and the larger Scottish moral sense tradition, sympathy “widens and deepens concern for consequences,” allowing us to “put ourselves in the place of another, to see things from the standpoint of his aims and values. Dewey, Ethics, LW 1; 270; cf. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, MW 14, 136; Dewey, Art as Experience, LW 10, 338. The capacity for sympathy is thus constitutively connected to our ability to re-present—that is, imagine—in our minds what may potentially be neither seen nor felt, but which is essential to enlarging our perspectives for decision-making. This is precisely why, as noted earlier, Du Bois says of the period in which Souls was written that he was preoccupied with a view of “democratic development” with the aim of including black Americans. His concern with how to quicken democracy’s development is another way of discussing the transformation of the polity, whose result would extend America’s moral and political boundaries. The example of Crummell is especially telling in this regard. It is worth briefly recounting some of the details of his life to contextualize the point Du Bois wishes to make here. After the destruction, in 1835, of the Noyes Academy interracial college where Crummell attended, he went on to enroll and graduate from the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. As Du Bois writes of the destruction of the Academy: “But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp.” Du Bois, Souls, 513-14. At the Oneida Institute, Crummell came to realize his calling, one that involved the spiritual uplift of African-Americans: A vision of life came to the growing boy, —mystic, wonderful. He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh new air. … He heard the hateful clank of their chains, he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the world. A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the uncalled out of the house of bondage. [H]e stretched forth his hands eagerly, and then, even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across the vision the temptation of Despair. Du Bois, Souls, 514. The temptation of despair to which Du Bois is referring is the result of the General Theological Seminary to grant Crummell admission because of his race. Du Bois uses Crummell’s life and his unrealized calling as a result of racial exclusion as an exemplary case of the African-American experience. “So he grew,” Du Bois explains, “and brought within his wide influence all that was best of those who walk within the Veil.” Du Bois, Souls, 519. Crummell is thus an exemplification of what Du Bois states earlier in the appropriately titled chapter I, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”: “Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.” Du Bois, Souls, 365. Du Bois’s constant reference to “black men” and to male leadership is not without its obvious patriarchal problems, especially in the context of arguing against inequality (See Hazel V. Carby Race men [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998]; for contrasting argument see, Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction, chap. 5). The spiritual strivings to which Du Bois refers in the title denotes that inner quest of self-realization that is the hallmark of freedom—a form of freedom which white Americans would have readily recognized. Crummell serves as a proxy for what goes unappreciated and unnoticed about blacks in America—their striving for success, the work of their lives, the character that is exemplified by both, and the frustrated attempt at self-realization. In narrating Crummell’s life and using him as a proxy, Du Bois intends to undermine the dividing force of the Veil so that the reader can come to appreciate and sympathize for those who stand behind it. For a similar account of Crummell see, Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow, 98-111. The Veil not only serves to divide the political status that blacks and whites occupy (the “world within and without the Veil”) Du Bois, Souls, 359., but it also signals an emotional geography that follows from this division (that leads to so little human sympathy). Notice, then, that the Veil represents (among other things) the division between what we might call the “outer” or experiential condition of blacks in America, and the “inner” disposition that experience should properly influence among white Americans. Notice further that this division between “outer” and “inner” domains is precisely what, from the perspective of Souls, Du Bois believes the rhetorician must bridge in an effort to expand the judgment of the reader. “We seldom study,” he says, “the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully.…And yet how little we really know of these millions … All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses. To-day, then, my reader, let us turn our faces” to their condition. Du Bois, Souls, 457. In focusing on the details of Crummell’s life and the character it represents, Du Bois hopes to both separate whites and blacks, while simultaneously connecting them. Separation happens by focusing on the specific and tragic details of Crummell’s life that is brought about because of his second class status. It is this specificity that is in need of a response. But the motivating force to address their condition, Du Bois believes, comes about because of a fundamental connection between blacks and whites that is obscured by the Veil and which he aims to uncover. Indeed, Du Bois says as much in the first line that opens the chapter: “This is the history of a human heart, —the tale of a black boy who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know himself.” Du Bois, Souls, 512, (emphasis added). In describing the chapter as a history of “a human heart,” Du Bois humanizes for the reader the subject of the narrative. He is, in other words, building blacks up into a