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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.1 (2008) 035–058] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.035 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

W.E.B. Dubois and Socratic Questioning 1

THOMAS HIBBS

Baylor University

Taking its cue from W.E.B. DuBois’s reference to Socrates in The Souls of 
Black Folk, the essay investigates points of contact and contrast between 
DuBois and Socrates on the relationship of philosophy to politics and par-
ticularly on the nature of liberal education. The hope is that the compari-
son will contribute in some small measure to a re-assessment of these two 
thinkers and of the nature of education. 

“Good sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the 
greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed 
of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as 
possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or 
the best possible state of your soul?” (Plato, Apology of Socrates 29e)2

In the midst of his Apology, Socrates engages in a critique of the cor-
rupt customs and practices of the Athenians, customs that subvert the 
natural hierarchy of body and soul, base and noble, vice and virtue. As 
Socrates sees it, Athenian culture embodies a systematic subversion of 
the true aims of human life. This of course is one of the lessons of the 
Allegory of the Cave, according to which individuals in the city are 
trapped, with their attention fixated on immediate appearances that, 
in their ignorance, they take for real things. 

If one were to substitute “American” for “Athenian,” then these words 
could have been spoken by the African-American author, W.E.B. 
DuBois, who appeals to Socrates in his greatest work, The Souls of Black 
Folk (DuBois 1989). One of the arguments running through Souls is 
that post-slavery, reconstruction America is increasingly falling prey to 
Mammon, to the deification of money, at the expense of higher aims. 
Northern capitalism risks a new kind of slavery, a new physiognomy of 
servitude, to borrow Tocqueville’s arresting phrase, a servitude in which 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.035


36 W.E.B. Dubois and Socratic Questioning

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

humanity is reduced to the functional status of producer and consumer. 
DuBois’s great conflict with Booker T. Washington is in part a dispute 
over the extent to which such a social, economic and political state ought 
to be accommodated by African-Americans.3 At least in Souls, DuBois  
focuses on what he takes to be Washington’s willingness to accom-
modate the exclusion of blacks from higher, liberal education, the sort 
of education whose goal is “not to earn meat, but to know the end 
and aim of that life which meat nourishes” (1989, 58). Moreover, the 
theme of images, concerning the nature and capacities of blacks as well 
as the true aim of human life, parading as objective truths pervades 
Souls. These are the “shades of the prison-house” (2).

Comparisons, even of thinkers from the same period and who write 
in response to one another, are always difficult and risky. When the 
thinkers are of entirely different epochs, have quite divergent goals 
in mind, adopt different genres, and address distinct audiences, the 
risks are even greater. Of course, there are many obvious differences  
between Socrates and DuBois. The latter is preoccupied with an issue 
that never surfaces as a distinct theme in Socrates or Plato, the issue 
of race. As DuBois famously and prophetically put it, the “problem 
of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (1989, 29). 
One might be inclined to see Socrates and Plato, along with much 
of classical civilization, as favoring what DuBois sees as the greatest 
evil of his time, slavery. Yet, DuBois himself invites such comparisons 
with numerous classical authors and figures, as he refers directly and 
favorably to Socrates, St. Francis, Shakespeare and others. DuBois’s 
Souls has near masterpiece status in part because he so successfully  
interweaves the contemporary, American dilemma of race with many 
of the great debates of Western civilization. DuBois appeals to Socrates 
and Francis early in Souls, in his first discussion and critique of Booker 
T. Washington, a critique that takes aim at Washington’s willingness 
to endure the exclusion of black youth from higher education. Accus-
ing Washington of succumbing to “triumphant commercialism” (31), 
DuBois argues that Washington’s exclusive emphasis on practical edu-
cation only reinforces the prejudices of the white culture against the  
intellects of young blacks. It also reinforces a corrupt self-understand-
ing in black Americans. 



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In much of the dispute between Washington and DuBois, the two 
men simply argue past one another. So, as we shall see, DuBois nev-
er argues against the importance of practical education in a trade for 
blacks, nor does Washington deny the importance of liberal educa-
tion, in its proper place. In Up From Slavery, Washington observes that  
offering a literary training in Greek and Latin letters to those who 
must live in a world for which they do not have the practical skills 
for a trade or homemaking or even cleanliness risks rendering blacks 
ill-equipped to meet the demands of freedom. Whatever his reserva-
tions about liberal education, he not at all interested in promoting 
a “triumphant commercialism.” Instead, he wishes to foster a love of 
“labour, not alone for its financial value, but labour’s own sake and for 
the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something 
which the world wants done brings” (Washington 1996, 38).

