http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alain-locke/
Author & Citation Info|Friends PDF Preview|InPho Search|PhilPapers Bibliography
Alain LeRoy Locke
First published Fri Mar 23, 2012
Alain LeRoy Locke is heralded as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance” for his publication in 1925 ofThe New Negro—an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music and portraiture by white and black artists. Locke is best known as a theorist, critic, and interpreter of African-American literature and art. He was also a creative and systematic philosopher who developed theories of value, pluralism and cultural relativism that informed and were reinforced by his work on aesthetics. Locke saw black aesthetics quite differently than some of the leading Negro intellectuals of his day; most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom he disagreed about the appropriate social function of Negro artistic pursuits. Du Bois thought it was a role and responsibility of the Negro artist to offer a representation of the Negro and black experience which might help in the quest for social uplift. Locke criticized this as “propaganda” (AOP 12) and argued that the primary responsibility and function of the artist is to express his own individuality, and in doing that to communicate something of universal human appeal.
Locke was a distinguished scholar and educator and during his lifetime an important philosopher of race and culture. Principal among his contributions in these areas was the development of the notion of “ethnic race”, Locke's conception of race as primarily a matter of social and cultural, rather than biological, heredity. Locke was in contemporary parlance a racial revisionist, and held the somewhat controversial and paradoxical view that it was often in the interests of groups to think and act as members of a “race” even while they consciously worked for the destruction or alteration of pernicious racial categories. Racial designations were for Locke incomprehensible apart from an understanding of the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they grew up. A great deal of Locke's philosophical thinking and writing in the areas of pluralism, relativism and democracy are aimed at offering a more lucid understanding of cultural or racial differences and prospects for more functional methods of navigating contacts between different races and cultures.
Locke, like Du Bois, is often affiliated with the pragmatist philosophical tradition though somewhat surprisingly—surprising because Locke's actual views are closer substantively to pragmatist thinkers Like Dewey, James, and Royce than are Du Bois's—he does not receive as much attention in the writings of contemporary pragmatist philosophers as does Du Bois. Regardless, he is most strongly identified with the pragmatist tradition, but his “critical pragmatism”, and most specifically his value theory, is also influenced by Hugo Münsterberg, F.S.C. Schiller, Alexius Meinong, Frantz Brentano, and Christian von Erhenfels. From early on in his education at Harvard University, Locke had an affinity for the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Locked developed his mature views on axiology well in advance of many leading pragmatists—e.g., Dewey and James. Among pragmatists, Locke has arguably the most developed and systematic philosophy of value, and offers many critical insights concerning democracy.
· 1. Chronology
· 2. Axiology/Value Theory
o 2.1 Value-Feelings and Value-Modes
o 2.2 A Functional View of Values
o 2.3 Transvaluation
o 2.4 Taxonomy of Values
· 3. Pluralism
o 3.1 Three Barriers to Pluralism
o 3.2 Pluralism as a Functional Base
· 4. Relativism
o 4.1 The Principle of Cultural Equivalence
o 4.2 The Principle of Cultural Reciprocity
o 4.3 The Principle of Cultural Convertibility
· 5. Aesthetics
o 5.1 The New Negro
o 5.2 The Young Negro
o 5.3 The Negro Spirituals
o 5.4 Who, and What, is “Negro”?
· 6. Philosophy of Race
o 6.1 The Concept of Ethnic Race
· Bibliography
o Abbreviations of Principal Works
o Primary Literature
o Secondary Literature
· Academic Tools
· Other Internet Resources
· Related Entries
1. Chronology
1885 / Born Arthur Locke September 13 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke in Philadelphia, PA.1902 / Graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia during that same year Locke was afflicted by rheumatic fever, which did permanent damage to his heart.
1904 / Graduates with Bachelor of Arts degree from Philadelphia School of Pedagogy first in his class. Publishes “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” his first known publication.
