Herder’s Impact on Du Bois’ Conception of Bildung

1 Introduction

Many have noticed the uncanny similarity between the language of the author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the theorist of Volksgeist, J. G. Herder (1744–1803). Such resemblances have led various scholars to postulate Herder’s influence on W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963).^[1] Nevertheless, discussions of the role of German philosophy in Du Bois’ thought center principally on the better-known Hegel, mentioning Herder largely in speculative, one-off remarks. Thus, it has not yet been demonstrated how, or if, Herder could have influenced Du Bois; nor has the potential impact of this influence on our understanding of Du Bois’ work been probed.

In this article, I argue that Herder’s ideas profoundly informed Du Bois’ conceptions of human selves and cultures. This impression on Du Bois’ philosophical anthropology and philosophy of culture crystalizes around the over-stretched yet potent concept of Bildung. This concept – generally translated into the English terms ‘development,’ ‘culture,’ ‘education,’ or ‘formation’ – was distinctively developed and popularized by Herder in the late eighteenth-century.

At the time Herder began writing, Bildung narrowly represented the cultivation of an individual’s capacities. He introduced three innovations to this concept. First, he dramatically widened its scope by applying it equally to the development of cultures and humanity as such. In this sense, Bildung indicates the end of a process of development by which all individuals and cultures could be assessed. Second, by applying Bildung to all human collectives, Herder pushed the concept toward our contemporary anthropological concept of culture, which describes the distinctive way of life of a human collective in non-normative terms.^[2] Third, convinced that each human group had a distinctive vision of the good, Herder used the term Bildung to articulate the pluralist claim that all cultures have a unique way of life the distinctive value of which ought to be cultivated by its members and respected by others. In this regard, he provided the concept with a new normative dimension.

As we shall see, the two normative senses of Bildung – conceived as the universal end of human development and as the distinctive value of diverse cultures – live uneasily side by side. I will argue that both registers found their way a century later into Du Bois’ conception of culture, development, civilization, and education. Moreover, I will argue that the famous inconsistencies of his approach to the turn-of-the-century ‘Negro Problem’ can at least in part be attributed to the contradictions of this inheritance.^[3]

In what follows, I begin with an analysis of the various senses and modifications of Herder’s conception of Bildung (§ 2) before providing a historical account of how this conception may have reached Du Bois (§ 3). I then assess the philosophical content of this influence by examining Herder and Du Bois’ conceptions of human individuals (§ 4) and cultures (§ 5). I conclude by demonstrating the consequences of Herder’s influence on Du Bois’ early approach to the ‘Negro Problem’ (§ 6).

2 Herder’s Concept of Bildung

The various senses of Bildung mentioned above are all present in Herder’s most influential work, the Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) (henceforth Ideas). On a descriptive level, he used the term – alongside cognates like Nationalbildung (national formation), Kultur (culture), Denkart (mentality), Nationalcharakter (national character), and Lebensart (way of life) – to signify the distinctive form of life, beliefs, practices, and conventions of a people (Volk or Nation) or, in fewer instances, of an individual. For simplicity, I will henceforth refer to this form of Bildung as ‘culture.’

Our focus, however, is primarily on the normative senses of Herder’s conception. The first, Bildung 1 (B1), represents the cultivation of human capacities in view of an end that is considered a normative ideal. Herder’s innovation consisted in extending this sense of Bildung beyond human individuals to human groups and the development of the human species as such.^[4] He thereby contributed to the growing late eighteenth-century European trend of conceiving “the synchronic dispersal of cultural levels demonstrated by the travel literature [as mirroring] faithfully the diachronic evolution of human cultural levels.”^[5] Accordingly, he presented each human epoch and culture as inhabiting some stage of development between childhood, maturity, and old age. He writes, for instance, that “[t]here are nations (Nationen) in the infancy, youth, manhood, and senility of the species.”^[6] He further notes that cultures are located on higher and lower “stage[s] of development (Stufe der Ausbildung).”^[7] This view I will call cultural evolutionism.^[8]

What distinguishes B1 from the anthropological sense of culture is that it is not a natural attribute but a trait which one must acquire, and one which can be obtained in various degrees. B1 is explicitly normative in the sense that its end is considered a good for all human individuals or groups. As such, it serves as a universal standard which allows for a ranking of individuals and cultures. When the contemporary English speaker claims that certain individuals or groups are ‘cultured’ or ‘civilized,’ this sense is invoked.

