Abstract
When William James published Pragmatism, he gave it a subtitle: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. In this article, I argue that pragmatism is an epistemological method for articulating success in, and between, a plurality of practices, and that this articulation helped James develop radical empiricism. I contend that this pluralistic philosophical methodology is evident in James’s approach to philosophy of religion, and that this method is also exemplified in the work of one of James’s most famous students, W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically in the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Sorrow Songs.” I argue that “Sorrow Songs” can be read as an epistemological text, and that once one identifies the epistemic standards of pragmatism and radical empiricism in the text, it’s possible to identify an implicit case for moderate fideism in “Sorrow Songs.” I contend that this case illuminates the pluralistic philosophical methodology James worked throughout his career to develop, and that the James-Du Bois approach to philosophy may even help locate the epistemic value of other religious practices, beyond the singing of hymns, and identify terrain mainstream philosophy has long neglected.
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Notes
See also Lettering Lewis (1994).
Kahn (2009) describes Du Bois and James, along with Dewey and Santayana, as pragmatic religious naturalists (24). I think this is a better description of Dewey and Santayana than James, and while I think Kahn’s reading of Du Bois is quite compelling, the account I am developing here suggests that, at least in Souls, Du Bois develops a strategy that might be taken as a defense of a position that perhaps challenges the limits of what might be, helpfully or unhelpfully, called naturalism.
Glaude (2007) has argued that the “insertion” of Du Bois and Alain Locke “into the pantheon of American pragmatism is much like the use of gender-specific pronouns to draw attention to feminist concerns” it “is too often an illusion” (2). By drawing attention to the influence of Du Bois on James, as well as the influence of James on Du Bois, I hope to offer something more substantive than lip-service or an illusion.
In the Hibbert Lectures that became A Pluralistic Universe given in 1908 James references the “rising tide of social democratic ideals” a likely allusion to Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics (first published in 1902) and the general sentiments of pragmatic progressivism that probably, in James’s mind, included Du Bois and his work (1977, 18).
For James, there is no single, solitary, unified “transcript of reality” (1975, 33).
In Some Problems, James accuses Hume of “half-hearted” empiricism for his failure to include conjunctions, as well as disjunctions, in his epistemological stance (1979, 100).
Although it’s important, for my interpretative purposes in this essay, to note that Souls was published after Varieties.
For James, the epistemic value of “our thoughts” consists in how “they successfully exert their go-between function” (1975, 37).
Blum (2007) argues that the sorrow songs “demonstrated that blacks felt fear and hope and proved that people of color were authentically human and had a special connection to the divine” (84). As a comparative sociological case about the religious lives of black Americans, I suspect that “Sorrow Songs” does amount to something of a proof in this direction, but as an epistemological inquiry into the veridicality of religious experience I think Du Bois is comfortable with moderate fideism.
See, for example, James’s retraction of the logic of identity that prevents the compounding of consciousness in Principles he later accepts in A Pluralistic Universe, particularly in the essay “Concerning Fechner.”
See, for example, Sarukkai (2002).
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Stepanenko, W.S. A new name for some old ways of thinking: pragmatism, radical empiricism, and epistemology in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of the Sorrow Songs”. Int J Philos Relig 87, 173–192 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09717-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09717-y