Alain Locke's relationship to philosophy is, as Leonard Harris has remarked, one of the “enigmas” of his life (Harris 1989, 10). On the one hand, Locke was drawn to philosophy early in his undergraduate education. At Harvard he quickly chose philosophy as his major, taking classes with William James and Josiah Royce, thus getting a grounding in American pragmatism. Jeffrey Stewart recounts the story of Locke meeting the then giant of American philosophy George Herbert Palmer, going on to say that Locke's “choice of courses with Palmer suggests that he may have been attracted to philosophy because of its vision of a universal discourse that all men, regardless of race, could participate in” (Stewart 2018, 64).After Harvard, Locke continued his education at Oxford from 1907 to 1910 as the first Black Rhodes Scholar. He then went to Berlin, staying there from 1910 to 1911. He took classes with Georg Simmel on Johann Fichte's philosophy; he was also a student of the Kantian Benno Erdman. When Locke began his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1916, we know that the works of Franz Brentano, Christian von Ehrenfels, and Alexius von Meinong, the “Austrian” school of value, were influential. His advisor was Ralph Barton Perry, a value theorist. Locke was, as we know, the first Black American man to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard in 1918, and only the second Black American man to receive a doctorate in philosophy in the United States. After graduation, Locke spent the better part of his career in the Philosophy Department at Howard University, chairing the department for more than 40 years, though his tenure there was interrupted by his dismissal in 1925 and reinstatement in 1928.Yet, during that time period, Locke only published a few pieces that are explicitly in philosophy. At the same time, Locke was prolific in his literary and cultural criticism and work on race. Why Locke published so rarely in philosophy is, as Christopher Buck has also remarked, “strange” (Buck 2010, 226). Jeffrey Stewart and Leonard Harris's work during the 1980s unearthed a few more unpublished papers and lectures, which have given us a slightly fuller picture of Locke's philosophical work. Locke's focus in his published and unpublished philosophical work is value theory and pluralism. The work on pluralism has been commented upon.1 By contrast, the work on value theory has received less comment.2 The prose in these essays is rather dry,3 standing in stark contrast to Locke's writing in The New Negro and to his aesthetic and social criticism. Compounding the style of the prose is the technical vocabulary of these essays, influenced by both pragmatism and the “Austrian” school.Locke's first published paper in philosophy, the only one in the field he was trained in, was written at the relatively late age of 50 in 1935. It draws on his dissertation and is titled “Values and Imperatives.” The paper considers shifts in value, known as transvaluation, central to a theory of value. The essay is prefaced by what Locke calls a “psychograph.” Asked to provide a brief account of himself to accompany his essay, the psychograph was his response. In it, Locke appears to give a reason for his sparse philosophical production. He states that he is “a cultural cosmopolitan, but perforce an advocate of cultural racialism as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro, and accordingly more of a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, artists than a professional philosopher” (312).Locke here declares that a pragmatic advocacy of “cultural racialism” is the reason for his sparse philosophical production, his desire diverted from professional philosophy to philosophical midwifery. The figure of Locke as midwife to a younger generation of “Negro poets, writers, artists” is well known. Yet the psychograph prefaces the first essay in which Locke is a professional philosopher. Within the rhetoric of the psychograph, this statement doesn't quite function as the apology that it seems to be. What, then, is the relationship of this psychograph to the essay that follows? Scholars have not read Locke's psychograph in conjunction with the essay, preferring by and large to comment upon the psychograph as a stand-alone piece. Curiously, Leonard Harris reproduces the psychograph in his introduction to The Philosophy of Alain Locke but does not include it with the essay itself.For Stewart, Locke had moved to philosophy as a young undergraduate because of a “universality” that appeared to transcend race. For the mature Locke, the existence of race can't be schematized into the relationship of a particular to a universal. What is the relationship of race to universality in Locke? What happens when it is a Black subject that voices a universal?In this paper, I contend with these questions by reading Locke's psychograph alongside “Values and Imperatives.” In the first part of this essay, I offer a reading that relates these ostensibly distinct texts. In the psychograph, as I show, the desire of the Black philosophical subject is produced as always already liable to circumstantial change. The universal is voiced through these shifts. “Values and Imperatives” carries this argument forward, making the case for functional rather than metaphysical universals. In the second part of this essay, I situate the psychograph and “Values and Imperatives” within a vogue for philosophical autobiography that arose during the interwar period and led to the publication of four anthology series in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. 