For Locke, our sense of value derives from our feelings, but the subjective or emotional component interacts with various forms of cognition. This means that much of our “world making”—the way we comprehend what and why we seek those objects and goals we take to be of compelling worth—intimately relates to values, themselves products of complex but structured acts of valuation. Value systems, for both individuals and groups, deeply lodge in political and social structures, often of a nationalistic sort. One of the most telling of all value systems is that concerned with race. Since race entered into national culture in disparate ways, Locke often dealt with racial issues by directly treating national, political, and social situations, but at the same time adding the crucial element of culture. It was the way culture could be used as an analytic tool, and the way it affected modes of thought and feeling, that tied it together with value, and led Locke to link the two categories.
His two early essays, one on the English national character—as displayed at Oxford—and the other, delineating the American “temperament,” actually serve as studies of value. So, too, does the eponymous essay, “The New Negro.” This essay was Locke’s most sweeping statement about the values that were both offered, and sought after, by African Americans as they entered the modern age. It represents Locke at his comprehensive best, as he weaves together sociology, history, demographics, and especially esthetics, all with a subtle argumentative direction that guides—or hopes to guide—the rather sudden efflorescence of African American art and thought into a patterned understanding that would clarify and enhance that culture for the coming years. With the appearance of the anthology The New Negro, and the essay that lent it its title, Locke assumed his role as one of the chief figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
In an early essay titled “The Ethics of Culture,” Locke taught his students about the perplexities involved in acquiring and becoming self-aware about one’s own culture. His pedagogic spirit informs the tone and argumentative shades and suggestions in the essay. “Values and Imperatives” was his most impressive effort written in the idiom of academic philosophy; it was in effect a summary of his Harvard doctoral thesis. The central argument of the piece insisted that values, in order to be humanizing and effective, had to be examined critically and systematically. Here the tone of the professional philosopher replaces that of the solicitous teacher. This more rigorous line of argument was reframed in “Value,” a contribution to an encyclopedia, and “A Functional View of Value Ultimates,” where again an analytic approach shapes the essay’s form.
In “Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension of Culture” Locke returns to his earlier views about culture and self-awareness, once more making the argument in the format of an address to college students. Near the end of his life Locke was able to use a brief book review to recall the work of his Harvard teacher, Ralph Barton Perry, setting out succinctly how he continued to think about questions of vale. An undated, and probably late, essay on Freud showed how flexible and open Locke was in confronting new bodies of knowledge, and how he was able to see that depth psychology had not only analytic rigor to offer but important implications about cultural and value as well.