“That Strange, Mysterious and Indescribable”: The Fugitive Legacy of Frederic Douglass’s Political Thought

Nick Bromell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass rests on a tour de force reading of Douglass’s own account of his childhood. Bromell grasps how Douglass’s infancy gave him a foundational sense of dignity that fueled his resistance to slavery in America and injustice everywhere. What follows is the final summative chapter of Bromell’s book which underscores how “Douglass was always a political thinker not a ‘bare’ theorist. He did not seek the truth for its own sake; he sought it because it carried him closer to justice.”

As I have underscored many times throughout this book, Douglass’s thought remains elusive today because the philosophical lexicon at his disposal to articulate it was inadequate to the task. But there also is a second, related reason. Douglass was not a unitary thinker. The split in his being was not just the hyphenated African-American identity that Du Bois called “double consciousness”; it was also the split indicated, yet also masked, by the conjunction “and” in his autobiography, My Bond­age and My Freedom. His bondage and his freedom were two very different states, and as a consequence, he could never be entirely at one with him­self. In his speech titled “The Nature of Slavery,” which he included as an appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, he declared: “But ask the slave what is his condition-what his state of mind-what he thinks of en­slavement? and you had as well address your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved” (423). Then and now, a reader’s first response to these words would be to object that surely Douglass himself was such a voice, speaking from within the memory of enslave­ment if not from within the condition itself. But I would suggest instead that Douglass was making an admission here: that in stepping from bondage into freedom, he had profoundly and irrevocably changed. He was no longer the man he once had been, and never could be again. As­pects of his past, and of the being of millions of his brethren in bond­age, were now unknown to him. Consequently, all his statements to the contrary notwithstanding, he could not truly “stand here identified with the American slave, and … see this day as he does”; such identification had become a trope, it was no longer a fact. And from his oscillation back and forth between these conditions came forth a fugitive philoso­phy with a profound attunement to the unknown and the unknowable within himself and others. I want to close this book with his cautionary words ringing in my ears, heeding his challenges to our conventions, and listening into the unknown that is Frederick Douglass, not just to the words we believe we can hear and understand.[1]

Here, on a Bare Theory

In 1855, well after Douglass had begun to think of himself as something of a political philosopher, he delivered a speech that called-the very en­terprise of political philosophy into question. Titled “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” the speech offered both a historical overview of abolition­ism and an implicit, philosophical justification for his break with Garri­son and the American Anti-Slavery Society. The quarrel between them, as we have seen, had as much to do with their different ways of thinking as with their different positions. In this speech, Douglass gives his own account of those differences.

He begins by asking several large questions about abolitionism: “What is this mighty force? What is its history? And what is its destiny?” Yet he also acknowledges that to pose such questions is to risk indulg­ing in idle “speculation”:

excellent chances are here for speculation; and some of them are quite profound. We might, for instance, proceed to enquire not only into the philosophy of the Anti-Slavery movement, but into the philosophy of the law, in obedience to which, that movement started into existence. We might demand to know what is that law or power which, at different times, disposes the minds of men to this or that particular object-now for peace, and now for war-now for Free­. dam, and now for Slavery; but this profound question I leave to the Abolitionists of the superior class to answer. The speculations which must precede such an answer would afford, perhaps, about the same satisfaction, as the learned theories which have rained down upon the world, from time to time, as to the origin of evil. I shall, therefore, avoid water in which I cannot swim, and deal with Anti-Slavery as a fact, like any other fact in the history of mankind, capable of be­ing described and understood, both as to its internal forces, and its external phases and relations.[2]

Multiple streams of irony permeate these remarks. Douglass’s words at first seem to enforce a pejorative distinction between “philosophy” or “speculation,” on the one hand, and “fact” and “history,” on the other. Feigning to believe that the philosophical questions are “profound,” Douglass goes on to mock them, indeed to mock profundity itself, and philosophy and theory along with it. Although these afford some “satis­faction,” he acknowledges sarcastically, they resemble the innumerable “theories” about “the origin of evil” that tell us nothing new and get us nowhere. Ironically pretending to honor such theorizing as the work of “abolitionists of the superior class,” he leaves no doubt in the minds of his audience about where he stands himself: he believes that his own humble recital of facts is more valuable than philosophical speculation.

This disparagement of theorizing gradually emerges as a theme in this speech; yet, when we have read or heard the speech in its entirety, we realize that Douglass has actually taken up and answered the very questions he mocked at the outset: “What is this mighty force? What is its history? And what is its destiny?” Not only that, but as I hope my ac­count of his political thought has shown, Douglass himself was deeply concerned “to know what is that law or power which, at different times, disposes the minds of men to this or that particular object–now for peace, and now for war–now for Freedom, and now for Slavery.” Far from leaving “this profound question … to the Abolitionists of the su­perior class,” he made it the engine that drove his own philosophical speculations. We can only conclude, then, that in Douglass’s mind, the questions themselves were not faulty. What was mistaken was a partic­ular way of approaching or handling them. Douglass uses irony to criti­cize one mode of speculation, thereby implicitly opening up space for his own rather different kind.