Continuing his critique of Washington, DuBois writes that, from 
Washington’s perspective, “the picture of a lone black boy pouring over 
a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon 
seemed to him the acme of absurdities.”  To this attitude, DuBois pro-
poses the query, “One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi 
would say to this” (1989, 31). The appeal to Socrates and Francis is a 
bit jarring; it seems unlikely that these are authorities shared by those 
in Washington’s camp; nor, given the sad state of black education, 
would these be authorities readily recognized by the great masses in his 
race; finally, among the white races, at least among the most educated, 
these are names known but systematically excluded from any practical 
impact on social or economic life in America.4  

The last point—the way in which America has failed to live up to 
the ideals animating Western civilization—is one that DuBois seems 
intent on driving home. Thus, DuBois’s citations of traditional West-
ern authors is not a strategy aimed at ingratiating himself with white 
America; much less it is a matter of a vain display of his own erudi-
tion. Instead, it functions, initially at least, as an accusation against 
white America for having fallen short of, and for existing in a state 
contradictory to, the ideals of Western civilization. Thus does DuBois 
revive the Socratic tension between philosophy and contemporary  
mores. But Socrates and Francis have more than a polemical function in 



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DuBois’s Souls. They exemplify a sense of humanity that is increasingly 
in danger of being forgotten in modernity, by white and black alike. 
Just as Socrates reproaches the Athenian citizen “because he attaches 
little importance to the most important things and greater importance 
to inferior things” (Apology 30a) so too DuBois contrasts the “quest 
of Goodness, and Beauty, and Truth” (1989, 56) with the deification 
of bread in America. The “Gospel of work and money… overshadows 
the higher aims of life” (36). Sounding a good bit like Socrates in his 
description of the deceptions of life within the cave or the city, DuBois 
curtly states, “the price of culture is a lie” (144). 

In what follows we will examine a series of Socratic themes in the 
writings of  W.E.B. DuBois: the paradoxical status of images, poten-
tially enslaving and liberating, and the nature of liberal education; 
the appeal to nature as a basis for a critique of corrupt customs; and 
DuBois’s response to the charge of elitism, a charge often leveled against 
Socrates as well. Such comparisons are commonly thought to be use-
ful for the way they mutually illumine distinct authors; in this case, 
the comparison requires a re-thinking of common assumptions about 
each thinker and about the issues that connect and divide them.5 As 
Charles Taylor has noted in his discussion of multiculturalism and the 
expansion of the canon in university curricula, the attempt to judge 
what is of value in an encounter with the “strange and unfamiliar” will 
likely entail openness to “strange and unfamiliar” criteria of value. The 
task is to develop “new vocabularies of comparison” that enable us to 
reach “judgments through transforming our standards” (Taylor 1994, 
67). But of course any serious study of the so-called Western canon of 
authors must begin with the assumption that these authors are also in 
crucial respects “strange and unfamiliar” to us. The current explora-
tion, merely a beginning in an important conversation between Socra-
tes and DuBois, should aid us in seeing both authors anew.

The Tyranny of Images and the Nature of Liberal Education

DuBois’s peculiar version of the alienation and ignorance of the Cave 
is connected to the central thesis of Souls, concerning the doubleness of 
the black soul. The world of white America “yields” the black man “no 
true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the eyes 



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of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on 
in amused contempt and pity” (DuBois 1989, 3).6  In Plato’s Cave, the 
puppeteers (poets and politicians) carry their constructs back and forth 
in front of the fire in order to cast images before the eyes of bound citi-
zens. In Souls, the images are formed within the minds and passions of 
black souls, inserted by the legacy of slavery and the continued practice 
of prejudice through a variety of legal and social customs. The images 
of racial inferiority instill in members of both the white and the black 
race the sub-human character of the black race. Thus, blacks are, as 
Socrates describes the occupants of the cave, “compelled to hold their 
heads unmoved through life” (Plato Republic 515b). America takes as 
an unimpeachable reality the constructed image of a slavish black race. 
As is the case in the Republic, so too in Souls, the first step in education, 
the first movement toward freedom from the enslavement of the cave, 
is to recognize an image as an image, or at least to recognize the conflict 
within the images. This is what DuBois calls “double-consciousness” 
or “twoness.” DuBois observes: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two 
thoughts; two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark 
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” 
(1989, 3). 

The very notion of doubleness or twoness suggests that human nature 
itself resists reduction to a sub-human uniformity, to a unity indicative 
of poverty of spirit rather than a higher integration of complex parts. 
The experience of internal conflict in the phenomenon of twoness is the 
basis of DuBois’s suggestion that the true philosopher or prophet of the 
human condition in America is not the purportedly free and superior 
white but the subordinate and allegedly inferior black. The latter has a 
better chance of recognizing the doubleness and the deception involved 
in the public ideology. Born within the Veil, the Negro is “gifted with 
second sight in this American world” (1989, 3). As Socrates insists in 
a number of places, the Athenians give no thought to true education, 
to the state of the soul, to the consideration of what DuBois calls the 
“riddle of existence” (1989, 58). In response to the statement of the 
god at Delphi, Socrates asks, “Whatever does the god mean?  What is 
his riddle?” (Apology 21b). This is precisely the language DuBois uses 
in his eloquent description of the nature of true education.



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The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before 
the Pharoahs, that was taught in groves by Plato, that formed the triv-
ium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedman’s sons 
by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its 
methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of 
scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal—
not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat 
nourishes. (1989, 58)

Calling to mind Socrates’ persistent comparison of the true educator to 
the experts who train individuals in crafts, DuBois writes, 

The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor 
a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, 
broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money getting, 
not apples of gold (61).