1904–07 / Locke attends Harvard University, earning his second Bachelor of Arts degree and graduatingmagna cum laude. During his time at Harvard Locke was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and studied under Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and Ralph Barton Perry. Though he was a member of the faculty at the time Locke never actually studied with William James. While at Harvard Locke received the Bowdoin Prize in English for an essay composed on Tennyson entitled “The Prometheus Myth: A Study in Literary Tradition.” It was while at Harvard that Locke first met Horace Kallen, who worked as an instructor.
1907–09 / In 1907 Locke was chosen as the first-ever African-American Rhodes Scholar. Even though he held a right to admittance to an Oxford college as a Rhodes Scholar he encountered some difficulty in this regard until he was finally admitted to Hertford College. While at Oxford Locke studied philosophy, Greek, and literature. It was while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar that Locke first met and became friends with Pixley Ka Isasha Seme. In 1907 and 1908, Horace Kallen was also at Oxford as a Sheldon Scholar.
1910–11 / Following his studies at Oxford University and before returning to Harvard University to complete his PhD, Locke studied at the University of Berlin under the German sociologist Georg Simmel, where he was reacquainted with his Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg. While at the University of Berlin Locke deepened his interest in value theory, particularly in the work of theorists such as Alexius Meinong, Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, and Frantz Brentano.
1912–14 / Appointed as assistant professor of English, philosophy, and education to Teachers College at Howard University.
1915 / Gives a series of lectures to the Howard chapter of the NAACP on the scientific study of race and race relations entitled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race.”
1917 / Doctoral dissertation entitledThe Problem of Classification in Theory of Valuesubmitted to adviser Ralph Barton Perry September 17, 1917.
1918 / Receives PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.
1925 / Fired from Howard University following efforts to achieve pay equity between black and white faculty. December of that year Locke publishesThe New Negro:An Interpretationperhaps his most famous work and earns himself recognition as a leading African-American literary critic and aesthete.
1928 / Returns to Howard University following the appointment of Mordecai W. Johnson, the university's first African-American president.
1935 / Reportedly it was in this year that Locke renewed his interest in writing philosophy as signaled by the publication of “Values and Imperatives,” inAmerican Philosophy, Today and Tomorrowedited by Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hook.
1942 / Publishes two edited volumes and an article:When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Cultureedited with Bernhard J. Stern,Color: The Unfinished Business of Democracyspecial volume ofSurvey Graphicand “Who, and What, Is Negro?”.
1943 / Delivers a series of lectures entitled “The Contribution of the Negro to the Culture of the Americas,” under the auspices of the Haitian Ministry of Public Instruction as the Exchange Professor for the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations.
1953 / Retired from Howard University and moved to New York.
1954 / Died June 9 in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York from persistent heart trouble.
2. Axiology/Value Theory
Locke's seminal essay in value theory, “Values and Imperatives” is as ambitious in its aims as it is pioneering. In it Locke states what he takes to be the central problem for axiology; details the reasons for the failure of American philosophy, particularly pragmatism, to make anything more than a minimal contribution to the development of the philosophical study of values; argues that values are primarily rooted in human attitudes; and provides an elaborate theoretical account of value formation and the functional role of values. A value, according to Locke, is “an emotionally mediated form of experience.” Locke issues the following warning:
[i]n dethroning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, and that norms guide our behavior as well as guide our reasoning. (VI 34)
Values are an important and necessary part of human experience. Values are an essential part of human existence as all human persons are inherently valuing beings. He writes:
[t]he common man, in both his individual and group behavior, perpetuates the problem in a very practical way. He sets up personal and private and group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypothesizes them as universals for all conditions, all times and all men. (VI 35)
Valuations of multiple kinds pervade nearly every aspect of our lives; our aesthetic, moral and religious evaluations and judgments.