After these opening feints, he proceeds to deliver a direct rebuttal of Garrison’s argument that slavery’s abolition could only be achieved by individual states seceding from the Union and then forming a new nation with a purified Constitution. “I dissent entirely from this rea­soning,” Douglass declares. “It assumes to be true what is plainly absurd, and that is, that a population of slaves, without arms, without means of concert, and without leisure, is more than a match for double its number, educated, accustomed to rule, and in every way prepared for warfare, offensive or defensive” (42). Not content with exposing the absurdity of Garrison’s position, Douglass goes on to ridicule the way of thinking that had produced it. And here is where he implicitly iden­tifies his own, quite different way of thinking: “As a mere expression of abhorrence of Slavery, the sentiment [no union with slaveholders] is a good one; but it expresses no intelligible principle of action, and throws no new light upon the pathway of duty… Here, on a bare theory, and for–a theory which, if consistently adhered to; would drive a man out of the world–a theory which can never be made intelligible to common sense–the freedom of the whole slave population would be sacrificed” (42). The precise object of Douglass’s ironic critique, then, is not specu­lation or theory per se, but what he calls “bare theory.” What character­izes bare theory is that it contains “no intelligible principle of action,” “throws no new light upon the pathway of duty,” and “can never be made intelligible to common sense.”[3] Conversely, he implies, a more ro­bust and legitimate way of theorizing would be one without such flaws. It would have value only if, after speculating about a topic (the origin of evil, the nature of civil government), it produced a “principle” that could guide our actions, point out to us the path of action we are duty-bound to take, and did both these things in a manner “intelligible to common sense.” Theorizing that is more than bare theory does not rest content with a speculative account of the way things are; it also explains what this account requires us to do. Douglass believed that good theorizing should be both analytical and prescriptive. It should not split thought from action but instead take these to be a unitary whole.

This is why a number of his readers have called him a proto-pragma­tist, arguing that his unitary conception of thought and action strikingly anticipates the thinking of William James and John Dewey. But are we hearing a “pragmatist” when Douglass explains in this speech why the abolitionist movement, with all its setbacks and reversals, will “go on”? It will persist, he claims, because “the moral life of human society…cannot die, while conscience, honor, and humanity remain” (45). Moral life, being intrinsic to the powers that constitute humanity itself,· can­not die unless humanity itself perishes. If even a single person remains to sustain it, Douglass asserts, “the [abolitionist) cause lives” because its incarnation. in any one individual man leaves the whole world a priesthood–occupying the highest moral eminence–even that of dis­interested benevolence. Whoso has ascended this height, and has the grace to stand there, has the world at his feet, and is the world’s teacher, as of divine right” (45).

As David Blight and political theorist George Shulman have shown, Douglass often spoke in this prophetic mode, one in which he called an errant people to cease sinning and to honor their founding covenant with their Creator.[4] Strongly influenced by his religious education under the tutelage of “Uncle” Lawson and by decades of reading the Bi­ble, and doubtless shrewdly cognizant of the cultural power of the Pu­ritan tradition of the jeremiad sermon, Douglass often figured himself  as a prophet come to warn his people of their certain doom unless they found their way–with his help–back to the path of righteousness. Such a prophet, he continues, in what is probably a self-description too, “may sit in judgment upon the civilization of the age, and upon the reli­gion of the age” because, knowing the truth of the higher law, “he has a test, a sure and certain test, by which to try all institutions” (45).

At just this point, however, Douglass reverses course and shifts from this prophetic mode back to the mode of”pragmatism.”[5] Such render­ ing of judgment, he asserts, “is not the chief business for which he is qualified”:

the man who has thoroughly embraced the principles of Justice, Love, and Liberty, like the true preacher of Christianity is less anx­ious to reproach the world for its sins than to win its repentance. The great work to which he is called is not that of judgment…His great work on earth is to· exemplify, and to illustrate and engraft those principles upon the living and practical understandings of all men within the reach of his influence…It is to snatch from the bosom of nature the latent facts of each man’s individual experience,. and with steady hand to hold them up fresh and glowing, enforcing, with all his power, their acknowledgment and practical adoption. (45-46, emphasis added)

Emersonian notes are unmistakable here, as are the tones and the pos­ture of the Old Testament prophets, but Douglass gives these the col­oring of his distinctive intellectual method by underscoring the unity of word and deed,· of thought and action, of reproach and repentance. The Mosaic figure of the man who has ascended this “height” of vision also the more down-to-earth and intelligible thinker who addresses the living and practical understandings of all men” and seeks their practical adoption” of his message.

