  Paul Taylor has persuasively sketched a general framework for understanding Du Bois’s philosophy of art. According to Taylor, Du Bois endorses an expressivist picture of the world, the key to which “is a determination to think of things as determinate but provisional expressions of an evolving world.” On this view, “the world unfolds into new forms the way a seed unfolds into a tree…by clarifying, over time, what was inchoate and implicit: by actualizing in history what formerly existed only in potentia.” Considered in the perspective of Marx’s and Dewey’s revisions of Hegel’s expressivism, Taylor’s Du Bois envisions ethical life as a work-in-progress—that is, as an ongoing project of holistic self-cultivation, of individuals artistically forming themselves by creatively responding to the histories, languages, and economic structures that constrain them (Taylor, 2016, 91–93).