4 The first of these was Raymund Schmidt's Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921) [Contemporary German Philosophy in Self-Portraits]. Shaped by the turn to subjectivity in the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and others, Schmidt devised the genre of philosophical self-portraits and solicited contributions from prominent German philosophers for his multivolume series. Schmidt's series was soon followed by John Muirhead's Contemporary British Philosophy, Personal Statements (1924) and then George Adams and William Montague's Contemporary American Philosophers: Personal Statements (1930). These anthologies problematized the generic distinctions between autobiography and philosophy, albeit in varying ways depending on the editor. Locke's contribution was published in the last one of these, Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook's American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow (1935). It is marked by the fact that he is the only Black man to contribute and because his “psychograph” stages an indirect access to the subject of philosophy, rather than an unfettered claiming of the first-person pronoun “I.” Locke also takes seriously Schmidt's call in his original volume for a philosophical self-representation that might provide a “psychogenesis” of the philosophy. Through a reading that problematizes the generic distinctions between autobiography and philosophy, I suggest that in Locke it is the Black philosophical subject who is able to access functional universals, which remain hidden for a white subject presupposing conventional notions of universality and particularity. I show an instance of this in the third part of the essay by looking at a passing exchange that occurs during a meeting of The American Scholar, on whose board Locke sat. In that exchange, between Locke and a young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Locke reads historical change in a detail that Schlesinger understands as trivial, a difference that demonstrates Locke's notion of a functional universal.As we move into Locke's text, let us keep open the question of how we might think the relation between universality and particularity in the production of philosophical subjects by way of race. Following Nahum Chandler's work, this paper proposes that an investigation of the Black subject leads to a general subject from which to claim the universal (Chandler 2014) .In May 1935, Horace Kallen—who claimed that he had invented the term “cultural pluralism” when he was a teaching assistant and Locke a student in George Santayana's class at Harvard—invited Locke to contribute an essay to his volume titled American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, edited with Sidney Hook. Stewart has suggested that Locke's budding, perhaps sexual, friendship with Chicago philosopher and politician T. V. Smith, formed after the two had spent time together in Greece, and a renewal of connections with Kallen, both in 1934, led to Locke's “rekindled . . . love of philosophy” (Stewart 2018, 694). In 1935, Locke was busy putting together a pamphlet series on “Negro adult education” and writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, which was never finished.5 Smith, then an editor with the International Journal of Ethics, and Kallen both invited Locke to contribute articles. Locke spent May and June writing “Values and Imperatives” for Kallen's volume. Kallen and Hook invited their contributors to preface their essays, as I have noted, with a short autobiographical account. The essays themselves were intended to be “personal credos.” Thus, Locke, as he is trying to write a biography of Douglass, is also involved in biographizing himself.In the very brief curriculum vitae that opens Locke's psychograph, he lists as one of his publications “Frederick Douglass; A Biography of Anti-Slavery (1935)” (312). Locke may have been anticipating the successful completion of this biography, a project that he would give up some years later. The title of this biography, which to us resonates with W. E. B. Du Bois's Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), foregrounds the ways in which the biographizing of Black life might always already involve something more general.6 For Du Bois, taking the “one human life I know best” might access the autobiography of a concept, of the philosophico-historical movement and phenomenon of race (Du Bois 2007, xxxiiii). Chandler's reading shows us the complexity of this practice. Locke's title suggests something similar, that Frederick Douglass's life leads to the biography of a movement, but we cannot know since Locke never finished it.Whether Locke's preemptive inclusion of his biography of Douglass was an indication of his confidence that he would complete it soon enough to publish it that same year, or whether it was an incentive to spur him on, we can certainly imagine Locke grappling with the problems of writing a biography of Douglass as he writes his own autobiographical account. For Stewart, Locke found in Douglass a masculinity that he both desired and was excluded from. We might also consider how our received readings figure Douglass as precisely that subject that overcomes its circumstances. We do not know how Locke planned to biographize Douglass. What we can say is that in his own autobiographizing, Locke presents a subject formed by, rather than overcoming, circumstance.If one of the conventions of autobiography is the claiming of the first-person pronoun “I,” Locke's psychograph complicates this convention. David Marriott has offered a provocative and astute reading of Locke's psychograph as a complex self-reflection, in which the movement of identity (I = I) is always fraught. Marriott also draws our attention to the phrenological connotation of psychograph (Marriott 2007, 152). For phrenologists, a psychograph was a machine that, through the measuring of a head, would hierarchically categorize mental capacity. Whether or not Locke intended this use of the term, or just the more general use of the term as a loose synonym for autobiography, we must keep in mind that he uses the word “psychograph” rather than “autobiography.” The subject of a psychograph—the psyche—is not identical with the subject of an autobiography. What we see in Locke's psychograph is