Just as for Plato, so too for DuBois, Socratic questioning of the proper 
ends of human life puts the inquirer at odds with conventional as-
sumptions, particularly with customary religious practice.7  DuBois 
contrasts directly the South’s desperate need for an institution of high-
er education with its current possession of religion, which he describes 
as “earnest, bigoted: religion that on both sides of the Veil often omits 
the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments but substitutes a dozen 
supplementary ones” (59). Contradictions in the inherited stories and 
practices of the culture are, for DuBois just as for Socrates, the starting 
point in a dialectic aimed at liberating the intellect to formulate the 
questions concerning the riddle of existence.8

It is important to see that DuBois is not indifferent to pragmatic 
needs and concerns. The goal of education, he insists, is “not to inspire 
human hearts with a vision of the true, the good, and beautiful without 
pointing the practical way of realizing some of these dreams here and 
now in their own lives.”  Education, he argues, must balance ideals with 
the “greater need of specialization and technique” (1971, 301). The vast 
majority of black as of white Americans will devote themselves to tech-
nical education, not liberal education. For all of his emphasis on the 
intrinsic desirability of liberal education, he does not hesitate to speak 
of its practical, political and social, ramifications. One of his chief argu-
ments against Washington’s willingness to limit education to the rudi-



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ments of knowledge followed by specialized training in a trade is that it 
leaves out of account the question who will teach the teachers, who will 
teach them how to understand their own work in relation to the whole 
of learning. Another argument concerns education as preparation for 
virtuous citizenship. “No secure civilization can be built in the south 
with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat” (1989, 73).

For all his willingness to promote the practical ends of education, 
DuBois insists that we not lose sight of the one true aim of educa-
tion, the end it alone can fulfill, the formulation of questions about 
the highest things, the ultimate mysteries of human life. Thus, he is 
adamantly opposed to treating education merely as a means, to an 
instrumental conception of the human intellect. Indeed, he stands 
in a long tradition of defenders of liberal education. The pursuit of 
knowledge is proper to human beings as human beings. Knowledge 
is intrinsically desirable; the anti-instrumental conception of knowl-
edge and education does not mean that the knowledge is useless in the  
pejorative sense. Indeed, DuBois’s statement that education investi-
gates the “end and aim of that life which meat nourishes” indicates that 
it is eminently practical. It informs how we ought to live; it is, in Pla-
tonic language, an inquiry into the good. Or, in the language DuBois 
himself uses to describe St. Francis’s account of education, it helps to 
satisfy the greater wants of the human soul, for “human service and 
sympathy,” for “knowledge and inspiration,” for “hope and truth and 
beauty” (DuBois 1971, 295). 

When DuBois describes education as a “breadth and broadening of 
human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture” or as the “organ of 
that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of 
life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization” (1989, 59) 
he calls to mind John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University: 

We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, 
as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by  
going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the  
mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, 
by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties 
and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual 
powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehen-



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siveness, is necessarily a matter of training….of discipline and habit. 
(Newman 1982, 114–115)

Enlargement, development, adaptation and the habituation of 
the intellect in the discernment of the integrated complexity of the  
objects of knowledge—all this is proper to the human intellect and the 
proper object of a truly liberal education. Indeed, the examination of 
education in DuBois’s works may well constitute the most eloquent 
and most probing statement on liberal education ever written by an 
American. 

DuBois’s insistence that liberal education be open to members of the 
black race involves a claim about the universality of human nature and 
the irrepressible humanity of the black race. The attempt at suppres-
sion of humanity through the denial of opportunity for true education 
will not have its desired effect. You can, he writes, “make just laborers” 
but “they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read 
the riddle of the world” (1989, 73). There is a paradox here worthy 
of Socrates. Questioning the riddle of existence is an impulse, or bet-
ter a natural propensity, that is at once latent within and obscured 
by ordinary experience and what passes for common sense. Embark-
ing on the task of philosophical questioning is, in one respect, con-
tinuous with the questions that arise within ordinary discourse about  
human life; yet, in another respect, it marks a sharp departure from the  
unreflective way of proceeding characteristic of ordinary life. Ordinary 
language and conventional mores thus exhibit the same paradoxical 
structure as does the image in Plato; if uncritically taken for what is real 
and true, they are enslaving, but if seen as pointing beyond themselves, 
they can be liberating. The natural orientation toward knowledge and 
the good needs cultivation and training for its realization.

The accusing question from the Apology, cited at the outset, the ques-
tion Socrates levels against his fellow citizens is not merely meant to be 
dismissive or negative. His appeal to their sense of grandeur or honor, 
their reputation for wisdom, and especially to their sense of shame, 
presupposes that they have the ability to recognize their departure from 
the natural order and that they are able, at least potentially, to distin-
guish higher from lower, noble from base. For Socrates’ questions and 
interrogations to be anything more than ironic mockery, they must  



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assume that the principles of the good life are at least implicitly  
operative in the practices already pursued by the Athenians. Similarly, 
DuBois is careful not to demonize white America. His goal is for both 
races to achieve a “generous acknowledgment of a common human-
ity.”9  Many of his strongest arguments appeal to the founding prin-
ciples of American democracy. His program is in “large conformity 
to the greater ideals of the American Republic….there are today no 
truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence than the American Negroes” (1989, 8). But of course that 
embrace of the ideals of America also contains an implicit accusation, 
perhaps even a threat. For, if those who founded America had grounds 
for revolution on the basis of unjust treatment by the English govern-
ment, how much more legitimate the cause of violent upheaval would 
the slaves have against the American government? 

The possibility of irrational resistance renders the attempt to reach 
consensus or agreement through reasoning problematic. It is an  
advantage of Socratic questioning, as practiced in the dialogues, and 
the dialectic of DuBois that both acknowledge the reality of volition-
al resistance. Socrates and DuBois think that the sort of education 
they promote will be painful for most citizens; the removing of the 
shackles that bind individuals and communities to irrational opinions 
is not pleasant and will be resisted to the point of violence against 
those who deliver an unwelcome message. Both thinkers encountered 
the remarkable human capacity for what Stanley Cavell calls “disown-
ing knowledge” (Cavell 2003). The task is to bring these conflicts and  
inconsistencies into the light of the day through discourse in the hope 
of engendering a kind of intellectual and moral conversion.

Nature, Convention, and Socratic Dialectic

That sort of discourse, the turning of souls that Socrates describes in 
the Republic as the focus of education, presupposes both a distinction 
between nature and convention and a complex relationship between 
the two. These themes were, not surprisingly, often part of the critique 
of the practice of slavery among African-American authors. DuBois 
would have been familiar with the dialectical relationship between  
nature and convention from Narrative of a Life of a Slave by Frederick 



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Douglass, whom DuBois calls in Souls the “greatest of American Negro 
leaders” (1989, 35). As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes in his introduction 
to Douglass’s book, the pervasive themes of the autobiography are: the 
tensions between nature and nurture, the unnaturalness of slavery, and 
especially its incompatibility with education (Douglass 1971, xiv–xv).

For Frederick Douglass as for his pupil in this matter, DuBois, the 
desire for knowledge can aid in the subversion of corrupt practices. We 
might read DuBois’s comments about education as a gloss on Doug-
lass’s autobiography. Throughout his Narrative of a Life of a Slave, 
Douglass turns repeatedly to the issue of education, access to which 
is systematically denied to slaves. When Douglass is moved from the 
Eastern Shore of Maryland to Baltimore, he encounters a woman of 
the “kindest heart and finest feelings,” the mistress of the house, who 
begins teaching him to read. But the husband abruptly terminates his 
education with the blunt statement:  

A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he 
is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world…. 
It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become  
unmanageable…. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great 
deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.

(Douglass 1971, 33) 

Douglass receives the harsh commentary as a “special revelation” concern-
ing the “white man’s power to enslave the black man.” Douglass concludes, 
“education and slavery were incompatible with one another” (38). 

As Tocqueville observed in anticipation of Douglass, a defining feature 
of slavery in the modern American South, and in striking contrast to 
slavery as practiced in the ancient world, is the refusal, on pain of grave 
penalty, to allow slaves “to be taught to read and write” (Tocqueville 
1969, 361). So contrary to nature is slavery, Douglass holds, that

to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It 
is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as pos-
sible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no 
inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; 
and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

(1971, 95) 



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In this case, a divided will, the anguish of seemingly insoluble conflict, 
is to be preferred to a simple unity that would result from the hollow-
ing out of human desire and self-understanding. 

Neither Douglass nor DuBois falls prey to the temptation to trans-
form the white race into a demonic Other, a temptation to which 
many whites and blacks have succumbed in their envisioning of the 
other race. Their refusal involves an implicit affirmation of a distinc-
tively pre-modern understanding of virtue and vice. Douglass notes 
that the woman who had abetted his education reversed course only 
after being cajoled and threatened by her husband. What inference is 
to be drawn from this?  

She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in 
mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training 
in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of 
treating me as though I were a brute. (1971, 37)

The practice of slavery frustrates the natural telos not just of the slave 
but also of the master; in this, Douglass implicitly affirms a teaching 
central to the classical ethical tradition stretching back to Plato and 
Socrates: vice harms the perpetrator, darkening his intellect, corrupting 
his experience of happiness, and blocking his access to the good. This 
thesis is central to the Apology, where Socrates tells his audience:  “If you 
kill the sort of man I say I am, you will not harm me more than your-
selves” (31d). Socrates makes an even stronger claim toward the end of 
the Apology, that a “good man cannot be harmed either in this life or 
in the next” (41d). Neither Douglass nor DuBois is committed to the 
extreme Socratic thesis that equates virtue with invulnerability to harm; 
they had too great an experience of tragedy and human deprivation to 
adopt that thesis. But they are committed to the weaker claim that vice 
harms the perpetrator, that it is in some way and to some extent its 
own punishment, and that the chief form the punishment may take is a 
kind of moral blindness that leaves the vicious trapped in their corrup-
tion. The great temptation for white America is not just its continued  
oppression of blacks but its resistance to seeing the fissure in its own 
soul, the way in which all of America has been transformed by the pres-
ence of Africans. Twoness is also characteristic of white souls.10