Herder’s second innovation consisted in the introduction of another normative sense of Bildung, one with a pluralist thrust. Bildung 2 (B2) represents the autonomous development of an agent’s distinctive capacities as a normative ideal. As in the case of B1, Herder applied this ideal to both human individuals and cultures. Unlike B1, however, B2 postulates that each individual and culture holds, at least potentially, something of distinctive value which they ought to cultivate. He often expressed this in terms of distinct cultural ‘gifts.’ Herder thus writes that “every individual human being carries within himself […] the symmetry for which he was made and which he himself must bring to completion (sich selbst ausbilden soll),” and he immediately applies this claim to cultures, noting that “each [nation] carries within itself the symmetry of its perfection, incommensurable with that of others.”^[9] In this regard, Herder’s conception of Bildung entails that each human being and culture must develop themselves after their own, incommensurable form of perfection, and that doing so will enrich the lives of other individuals and cultures. This view, when applied to cultures in particular, I will call cultural pluralism.

The table below specifies how each sense of Bildung functions when modified by application to individuals or cultures:

3 From Herder to Du Bois

I contend that both of Herder’s normative senses of Bildung found their way in to Du Bois’ philosophical anthropology and philosophy of culture. In this section, I sketch three routes for this transmission: Africana, Anglo-American, and German. I intend here to indicate why Du Bois’ conception of culture can be reasonably thought to have been derived from Herder’s conception of Bildung, however mediated by other theorists.

Before turning to Du Bois, however, I should note something regarding Herder’s legacy in general, which helps explain why he is often not mentioned by name despite his enormous influence. As Goethe reports, Herder’s ideas were quickly assimilated into German thought while his name was actively disremembered.^[10] During his lifetime, the then-dominant intellectual powerhouses and their followers – Kant, Goethe, and consequently, the German Idealists and Romantics – suppressed his influence for both theoretical and personal reasons.^[11] After his death, during the period of 1871–1940, Herder’s reception was further muddied by German nationalists, who presented him in a racist, anti-cosmopolitan light. This unsavory image limited the explicit acknowledgment of his influence throughout the twentieth century, especially post-World War II.^[12] In effect, the father of German historicism became a persona non grata.^[13] Nevertheless, Herder’s influence was sure and strong enough to be traced in W. E. B. Du Bois more than a century later – and, as we will see, it would get him into trouble as well.

Perhaps surprisingly, Du Bois’ first encountered Herderian thought through Africana rather than European theory. A number of Black theorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries re-invigorated Herder’s distinctive idea that every culture – African included – has a unique gift to offer the world.^[14] The Caribbean-cum-Liberian man-of-letters and emigrationist Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) represents the vanguard here. Clearly echoing Herder, Blyden writes that “the idiosyncrasy of a people is a sacred gift, given for some Divine purpose, to be sacredly cherished and patiently unfolded.”^[15] This statement, in fact, is a quotation from a sermon of the American transcendentalist Theodore Parker.^[16] Parker, it is well-known, read Herder’s works and popularized his approach to diversity.^[17] Indeed, each time Blyden speaks of racial or national ‘gifts,’ ‘genius,’ or ‘personality,’ he refers to Anglophone writers who are known to have been influenced by Herder, like Stopford Brooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.^[18]

In 1891, Du Bois took Blyden’s influential essay collection Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887) out of the Harvard library. In these essays, Blyden made the cultural gift argument three times over. We can surmise that this work made quite an impression on Du Bois, as he went on to dub Blyden “the foremost scholar of the race” in print and to adopt his language of the Negro gift.^[19]

Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), who conversed with Blyden and influenced Du Bois, also promoted this position.^[20] She writes in 1892 that, “[e]ach race has its badge, its exponent, its message, branded in its forehead by the great Master’s hand which is its own particular keynote, and its contribution to the harmony of the nations.”^[21] This Herderian idea could have stemmed not only from Blyden but also from the French historian François Guizot (1787–1874), whose tremendously influential General History of Civilization in Europe (1838) she often cites.^[22] Cooper’s work, too, is a possible source of the Herderian influence on Du Bois, as some of his claims about Black culture that echo Herder’s ideas most clearly seem to be paraphrases of Cooper’s work.^[23]