wider judgment, so that the white reader may be “touched.” Du Bois, Souls, 514. And the result of being “touched” is that the reader will come to hear appropriately—that is, understand—the nature of Crummell’s plight and those like him. But Du Bois does not mean for this to be a narrow sentimentalism. This humanization aspires to bring about a perceptual shift that relocates the “black boy” from outside the orbit of the affective concern of the white reader to its inner domain. The white reader is at once, or so Du Bois hopes, moved by the quest for self-development with which they share with African-Americans, and chastened by its specific frustration in the lives of those darker individuals with whom they share the polity: You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage, —you who in the swift whirl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvelous vision, have fronted life and asked its riddle face to face. And if you find that riddle hard to read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanders fall! …The Valley of the Shadow of Death gives few of its pilgrims back to the world. Du Bois, Souls, 519. The specific and unjustified suffering of the “black boy” becomes the object of reflection about which one should properly feel sympathy. Here the reader comes face to face with the destructive influence of racism, but it serves to underscore the fundamental gap at the core of the polity that stifles affirmative gestures by fellow human beings and which serves as the basis to elicit the concern of the reader. In tying the rhetoric of Souls to a concern with eliciting sympathy, Du Bois is acknowledging an important obstacle with which he and his excluded fellows must confront—that is, the asymmetrical power relations at the core of American democracy. While it may seem odd that Du Bois relies on a rhetorical engagement rather than political action properly speaking, at least in 1903, this mistakenly understates the fact that he sees the written word as a form of political action in a world of political inequality that must stand alongside traditional modes of protest. He thus seeks to wage the battle for the place of African-Americans, indeed, the fate of the nation, within the very heart of his readers, agreeing with Dewey and James that democracy is not merely about institutions and laws but is a way of life. Persuasion and Uncertainty: On the Necessity of Faith Thus far I have been suggesting that the idea of the people creates a space for evocative appeals that elucidate the relationship between rhetoric and sympathy in Souls. I want to close now by suggesting why this account does not lose sight of the theme of uncertainty and faith with which we began, and, in fact, is coextensive with these earlier themes articulated by James and Dewey. The most obvious point is the following: To engage in persuasion in no way implies that one will be successful. In Souls Du Bois is very much aware of the insecurity involved in his specific attempt to persuade the nation. Consider the following two passages, the first from the deeply tragic chapter on the death of Du Bois’s son and the second from the chapter on the sorrow songs: Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live—a Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful. Du Bois, Souls, 507. Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life something faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Du Bois, Souls, 544. Through the figure of his son, Du Bois occupies a middle space between hopelessness and unhopefulness. But curiously, the sentence begins with a commitment to hope. What should we make of this odd sentence? His point is that to abandon hope altogether would essentially lead to pessimism and paralyze black Americans. But hopefulness, as Du Bois understands it, would go to the other extreme; hopefulness does not merely stipulate a desire or wish, but simultaneously believe that its realization is assured. It abandons precisely the kind of humility the pragmatists’ caution, and the courage faith in an ideal demands. Hence Du Bois says a few pages later of his son: “Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we—aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end.” Du Bois, Souls, 510. His use of the auxillary verb “might” functions in precisely the way James and Dewey used the word “may” in the previous section; it denotes a condition contrary to what an existing state of affairs suggest, but which “may” be realized in a world that is still in the making. Hence the last clause of the sentence: “for surely, surely this is not the end” precisely because the people, like the world to which they belong, is still in the making. With this discussion in the background, we are now prepared to answer the question articulated in the second of the two passages—Is such a hope justified? As with faith, there is no way to know if hope is justified prior to us acting in an uncertain world and having that world respond with a positive nod. Du Bois’s use of “faith” in relation to “the ultimate justice of things” is not something actually given, but something toward which the nation must work. This is why it is an object of faith rather than of knowledge, and this is why in the process of struggling to realize it we court danger, we find ourselves epistemically blind, and we come to realize that our sacrifices (of moral, political, and physical standing) may go unredeemed. There is little doubt this is what Du Bois means when he closes the final chapter of Souls with a conditional sentence: “If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.” Du Bois, Souls, 163. As with James and Dewey, Du Bois knows that he and his excluded fellows act in a world over which they do not exercise sovereign control and in which they can only see their way through with faith. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 5