What is the role of black philosophers in American philosophy, and in what relations do their works stand to those of (say) Franklin, Emerson, James or Rawls? Is it legitimate to include the works of such past black American authors as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois in courses in American Philosophy? (If Douglass and Du Bois were alive today would they wish to be included?) Do, or should, living black American philosophers wish to "be included"? Does the whole notion of "American Philosophy" even make any sense, seeing that blacks (and Indians, and Latinos, and ... ) have historically been excluded from "mainstream," "Western" academic philosophy? After due consideration I've decided that I am eminently unqualified to answer any of these questions. Accordingly I submit the following description of the course I offered last semester (spring 1997) merely as (possible) material for the debate over them, and not as a "contribution" to it.

Coincidentally I received a copy of Lewis R. Gordon's new collection, Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (Routledge, 1997), just when I was struggling to redesign and refresh my elective course on American Philosophy. It is not at all my intention here to review Gordon's book, but I do wish to say a few things about why I and my students found it to be an exciting text and why it worked so well-in my opinion, and in the view of most of my students-in focusing and energizing the course.

Foremost, to contemplate the situation of American blacks, past and present, indeed the situation of black people in the world generally, is chilling, and Gordon writes about this very movingly. Again and again we found ourselves pulled back to his guiding question, "What is to be done in a world of nearly a universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, black folk?" (p. 1) and to his overarching claim that "race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question fundamentally of 'the blacks' as it has for no other group. It is not that other groups have not been 'racialized.' It is that their racialization, if we will, has been conditioned by a chain of being from the European to the subhuman-on a symbolic scale, from the light to the dark."Gordon's question could legitimately stand as the central problem of black existentialism as such.

Secondly the volume proves (I think) that black existentialism is a recognizably coherent movement in American philosophical thought, which one could reasonably predict will someday come to be widely regarded as a genuine philosophical tradition. Aside from the motive force supplied to it by the actual historical experience of blacks, black existentialism is definitely locatable at the intersection of three distinct intellectual forces: black American social thought (Washington, Douglass, Du Bois, Alain Locke, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and many others), the work of Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who first documented the historical constitution of black defiance to black devaluation as "a madness or social deviance," and the European tradition of existentialism which culminates in Sartre and Beauvoir. Black existentialism strikes me as being as much an attempt to rethink and so to reclaim a tradition as it is a novel freestanding "school of thought" in its own right-namely, the tradition of "existential" analysis which in retrospect appears powerfully at work in the writings of Douglass, Du Bois et al. Thus Sartre is more a catalyst for, than a "founder" of black existentialism. His scathing "Return from the United States: What I Learned About the Black Problem" (1945, translated with comparative notes on the problem in 1995 by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting) nevertheless seems the perfect place to begin the course discussion.

Third, the Gordon book supplies what amount to perfect "matrices" for thought and discussion in an undergraduate course. The first such matrix Gordon provides explicitly by distinguishing between the "teleological" question of black liberation and the "ontological" question of "black identity in the midst of an antiblack world." The first question "finds its fountainhead most poignantly in Frederick Douglass," in his conception of struggle and in his "various efforts to develop a theory behind the significance of his decision to fight against his abusers." (p. 7) The ontological question is perhaps expressed most lucidly and forcefully by Gordon himself, who, after citing Fanon, writes:

Blackness and, in specific form, the black thus function has the breakdown of reason, which situates black existence, ultimately, in a seemingly nonrational category of faith. Blacks live on, as Dostoyevsky might say, in spite of logic ... The black stands as an existential enigma.

Eyed, almost with suspicion, the subtext is best exemplified by the question: "Why do they go on?"

'Why do they go on?' placed in the context of the black is easily reformulated, simply, as, "Why go on?"

The question of continuing to live on is connected to a controversial theme of all existential thought ... There is a sense in which none of us has ever chosen to be born into this world ... Yet, in our decision to live on, we live a choice which requires our having been born-in a word, our existence. In the context of blacks, the implication is obvious. No one chooses to have been born under racial designations, but the choice to go on living, and especially choices that involve recognizing one's racial situation, has implications on the meaning of one's birth. It transforms itself into a subjunctive choice to have been born. Applied to groups, it is the question of whether certain groups 'should' have existed...Antiblack racism espouses a world that will ultimately be better off without blacks. Blacks, from such a standpoint, 'must" provide justification for their continued presence. So, why go on? (pp. 5-6)

Fourth, Gordon's collection taken as a whole contains an invaluable scholarly "tour" of classical black American philosophy, and many of the articles present extensive citations from those past authors who are routinely excluded from philosophy courses. Ernest Allen Jr.'s essay on "Rethinking the Du Boisian 'Double Consciousness'," for instance, is a most clear, careful and sophisticated, as well as moving account of Du Bois's thought and career. Similarly, Bernard R. Boxill's "The Fight with Covey" offers a penetrating moral-philosophical analysis of the tensions, in Douglass's character and writings, between his pacifism (before 1849) and his "celebration of the psychological and moral consequences of fighting Covey." Existence in Black could serve as a valuable shared secondary source in many courses other than the one I describe.

