W.E.B. Du Bois and His Artistic Approach to Social Science

by Anthony Monteiro.

This is the text of a lecture given by Dr. Anthony Monteiro at the Parkway Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia on February 20, 2025. It has been republished from Avant-Garde Journal.

W.E.B. Du Bois at the Afro-Asian Writers Conference, Tashkent.

Perhaps I should say a little bit about some of the agony that I have gone through preparing this. And it has been a bit of an enterprise of agony. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. When Ben asked me to do this, he also asked me for a title. As you can see it is “W.E.B. Du Bois and His Artistic Approach to Social Science.” More specifically, I would say “To Sociology.”
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I had written and spoken about Du Bois. Titles such as “The Art and Science of W.E.B. Du Bois.” I had written some things on Du Bois as an epistemologist, a theorist of knowledge. And I pretty much thought I was prepared to do this. Then I discovered suddenly I wasn’t all that prepared. Let me explain my unpreparedness. 

In the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation, we had begun studying the Renaissance as part of understanding modernity and modern capitalism, the rise of the modern bourgeoisie and of the liberal state. And so I was suddenly confronted with a scientist who was an artist, or an artist who was a scientist. 
Of course most of us know Leonardo da Vinci for a couple of paintings: the “Mona Lisa,” the “Last Supper,” and a couple of others. Not much of his painting survives. Maybe about 15 or 20 pieces. Isn’t that extraordinary.

But then, there are about 7,000 pages of his diaries, his notes, his observations on areas of science. Everything from botany, to geology, to mechanics, to physics, to astronomy. He explored all areas of science. In fact, as I was doing this research, I said, “Look, Leonardo has to be a part of the discussion of Du Bois, and Art and Science.” 

I discovered an essay that Du Bois wrote in 1890. I believe he was still at Harvard University at this time as an undergraduate. He had already completed an undergraduate degree at Fisk University and he was admitted to Harvard but they said, “You can get into the graduate school only if you redo your undergraduate degree here at Harvard.” 

And of course even then as a young man Du Bois was very proud, some would even say arrogant. He never forgave Harvard for that, and he would insist he was always at Harvard, not of Harvard. But he wrote this essay called “Leonardo Da Vinci as a Scientist.” He was about 22 years old when he wrote this. And it would put most established intellectuals and academics to shame; the maturity of the essay. 

What he argues is that Leonardo da Vinci is the founder of experimental science. Most often we associate that with Francis Bacon. But he says it was Leonardo, at least a hundred years earlier. As I read that, it said to me something about Du Bois and his approach to science. 

I had talked about Du Bois as an artist. He defined himself as a social scientist, in fact with the emphasis upon science. He had said that race was the problem of the 20th century, the problem of modernity. And that to solve the problems, or answer the unanswered questions, of modernity required social science. That all of the people who claimed to be doing social science were not in fact doing it. And his aim was to make sociology a science.

His first love was philosophy, and William James who was his closest friend and mentor at Harvard told him, “But you can’t make a living with it.” So he does his PhD in history. His dissertation which was published as the first volume in Harvard’s historical series was entitled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. He was not afraid to give long titles (laughs). But it went beyond anything that one would expect of a PhD dissertation. 

I was particularly struck by the seventh chapter. It seemed to be what I would call a poetic leap. An imaginative leap, especially for that time. It is finished in 1895. One would think he would look at the English abolitionists, because England was the center of the struggle to end the transatlantic slave trade. But he does so much more than that. He studies the slave system as a labor system and the enslaved African as a worker. And the seventh chapter is on the Haitian Revolution: that the struggle to end slavery and to end the transatlantic slave trade was not essentially, or only, I should say, a European occupation. That it was the Haitian Revolution that played a significant role. 

But then I’m looking at his life. And in 1897, hardly out of graduate school he joins with a group of Black men and women—one woman by the way, but mainly men—to form what became known as the [American] Negro Academy. There was a debate about what to name this academy. Du Bois, I am certain, wanted to name it the African Academy. Like we had the African Methodist Episcopal Church and various other Black organizations that had “African” in its name. But that was a sensitive question for many Black folk because it was not unusual for white slavers to say to free Blacks who named their churches the African Methodist, or in this case the African Academy, “Well if you are Africans, go back to Africa,” you see what I’m saying. So they decided upon the Negro Academy.

Then I was reading his The Philadelphia Negro. The originary work of urban sociology; and it remains unsurpassed even up to this day. 

And I’m looking at this work. Besides the beauty of the prose, there are his hand-drawn maps, and his hand-drawn charts. And besides the beauty of the language we have these drawings—not unlike what you would find in Leonardo da Vinci’s diaries or sketches of the human form, side-by-side with his writing. You read it, and it’s like okay, sociology, but not like any sociology I’ve ever read. Because it is all of this art. These hand-drawn maps of the Seventh Ward. And these tables and these charts. In his own hand. 

