Douglass spends his entire life of slavery searching for his enlightenment. Through continual reading and writing, Douglass gradually develops his own thought and reasoning. For the first time, Douglass realizes his life is not subject to anybody else. Besides, knowledge gives him courage to do what other people can’t do. He starts to have rebellious thoughts and think according to his own understanding, without anyone telling him to do so. Eventually, Douglass finds his enlightenment, which is alternately his freedom. Just like Kant states in his essay, “have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment”(Kant 1). Enlightenment is not a one step process. People must be brave enough to think differently from the people in the past and then act for themselves. In other word, Enlightenment is an ongoing process that one must have courage to abandon immaturity to development his/her personal understanding in order to be an enlightened individual.
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1. The Hook. It’s not the most startling hook, but it’s clear and it does bring Douglass, slavery, and enlightenment together. And I also find it to be the most compelling part of the introduction. A-
2. Transition. Well your transition is hard to discern because it feels like instead of transitioning to a thesis you kind of just continue to talk about the subject, and you manage to meander your way to Kant and the gradualism of enlightenment. C+
3. Thesis. In a lot of way it doesn’t appear as if you have a thesis here. As mentioned above, the introduction reads as if you are just kind of talking generally about Douglass and or enlightenment. I think though that you want your thesis to be “People must be brave enough to think differently from the people in the past and then act for themselves.” Which you then follow up with a paraphrase of how Kant defines enlightenment. The problem with this thesis is that it is not text based. Your “it” here is all people and the general bravery needed to think differently. The needed bravery of all people can’t be your thesis. The “it” is too huge. You can’t point it out in the text, and you can’t by any means we have available to us in this class ascertain any information about all people. You needed an “it” based in the text. You then needed a claim that was about how that “it” worked in the text to communicate X or Y. If you had this kind of claim, the so what would be whatever that X and Y did to our understanding of the text as a whole or our understanding of some theme in theme in the text. D
4. Road map. You don’t have a road map. I have no idea how the paper that follows this introduction would go about illustrating it’s argument. F
Total: C-/D+