A theory that is “living and practical” was thus, for Douglass, the pre­ferred alternative to one that was “bare” and speculative. In his view, the “truth” of such theory coordinates simultaneously with its fidelity to higher law, its ironic acknowledgment of the limits of its own perspect­ive, and its commitment to practical application. In yet another of his stunning reversals, Douglass makes this point vividly: even the “slave­holder himself,” he argues, has assented to the principles of higher law nd agreed with the antislavery man’s appeals to justice, liberty, and humanity–but only with reference to himself. “You have only to keep out of sight your manner of applying your principles, to get them en­dorsed every time. Contemplating himself, he sees truth with absolute clearness and distinctness. He only blunders when asked to lose sight of himself. In his own cause he can beat a Boston lawyer, but he is dumb when asked to plead the cause of others” (46-47). In other words, the slaveholder, too, has only a “bare theory.” It is bare because it is indiffer­ent to the manner of applying its principles.[6]

Perhaps it was to warn readers against approaching Douglass as though he were a more conventional thinker that James McCune Smith, in his introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, offered such a rich analysis of Douglass’s “plantation education” (126); repeatedly empha­sizing that it had given Douglass a manner or method of thinking that was significantly different from that of most of his presumed readers. After listing what he took to be Douglass’s most striking qualities of character, Smith contrasts the “formulas of deductive logic” typically learned in “the schools” with the method of “induction” Douglass learned from “nature and circumstances.” Referring specifically to “the first ninety pages” of My Bondage and My Freedom, Smith suggests that they “afford specimens of observing, comparing, and careful classify­ing .. . that [make it] difficult to believe them the results of a child’s thinking.” He then went on to claim, “To such a mind, the ordinary pro­cesses of logical deduction are like proving that two and two make four. Mastering the intermediate steps by an intuitive glance…it goes down to the deeper relation of things, and brings out what may seem, to some, mere statements, but which are new and brilliant generalizations, each resting on a broad and stable basis” (122-34).

In these sentences, Smith alerts readers that they will not find formulaic and “ordinary” reasoning but rather “induction” in Douglas: writings; he also teases out the implications of inductive logic itself. (Inductive reasoning starts from observations about the world and then moves to laws and generalizations about it. Deductive reasoning, in contrast, begins with a theory or hypothesis and then seeks to test. or prove it, through a close examination of evidence.) Inductive reasoning, Smith suggests, is quicker than deductive to perceive and explain “the deeper relation of things,” probably because it starts at the bottom and thinks upward. (Inductive reasoning is sometimes described as “bottom-up” reasoning.) Consequently, as we might infer, inductive reasoning also has the potential to evade, challenge, and reform the assumptions and concepts (“formulas of deductive logic”) that have a ready been put in place to explain the world. It goes “deeper” because is trying to find the meaning of phenomena rather than trying to test or prove a meaning that has already been hypothesized or claimed. Inductive reasoning is often accused (rightly) of drawing overly broad conclusions based on too little evidence, and it is to counter this charge that Smith asserts that Douglass’s conclusions, though drawn from his personal experience, nonetheless rest “on a broad and stable basis” (134). Conversely, however, deductive reasoning can err by passing over phenomena it deems irrelevant, but which in truth are highly pertinent. For this reason, deductive reasoning can be more easily used to demonstrate the truth of an epistemological or political order that is already established, whereas inductive reasoning is more likely to build new conclusions that challenge those already in place. This is why inductive reasoning has been so useful to science even though, as David Hume argued, it cannot be justified in a philosophical sense without circularity.  (Smith, having been trained in Edinburgh, would almost certainly have known David Hume’s famous critique of induction in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.) [7]

Smith also remarks on the political efficacy of inductive reasoning when he declares that wherever Douglass traveled, “the people” would “earnestly say, ‘Tell me thy thought!‘”–that is, tell me how things look to you and what I should do. “And somehow or other,” Smith writes, “revolution seemed to follow in his wake” (132). Smith returns to the evolutionary potential inherent in Douglass’s inductive method and standpoint epistemology when he claims that his speeches “were not the mere words of eloquence … that delight the ear and pass away. No! They were work-able, do-able words, that brought forth fruits in the revolution in Illinois, and in the passage of the franchise resolutions by the Assembly of New York” (132; emphasis added).

Smith’s account of Douglass’s “work-able,” ”do-able” words, and of the revolutions they in­cited, should remind us that Douglass was always a political thinker not a “bare” theorist. He did not seek the truth for its own sake; he sought it because it carried him closer to justice.

All such “active thinking,” as Wilson J. Moses observes, “runs into contradiction,” and all “original thought is generated by the tragic and heroic struggle to reconcile conflict.”[8] Active thinking runs into self-cont­radiction because it is continually adapting itself to changing circum­stances; almost inevitably, some of those adaptations will conflict with earlier ones. All thought is temporal, but thinkers who situate them­selves in time know what this means: one must adopt what Douglass called “a fixed principle of honesty.” Therefore, Moses concludes, “It is the task of the historian to discover the processes by which thinkers seek to reconcile or, as some would say, to rationalize their own con­tradictions.”[9] Although this is certainly the task for a historian writing a history of Douglass’s political thinking, it does not quite describe the task of either a political theorist or a literary critic who studies Doug­lass. In both a theoretical and literary inquiry, the work also requires delving into these “contradictions, listening to them and learning from them what is self-limiting about one’s own thinking and one’s language. It requires softening one’s tacit belief in the comparative truth of one’s perspective–the assumption that one can perceive the truth of the past more readily than the past itself could–and instead to be open to the unknowable that lies in the space between now and then, be­tween speech and silence, between what is “full of meaning” and what is “unmeaning jargon.” One name for that unknowable is “gap.” Another is “aporia.” Yet another is “fugitivity.”

Was Douglass a Black Nationalist?

As I have aimed to show from the start of this book, Douglass’s political thought emerged from his experience of raced enslavement and took form as he brought what he had learned from that experience not just to abolitionism but to a wider set of issues of concern to the Black community and the U.S. polity. Chief among these was race or, more pre­cisely, white racism. For these reasons, Douglass was first and foremost a Black political philosopher. But this is not to imply that he is a rep­resentative Black theorist, or that he initiates or stands in a particular tradition of Black theory. Here, too, we encounter Douglass’s fugitiv­ity as he (like many other Black thinkers, activists, and artists) evades the categories and taxonomies–assimilationism, Black nationalism, Black egalitarian liberalism, the Black radical tradition–that continue to play such an important part in the academic study of Black American cultural production.

If we ask, for example, Does Douglass stand in the Black radical tradi­tion? or Was Douglass a Black nationalist?, the answers depend entirely on what we mean by these terms. If they entail commitments to a Black racial identity or to an independent Black community and culture living within the territorial United States, then I would argue that the answer to both of them is no. If these terms indicate a commitment to the en­during value–for Black and white Americans–of modes of thought and expression that have arisen within “the muck and more” of distinc­tively Black historical experience, then the answer is yes. Likewise, if these terms connote a willingness to use violence in self-defense, in de­fense of one’s community, and in defense of human dignity and rights everywhere, then again the answer is yes. If the terms express a belief in the value of racial pride, the answer is no. But if they express a belief in the importance of Black dignity, then the answer is yes. If they mean a commitment to revolution, then again everything depends on what one means by that term. Douglass was skeptical if not hostile to the notion that significant historical change can be accomplished overnight and cemented in place afterward. He admired the 1848 revolutions in Eu­rope, and he urged his Black readers to draw inspiration from them, but he did not think that any revolution could usher in a new era overnight. Rightly understood, revolution meant endless struggle.

Was Douglass a humanist? Yes but in a particular sense of that word. As we have seen, in order to address the problem of whites’ anti-Black racism, he developed a more substantive theory of the human than could be found in U.S. public philosophy, based as it was so largely upon natural rights liberalism. He argued that our human rights are not just “endowed” such that we “possess” them, and he urged instead that we understand our rights as deriving from the powers that constitute us as humans. He warned that unless we have an opportunity to exercise those powers freely, we will not become conscious of them, and of the dignity and the rights that they confer. Nor will others. This far more relational and action-oriented understanding of rights and citizenship provided Douglass with a far better explanation of the dynamics of ra­cial oppression–and how to combat them–than did Locke’s natural rights philosophy.

Was Douglass an assimilationist? On the one hand, in an obvious way, the answer is yes: Douglass urged Black Americans’ “incorporation” into the United States. On the other hand, the answer is no, since the nation he envisioned would have to be “composite,” not white. Douglass’s anti­racist strategy therefore amounts to far more than just “assimilation” or “integration.” It also calls for whites to purge themselves of racism and to redescribe the citizen and the human as an assemblage of pow­ers, not as a mere blank abstraction bearing human rights. At the same time, it calls on Black Americans to do more than appeal to whites for recognition of Blacks’ rights by invoking the morality they share with them; they must also struggle to empower themselves through the ex­ercise of their distinctive human powers and thereby to command the respect of whites. In short, if “assimilationist” signifies conformity to established white norms, then Douglass was no assimilationist, since he clearly wished to transform those norms. Why would he have aimed “to instruct the highly educated [white] people” of the United States “in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity” if he had wished merely to assimilate with them? Why would he have elaborated a political phi­losophy applicable to them if he believed that appeals to the public phi­losophy they already had would suffice? But if “assimilationist” means a total commitment to a universal human community, then the answer is yes. And not just Blacks, but also whites and all other races, would have to assimilate to it.

Michael Dawson has posited that a signature trait of Black nation­alism is that it takes “race as the fundamental analytical category of concern to African Americans.”[10] By this measure, Douglass definitely qualifies as a Black nationalist, since throughout his long career he took white racism to be the most urgent problem facing both the Black community and U.S. democracy. Recall his words: “The relationship subsisting between the white and colored people of this country is, of all other questions, the great, paramount, imperative and all commanding question for this age and nation to solve.”[11] More important, his most distinctive contribution to democratic political thought–his theory that human powers and dignity are core values of democracy–arose in the first place from his analysis of what white racism is and seeks to do. As well, we must bear in mind that Douglass often advocated for all Black political organizations, and at times for all-Black schools.[12] But if Douglass was a Black nationalist, he was also in an important sense a Black liberal insofar as he was fully committed to an abstract universality of citizenship. However, if, as Dawson writes, “black nationalism ..cannot be made to march under the liberal banner,” then Douglass could not have been a Black nationalist.[13] How can we resolve this paradox? One way, I suggest, is to acknowledge that Douglass espoused an unfamiliar but deeply radical conception of Black nationalism: one that is not separatist, but instead places the perspective of Black America at the center of the nation, as a generating force of its understanding of democracy. To put this formulation in its most provocative form: Black nationalism, for Douglass, would have meant striving to turn a white democracy Black.

“To get at the Soul of Things” 

Despite the effort of some thinkers to rehabilitate the term “human­ism”–including, notably, Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter–within the academy today it still lingers under a cloud of suspicion, and for good reason: its long-standing and often covert usefulness to Eurocentrism, colonialism, and the subtle enforcing of the racial contract. Douglass’s political thought, however, asks us to rethink and reconsider whether all forms of humanism deserve this judgment, and it does so first and foremost by redefining the site at which political theorizing comes into being as a site of endless struggle. Douglass believed that all citizens, indeed all humans, must commit themselves to such struggle, and that once they do, they will have to look around for the resources they need in order to sustain their efforts forever. Even after a revolution, no reign of democratic flourishing ever will set in and last indefinitely. Endless struggle is the democratic condition. Or, as John Lewis so pointedly puts it, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a na­tion and world society at peace with itself.”[14]

What would Americans–Black and white–need in order to sustain such a struggle? Along with transformed conceptions of the freedom and dignity of all persons, thought Douglass, they would need trans­formed conceptions of time, progress, the universal, and the human. Time, in most of Douglass’s writings and speeches, is not simply a tem­poral dimension of existence–as in the familiar notion of time as the “fourth dimension.” Time, for Douglass, is the temporal movement of action. He urges us to think less of actions as occurring in moments of time, and more of time as coming into being only as the occasion or expression of an action. We can grasp this difficult thought if we hold in our minds simultaneously both senses of the word “occasion”: as a noun, it means “opportunity, or grounds for action,” and as a verb, it means “to bring about.” This way of thinking about time was an exten­sion of Douglass’s tendency to distrust the category of existence, or be­ing, in human affairs, and to replace it with action or acting. His view resembles somewhat John Dewey’s admonition that human experience is in truth an “undergoing”: in every moment of life, we are not just being, but doing and being done to. But, as I have noted earlier, where pragmatists tend to think of undergoing as experimentation, Douglass gave it a more urgent cast: it is struggle.

Here I want to borrow an insight and a word from literary historian Jeffrey Insko, who has written the most searching and profound account of Douglass’s temporality, which he characterizes as “anticipation.” In­sko writes: “An affective rather than an analytical mode, anticipation suggests a complex of feelings, experiences, or even bodily sensations one can have toward and of the future.”[15] This way of thinking about time strongly disposed Douglass to prioritize the present, pay tribute to the future (since action in the present aims to bring it into being), and downgrade but not dismiss the value of the past. Recall that in his March 1849 editorial titled “The Constitution and Slavery,” he had crys­talized his understanding of the relation between time and human knowing in his phrase “the ever-present now”: “True stability consists not in being of the same opinion now as formerly, but in a fixed princi­ple of honesty, even urging us to the adoption or rejection of that which may seemed to us true or false at the ever-present now.”[16] Douglass’s em­phasis on the present appears most famously in his July Fourth speech, where he called it “the ever-living now” and emphasized that “now is the time, the important time”: “My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now …We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to no­ble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time …. You live and must die, and you must do your work.” [17]

As Insko argues, however, Douglass’s “present” was “ever-present” because it was a present of anticipation, a future-oriented present. About five years after his July Fourth Address, Douglass’s distinctive demo­cratic temporality informed his May 1857 response to the Supreme Court’s recent Dred Scott decision. This moment was almost certainly one of the gloomiest of his life. The culmination of a series of setbacks that had begun in 1850 with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the de­cision dealt a devastating blow both to abolitionism’s hopes and to the prospects of free Blacks living anywhere in the United States. While the 1850 act had extended slavery by permitting slaveholders to override the local laws of the free, northern states, the 1857 decision extended slav­ery even further by implicitly denying the very possibility of citizenship to all Black Americans, including those who were already nominally free. Yet this was not how Douglass chose to interpret the decision’s impact. Instead, he argued that by making the injustice of slavery more “open” and “glaring,” it marked an inevitable stage in a long struggle whose steady intensification augured the certain defeat of the slavery system.

