Reading the celebrated Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass (1817-95) as well as his second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) alongside the theories of freedom including Immanuel Kants and G. W. F. Hegels among others, this dissertation examines the process through which the young American slave Douglass discovers the idea of freedom and turns it into the primary object of his pursuit to the point that he stakes his life in his famed battle with the overseer Edward Covey. The experience of hearing other slaves voicessuch as Aunt Hesters cries and slave songsopens his eyes to the darkest reality of Southern slavery, constructing in Douglasss mind a material core that drives him to find some explanation for it, which he gradually comprehends by his continuous efforts to carefully overhear what slaveholders are saying and to learn to read. The fanstasmatic manifestation of Douglasss irrepressible aspiration for freedom in the form of a flash in his consciousness after he is utterly subjected to Covey and his subsequent apostrophe to the sloops on the Chesapeake Bay are in significant ways comparable to Kants conceptualization of the moral law of freedom in terms of the starry heavens and the voice of reason as well as the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime. Unlike Kant, who delimits the act of freedom solely within the minds transformation of its own disposition, Douglass stresses in his account of the fight with Covey that such an existential transformation is completed by an action in the real world. Douglasss description of his victory over the overseer shares with the Hegelian dialectic, especially the acclaimed dialectic of master and slave, several crucial threads including an emphasis on irreducible material elements involved in the reversal, elements which he closely relates to the 'fact' of his freedom. At the same time, Douglass diverges from the Hegelian theory of freedom on important points such as the primacy of the state over individual liberty among others.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-10142011-044352 |
| Date | 17 October 2011 |
| Creators | Hori, Tomohiro |
| Contributors | Lowe, John Wharton, Kronick, Joseph, Berman, Jacob, Costello, Brannon, Bach, Jacqueline |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-10142011-044352/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds