A Preface to Chapter 5
Du Bois’ rendering of Crummell’s life story not only allowed him to pay tribute to someone who was obviously a friend but also provided a useful vehicle for illustrating the journey of an individual soul to spirit. Crummell’s life was especially ideal, however, because Hegel’s example of the “unhappy consciousness” involved a priest (a religious self-consciousness) engaged in a struggle with God.1 Although suggestions of such a journey in the lives of other individuals are evident from the start of Du Bois’ book, a complete Hegelian example requires that we see the individual process in its entirety, which Crummell’s life story accomplished. Given, however, that Phenomenology is about groups and about their relationship to World Soul, even more evidence is necessary for the comparison between Souls and Phenomenology to hold up.2
Although it is widely accepted that some of Du Bois’ published work reflects the influence of Hegelian idealism, the debate over the extent to which any of this work was influenced by Phenomenology remains unsettled. Most recently, Robert Gooding-Williams wrote: “I do wish emphatically to reject the much stronger thesis that the Hegel-echoing features of Du Bois’s concepts and language belong to a narrative that palpably parallels the narrative of a well-defined stretch of the Phenomenology.”3
“Proving” an exclusive relationship is not the purpose of this brief exploration. Even where the similarities between the two texts are strong, intellectual thought at any particular point in time usually derives from a line of thinking and a series of thinkers representing a span of time. That is to say that Hegel’s Phenomenology bears the influence of Fichte, Schelling, and others, most of whom were partly indebted to Kant. Moreover, philosophers can trace lines of reasoning in all of these works all the way back to the classical philosophers.4 The goal here, however, is simply to show that The Souls of Black Folk has a closer and more complete relationship to Phenomenology than has previously been demonstrated. The point is not that it is the only influence.
Du Bois was not deterred by the fact that Hegel did not consider the role of black folk in Soul’s/Consciousness’s journey toward self-determination/freedom and Spirit’s quest for knowledge in his philosophy. The relative absence of black people in Hegel’s studies likely created a purpose rather than an obstacle for Du Bois. Subsequently published literature—scholarly and popular—that characterized black people as tertium quid was not daunting, either. Instead, Du Bois simply went to work. His history of the striving of the souls of black folk established their humanity and their rightful placement in the narrative of World Soul’s journey to freedom and to knowledge.
It is easy to miss the parallels between Souls and Phenomenology for a number of reasons. First, Du Bois was writing to a very diverse audience; the text had to hold relevance for all of them (or as many as possible). Second, Du Bois was more than a philosopher: he was a historian, sociologist, political economist, and creative writer, at least, and carrying out the methods and objectives of these diverse areas easily obscured some of the philosophical revelations. Third, because Du Bois’ chapters are not named for the aspects of consciousness discussed in them as Hegel’s chapters are, even the sometimes-striking parallels in content and structure can recede into the background of the more obvious history and sociology. And finally, and perhaps related to all of the above, rather obvious historical reference points (e.g., Du Bois’ appropriation of Revolutionary Era rhetoric) scattered throughout the text also have the potential to lead readers astray. Despite all these potential diversions, explicit Hegelian parallels are clear across the book. Looking directly at Du Bois’ first nine chapters as Hegelian in structure and content provides a useful introduction to his final four chapters, which have no direct parallel in Hegel’s study. Thus, the first nine chapters in Souls also give the final four chapters new significance.
The first section of Du Bois’ study, in which these black folk who were finally legally free and attempting to make sense of a world that was simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, replicates important parts of Hegel’s first chapter, “Consciousness.” Du Bois’ first three chapters, in fact, should be compared to the content of Hegel’s three subsections of “Consciousness”: “Sense-Certainty,” “Perception,” and “Force and the Understanding.”
In the first chapter of Souls (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”) Du Bois described “[t]he first decade [after emancipation as] merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom,” which continued to elude the former slaves. They pursued suffrage and education, but “the Canaan was always dim and far away.” These first steps toward education did not get the freedpeople to their promised land, but there was “dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect” and “a dim feeling that, to attain [their] place in the world, [they] must be [themselves] and not another.” In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the former slaves did not reach consciousness fully—things remained “dim”—there was only sense-certainty, but this was only the beginning of conscious’s development to reason. In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” which parallels Hegel’s second subsection of consciousness—“Perception: or the Thing and Deception”—in which “the Thing,” freedom, was symbolized by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the “Deception” was the bureau’s dissolution, the freedpeople sank to a state of peonage and servility, and “a figure veiled and bowed” sat at a metaphorical crossroad (“in the King’s Highways”). Du Bois concluded: “Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed” (emphasis added). Sense-certainty that has developed into perception makes it possible for an “unconditioned universal” to appear. Hegel described it as a “one-sided extreme of being-for-self.” It appears to be a true consciousness, but, as Hegel noted, “the object has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle; but consciousness is not yet for itself the Notion, and consequently does not recognize itself in that reflected object” (PS §132). Hegel continued, “this reduction of the diversity to a pure being-for-self, is nothing other than the medium itself, and this is the independence of the different ‘matters’” (PS §136).
This medium, which reduced the diversity (of opinions, thoughts, and ideas) to a universal being-for-self, is, in Du Bois’ text, none other than Booker T. Washington (Du Bois’ chapter 3). And because, in this case, consciousness is not yet “True” and is merely apprehending itself (rather than realizing itself; its self is still object), “we must step into its place and be the Notion which develops and fills out what is contained in the result” (PS §133). Although we may, indeed, become “the Notion,” in the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” the “we,” the phenomenological observer, is Du Bois, who becomes the Understanding which preserves “the two moments” (the difference in thought between Washington and others) that have to be reconciled by “Force” or “movement” to true (self-) consciousness (PS §136). In a particularly transparent adaptation of Hegel’s discussion of “Force(s),” and probably alluding, again, to Washington, Du Bois observed, perhaps snidely, “[i]t is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.”5 Du Bois’ discussion ends as Hegel’s ends, by introducing the “universal difference” that is “expressed in the law [the supersensible world], which is the stable image of unstable appearance” and inherent opposition (PS §149). Du Bois challenged the appearance of stability that Washington’s influence encouraged, urging opposition to any injustice or limitation in rights or opportunities: “By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men.” Doing anything less would have left the question of black humanity and its place in World Soul’s striving unanswered.
The middle chapters of The Souls of Black Folk have the unmistakable stamp of the then-new sociological methods (along with new developments in anthropology). Dividing them in a particular way, however, transforms them into representations of Hegel’s discussions of “Self-Consciousness,” “Reason,” and “Spirit.” Hegel’s discussion of “Self-Consciousness,” for example, finds parallels in Du Bois’ “Of the Meaning of Progress,” where nearly all the personalities who appear are involved in an unmistakable “Lordship and Bondage” type of struggle. And in the details of the lives of nearly all the black folks whose experience he examined, stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness are impossible to miss.
“Of the Meaning of Progress” is, however, written in two parts of a different sort. The first part details Du Bois’ summers as a teacher in western Tennessee while he was an undergraduate at Fisk, and the second part relates to his return fifteen years later. The first part ends with a direct observation of there not yet being a collective consciousness there, only individual consciousnesses.
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages.
These diverse languages—these separate consciousnesses—could eventually be joined into one collective consciousness. But when Du Bois returned to Wilson County fifteen years later, there was mostly debt, anger, and poverty and, correspondingly, stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness. Some people had died, far too young. Others had left. Most continued to strive, but many among them were still certain that the white folks would, by hook or by crook, eventually get all they had.
As bad as the circumstances were, there were, however, glimmers of hope. Among them were the Burkes. “The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed, the gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out of debt, being so used to it.” In the Hegelian construct, Mr. Burke had accomplished something very important. He (and some of the other individuals in the chapter) symbolized consciousness as a “completely developed single individual, or the single individual that is an actual consciousness, as the negative of itself, viz. as the objective extreme; in other words, it has successfully struggled to divest itself of its being-for-self and has turned into a [mere] being” (PS §231). Hegel explained in detail:
Through these moments of surrender, first of its right to decide for itself, then of its property and enjoyment, and finally through the positive moment of practicing what it does not understand, it truly and completely deprives itself of the consciousness of inner and outer freedom, of the actuality in which consciousness exists for itself. It has the certainty of having truly divested itself of its “I,” and of having turned its immediate self-consciousness into a Thing, into an objective existence. Only through this actual sacrifice could it demonstrate this self-renunciation. For only therein does the deception vanish. (PS §229)
For Mr. Burke and many others,
for itself, action and its own actual doing remain pitiable, its enjoyment remains pain, and the overcoming of these in a positive sense remains a beyond. But in this object, in which it finds that its own action and being, as being that of this particular consciousness, are being and action in themselves, there has arisen for consciousness the idea of Reason, of the certainty that, in its particular individuality, it has being absolutely in itself, or is all reality. (PS §230)
This “freedom of self-consciousness” suggests a promising answer after all to Du Bois’ wondering whether “all this life and love and strife and failure” was “the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day.” The evidence unfolds in his “middle” chapters.
Hegel’s “Reason” chapter, “The Certainty and Truth of Reason,” is divided into three substantial subsections: “Observing Reason,” “The actualization of rational self-consciousness through its own activity,” and “Individuality which takes itself to be real in and for itself.” These three topics, although in bits and pieces, are also among the subjects of Du Bois’ next three chapters, where we find self-consciousness in the world. In “Of the Meaning of Progress,” consciousness (Mr. Burke, Josie and her family, and others) “did not understand the world; it [they] desired it and worked on it, withdrew from it into itself [themselves] and abolished it as an existence on its own account, and its own self qua consciousness.” In “Reason,” however, self-consciousness is very interested in the world, “for the existence of the world becomes for self-consciousness its own truth and presence; it is certain of experiencing only itself therein” (PS §232).
Du Bois’ “Of the Wings of Atalanta” includes some aspects of Hegel’s “Observing Reason” in which consciousness, now in the world, struggles to determine the essence of things (rather than of itself); reduces “observation and experience” to truth, though these observations are mere perceptions; seeks “laws” in very self-interested ways; and reduces organic existence to abstractions and the inorganic environment, which is constantly changing, into something fixed. Self-consciousness has clearly missed the mark here, but the point is that it is still striving. Although Du Bois’ Hegelian parallels here are less complete than they are in other chapters, his lament that black folk have adopted the ways of the world (presumably based on experience and observation) and made “the Gospel of Pay” their truth, too, at least suggests the trajectory of Hegel’s discussion.
Hegel’s “The actualization of rational self-consciousness through its own activity” describes three “universal forms” that appear in the process of actualization. The first is “pleasure and necessity,” in which consciousness pursues its own happiness, indulging “to the full the pure individuality in which it appears.” This relationship with its other is “a dead actuality” (it is defined by “moments” and has no real content) and is thus “the poorest form of self-realizing Spirit.” It will remain vacuous until it is more than being-for-itself and being-in-itself and recognizes its relationship to its opposite and unites with it (the necessity) by engaging life, or as Hegel put it, by “[taking] hold of life and [possessing] it.” The second of the three universal forms is defined by the law of the heart (PS §361–67). Consciousness confronts this law in the world, where there is great suffering because of the conflict between “individuality and its truth.” Consciousness works to eliminate this other necessity (the law in the world) and to promote “the welfare of mankind” (its pleasure is now “the universal pleasure of all hearts”). Others, however, find this is not “the law of their hearts”; it is, rather, little more than conceit or a kind of arrogance. And the “public order” that appears to emerge in this case is rather a “universal state of war, in which each wrests what he can for himself” (PS §§370, 373, 379). Ultimately, consciousness sacrifices this individuality and creates a new consciousness, Hegel’s third and final form, virtue.6
In “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois’ “three streams of thinking” that “have flowed down to our day” since the first slave ships landed in Virginia are not quite the three “universal forms” that Hegel described, but they bear some similarities. The first for Du Bois was “the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands [that called] for the world-wide coöperation of men in satisfying them” (Hegel’s “pleasure and necessity”). Du Bois described this as “a new human unity” that drew men of all colors closer together, but fulfilling this “pleasure and necessity” depended on trickery, “force and dominion” (Hegel’s “dead actuality”). Du Bois’ second stream relays the conflict between the competing laws that Hegel described. The law in the world denied that these (black) beings were human and built an environment around them that made it nearly impossible for them “even [to] think of breaking through.” The law of the heart was expressed in the thought that came from those walled-in souls: “‘Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!’”
In Hegel’s third universal form, “The actualization of rational self-consciousness through its own activity,” self-consciousness finds “the Thing to be like itself, and itself to be like a Thing, i.e. it is aware that it is in itself the objectively real world.” With that understanding, self-consciousness becomes a real united “self-consciousness that is recognized and acknowledged,” not just an “outer existence” but an “absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals in their independent actual existence.” Du Bois understood, as Hegel wrote, that this can only happen “in the life of a people or nation,” or collectively. The work (activity) of the “separate independent beings” is to give up their particularity for the “universal Substance as their soul and essence.” Those individuals working in this way turn themselves into a thing in the process and in return receive back their “own self.” The best examples of these souls (this self-consciousness) in the social world are Du Bois’ “Negro college-bred men,” whom he maintained had no parallel in their “broader spirit of helpfulness, . . . deeper devotion to their life-work, or . . . consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties.” These men, through their work (their own activity), represent virtue. For this self-consciousness, rather than the “resistance from an actual world opposed to it,” its “aim and object are only this expressing of itself” (PS §§347, 349–51, 359).7
Du Bois’ final chapter related to Reason is “Of the Black Belt.” Based primarily on life in Dougherty County, Georgia, with its “ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites,” Du Bois characterized the region as the “forlorn and forsaken” heart of the former “Cotton Kingdom—the shadow of a marvelous dream.” Upon his arrival there, he launched himself on a search for its king, but he only found men, women, and families of workers who rarely managed to earn any money and farmers who had bought and paid for land and lost it through thievery. It is difficult to imagine “Of the Black Belt,” as hopeless as it seems, as a possible illustration of Hegel’s “Individuality which takes itself to be real in and for itself,” but it could be just that.
In Hegel’s final section on Reason, “self-consciousness holds fast to the simple unity of [objective] being and the self, a unity [“being for itself”] which is its genus.” In this state, consciousness casts off its opposition, ignores its other, and concerns itself only “with itself” (PS §§394–396). This consciousness has successfully negotiated “the matter at hand” and resolved the conflicts between, on one hand, its desire, ability, and work, and, on the other hand, the actual circumstances in which it is all embedded. Consciousness now knows that its work produces no value for itself (“the work . . . exists for other individualities”), and so to unite its “doing and being,” this consciousness focuses on and makes work the end, preserving “its Notion and its certainty as what objectively exists and [enduring] in face of the experience of the contingency of action.” It “now acquires its significance through self-consciousness and through it alone” (PS §§405, 409, 410). Thus, even though the black Dougherty County residents rarely succeeded in a material sense, they know that “something was taken in hand and done” (PS §413). Having made work “its [their] own affair,” they point to what they actually accomplished. Their land and labor were routinely stolen, but what mattered even more for them is that they worked, bought a farm, raised a crop, and/or leased a tract. Their “own action and . . . own effort” becomes the new “matter in hand,” and thus “this particular consciousness knows it to be its own individual reality and the reality of all” (PS §§417, 418). This consciousness is aware of the laws of reason and what is ethical, but it also knows that challenging the law leads nowhere and only destabilizes “the ethical consciousness.” And so this consciousness remains itself “within the ethical substance . . . the essence of self-consciousness.” And “this pure unity of the I and being, of being for itself and being in itself, is determined as the in-itself or as being, and the consciousness of Reason finds itself” (PS §§432, 437, 438).
Du Bois provided numerous illustrations to support his points. When he asked one tenant farmer what he paid in rent, the farmer responded that he did not know. When the man asked his colleague, the response was “all we make.” Another, when asked whether he owned the land he farmed, replied “only this house.” His wife added that they had previously bought and paid for 700 acres of land but were cheated out of it. The husband subsequently worked for the owner of the land for thirty-seven days and got paid “in cardboard checks” that were never honored. Finally, the sheriff seized the couple’s work animals, crop, and household goods. When Du Bois reminded the man that “furniture is exempt from seizure by law,” the farmer replied, matter of factly, “‘Well, he took it just the same.’”
The next three chapters of Souls are especially transparent illustrations of Hegel’s lengthy discussion of “Spirit.” “The Quest of the Golden Fleece” parallels Hegel’s “The true Spirit: The ethical order.” “Of the Sons of Master and Man” represents Hegel’s “Self-alienated Spirit: Culture.” And “Of the Faith of the Fathers” is Hegel’s “Spirit that is certain of itself: Morality,” where we see the fulfillment of Hegel’s announcement in his chapter on Spirit that “Reason [becomes] Spirit, when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself” (PS §438).