the retrospective rendering of the movement of desire in a psyche.Locke's psychograph opens with the description of a philosophical subject for whom desire and the appearance of that desire are not identical: “I should like to claim as life-motto the good Greek principle,—‘Nothing in excess,’ but I have probably worn instead as the badge of circumstance,—‘All things with a reservation’” (1935, 312). There are two disjunctions here: The first is between the subject who might need to temper desires that can be realized in the world and the wary subject whose every desire must be cautiously expressed. The second is, of course, between what the subject would like to claim and how it appears (“I have probably worn”) due to circumstance. Circumstance thus plays an important role in the formation of this philosophical subject. The fiction of a withdrawal from the outside world into an inner struggle is not tenable for Locke, an inner struggle that would be expressible by the Greek motto, which suggests the tempering of desire. Circumstance precludes the holding of such a distinction. It has instead produced a wary subject.Circumstance, Locke tells us, sets in motion the figure of a “paradox,” which repeatedly stages a disjunction between an expressed desire and its deviated realization: “Philadelphia, with her birthright of provincialism flavored by urbanity and her petty bourgeois psyche with the Tory slant, at the start set the key of paradox; circumstance compounded it by decreeing me as a Negro a dubious and doubting sort of American and by reason of the racial inheritance making me more of a pagan than a Puritan, more of a humanist than a pragmatist.” The key circumstance here of course is being “decreed . . . as a Negro” (312).“The key of paradox” is a kind of admixture that is not fully an opposition: “provincialism flavored by urbanity,” “petty bourgeois psyche with the Tory slant.” Instead, two somewhat incompatible things are brought together, in which one term qualifies the other. The result is that the subject's intention can never be realized directly. It is thus not quite a struggle over desire but a repeated (and perhaps unexpected) diverting that forms this subject: Verily paradox has followed me the rest of my days: at Harvard, clinging to the genteel tradition of Palmer, Royce and Munsterberg, yet attracted by the disillusion of Santayana and the radical protest of James: again in 1916 I returned to work under Royce but was destined to take my doctorate in Value Theory under Perry. At Oxford, once more intrigued by the twilight of aestheticism but dimly aware of the new realism of the Austrian philosophy of value. (312)Although the other personal accounts in Hook and Kallen's book assume an easy relationship to the self as subject, recounting influences and pivotal moments, Locke's self-recounting stages a subject in which the transposition of desire—designated by the figure of paradox—is the moving force. Left out of Locke's recounting of his time at Harvard as an undergraduate and graduate student and his time at Oxford are both the intense race hostility that he had to contend with and his burgeoning sexuality. As Locke moves to describe his disposition, race then appears as the reason for a split between his personal and philosophical preferences and his political commitments: Socially Anglophile, but because of race loyalty, strenuously anti-imperalist [sic]; universalist in religion, internationalist and pacifist in world-view, but forced by a sense of simple justice to approve of the militant counter-nationalisms of Zionism, Young Turkey, Young Egypt, Young India, and with reservations even Garveyism and current-day “Nippon over Asia.” Finally a cultural cosmopolitan, but perforce an advocate of cultural racialism as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro, and accordingly more of a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, artists than a professional philosopher. (312)The rhetoric of necessity (“forced,” “perforce”) moves the philosophical subject from its original desire or preference to a different position. It is in the repetition of the conjunction “but” that the change of value, because of race, is situated. Freedom for this subject is coupled with necessity, not its antithesis. The Greek motto—“nothing in excess”—about the tempering of desire, changes in Locke to a professed ambivalence about any desire held by the subject—perhaps because the desires of a Black man were often brutally redirected by circumstances. We might say that the circumstances of race thus form an imperative.For Locke it is the determination of the philosophical subject through circumstances that leads to the universal. Locke's final line is a warning shot to those who, like Horace Kallen, would like Locke to be a race representative, offering, in Kallen's words, the “Negro contribution to the United States,” to which we might also include American philosophy (Marriott 2007, 171): Small wonder, then, with this psychograph, that I project my personal history into its inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism, with a not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life. (Locke 1935, 312)Kallen reads Locke's final lines as a kind of protesting submission to the exigencies of circumstance, which obliged Locke to move from a preferred monism to a cultural pluralism. Kallen thus reads “rationalization” as a quiet protest against this obliged shift. We might, however, consider how “inevitable rationalization”—carrying the force of necessity—is precisely the task of the reader: how to relate the psychograph to the philosophical credo that follows. Locke tells us that he “project[s]” his personal history. In the essay that follows, projection is described as the antithesis to acceptance, placed in a list that includes “repose and action, integration and conflict.” In this series of oppositions, one term has to do with the resolution of tension and the