Douglass’s retrieval of hope from the “lengthening shadows” of de­spair was far from optimistic about the future, however; rather, it seemed to deny the usefulness of the temporal category we call the “future.” He begins his speech with a subtle but effective framing that emphasizes his temporal location in a present of great urgency. His key rhetorical device here is anaphora: “While four millions of our fellow countrymen are in chains–while men, women, and children are bought and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine–while the remorseless slave-ship draws the warm blood of our common humanity–it is meet that we assemble as we have done to-day.”[18] These repetitions of “while” underscore that the “to-day” of that meeting is located firmly within a cotemporal, circumscribing present of slavery’s continuing existence. In the next paragraph, Douglass strengthens this frame through an insistent repetition of the phrase “than now”: the enemies of abolition claim that “the price of human flesh has never been higher than now“; that the people of the South have never been more attached to slavery “than now“; that “slavery has never reposed on a firmer basis than now” (407; emphasis added).

Having thus firmly placed his audience in this discouraging now, Douglass goes on to confess his own inclination to look to the future for respite or deliverance. He begins in an unabashedly affective regis­ter: “With an earnest, aching heart I have long looked for the realization of the hope of my people” (408). He then describes this stance of looking forward using shockingly material metaphors intended to convey that, in the “present” from which he looks forward, he is still an embodied, “barefoot” consciousness: “Standing, as it were, barefoot, and tread­ing on the sharp and flinty rocks of the present, and looking out upon the boundless sea of the future, I have sought, in my humble way, to penetrate the intervening mists and clouds, and, perchance, to descry, in the dim and shadowy distance, the white flag of freedom, the pre­cise speck of time at which the cruel bondage of my people should end” (408). Abruptly, however, Douglass closes down this futural prospect: “But of that time I can know nothing, and you can know nothing. All is uncertain at that point” (408). By thus eschewing the consolations of futural thinking, Douglass places his audience, too, on the “sharp and flinty rocks of the present,” where one thing only is “certain”: “slave­holders are in earnest and mean to cling to their slaves as long as they can, and to the bitter end” (408).

For Douglass, then, political time is hammered out by exigency and exists only as the site of struggle. From the past, we take only what we need for that struggle. Of the future, we can know nothing. And although the present may feel like sharp and flinty rocks beneath our feet, it can also be experienced as an “ever-present now,” an “ever-­living now,” a forward-looking now. Pessimism and optimism, the grip of the past and the possibilities of the future, converge in this existential commitment to struggle. It is a struggle without end because it is a struggle against against power that “concedes nothing without a demand, and .. never will.” “Parties, like men, must act in the living present or fail. It is not what they have done or left undone that turns the scale, but what they are doing, and what they mean to do now.”[19] There, in that phrase “mean to do now,” we catch the blending of present and future that Insko calls “anticipation.”

To be sustained, thought Douglass, such struggle must be fueled by: firm belief in progress ( or by a resolute anticipation of progress). At times he expressed this belief as if it were something he had to will, or even to pretend, in order to sustain the struggle. As he put it in his lecture “Pictures and Progress,” “He who despairs of progress despises the hope of the world–and shuts himself out from the chief significance of his existence–and is dead while he lives.”[20] more often he stated his an­ticipation of progress as a logical induction from facts he had observed. In his response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he avowed “I believe in the millennium–the final perfection of the race, and hail this Proclamation, though wrung under the goading lash of a stern mil­itary necessity, as one reason of the hope that is in me.” And so he was critical of pessimism: “I have somewhere seen a doubt expressed that there is any such thing as human progress. Some go so far as to say that this world is growing worse. To this view–this disheartening view, l may say–there is no more impressive contradiction than in the history of the anti-slavery cause.” [21] One might say, then, that Douglass holds in tension present-day theories that either emphasize the ongoingness of the past of slavery or underscore the need to aspire and work toward al­ternative futures. He moves back and forth in the interval between “the not yet” and the “no longer,” refusing to be defined by either of them.[22] Yet Douglass would also go beyond such practical and historical ar­guments for progress to assert a metaphysical claim: that progress is the expression of the immutable laws of the universe: “the world, like the fish preached to in the stream, moves on in obedience to the laws of its being, bearing away all excrescences and imperfections in its prog­ress.”[23] As he grew older, he rested his understanding of progress in­creasingly on his particular conception of the human: it posits that the source of all “higher” law is not the will of a divine being but human na­ture itself, with all its distinctive powers. As he affirmed in 1863: “But little hope would there be for this world covered with error as with a cloud of thick darkness…if there were not in man, deep down, and it may be very deep down, in his soul or in the truth itself, an elective power, or an attractive force, call it by what name you will, which makes truth in all her simple beauty and excellence, ever preferred to the grim and ghastly powers of error.”[24] This “elective power” is an aspect of our oral power,” which may be why he shifts from the adjective “elec­tive” to “attractive”: we do not elect to exercise this power so much as we find ourselves obeying its commands, which are as irresistible as gravity. In an 1865 speech, he associates this inward moral force with another “element of progress” that lies within our very nature: “Man is distin­gished from all other animals, but in nothing is he distinguished more in this, namely, resistance, active and constant resistance, to the forces of physical nature …To lack this element of progress is to re­semble the lower animals, and to possess it is to be men.”[25]