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At various junctures in his book, DuBois describes the Veil separating 
black from white America. The color line is not a neat division between 
the white and black worlds; especially for black America, the attempt, 
coerced or voluntary, to live in the white world creates a fissure in the 
soul, the twoness underscored in the use of the plural “souls” in the 
title, The Souls of Black Folk. “Such a double life, with double thoughts, 
double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words 
and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypoc-
risy or radicalism” (1989, 142). An incessant source of pain and of the 
temptation to violent destruction, directed either inward or outward, 
internal division is preferable to a peremptory and premature oneness 
achieved through either pretense or revolt, hypocrisy or radicalism.  
A subjugated people can take one of three potential paths:  revolt and 
revenge, conformity, or a determined effort at self-realization (34). In 
comparison with acquiescent conformity, revolt appears to be active-
ly self-affirming. Certainly, DuBois thinks that in some cases revolt 
is justified and necessary (as is palpable in Frederick Douglass’s own  
autobiography), but never should it be an end in itself. For all its  
instrumental utility as an aid in liberation, it can also be a trap since 
it fails to transcend the terms of debate established by its opponent. 
In opposition to these two self-defeating extremes, DuBois proposes a 
third path, a determined effort at self-realization. 

DuBois’s third way calls to mind Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of 
the resolution of a conflict of traditions. For MacIntyre, a healthy tradi-
tion is not a site of stagnant repetition, but rather of ongoing conflict and 
debate, of argument triggered by unresolved problems within one’s own 
tradition and by objections voiced by members of rival traditions. Every 
working tradition is engaged in attempting to resolve a set of questions. 
In so doing, it will produce a “set of reformulations, re-evaluations, 
and new formulations and evaluations, designed to remedy inadequa-
cies and overcome limitations” (MacIntyre 1988, 354).11 According to 
MacIntyre, the Platonic dialogue inaugurates this form of inquiry as 
exemplary for philosophy. As we have observed, DuBois strives in Souls 
of Black Folk to appropriate segments of the Western canon. At least one 
of his purposes is to resolve what he takes to be the chief contemporary 
conflict in the tradition, the battle over the color line.



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DuBois attempts to resolve a conflict of tradition not simply by  
exhibiting his mastery of the authoritative texts and voices of the West-
ern tradition, but also by establishing his own voice within and against 
that tradition, a voice that extends the tradition in unanticipated ways. 
If he is successful, the result would be that the tradition is, as MacIn-
tyre puts it, “less vulnerable to dialectical questioning and objection” 
(1988, 359).12  Indeed, on many counts, for example, his understand-
ing of liberal education, DuBois displays a superior understanding to 
that of his contemporary Americans. 

Through his engagement of classical and American texts and themes, 
DuBois argues that contemporary America is deeply at odds with the 
great animating truths taught by Socrates and that the West can be 
saved from its own current self-destructive tendencies only by learning 
from what MacIntyre calls “an alien tradition.” In this case, the alien 
tradition “both explains why...the crisis had to happen as it did and 
does not itself suffer from the same defects of incoherence or resource-
lessness” (1988, 365). In contrast to those who see DuBois as engaging 
in a regrettable act of self-assimilation, by conforming his intellect to 
the great white tradition of learning, DuBois is arguing, against such 
critics as against the naïve self-understanding of white America, that 
much of that great tradition is at odds with contemporary assumptions 
about human nature and the good life. What DuBois proposes is a way 
of overcoming these internal conflicts, a path that involves a fresh en-
counter of authors with whom we have become far too familiar. In so 
doing, he revives and continues a practice of rational inquiry initiated 
by Socrates. 

Elitism, Alien Traditions, and DuBois’s Apologia

That alien tradition is most evident in the culminating chapter of Souls, 
“The Sorrow Songs,” DuBois’s commentary on “the Negro folk-song—
the rhythmic cry of the slave.” In an irony lost on those who accuse 
DuBois of a parochial elitism, the culminating chapter of Souls is not a 
meditation on Western philosophers or poets, but on the tragic, spir-
itual artistry of the songs of the slaves, “a message naturally veiled and 
half articulate” (1989, 182). In this irony, there is both paradox and 
indictment. America’s highest longings, indeed the most noble aspi-



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rations of human nature itself, can be detected in an art form that 
“has been neglected, …has been, and is, half despised, and above all…
persistently mistaken and misunderstood” (178). The paradox and 
the indictment, as David Levering Lewis notes, are woven into the  
entire structure of Souls. The pairing throughout of Negro spirituals with  
European verse advances the “then-unprecedented notion of creative 
parity and complementarity” of whites and blacks. DuBois’s point is 
that “until his readers appreciated the message of the songs sung in 
bondage by black people…the words written in freedom by white peo-
ple would remain hollow and counterfeit” (Lewis 1993, 278). DuBois 
is not arguing for inclusion of an alien voice merely on the basis of its 
having been neglected and oppressed. The sorrowful songs embody the 
deepest longings of the human creature:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a 
faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair 
change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith 
in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless 
justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is 
always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their 
souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow 
Songs sing true? (1989, 186)13