other is provoked by tension. We might perhaps then also read this last line as a warning not to take the lines “inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism” to easily mean “Negro contribution.” In other words, the tension that projects this personal history asks the reader to contend with the circumstance of race as a paradoxical force of necessity that occasions the swerving of destiny, rather than Kallen's view that “darker skin [is] in matters of spirit an incidental difference” (Kallen 1957, 121). For Kallen, cultural pluralism is the recognition of difference as primary and of racial difference as ultimately trivial. For Locke, however, the circumstances of race play out elsewhere than only in terms of personal or individual identity.Let us now turn to “Values and Imperatives.” Locke begins with the proposition that All philosophies, it seems to me, are in ultimate derivation philosophies of life and not of abstract, disembodied “objective” reality; products of time, place and situation, and thus systems of timed history rather than timeless eternity. They need not even be so universal as to become the epitomized rationale of an age, but may merely be the lineaments of a personality, its temperament and dispositional attitudes projected into their systematic rationalizations. (1935, 313)It's not clear whether Locke had read Schmidt's series. The series had been well reviewed, including by Wilbur Urban, one of the leading names in axiology. Locke also spent his summers in Berlin during the 1920s and certainly knew German. Whether or not Locke read Schmidt, this beginning resonates with Schmidt's project. A universal is announced (“all philosophies”) as a subjective belief (“it seems to me”). If we read this first paragraph over against the last paragraph of the epigraph, we see the parallel. In the psychograph: “I project my personal history into its inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism.” In the body of the essay itself, “philosophies . . . may merely be the lineaments of a personality, its temperament and dispositional attitudes projected into their systematic rationalizations.”Projection here is a throwing outward through which something personal appears as something systematic. “Projection” is a term that Locke often uses in his aesthetic criticism and in these philosophical works. This term functions to relate what appears to be an opposition: the individual and the system, an opposition that Locke is trying to undo from the very first sentence, in proposing that all philosophies are philosophies of life.Yet, if Locke begins with this proposition, that all philosophies are, to this philosopher, philosophies of life, he then proceeds by criticizing relativism, arguing that no philosophy can afford to ignore absolutes. The figure of paradox that was at work in Locke's psychograph is also in play in the philosophical work. A philosophy of “life” (“life” is the word that carries the charge of the paradox) cannot afford to ignore the imperatives engendered by our absolutes, for, Locke writes, “we live by them.” We can almost feel the way in which the strange figure of a paradox that combines apparent contraries is at work in the personality writing these lines.Is it any surprise that the essay or philosophical credo is concerned with how the force of necessity (“imperatives”) is related to changing circumstances (“values”)?Toward the end of the first paragraph, after describing sections of “American thought,” Locke shifts to the modality of necessity and invokes the collective “we” of American philosophers: Several sections of American thought, however, have been so anxious to repudiate intellectualism and escape the autocracy of categoricals and universals that they have been ready to risk this. Though they have at times discussed the problems of value, they have usually avoided their normative aspects, which has led them into a bloodless behaviorism as arid as the intellecualism they have abandoned or else resulted in a completely individualistic and anarchic relativism which has rightly been characterized recently as “philosophic Nihilism.” In de-throning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, and that norms control our behavior as well as guide our reasoning. Further, as I shall later point out, we must realize that not in every instance is this normative control effected indirectly through judgmental or evaluational processes, but often through primary mechanisms of feeling modes and dispositional attitudes. (313)Imperatives emerge in feeling and dispositional attitudes. Locke's own “dim recognition of the realism of the Austrian school” can be placed here. The Black subject, who has had to contend with paradox from the beginning, is not as caught up in the traditional oppositions as the white philosophers.Somewhat abruptly, Locke then shifts from the modality of necessity, the non sequitur be that as it may seemingly performing Locke's motto of “all things in reservation,” as the necessity is attenuated: Be that as it may, it seems that we are at last coming to the realization that without some account of normative principles, some fundamental consideration of value norms and “ultimates” (using the term in a non-committal sense), no philosophical system can hope to differentiate itself from descriptive science or present a functional, interpretive version of human experience. (314)The paragraph then moves back into the universalism of a truism: “Man does not, cannot, live in a valueless world.” Paragraph after paragraph turns around the setting up and then changing of the traditional figure of paradox: an attempt to combine irreconcilables.How then to satisfy the need for certainty, which had been elaborated in John Dewey's Quest for Certainty, without relying on absolutes or ultimates? How to establish norms that don't find their justification in metaphysical universals? Locke's response to these questions is, following