January 20, 2006: MLK the Dialectician
It is well worth remembering that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was a graduate student at Boston University's School of Theology he took a two-semester seminar on Hegel and became extremely interested in Hegel's account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the master/slave dialectic in particular, and in dialectical thought in general. Not surprising for the time (1952-53), however, he was exposed by his professors to an interpretation of Hegel's view of dialectics as "moving from a one-sided thesis to a corrective, but also one-sided antithesis and finally to a more coherent synthesis beyond both" (David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [HarperCollins, 1986], p. 46). King immediately adopted, and for the remainder of his life made political use of, this interpretation of dialectical method. For example, as Andrew Young once recalled, "[King] would want somebody to express as radical a view as possible and somebody to express as conservative a view as possible. We kind of did this sort of like a game and it almost always fell to my lot to express the conservative view. . . . He figured . . . the wider variety of opinions you got, the better chance you had of extracting the truth from that" (Garrow, pp. 464-65).
Herein lies my interest in, and concern about, MLK the dialectician. As is well known, and vigorously insisted on, by contemporary scholars, Hegel himself never used such "thesis/antithesis/synthesis" terminology, which all too easily lends itself to a simplistic and mechanical application to any and all situations. As we know especially from Louis Althusser's investigation into the features of a "materialist dialectic," history and politics operate more in fits and starts, and through a complex overlapping of tendencies that are not clearly demarcated "extreme" positions. In short, as Mark Phillips has reminded us, for Althusser dialectical movement is inherently uneven.
So what, though? Would King have been an even better movement leader if he had read Hegel from an Althusserian--really just a philosophically informed Leninist--perspective? I'm not sure, but I think it's a question worth posing as we face the stalled dream of a more just and peaceful United States and world. Even as we honor King's courage and vision, we shouldn't be reluctant to engage critically with his--or or any other leader's--method of political analysis.
Comments
Very interesting about MLK. I just saw a rerun of the King documentary on public television. There was a clip of him answering a red-baiting question from a news person, and I noted that he responded in a way indicating that he had a background in philosophy.
In your description, King seems to be using a dialectical method of political practice, almost like setting up an experimental situation. Or maybe it would be better to describe it as a pedogogical method? Perhaps in these types of partially controlled situations, the simplified version of dialectics makes sense, whereas one should use a more nuanced version in the critique of a complicated social phenomenon.
Posted by: Emmett | February 17, 2006 11:21 AM