If the songs sing truly, they sing for all of us, although admittedly 
not in the same way. For them to do this, distances between ourselves 
and the singers of the songs must be acknowledged. But for the songs 
to communicate at all, distance must to some extent be bridged even 
as it is remembered. What we need is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls 
translation, the appropriation of an alien discourse as other and yet 
as becoming one’s own. The goal is to possess a second first language. 
Commenting on the pairing throughout the work of epigraphs from 
Negro Spirituals and from European verse, Lewis writes, “the cultural 
symbolism of these double epigraphs” is “profoundly subversive of the 
cultural hierarchy of the time” (1993, 278). In this language, we find, 
according to DuBois, a strange confirmation of the universality of  
human nature and of the link between the highest and the least long-
ings of the human heart. The confirmation serves as much to unsettle 
as to buttress contemporary assumptions. As Shamoon Zamir notes, 



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the “historical knowledge” embodied in the spirituals “reverses the flow 
of knowledge and power” from any kind of elite to “the black masses” 
(1995, 171).

What then are we to make of DuBois’s insistence upon a distinc-
tion between the few and the many and his aspiration to transcending 
contingency through education? His notion of the black race being 
rescued by its Talented Tenth, a phrase that appears just one time in 
Souls, has seemed offensive to many. In his essay of that title, he wrote, 
“Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom 
upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward 
that culture filters” (1903, 45). DuBois’s attention to the few resembles 
Socrates’ approach in yet another way. Socrates attracted ambitious, 
intelligent young men, who, if they were to be saved from the cyni-
cal quest for power, were in need of a more stringent and ennobling 
pedagogy than that on offer to the majority of young people. Socrates’  
attempt to offer such a pedagogy, which might ultimately serve the pub-
lic good, puts him in opposition to conventional society and its stand-
ards of educating youth, which merely inculcates uncritical acceptance 
of received opinion. Thus, he is accused of corrupting the youth. At 
one point in Souls, DuBois responds to a similar accusation. Medioc-
rity and uniformity are, many think, preferable to the dangerous and 
potentially politically destabilizing attempt to educate for excellence. 
Like Socrates, DuBois is also able to recognize something to which our 
sometimes dogmatic egalitarianism can blind us, namely, that certain 
types of souls will of necessity seek grandeur and excellence. To neglect 
the peculiar needs of these souls, to omit consideration of their types 
from education, is to invite them to seek a radically individualist, even 
destructive, path to greatness. How ought we to rightly order such 
souls in their quest for greatness? That is the educational question to 
which both Socrates and DuBois would have us return. 

For all his emphasis on the color line, he often treats education as 
dwelling in a transcendent realm that appears free of the contingen-
cies of class, race, or gender. Recall the following famous passage from 
Souls:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move 
arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcom-



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ing women glide in gilded halls. From out 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 or condescension. So, wed with truth, I dwell 
above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?

(1989, 76)
One of the ironies here is that DuBois is more at home with famous 
Western authors than are contemporary educated white Americans. If 
there is an elitism in DuBois, it seems quite similar to that of Socra-
tes, who insists repeatedly that, as is true of the various crafts, such as 
horse breeding, only the few are truly capable of producing excellent 
specimens. Moreover, Socrates also sees education at its peak moments 
as transcending cultural limitations. DuBois’s experience of reading 
beyond the Veil calls to mind Socrates’ suggestion that the afterlife 
would be quite pleasant indeed, were it to afford us the opportunity 
of questioning the great heroes and artists who have preceded us. In 
both Socrates and DuBois, alignment with cultural heroes and great 
authors is a way of driving a wedge between these authorities and the 
comfortable, self-serving assumptions of contemporary society. These 
authors cannot be held captive by the dominant culture of the time. 
This is a point little noticed in the contemporary debates between  
defenders of the canon and advocates of multiculturalism—Socrates 
and St. Francis can be just as alien to contemporary readers as are 
Douglass and DuBois.14

Thus education and critique themselves involve at least a limited 
transcendence of antecedent conditions. The overcoming of parochial 
oppositions based on race is part both of DuBois’s political project and 
of any serious project of liberal education. DuBois, it must be admit-
ted, does not supply or share much interest in an account of knowledge 
or metaphysics to undergird a complex hierarchy of images and exem-
plars. He does, however, have a conception of the range, suppleness, 
complexity, and mystery of the human person, in light of which he 
criticizes various sorts of reductionism. It is precisely in the Sorrow 
Songs, sung by the most alienated portion of humanity in America, 
that DuBois detects the promise that “sometime, somewhere, men will 
judge men by their souls and not by their skin” (1989, 186). 



