Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Chapter Four: The Sociology of Knowledge

  The Sociology of Knowledge E   Southern, Fontaine still knew that Louisiana’s social setting had jelled inchoate ideas about he what wanted from life. Disliking the South, he was motivated to write, to make a reputation as a thinker, and to publish his way out of Scotlandville. In any case, the period brought his most sustained intellectual success, a time in which he thought most coherently about the problems of race in America. Over these years he wrote four essays about such questions.1 In them, of greatest significance, he explicated his intricate sense of how individuals understood their social world. He put together his knowledge of the pragmatists with his own grasp of some new European ideas. Fontaine applied his conjectures to American racial issues— but did so after sorting out his connection to Alain Locke. Alain Locke In early  Fontaine had begun the acquaintanceship with Locke that eventuated in Locke’s trip to Lincoln in the spring of  and Fontaine’s cultivation of the older man.2 Although at Harvard Locke had not studied with James, who had died in , Locke had oriented himself around the part of Cambridge that promoted James’s pragmatism. One of James’s followers, Horace Kallen, promulgated ‘‘cultural pluralism,’’ a position Kallen took to embody James’s theory of knowledge and its wider implications. Locke promoted a version of cultural pluralism. He looked on knowledge as an almost personal instrument for human growth. In the world of affairs, people had    to recognize a diversity of values and ways of living as equally legitimate. Locke’s philosophy developed one of the nonabsolutist accounts of ethics that were heralding tolerance in interpersonal relations.3 Yet activity within formal academic philosophy did not restrict Locke’s career. He envisioned a vibrant black life that would enrich and diversify an American society in need of mutual respect. Intellectuals celebrated his New Negro, and by the s Locke led black leaders in the codification and extension of an indigenous tradition of high and popular black culture. Locke encouraged Fontaine’s interest in ‘‘race knowledge.’’ He also almost certainly instigated the various incomplete literary forays Fontaine made during the late s and early s.4 The young man had begun a play and mulled over a textbook on philosophy that would have a contemporary, problematic thrust, with an emphasis on aesthetics.5 Twenty-five years later, Fontaine still often tried his hand at conveying in writing the realities and rhythms of ordinary black life and the dialect and dialogue that went with it.6 He would have been peculiar had he not found the talented and engaging older man an admirable mentor. Nonetheless, the arts and aesthetics did not primarily hold Fontaine’s allegiance, and he may have exaggerated his interests to Locke to make a bond with the famous thinker. Fontaine had theoretical and analytic proclivities not entirely compatible with Locke’s stress on aesthetic diversity. In October , they got together again in Harlem, and the meeting shaped Fontaine’s self-identity. The decorous and genteel Fontaine had recently married and was not ungratified that his wife had a sexually provocative dimension . Locke was a mild and respectable man but also an active homosexual. In pain because of desires that were publicly illicit, he may yet have been on the lookout for a liaison of some kind. In the early s Locke had vainly approached Langston Hughes, although when the approach failed, both men were able to get along thereafter.7 I can only make an educated guess about the psychological dynamics at work when Locke and Fontaine met. Locke intimated a relationship to Fontaine. Was Fontaine, Locke asked, ‘‘even half as interested in my friendship as I am in yours’’? Locke wanted ‘‘to borrow a little warmth and joy of life from youth.’’ But a gap separated ‘‘youth and crabbed middle-age’’—Fontaine was twenty-nine, Locke fiftyfour . Locke worried about what he could offer Fontaine, ‘‘an exceptional youngster.’’ He merited ‘‘even more than life ha[d] yet given’’ him. Were Fontaine committed to art and literature, Locke had ‘‘connections that really would make it worthwhile’’ for him. But Locke fretted about his usefulness Sociology of Knowledge  because Fontaine had primarily other interests. Indeed, after this meeting, Locke wrote to Fontaine, it was ‘‘entirely up to [him]’’ whether their paths would cross again Fontaine never received this note, but shortly after Locke wrote it, the...