Fifth, and finally, there were an astonishing number of points at which the concerns and arguments of the authors represented in Existence in Black spontaneously and vividly "linked up" with ideas dealt with in other parts of the course, on Puritanism, transcendentalism and pragmatism-whether by harmonizing, dovetailing or outrightly clashing with them. One, which seems almost too obvious to call attention to, is the rich array of similarities and contrasts between Du Bois's evolving conception of the "double consciousness," and Emerson's. (I mention a few other such "links" in the syllabus and won't go into them further here.) Spending a month in Existence in Black vitalized the course as a whole by converting, if you will, the material surveyed into a sort of "hypertext." One reads Emerson differently, somehow, having pondered the moral and intellectual struggles of Du Bois-and vice versa.

That is all I have to say, except that I am glad, looking back, that I was able to overcome my own metaphilosophical and pedagogical worries and go ahead and structure the course as I did. At least four of the eight students who participated are planning to share their conclusions regarding "existence in black" with their fellows, this fall, in the form of an 'open class' sponsored by our local, shadowy and anarchic, philosophy club, "The Freethinkers' Association." It should be interesting.

In this survey of American philosophical thought we shall focus especially on three major intellectual traditions which are distinctive of philosophy in the United States. Transcendentalism, perfected in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, upheld the divinity of nature, the supreme worth of the individual person, and the capacity of individual men and women to directly intuit universally valid truth. Their radical individualism posed a living challenge to the authority of civil coercion over private conscience. Pragmatism is the only school of Western philosophy that is native to America. It rejects the predominant European model of knowledge as contemplation of fixed certainties in favor of a dynamic and future-oriented conception of knowledge as guide to effective action. For Charles Sanders Peirce pragmatism was primarily a theory of meaning, according to which the way to clarify the meaning of concepts and beliefs is to determine the expected practical consequences of adopting them. For William James it was a method for resolving philosophical puzzles and deciding what we are justified in believing as we make critical choices in our lives. For John Dewey it became an account of human knowledge conceived as experimentally-produced ideas useful in the struggle to civilize ourselves amidst the social and historical forces that shape our lives and determine our chances of making progress as human beings. Black Existentialism, though it can trace its roots partly to such European thinkers as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvior and Afro-Caribbean author Frantz Fanon, as well as to great American authors such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, is currently most dynamically engaged in and presented by black American philosophers. Central issues in the philosophy of existence-concerns of freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, liberation and faith-achieve special poignancy and urgency in the United States, given its history of black slavery and anti-black racism and the consequent nihilistic challenge to black existence and identity.

Note: in developing the idea for this course, in which these three American philosophical traditions are conjoined in one plan of study, I have hoped that our actual work in the seminar will be experimental and exploratory: we will try to discern and explain the relationships among transcen-dentalism, pragmatism and black existentialism as well as learn about and debate for ourselves their respective guiding issues and intellectual achievements. For example, the three headings are certainly not mutually exclusive; Cornel West seeks to develop a "prophetic" pragmatism that can address, in the spirit of existentialism, the nihilistic threat to black America. Another suggestion: The pragmatism of Dewey is optimistic, not angst-ridden; yet his views on education remain extremely influential in current debates surrounding issues of inner city educational reform, and his instrumentalist conception of knowledge as inherently aimed at problem solving is congenial to several black existentialist thinkers. Again, perhaps we will detect strands of argument in the black existentialist authors whose thought is represented in our anthology which hark back to, or build upon, earlier "non-black" spiritual and intellectual endeavors of the transcen-dentalists, or even the New England Puritans. I don't know. Let's find out; that is the point of having a seminar.

Moreover the syllabus-especially for the third part of the course, on black existentialism-is tentative: which articles we discuss in class will depend largely on your specific interests, and you are certainly encouraged to study and write about articles in our anthologies that are not formally assigned. Moreover I strongly encourage you to go beyond the sources in our texts to explore authors who are discussed but not represented via their own original works, in the anthologies: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Du Bois, Douglass, Fanon, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, Anna Julia Cooper, Martin Delaney, Angela Y. Davis, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and many others.
 
 

American Philosophy: A Historical Anthology, edited with commentary by Barbara MacKinnon (State University of New York Press).

Existence In Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, edited by Lewis R. Gordon (Routledge).