Excerpt from Black Philosopher, White Academy


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Published: Oct 14, 2008

Below is an excerpt from Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine, by Bruce Kuklick (University of Pennsylvania Press, 192 pp., $55, copyright reserved). Kuklick will speak Thu., Oct. 16, 6-7 p.m., at Penn Bookstore, 3601 Walnut St. For more information, visit upenn.bncollege.com.

Chapter Two:

A Student of Philosophy

Teaching and Graduate Study

Fontaine took his degree from Lincoln in the spring of 1930, just as the United States was entering the Great Depression. Over the next six years he earned his living as an instructor there, one of several part-timers. He just preceded the first black professors whom the institution hired as standing faculty. Fontaine taught Latin, and from elementary Latin — the learning of the grammar of the language and the reading of Caesar's Gallic Wars — he moved to classes in authors traditionally considered more advanced, Cicero, Vergil, and Livy. He shared teaching duties with Azikiwe, whom Lincoln had appointed to a similar position in history. In 1935 Azikiwe brought Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast (later Ghana) to Lincoln. Nkrumah, who later emerged as the first black leader of Ghana, became perhaps Fontaine's most famous student, although he was also a friend. Robert Carter, later a civil rights lawyer and a federal judge, studied under Fontaine. Carter remembered a ''virtually cadaverous'' Fontaine as a vigorous and engaging young scholar and kept up with him for decades.

Besides Latin, Fontaine taught history and government, and at the end of his efforts at Lincoln, in 1935—36, he contributed to the modernist inroads on the classical curriculum. He created one course on contemporary international politics. This evaluation of Communism, Fascism, and democracy

took up the heated international issues of the 1930s. With Communism, Fontaine examined the ideas of the new ''Soviet'' state in Russia, based on the theories of Karl Marx and devoted to the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the rise of a proletarian democracy. The ''Bolsheviks'' had seized control in Russia during World War I, and under Lenin and Stalin they codified these Communist ideas. Soon thereafter another self-consciously innovative group, the Fascists in Italy, came to power. Fascists in Germany, led by Adolph Hitler in the early 1930s, followed the Italians. Fascism and its German variant, Nazism, based their beliefs more in a nonrational notion of a Volk or people than in rational notions of economic exploitation. In his lectures Fontaine contrasted both Communism and Fascism to the more modest ideas associated with the growth of the ''Western'' and capitalist democracies in England, France, and the United States. The course began Fontaine's lifelong interest in the theory of politics, a concern a little removed from the hurly-burly of real political life but not indifferent to it.

Perhaps more important, Fontaine initiated instruction in ''black history'' at Lincoln. The ''historically black colleges and universities'' had begun sporadically to teach it in the second decade of the century, but lecturers still only occasionally explored the subject in the 1930s. While Lincoln lagged behind many innovating schools, Fontaine led there in devising a pathbreaking two-semester class entitled ''The Negro in African and American History.'' Only fifteen years later would Lincoln regularly offer another version of Fontaine's teachings, which its first black president, Horace Mann Bond, would sponsor.

Even though Fontaine had a heavy and varied instructional load, Lincoln did not consider him a full-time employee, and he was taking graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as well. Black men with inclinations to scholarship would usually gain a post-baccalaureate diploma only through part-time (and summer) training at northern colleges, while they held down other jobs and prayed that they might use their advanced education. Lincoln's dean, the philosopher George Johnson, who had a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, may have encouraged Fontaine, not only in his part-time work at Lincoln but also in his part-time graduate education.

Virtually all African Americans, even in the North, received their undergraduate degrees at black institutions such as Lincoln. By the 1930s Howard University offered a master's degree, but for true graduate instruction the hopeful scholar of color had to penetrate the higher reaches of the white academy outside the South. The University of Pennsylvania, along with the University of Chicago, Columbia University in New York City, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, led premier white educational centers in admitting blacks to degree programs beyond the bachelor's. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, not as open as the others, had produced the most famous black scholars, W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. But just because Harvard, Yale, and Princeton capped the top stratum of colleges, they were more discriminatory than Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, and Pennsylvania.

At the same time blacks could always aspire to graduate enrollment in most northern schools that had professional or advanced offerings. The origins of the University of Pennsylvania went back to the College of Philadelphia that Benjamin Franklin had founded in the eighteenth century, but its status as a university was associated with its more famous medical school. In the early twentieth century, the university had a more than respectable reputation, although it still rested on its professional training, not just in medicine but also in law and in its notable Wharton School of Business.

Centered in ''the College'' at ''Penn,'' the baccalaureate arts and sciences dominated the university far less than they did at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Experts ranked Penn at the bottom of the lofty group of schools informally known as the Ivy League. In part the institution's low rating among the Ivies was owing to the prominence of preparation in practical education instead of veneration for the customary academic disciplines; in part to the school's comparative friendliness to Jews. Penn occupied a niche more urban and secular and, if truth be told, more vulgar and useful than most of its Ivy League peers. The school had only begun its rise to international prominence.