“The Quest of the Golden Fleece” provides extensive empirical detail about life for black folk in the cotton belt, but by continuing the examination of life in Dougherty County, the chapter also illustrates what Hegel detailed in “The True Spirit: The Ethical Order.” Hegel’s chapter is about human and divine law and the discord between them and between individual action and essence/substance. In Hegel’s discussion of the ethical world, spirit is the nation, and the citizens of that nation represent consciousness. Consciousness is reflected in the law, which, along with customs, represents universality. As that universality manifests in an “individuality,” it is self-certainty, or the government. The general acceptance of these aspects becomes the manifestation of “its truth.” It appears to be “a concrete existence . . . that has freely issued forth” (PS §§447–48). The cotton belt district that Du Bois described was his symbolic “nation” with its laws, its citizens, and its customs, all which seem to crush the life out of its poor black residents. In Hegel’s words, “the ethical world [the world of laws] showed its fate and its truth to be the Spirit that had merely passed away in it, the individual self” (or the government as a “legal person”) (PS §596). In this world of laws and customs, these black residents became an “absolute unessentiality” and “self-estranged . . . in a world of ‘culture.’”8
Du Bois explored this isolated spirit (Hegel’s “Self-Alienated Spirit: Culture”) in “Of the Sons and Master of Man,” expanding it out from Dougherty County. In Hegel’s chapter, spirit has to navigate “this world,” a world of civilization and culture from which it (spirit) is alienated, and the “other-world,” which is actually the essential. Du Bois maintained that “[w]hatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past [between the “world of civilization” and the “other world”], it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon.” He acknowledged that the “[w]ar, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery” that resulted from this contact could easily be explained away as strength over weakness, civilization over heathenism, good over bad, and superior over inferior, but none of these was an adequate explanation. In totality, the discussion of the relationship between and among men showed that the development of “civilization” and “culture,” as it happened in “this world,” was no substitute for the development of mind/soul.9
“Of the Faith of the Fathers,” which incorporates a discussion of the antislavery movement, the Civil War, and its aftermath, replicates parts of Hegel’s “Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality,” which developed around the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and “the terror” that followed it. Although my detailed discussion of Du Bois’ chapter on religion unfolds below in chapter 5, it is useful to point out here that morality as the negative (some would say the opposite or antithesis) of the ethical world of laws and customs, which both Hegel and Du Bois discussed earlier, holds a significant place in Du Bois’ discussion. “Morality” in this context is not the more modern, value-laden judgments of people’s perceptions of “right” and “wrong.” Rather, morality here is the execution of the “Will” and self-determination. Du Bois’ chapter on religion illustrates Hegel’s “The moral view of the world,” in which the individual consciousness is finally no longer “alienated from its own ‘concept’ in the worlds of culture [and] faith” but has “achieved unity with its own inherent universality.”10 It was through religion that consciousness achieved this unity or Hegel’s “concrete.”
Hegel’s discussion of morality, however, includes other important detail that will matter in explaining Du Bois’ final chapters. It relates to the discussion of “the harmony of morality and nature,” which at first eludes consciousness because it is focused on immediate knowledge. Because this consciousness is totally consumed with itself, its otherness, self-consciousness, is left free to focus on itself as well. “The freer self-consciousness becomes, the freer also is the negative object of its consciousness,” which becomes “a complete world within itself.” In that world, “the absoluteness of morality and the absoluteness of Nature” are completely discordant. Moral consciousness, whose essence is duty, “learns from experience that Nature is not concerned” with their unity, which leaves the moral consciousness with pure duty (rather than self-realization) as its object. Because moral consciousness cannot be happy with the mere appearance of self-realization, this actualization becomes something that is “postulated” even though it is “a demand of Reason” (PS §§599–602).11
The prospect that this unity/harmony “cannot be attained, but is to be thought of merely as an absolute task, i.e. one which simply remains a task,” can only lead to frustration because of the inherent contradictions: there is a task “which is to remain a task and yet ought to be fulfilled,” and, equally contradictory, there is the idea “of a morality which is no longer to be [a moral] consciousness, i.e. not actual.” A “perfected morality” that cannot be fulfilled raises questions about the “essence of morality,” and “pure duty” is a poor (“unreal”) substitute. And so we are left with two postulates: “the harmony of morality and objective Nature, the final purpose of the world” (or “implicit being”) and “the harmony of morality and the sensuous will, the final purpose of self-consciousness as such” (or “being-for-self”). Each is “the other of the other” (PS §603, 604).
Du Bois’ “Forethought” introduced us to all of his chapters, separating them into two distinct groups. The first eight chapters, comprising the first group, he further subdivided into three smaller sections (which, again, suggest the movement of the souls of black folk from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness to Reason). He characterized the first two chapters as about emancipation; then there was a chapter on leadership (Booker T. Washington) standing alone. He then coupled two chapters focused on “the two worlds within and without the Veil” to two more chapters of “deeper detail” on those worlds. Then Du Bois offered some guidance for our movement from this group of chapters to the second group (the next five chapters): “Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” Du Bois’ division of these chapters in this way is, to say the least, provocative. Situating his characterization of them as white and black worlds within the Hegelian construct provides an important new way of thinking about the three most recognized concepts of Du Bois’ book—the veil, the color line, and double consciousness—and it gives greater significance to the final chapters of the book.