Douglass’s faith in a human nature whose powers work unceasingly for progress was also the foundation of his belief in the viability of de­mocracy as a form of human governance:

If I believed in the doctrine that human nature is totally depraved, that it is an evil nature unmixed with good, I should hold with Carlyle that it is better to restrict the right of suffrage among the masses of the people. If I believed that there was a prevailing disposition to evil and a preponderance of evil over good in human nature, I should say that the less the masses have to do with governing the better, for the less of humanity there was in it, the more of divinity there would be. But I believe that men are rather more disposed to truth, to goodness and to excellence, than to vice and wickedness, and for that reason I wish to see the elements of humanity infused throughout all human government.

Somehow, then, Douglass was able to hold fast to two seemingly op­posite views of time. One was an extreme form of presentism in which the “ever-present now” absorbs both past and future and constitutes the only meaningful temporality of human life. The other was a strong anticipation of progress, which does imply a futurity of some kind, understood as endless struggle undertaken where all action occurs in fhe present. He neither reconciled these two conceptions of time nor subsumed one within the other. He accepted the tension between them as he accepted that progress is both an inevitable expression of man’s nature and an accomplishment won by countless actions performed by persons living in their moment of “the ever-present now.” A belief in the inevitability of progress, for Douglass, was not an encouragement to complacence or even hope, but a recognition of the human capacity for endless struggle and sacrifice to bring about a better world: “The world has made some progress since then: it is making progress all the time, but it so happens that every step in the world’s progress costs terribly; every inch of man’s disputed way upwards is bought at the cost of agony and often of blood.”[27]

As I have noted earlier, Douglass gradually moved from a Christianity-based philosophy to a more human-centered one. We may also describe this movement as his heading steadily toward a mystery he called soul. In 1855, he had defined humanity as being “endowed with those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and sense, and grasps with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely glorious idea of God.”[28] In 1863, as we have just seen, he had declared that there “in man, deep down, and it may be very deep down, in his soul or in the truth itself, an elective power, or an attractive force, call it by what name you will, which makes truth in all her simple beauty and excellence, preferred to the grim and ghastly powers of error.”[29] In his remarks in 1870 at the final meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he had said: “I want to express my love to God and gratitude to God, by thanking those faithful men and women, who have devoted the great energy of their souls to the welfare of mankind. It is only through such men and women that I can get any glimpse of God anywhere.”[30] In 1883, he had affirmed: “What is true of external nature is also true of that strange, mysterious, and indescribable, which earnestly endeavors in some degree to measure and grasp the deepest thought and to get at the soul of things; to make our subjective consciousness, objective, in thought, form and speech!’ And in an April 1885 speech, he called the struggle against racism a struggle for “the soul of the nation”; then, as if to acknowledge that by using the word “soul” he was asking his audience to risk uncharted depths with him, he came back to it again: “Let me say one word more of the soul of the nation and of the importance of keeping it sensitive and responsive to the claims of truth, justice, liberty, and progress. In speaking of the soul of the nation I deal in no cant phraseology. I speak of that mysterious, invisible, impalpable something which underlies the life alike of individuals and of nations, and determine their character and destiny.”[31]

When Douglass says that we may call soul “by what name you will,” he is frankly admitting that the deepest source of his anticipation of progress and belief in humanity is so mysterious as to be beyond the reach of language. It is fugitive. Or, as political theorist Melvin Rogers might say, it “runs ahead of the evidence.”[32] We may call it by whatever name we like, he suggests, because all names for our reasons for faith are inadequate. As he puts the matter in his lecture “It Moves”: “Con­templated as a whole, it [truth] is too great for human conception or expression, whether in books or creeds. It is the illimitable thought of the universe, upholding all things, governing all things, superior to all things. Reigning in eternity, it is sublimely patient with our slow ap­proximations to it, and our imperfect understanding of it, even where its lessons are clearly taught and easily understood.”[33]

Like Douglass’s belief in human brotherhood, like his eternal now that has no patience with either pessimism or optimism, like his meld­ing of the certainty of progress in the future with the necessity of end­less struggle in the present, Douglass’s soul language admonishes us to name our deepest value commitments even when we know that our words will fail us. These commitments come to rest, like it or not, on our suppositions about human nature. Do we believe, then, with Douglass, “that men are rather more disposed to truth, to goodness and to excel­lence, than to vice and wickedness”? If so, what gives us reason to think so? If not, on the basis of what alternative view of human nature may we remain committed to democracy? Having seen the worst that human beings can be, and the worst that they can do to one another, Douglass felt that the obligation to ask these questions was foundational to po­litical philosophy and political struggle. Yet he also acknowledged that the answers to them would vary, and that no answer could offer more than a glimmering–and fugitive–vision of “that mysterious, invisi­ble, impalpable something which underlies the life alike of individuals and of nations.”

