What If Your Feelings Created All Your Values?
A Rhodes Scholar Asks a Dangerous Question
In 1907, Alain Locke (1885–1954) became the first Black American Rhodes Scholar. He traveled to Oxford University to study philosophy, but he ran into a wall. Many white scholars believed that some cultures, and even some races, were naturally superior. This was the so-called “science” of the day. Locke didn’t accept that. He had grown up in Philadelphia, excelled at Harvard, and was now face-to-face with a puzzle: if human values like goodness, beauty, and truth aren’t fixed by biology or God, where do they come from?
Locke spent his whole life exploring that question. He became a philosopher of value—what matters, and why. His answer was bold: values come from human feelings, not from eternal rules or physical facts. And if that’s true, no culture has a monopoly on right and wrong. This insight not only shaped his philosophy but also put him at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a great outburst of African American art and literature in the 1920s.
Feelings Create the Categories of Value
Locke argued that every value starts with a feeling-quality. Imagine you see a breathtaking painting. Before you analyze it, you just feel a sense of repose or exaltation. That immediate feeling determines what value-mode you’re in: aesthetic, moral, religious, or logical. You don’t reason your way into finding a painting beautiful. The beauty hits you first, like a wave. Then your mind tries to explain why.
This was a radical idea. Most philosophers in Locke’s day thought values were rational—that you could prove something was good or beautiful with logic, the way you prove a math problem. Locke said no. The proof is in the feeling. A math proof can feel beautiful, but its truthfulness is logical; the value “beauty” comes from the feeling, not the proof itself. This explains why the same object can be valued in different ways by different people, or even by the same person at different times. Locke called this shifting transvaluation. A puppy might make you feel moral tenderness (you want to protect it) or aesthetic delight (it’s cute). The feeling changes, so the value changes.
Values, then, are not static things we discover in the world. They are processes—ways of experiencing life through feeling. This leads to a practical problem: if everyone’s feelings differ, how do we avoid chaos? Locke’s answer was to study how values actually function in societies, not just how we wish they’d work.
Three Barriers to Getting Along
Locke saw three big mistakes that stop people and cultures from understanding each other. He called them barriers to pluralism—the idea that many different value systems can coexist peacefully.
The first is absolutism. This is the belief that your values are universal and apply to everyone, everywhere, forever. People who think their moral or religious rules are the only right ones often dismiss others as simply wrong. Locke warned that absolutism shows up in new forms all the time, even under the cover of science or democracy. Second is uniformitarianism. This is the demand that everyone in a group must share the same values. Think of a school that forces every student to like the same music or play the same sport. It crushes diversity. Third is arbitrary dogmatism. That’s when you cling to your values without ever being open to questioning them—you decide they’re just “true” and refuse to consider other possibilities.
To move past these, Locke offered a practical kind of pluralism. He said we should look for what he called basic human values—needs and concerns shared across cultures, like family structures or spiritual expression. If we focus on functional constancy (how a value works, like caring for children) rather than its specific form (who cooks dinner), we see that different customs often serve the same human needs. This doesn’t mean all values are equally good, but it gives us a fair starting point for discussion.
Race Is Something We Do, Not Something We Are
Locke’s most controversial move was to rethink the concept of race. The science of his time claimed that humanity is divided into biologically distinct races, each with fixed traits. Locke, influenced by anthropologists like Franz Boas, called this an ethnic fiction. Biological differences exist, but they don’t map neatly onto the social groups we call races. A “Black” person in the United States shares some ancestry with a person from Ghana, but also with Europeans and Native Americans. So what makes someone “Black”?
Locke answered: culture, not biology. A race is a social group shaped by shared history, customs, and ways of expressing value. He called this ethnic race or culture group. For example, African Americans developed unique musical forms, literary styles, and religious practices—not because of genes, but because of shared experience and social inheritance. This means that “race” is real as a social force, even though it’s a fiction biologically. Locke even said that within what we loosely call one “race,” there are actually many ethnic races—multiple Black cultures, multiple White cultures, and so on.
This view doesn’t ignore racism. Locke knew that political conceptions of race—where one group dominates another—cause deep harm. He analyzed how racist creeds and practices get built into societies. But he believed that replacing the biological myth with a cultural understanding could help dismantle prejudice. If race is something we do together, we can change how we do it.
The New Negro: Art Without Apology
Locke didn’t only write theory. In 1925, he edited a groundbreaking book, The New Negro, which launched the Harlem Renaissance. Black artists, writers, and musicians were creating work that was bold, personal, and universal. Locke argued that earlier Black art had been trapped in propaganda mode—it aimed to show white audiences that Black people were respectable, civilized, “not like the stereotypes.” The result was often stiff and lifeless. The new generation, Locke said, had stopped “speaking for the Negro” and started “speaking as Negroes.” They expressed their own feelings, their own contradictions, their own beauty. That shift made the art human, not just racial.
He especially loved the spirituals—the religious folk songs born in slavery. To Locke, these songs proved that deep emotion could turn suffering into something transcendent. They were “classical folk expression”—particular to a time and place, yet touching anyone who heard them. He saw in the spirituals the perfect example of his value theory: the feeling of exaltation created a religious value-mode, and the songs organized a community around that feeling. They survived, he said, not because they were “Negro” songs, but because they were “fundamentally and everlastingly human.”
For Locke, art was never just decoration. It was a laboratory for values. By paying attention to what moves you aesthetically, you learn how your feelings create the world you value.
Still Tuning the Instruments
Locke died in 1954, but his ideas are more alive than ever. Today, when people argue about “cultural appropriation” versus “cultural appreciation,” they’re walking on ground he cleared. When you realize that your favorite music—hip-hop, jazz, K-pop—emerged from a specific cultural feeling yet speaks to you across oceans, you’re experiencing the principle of cultural reciprocity: cultures exchange values, and both are changed. Locke would ask: can you appreciate the feeling-quality of another culture’s art without stealing it? Can you respect a value system even if you don’t share its feelings?
He wouldn’t give a simple answer. But he gave us tools: look for functional equivalences, avoid absolutism, and treat race as a social story in progress. Next time you feel that rush of awe from a song or a painting, remember—you’re not just “liking” it. You’re building a value, right there in your chest. And that private feeling is the tiny engine of whole cultures.
Think about it
- If values come from feelings, could someone’s feeling that bullying is good ever make bullying truly valuable? Why or why not?
- Imagine a new student joins your school from a very different culture. How could you use Locke’s ideas to understand their values without judging them as “wrong”?
- Can we ever say one culture’s art is “better” than another’s, or is that just a feeling too? Defend your answer.