A more diffused Herderian reception also reached Du Bois through the mainstream of turn-of-the-century Anglo-American letters. Generally, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent a high-water mark of German influence on American literature and philosophy. Alongside Kant, German Idealism, and Romanticism, Herder reverberated throughout American thought through figures such as Walt Whitman as well as the aforementioned Emerson, Guizot, and Parker.^[24] Emerson, in turn, was particularly influential for Du Bois and is even considered a potential source of Du Bois’ famous ‘double-consciousness.’^[25]

In this context, it was foremost the English essayist, Thomas Carlyle, who introduced Du Bois to Herder’s conception of Bildung as an ideal applicable to individuals. If there were only one lesson to be gleaned from Du Bois’ Harvard library list, it is that he was thoroughly obsessed with the conservative satirist.^[26] Part of this draw must have been Carlyle’s ethical vision – he saw each individual as having a distinctive, God-given mission which they are tasked to fulfil by self-realization and work.^[27] Carlyle self-consciously and avowedly borrowed this idea from Goethe, just as Goethe had done from Herder.

Du Bois was also directly indebted to Goethe. Indeed, the latter is the most notable student of Herder with whom Du Bois deeply communed. The Frankfurt polymath attested to Herder’s significance for his intellectual formation in his autobiography.^[28] In particular, Herder’s appreciation for the distinctive value of each culture had influenced Goethe’s fascination with national folk literature as well as his ethical vision of the self.^[29] The latter is brought to life in his monumental Bildungsromane, Faust (1808, 1832) and Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), two of Du Bois’ favorite novels.^[30] Through Carlyle and Goethe, then, the young Du Bois absorbed the Herderian ideal of life as individual and collective self-realization.

As mentioned earlier, much has been made of the possibility of Hegel’s influence on Du Bois, particularly the latter’s philosophy of history and theory of double-consciousness.^[31] If such accounts hold up, and to the extent that they do, Hegel should also be considered a source of Herderian influence on Du Bois. This is because the effect of Herder on Hegel is most evident precisely in the latter’s philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history.^[32]

In any case, a century later, Du Bois’ lecturers at the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt University) demonstrated the continuing significance of Herder for German thought.^[33] The courses on political economics he took with Gustav von Schmoller and Adolf Wagner carried the Herderian legacy of German Historicism, with its characteristic emphasis on the sociality of the self, the historical evolution of societies, and the psychological unity of a culture.^[34] Indeed, I will argue below that Du Bois drew from these courses a Herderian-infused conception of human collectives, which he expressed in his famous definition of a race in “The Conservation of Races” (1897).

Herder was explicitly studied in two of Du Bois’s courses at Berlin. Heinrich Von Treitschke’s (1834–1896) “Politik” course (Winter 1892–93) adopted and endorsed him as “an unsurpassed stimulator of thought” who “taught the German nation to think historically.”^[35] Von Treitschke openly and regrettably fused Herder’s conception of Volk to his own vision of politics as national self-assertion.^[36]

But Du Bois received his most extensive introduction to Herder’s ideas in Dilthey’s “Geschichte der Philosophie” course (Summer 1893), where he encountered a progressive version of Herder’s legacy.^[37] At the very outset of both his outline for that course and his monumental Introduction to the Human Sciences, Volume 1 (1883) (which Du Bois took out from the Berlin library in 1894) Dilthey argued that Herder began a transformation in German thought toward historical particularity and presented his own philosophical project as an attempt to provide this intuition with a firm philosophical foundation.^[38] Elsewhere, Dilthey presented Herder’s essential innovation as follows:

Herder’s perception of the intrinsic worth of every historical stage and each form of life in every region of the earth, of the realization of happiness and perfection under the most various conditions, of the spontaneously developed (bildenden) forces of human nature, drove him beyond the limitations of the eighteenth century.^[39]

It is not hard to imagine that the young Du Bois, Harvard MA in history freshly in hand, would have been intrigued.