Then I get to The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. And then I have to say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here?” Because The Souls of Black Folk I consider to be a work of sociology, maybe his best sociology. I remember reading about Richard Wagner, the German operatic composer. And Wagner, different from the Italian opera writers, had an idea of a complete work of art—an opera should be a complete work of art. Not just singing and acting, but more than that. So I’m looking at The Souls of Black Folk and I’m reading it. And there’s of course the writing, the metaphor, the irony. But then there is poetry. There are lines, bars of music. Of what Du Bois would call the Sorrow Songs. There’s a short story. I’m saying, this is a complete work of art, already.

So I would talk about Du Bois in these terms and try to point out his artistry. But I never felt completely satisfied with it because I never fully defined what I meant by art. And what makes the artist different, especially from let us say the empirical scientist? It is this huge imagination. It is the imaginary that seeks to understand the human in ways that empirical science does not and cannot.

So already Du Bois understood that to solve the problem of the 20th century—which he said was the color line—required not just empirical science, but an imaginary that saw the future. Somehow I found myself getting closer to what Du Bois was doing, was all about, as an artist. And why the need for art. 

Just one other thing: Du Bois wrote three novels. One of the novels, his last one, was three volumes. And these novels are historical novels. I would say that the model for them is Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; or Leo Tolstoy. A historical novel which follows characters or a character through many situations. 

One of them struck me most, which is not about the American situation but more about the world situation, and that novel is entitled Dark Princess, subtitled A Romance. And the romance part had two meanings. It was in fact a romance between an African American man and an Indian princess. But it was a romance in the sense of the genre we call the romantic genre, the revolutionary allegory. Where the characters are not just about themselves but are struggling to change the world.

That’s what I was going to talk about. And then I read Du Bois’s essay on Leonardo as a scientist. Could I just read just a quote from that? He says, “I am sure that every candid mind must acknowledge that Leonardo da Vinci did a great work in science; that few lives even in modern times have been more completely given to empirical investigation of nature; he stands before us unique among contemporaries and predecessors. His method is wholly inductive—,” meaning from the bottom up, the empirical, “scarcely a single proposition can be found in his manuscripts which is not supported by a fact which ‘I know’ and experiment ‘I have done’ or an occurrence ‘I have seen.’”

And this was 100 years, 150 years before Francis Bacon, who was often considered the founder of experimental science, began to write. Now this is when Du Bois was 23. And I don’t think this represented a throwaway or something he was just doing for a class. It represented in a certain sense a commitment to do something like Leonardo was doing. 

So then I began to think more. I’ve always been interested in where Du Bois stands in modern history, in the modern struggle of ideas. And by modern I’m basically saying the period with the rise of European modernity and capitalism. But then modernity after the end of plantation slavery; I think that is a decisive cutoff moment. 

So we’re talking about modernity that was essentially European; but then after the end of chattel slavery, modernity which is not singularly European. Where to discuss modernity in its fullest sense meant to discover or rediscover what humanity is. 

That meant to take on all vestiges of white supremacy in science and philosophy and epistemology. It was to Du Bois that this task fell. 

So I had to think. Was this just, as we would hear it discussed in normal academic and public discourse: “Du Bois was a great thinker. Du Bois was a great Black thinker”—always have to qualify it—make sure we don’t confuse it with “the great thinkers.” And I would say no. 

If Hegel and Kant and Descartes and John Locke and others represented the fullest of European modernity, what do we say of a thinker who expands the notion of modernity and of humanity to include all of humanity? And to thus challenge previous modern thinkers at the point that race confronts their theorizing and how they avoid it as such. 

So it occurred to me that Du Bois might represent—he is one of those thinkers that begins a world movement of thought. A new moment in modernity. By the way, I’m not anti- or post-modernity. I don’t think modernity is exhausted as a way of thinking, of knowing, of articulating the world and humanity. The question is: how do you resolve the problem of modernity? And Du Bois was absolutely right, it was the color line. Because modernity comes into the world on the shoulders of the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and then colonialism. 

Thus it is almost a given that modern thinkers would perceive modernity in Eurocentric, ultimately in racialized white ways. It would take another thought movement to resolve that problem and to advance human thought. 

I hadn’t thought about this until I started thinking about Leonardo da Vinci, and the ways that Du Bois talked about him, as a figure who initiates a movement of world thought. And if Leonardo did it in the 15th century, I am prepared to argue that Du Bois does precisely that in the 20th century. 

So we can speak, and I think we should speak, of a new movement of world thought after Du Bois. Now, you can make the argument, and I would not be adverse to this argument, that Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity is also the beginning of a world movement of thought. 

Well perhaps we have two men who represent the same thing. Because I would not diminish the magnitude of Einstein’s achievement and contribution to the movement of thought. But I think with one qualification that the problems of natural science, experimental science and their methods had already been well-established by the time Einstein comes along. 