Nick Bromell, “‘That Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable’: The Fugitive Legacy of Douglass’s Political Thought,” in The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, pp. 189-205.  Copyright 2021, Duke University Press.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher.  www.dukeupress.edu

NOTES

1 John Stauffer offers an analogous and complementary argument about the dif­ference between Douglass’s aesthetics of freedom and his aesthetics of bondage in “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics,” 114-36.

2 FDP 3:19 Further page references will be made in the text.

3 Douglass’s language here bears a strong resemblance to Lysander Spooner’s. (Spooner was a principal theoretician of the political abolitionists’ argument that the Constitution rightly understood was an antislavery document.) Spooner de­fined law as “‘an intelligible principle of right, necessarily resulting from the na­ture of man, and not an arbitrary rule, that can be established by mere will, num­bers or power.'” Spooner, quoted by Schrader, “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought,” in Lawson and Kirkland, Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, 91.

4 Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, 236, 445; Shulman, American Prophecy, 16-20, 76-80.

5. Or perhaps what Cornel West has called his “prophetic pragmatism,” though he does not mention Douglass in connection with it. West, American Evasion of Phi­losophy, 234.

6. As I hope we have seen, Douglass’s more integrative way of thinking expresses his commitment to relationality, connections, continuities, breadth, and gen­erosity and his aversion to compartmentalization, separation, narrowness, and meanness. For Douglass, nothing stands alone. Everything is part of a spectrum. Ideas cannot be separated from actions. Absolute truth cannot be separated from standpoint perspective. Principles cannot be separated from the manner of apply­ing them. Culture cannot be separated from nature, and mind is not altogether distinct from body. Each pair should be regarded as a unitary whole that is always in tension, or in struggle, with itself.

7 Of course, as the story of the three blind men in their first encounter with an elephant conveys, the use of inductive reason is hardly foolproof. An even greater danger, in my view, is that deductive reasoning often pretends to be inductive. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson gives the appearance of dispas­sionately observing and collecting data from which he assembles his scientific conclusions, but we have good reason to believe that about some matters–e.g., the condition of the “New World” and the nature of African persons–he arrived first at conclusions and then selected evidence that purportedly supported them.

8. Moses, Creative Conflict, xi-xii.

9. Moses, Creative Conflict, xii.

10. Dawson, Black Visions.

11. FDP 3:570.

12. Finally, there is at least some affinity between Delany’s idea of “inherent sover­eignty” and Douglass’s notion that rights derive from inherent human powers that compose dignity. To put the matter bluntly: Do not both thinkers share a dispo­sition toward what we would now call “essentialism”? In the nineteenth century, essentialism was at least as prevalent a disposition as contingency thinking. Yet the deeper reason for their affinity on this point might have been their experience as raced Black bodies living in a white racist polity. Insults to his Blackness might have triggered in Douglass, as much as in Delany, a drive to locate bedrock values in his own body. Thereafter, a fork in the road might have led him to emphasize such value in all human bodies, whereas Delany emphasized the specific value of Black human bodies. These are major differences, of course; up to that point, how­ever, they were walking the same path, one that originated in their experience and consciousness of race.

13. Dawson, Black Visions, 13.

14. John Lewis, “Together You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation.” https://www .nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html. July 30, 2020, 8:52 AM EST.

15. Insko, History, Abolition, 129. Cody Marrs offers a quite different view of Doug­lass’s temporality: “Time, he came to believe, tends not to progress in a straight line, but to break off and return in unexpected ways.” I think Marrs is correct if “in a straight line” connotes “automatically” rather than through struggle; but I would disagree with the second part of Marrs’s account, which implies that, in breaking off and coming back, progress has a life of its own apart from human struggle. Marrs, “Frederick Douglass in 1848,” 435.

16. FDP 1:361.

17. FDP 2:366.

18. LW 2:407 (emphasis added). Further page references will be made in the text.

19. FDP 5:178.

20. FDP 3:471.

21.FDP 3:471; FOP 3:552; FOP 4:410.

22. I am grateful to Lawrie Balfour both for pointing this out to me and helping me find the language to express it.

23. FDP 3:555,

24. FDP 3:553.

25. FDP 4:495.

26 FDP 4:173.

27. FDP 4:315.

28. FDP 2:255.

29. FDP 3:553 (emphasis added).

30. FDP 4:264 (emphasis added).

31. FDP 5:191 (emphasis added).

32. Rogers writes: “If what we are after is commending a posture toward one’s ethical and political inequality, what we can say is that transformation for and by oppressed peoples, as far as I know, has never finally come about by taking the facts of the case as settled…So if political struggle persists and thus the belief in transforming America into a racially just society persists, it will do so by running ahead of the evidence needed to justify or make sense of the struggle itself. This is what [Anna Julia] Cooper and [William] James meant by the term ‘Faith.'” Rogers, “Running ahead of the Evidence.”

33. FDP 5:141.