Despite its professional emphases, Penn had a well-regarded tradition of graduate instruction in a number of the liberal arts that dated back to the late nineteenth century. Fontaine set foot on campus as an advanced student in philosophy, a candidate for the Master of Arts degree. This one-year graduate program could also be completed in two years of part-time study. The famed Jewish scholar Isaac Husik undertook the job as Fontaine's first white graduate-school mentor. Husik had immigrated to the United States from Russia as a boy and had himself received his higher education, including a doctorate in philosophy, from Penn. He had written on Aristotle, but the learned world mainly respected him for his work on medieval Jewish thought, and his editing and translating of this material. While Husik took Fontaine under his wing and shepherded him through the program, Fontaine did not take many courses from the philosopher. Instead the advanced study of Latin at Lincoln had interested him in Roman thought.

In this work a younger professor of philosophy at Penn had a major influence on the new graduate student. Francis Clarke, a dignified scholar of medieval ideas, was a rare Roman Catholic outside the quasi-segregated Catholic system of higher education. Clarke interpreted the theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225—74), the leading schoolman of medieval Europe, and encouraged Fontaine to look at Latin philosophy from the time of the Roman Empire to the early modern period, roughly 300 B.C. to 1500 A.D. In this endeavor, Fontaine would build on his extensive knowledge of the Latin authors he had read and taught at Lincoln.

Edgar A. Singer, the senior member of the Philosophy Department and a man of high local reputation, proved even more important to Fontaine at Penn. Singer augmented Fontaine's knowledge of ancient and medieval thought through an admiration for the course of thinking from the time of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Singer introduced Fontaine to the modern philosophy of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and stressed the German heritage of Immanuel Kant and G.F. Hegel. For early twentieth century American thinkers such as Singer, Kant stood out as the vital historical figure. Kant argued that, in knowing, human beings did not just grasp the external world. Knowledge rather arose when they applied a framework of concepts to an otherwise unknowable sensory input. Kant identified knowledge with the structure of a universal human perspective, with what finite rational beings could obtain. He compromised ''absolute'' knowledge. Humanity could only approach it, Kant maintained, as an ideal that might regulate conduct. Human beings could legitimately hope that such knowledge existed, and so direct their energy to achieving it, even though they must fall short. Kant's successor Hegel examined the human perspective from which knowledge came in the context of history. The perspective could and did change. Human beings at different times had inevitably different perspectives, and their knowledge had varying shapes. At the same time, for Hegel, history progressed and somehow led to absolute knowledge in an indefinite future.

After Kant and Hegel, Singer focused on American ideas, which at Penn consisted of the pragmatism that had developed over the preceding fifty years. The writings of Charles Peirce and William James, both connected to Harvard University, founded this school of thought at the end of the nineteenth century. More recently and most famously, John Dewey, who had taught at the University of Chicago until 1904 and had retired from Columbia in 1929, brought pragmatism to fruition. Finally, George Herbert Mead, who had taken over Dewey's position at Chicago and had died in 1931, brought further nuance to pragmatic ideas. Under Singer, Fontaine learned how pragmatists had carried forward the views of Kant and Hegel. The pragmatists called attention to science and common-sense experimentalism in the human engagement with the world. They were unlike traditional empiricists, who tended to view the mind as the passive recipient of material. The pragmatists instead focused on the way human beings interacted with their environment, and how the mind, as Kant and Hegel had stressed, molded what it knew. Ideas, for the pragmatists, did not inertly match up (or not match up) with the world; they were instruments of action. True ideas led us through experience in a perspicacious way. For James they ''worked'' and had ''cash value.'' He defined truth as ''only the expedient in our way of thinking.'' James epitomized a friendly, open, and pluralist understanding of the world and dismissed the pursuit of the unconditional, as Dewey would later attack ''the quest for certainty.'' Dewey especially advocated the use of social knowledge, the new social sciences, to approach public issues.

Finally, Singer laid out the implications of pragmatic thought for dynamic intellectual work in the United States. Although Singer had received his academic degrees at Penn, he had studied with James and brought pragmatic emphases to the university. Singer revered James, but he also talked about Mead's notion of the social nature of the human person. Selves, for Mead, developed jointly in a partially man-made cultural framework that offered an array of challenges and a repertoire of acceptable responses. Singer gravitated even more to Dewey's social activism and pointed out how human communities could bring scientific, rational understanding to bear on contemporary problems. He supported the liberal views of Franklin Roosevelt's political New Deal of the 1930s. A spirit of trial and error permeated the politics of the Democratic Party of that era, and Singer even espoused the more outre' ideas associated with the coterie around the president's wife, Eleanor.

Voracious in his interests, Fontaine loved being a student. In addition to higher-level lessons in Latin at Penn, he did courses on specific thinkers in the long history of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Friedrich Nietzsche; on thematic issues in aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, ethics, and political philosophy; and in contemporary problems of epistemology and logic. Later, as a post-graduate, he continued wide-ranging advanced studies in philosophy, history, international politics, and languages. Many years later critics would deprecate this range of learning as being overly attentive to ''dead white European males.'' Fontaine set his sights on mastering just this knowledge. In 1932 he earned his M.A. from Penn. A year later, after continuing to take courses, he spent the summer studying philosophy at Harvard, easily the commanding institution of higher learning in the United States.