The great question, the great problem was the problem of humanity. It was a greater problem than solving the problem that Einstein solves or discovers with the theory of relativity. Sometimes because we think that previous philosophies and philosophers had solved all of the great problems of “Man” that most of us would just add on; you couldn’t surpass Hegel. “Who can surpass Hegel?” they would say. Who can surpass Kant?

We could go on. The modern period, they would say Sartre, or Heidegger. So whatever a Black thinker would do could not equal that. 

My claim is that the problem of humanity, which ultimately is the problem of war and peace, of poverty, of social equality, and “What is the human? Who is the human?” had not been solved and still remains to be resolved. And so I would argue, indeed Einstein begins a movement that advances world thought. But he stands on the shoulders of already established methods and science and experimentation and mathematics. 
Du Bois was opening up an entirely new area or region of human thought, so important that humans survival depends upon us getting that question right.

Let me just say one other thing, and this is very interesting; Du Bois began his college studies in philosophy at Fisk University. Those of you who do not know, Fisk University is a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a historic college, one, because Du Bois went there, but also because a major part of the Civil Rights Movement issues from Fisk University. Such people as James Lawson and Diane Nash and John Lewis all went to Fisk and were all a part of a collective of student activists who challenged racial segregation.

Du Bois went to Fisk. As I said, when he went to Harvard they said you have to redo your undergraduate degree, we don’t fully accept a degree from Fisk. Du Bois didn’t like that. Du Bois would always say, “I was at Harvard, I was not of Harvard.” When he spoke about this he was both at Fisk and of Fisk. He said of his Harvard professors they were no better than the ones that Fisk; the ones that Harvard were just better known. [I say this] having gone to a historically Black college—forgive me if I say something offensive—when Black colleges really were about educating Black freedom fighters, which I don’t know is the case these days. 

His friend and professor William James, a famous pragmatist philosopher and psychologist, told Du Bois, “You can’t get a job with philosophy.” So Du Bois does history but then he says he wants to do sociology. So how will he do it? He said, “I will combine”—this is interesting—“I will combine history and philosophy to produce sociology.” 

I still wrestle with that. History and philosophy. By philosophy, what did he mean? The broadest definition of knowledge and its practices? Was art a part of philosophy for him? And was history the study of how things evolve over time? He would always say that as he approached the study of history and of social problems, he did not approach the world as a finished product, but in development. 


This was very important for that time because this was the beginning of the 20th century. Europe was celebrating itself and it had been decided, they thought, that Europe would lead all progress and all development. Du Bois said: no, the world is not finished. And so we have a lot of work to do. 

I took his understanding of philosophy to be the broadest understanding of knowledge, including art, including the natural sciences. In a certain sense I think Du Bois looked at philosophy kind of the way that Hegel defined philosophy as a science of sciences. The overarching knowledge within which we study specific things.

Let me end with this. Du Bois’ work to me is breathtaking. Once, I think, you encounter Du Bois, you become impatient with most other thinkers, especially contemporary thinkers and their ideologies and their pettiness, and their careerism, and their emphasis especially in what we call this postmodern period; their emphasis upon form rather than essence. Their emphasis upon performance rather than truth. And their lack of any modesty, which I would associate with decency. 

The central objective for Du Bois was freedom. The specific study was of Afro-America. The aim of which was to free humanity from the fetters of ancient and contemporary forms of oppression. To know the human meant going beyond what was scientifically or empirically available to us. To know the human was to know that which was intangible. Martin Luther King gave a sermon called the “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” The third dimension was to strive for that which is not concrete, that which is often associated with God.

But in the ways that for example King, and especially Du Bois and Baldwin, use God—and what they interpreted as what human beings meant when they spoke about God—was the unknown, but the knowable. It is the realm of artistic and poetic imagination. It is a leap on the part of the scientist, of the sociologist, to go where empirical knowledge cannot take you. 

Du Bois studied the Negro spirituals, what he called the Sorrow Songs. He said they were the rhythmic narrative of a disappointed people. That’s what today we call the blues. That is the most profound—and Du Bois said it this way—the most profound creation on this side of the Atlantic. So much is done to obscure the blues, to make them seem trivial. Produced by people who are not that educated. But it was precisely this that Du Bois was trying to get at. And one could only understand the human in all of its completeness by understanding the ordinary person. What Du Bois in Black Reconstruction will call the Black Proletariat, and the imagination that comes from it: a Black Proletariat Imaginary. Upon which a moral, revolutionary imperative is built. 

Leonardo was a scientist and an artist, but a revolutionary. Du Bois was a social scientist, and an artist, and a revolutionary. If I were to say anything or try to leave anything to summarize this presentation: 
To know the world, it is not enough only to know what we can empirically, or through our senses, experience. To know the world is to imagine the world as it could be. And that is Du Bois, and that is Leonardo Da Vinci. Thank you. 

Dr. Anthony Monteiro is a Du Boisian scholar, a long time activist for peace and Black liberation, and the founder of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation. He lives in Philadelphia.