On Locke's estimation,
the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion. (VI 36)
This is the central and driving question of Locke's axiology and as such it points to some of the crucial aspects of his overall philosophical view, but his theory of value specifically, and importantly his social and political philosophy. On the axiological plane the question is reformulated as whether or not the fundamental value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their end values prior to evaluative judgment. If value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their own ends, then there would exist a more direct approach to the apprehension of values. Moreover, if a connection can be discovered between certain psychological states and particular valuations then that might yield at least one avenue for an objective assessment of values and valuations. On the social and political plane—the practical plane where persons actually form valuations and act on them in myriad ways—the question is formulated in terms of how best to avoid a theory of value that is static, arbitrary and overly formulaic in ways that impede the theory's ability to provide an adequate understanding of value phenomena. To do this, a functional analysis of value norms is required, and normative principles must be the result of the immediate context of valuation. This we will see in the following sections is the major thrust of Locke's value pluralism and relativism.
2.1 Value-Feelings and Value-Modes
Locke begins by considering what he takes to be the most basic feature of values; their emotional character. He writes
the value-mode establishes for itself, directly through feeling, a qualitative category which, as discriminated by its appropriate feeling-quality, constitutes an emotionally mediated form of experience. (VI 38)
There is a particular feeling or feeling-quality associated with each value-mode. In fact, Locke contends that value-modes differ in virtue of differences in feeling-qualities. The value-mode, or perhaps better, the mode of valuing, refers to the qualitative character of a particular way of experiencing as mediated by a given emotion or attitude which Locke terms the feeling-quality. This has several important implications for the general theory of value: predicating a value to a subject depends on the feeling-quality associated with it; values are immediately recognized through an apprehension of their emotional quality; value-predicates are determined by the affective and volitional influence of the feeling-quality; and the imperatives of a given value are given immediately once the primary feeling-quality has been established.
Locke claims that there is a necessary connection between the feeling-quality and the value-mode with the former determining the later. The value-mode is normally established as the value is being apprehended. If this were not the case, the value-mode would be indeterminate even while its immediate quality is being felt. The basic categories of value are not rational: one cannot simply reason one's way to an understanding of them. In developing and articulating his axiology, Locke looks for the categories of value in the actual valuations of human beings. Rather than predetermining the categories of valuation and attempting to cram experiences of values into them, his theory begins with our concrete valuations and determines which if any features they have in common. It is then on the basis of the commonalities observed to obtain between particular experiences of values that they are classed together as members of the same class. Locke writes,
[f]lesh and blood values may not be as universal or objective as logical truth or schematized judgments, but they are not thereby deprived of some relative objectivity and universality of their own. The basic qualities of values…pertain to psychological categories. They are not grounded in types of realms of value, but are rooted in modes or kinds of valuing. (VI 38)
Locke is aware that it is not easy to demonstrate that the fundamental identity and unity of a value-mode depends on a feeling-quality. It may be that the position thus far articulated is merely hypothetical and speculative and requires an experimental methodology to prove it. Locke notes that the main objections to the position have been addresses by developments in the Gestalt psychology insofar as it has established an empirical basis for a comprehensive perceptual scheme functioning in recognition, comparison and choice. Further circumstantial evidence is offered for the position by the phenomenon of transvaluation (seesection 2.3below).
2.2 A Functional View of Values
On Locke's view, though the value-mode is determined immediately by the affective character of the value, this is not the final determination of the value. Even after the value-mode has been ascertained, the legitimacy of the value may still be in question, its place in the overall value scheme may be unclear, and particular aspects of the context of valuation may be uncertain. This leads Locke to conclude that the primary normative character of value norms is best sought in their functional role as stereotypes of feeling attitudes and as habitual impulses toward certain choices of actions. This would make them culturally specific, as well as temporally and geographically contingent as values can only be habituated and function with any degree of reliability in specific contexts. Moreover, as in the case of apprehending value-modes, the functionality of a given value is to be discovered experientially; rather than, postulateda priori. Values, then, would only become absolutes—should they become absolute at all—because reason and judgment secondarily re-enforce them as such. In their immediate character and quality values are affective, but they are further mediated by reason and judgment. Value predication depends on reason and judgment; but the predicates themselves are determined by the modal quality of the value. So, the judgment that an object is beautiful or ugly involves reason and judgment, but that the object is experienced as aesthetic depends on its affective apprehension; its being experienced aesthetically.