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Instead of an unbridgeable gap between few and many, low and high, 
we should rather see in DuBois a Socratic argument for the mysteri-
ous interconnection between the lowest and the highest. For DuBois, 
Socrates is a paradoxical and instructive figure. He is at once a cultural 
icon and philosophical authority and someone whose life and teach-
ings have been persistently marginalized in America.  “Attached to the 
city as a kind of gadfly” (Apology 30e), Socrates opposes the city’s in-
souciant injustice, its hollow materialism, and its unreflective compla-
cency; although scorned by his own community, he pricks the con-
science of fellow citizens by his very presence. DuBois himself adopts 
a similar stance in relation to modern America. Of course, there are 
tensions in Plato’s depiction of Socrates, tensions between his divine 
calling, his role as gadfly, which is a sort of social vocation, and his 
vocation as a philosopher whose telos is to transcend the Cave and its 
murky, oppressive discourse to arrive at a transcendent vision of the 
Good. The philosopher, as we learn in the Republic, must be com-
pelled or forced to return to the Cave, to take on his role in the city 
(519b–521b). Yet, the Apology has a different accent, on Socrates’ self-
understanding as involving an ineradicable connection to Athens.15  
In the Republic itself, for example, in the very sequence in which we 
learn that the philosopher will only return to the city if compelled, the  
order of discussion in the dialogue suggests something else. Plato 
gives us first the divided line (510d–511e) and then the cave (514a–
518b); the abstract followed by the concrete. Does this suggest that full  
understanding will necessitate that the ascent be followed by a descent, 
that the path beyond the cave is at least in part motivated by a desire 
to discriminate better the things and activities within the cave? This 
is certainly true for DuBois, whose ascent beyond the Veil is but one  
moment within a more comprehensive social and political calling.

For all their attention to the cultivation of the few, DuBois and Soc-
rates share a decidedly anti-elitist trait: their refusal to adopt exclusively 
technical and professional language or methods of inquiry. Socrates 
begins the Apology by asking the forbearance of his hearers for his  
inability to speak the technical language of the courts. He will speak as 
he has always spoken, in a popular language befitting the marketplace, 
just as he had earlier given up the pursuit of technical, scientific inquir-



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ies in favor of the investigation of human things (17a–18a). Similarly, 
DuBois admonishes us that 

it is easy to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and com-
prehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often for-
get that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant 
it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways 
and thought: and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and 
weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim 
horizons of human life,—all this, even as you and I. (1989, 100) 

There is some similarity here to Socrates’ practice of philosophical dis-
course in the midst of the daily life of the citizens of Athens. Socrates’ 
adoption of ordinary language and his willingness to engage his in-
terlocutors on their own terms contains an implicit critique of those 
who, in adopting a theoretical stance toward ordinary agents, treat the 
motivations of those they study differently from the way they conceive 
of themselves and their intentions. 

Under Socratic questioning, ordinary language and conventional 
practice can be shown to contain the seeds of philosophical explora-
tion. Even more than Socrates, who is given less credit than he should 
for appreciating poetry and myth, DuBois exhibits the breadth of such 
sources. In its admixture of prose and poetry, as in many other ways, 
The Souls of Black Folk is a book that resists classification in terms of 
traditional genres. It contains history, autobiography, sociology, phi-
losophy, poetry, and lamentation. It is unified by a singular voice pur-
suing a unified goal. Purity of heart, as Kierkegaard put it, is to will one 
thing. DuBois wills the recognition of the full humanity of the black 
race, a recognition that cannot occur without mutual recognition of a 
common humanity across the color line. The book is an eloquent and 
cogent case for the full humanity of the black race, exemplified not just 
in the capacious erudition of its author, who here represents his race, 
but also in that author’s ability to capture the full humanity of that 
portion of the black race that has been most reviled and mockingly 
dismissed as less than human. 

Yet, DuBois is after more than mere egalitarianism; his writings 
evince a range of human capacities and callings and give testimony to 
the mysterious links between the lowest and the highest. Philosophy 



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and liberal education have the same end in view: the pondering of the 
riddle of human existence. Philosophy is not one isolated discourse 
among many but an aspiration that permeates all human discourse. 
As much as it may desire knowledge of the highest things and of the 
connections between all things, it remains a discourse at the margins 
of the dominant culture, both in Athens and in America, a discourse 
most often forgotten or oppressed. In the face of that forgetfulness, 
both Socrates and DuBois urge upon their contemporaries the task of 
remembering what it is they at some level already know. That task, the 
philosophical task, is the vocation exemplified and defended in both 
Plato’s Apology and DuBois’s Souls. And this is perhaps the final way 
in which we can detect echoes of Socrates in the writings of W.E.B. 
DuBois: his finest book is perhaps best understood as an apologia. 

Notes

1. This essay was originally read as part of a faculty development workshop 
(“Socratic Questions”) at Villanova University, a workshop funded jointly by 
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Villanova Institute for 
Teaching and Learning. The final version profited enormously from extensive 
discussion with the Villanova faculty involved in the workshop, as well as from 
a conversation with members of the philosophy department at DePauw Uni-
versity. Also helpful have been the comments of my colleague at Baylor, David 
Corey, and my graduate student assistant, Julianne Romanello.

2. References to Plato are to dialogue and Stephanus page number; see the refer-
ence list for the editions used in this article.

3. For a recent, revisionist examination of the New Deal that sees Washington as 
a brave voice for self-help and free markets, see Shales 2007.