In Phenomenology, in order for Consciousness to reach Self-Consciousness, two extremes had to be reconciled—the “pure inner world” and “the inner being gazing into this pure inner world.” The two are separated by a middle term that Hegel called a “curtain,” which he characterized as a form of “appearances” that has to be “drawn away” so that Consciousness can see that it is only gazing at itself in “different moments.” Once Consciousness understands that these two worlds coincide, the “middle term” (of appearances) “vanishes,” and we see Self-Consciousness (PS §165). Du Bois’ characterization of his first eight chapters as being about the white world and the next five as about the black world indicates (from the very first pages of the book) that the form of appearances—Hegel’s “curtain”—is keeping white America from seeing that when it looks at black America, it is only seeing itself at a different “moment.”12 And so, just as Hegel’s “curtain” had to be “drawn away” to reveal what was behind it, Du Bois had to “raise” the veil—the middle term “of appearances”—that stood between America’s divided (double) consciousness.
When Du Bois raised his veil—of color, race, the color line—to show us what was behind it, there was, literally, a study of black religion (“the meaning of its religion”), a story about the death of a child (“the passion of its human sorrow”), and stories about the growth, development, and demise of John Jones and Alexander Crummell’s long but ultimately triumphant wilderness experience (“the struggle of its greater souls”). They are illustrations of consciousness’s (soul’s) increasing development of self-knowledge or the philosophy of spirit. Recall that in Hegel’s construct, as consciousness (Du Bois’ white world) remained concerned only with itself, self-consciousness, “the negative object of its consciousness” (Du Bois’ black world), became “a complete world within itself.” And as its own world, it developed from consciousness (Du Bois’ firstborn represents Hegel’s perception and sense-certainty or early stages of Consciousness) to self-consciousness and having reason (the story of John Jones) to being reason and thus spirit (the story of Alexander Crummell). At least it certainly seems that Crummell got past “pure duty” to self-realization. We have to assume that, as was the case for Hegel, religion served as the necessary movement or “force” that allowed this accomplishment. In Du Bois’ chapter, it also provided the necessary bridge between the material (phenomenal) and the spiritual (noumenal) for the souls of black folk.13 And Du Bois’ placing his religion chapter between these two parts (rather than at the end of the volume as Hegel did) even suggests that religion might also provide the bridge between American consciousness and self-consciousness and, therefore, the white and black worlds.
But finally, after Du Bois introduced and described the two groups of chapters, he brought up the last chapter on the Sorrow Songs: “All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written.” Explicitly separating this chapter from the other two parts suggests some special significance. Having placed a few measures of music from a “sorrow song” at the beginning of each chapter did more than introduce us to this important aspect of black culture, it presaged a conclusion that uses the songs in a much more radical way—to take us through to the culmination of the “science of philosophy” (Wissenschaft) in Absolute Knowledge.
Music was a logical vehicle for this demonstration. Not only was this medium important in black American culture, but music can keep us anchored to ideas related to the larger discussion of World Soul. For much of human history, nature was the defining force in man’s life, and in this natural world there existed “true harmony.” Music, a form of speech or a language to some people, not only provided an accessible way to illustrate that harmony metaphorically, but phenomenologically and metaphysically it also represented “the speech of nature and the speech of the spirits.” Eventually, the awareness of this harmony and unity was lost as “the reasoning of man asserted its independence, . . . and man became aware of and bound by his individuality.” But “the truest form of music, [that which] comes closest to the original [in nature]” is presumed, still, to reflect this “harmony and unity.” It is “a precision and order [that is] characteristic of the universe,” and I believe that we can demonstrate it in “the mathematical relationships” within the songs of Souls.14
There was a good reason for Du Bois’ not including the Sorrow Songs chapter in his introduction to the two groups of chapters (life beyond and within the veil). I propose that in Du Bois’ chapter on the songs, this consciousness (the souls of black folk) accomplished something that Hegel’s final chapter did not. In the chapter on the songs, the unity of absolute morality and absolute nature no longer remained “an absolute task”—something “postulated” but “not yet actual.” In my final chapter, not only is this harmony actual/real, but it is evidence of Absolute Knowledge. Although the religion and art of the folk provided a route to it for both Hegel and Du Bois, only Du Bois actually arrived there.