The foregoing account of Du Bois’ intellectual formation provides substantial historical evidence that he had been introduced to Herderian thought through Africana, Anglo-American, and German sources. I would like to close this argument by pointing to possible textual evidence for direct influence. One of the most famous phrases of Souls is uncannily similar to the closing lines of the Book 15 of the Ideas.^[40] There, Herder illustrates the significance of historical study for an individual’s Bildung by means of the following allegory:

[H]istory allows us to enter these delightful groves, where we may converse and communicate with the learned and righteous of so many past ages. Here Plato stands before me; there I hear the affable Socrates and share in the fate that will ultimately befall him. When Mark Anthony speaks to his heart in private, he speaks to mine also; and poor Epictetus gives commands, mightier than a king. The tormented Tully, the unfortunate Boethius confide to me the circumstances of their lives, their afflictions, and their consolations.^[41]

Du Bois invokes an analogous image as the final rhetorical punch of his argument for the value of higher education:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.^[42]

The characters are different, but in both cases we find the image of communion with the learned of all ages as the conclusion of an argument for the importance of individual cultivation. More precisely, Du Bois seems to re-employ Herder’s persuasive image of the value of history in the production of a certain type of development to demonstrate the importance of liberal education for African Americans. This suggests that Du Bois latched onto Herder precisely where the latter illustrated his conception of individual Bildung.

Regardless of whether the above is a reference or mere coincidence, I have provided here three historical pathways by which Du Bois was certainly exposed to Herder’s ideal of Bildung. In the following section, I will demonstrate that this ideal became central to Du Bois’ normative conception of the self and culture.

4 The Bildung of Individuals

Let me begin with an analysis of how Herder’s two normative conceptions of Bildung (B1 and B2) inform Du Bois’ approach to the self. Highlighting this connection is important, as no extant literature on the two has looked beyond their conception of culture.

Bildung 1, recall, represents the cultivation of human capacities in view of an end that is considered a normative ideal. When applied to individuals, B1 denotes the view that human capacities require cultivation for their perfection. By positing a normative end of human development, B1 allows for judgements that distinguish individuals in terms of their degree of cultivation. Herder writes, for instance, that “[a] human soul is an individual in the realm of minds: it senses in accordance with an individual formation (Bildung), and thinks in accordance with the strength of its mental organs. Through education these have received a certain, either good or negative, direction of their own.”^[43]

Du Bois’ commitment to B1 is clear in his project of racial uplift by a salvific class of race leaders. He envisions a cadre of “cultured men” who will cultivate the Negro masses in their image.^[44] The fact that Du Bois shares B1 as applied to individuals, which is the meaning of Bildung that became common currency during the Enlightenment, is not remarkable.^[45] What is noteworthy, however, is that Du Bois took over B2, that is, Herder’s idea of the self-realization of an individual’s distinctive capacities. B2 can be analyzed into the following components: an emphasis (i) on the self-directed nature of the development of the self, (ii) on the individuality of the self which emerges from this development, (iii) on the harmony of the cognitive and affective human capacities that result from this development, (iv) and on the importance of language in this process.^[46]

Herder’s commitment to B2 is an outgrowth of his conception of individuality. Drawing on Leibniz’s monadology, he conceives of each individual as unique and as containing a particular point of view:

Whoever has noticed what an inexpressible thing one is dealing with in the distinctive individuality of a human being – to be able to say what distinguishes him in a distinguishing way, how he feels and lives, how different and idiosyncratic all things become for him once his eye sees them, his soul measures them, his heart feels them.^[47]

From the conception of each individual as having a unique vantage on the world, it is a short step to the notion that each of them has something worth cultivating and protecting. The development of this perspective is epistemically valuable to others, he argued, since it provides them an external standpoint through which they can assess their own worldview. This more specific notion of Bildung was massively influential and further developed by the main representatives of German Idealism and Romanticism, including Goethe.^[48]

Through Goethe and the other authors discussed above, this Bildung ideal became central to Du Bois’ ethical vision of the self. As Paul Taylor observes, a thoroughgoing “perfectionism” – the cognate ethical ideal of “the perfection of character, or the complete and harmonious development of personal capacities” – is at the core of Du Bois’ life-long normative framework.^[49] As the young Du Bois puts it in his Berlin journal: “What is life but life, after all? Its end is the greatest and fullest self.”^[50]