Brentano, to propose a shift in our understanding of values.In the unpublished piece “Value,” Locke criticizes the metaphysical distinction of fact and value that subtends the divisions of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Against Kant's idea, that we must practically live as if certain unknowable concepts—God, immortality, freedom—both give validity to our values and also entail a separation between the theoretical and the practical, Locke argues that the distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason, and the concomitant distinction between facts and values, does not hold, that our sciences are imbricated with our interests. Indeed, Locke boldly suggests that logic is a “science of values.” He writes, “The search for ‘true reality’ in pure and unadulterated ‘fact’ . . . has always been in vain. Only the moral to be drawn is not, as idealism supposes, that reality is the work of ‘pure thought’” (Locke n.d., 118). Rejecting the distinctions between idealism and materialism (and rationalism and empiricism), Locke goes on to state that “the thought which cannot be rooted out is a valuing thought” (118). We might read Locke here as offering a response to Descartes's Meditations II different from the traditional line of interpretation in philosophy, which has been to locate the subject in the thinking thing, the res cogito. In Meditations II, Descartes's proposition of a thinking thing is followed by what we might call, following Locke, the thinking thing that values: “But what therefore am I? A thinking thing. What is that? I mean a thing that doubts, that understands, that affirms, that denies, that wishes to do this and does not wish to do that, and also that imagines and perceives by the senses” (Descartes 2008, 20).Locke locates the birth of the field of axiology in Nietzsche's assertion that all values are transvaluations, that is to say, that values are historically and socially changing, never stable. The International Journal of Ethics had featured many essays in the 1930s that deliberated on the question of what values are, whether they are subjective or objective, whether they are primarily economic, and so on. Locke calls his own approach functional. His account is by and large focused on the traditional values of philosophy, namely, truth, beauty, and goodness, rather than economic values.In “Values and Imperatives,” Locke does not particularly dwell on the ontological question of what a value is. Rather, he focuses on how a value works. Taking the philosophical trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness as examples, Locke argues that these values are not logically differentiable types. Values for Locke are not only historically changing but also never stable in terms of their logical schema. He notes the ubiquitous phenomenon of transposition, pointing out that an artist might feel duty toward their aesthetic creation, that a logical proof might be apprehended as beautiful, and that a moral action might be judged noble. For Locke, the transposition of moral necessity and beauty is inherent to value. It is neither a change in assumption nor an analogical shift. Instead, it is a clue to how values operate. Locke thus puts forward the argument that values are rooted in what he calls “feeling-modes.” The apprehension of a value is the apprehension of a feeling quality, such as “exaltation, tension, acceptance, and repose.” Such values as truth, beauty, and goodness, therefore, have no “fixity of content” but are rather references (we might also say indices) to particular feeling-modes. Locke offers a tabular schema of value, in which four feeling-modes are divided into an “introverted” and “extroverted” direction, either toward an individualized value or toward a socialized plane of action. To these feeling-modes or modal qualities correspond the traditional value types, their predicates, and finally such polarities as satisfaction and disgust for the beautiful and consistency and contradiction for truth. On Locke's functional approach, such a schema is not exhaustive, but rather an attempt to describe how values function. The functional difference of these feeling-modes is of course psychological rather than logical.Each mode, writes Locke, sets up its own norms, a kind of “categorical imperative” that is psychological rather than metaphysical. Thus, for instance, an artist feels a kind of urgency toward finishing an artwork. It is in this process of valuation that Locke grounds the validity of norms and imperatives, rather than in some kind of metaphysical absolute.It is in the conflation of these relative norms or imperatives for absolute ones that Locke shifts to the social world and “practical wisdom.” Locke quotes Nicolai Hartmann's assertion that “Every value, when once it has gained power over a person, has a tendency to set itself up as a sole tyrant of the whole human ethos, and indeed at the expense of other values.” Dividing the human species into “psychological tribes,” Locke suggests that the “antidote to value absolutism lies in a systematic and realistic demonstration that values are rooted in attitudes, not in reality” (1935, 328) If the view could be established, writes Locke, that all values are “derivative aspects of the same basic reality” (329), rather than competing conceptions about reality, then it might be possible to “maximiz[e] . . . the value-mode itself as an attitude and activity” (330), rather than fight over the definitions of values or the validity of one value over against another.What we find then is that our imperatives are driven not so much by free choice as by the apprehensions of specific feeling-modes. In “Value” Locke writes that trying to locate value in feeling, will, or desire is “somewhat nugatory” and it is more helpful to understand “value as a personal attitude, of welcome or the reverse, toward an object,” “a concern of the whole man” (n.d., 125–26).Writing in 1935, as the violence of v