Corey Barnes

The fifth chapter elucidates Locke’s value theory, which was the second of Locke’s two-part response to racism. In describing Locke’s account of value, I first discuss what Locke considered the appropriate start-points for investigations into value. Locke thought that an appropriate starting-point for inquiry into value is the social and political world. Afterwards I examine Locke’s rejection of both value-objectivism and value-subjectivism. Locke thought that if we took society and the political world as our starting-point for investigating the nature of value, then we would reject both objectivism and subjectivism. After engaging his rejection of value-objectivism and value-subjectivism, I discuss Locke’s positive value theory. For Locke, values are emotional forms of experience. And finally, after discussing Locke’s positive view, I relate it to democracy and cosmopolitanism.

The fourth chapter elucidates Locke’s theory of race, which was the first of Locke’s two-part response to racism. In elucidating Locke’s philosophy of race, I begin by looking at what Locke took to be the significance of and appropriate starting-points for inquiry into race. After showing why studying race is important, and how one should begin the investigation, I illustrate Locke’s refutation of anthropological theories of race. After discussing Locke’s critique of anthological theories, I discuss Locke’s positive racial view. Locke argued that race is a product of history. In fact, race is itself a culture-product—a sort of value that better unifies members of a group around a shared culture-type. After discussing Locke’s ontology of race, I discuss Locke’s answer to the normative question of race—namely, what we ought to do with race. Locke seems to have thought that race is of value beyond pragmatic reasons that would license conserving it. Race is valuable because of its necessity for culture. And culture is necessary for human flourishing. I end with a discussion of Locke’s views of racism, along with his statements on so many “fallacies of race.”

The third chapter focuses on racism. Locke took racism to be America’s deepest and most fundamental problem. As such, he took it to be the gravest threat to the practice of democracy and the cultivation of a cosmopolitan community. Rather than highlight the history of practices emerging from white supremacy, I highlight important theoretical moments for white supremacy throughout history. I highlight these moments by looking at the works of four authors—namely, François Bernier, Immanuel Kant, Johann Blumenbach, and Arthur de Gobineau. Each of these author’s theories of race created aspects of, reified, justified, popularized, or reinforced racism in important ways. Each thereby demonstrates why democracy could not be practiced, and thus why cosmopolitanism could not be achieved.

The concluding remarks do three things. First, they briefly recap the structure of the book. Second, they discuss two potential problems with Locke’s theoretical solutions to the gravest impediment to cultivating a cosmopolitan community. Locke said nothing of sexism and homophobia. Further, Locke needs a practical program to motivate people to abandon racist and white supremacist practices. Third, the concluding remarks set up a forthcoming work that completes the systematization of Locke’s philosophy—namely, that his philosophies of education, art, and religion are practical solutions that show how we might change people’s perceptions in a way that moves them toward a democratic mindset, thereby cultivating a cosmopolitan community.

The second chapter describes Locke’s democratic theory. I begin by separating an overarching concept of democracy from eight conceptions of democracy. Afterward, I focus on political democracy specifically. In so doing, I answer what type and model of political democracy Locke endorsed. I then provide Locke’s answer to political democracy’s value, the requirement to spread it throughout the world, and thus why its values are of such importance for the establishment of a cosmopolitan community. As such I provide answers to why it is favored over other forms of government.

The paper explores Alain Locke's views on Black American art. I look at what he thought constitutes Black American art and what he took good Black American art to achieve. As for the former, I examine two ways of looking at Black American art: (1) as defined by artists' expression of the emotional state or inner lives of Black Americans, and (2) as defined by certain formal qualities of the work itself. I show that Locke melded these two positions together in a unique way. In my discussion of what Locke took good Black American art to achieve, I engage (1) with his general theory of value, (2) with his thinking on aesthetic and artistic values more specifically, (3) with his metaphysics of race, before addressing his thoughts on what constitutes Black American art simpliciter, and on what it achieves when it is good art.

Marya Schechtman has given us reasons to think that there are different questions that compose personal identity. On the one hand, there is the question of reidentification, which concerns what makes a person the same person through different time-slices. On the other hand, there is the question of characterization, which concerns the actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, etc. that we take to be attributable to a person over time. While leaving the former question for another work, Schechtman answers the latter question by proposing what she terms the narrative self-constitution view, whereby Schechtman claims that we account for intuitive features (moral responsibility, survival, compensation, and self-interested concern) of characterization through narratives. Still, merely having a narrative is not enough. In order to live the life of a person, an agent’s narrative must sync with the narrative told about him/her in community. This paper, while in full agreement with Schechtman’s claim regarding narratives and their ability to explain the intuitive features that regard the question of characterization, puts pressure on the latter claim. I argue that a person’s narrative is not merely one that synchs with the narrative told in community, but one that is determined by the person’s community. In focusing on Schechtman’s second claim, I appeal to the Akan conception of personhood, showing that the community sets the parameters of personal identity, and by body politics and conferring social recognition, determines the traits that we take to be attributed to a given person over time.