Indeed, Herder’s B2 provides an interpretive key to one of the most important arguments of Souls. Du Bois’ argument for the value of liberal education in this work hinges on his claim that it sustains a particular form of human development:

[There] must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate and labor in its own way […]. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds […] [and] they shall again. Herein the longing of black men must have respect […] [that they] may give the world new points of view.^[51]

Here, Du Bois articulates an ideal – “higher individualism” – which brings together many of the key elements of Herder’s B2 as analyzed above. He envisions the autonomous development of an individual’s capacities which goes over and above ‘low’ individualism by its contribution to others. Thus, such individuals have “inspired and guided worlds.” This notion of development emphasizes individual uniqueness, entailing that the thus cultivated soul will “love and hate and labor in its own way.” Finally, the value of this form of self-realization stems from epistemic considerations, since these individuals “give the world new points of view.” In other words, Herder’s B2 is at the core of Du Bois’ conception of education qua individual development.

5 The Bildung of Cultures

When one characterizes humans as beings whose essential capacities require development, one is immediately led to the social and cultural contexts in which this development is facilitated or inhibited. Unsurprisingly, therefore, both Herder and Du Bois emphasize the sociality of the self. In this section, I will show the continuity between Herder and Du Bois’ concern with individual Bildung and cultural Bildung, given their philosophical anthropologies (§ 5.1). I will then demonstrate that they share a descriptive conception of cultures as collective agents striving to realize shared values (§ 5.2), and argue that they apply the two normative senses of Bildung to this conception (§ 5.3). Finally, I will contend that, when applied to cultures, there is conflict between these two ideals (§ 5.4).

6 The ‘Negro Problem’ as a Bildung Problem

It is curious that the early Du Bois is both berated as a Eurocentric elitist and celebrated as the vanguard of twentieth-century Black cultural nationalism.^[119] On the one hand, his infamous uplift program of the ‘Talented Tenth’ calls for a cadre of exceptional men, who “have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture,” to uplift the ‘backward’ Black masses.^[120] On the other hand, the closing chapter of Souls discerns a salvatory message to humanity implicit in the folk-culture of African Americans, and “Conservation” bids for the development of their distinct race ideals as a gift to human civilization. The foregoing gives us reason to think of these diverse elements as tied together in Du Bois’ conceptual framework itself. That is, to explain this contradiction in his approach to the ‘Negro Problem’ we need to look no further than his conception of culture, development, and civilization – in other words, his Bildung – itself.

Du Bois’ essay “The Study of Negro Problems” (1897) provides us with the clearest statement of his early theoretical account of the state of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Bildung 1 and 2 are evident, I argue, in his definition of a social problem as “the failure of an organized social group to realize its group ideals, through the inability to adapt a certain desired line of action to given conditions of life.”^[121] Here he expressly defines a social problem as the failure of a culture to realize B2, that is, to develop and express its “its group ideals,” and, thus, as the failure to contribute to human civilization.

Further, by explaining this failure as “the inability to adapt a certain desired line of action to given conditions of life,” Du Bois also draws B1 into his conception of a social problem. This is because, in this context, the “given conditions” to which Negroes fail to adapt is “the level of American civilization.”^[122] Their lack of cultural development is assumed to be a primary cause of their social problem. As he puts it a few pages later, “Negroes do not share the full national life because as a mass they have not reached a sufficiently high grade of culture.”^[123] Thus, Du Bois’ early conception of a social problem is infused with both strains of the Herderian ideal of Bildung. On his account, a social problem is constituted by the failure of a group to realize their distinct ideals (B2), and this is caused by a lack of adjustment to civilization (B1).

But Du Bois adds an element to his explanation of the ‘Negro Problem’ that distinguishes it from social problems in general, namely, the prejudice of White Americans. This “conviction varying in intensity, but always widespread–that people of Negro blood should not be admitted into the group life of the nation no matter what their condition might be,” Du Bois writes, “gives rise to economic problems, to educational problems, and nice questions of social morality.”^[124] Thus, he qualifies his assessment of the breakdown of collective Negro Bildung by adding that it is at least partially caused by the hostility of the surrounding American world.