4. Although we will not focus on St. Francis in this essay, his influence on 
DuBois is palpable, not just in Souls, but even more so in the text of a com-
mencement address he delivered at a public school in Washington, D.C. in 
1907, not long after a devastating earthquake leveled San Francisco (DuBois 
1971). DuBois uses that event as an occasion for considering St. Francis as a 
model for civilization. Why, DuBois asks, should we ponder the life of a medi-
eval saint?  Why go so far back in time to understand where we are today?  By 
fixing in our memories the life of Francis, we will come to appreciate a certain 
“attitude toward wealth and distinction and the need and place of human 
training to emphasize this attitude.”  What was Francis’s attitude?  Francis 
understood that there were material and bodily needs and that satisfying these 



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needs was a good. But he was also convinced that there were “greater wants,” 
for “human service and sympathy,” for “knowledge and inspiration,” for “hope 
and truth and beauty.”  And Francis also understood the tension between the 
great and the greater wants. To satisfy spiritual starvation requires some degree 
of renunciation of material goods. Education certainly involves the cultiva-
tion of a sense of relative importance of these different wants and goods. But 
education is principally about what Francis’s life was about at its core: a quest 
to “read life’s riddle and tell the world its true unraveling.”  Francis faced the 
same human condition we face, and he posed the questions each of us must 
ask: “What am I? What is this world about me? And the word and I—how 
shall we work and laugh together?”

5. The comparison of the founder of Western philosophy and an African-Amer-
ican author may help put in question certain tired assumptions in the debate 
between those Amy Gutman identifies, somewhat crudely, as essentialists and 
deconstructions (Gutmann 1994, 16–19). In making the case for expanding 
the canon to include African-American authors, Gutmann asks, “Is Aristo-
tle’s understanding of slavery more enlightening than Frederick Douglass’s? 
Is Aquinas’s argument about civil disobedience more defensible than Martin 
Luther King’s…?” (15).

6. As David Levering Lewis notes, an important source for twoness and internal 
division in DuBois is Hegel, particularly his famous treatment of master and 
slave. See Lewis 1993, 139–140.

7. On this, see particularly Plato, Euthydemus, 278e–282b. I am grateful to 
David Corey for this reference.

8. A very different sort of American appropriation of Socrates can be seen in the 
life and writings of Benjamin Franklin, who read Plutarch and Xenophon and 
practiced what he called “my Socratic method,” that of the “humble inquirer 
and doubter” (1982, 16). Of course, Franklin’s conception of the virtues is 
entirely instrumental and he exhibits no abiding interest in the great questions 
or in liberal education as existing in a kind of paradoxical tension with con-
ventional life and ordinary language. His diffidence towards religion and his 
circumspect public expression of his own views are the foci of Jerry Weinberg-
er’s Benjamin Franklin Unmasked (2005), a book that offers a Straussian inter-
pretation of Franklin as an American Socrates. For a comparison of Franklin’s 
Autobiography with Washington’s Up From Slavery, see Sidonis Smith 1974, 
30–44. Smith notes that for all the ways in which Washington uses Franklin’s 
story as a model, his rhetoric is void of Franklin’s irony.

9. DuBois’s generous appeal to generosity would not last. Not many years after 
he penned The Souls of Black Folk, he wrote an angry, denunciatory tract called 
“The Souls of White Folk” (DuBois 1990, 180–184). In that piece, he accused 



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the white race of asserting and pursuing a colonial project of claiming the 
entire earth forever. White “colonial aggrandizement,” as evidence for which 
he cites the first Word War, is not an accidental feature of the modern, white 
West but its very essence. The “using of men for the benefit of a master” is not 
new, but the “imperial width—the heaven-defying audacity” with which it is 
now pursued is indeed a novelty. The “Promethean” project of white domi-
nation is, for DuBois, a peculiar invention and vice of the modern world, 
unknown in antiquity and the middle ages. This leaves open to the question, 
to which DuBois, so far as I can discern, never returns, namely, whether pre-
modern Western sources and practices might provide a stance from which to 
appraise the corruption of modern thought and practice.

10. DuBois’s belief, evident in his essay “The Souls of White Folk,” that whiteness 
had become a policy of elimination of the rights of any colored people,  
involves a re-appraisal of this claim or at least a re-appraisal of whether the 
white race can be engaged rationally.

11. Compare Taylor’s discussion, in Gadamer’s language, of a fusion of horizons 
(Taylor 1994, 67).

12. There is at least one common influence here: Hegel.

13. As Julianne Romanello pointed out to me, a further comparison may be fruit-
ful between DuBois’s sorrow songs and Socrates’ decision to “make music” 
in the Phaedo. In how many ways would the received views of Socrates and 
Plato be altered if we were attentive to what Nietzsche calls the Socrates who 
practices music?

14. For an unusual example of the power of canonical literary texts to provide a 
space for the imaginative exploration of human life in the face of totalitarian-
ism, see Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003).

15. On this, see Corey 2005. For a reading of Plato as insisting upon the primacy 
of ordinary language and its latent conception of the good, see the chapters 
on Plato in Rosen 2002. I set aside for now the question of Plato’s final views 
of Socrates, even of whether all the dialogues give us a consistent picture of 
Socrates.

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