Du Bois’ account of the effects of this prejudice reveal that his conception of the ‘Negro Problem’ also involves the ideal of Bildung applied to the level of individuals. The result of prejudice he most bemoans is its frustration of the development of Negro individuals:

[Prejudice] makes it more difficult for black men to earn a living or spend their earnings as they will; it gives them poorer school facilities and restricted contact with cultured classes; and it becomes, throughout the land, a cause and an excuse for discontent, lawlessness, laziness and injustice.^[125]

As a consequence of the sociality of the self, we have seen, the Bildung of individuals always depends on the existence of the right type of social-cultural context. Du Bois’ primary critique of America, then, is that by “[looking] on in amused contempt and pity,” by excluding them from economic opportunities, education, and civic rights, America has asphyxiated the capacity of Negroes to cultivate themselves both individually and collectively.^[126]

Just as the absence and impediment of Bildung constitutes the ‘Negro Problem,’ Du Bois sees its restoration as the solution. His emphasis on education as the cure for America’s social ills is consistent with his deeper conception of human cultivation. Thus, he defines education in the broadest of terms as the medium of social development, claiming that “education is that whole system of human training within and without school house walls, which molds and develops men.”^[127] For Du Bois, then, developing a small class of cultivated leaders principally through education – an “aristocracy of talent and character” – is the way to lead the rest of the race upward.^[128] This developmental approach, central to the infamous ‘Talented Tenth’ strategy, is his answer to the ‘Negro Problem.’

Naturally, the tension between B1 and B2 in Du Bois’ conception of Bildung haunt this solution. On the one hand, the ‘Talented Tenth’ program assumes that there is a determinate civilization or culture that can be assimilated by these prospective race leaders. This ideal culture, of course, is reflected in the best of European society. These leaders, recall, “have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture.”^[129] And they must be trained, like him, in the best “colleges and universities of the land.”^[130] On the other hand, Du Bois considers it the mission of the ‘Tenth’ to help their race realize their distinctive “race ideals,” and he notes that “each soul and race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum.”^[131]

The co-presence of these two ideals of Bildung poses questions that are difficult to solve at both a practical and theoretical level. Are the Negro ideals to come from Europe (not Negro), Africa (too savage), or the African American masses (backward)? How does an uncultured group begin to develop its unique message if they must be trained by external resources and in the mold of another culture? How can such leaders mediate between these two spiritual communities without dissociative disorder? These tensions stand at the core of Du Bois’ solution to the ‘Negro Problem,’ and its burden bears on both prospective race leaders in the form of double-consciousness and on us who follow in his wake.^[132]

7 Conclusion

While it has often been noticed that Du Bois’ conception of race is reminiscent of Herder’s Volk conception, this article confirms this connection by presenting the first detailed historical account of how this transmission may have taken place. In the process, I have uncovered a rich connection between Du Bois and Herder’s deeper conception of human development at both a descriptive and normative level, and as applied to both individuals and cultures.

As regards the descriptive level, I have shown that Du Bois’ intellectual formation was marked by a range of thinkers who were but one step removed from the father of German Historicism. He was enlivened by Herder’s thesis, which he encountered primarily through Africana thinkers Edward Blyden and Anna Julia Cooper, that each culture has a distinct “gift” for humanity. Through his literary fascination with Goethe and his Anglophone heir Carlyle, he came to view life as a quest for individual self-realization. In Berlin, he encountered Herder’s ideas in the courses of Treitschke and Dilthey, and he may have reworked Schmoller’s Herderian conception of a Volk in his famous early definition of a race.

As regards the normative level, I have argued that Herder and Du Bois’ conception Bildung is beset by an internal contradiction between cultural evolutionism and cultural pluralism. This tension is produced by the fact that both conceived of the end of universal human development in terms overdetermined by Eurocentrism.

If Souls, in the words of Du Bois’ foremost biographer, “redefined the terms of a three-hundred-year interaction between black and white people and influenced the cultural and political psychology of peoples of African descent,” then the foregoing account provides reason to think that the “new terms” introduced by Du Bois inherited the strains of a conception of culture, development, and civilization traceable to Herder.^[133] If what I have argued is correct, then Du Bois’ landmark approach to the ‘Negro Problem’ brought the tensions of Herder’s Bildung conception into the very heart of twentieth-century Africana thought.